Why Is There so Much Killing in the Old Testament? Part 1 | Table Talk S03 E09

Foreign.

Okay, guys, we need to roll cameras here.

Let's get going.

Everybody ready? Quiet on set and start your move. And action. This particular question that we're going to raise right now for our conversation is one that comes up for me in just about every Q and A session, no matter where I go in the world. If you open it up for people and say, hey, what if you had any difficult question that you would like to put forth regarding the Bible, what would it be? And everybody asks the question, why is there so much killing in the Old Testament? There are variations of this question. Some people just say, why is the God of the Old Testament so brutal? Some people say, it sure seems like there's a big difference between the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament. What's going on here? The Old Testament looks crazy. It looks insane. It looks like there's everything from genocide to polygamy, slavery. And it looks like God is condoning all of that. It looks like God is right in the middle of all that and actually commanding some of these.

And in the New Testament, Jesus is kind of caressing a little lamb.

He's caressing a little lamb. That's right. He's a mile.

Some people would say, is Jesus the God of the Old Testament?

Yeah, that terminology is used, isn't it the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament? So it's a serious problem. And I believe that there are a lot of people who just hold the Bible and Christianity and God at arm's length and just say, I can't go there. That is just too crazy, what's going on in the Old Testament. So we need to begin, I think, by just confessing that it is a serious question. It's a serious problem. We need to feel the weight of it. As we said about some of the questions yesterday, it's a weighty question. And we don't have. I think, as we've explored the subject individually and together, at times we don't have neat, packaged little answers, little sound bites, a sentence or two that would resolve all the mystery and have everybody feel okay about what's going on. It's tough. Jeffrey, what were you saying one time when we were talking about it? That we ought to feel. We ought to feel something about what's going on in these stories.

Yeah, it's a messy thing. God is dealing with.

Fallen structures, fallen social structures. And I don't think it's genuine or honest to think that just because we're believers, we could read some of the really tough passages in the Old Testament and just be totally fine with it. Unmoved, unaffected. I think we're supposed to.

Untroubled.

Yeah, untroubled. I think we're supposed to feel, like you said, feel the force of what we're reading. Like, oh, look, to be honest, I read things in the Old Testament and I'm just like, ah, that's a hard one for me to swallow. Like, what? I don't understand what's going on. And I think that's okay.

It is okay. And for every person that Ty described that said, you know, that is non committal about Scripture, that's non committal about Jesus, about Christianity, that's holding these things at arm's length. For every one of those people, there's at least one who loves Jesus, who loves scripture, who loves his Word, who is also troubled by these things in the Old Testament.

Exactly. It's almost like that relative that, you know, you're just like, yeah, you know, he's related to you, but you don't always invite him over. You know, he's there, but he's not like the top of the list when it comes time to, you know, when you, when you're sitting down saying, what am I going to preach a series on this. You know, you get an invitation to a conference or a church or whatever.

And what am I going to.

I think I'm going to preach on genocide in the Old Testament.

You just don't do it.

That's my point. You're like, whoa.

And honestly, how many sermons do you hear on that?

It's so difficult that I think most theologians and preachers just avoid it.

And that's a complaint from the unbelieving community, isn't it, that we pick and choose.

Being disingenuous with your own text.

Yeah, we love to pick and choose the pretty text, the nice text, the morally elevating text, but we just skip around and. And avoid and skirt some of the more difficult passages.

And a word about Ty and I so appreciate you saying this, and I think we need to be saying things like this more in the Christian faith that not every difficult question has a nice, neat, square edged, platitudinous answer. And you just put that block right here. And this block fits seamlessly right here.

Not just with regards to this issue. We spent a couple episodes ago wrestling through if God is so forgiving, then why did Jesus have to die? And I felt like we had great clarity there. I loved that conversation. I went home rejoicing about that conversation. But when it was done, it's not as though we had solved the mystery of the nature of God and solved the mystery of the nature of the.

Cross, the nature of sin.

It was helpful, super helpful. It was beautiful. It was awesome. It was edifying, all of those things. But this isn't the only mystery. There's lots of mysteries in Scripture, but this is a mystery that seems in some significant degree. No, it doesn't seem.

It is.

It is in some significant degree out of character with the God that we've been talking about through eight episodes.

You know, can I just. I wanted to reemphasize something as well on that point, is that it's not merely that it's okay for us to struggle through these, through this difficult terrain, but that even in Scripture itself, the prophets. We said this in an earlier conversation, King David in the Psalms, he's just like, God, you know, what's going on? Why? Why are you deaf? Are you blind? So this is the kind of language that the prophets themselves used. And I think that's a powerful thing. And that shows to affirm that it's okay to struggle, it's okay to wrestle. Because if the prophets themselves struggled and wrestled, what would we expect from those of us who are readers who are encountering the words of the prophets? You would assume that we also would walk away many times with that dilemma, that tension. That's the word for me. There's a tension there that I think.

Has to be there. You literally have the prophets filing complaints with God, crying out, how long are you going to let this go on? And the prophets are so bold at times as to say, God, why not this, this or this? Making suggestions to the monarch of the universe. I think you should just, you know, cut to the chase and deal with it. Why don't you just, David, at one point, lord, why don't you just lay waste to the wicked and stop all the evil stuff going on in the world? Why don't you let it go on? That's David's. I think God can handle that. I think God wants us to genuinely feel the gravity of how horrible the sin problem is. The problem is that we oftentimes not reading the story as the story unfolds. We think that God is the one who's the perpetrator of the evil in the storyline rather than the one who is in solidarity with us suffering through the evil. Do you see what I'm saying?

