Why Is There so Much Killing in the Old Testament? Part 2 | Table Talk S03 E10

Last discussion, we were hurrying. We came to an abrupt close. I don't know if you remember that.

Yep.

And. And we felt like, hey, we need to have a part two. We didn't plan on having a part one. Part two on why is there so much killing in the Old Testament. But this is such a serious question and a question that we have so much interest in. And we felt like we had a lot of clarity, but there were things that we felt like we still needed to address that we hadn't even gotten into. So maybe it would be good for us to begin by summarizing what. Where we've come from in that previous conversation, and then from there begin to inch our way forward to some of the additional difficult passages that we think need to be made sense of.

Yeah, that's a good idea. So what are the things that we. Okay, well, you help me. The first thing that we talked about is, number one, that these are thorny questions that don't have nice, neat, easy, platitudinous answers. And that. That actually strongly suggests the authenticity of Scripture. It's a human book with, as you kept saying something, human structures. Do you remember what your language was there? Fallen. Human structures, social structures. So we talked about that, and then we started talking about. What I loved is that we started inching toward the solution. And we don't mean the solution in any absolute sense, but toward the direction of the answer. It's like, we know it's in that direction. It's over that hill, you know, across that valley, through that river. And we started ty with that compass point that is so crucially important that you brought our attention to that true north compass point that Scripture opens in Genesis 1 and 2 in a certain way with a certain picture of God, a certain portrait of humanity and the interrelationship of God and humanity. And then it closes in Revelation 21 and 22 that same way. And you brought out something that I had never seen before, and that was that in Genesis 3, we're introduced to this word and this idea of the curse. And then in Revelation 21, the removal or the lifting or the ending of that curse.

So sort of the Eden to Eden perspective. And then I loved that little. That little island of hope in the vast sea there of the Old Testament and the New Testament to some degree, that is difficult to understand God's accommodation. And that's Isaiah 11:19. They will not hurt or destroy. 11, 9. I keep saying 19, they will not hurt or destroy in all my holy.

Mountain, because the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord.

Jeffrey then talked about the accommodationist principle. And I loved the Matthew 19 thing where God made Adam and Eve. And then later Moses says, well, you can divorce on these grounds or according to these principles. But Jesus says in Matthew 19, but it wasn't like that from the beginning. It was because of the hardness of your hearts that God accommodated the situation. And that launched us off into a whole.

We talked about that Ty got into David and Saul and the Kings.

That was an accommodation to the Old Testament.

And that accommodation principle, how it applied there, and how that David became a man of war, a bloody man, that he was a man of war. And toward the end of his life, he wanted to build this temple in worship for the Lord. And God, in a sense, distanced himself. He pulled back and he said, no, David, you can't do that. Yeah, your hands are bloody. So even though God is blessing David and protecting him, et cetera, God is in another sense saying, that's not my way. That's not the way that I operate when it comes to a temple to worship me. Solomon, a man of peace, is going to put that temple up.

So that was the accommodationist principle.

Old Testament.

Yeah.

And I like that. And we mentioned that God is accommodating us all with even things like language.

And just the fact that there's such a thing as a Bible is a condescension of God to accommodate our ability to even comprehend even the language used in scripture. This is not God language. This is human language.

Like Ty has said before, God is an author, is not represented, equated. Then we spent time on the flood. We spent time on difficult text, Sodom and Gomorrah. Then we went to. Was it numbers 5, Deuteronomy 20, Deuteronomy 20, some of those difficult passages there.

And then we went to Leviticus where we read. What were these.

The kinds of things that were going on, the offering, you know, the bestiality you mentioned there. Child sacrifice. Child sacrifice. And the thing that sort of jumped out to me there was when James. The thing that kind of brought the whole thing together for me was when James told the story about his two dogs, you know, and they get cancer and you have to remove the eye. And eventually the thing is, it's just unsavable. So God looks down and he says, hey, look, this is irredeemable.

Yeah.

So I think that catches us.

That catches us to where we're at. Yeah. I personally felt like in our discussion, we didn't get as far into what some People refer to as the ethnic cleansings of the Old Testament, as we would have liked to. I always think of the ethnic cleansing episodes in Quote marks because they're not ethnic at all.

It's not genocide.

Genocide, yeah. And genocide is another word.

That's quotation.

Yes. Ethnic cleansing, genocide. That's a misnomer. We don't see in the Old Testament narrative God favoring one ethnic group above another ethnic group. We see God calling Abraham out of a culture. And very explicitly, at the beginning of the storyline, in chapter 12 of Genesis, God says to Abraham, I'm calling you out so that through you, through your posterity, all the families of the earth may be blessed. So from the beginning of the story.

God has his eye on all of humanity. God loves the whole human race, and he's not favoring one race above another race. What the principles are that are in play in the Old Testament when it comes to the various tribes of Canaan that Israel is going to war with, it's not ethnicity. That's not the issue. This isn't a Rwanda situation where the Tutsis and the Hutus and the Tutsis are at war with one another because they have racial differences. There's not a direct carryover. That's not apples and apples.

Yeah. Because you even see various passages, and I wish one was at the tip of my tongue, where in the Mosaic literature, in Deuteronomy and so forth, it says that when there's a stranger that comes into Isaiah 56. Yeah, treat him.

