Violence In The Old Testament Quotes

I'm in no rush to patch up these questions. God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don't want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don't think he wants me to either. There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I'm still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn't let go of me yet.

We think ourselves possessed, or at least we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact. There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny, or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself, it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not much better; even in our Massachusetts, which, I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemies upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any arguments for investigation into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Volney's Recherches Nouvelles? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws... but as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825}

The point is, if you pay attention to the women, a more complex history of Israel's conquests emerges. Their stories invite the reader to consider the human cost of violence and patriarchy, and in that sense prove instructive to all who wish to work for a better world.

The violence described in the Old Testament was endemic to the ancient Near East and remains endemic to much of the world today. Although our refined Western sensibilities recoil from these violent passages, in fact the Old Testament is to be credited for presenting the human condition in all its starkness

Jesus is what God looks like when there are no clouds in the way.

to say that a passage is divinely inspired is not to say that it necessarily reflects an unclouded vision of God.

It is a curious thing that at my age — fifty-five last birthday — I should find myself taking up a pen to try to write a history. I wonder what sort of a history it will be when I have finished it, if ever I come to the end of the trip! I have done a good many things in my life, which seems a long one to me, owing to my having begun work so young, perhaps. At an age when other boys are at school I was earning my living as a trader in the old Colony. I have been trading, hunting, fighting, or mining ever since. And yet it is only eight months ago that I made my pile. It is a big pile now that I have got it — I don't yet know how big — but I do not think I would go through the last fifteen or sixteen months again for it; no, not if I knew that I should come out safe at the end, pile and all. But then I am a timid man, and dislike violence; moreover, I am almost sick of adventure. I wonder why I am going to write this book: it is not in my line. I am not a literary man, though very devoted to the Old Testament and also to the "Ingoldsby Legends." Let me try to set down my reasons, just to see if I have any.

Each one of us has to find such a relationship in the suffering that we ourselves experience, be it the loss of a job or a home, the death of someone we love, rejection by our parents or our children, the breakdown of a marriage, institutional injustice, social violence or whatever. The causes of our personal suffering are many. And when we find the living, liberating answer that gives us meaning in the midst of suffering, we realize that it is a very personal answer.

One of the great tragedies and errors of the way people have understood the Bible has been the assumption that what people did in the Old Testament must have been right ‘because it’s in the Bible’. It has justified violence, enslavement, abuse and suppression of women, murderous prejudice against gay people; it has justified all manner of things we now cannot but as Christians regard as evil. But they are not there in the Bible because God is telling us, ‘That’s good.’ They are there because God is telling us, ‘You need to know that that is how some people responded. You need to know that when I speak to human beings things can go very wrong as well as very wonderfully.’ God tells us, ‘You need to know that when I speak, it isn’t always simple to hear, because of what human beings are like.’ We need, in other words, to guard against the temptation to take just a bit of the whole story and treat it as somehow a model for our own behaviour. Christians have often been down that road and it has not been a pretty sight. We need rather to approach the Bible as if it were a parable of Jesus. The whole thing is a gift, a challenge and an invitation into a new world, seeing yourself afresh and more truthfully.

If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.

For Jesus, questioning religious violence in ourselves, in our faith, and in our sacred text is a moral imperative. Compassion and character compel us to question, and that questioning in the name of love is modeled for us in Scripture itself. As Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim puts it, “An inner-biblical warrant exists for the people of God to raise questions.”19

The only violence God sanctioned in the OT was for nationalistic purposes. That’s because nations require violence. To exist, they need criminal laws, warfare policies, and armed men to enforce them. By their nature, they have order to maintain, territory to defend, national sovereignty to preserve, and history to control. But transnational, interethnic, nongovernmental, geographically dispersed organizations (like the church) do not.

BARRY GIFFORD, Author of "Wild at Heart", on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester: "Marisa Lankester's unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why." Film "Wild at Heart" won Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Film by David Lynch

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond.

