Why Does God condone violence in the OT?

Here we are in our third week of our series on Great Questions. This week, I want to look at one of the stickier issues of Christianity: the portrayal of violence in the Bible, in particular, in what we often call the Old Testament or the First Testament.

Numbers 31:7–18 NIV

They fought against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and killed every man. Among their victims were Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur and Reba—the five kings of Midian. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder. They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps. They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho. Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle. “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

Now we might be tempted to think that this is a one off story, but it is something that we see repeated throughout the Old Testament narrative. We have the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his own son. We have in the book of Joshua, when the Israelites were attacking the city of Jericho, it says,

Joshua 6:21 NIV

They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

Deuteronomy 20:16–18 NIV

However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.

Before we go on, take a moment and let those verses sit with you. What do you feel or think when you hear them? Reflect on that for a moment and allow the weight of this question to sit with you. Verses like these have impacted many people in our society in a negative way. Many young people have a distorted view of the Bible. They see it through the lens of Sunday school that mostly taught them morality and they haven’t been taught to read it themselves or how to interpret it from an adult perspective. This means that when they go through the Bible and come across passages like these, they are offended and many leave the faith because they can’t reconcile God’s actions with the idea that God is good.

And many opponents of Christianity will use verses like these to “prove” that God is a terrible being.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

The good news for us is that there is an answer to this connumdrum of God and violence. Today, I want us to look a few of those answers together and my hope is that this teaching will bolster your faith in God and remind you of his goodness, his grace, and his sovereignty. I also hope that today’s teaching helps equip you for when people ask about it question as you share your faith. To frame our discussion today, I want to give us two reasons why we are so confused on this subject.

Reason 1 - We aren’t interpreting the Bible correctly

Theologian William Plachar said “What is in the Bible is different from what the Bible teaches.” There is a lot in the Bible that Bible doesn’t teach us. We need to be smart readers of the Word and understand what God is teaching us.

One thing we need to look for is what is description and what is prescription. There is a massive difference between what we are told happened - a description of events, and what God commands us to do. For example, in the book of Genesis, there is a story about Abraham’s nephew Lot and how two angels appeared as men in his city. Lot invites them to stay at his home and while they are there, some men come banging on his door, demanding that Lot release the men so they can rape them. Instead, Lot offers his two virgin daughters for them. Horrible right? But the point is not that we should do as Lot did. The point is to show how evil the men of Sodom were, not how good Lot is. We need to see what is descriptive and what is prescriptive.

Another piece of bible interpretation that we need to have is Biblical context. When people take a verse or even a passage out of the context of the rest of the Bible, they do something called proof-texting and when you do that, you can make the Bible say anything you want to. I do this as a joke all the time. People will say, “No way you can eat all that ice cream” and I reply with “Yeah, well, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength” which is from the book of Philippians. Now, that’s not what that verse is teaching, even if that is what it says. When it comes to understanding some of the violence that God condones or even commands in the Old Testament, we have to understand these passages in their biblical context.

For example, when we look at Numbers 31, where Moses commands the death not only of the soldiers, but of women and children from our 21st century, western perspective, it is a brutal passage. But in its biblical context this is a different scene and the original readers would understand it very differently than we do. When we put this passage back into the context of the rest of the bible, we see that this attack is retribution for all the times the Midianites have attacked and harrassed Israel. In Genesis 37, we see them as slave traders, as they sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt. Then in Numbers 25, the Midianite women together with the Moabites were leading the Israelites into sexual sin and worship of a false God. In other words, they causing Israel to violate their covenant with God. While we, from our privileged position thousands of years later on the other side of the world in a land that has never had a enemy, might see God’s command to attack the Midianites as unfairly violent, the original readers saw it as God executing his justice on a wicked nation that had ensnared and attacked God’s people.

Understanding Biblical context is key for understanding the Bible. A lot of people love to quote Jeremiah 29:11

Jeremiah 29:11 NIV

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

but they forget about verse 10 which says

Jeremiah 29:10 NIV

This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.

They love to claim the promise that was not given to all people, but only to Israel when they had been conquered and were living as exiles in another country as second-class citizens, far away from the temple -their center of worship. Context matters when it comes to understanding the Bible, especially the issue of violence in the OT.

Now, there is one more issue related to how we interpret the Bible that we need to talk about. We need to look at our interpretive lens.

If you pick up a Tom Clancy novel, or a Jeannette Oke book, what do you do? You open to the first page and read on straight. But our Bibles aren’t really meant to be read like that. You can read it like that, but the best way to read it is to start with the Gospels. Jesus’ redemption of humanity - his sinless life, his atoning sacrifice and his miraculous resurrection is the lens by which we read the rest of the scriptures. And this lens is supremely helpful in understanding the OT, and the violence in it.

We need to read and study the OT in light of the work of Jesus - the redemption of mankind. What that means is, when we see the destruction of the Amalekites or the Midianites or whomever, we don’t look and say, “poor them.” We should see those countries and say “but for the grace of God, goes I.” Normally I hate that phrase because we often mean it like “aren’t I lucky that I am not as poor as they are.” But in this case, it’s true. Except for the grace of God, we would be dead in our sins like the nations that attacked Israel, profaned God and indulged in every sin imaginable. When God orders that they be wiped out, it is the just retribution for their evil and we should see it and say, “That’s what I deserve”. But thanks be to God, that instead of giving us what we deserve, he gives us grace and mercy through his Son. Praise God from whom all blessings flow that although the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. This is why we need to read the OT through the lens of Jesus redemptive work. We see the violence that we deserved and we can praise God that through Christ, we are not only spared, but we are invited to live in God’s own country, his kingdom and be adopted as his beloved children.