Treat him carefully. Because you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt so clearly.

And they become part of the people. They take hold of the covenant.

They are.

They become parts of the Stranger.

Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments. The Stranger that is within thy gates.

So if it's not ethnic, if it's not genocide, while the killing in the Old Testament. Well, I'd like to suggest that it's not ethnic issues that are under consideration, but moral issues that are under consideration. For example, when we come to Psalm 106, all right, and we read in verses 34 and onward, this will make sense in our context. Now listen to these words. This is Psalm 106, starting with verse 34, where God is basically saying, you didn't do what I said. I told you to destroy the Canaanite tribes. And then he says in verse 34, they did not destroy the people concerning whom the Lord had commanded them, but they mingled with the Gentiles and learned their works. Okay, here's what God's concern is.

What verse Was that time 35?

34. Now I'm in 35. The problem wasn't the ethnicity. The problem was that they learned their works. And then it goes on in verse 36 and says they served their idols, which became a snare to them. And then it says they sacrificed even their sons and daughters to demons and shed innocent blood. The blood of their sons and daughters whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan. And the land was polluted with blood. Thus they defiled this. They were defiled with their own works and played the harlot by their deeds. Do you see what's happening here?

Absolutely.

God is concerned. That's a great. God is concerned here not with one ethnic group versus another ethnic group. He's describing the peoples of Canaan as people who are worshiping demons and doing human sacrifice. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Jeffrey, you had read earlier in our previous discussion all kinds of dastardly deeds that were being committed.

Sexual perversion between humans and animals and so forth.

Yeah. All that stuff going on. And God's concern here is I'm pulling Israel out. Not because I'm playing favorites with ethnic groups. I'm pulling Israel out to be a blessing to the whole earth. I'm going to teach this people group new ways of relating. I'm gonna teach them the ways of love and goodness toward their fellow human beings. And that's the thing that's gonna be a blessing to all the other nations if we can pull out a subgroup of humanity, educate them as kings and priests and send them back in.

That's God's plan. And they're being polluted by partaking of these horrible actions. So now we know what's behind. It's a moral issue that's at stake. It's not an ethnic issue that's at stake.

The other thing about. And that's a great point, it's a hugely important clarification because as we read in our last episode, that sort of, you know, semi humorous and certainly articulate characterization or mischaracterization of God by Richard Dawkins. You know, one of the things that he says in there is, you know, genocide, genocide, genocidal, etc. Fraternal, all of that. But that's not what's taking place here. This is not drawing the line on ethnic boundaries, you know, or like, okay, your nose is whiter than the. You know, so you're out and your skin is too dark. Several years ago I went to Austria and we went to a place in Austria called The Eagle's Nest, which was sort of the. One of the places from which Hitler would repose. He would spend time there and would plan these, you know, various strategies in the war. And they had these charts, there's a museum there and they literally have these charts that would depict how you could discern between an Aryan person and a Semitic person. And they had diagram after diagram of the shapes, the profiles of people's noses. And they would be like, okay, if the nose is like this, they're out. And if the nose is like this, they're in. And if the hair is like this, they're out. And if the hair is like this, you're just like, really?

Do I have the right nose, by the way?

Yeah, you're in.

It's just crazy, isn't it?

The point is that people will draw lines wherever.

Right people.

But God isn't doing that. Scripture says over and over and over again, God is no respecter of persons. God is no respecter of persons. He shows no partiality, Paul, in Romans to the Jew and also to the Greek. To the Jew and also to the Greek. So what's taking place exactly as you've said, there is not some ethnic arbitrary skin color, nose size, hair texture, whatever. It's saying, hey, look, I would prefer it if my people didn't put their fresh born baby girls and boys into the fire to a demon. That's different than the size and shape of your nose. And that behavior, it's demonic. It has to be.

Absolutely, yeah. I'd prefer if children didn't grow up in homes where mom and dad were engaged in sexual perversions with animals, with beasts in the field, or a culture.

In which women from birth are set aside. This little girl and this little girl and this little girl, we're going to raise you for temple prostitution. We're going to worship our demon gods by coming to worship service and performing sexual acts. It's horrible.

What's going on?

That was close.

We ended our last program also by saying that to some degree the United States, for better or for worse, and whether or not they're perfectly accurate, consistent in their application, certainly they're not. But there is a sense even in which the US says, hey, we see oppression here, we see injustice here, or NATO and they say, hey, we're going to stop that, we're going to stop that, we're going to stop that. And while we might not agree with every instance, and certainly we don't, we don't absolutely.

That you would intervene to protect the hopeless. Now on that note, and I think we might have to come back to this at some point. When we were on that, the last episode, just afterward, we broke, and one of our cameramen, Josh, he said to me, hey, look, but in a previous episode, you had said you had spoken about the myth of redemptive violence. The myth of redemptive violence. Superheroes and, you know, these people have done violence to us, so we'll do greater violence to them and everybody lives happily ever after, he says. So how is that not in some sense an infraction of the very principle that you laid down in an earlier episode? Maybe not right this moment, but I think we need to take that up.

