Recently I went to Greenbelt festival, a Christian festival of music, arts and justice. And whilst there, I went to a talk by John Dear, an American priest and peace activist, arrested many times for organizing peace protests against violence and wars. Essentially, he's very into peace. And in his talk, the topic of the Old Testament violence was brought up, especially the taking over of Canaan, the Promised Land. And he described the OT as a 'slow revelation of God'. That the attacks on other tribes revealed a community struggling with violence. And that throughout the OT, Israel were discovering who God was, and what he was like, and once you leave the history books and get to the prophets, especially Isaiah and Amos, we see a God who is incredibly concerned with peace and justice and who rebukes his people for holding religious festivals whilst ignoring justice for the poor and oppressed. Of course, in the OT, this is not limited to the prophets, as many actions in the history books and laws are based on justice and God's concern for the poor. And once we reach the gospels, we see the ultimate revelation of God in human form. And the sermon on the mount being an example of Jesus' longing for peace.
To me, this begged the question, 'So how do we read the verses in Number and Joshua etc. that explicitly claim that God condoned and ordered killing'. So after he had finished his talk, I asked him this question, to which he replied very frankly, 'That's not God'. This greatly challenged my view of the Old Testament, as apart from Genesis chapters 1-12, I had seen the rest of the book as more or less entirely literal. But then I thought, for a collection of 66 books, written by over 40 authors in several languages, spanning several continents and multiple genres over 2 millenia, we often read the Bible in an incredibly straight forward way, and from the viewpoint of our modern culture, which means that a lot of the time, we get things completely wrong. So I asked a few people of what their thoughts on the matter of violence in the Old Testament were, and got some interesting and thoughtful responses.
We can't ignore the fact of God's wrath. That God is holy and completely separate from sin, and from Romans 3:23 and 6:23: 'For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God... For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.' This speaks of our redemption from the punishment of sin, that we can be forgiven and our sin can be taken away, if we ask. But the verses are also clear that 'the wages of sin is death', and being pointed to Genesis 15, we are told that the people of Canaan were sinful people, and that they had been persistently rebellious and idolatrous, and conquering their land was judgment on their sin. (Genesis 15:16 'In the fourth generation your descendants will come back [to Canaan], for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached it's full measure) This speaks of God's patience and willing for repentance, but intolerance for sin.
However, whether or not you believe that God commanded the killing of the inhabitants of Canaan, many questions are raised on either side, and whilst I have heard several viewpoints, I am far from being certain of exactly what I believe. And I am very interested to hear people's viewpoints on the matter. Although we sometimes have to remember not to focus too much on the matters that aren't vital and realize that as long as we know the importance of God's saving love and grace, the other topics - whilst interesting and helpful to understand - are not worth fighting over. With this in mind, I would still love to hear what people think on this matter and on others.