But the god himself in the book of Job, does he concern us? Is it all but a poetic play with a strange and too old-fashioned conception of God? Do we know this god? Well, we know him from the history of religion, he is the god of the old testament, the army of the armies, or as we would say, the army god, the jealous Yahweh. But does he only live in the history of religion? No, he also reigns in our experience, today as before 2400 years ago. He represents a well-known biological and social environment: the blind forces of nature that are without contact with man's drive towards order and meaning, of disease and the erratic impact of death, the fleetingness of fame, betrayal of friends and relatives. He is the machine and the god of power, domination of violence, party slavery and conquest alike, the god of copper pipes and armor plates. There are more than Job, who meets him with the weapon of the spirit. Some of them being trampled into heroic martyrdom; others also see the limitation of marty reed, they bend inwardly, but hide for the doubt in their heart.

The cry of the poor in the Old Testament was a cry for justice. It was a cry made by free men and women, often of moderate—some even of considerable—means. It was the cry of victims. But these were not the victims of poverty so much as they were the victims of violence and oppression brought upon them by persons more powerful than themselves.28 It was this relation of petition to justice that gave weight to the Hebrew assonance by which ze‘aqah—“the cry”—was expected to be met by zedaqah—“righteousness.” And “righteousness” was achieved through an act of justice granted by the powerful to the weak. The word only later came to mean alms given by the wealthy to the poor. This “elegant juxtaposition of words” did not escape the alert eyes of Jerome, in 408–10, as he commented on the classic phrase of the prophet Isaiah: He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness (zedaqah) but, behold, a cry (ze‘aqah) (Isa. 5:7).29 The absorption of the language and history of the Hebrew Scriptures in the Christian communities between the fourth and sixth centuries slowly but surely added a rougher and more assertive texture to the Christian discourse on poverty. The poor were not simply others—creatures who trembled on the margins of society, asking to be saved by the wealthy. Like the poor of Israel, they were also brothers. They had the right to “cry out” for justice in the face of oppressors along with all other members of the “people of God.

We can understand why one of the titles given to Jesus is that of ‘prophet.’ Jesus is the last and greatest of the prophets, the one who sums them up and goes further than all of them. He is the prophet of the last, but also of the best, chance. With him there takes place a shift that is both tiny and gigantic – a shift that follows on directly from the Old Testament but constitutes a decisive break as well. This is the complete elimination of the sacrificial for the first time – the end of divine violence and the explicit revelation of all that has gone before. It calls for a complete change of emphasis and a spiritual metamorphosis without precedent in the whole history of mankind. It also amounts to an absolute simplification of the relations between human beings, in so far as all the false differences between doubles are annulled – a simplification in the sense in which we speak of an algebraic simplification. Throughout the texts of the Old Testament it was impossible to conclude the deconstruction of myths, rituals and law since the plenary revelation of the founding murder had not yet taken place. The divinity may be to some extent stripped of violence, but not completely so. That is why there is still an indeterminate and indistinct future, in which the resolution of the problem by human means alone – the face-to-face reconciliation that ought to result when people are alerted to the stupidity and uselessness of symmetrical violence – remains confused to a certain extent with the hope of a new epiphany of violence that is distinctively divine in origin, a ‘Day of Yahweh’ that would combine the paroxysm of God’s anger with a no less God-given reconciliation. However remarkably the prophets progress toward a precise understanding of what it is that structures religion and culture, the Old Testament never tips over into the complete rationality that would dispense with this hope of a purgation by violence and would give up requiring God to take the apocalyptic solution by completely liquidating the ‘evil’ in order to ensure the happiness of the chosen.

The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72 Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need. SELF-CONTROL

Not all monotheisms are exactly the same at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion. They're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness, and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally, it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, and with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of Wahhabism and Salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally. It's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman in the Arabian Peninsula three times through an archangel, and that the resultant material—which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old and The New Testament—is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well, I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right—as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel—I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says, "No, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams—this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now—"Behead those who cartoon Islam." Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities, ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you while you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left.