We don't see God as with us in the messy pain of Earth's history and navigating the problem. We see God Just pouncing and pouncing and pouncing. Sitting up in heaven with his finger poised over the zap button, so to speak, and just sitting there waiting for somebody to do something he doesn't like and arbitrarily saying zap to you and zap to you and boom, bam. Take that. That picture of God is not the one that emerges when you take in the storyline of scripture, the whole of scripture.

That's a great point, James. Before you jump in there, I think we should lay that foundation very clearly. You just said the storyline. It seems to me that the difficult terrain of the Old Testament is even more difficult when you just isolate a passage or a text that's right from the Old Testament. I mean, let's be honest. Normally when this is presented as a difficulty, it's normally just lifted from the page and analyzed in isolation as if it existed in a vacuum. And I think what will come out of this conversation is when you view Scripture as a narrative, as a story, as a plot, there's main characters and there's an underlying tension, controversy to the whole narrative. Then those specific passages. I'm not saying we arrive at a squeaky clean answer, but I begin to.

Make at least share the context.

They begin to make what we could call narrative sense. They don't make sense in isolation, but they make sense within the narrative that is unfolding.

Right.

I really like what you were saying, Ty, about David. The Bible says David was a man after God's own heart, which to me speaks volumes about the kind of God we serve. And when you connect how David struggled with the evil in this world and what was going on in this world, I think what David is doing is he is giving us a picture of the heart of God.

Oh, yes.

You see the same thing in Job. Job is God's man. He's a perfect man. Why? Because he's longing for his children. He's sacrificing on behalf of his children every day. And Satan hates that picture of God who doesn't sleep, who gives the greatest sacrifice ever in behalf of us. And as Job goes through this trial, God doesn't. Job asks God the same tough questions that David asks God. God doesn't get on Job's case per se. God even says in the end, Job is my man because Job feels about sin the same way I feel about sin. David feels about all of this evil the same way I feel. That man is a man after my own heart. And so God not only allows but inspires David with this revelation that gives us A picture of the heart of God. And to me, in the end, that's the only answer that satisfies is in the midst of all of this evil, how does God feel about it?

We might even imagine that as the prophets cry out, God, how long is this evil gonna go on? We might imagine God resonating with that and saying, yeah, of course. How long?

He's their representative. They're his representative.

Yeah.

A couple things that I wanted to add to that. The first is that this whole conversation that we're having, to me, one of the takeaways, it's a bit of a tangential takeaway, but it's a takeaway nonetheless, is that this speaks about the authenticity of Scripture. To me, Scripture doesn't come off as this squeaky clean, spotless, legendary, embellished.

Everything's.

Everybody comes off looking great. The heroes are awesome. They don't make mistakes. They ride in on the white horse. They do everything right. They ride out of town and all is well. No, we see many of the chief characters of scripture presented in a less than flattering light. And many of the chief.

Instances, the great stories in Scripture, where people are sometimes painted in a less than flattering light, there are some exceptions. It's very difficult to find anything that Daniel did that was amiss.

Right.

But you look at the life of David, and I say all the time, what would we do without David in the Old Testament and Peter in the New Testament? I think we would. I would be tempted to feel guilty, that's for sure. Because I'm just like, man, I look at Peter and I think, oh, I'm so glad this guy's in the New Testament. I need a guy like that, a loudmouth who gets the wrong answer quite a little bit, who's overconfident.

I need that guy there.

And when I go to the Old Testament and I see David, I'm like, man, what is he doing, you know, about half of the time? And even Moses, you know, his story starts off and he's just totally out of sync with God's plan. He's murdering an Egyptian. He's going to do it in his own strength. Adam. I mean, this.

The list goes on and on.

Abraham. Thank you. And what I love about this is it just bespeaks of when I read Scripture. I think that sounds real.

Yeah.

There's an authenticity there. There's the ring of Scripture. That's the first thing I wanted to say. The second thing I wanted to say is about the isolated incidences. If you followed me around with One of these GoPros, if you took a GoPro like this and you followed me around for my whole life, and you had an incident of David's whole life. Like, in the same way that we have a narrative of Scripture here, if you had a narrative of David, you could pick out instances in the life of David, even since conversion, you could pick out instances in my life, and they would be radically out of harmony with the overall trajectory and direction of my life. You say, hey, what's he doing? Why are he and his wife here arguing? What's that about? And he's spanking his child here. And why is he committing this sin? You see what I'm saying? He'd be like, what? I thought this guy was a Christian. But when you take those incidences that could be lifted from the overall story out of the narrative arc, well, now we got a problem. But you put them in the narrative arc. Does that excuse me becoming impatient with my wife? Does it excuse me being impatient with my children or doing something that I know I shouldn't know? It doesn't excuse it, but it gives it a context.

That's right.