It's a great question, but almost 13 addresses that question. By the way, I wanted to say something you mentioned, that it's not favoritism that God exercised. And I think there's a powerful point here in that that's evident in the Old Testament narrative, because whenever Israel, God's own favored people, quote, unquote, would teeter on the edge of the very things that these other societies were engulfed in, what happens? The Assyrian captivity, Babylonian captivity. It just shows that the same moral foundation and standard by which God held other nations accountable, he also held his own people accountable.

Good point.

See what I'm saying?

That shows it's not a favoritism.

Yeah, it's not favoritism. It's objective.

I've never seen that before. That is such a, a good point.

If Israel is not firing on all cylinders, if Israel loses the plot, what happens to Israel? Okay, Israel is in trouble. And God, what does God do? God says, assyria, King of Babylon, Egypt, come, you need to take care of these people because they've lost the plot.

And that's right in the context of 106.

Okay, that's what I was just going to say. See, tithe once off, in Psalm 106, we read verses 34 to 39, which is great. The primary concern that the psalmist is raising here in Psalm 106 is not so much the behavior of the non Jewish nations, it's the behavior of that they learned these practices. And verse 40 says, Therefore the wrath of the Lord was kindled against his people, that is to say the Jewish nation, so that he abhorred his own inheritance, and he gave them into the hand of the Gentiles. That's the very thing you're talking about. And to those who hated them, to rule over them, their enemies also oppressed them, and they were brought into subjection under their hand many times he delivered them, but they rebelled in their counsel and they were brought low for their iniquity. So this is exactly your point.

This is powerful.

He's totally. He's egalitarian, he's fair, he's just. He's impartial.

If we were to line up all the books of the Old Testament, a big chunk of them would be, especially some of the. Many of the minor prophets and some of the major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they're dealing with issues revolving captivity. There's the pre exilic prophets, then there's the post exilic prophets. And a lot of this just occurred to me. I don't know if you guys see anything in this, but much of our Old Testament.

Is the prophets. Addressing the issue of why is this happening to us when we're your people? And God's reply is.

The same standard by which I hold the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites accountable with. That's the same standard I hold you accountable. Why are you in captivity? Because this is not favoritism.

You're operating on principles that tend toward captivity.

He that leads into captivity will go into captivity. There's a principle there. Ty, you had something you were going to say?

Yeah, I was going to just respond to something Jeffrey said. This just popped into my mind, actually, during the break. And then it fits perfectly here. In Genesis 15, you have God interacting with Abraham or Abram at this point. And. And he tells Abram that your posterity, your people are gonna go into captivity at some point. And when they're in captivity, they will be oppressed, they will be mistreated. God is not in favor of this oppression or mistreatment. He's simply saying, this is what's going to happen. This is what's going to happen.

I gotta say something.

And then it's very interesting. It says that. That God is going to interact with the people in such a way that he says something fascinating. He says here that the cup or the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. Okay. This is a fascinating biblical idea.

Huge.

The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. That's in Genesis 15:16.

The Amorites were those that were occupying the land that God had promised to Abraham.

This tells us that God wasn't even quick to judge or to move against those who were kind of like the Sodom and Gomorrah thing. All this evil was going on. God is not quick to even judge the Amorites. He's saying, maybe this can turn. Maybe these people will Change. Maybe this is going to go a different direction. The iniquity isn't yet full. In other words, they haven't reached what you said earlier, David, the irredeemable point. It's not irrevocable yet. They haven't crossed the point of no return. So it's as if God is looking on and these cultures and God is saying, my heart wants to pull them back from the direction they're going. And there's still hope. No, no, no. Oh, they just crossed the line. There's no hope now. I can't redeem that culture now. That culture only serves one purpose, to infect others.

You know what's really interesting about this?

I need to say something on that, so you need to jump in real quick.

Okay.

You know what's really interesting about this? From the context of Genesis and Abraham's experience, here's something that's really interesting. Abraham is a representative of God. In fact, he's the representative of God, of planet Earth. Okay? Sodom and Gomorrah, before it's destroyed. Two things happen with Sodom and Gomorrah. The first thing that happens is they have a big battle. The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah are in a battle and they lose. And Lot and all of the cities, they all go into captivity. Guess who rescues them?

Abraham.

Abraham rescues them. Okay. Number one, God inspires and strengthens and gives Abraham wisdom to rescue. He's like a king. I'm saying king and priest because he's like a king. He rescues Sodom and Gomorrah and all the inhabitants. Second thing that happens, the angels come down to check out what's going on, and they tell Abraham what they're going to do. And Abraham intercedes for the very people that he rescues.

Them.

He intercedes.

And this is God.

This is God.

I want to rescue them from their enemies. I want to intercede for them. I want to do everything I can. And Abraham. You said 10. I would even go down to five.

I would go down to five. Abraham stopped asking.

He stopped asking. He stopped asking.

It's as if Abraham is coming against them and then he's interceding for them. Think of this story. Just put this in.

No, not coming against them. He was fighting in their behalf.

Yeah, well, he.

Coming against their enemies.

Coming against their enemies and delivering them. Okay, but then I was on a different point.

I should have never clarified that.