When Paul instead defines the power of God as the self-sacrificial love revealed on the weak-looking cross (1 Cor 1:18, 30), you know this message had to be from God because it’s not the kind of thing humans would ever make up on their own! In fact, it flatly contradicts the kind of coercive power people have typically ascribed to God/gods throughout history—including, unfortunately, throughout most of church history.

What we do find in the Bible is the progression of instruction. The Old Testament gave guidance to protect slaves and give them more dignity. This made Israel distinct from other nations. The New Testament moves one step farther, declaring that regardless of whether one is the slave or the one the slave serves, they are equals, brothers and sisters in Jesus.

Slavery is evil. God did not create it or endorse it. God specified the death penalty for slave traders in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament he clearly said it is sin. The Bible verses on slavery guide us in how to bring better treatment to people caught in a system that was established by humans. • Most of ancient slavery in the time of the Old Testament and New Testament was different from the slavery we are familiar with in modern times. Back then people were bought as servants, the money going to pay a person’s debt. Poverty forced others into servanthood just to stay alive. This slavery, or servanthood,

Slavery is evil. God did not create it or endorse it. God specified the death penalty for slave traders in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament he clearly said it is sin. The Bible verses on slavery guide us in how to bring better treatment to people caught in a system that was established by humans. • Most of ancient slavery in the time of the Old Testament and New Testament was different from the slavery we are familiar with in modern times. Back then people were bought as servants, the money going to pay a person’s debt. Poverty forced others into servanthood just to stay alive. This slavery, or servanthood, was not race based.

If read hastily, Joshua’s story may seem like a far cry from this prophetic vision. But throughout the book we see signs that so-called “outsiders” play an outsized role.

As I suggest below, there are two different perspectives on the conquest in Joshua. The story of Jericho belonged to only one kind of storytelling in the book. It’s the Majority Report, since it’s the one most readers assume. It’s a story of utter and complete conquest. Another existed, and it needs to be heard. That second is what we might call the Minority Report.

The herem language is supposed to shock and startle. So, a first step is to simply notice that response in ourselves. We might wonder if they don’t disturb us.

My point here is that the anti-Canaanite commands in Deuteronomy are just one piece of a larger complex of commands in Deuteronomy designed to eliminate the threat of idolatry and foster undivided commitment to Yahweh.

Deuteronomy 7:1-2. In other words, failing to utterly destroy the inhabitants of the Promised Land leaves the Canaanite temptation around. However, if herem is hyperbolic (as argued above), there would undoubtedly be Canaanites who remain, as Deuteronomy 7:22 suggests. In addition, verse 5 suggests that herem was meant to be focused on worship sites.

This is religious vandalism, not the extermination of whole people groups! Or, if you prefer scholarly parlance, this is a “reform movement,” not a genocidal campaign.

Genesis 9 addresses God’s right to address bloodshed in the post-flood world. The proverb doesn’t hand humans or the state power over life and death.

What we can say is that a proper understanding of Genesis needs to be the starting point from which we try to understand those later passages, and not the other way around.

The Great Flood (with a capital ‘F’) was a shorthand way of referring to the undoing of creation. God would never again destroy creation.

God commits himself eternally to the well-being of creation. What a promise!

God then promises to create the conditions for humanity, and therefore all creation, to become what it was supposed to be (Gen 9:8-18). Violence would never again destroy the earth.

have set my bow in the clouds” God is essentially saying: “I swear on my own life.

He would protect creation from ever again collapsing.

God decided to let the floodwaters burst forth and rain down to return the earth to a state of useful formlessness. Then, brooding over those wild waters God “remembered” his covenant with the earth and began to recreate (Gen 8:1).

We’re looking at weapons because later we’ll see that Joshua is doing something subversive with them. To spoil the ending here, Joshua later tells Israel that it was “not . . . with your own sword and bow” that Yahweh gave them the land (Josh 24:12). It was Yahweh’s own action.

I want to name the obvious here for a moment. This is not good military strategy (nor is it an endearing geographical name). I can just imagine Joshua addressing his officers: “Gentlemen, tomorrow at dawn we cross the Jordan. And when the enemy least expects it, we’ll attack! . . . ourselves . . . with swords, to prepare for war!