This is a super, super important point. Jeffrey has brought this to our attention. I mentioned the narrative sense that it makes. Now you're emphasizing this. I think that we need to bring to our attention the fact that over and over again, there is misunderstanding of the God of the Old Testament and the God of scripture as a whole. Because, as Jeffrey said, stories are being looked at in isolation from the narrative. For example, we have case in point with Dr. Richard Dawkins, very famous atheist. He's a biologist, and he rants against the God of the Old Testament, the God of scripture. And when he's doing so, if you read, for example, the God Delusion.

New York Times bestseller. When you read that book, you're not reading the writings. So much of a scientist, he's not making so many scientific statements. He's ranting. He's upset at the God of the Old Testament. And as he's doing this, you read the examples he gives. And for example, he sees. And we'll get to this later. I think we're gonna discuss this in detail. But he looks at the biblical story of the Flood, and all he sees is what in the world. This guy just drowns the whole world. And the picture he gives is God just grabbing people by the neck and sticking their head underwater. It's an isolated picture.

It's not even an accurate picture.

It's not even an accurate picture because you think he didn't read the story and he didn't take in the whole terrain of the subject matter for my own personal amusement. David, perhaps, please. Yeah, David, read this quotation from Richard Dawkins for us from the God Delusion. Read this quotation.

Yeah, I was just gonna. This is the one. I was even thinking. I was thinking. Were you really? Oh, yeah, I was gonna reference that. Classic atheistic.

This really presents the problem. This is the problem.

So Dawkins, in his book the God Delusion, writes, 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, sadomastochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Good job.

That is a mouthful.

That is a mouthful. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. This guy sees God in arguably the darkest light that you could possibly imagine.

That is Satanic.

That's Satanic.

And that's a great description of Satan.

That's a description of. Hey, hey, that's the point.

That's the point.

This is a description of Satan that's being transposed over God.

And that's been the.

That reminds me of the great statement, great controversy is Satan's constant effort to misrepresent the character of God. And he's obviously done a marvel and.

To take his principles and apply them to God.

So here you have an example of a man, Dr. Richard Dawkins. We're not picking on him. This is what he's written. A man is obviously very intelligent. He's an intelligent guy. He's been voted the most intelligent person on the planet or one of the top three most intelligent people on the planet in polls that have been taken at times. So he's not lacking.

I would measure that.

Yeah, he's not lacking in iq, but what is he lacking in? He's lacking in perspective, context, context, even faith. Even faith. And he sees something going on in the Old Testament narrative that we don't see going on there? We read the same text and we see an entirely different picture of God. And so how do we unpack that? What is the picture of God that we see taking place in the Old Testament scriptures and in Scripture as a whole? And that's where we need to go.

I think it's really important to add to that, that we don't see that because we were necessarily brought up in a Christian environment where we were protected from and insulated from all of these wild ideas about God. We had the same issues with God, the same struggles with God, the same questions about the Old Testament that have come to a different conclusion here. And we looked at that with the same desire to find an answer.

That's right.

That's right. I think that's a great point. And we don't want to create a situation where we fob all of this off on the Dawkinses of the world, as we said, and that we need to do that. We need to say, hey, look, these are actual questions. But for every Richard Dawkins, again, that's holding at arm's length or even at a football field's length, this God of Scripture, there is somebody, there's at least four of them at this table and probably a whole lot outside of it that are saying, okay, I do have faith, I do trust Jesus, I do believe in the narrative scope and all of that, all the lines, but still, okay, so why is that story in the Old Testament? And I think when we come back after the break, we're going to have to take a look at that and say, okay, let's get into some of these texts and let's see how does it fit into the narrative. It's not always nice and neat like we could wish it would be, as we've mentioned. But we have been able to cling to our confidence and our hope in the God of scripture, not because of these stories, but in spite of them. They're there, and yet we think that they can be. While maybe not harmonized, they can be understood.

Okay, let's dive into the difficult stuff after the break.

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There's a great way to set up the answer to the problem that we've posed. That, at least for me, has been helpful. And I just want to throw it on the table and see if you guys can get it out there. Yeah, just see if you think this helps. We're about to deal with the messy, difficult parts of a narrative, of a story, things that we're not comfortable with and things that we've suggested that God isn't even comfortable with. Okay, so that's the body of the story. But if you look at the biblical narrative and you go back to the very beginning of the story, all right, Genesis 1 and 2, what we call pre fall. You have a picture before the entrance of sin. Gotcha. You have a picture of God, how he thinks, how he feels, his aspirations, his desires, the kind of person God is. And you go to the end of the story, the last two chapters of the Bible, in Revelation 21 and 22, and you have a picture of God. Now watch where this goes. These are like two bookends. In the beginning of the story, you have a God who creates a world in which he looks at what he's made, and he says, it's good. Good, good, good, good. Very good. It's very good. God has created a situation in which there is no pain. There is no suffering. There is no relational discord. There's just love, love, love, and more love. There's giving, giving, giving, and more giving. There's freedom, freedom, freedom and more freedom.

And pleasure.

