[As transcribed from my journal on 6/19/10 with a few revisions...]
Deuteronomy 9:5 - Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations the Lord your God is driving them out from before you, and that He may confirm the word that the Lord swore to yoru fathers to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
Many times I hear people object to the character of God, saying He is wrathful, vengeful, hateful etc. They wonder how Christians can follow a God like this saying he is hardly compassionate, loving and just. Many times they point to the Torah/Pentateuch and the conquering of Canaan to justify this claim. Until now, I've simply not had an answer to response for such claims other than "I don't know". Now I think I actually have a partial reply to them.
The answer is because the nations being conquered were wicked in the eyes of the Lord. And when wickedness is present, one of two thinks much take place. 1.) There must be forgiveness, which the price of the evil and disobedience is borne by the accuser (in this case God), or 2.) the evil must be paid for/punished.
We see later in the NT, in Romans specifically, that the wages of sin is death. Sin is defined as disobedience/going again God's commandments. Sin can be equated to evil, or in this case, wickedness. The wickedness had to be paid for by someone. The Isrealites had the Law to know how to pay for their transgressions - the Canaanites did not, and the Messiah (ie Christ) had not yet come to pay for them Himself. (He hadn't even been prophesied yet). So the Canaanites had to pay for their own wickedness with their lives as the wages of sin - ie wickedness, is death.
Even though it is understandably more difficult to see, we do see God's trustworthiness and justice in this passage as well. In the verses preceding and the verses following Deut 9:5, we hear over and over agin how it is not because of the Isrealites righteousness that the are receiving the promised land not inhabited by the Canaanites, but because of their (the Canaanites') wickedness and also because of the promise God gave to their forefathers - the Patriarch's of their nation: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
A promise He had made generations beforehand was now coming to fruition.
I still don't completely understand God's methods, or why He choose to do things they way He did, but as Isaiah 55:8-9 says, His ways are higher than my ways, and His thoughts are higher than my thoughts.
God is big, and I do not understand Him, but still, I trust Him and I try to follow, love, and worship Him with every fiber of my being (though often failing). The good thing is that His love never fails, His faithfulness never ends. His patience outlasts my sin. He has breathed life into me and chosen me to be His own and there is nothing I can do to change His mind about me.
I don't have to worry about being a perfect example of God's love to others (and good thing because I would fail MISERABLY). All I have to do is point people to Him (verbally) and let God open their eyes and reveal Himself to them. Nothing I do is for nothing when trying to show Him to others because He is doing all of the work for me. (Has already done all of the work.) None of my efforts are for waste.
It's all about God. I can do nothing apart from Him, and I am nothing apart from Him. It's all about Him. The reason I am here today and the reason I am not going to Hell upon death is because of Jesus Christ and Him crucified... He is the reason we can worship freely and without fear of wrath, because we are justified in Him. Jesus Christ is the reason for all good things and He is all we have to show other people!
"And when wickedness is present, one of two thinks much take place. 1.) There must be forgiveness, which the price of the evil and disobedience is borne by the accuser (in this case God), or 2.) the evil must be paid for/punished."
ReplyDeleteWhat about when wickedness is present, there only needs to be justice? This seems to be what happens in a court of law. The forgiveness factor seems to be a privilege and independent of justice. This would be true at least in our civil government.
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If I understand your response to peoples' objections about God's character, it can be currently summarized as such: people are wicked, and so God can do as he sees fit for justice using his people in the process. Would that be correct? That was essentially what I got; that people are wicked and so that explains how God may 'come across wrathful, hateful, etc' due to his justice to their evil ways.
Looking back to that culture from ours, many things seem to be more brutal, primitive, violent, etc than things do today. Did God just work the best way he could in that time, through their warfare and such? Could God have done it better? Who knows? I certainly know there would be some resounding answers from some for a big YES. Others a no, yet others unsure.
I would prefer looking back from today that God wouldn't have initiated and promoted warfare and the destruction of people by people. It seems quite destructive to say the least. Some may argue that the people themselves were destructive. There are many people today that are destructive. How should we treat them? But things have shifted you say? We don't do that anymore? No more throwing stones, killing people for adultery, etc. What is different today, why did these things stop? Due to Jesus coming? Due to our societal morals evolving? Something else or a combination of these and other factors?
cont...
ReplyDeleteI think the reason Christians may be okay with these detached-from-our-society characteristics of God is that it may not seem like a reality since we primarily hear the 'Jesus aspect of God', though he brought some justice but not as much in comparison to the physical justice in the OT, or perhaps due to the perception of God as loving, caring, etc, the OT events are overlooked or not seriously considered. There is a great amount of trust and relationship in God through Christ, that there would be a trust that since everything happens for a reason, surely God had a good reason for doing it, and since he is God, it is okay.
Let's say that some of Allah's followers decide to worship another god, and so Allah must punish these wayward Muslim followers.
" Then he said to them, "This is what Allah, the High God says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.' "
To anyone other than the one who is a follower of the religion, the above would seem like a mass genocide if 3000 people were killed. The religious follower may try to avert the attrocity as evil by stating that Allah is good and he is just. For a non-follower, no amount of context would matter for the above action. Whether those other-god-worshiping-people were wicked or not, does it not seem evil to non-followers? How is that different from other mass murders and genocides? Just that someones God sanctioned it and thus justifies it? This is what the non-follower cannot accept.
I think that if we took some passages in the Christian's scripture and changed some of the names around such as God to Allah and such, we would see the acts and morals as evil and a great injustice, such as the above modified text from Exodus 32:27. Perhaps this can give some insight into how people may see a God that they don't follow as evil pretty quickly. A person can do a lot of good things, but one bad thing (such as sleeping with little boys) can bring them to ruin. Why would peoples' reasoning be any different for a god/God?
I feel like I've just scratched the surface of things I'd like to think through and eventually blog, but I will end it here.
That should help you understand how a non-religious person of a particular religion may see that religions god/God.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to do some more researching and such on these lines of conversation. Doing a quick search online I see:
1) Is the God of the Old Testament Different From the God of the New?
http://www.comereason.org/bibl_cntr/con090.asp
Where he discusses the differences in the targeted audience: in the OT God was trying to protect a newly born nation out of which the Messiah was to come (political governments and establishing a nation), whereas Jesus was more so targeting individuals personally.
2) Criticism of the Bible: http://www.evilbible.com/evils%20of%20the%20torah.htm
This topic really seems to me to require an understanding of the entirety of the Bible to come to an informed response. I'd be interested in the thoughts of others for what many see as a dichotomy between the OT and the NT, or at least how easily it can be to see the God of the Bible in this negative light. If the characteristics of God are contradictory (or seem so), how can a person come to believe in this God? I think this is a large stumbling stone for some to come to faith in the God of the Bible. What do you think?