This would have been physically painful and symbolically disempowering. As Mark Buchanan points out, “Circumcision makes a man childlike. It makes him defenseless. It incapacitates him.

But Joshua needed to uncouple his perceptions of God from the narrow confines of nationalistic thinking.

When we pan out from these stories, we see a regular pattern wherein God reminds his leaders and liberators that they are not exempt from the danger of proximity to God, or of the need to remain totally devoted to him.

The sword of the Lord is a terrible thing, and not just for our enemies. The sword of the Lord cuts both ways, and right through the lines that we use to delineate insiders and outsiders (cf. 1 Pet 4:17).

He would drive out the Canaanites (remember, “little by little,” Ex 23:30).

it is likely that these stories are meant to be applied to the lives of Joshua’s first readers by rooting out idolatry within Israel.

These verses raise the bar of discipleship, showing that Jesus-loyalty can even divide us from what we previously considered our highest priorities.

That would be Israel’s greatest weapon.21

Joshua uses a more realist style to write the Minority Report. Realism portrays the world, warts and all, and seeks a “faithful representation of reality.

At face value, this could sound like the genocide of a major urban population. But as noted in chapter ten, herem suggests comprehensive destruction, and not necessarily the killing of every single person of all categories.

By contrast, those who fail to conquer succumb to idolatry, murder, and disregard for the law (Rev 21:8).

Rather than exodus versus conquest, perhaps we should think of Joshua as the final scene in the exodus.

also suggested that Israel’s beginnings were complex. They comprised groups of former slaves from Egypt but also indigenous Canaanites.

First, it’s safe to say that Joshua is not a straightforward tale of genocide

Rahab embodies Torah in word and deed.

Recognizing these Canaanite- and foreigner-including texts doesn’t undermine all other references to killing Canaanites. Those stories are still there. However, they at the very least complicate our ability to portray the conquest as a straightforward account of genocidal destruction.

22). In other words, the actual process would be slow and steady. This creates a tension between Deuteronomy 7:2 and 7:22, unless verse 2 was means to be read hyperbolically.

The intent is not total destruction of Canaanites but separation from Canaanite religious practices.

Taking a page from Joshua, Hebrews then reminds those of us at the edge of that Promised Land that “the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart

The book’s battles were between Israel, whose God is king, and the Canaanite city-states, for whom kings were like gods. Battle reports in Joshua consistently focus on the defeat of kings. Table 12.1. The defeat of kings Text King(s) Depiction

And fourth, the question is important because we need to understand the way that God’s purposes bend toward peace.

Bible itself—is tied intimately to God’s exercise of justice.

Tertullian is highlighting the danger of separating God’s wrath and justice.

God’s mercy outweighs by at least five hundred to one! We’ll discuss this in chapter fourteen.

For important reasons, these verses—which are central to an Old Testament portrait of God—hold God’s mercy and judgment together,

This approach’s slogan would be, Ancient people project their violent tendencies onto God.

By describing shalom and the shattering of it, the Old Testament gives us an education in how to think about the problem of violence.

But to name what I consider the best approach to interpreting violent texts it would be this: Read it slow. Read the biblical text slowly and carefully.

Certainly not! Watery formlessness—or a Great Flood—is the ancient way of expressing “un-createdness.” God is saying that he’d never again uncreate the world. He’s fully committed to this creation despite the ongoing problem of violence.

But according to Genesis, violence isn’t part of creation’s DNA. Only goodness is.

Martial and marital domination went hand-in-hand for kings and other men of power.

We now have the presence of the divine on earth in a form that utterly misrepresents God through its exercise of royal violence and despotic authority over other humans.

Once again, domestic violence (taking women) accompanies public violence (warrior-kings).

The important point for our study is that these stories of male dominance and violence against women belong within the broader narrative portrait of humanity’s rebellion against God.

a fever, and even vomits when humans are morally ill (Lev 18:28; 20:22; cf. Deut 11:8-17).