We fall in love with pleasure and all that's going on in those first two chapters. Okay, Then the story unfolds, the messy part of the story. In chapter three, the fall occurs of Genesis, and the word curse is introduced. All right, now watch this. Then all this horror unfolds down through history in this story. High points and low points and successes and failures and people who are achieving great things by faith and God is giving the nod and. Yes, and then there are things where it descends into horror and ugliness and the story's unfolding, unfolding, unfolding. You come to Revelation 21:22, and now you have a situation where God is described as wiping all tears from eyes. And he says, no more pain, no more suffering, no more death, no more. No more. No more of all this stuff in the body of the story. We're going back. And then this. This in chapter 22, and there was no more curse. What has happened? Verse 3 of chapter 22. Okay, no more curse. So you have. In Genesis, you have the introduction of the word curse. Not curse in the pagan sense of abracadabra. Curse, Curse in the sense of suffering and horror and ugliness and terrible things.

All of that starts to unfold as a result of.

Yeah, and you get to the end of the story, and now no more curse. So what this says to me is that whatever's going on in the body of the story, all the horrible things that we're about to look at and unpack, okay, all that horrible stuff.

None of it is reflective of God's character, will or aspirations, his original plan. And none of it is reflective of what God finally leads us to as a restoration. Do you see how that works? I gotta add a scripture to this. I gotta add a scripture. This is in Isaiah, chapter 11, verse 9, and it's just phenomenal. It says, this is God describing reality and our world as our world is in its final configuration, when everything is the way that God wants it to be. And they shall not hurt nor destroy. In all my holy mountains, says the Lord, for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord. What this is telling us that at a very bare minimum, that all the horror and ugliness that we see taking place and unfolding in human history is not reflective of what's going on in the heart of this sensitive God who loves and is good. What we see is two bookends and then God navigating the evil in between and returning us. Do you like that as a general way of looking at that?

You know, I was going to say that.

Everything in Genesis 1 and 2 and Revelation 21 and 22 is reflective of God's ideal. Right? Your point exactly. Everything we read in between.

Falls short of God's ideal. I want to introduce now this thing that we all know as the accommodation principle, right.

What we read about in between those two bookends is God.

Meeting humanity where it is, right. In order to deal with the brokenness and the fallenness of the human race. But in order to meet humanity where humanity is, God has to operate and relate to humanity in ways that are less than his ideal. So there's an issue that whenever we read things in scripture in the Old Testament, we cannot jump to the conclusion that that's what God wanted, that's reflective of God's ideal. We always have to read it against the backdrop of Genesis 1 and 2. For example, we'll read passages in the Old Testament where women are related in a certain way, are related to in a certain way, but we always have.

To in a bad way. Yeah.

And we have to read that always against the backdrop of Genesis 1 and 2, where none of that existed. Inequality didn't exist. Like you were saying, pain, suffering, and so forth didn't exist. I want to share a passage that I think is super, super powerful on this very point, and It's Matthew, chapter 19, and I'm beginning in verse three, and I'm hoping I have the right verses here. But Matthew 19:3, this is where Jesus is being confronted in regard to marriage and divorce. Okay? So I think this is a great point where you have things in the Bible that are written but that are not reflective of God's ideal. Matthew 19:3, the Pharisees came to Jesus, testing him, and they said to him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason? And verse four, Jesus says to him, haven't you read that he who made them at the beginning made them male and female. And that's in quotation marks. He's quoting from Genesis pre fall, right. And verse five, and said, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. Again quoting Pre Fall verse 6. So then they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man separate. They said to him, then why did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce to put her away?

Break that down.

So in essence. Wait a second, Jesus, you're telling us that it was never God's intention for divorce to be a thing? If what you're saying is true, then why is it that when we crack open more like the scrolls we unroll, when we unroll the scrolls of the Old Testament, of the Old Testament scriptures. Why is it that you told Moses.

To tell us divorce should be conducted.

Like this, that there's provision for divorce, right?

Accommodation.

If you're not into divorce, then why have you. Why did you communicate through the Old Testament scriptures that here are parameters for divorce? I think this is brilliant.

It is brilliant.

And Jesus answer is just like it's money. Verse 8, he said to them.

A.

Lot of money, Moses.

Because, Moses, because of the hardness of your heart, there you go. Permitted you to divorce your wives. And then from the beginning, this was never supposed to be the case. So to me, again, this doesn't allow me to walk away with squeaky clean answers. But I'll tell you what it does do.

It gives a context.

It gives me something to work with. I read stuff in the Old Testament that frankly freaks me out. But I have to read that against the backdrop of Genesis 1 and 2. And this principle, although only speaking in regard to marriage, divorce, it gives a principle, applies to. And I'll just put all the dirty laundry on the table, slavery, women's rights, polygamy. Polygamy and all the rest of it, right? It's powerful.

Everything.

Genocide, killing, war. In the Old Testament, that principle, it's a key that unlocks and helps us grapple with all the other difficulties in the Old Testament. And that key is, namely, this is not God's ideal. God's ideal is Genesis 1 and 2. Equality, liberty, mercy, justice, so forth and so forth. But because of the hardness and the fallenness of the social structures and of the human race and of the human race and of the people, God has had to work with the mess that the curse has brought on. And because of that working, he has to work with what he's got, although it's less than his ideal. So I think that's super important to unravel that.

