Written by Marilyn Baldwin
As Christians in our modern world, are there certain things we deem to be unutterable? On GTS courses, people have said that they struggle with many of the OT portrayals of God. They cannot believe that He can be a God who loves his people when He wreaks barbaric physical vengeance in many situations. ‘Is this the God who came to earth as Jesus? Is this a god we can worship?’, they ask. Can many accounts in the Old Testament really be ‘God-breathed’ as Paul stated? (2Tim 3:16,17) Is the OT picture of a vengeful God believable?
God does not judge against those who wrestle to understand him. He applauds Jacob’s questions and blesses him (Gen 32:24-30). Could this be taken as a mandate for us today?
For more informed access to interpreting the God of the Old Testament, we need to discover more of the world in which it was written. A few years back, as a GTS student I was introduced to the writing and talks of John Walton, an expert on the world of the Ancient Near East. People’s concepts of their surroundings were vastly different then: a flat earth, a sealed off inaccessible heaven, a threatening depth below and a very different God. For ‘our God’ to communicate with those people, he would need a means of communication with a people living under very different concepts and attitudes to life.
Read Num 31:1-17. Is this ugly? Yes! Does it sound like the God we worship? No! But it’s in the Bible, which is TRUE! Yet… In the book of Exodus we read, “Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness”. There is SO much to disentangle. (Ex 34:5-6).
Can we as Christians reconcile the sometimes-violent Old Testament God-portrait with Jesus, God incarnate? AND, should we question what is written in the Bible?
The theologian Greg Boyd concludes in his book Cross Vision that violent portraits of God have created an ‘elephant in the room’ that we must stop ignoring and avoiding in order to figure out how such passages can point us to the God we see in the crucified Christ. Is this a challenge we need to embrace?