Total violence led to total collapse. The termites had destroyed creation’s framing. The creational home may have appeared solid from the outside, but the divine inspector declared the house a teardown. To adopt Luther’s well-known phrase, creation was “curved in upon itself.

Violence is an ecological crisis. In this way Scripture is way ahead of its time in recognizing the ecological impact of violence.

Turning creation back to formlessness may have been part of God’s consequent will—which follows from certain conditions—but it was certainly not part of his antecedent will (God’s original plan).

So, what does the potter do? He stops the wheel and takes the clay into his hands. He forms a new ball of clay out of the old. He returns the clay back to a state of useful formlessness. The potter returns the clay to this preformed state in order to remake it.

The ground-destroying curse is reversed.7

herem)

At the very least, we must concede the deep tension between these texts and what we learn of God from other places in the Bible: The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. (Ex 34:6, NRSV)

Hardly. Here’s Tertullian’s warning. There are always hidden costs to pictures of God that eliminate challenging tensions.

Christians—as well as Jews—over the centuries have had to come to terms with this tribal portrait of God and have moved on; the ancient tribal description of God is not the last word. Speaking for Christians, capturing land and holding on to it by violence is not a gospel way of living. Christians today, therefore, have an obligation not to “follow the Bible” here, not to allow the ancient tribal description of God in the Old Testament to be the last word. These ancient writers had an adequate understanding of God for them in their time, but not for all time—and if we take that to heart, we will actually be in a better position to respect these ancient voices and see what they have to say rather than whitewashing the details and making up “explanations” to ease our stress. And for Christians, the gospel has always been the lens through which Israel’s stories are read—which means, for Christians, Jesus, not the Bible, has the final word. The story of God’s people has moved on, and so must we.

As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them. From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God’s emissary, Noah himself.

people who have a loving mental representation of God tend to have a greater capacity to think objectively about controversial matters and to make rational decisions than do people who have a threatening mental representation of God.[

Barry Gifford, Author of Wild at Heart, says: “Marisa Lankester’s unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why.

BARRY GIFFORD, Author of "Wild at Heart" on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester: "Marisa Lankester's unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why." Film "Wild at Heart" won Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Film by David Lynch

There is no greater extremity to which the perfected united and all-holy God could have gone on our behalf than to become our sin and curse.  Indeed, as beautifully mysterious as it is, Paul reveals that on Calvary, God went to the extreme of experiencing his own antithesis!

God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all. —A. M. Ramsey

For Jesus, the key to understanding the Old Testament was located in his own life and work, for everything pointed to himself. —David Dockery

It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of a believer’s mental representation of God, for the way you imagine God largely determines the quality of your relationship with God. The intensity of your love for God will never outrun the beauty of the God you envision. Related to this, the depth of your transformation into the likeness of Christ will never outrun the Christlikeness of your mental representation of God.

In fact, there is mounting neurological evidence that a person’s mental representation of God significantly affects their quality of life, for better or for worse. For example, it’s a neurological fact that people who have a loving mental representation of God tend to have a greater capacity to think objectively about controversial matters and to make rational decisions than do people who have a threatening mental representation of God.

While I continue to affirm that the whole Bible is inspired by God, I’m now persuaded that the Bible itself instructs us to base our mental representation of God solely on Jesus Christ.

Everything we need to know and can know about God is found in Christ.

Jesus viewed the OT as a divinely inspired authority that was under, not alongside, his own divine authority.

Origen taught that when we come upon a biblical passage that seems unworthy of God, we must humble ourselves before God and ask the Spirit to help us find a deeper meaning in the passage that is worthy of God.

It’s time that Christianity should be redefined by the world based upon the original teachings of Jesus, instead of the Old and New Testaments which have been interpreted, reinterpreted and distorted by all the Ecumenical Councils, i.e. the Church Councils.

Christ did to the Jewish orthodoxy, what Buddha did to the Hindu orthodoxy.

Jesus recognized that God within him and became Christ - so did Siddhartha Gautama and became Buddha - so did I - and so can you.