The Lord just gave you a very high level of clarity.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

That was extremely helpful in outlining the essence of what we're referring to as the accommodation principle. I'd like to give now and see if this fits or not. Just cross examine this, you guys. An Old Testament example that will serve as a lens through which we can see this accommodation principle in action. Okay, we have this guy that we've referred to as David. All right? David is a man who becomes a king in Israel, basically because the people have demanded a king. All right, first there's Saul, but then there's David. God in the story doesn't want Israel to have a king at all. He wants to govern his people through prophets, through information, through wisdom. He wants to educate his people to live in such a way through information.

That they're self governing priests.

Yeah, they're self governing. They're a kingdom of priests. That's how God wants to govern his people, with wisdom. No, we want a king. We want someone over us to.

Like the other nations.

Yeah, like the other nations. God says, no, you're not gonna have a king. They insist. And so what does God do in the story? He accommodates. He says, okay, you insist upon having a king, you're gonna have a king. And it's gonna get. I'm just gonna tell you it's gonna be bad. He's gonna take your women as concubines. He's gonna tax your lands. He's gonna take your. Your son's off to war. Just so you know, that's what it's gonna look like to have a king. You put a human being in power, and power corrupts.

For our viewers, you're referring to First Samuel, chapter eight. So keep going.

So then they get Saul. All right, Then the second king after Saul, cutting to the chase here is David. Now, this is astounding to me. David is a man after God's own heart. David is chosen by God to be the king of Israel. David is under the blessing of God. David turns to God for guidance and strength in conducting war with the nations around, right? And David is a man of war. David goes through his entire military career as a king. All right? He comes to the end of his career, he's getting old. And he says, God, here's how I want to go out. Here's how I want to end my life. I want to build for you God, a temple for the worship of God. And then God says something astounding.

I know this is astonishing.

Yeah. God says, david, no, you can't build a temple for the worship of me. God, because you're a man of war and there's blood on your hands, the temple has to be built by a man of which in the story, that will be Solomon, who was not a man of war, but a man of wisdom, a man who had his ups and downs. Of course we want to go into that, but here's the thing. Here's the thing. Do you see what's happening here?

God is essentially blessing David. He's going along with David and he's.

I'm taking notes while you're talking.

He's guiding David. He's blessing David. David's my man. But then when it comes to worshiping God and are building a temple to worship God. God disassociates himself from the very wars that he blessed David to win.

Right.

And that tells us that God's ultimate will is not war. In fact, when we come to the minor prophets, there's a passage, and maybe you guys know where it is. I don't know where it is. Where God is expressing what his ultimate will is. And he says, they shall teach war no more.

That's right.

No more war.

Like that old, that great spiritual, gonna study war no more.

Yeah, there you go. So there's God accommodating his people in their fallen, messy state and then disassociating himself from war. People say, well, why all this genocide in the Old Testament? Why all these. The Israelites going in under God's command and slaughtering other nations? We'll get to that. But we can clearly see that whatever it is, God ultimately is not a God of war.

I love the way that we're inching toward the answer. And frankly, it's the responsible thing to do. There might be some listening in. Maybe someone has shared, a believer, has shared this conversation with an agnostic or an atheist or someone who's hostile, and they're saying, okay, get to the point, get to the point. But the point is, is that this is the point. You can't just run headlong into these difficult passages any more than you could run headlong into the narrative, the GoPro narrative of David's. Why is he yelling at his wife right here? What's going on? Okay, well, wait a minute. But what about this and this and this as a context and what we've said here? This is not escapist. No, this is people. It's the actual story trying to wrestle through and understand. But what I love about what we've done so far is we've shown God's ideal. Okay, we've done that. We've started this way. This is. I'm compartmentalizing. Number one, we said, this is difficult. These answers aren't all nice, neat and easy. Number two, we've said, this is God's ideal. And we did the Genesis 1 and 2 to Revelation 21 and 22. And then I love. There's almost like that little buoy in the middle of Isaiah 11:19. You know, this is what it's going to be like. They're not going to kill or kill 11, nine. Thank you on my holy mountain. And then now we're saying, okay, so what's the next step? Well, it's accommodation Matthew was it 19:19. Accommodation where God's accommodating. And then we just had this accommodation. As Prince. I love that. I just feel like it's important for us to say that we're inching toward. And when we get there, it's not as though everything is going to line up and every I is going to be dotted, every T will be crossed and all will be well. But at least we'll have a superstructure, a narrative from which to say, okay, I still don't like that, but I see where it fits in the flow.

Totally. I really like what you just said, David, because that's what's missing. Ty was talking as he introduced this, about this whole attack of atheism against the Bible and against the God of the Old Testament specifically. And what is missing from all of that is this inching in, inching in, taking up the big picture, which I love, the way we did that, starting in Genesis and going to Revelation and showing the bookends, the beginning and the end. But also a lot of these principles that Jesus talks about in Matthew 19, as you said, that remind us that God is accommodating. Accommodating, accommodating. But he has a will and he wants that will to be done. And it reminds me of the prayer of Christ in Matthew 6, among other places, where he says that we need to pray thy will be done on.

Earth as it is in heaven, which.

Tells us it's not being done and tells us that we are to be delivered from this evil.

You know what? It just occurred to me that the accommodation principle is not merely a thing within the canon of Scripture. It's not just a thing God did in the Old Testament times until we would come to our senses. And he can relate to us differently. It just occurred to me that this is still the way he relates to humanity.

What about you? What about your course?

It is.

Think about your own journey.

