Day 11 - 40-Day Journey through the Bible

Today is Day 9 on Facebook Live on my Facebook account here at about 5:05pm. We continue today with the fourth scene, Sacrifice. The theme of God’s judgment and the need for a sacrifice is front and center in this scene. See below for some thoughts about God’s judgment.

REPELLED BY GOD'S JUDGMENT

The subject of God's judgment--God's wrath against sin, God's justice--is hard to understand and accept. This can really trip a lot of people up when reading the Bible.

Some just ignore it. There are Christians all over the world today who will skip this part of the Bible for their entire lifetime. They won't hear any sermons on it. They won't read it.

Some devalue it. A lot of Christians simply pass off this part of the Old Testament as coming from an inferior part of the Bible, thankful that they can focus on the New Testament and a few choice texts from the Old Testament.

Some are deeply disturbed by it. It impacts their relationship with God. They find it hard to love a God who judges, sometimes quite harshly.

Some turn away because of it. How many people write off the Bible because of its depiction of God's judgment? How many Christians in college, forced to grapple with this subject for the first time by a professor, turn from the faith they once held to? How many other Christians do the same thing after watching a documentary on PBS, reading a book, or talking with a friend who are determined to undermine any faith in a God who judges.

Consider this story told by pastor and author Dan Kimball in an interview with Christianity Today magazine:

For years I kind of swerved around those tough verses. I just thought, Well, somebody's figured those out. But then I received a series of emails from a guy named Brad, asking about blood sacrifice and the strange things in Leviticus. One of his questions: "Why does the Bible say a woman has to marry her rapist?"

I'd try to answer them, but then I'd get another one from him almost instantly. Finally I wrote back and said, "Brad, can we meet?" So after a service one Sunday, this kid approaches me, and introduces himself as Brad. I couldn't believe it. He was in eighth grade! I asked him, "Where are you getting these verses?" He said told me it was a website: EvilBible.com. He was just copying the questions on this website and sending them to me.

In the past, you might come across these problematic passages if you went to a bookstore or library, or read the Bible very carefully. You'd have to dig for it. Now you just go online. It's being propagated through the Internet. A 13-year-old girl asked me, "Why did God kill the Amalekites?" The guy that cuts my hair asked me why there are unicorns in the Bible. There aren't, of course. An early King James Version just mistranslated the Hebrew word for "wild oxen." But these kinds of ideas are all over the Internet.

We're not going to swerve around this topic.

I resonate with Joshua Ryan Butler says about this in the same article quoted above:

If you can help people see God's goodness, even in the tough places of Scripture, their faith becomes more unshakeable. I think the ivory tower and the suburbs have influenced a lot of American evangelical theology. We end up with a protected, safe, sanitized faith. But the God of Scripture is untamed. So you have this safe, sanitized god and then you encounter the hard reality of the world, and you think, Where the heck is God in this? How does this fit in?

I've worked in some tough spots around the world, like genocidal war zones. I've seen kids coming out of sex trafficking. It's made me realize that I need the untamed God, not the sanitized god, to be able to make sense of his goodness in this bizarre, raw, jacked-up world. We need to help people see God's goodness even in these hard passages, so they can reclaim a greater confidence in the goodness of God. But it's also about unleashing our vision of God. We want them to see God as he is—untamed. Holy. Just. Hating evil. Doing good. That's a God you need when you encounter the raw, hard realities of our world.

If you're a Christian parent or you want to help others come to faith, you can't afford to think superficially about this.

I really don't think we can settle it for everybody. And, although I feel I understand it, I'm still bothered by it.

I'm bothered by it for a good reason and for what I think is a poor reason.

The good reason is that I believe God to be good and fair because the Bible tells me he is good and fair. The cross is a demonstration of his love and goodness.

If I didn't believe in God, I wouldn't have a leg to stand on if I wanted to complain. After all, nature is brutal. Why not simply accept a world where power wins, except that I might not have power?

So, the good reason is that these depictions of God judging seem to me, at times, to contradict what God says is good.

But there's also a poor reason I'm bothered by all this. As a cosmic rebel, I'm constantly battling God for leadership of my life. I tend to shrink God and elevate my own logic and goodness. I also shrink my sin. I'm extremely short-sighted when it comes to impact of my sin.

Of course I will be repelled by a holy God who judges sin.

Grapple with this. Think hard and deeply. Let God surprise you.

But keep this in mind. Every sin we commit has ramifications far beyond what we can see. Each sin creates a chain reaction that negatively and tragically impacts our world. God can see it all. He is perfectly holy, good, and just. God sees the inevitable end of our lives apart from him. So when God exacts violent judgment on earth, he is speeding up the inevitable death and destruction we have unleashed in our world with our sin. Inevitable is the key word. God speeds up the inevitable results of the life and end we have made for ourselves. 

Photo by Josep Castells on Unsplash