Again, what was your point, Jeffrey? We gotta take a break. So maybe this is. This will be quick. In verse 13, I'm still. In Genesis 15, it is predicted that the descendants of Abraham will be strangers in a foreign land for 400 years. This is the Egyptian captivity. And then following further is the passage you brought up. Okay, the people of God will be in captivity. And then he mentions the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. Then when you get down to the last verses of that chapter, a list of different people groups are mentioned. The Amorites are included in that. These are people that are in the way, en route in between the people of God in Egypt and the promised land. Right. So here's what I'm saying. I remember reading that meanwhile, God's people are captive in bondage in Egypt, and God leaves them there. Leaves them there? Why? Because he knows that when he delivers his people out of Egypt, they will have to journey in order to get to Canaan. And as they journey, they will encounter these different people groups. God knows that there are heathen people groups whose iniquity is not yet full. He's willing to leave his people in Egypt in bondage and mercy. His favored people who get the favorite treatment, they're left in Egypt out of mercy to these different tribal groups whose iniquity is not yet full. And only when they make full of their iniquity are God's people ready to be delivered. And I think that that's a powerful token of God's mercy and long suffering. And it argues the exact opposite. In that configuration, who is getting favor treatment? The people of God or the enemies of God's people?

Oh, it's so clear.

The enemies of God's people are being treated with favoritism above God's own people at the expense of God's own people. And I just think that that's another point to the scene.

That's where we are right now. We're in this world, we're in bondage. God is fighting for us. God is wanting to deliver not just good people, but people that aren't going in the right direction. And that's why Christians are to fight for those same people and to intercede for those same people. In 2 Timothy, it says we should intercede for kings and for all that are in authority. We should pray for them and supplicate for them. I think all of these principles are not just a revelation of God's heart, but a revelation of our own hearts. And I think one of the ways we understand this to be a revelation of God's heart is because we begin to sense the way that we're supposed to relate to people and individuals and nations and other belief systems in the way that we react and respond to their teachings, et cetera.

Yeah, that's where we have to take a break because we've got to go by the clock and we're pretty excited though.

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Probably one of the best known verses in the Bible, especially among believers, is Joshua 24:15. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord in that very same chapter, Joshua chapter 24. Just a few verses before that, in verse 12, we encounter this verse. It's an interesting verse and it's a verse that is very much in keeping with what we're seeing here. We ended on the iniquity of the Amorites, not yet full. Jeffrey was talking about the impartiality that God showed to the degree that he even inconvenienced. And that would be a mild word, his own people to wait for some invisible threshold to be crossed. And yet when that threshold was crossed and we should probably just give a little background here for those that maybe don't know the Bible as well as others.

The first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, are written by Moses. And they tell a number of stories, but the main story is the story of the Exodus, right? Hollywood's just getting ready to make this movie right on Moses. And it's called the Exodus, the coming out. It comes from ex, like exit out. And the people of God have been in Egyptian captivity. The descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob are now coming out of Egypt. They go to a mountain called Sinai. God gives them sort of instructions. He gives them the law, he gives them the sanctuary. And it comes time for them to take possession of the land that God had promised to Abraham hundreds of years before, several hundred years before. But that it's not a vacant land. It's not a land that has nobody in it. It's going to require not only their possession, but the dispossession of the people groups that are there. And now we have reached the point that invisible threshold known only to God, where these cultures and the peoples in those cultures have become largely irredeemable. Now, I say largely, almost entirely irredeemable. I say that because then we come to the book of Joshua. And Joshua, if you can think of Moses as getting the children of Israel to the borders of the Canaan land, Joshua is the one that gets them over the borders into the promised land. And it is fascinating because one of the first stories that we're introduced to is the story of Rahab, Rahab the harlot. And the story of Rahab is the spies have gone in, they're looking at the land, how are we going to militarily conquer, etc. And Rahab is somebody who affirms faith and confidence in the God of Israel she's preserved. So this little instance demonstrates the heart of God, the patience of God, the accommodation of God. But what I want to point out is Joshua, chapter 24. This is coming out to the end of the book of Joshua. The dispossession has largely taken place. And it says this in verse 12. Pick it up in verse 11. Then you went over the Jordan and came to Jericho. That's Rahab. And the men of Jericho fought against you also. And here's that list that Jeffrey had pointed out. The Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. But I delivered them into your hand. Look at this verse 12. I sent the hornet before you, which drove them out from before you also the two kings of the Amorites, but not with your sword or with your bow. I have given you a land for which you did not labor and cities which you did not build and dwell. In them you eat of vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant. Now, therefore, fear the Lord, serve him in sincerity and in truth, and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the river and in Egypt. Serve the Lord. And here's the classic verse that so many know. And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods, and we've already seen that those were demons which your fathers served that were on the other side of the river, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you now dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And a fascinating idea here is this idea of the hornet. There were instances in scripture, not every instance. Joshua simplifies the history here in which God appears to have preferred that he do the driving out, that it not be a military conquest. Think of going back to Jericho. When they conquered Jericho, it wasn't with the sword, it wasn't with the bow, it was with worship. I know that sounds wild, but they're walking around Jericho with the ark, seven days, and the trumpets for seven days, and the walls fall. That's a supernatural act. That's not the Israelites going in and piercing with the sword or whatever the other instruments of war that are used, these terrible instruments that are designed to cause death. This is God doing something. But as the story progresses, and again here Joshua gives a truncated version, the Israelites themselves become involved in the dispossession. And then as we go to the rest of the Old Testament, it becomes David, a man of war. And then we'll get to the Book of Judges, and it's a violent culture, violent situation, violent society. And finally, God's like, all right, we'll do it your way. There's that accommodation, and that's hard. Well, the Hornet thing to me is fascinating because God is essentially saying here, if you would rely totally and completely on me, and not needing a king who will ride into battle with his shiny sword and his white horse, I will fight for you. It won't be, he says, by your sword or with your bow. And there were instances where that's what occurred. He cites here the two kings of the Amorites.