When I first encountered the gospel and I had this radical transformative experience in my life, God didn't relate to me or expect from me or reveal to me the things that he revealed to me five, six, seven years later.

Yes.

So God gave me what I could.

Handle at the time and stayed in relationship with you.

Yeah. God took into account the context you were saying? Not the context, the trajectory of my journey. And he related to me accordingly. So I just think it's awesome that this principle, this accommodation principle in Scripture is still the way God relates to humanity today. And furthermore, if we just think of, I mean, we're a bunch of evangelists at the table, but the expectations one would have towards other Christians or newly.

Or what about going to the mission.

Field or to the mission field. You enter an entirely radically different culture who's being introduced to this for the very first time.

It would be crazy to relate to that culture in a way where you would expect them to totally alter and recalibrate everything.

Immediately.

You would assume you would ruin the relationship.

You would assume that there's a gradual process that would be needed. And that's exactly what we're saying is in the Old Testament.

So you could say God, for example. God doesn't like polygamy, Right? We know that it's not his ideal. We know that from Genesis 1 and 2. We know that from Jesus statement in Matthew 19. God is not in favor of polygamy, but he's dealing with Abraham because he's got this big plan that he's working out. And to go after that in that culture, in that setting, at that time, with that man, to go after that would circumvent the bigger objective that God is trying to achieve.

We were saying in a previous conversation that you bring up Abraham. So Abraham is coming from an environment, a civilization, a culture where children are being sacrificed.

To idols. So God has a. He has to evaluate his approach. Okay, this is my man. This is my number one man. Okay? I need him to be on point. He's coming from an environment where children are being sacrificed, and he's also into having two or three wives.

Okay, so.

Okay, so you see what I'm saying? Absolutely.

So he has to deal with something, but he's not just going to lay it all on Abraham. So you see the polygamy thing persist a little longer through the narrative, but the child sacrificing God is like, get up and pack your bags.

At the most fundamental level, even apart from the polygamy thing or the genocide thing or the slavery thing, God is accommodating every one of us at the level of language. So this is something that we need to understand.

That's a good point.

This is.

We are.

The fact that the Bible is even there, it's a combination.

The fact that God has condescended to speak, speak to beings that are not like him. The chasm between created and creator is an infinite chasm. It's greater than the chasm between an amoeba and Gabriel, the angel. That chasm is, say, whatever, 100 miles. Okay, well, then the chasm between the kind of being that Gabriel is and God is, is a billion miles. So the moment that God makes, that's a condescension, right? It's an accommodation. Then the moment he speaks, that's an accommodation. So much so that when we're dealing with God, even in our prayers, there's this great text in Romans 8 that says that the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be uttered because God's like, I know what he thinks he's asking. I know what he thinks he wants, or what she thinks she wants. But I'm going to hear the intent. I will accommodate the fragility and the humanity of that prayer, of that situation, of that. So this accommodation is not just in the big things. In other words, it's not just like a nice little principle to get these skeletons back in the closet where they belong. No, God is accommodating us at every conceivable level. The second thing I wanted to say, and I love this is great quotation from Norman Geisler, well known Christian philosopher and apologist. And this has stuck with me. I read it probably 15 years ago and it's just stuck with me. He said, apparently God would rather wrestle with stubborn human wills than reign supreme over rocks and trees.

Oh, that's good, that's good.

He said when I read Scripture, apparently God would rather wrestle with stubborn human wills than reign supreme over the rock centuries.

We have to take a break because we have this whole schedule thing going on, but we'll come right back and continue with the discussion.

The Light Bearer's Story is a short, award winning video that gives an inside look at one of the boldest and most effective missionary ventures of our time. You will see how multiple millions of gospel publications are flooding the nations free of charge by surprisingly simple means. For your free copy of the Light bearer's story, call 876-585-1111 or write to Light Bearers, 37457 Jasper Lowell Road, Jasper, OR 97438. Once again, for your free copy of the Light bearer story, call 877-585-1111 or write to Light Bearers, 37457 Jasper Lowell Road, Jasper, OR 9743. Simply ask for the Light Bearer Story. I think we've laid a really helpful foundation and now we need to spend some time getting into some of the difficult situations that we encounter in the Old Testament. I'll begin with the Flood because that's an early story in the big narrative that people really struggle with. And as I mentioned earlier, there are people who see it as just a malicious act of drowning a bunch of people with no just cause and in a way that is cruel and heartless. But I want you to notice something in the story, in the text of Genesis chapter six that is oftentimes overlooked. First of all, as the story is told, it says in verse three that the Lord said, my spirit shall not strive with man for forever. So the first point is this. God is striving with man. What's the context? Striving what? Striving to get human beings to stop hurting one another.

He's working with.

To stop perpetrating injustice on one another. He's working with them. So that, first of all, tells us.

Tells us a lot about how God deals with people.