Too many Christians prefer to get their understanding of the Bible from shmucks like me. This isn’t the way it should be. The role of the preacher should be to inspire you, through preaching and teaching, to continually return to Jesus and worship him only. The key to really understanding the nature of God and by extension, his will for your life, is to understand the historical, biblical and even the literary context each passage is in and then interpret it through the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross. The whole OT is moving towards the cross and the NT after the gospels is moving out from the cross, showing us what happens when we allow Jesus, our risen Saviour, to be the king of our hearts.

Reason #2 - We don’t trust God’s sovereignty

Have you ever been afraid? Not like a scary movie fear or a roller coaster thrill, but real fear. I have. In fact, if you are participating in our online chat, let us know of a time when you were afraid of something. Tell us what you were afraid of and what happened. As you type that, I’m going to tell you of a time I was terrified.

I want to show you all a picture. This is my awesome sauce daughter, Rebekah when we lived in Calgary, AB. In Alberta, they do things, a little different there. They don’t have sales tax, they have mountains (and don’t try to tell me Blue Mountain counts, because it doesn’t), and because of the farming history of the province, they let 14 year olds get learner driver’s license. Let’s put that photo up again. You see, where, you look at this photo and see a lovely young lady full of hope and optimism, I look at it and remember the fear. Sitting in the passenger seat as she drove my SUV, which isn’t paid for yet, on a six-lane highway at 110 km/hr, I prayed as I had never prayed before. And admittedly, she did pretty good on the highway. The full parking lot at Costco was a whole other issue. I thought, here we go Lord, you are about to take me home.

I learned two things that day. First, 14 is too young to drive a car on a hwy. Second, I learned how hard it is to give up control. I had to trust myself to her and I didn’t do great. I hit the brakes on the passenger side awfully hard multiple times while gripping the handle above the door. Giving someone else control is hard to do. Giving God control of our lives is very hard to do and I feel like every day is a battle to let go of control and trust God. But if I tell you that you need to trust God with your future, most of you will nod, some will shout Amen, and some won’t look up from your smartphones. But what if I said, we not only need to trust God with our future, but we also need to trust God with our past, with history.

Psalm 47:2 NIV

For the Lord Most High is awesome, the great King over all the earth.

The Bible teaches us that God, as the creator and sustainer of the universe (or, if you are a comic book nerd like me, the multiverse), sovereignly rules over everything. Nothing in all history has happened that he didn’t know about or allow. But that bothers some of us, doesn’t it? We see the terrible things that happen in the world and we wonder if God is good, why didn’t he do anything about it. We can rationalize those things and explain them away, but one thing that has challenged me in my faith recently, is the unapologetic stance in the Bible that God really does rule over all.

Deuteronomy 32:39 NIV

“See now that I myself am he! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.

Job 1:21 NIV

and said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”

The people of the ancient near east had no qualms about ascribing both victory and defeat, miracles and disasters, life and death to God and saw it as God exercising his sovereign power. And for them, even though disasters happened and they thought God caused it, they still praised God, they kept believing in him - in fact, it was often the disasters that were catalysts to a mass repentance of God’s people back to him from the idols they were worshipping.

The violence and the command to kill whole tribes of people in the OT is the sovereign hand of God, bringing justice for the Israelites who had been harrassed and attacked by these neighboring people groups who were practicing all sorts of horrific evil. In fact, if you read Leviticus 18 (you know, that book you all skip when doing your devotionals) you would see a list of deplorable sins that Israel was not supposed to do, including sacrificing children in fire to the false god Molech, having sex with animals, having sex with sisters, aunts, daughters-in-law and such. But then you would see this:

Leviticus 18:26–27 NIV

But you must keep my decrees and my laws. The native-born and the foreigners residing among you must not do any of these detestable things, for all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you, and the land became defiled.

This was what was happening in those nations. And make no mistake, sin is repugnant to God. It violates his holy nature. That’s why he set up a sacrifical system in Israel, to provide a solution to the defilement of sin - to cleanse the nation and remind them of the terrible cost of sin. This sacrificial system was a shadow of the real sacrifice that was to come through Jesus’ death on the cross, which, through faith, atones for all of your sin, and all of my sin and provides us with freedom and forgiveness.

Can you look through the Old Testament, see the things in there that violate our peaceful 21st century western world and trust God with history, believing that in his sovereignty he acted for good, even if we don’t really get it?

Conclusion

When it comes to this question of “Why does God condone or even command violence in the OT” I think many of us struggle because we aren’t interpreting the Bible correctly and we don’t really trust the sovereignty of God. One of my primary goals today was to equip you to be able to give a reasonable response when someone brings this up to you as you share your faith. But I also hope that some of you might make a change today - a change to read the Bible better and a change to trust God more. And so, to that end, I want to challenge you with two things:

As you read the Bible, study it a bit deeper. Get a commentary that will help you understand the biblical, historical and literary context better and figure out first, what is the author saying to the original readers and second, how does that apply to me, in my present day life and context. If you do this extra studying, I think you’ll find that the Bible is a far richer and deepr book than you have ever experienced it before.

Memorize Job 1:21 - “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” Job lost everything - he lost his family, his money and his health and he yet he didn’t give up his faith in God. You probably already have gone through some stuff in your life that hurt you deeply. I’m sorry to say, there most likely will be more hurt and loss coming up. But don’t give up on God. Trust that God will sovereignly see you through it and give you the strength to say “May the name of the Lord be praised.”

Pray