These were warrior cultures. These were cultures of brutality. And these were people who. That conducted their political affairs in brutal ways. And even the people that God is endeavoring to work with Israel, they're recently slaves in Egypt. And that is simply to say that.

They don't have a history of building up and establishing just political process, just culture. They don't have a civil system.

They're product of their own society.

Yeah. They don't have conflict resolution at a high level. They have conflict resolution at a low level, at a brutal level. And so while God would rather the Canaanite nations not be conducting themselves in the brutal ways that they are and incorporate them into Israel as quickly as possible with these higher principles of love for God and love for others, that would have been God's first will for these cultures like Nineveh to repent and be incorporated into Israel. But they're irredeemable at some point. And then the very people that God is working with have to go through an educational process. I have to teach you. And so you find in the five books of Moses, part of it is that he's setting up a judicial system. He's saying, we're going to have judges. And if there's a conflict between two people, the way we're going to resolve it is you're going to come and you're going to present the problem before the judges.

It's very democratic.

Yeah. And the judges are going to think through all the factors and they're going to rule, and you're going to obey the judgments that they pass. So God is operating, as you would expect with God, a very sophisticated level of justice. They're operating at a very low level of justice. And God is trying to bring the people up in their way of conflict, resolving conflict. And that takes time. God's only other option would be to have no people.

Well, we tried that with the Flood. Now we're back here. We're already back here after the flood. He's already started with the little embryonic family of Noah. And we're just a few hundred years later and we're here again.

Here we are.

And the book. Is there a more difficult or even discouraging book in the Bible than the Book of Judges?

I don't think so.

The Book of Judges is rough.

It's very rough.

I mean, this is when it comes to this topic. Exactly. And I think we should look at a story in the Book of Judges, but the whole Book of Judges, there is a stark contrast between the Book of Joshua, where you have a largely obedient people that are winning victory after victory, obedient to the Lord, and then the Book of Judges. Is quite the opposite.

There's strange stuff going on in there. I mean, what is the stuff that you see going on in there? It seems like God is saying, you know, this is okay, and this is okay. And this is okay. What are these things?

He's not. He's not okay. Just. You can summarize the Book of Judges by looking at the last verse of the Book of Judges. The last verse of the Book of Judges. The author of Judges, whoever wrote. We don't know who this was. Some say it may have been Samuel. We don't know who wrote the book.

Which is always a good principle to read the last. The closer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The closer normally tells you something about what was the point?

Well, in the closer, my point is this. The author of Judges, whoever it was, is clearly writing with a purpose. And he's not just telling, or she's probably. He is not just telling a story for some, you know, he's not just telling a history, a general, you know, unimpassioned, uninvested history. No, he's telling a very specific moral story. And this is the moral story that he's telling. Okay, judges, chapter 21, verse 25. It is this. In those days, there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. That's the Book of Judges. That's a scene, 21 chapters. And that refrain occurs over and over and over again. He'll say it, I think, at least five or six times. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. What was right in his own eyes. What was right in his own eyes. So this introduces us to an idea that's hugely important, and that is the difference between prescriptive stories and descriptive stories.

Okay, break that up for us. What do you mean by that?

Basically, the Bible consists of tales, stories. We've talked about this. The humanity of Moses, the humanity of David, the humanity of Abraham, their doubt, their unbelief, their confidence, the highs and the lows. And because the Bible is lots of stories that make up a big story, not all the things that happened were always nice and neat and rosy and sweet. And everybody's doing exactly the right thing. Abraham lied, and David was a bloody man, and Moses was a murderer.

So that's describing these people.

That's describing. There are stories in the Bible that are simply describing. This is what happened. It's a factual report of what is or what was.

So that's descriptive.

That's descriptive. It's describing.

Okay.

The other kind of story in the Bible is also Descriptive, but there's a prescriptive element, in the same way that a doctor would write you a prescription, take two of these, call me in the morning, a prescription. Do this.

Okay.

And so, for example, the Book of Daniel is maybe the classic book in the Old Testament. There are other examples, but the Book of Daniel is one that was clearly crafted. There's an architecture, there's a symmetry, a beauty to the Book of Daniel in which you have. This is not only what did happen, but this is an example for you. So you have, for example, Daniel, chapter one. They didn't eat the king's food and God blessed them. That's not just telling you what happened, it's telling you that they did. Right. Daniel, chapter three. The Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego would not bow down to the image. That's not only an historical event, it's a moral prescription. You should behave in the same way. So to Daniel, chapter six, Daniel and the lion's den. So. So when we read a story in the Bible, if we're like, whoa. And there are some whoa. Stories in the Book of Judges, we need to ask ourselves the question, is this a description of what was as a warning or merely a report in the case of Judges, as a warning against pursuing our own ways, or is this not only a description but a prescription of how we should act?

And what you're saying too, is possibly, is that the last verse is telling us that. That by and large, this is a.