How God deals with people. Secondly, down in verse five, it says that the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. So this thing is going off the charts. Wickedness is now exponential. It's gone viral. It's everywhere and it's horrible. And it says that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. That's pretty strong language. This is some bad stuff. The world is in a bad place. Verse 6 says that the Lord was sorry that he made man and that it grieved his heart. Here's a God who is looking on the way children are being treated, the way women are being treated, the way men are treating fellow men. And he's grieved. So this isn't a barbaric God who just flies off the handle one day. This is a God who's laboring, he's pleading and he's grieved. But here's the part that I find very interesting. As the story goes on. It says in verse 11 that the earth was corrupt and filled with violence. Filled with violence, you guys, how much violence? How bad was this wickedness? Verse 13. And God said to Noah, the end of all flesh has come up before me. The end of all flesh has come up before me. And then he says, I will destroy the earth with a flood and start over with Noah. That's the short version. Do you see what's happening here?

The end of all flesh.

The end of all flesh. That term. Very few people take that into account. Essentially, what God is saying here is the human race is teetering on the edge of extinction.

Yes.

There's not gonna be anybody left.

So, God, I'm gonna take action.

I'm gonna take action. I'm gonna intervene to save the human race by ending this evil that is like a parasite that's just spreading. It's gone pandemic. Everybody's taken in. And we know how bad it was because how many people got in the ark? Eight.

Yeah.

Okay. This thing had spread. This was a virus that was infecting the whole world. And God says I have no choice but to destroy in order to save. To destroy in order to. I have no choice. What are my options? What am I gonna do if I allow one more generation to go by? There's no Noah. There's nobody. The human race is trashed. The whole thing goes extinct. What are we gonna do then? So God preserves the human race by preserving Noah and his family and the larger story. Why? In order to enter into covenant with Noah.

That's right.

So that messiah can come to reverse all the effects of evil and eventually save humanity.

It's the whole surgeon thing. Removing a tumor, removing a cancerous part of the body in order to preserve.

The rest of it.

You know, I really like that because In Luke chapter 5, 30, 32, Jesus describes himself as a physician. And it reminds me of a story. I had two dogs, Jake and Willie. They were Lab's brothers.

I remember those years for many years.

Yeah. And both of them died of cancer. It was a little different with Jake than it was with Willie. Willie was the first one to get cancer, and he got it in his eye, and we didn't know what it was. We just said, whoa, his eye looks kind of funny. It's kind of changing in its appearance. It's like he's going blind. And we took him to the vet and they told us he has cancer. It's in his eye. If you remove the eye, there's a possibility that the dog will survive. And so we were just totally wanting the dog to survive.

We were.

We were wanting to save the life.

Of the dog and we were willing.

To sacrifice the eye. And I have to say to you, honestly, that it wasn't mean spirited. We weren't angry at our dog.

We loved our dog.

We wanted to keep Willy. And he loved the one dog. He was the loving one of the. Jake was the. He was the.

He's the one you wanted to destroy.

He was. He was the. He was the lead dog. He was. He was the boss.

Was he the black one?

Yes.

Yeah.

And Willie was the lover. He was the one.

He was the golden.

He was the golden. He was just the lover. And so Jake was the alpha. And so anyway, we went through the surgery, it was successful, et cetera, but the cancer came back and it permeated the entire body of Willie. And eventually we had to put him down. And I think this is a beautiful picture of what we see in Genesis. God sees the cancer of sin permeating the entire body of the human race, and he puts the race down. When we took Willie, I wasn't there. My wife took him in. When we took Willie in to the vet, she broke down. She couldn't handle it. In fact, later, and I'm just going to cut this story short, but just to make this one point later, when Jake also got cancer, when I had to put him down, I told my wife, I said, I'm here. I said, I'll put him down. Don't worry. I know you couldn't handle this. I'm the man. I'll take it. I got this. Took him into the vet. The vet said to me, hey, if you need to leave, if this is too much.

No, I'm good.

I can handle this.

Boom.

I go in there, they put the first shot in.

I literally fell apart, fell to pieces.

I was weeping.

I left there. I just couldn't even control myself.

And you're a fallen, dysfunctional human being.

What's the heart of God?

What's the heart of God? Grieving.

The heart of God is in Hosea.

God gives his heart.

He talks about how. And the reason I think this is so powerful is because it lines up with. And I'm just going to say this quickly, I'm not going to take a lot of time with this, but it lines up with another story in Sodom and Gomorrah, a story where God comes down and sees the evil that is taking place there. The cries have come up. And there's one verse here. In verse 20 of Genesis, chapter 18, it says, the Lord said, because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is grievous. We see grievous sin in the world today, and we want to do something about it. We want to do something about the slave trade and the sex traffic trade and pornography that affects children. We want to do something about that, don't we? And this is what God sees in Sodom and Gomorrah. And Abraham is playing, and God's like, yeah, if there's 50, I'll say, if there's 45. If there's 40, if there's 30, if there's 10, I will save that city.

He barely got one.

And the two daughters, barely. And God is just in Hosea. God is just saying, how can I give you up? How can I let you go? And I think about my dogs, and I think about the fact they had cancer and I didn't want them to die, but I knew that it was better for them. It was an act of mercy.

James, I want to emphasize that in Genesis 18, the Sodom and Gomorrah story, you mentioned this really fast in passing, but I think we need to really emphasize that it says that the reason God intervened is because the cries of sufferers were coming up before him.

That's right.

There was an outcry against Sodom. There were children who were being mistreated, there were women being mistreated. And God intervened to end suffering, not to impose suffering.

I mean, look, just like with Willie, the passage is pretty. Is pretty rough, man. I mean, the passage implies that it was customary in a society where if you're a visitor and you're a man and you thrown into town that gang rape of men raping another man was customary.