That's a good point.

Description.

Absolutely, Ryan, good point. That's a big hint right there.

Because even the heroes of Judges. Samson's one of the great heroes of Judges, man. This guy is as human as they come. He's lust filled, he's violent, he ruins.

He fails over and over again.

He fails over and over again. He basically ruins his life. He ends his life by committing sin.

Wouldn't even have known that he was in unless we read Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews, chapter 11 is the only thing that indicates, oh, yeah, he's there.

Another way to say that is, is and ought to. Right, Is and ought. You're reading scripture. Much of it is describing what is. This is what is happening. But you have to distinguish that from what God thinks ought to have been happening. That's right. There's another point I wanted to make on this that I think is really powerful, and that is regarding the descriptive nature of Scripture, that there's a tone of genuineness and authenticity in that. Basically, these are biographies. These are biographical sketches. Many of them are sweeping sketches, but they're biographical sketches and some are autobiographical sketches. Now, here's the interesting thing that when you compare the Hebrew scriptures and even the New Testament with say, I know you're gonna go Egyptian literature. This is a piece of ancient literature. That's what it is. Compare this literature with Egyptian, and there's a huge difference where this is like dirty laundry on the table. And whereas you read these other ancient literatures and it's propaganda, it's basically highlighting all of the ups, but there seems to be an absence of all of the downs. Whereas the Bible is all on the table. And I always tell the students in the class, if you wanted to learn the worst of the Jews in their history, who would you have to consult to tell you that story? The Jews themselves. In other words, all of the apostles and disciples in the New Testament, they themselves report on their own dirty laundry. So anyway, just a point on that description. I think that's a tone of authenticity.

Because even today, our media is moving in that direction. You know, most of the television shows on TV today are not these Hollywood productive, you know, where everything's just perfect and right. It's just real tv. People are just done with all that fake stuff. And the Bible is a real book that tells real stories about real people in real time.

Yeah. Let's give an example right before the break, because we've talked about the is ought principle, the descriptive versus prescriptive. And you were in Judges. So what about Judges, chapter 11, verses 29 and onward. You have a story here. I'll just summarize the story. There's this guy named Jephthah, and he enters into some kind of very odd deal. He thinks with the Lord.

An oath.

An oath. And he says, he's won a battle. Yeah, he's won a battle. And he says, oh, I'm so glad that I won this battle. The first thing that walks through my door, I will sacrifice to the Lord. Now some people look at that and they say, wow, the Bible is, what is God up to here? God's requiring this. No, it's just describing what this guy was doing. His daughter walks in the door. So then he feels obligated to follow through and perform a human sacrifice. To sacrifice his daughter. And he does. And he does. He sacrifices her. The question is, is this descriptive or.

That's really a question that's clearly descriptive. That's an example of somebody being stupid.

Right.

And then there's a period at the end of that sentence. That's it.

An exclamation point. And this is a good example of. Okay, we know that it's prescriptive. And I'll close with this because we've already quoted from Jeremiah. And I'll find that text in the break where God says, this idea of child sacrifice never came into my mind. So, you know, you think that's to the Lord?

Yeah.

No way.

He's making a human sacrifice. He thinks, to the Lord. And that's recorded in scripture. And the whole time the Lord is like, I don't want that. Why are we doing this? Absolutely not.

Right.

So it's describing what happened. It's not telling us what he want to do.

That's a great example. That's a great example.

So let's take the break and we'll come back for our third and final segment of this conversation.

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At the close of our last session, I had mentioned there was a text in Jeremiah that I've alluded to a couple times about God saying that this idea of child sacrifice hadn't even come into his mind. And I just want to read those two texts. Jeremiah, chapter 19, verse 5. It says, they have built also the high places of BAAL to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings to baal, which I did not command or speak, nor did it come to my mind. Wow.

Love it.

Then Jeremiah, chapter 32, verse 35. Very similar text. They built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of the Son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and daughters to pass through the fire to Moloch, which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind that they should cause. That they should do this abomination to cause Judah to sin.

What was that second one? Jeremiah? What?

Jeremiah 32, 25, 35. 32, 35. So he says, Baal. They're offering their sons and daughters to Baal. I never said that. It didn't even come into my mind. They're offering their sons and daughters to Moloch through the fire. No.

That'S not even coming into my mind.

So it's almost like God himself is shocked. He himself is shocked at the same things that we would be shocked with.

Well, he certainly Finds it abhorrent. I mean, he says as much. That is what he means when he uses the idiom there. Because God knows all things.

Right?

In other words, he's saying that kind of intention that pers. No, no, no, no and no.

No. God is navigating horrific evil. He's dealing with people who have it in their hearts to do these kinds of things, and he's interacting with them in such a way as to redeem all that possibly can be redeemed from those kinds of actions. He's not himself, the source and the origin. It's not in his heart, as it says. It never came to my mind. I'm not that kind of God.

I don't think that way.

Love it.

Geoffrey, you had said that there was a text in numbers that was really gnarly.

If we could use that.

Gnarly.

Gnarly.

He just brought gnarly out.

There's a gnarly text.

That's a whiteboard.

It is.

What does it mean?

When in Rome. You know.

When in Rome.

Shame.

For shame. For shame.

In numbers five. In numbers five, there's this crazy passage. It's called the law of jealousy.

Okay.

And I just want to walk through this passage. I think this is a great example of something that sounds crazy at the surface level, but if we were to put ourselves in that world and in God's shoes, where he has to, you know, deal with the structures that he has available.

We can at least begin to grasp something here. So I'm just going to.

The law of what?

It's called the law of jealousy.

Oh, yeah.

That's what I call it. Anyway, Numbers, chapter five. So I'm going to jump right in. Instructions are given to a husband who becomes jealous of his wife.

Okay.

Jealous at his wife, suspicious of his wife being unfaithful to him.

Okay.

Okay. So it says in verse 14, numbers 5, for our viewers, if the spirit of jealousy comes upon him, the husband, he becomes jealous of his wife who has defiled herself. Or if the spirit of jealousy comes upon him and he becomes jealous of his wife, although she has not even defiled herself. In other words, he doesn't know. He's just suspicious. Then the man, verse 15, shall bring his wife to the priest. Okay, now skip. Jump to verse 16. And the priest will bring her near and set her before the Lord. Verse 17. The priest will take holy water in an earthen vessel and take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it inside the water. Verse 18. Then the priest shall stand the woman before the Lord, uncover the woman's head, and put the offering for remembering in her hands, which is the great offering of jealousy. And the priest shall have in his hand the bitter water that brings a curse. Verse 19. And the priest shall put her under oath and say to the woman, if no man has lain with you, and if you have not gone astray to uncleanness while under your husband's authority, be free from this bitter water that brings a curse. But if you have gone astray while under your husband's authority, and if you have defiled yourself with some other man other than your husband who has lain with you, verse 21, then the priest shall put the woman under the oath of the curse. He shall say to the woman, the Lord make you a curse and an oath among your people. When the Lord makes your thigh rot and your belly swell, and may this water that causes the curse go into your stomach and make your belly swell and your thigh rot. And the woman shall say, amen, so be it. Then the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he's going to scrape them off into the bitter water. And then the woman has to partake of this, shall I say, gnarly ceremony that takes place.

I remember I read this years ago. I'd forgotten this was in the Bible, and I.

I'm not pleased being reminded of it. But here's the thing.

Are you going to explain this?

Well, because that would really make my day.

That would make my day.

We bring this up in class, and we take great pleasure at the facial expressions. This is a difficult passage. This appears to be living in a different world that we're accustomed to.

Blatantly in a different world. So here's what we always say to our students. First John, chapter four, verse eight.

God is love.

God is love. And then you get.

And then we have them read this.

Then you got stuff like that. God is love.

Stuff like that.

How's that fit?

And you know, we always do.

Do you provide any sort of resolve?

No, but I'm with Beatty. No, we don't provide resolve. And that's the genius of the exercise that we do in the class, David. What we do is we say, read these two passages, God is love. And then read this. And we give them no clues. We say, now break up into groups of three or four. You read those passages and consistently. Am I right, Jeffrey?

It happens almost every class.

Consistently, they all read the passage and come to the same conclusion on their own reading the passage.

But they wrestle with it. They wrestle and they're like, ugh, I.

Wrote down a conclusion. I'm not going to tell you what it is because I don't want to make a fool out of myself, but I want you to tell me what your answer is.

I think it'd be fun if you were wrong.

I think just be a court jester.

Let's be clear here. We're not.

I've got it written here, so I.

Think we know you'll say it.

And I'll tell you, if I also say, oh, yeah, that's exactly what I.

Wanted, James, that would have the same effect. Because if you tell us, no, that's not what I said, then you're still kind of.

But I don't have to tell everyone what I actually said.

So, Jeffrey, break it down. What?

Oh, I'll tell you what we.

We should say when we mention going into class and we're talking about. Arise a school that we.

Yeah, we run a discipleship.

Discipleship school for three months out of the year, six months out of the.

Year as we wrestle with the past. What I think, again, we're approaching this ground is level here. What I think what's going on in this passage is simply this. God is operating in a patriarchal society where.

Women don't have access to the same rights that men do. And so in this scenario, if a woman would be accused of something, she has no recourse, she's in trouble. There's no systems in place within that structure to protect the woman, so she has no defense.

So here's what God does.

God says, I don't trust broken men. Right. Fallen men. To be able to cast judgment in these scenarios, I will remove that prerogative from your social structure, from your civil structure. We're going to make this a spiritual thing where it's going to have to be a divine sign that that will show whether that woman is guilty or innocent in a form of protecting the woman. So in that sense, there's an imperfect approach to God expressing. This is an expression of God is love, in that God is protecting the oppressed. God is protecting those that don't have rights, and so forth, and so forth now. And then here's what we always say to the Sunnis, because there's always two or three feminists in the class, right? They're like, wait a second, that's cute and all, but why does the woman even have to be subjected to all of this? To which we would say.

Because that's the culture she's living in. That's the world we live in.

Is that God's ideal? Absolutely not. So God takes something that's terrible and he moves it several notches towards his ideal. Is it at the point of his ideal? Absolutely not. That passage still drives me crazy. And my wife is not a big fan of that passage either. But here's the thing. But the point is.

Funny that.

But the point is, the point is, you can see how God is trying to approach a redemptive process in a broken system without totally moving too fast for the people for them to follow. It's not a perfect answer.