And the women were offered.

Yeah.

And women were treated in the place of the men.

This isn't women with their strollers on their way to Target or a Walmart. And God just flies off the handle. This is a decadent culture.

Ty mentioned earlier in the first segment of this program, he just quickly ran by power corrupts. And yet the reality is that that's a statement from Lord Acton, and the context of that statement is fascinating. No need to go into it here. But when he said, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. God has given humanity a sphere in which to operate. So the people of Sodom had. They had power over their city, they had power over their lives, they had power over their families. But when that power has been so employed, so misemployed, so corrupted and perverted, that it's beginning to affect people outside of that, their sphere of influence, and then furthermore add on top of that, those people, if they're reproducing, so now you have children that are being poured into environments that are so corrupt. I mean, we find instances in the Old Testament where people were putting their children into the fire to a God named Moloch. And there's this great text in Jeremiah where God says, this never even came into my mind.

What are you doing?

So the idea that God would come down and say, and he's uniquely qualified to do so, the vet was uniquely qualified to say, hey, look, this dog is not going to survive. God is uniquely qualified to look at Sodom and say, there's nothing redeemable in that culture. Now somebody says, well, why doesn't God come down and Force them to. But that's not the way that human beings work. A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion. Still, if God could force every human being to believe the ideal, to accept the ideal, to be loving kindness, you know, just merciful, surely he would do it.

Well, we do have the story of Nineveh. And God didn't force, but he pled.

Yes, thank you.

They changed. And he did destroy. And he destroys.

That's God's purpose.

Guys, can I put some other rough, rough stuff on the table? I just want to read some of the. Some really hard passages. And I'm going to read from Deuteronomy, chapter 20. We're on this very subject of the whole surgeon and the whole cancer and so forth. But this is usually what's alluded to when people bring up difficulties in the old Testament. Deuteronomy 20. I'm beginning in verse 16. The cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you will let nothing that breathes remain alive.

That's tough.

But you will utterly destroy them. The Hittite, the Amorite, Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, the Jebusite. Different people groups, just as the Lord your God has commanded you, lest they teach you to do according to all their abominations.

That's the point.

Which they have done for their gods. And you sin against the Lord your God. So I just want to make a really quick jump from there and ask the question.

Who are these people? Who are these people? What is God doing here? What is he reacting to?

Yeah, what are they doing?

And there's a description of that. Actually, we go back to Leviticus. In Leviticus we have a specific description that helps me process it. Leviticus 18. And I need to hurry here. Clock is ticking. But In Leviticus chapter 18, God explains what's going on here. And I'm reading from verse. Let's just start in verse 20. Listen to the types of warnings that the community of Israel were given. Moreover, you shall not lie, that is, sleep with or engage in sexual interaction carnally with your neighbor's wife, to defile yourself with her. You will not let any of your descendants pass through the fire to Molech. You were just alluding to sacrifices and child sacrifices. Nor shall you profane, profane the name.

Of the Lord your God.

I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. Nor shall you mate with any animal to defile yourself with it. Nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it. It is perversion to me. You're looking at a society, at a culture, at a people group where sacrificing children to fire was customary, where, and this is difficult to even process bestiality, by which we mean human beings engaging in sexual interaction with animals. So you were saying that the issue there was not only that they had the power to do whatever they wanted to do within their own society, but this was becoming a problem that was spreading.

Yeah. Verse 24 says, all the nations are defiled.

All the nations are defiled. So when we think of, hey, look, there's no question that doesn't immediately say, oh, okay, no problem. I get why God said the Hittite, the Canaanite, and why he needed to remove them from society. It doesn't enable me to walk away squeaky clean, but it does help me to understand, okay, how would I feel, how would we feel, how would the modern unbeliever feel if we were aware that in a society near us.

We would freak out?

We can answer that question with the United States military policy right now. Now, it's not perfectly consistent and it's not in every instance, but the US sees abuse taking place in this country.

Or whatever, and we cry out often.

Whether it's legit or not. The point is, is that we see ourselves in some significant sense because we have the ability to stop oppression, injustice, exploitation. We feel a compulsion to do so.

Wow.

And we do want to just be clear. I'm not endorsing the way that we do it. My point is that if we say, if I see a 17 year old boy that I could take, you know, that I could wrestle to the ground trying to rape an 11 year old girl, I'm going to stop that. I'm going to.

Even if you couldn't take down the person that's doing that, you're going to intervene?

Intervene, I'll do something.

And if in the process you had to stop the act by actually injuring or ending the life of the person, perpetuating that society would not call you a murderer, but a hero. God intervenes in similar situations in scripture and we call him a monster.

Wow.

Do you see that? Yeah. We're completely out of sync with reality. The fact is that we don't see God in the biblical narrative flying off the handle in a rage and being arbitrary in his actions. We see God intervening in mercy, intervening in justice, doing what is right. And we see extraordinary patience over and over and over again. You could ask the question, why is there so much killing in the Old Testament. You could also ask the question, why isn't there more? Why didn't God intervene more than he did?

Why is God allowing all this?

Why, even now he went to flood 120 years. Exactly. So I think we've given a good base for the answer. There's still quite a questions, but that's the note upon which we have to close.