And everybody comes to that conclusion.

No, it's in the passage because it begins in verse 14 by basically saying the issue that God is dealing with is the spirit of jealousy on the man's part. And the woman may or may not be guilty. She could be being falsely accused by her husband. And in that setting, in that culture, a woman had no recourse. If the man says, you've had an affair, you've been unfaithful to me. And in his mind, his motive is, I just don't want this woman anymore. I want another woman. I'm going to trash this woman because I have other motives. God is saying, wait a minute, you're not going to deal with the daughters of God in this way. We're going to implement in your setting a justice system in which I will judge my daughters. If she's guilty, it'll be known. If she's not, you are not going to treat women like this, where you just throw them away. So this is actually moving the culture in a direction that is allowing for women to have recourse in a system in which women have no recourse. And yes, student after student after student.

Comes to that, but I mean, obviously.

That only proves that the students are smarter than me.

Well, different language, different. And we give them like, we give them like 30 minutes for that. But, but here's the, we only gave you five. Here's the point, though. I, I, we have to reemphasize this. At the end of the day, even that explanation is not squeaky clean. Like, I don't walk away from that passage thinking, oh, I'm so glad, that makes me feel so good. It's still a very difficult passage. And I think that's the point, is that God is dealing with broken systems. And even that explanation is God moving it one step further towards his ideal. That's the point of the passage. At least my explanation of the passage.

We can't avoid the fact that we're dealing with. And God is dealing with a very messy human situation. But we can be absolutely certain that God interacting with us. When I say us, I mean the human race as a whole is to our great advantage versus God simply washing his hands of the human race and walking away and leaving us to our own devices. So it sure looks to me like God in the accommodation principle is condescending to such a degree that he looks guilty of things that he's not actually guilty of. He's still taking our sin upon Himself, not just at the cross, but he's taking our sin upon himself by interacting with us in such a way that he looks like he's condoning things that ultimately he's not condoning, but he has no choice but to navigate through it with us.

That's a big God.

That's a very big God. When you just said that line there about how we wouldn't have even been, you know, you basically got two options. God to interact with on our level, a way that we can understand in various cultures, various times, various places, situations, people, or to leave us alone. But we saw what happened in the flood with that, you know, even there by the flood, and God hadn't left humanity entirely alone, we wouldn't be here today, is the point. The rain would have been extinguished. Listen to this. In Galatians, chapter 5, Paul is coming to the close of his argument in Galatians and he summarizes, and we've made this point before, in another conversation, I mean, verse 14, he summarizes the whole essence of the law, the whole essence of the writings of Moses, the whole essence of the old Testament, the Ten Commandments. He says, for all the law, Galatians 5, 14, is fulfilled in one word, even this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. That's those civil structures that if everybody lived according to that, they wouldn't need a king, they wouldn't need a hierarchical, a combination of principle. If this was truly, completely practiced. Perfectly right? But then he says in verse 15, but if you bite and devour one another, beware, lest you be consumed by one another. And that's kind of the idea here that you're saying, if God just let us go to our own devices without coming to pull us out of the muck, out of the mire, out of the confusion, we wouldn't make it to third base.

We would consume each other. Yeah.

In fact, you know, when I look at, for example, Matthew 24, where Jesus is speaking of the end time events, I notice, and it's really interesting to me that he references to the flood. And when we think about the flood in this context, this question, we're thinking about, why did God do that? But Jesus, when he's referring to the flood, he's thinking, you know, remember how bad it was in the days of the.

That's how bad it's going to be.

In the end of time.

That's why.

That's why when I come the second time, I'm coming to end this. Because it's going to be just like it was in the days of Noah. It's going to be that way again.

Something that's helped me over the years to put myself. Can I say it this way? In God's mental space, in his emotional space, how hard this is to navigate is. Imagine that you get a knock on your door and you open the door and there's a police officer standing there and he says, I have terrible news for you. Your son has been murdered. Now just for a minute, feel what you would feel hearing that news. You're angry, you're filled with rage, you're thinking, who did this? You want justice, the full extent of the law. And then as you're feeling all of that, the police officer says, and the news is worse than that because the person who murdered your son is your daughter.

Now watch your emotional state change.

Now suddenly you're in this very difficult emotional space where, yes, justice, but mercy. And now we realize that all human beings to God are sons and daughters. He's navigating a very difficult situation.

He's dealing with, with all of our muck and mire and ugliness. And he's desperately striving to save and to heal and to restore. But the only way he can do it is to jump in with both feet. And that's what we see taking place in Jesus at the cross. Well, Jesus in his whole life. And then reaching its climax at the cross, Jesus reveals to us the character of God in all its brilliant beauty by condescending to come very close and to experience with us the suffering that we're going through rather than to remain aloof and separated from all of it. I think what we see taking place in the whole narrative of Scripture is that the cross principle that we see manifest in Christ in time and space at Calvary in AD 31, Jesus dying for us. But maybe the whole form of God's character through the Old Testament narrative is a self sacrificing form that he's taking by condescending, by interacting, by staying connected, by loving, loving, loving and accommodating our fallen state. The ultimate answer to the story of Scripture, and especially the hard parts of the Old Testament, is that in Christ at Calvary we see that God is up close and personal, and he's there with us.

Sam.