Violence in the Bible

Violence in the Bible

What does ‘sorry’ mean?

What do you do with someone who says

Sorry sorry sorry

but keeps on and on doing it again?


This person does not mean the apology. He has not really repented.


What happens if you forgive this person? He doesn’t understand the difference between forgiveness and overlooking. If you forgive him, he will assume that you don’t really care about what he did wrong.


There is no point in discussing forgiveness with a person like this. He won’t understand it.

He needs to understand the seriousness of his sin before anything can be said about forgiveness.


God’s dealings with the human race show how He taught this lesson to His Chosen People. They had to learn the seriousness of sin before there was any point in teaching them about forgiveness.

The Bible Story is a Progression

The Bible is not a random collection of stories. The order in which the events happen is important.


If we arrange the Bible stories in a straight line, the main events happen in this order.


The most important event in time is the crucifixion of Jesus.Every event before this point anticipates the crucifixion.

Every event after this point is interpreted in the light of the crucifixion.

AbrahamStrange Stories among the Aliens

Abraham lived in a pagan society where the people worshipped many gods. He knew nothing about the One God, so Abraham’s story begins with the basics.


Here is the basic lesson that God gave Abraham.

There is only one God.He must be trusted and

obeyed.


God did not give Abraham much ‘moral’ teaching about how to treat other people.


One very frightening story about Abraham tells how God instructed him to kill his son Isaac as a human sacrifice.


This sounds barbaric to us, but Abraham did not know any better. Human sacrifice was the norm in the pagan religions around him. Because parents ‘owned’ their children, they were entitled to kill them; it was not considered murder.

Abraham was sad about having to sacrifice his son, but he had no reason to think of it as a wrong thing to do.


Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son – a sign that he loved God even more than he loved his own family. He had learned the lesson of trust and obedience.


In the end, of course, God interrupted the ritual and told Abraham to sacrifice a goat in Isaac’s place.

So Abraham also learned that God is the sort of God who does not really want us to kill our children.

MosesThe Royal Executioners

Abraham learned about God’s trustworthiness; Moses learned about God’s morality.

MosesThe Royal Executioners

At the time of Moses, God spelled out the Law, including the idea that murdering innocent people is wrong.

Since the time of Moses, God has not told anyone to murder their sons. After that time, everyone knew that God did not want murder, so asking for murder would not have been a good test of commitment.

JoshuaThe Royal Executioners

The lesson God gave to Joshua was

Sin is serious.


Joshua led the Holy War – the most violent section of the whole Bible.

The Israelites conquered the Promised Land with great violence – because God commanded them to do so! He instructed them to exterminate the Canaanite tribes who were living in the Promised Land.


The purpose of this Holy War was to show that God takes sin very seriously. The Canaanites were guilty of dire sins.

• They had rejected the Living God to worship idols.

• They practised human sacrifice by burning children alive.

• They practised ritual prostitution as an act of sympathetic magic.

• According to the myths, the Canaanite gods murdered family members, started wars and enjoyed mutilating their victims. This must have encouraged their worshippers to follow their example.


Abraham had lived among the Canaanites 500 years ago. God said that Abraham’s family would have to wait to possess the Promised Land because He was going to give the Canaanites time to repent. The Canaanites had observed God’s dealings with Abraham’s family.

Yet at that time, and in all the 500 years since, they had not repented. In fact, the Bible text implies that they had become even worse!


The Canaanites had been hearing about God’s more recent actions among the Israelites for forty years (the escape from Egypt, their victories over the attacking armies) yet they still had not repented.


Israel was to become God’s own country, and therefore there could be no risk of corruption by the Canaanites’ example.

It was time for the Canaanites to be punished as they deserved. So God sent the Israelites, who destroyed the Canaanites with great savagery.


We know of one Canaanite who genuinely repented. Her name was Rahab, and she had been a cult prostitute, right at the centre of the evil Canaanite religion.

God forgave Rahab’s whole family and allowed them to live among the Israelites. Rahab later married an Israelite named Salmon, and her grandson’s grandson was King David.

If any other Canaanites had repented, do you think God would have forgiven them?


The Israelites learned from this that God WILL punish sin.

DavidThe Darkness is Within

After the Israelites had conquered Canaan, they stopped conquering. They had no plans to take over the world. They just wanted their own Promised Land.

ALL their remaining wars were wars of defence.


Soon after the Israelites settled in Canaan, the Philistines (‘Purple People’ or ‘People from the Sea’) arrived. They too wanted to conquer the land of Israel!

The Philistines were another people with a murderous religion. If they had been allowed to establish their cult in Israel, it would no longer have been God’s chosen land.


So for the next two centuries, the Israelites had to fight them off.

They eventually drove the Philistines out of Canaan.

The Kings and the ProphetsThe Darkness is Within

After that, God did not command any more wars. The Israelites did, however, fight more wars of defence against obvious enemies such as the Assyrians and Babylonians.

The prophets kept reminding them

Repent of your own sins first.


It is much easier to recognise other people’s sins than our own.

Once the Israelites had recognised the seriousness of their enemies’ sins, they had to face up to their own.

It took them a very long time to learn this lesson.


The goal of the Israelites’ conquest was to set up a theocracy in one geographic location – a community that would be faithful to God and formed in His image.


To keep the community pure, God commanded the death sentence for certain sins.

• Murder• Adultery• Idolatry• Blasphemy• Sabbath breaking• Disobedience to parents


Why were these sins singled out for capital punishment?

All sins are serious and all sins cause a spiritual death. God might have demanded capital punishment for every sin – but then nobody would have survived childhood! So only a few sins were to be punished on earth.

The death penalty was a metaphor for spiritual death. It reminded God’s people that all sin will cause death in the end.


God sent prophets, who spoke at length about all kinds of sins.

The prophets warned that if the people did not repent, God would punish them.

Most of the people failed to repent.

God did not command any of this evil behaviour. They were doing it in disobedience to His commands.


Eventually, the people took the consequences of their sins. Most of the Israelites were conquered by the foreign super-powers and carried off into exile. They never returned home.

EzraA People for His own Possession

After the Exile, only 2-3% of the Jews returned to the Promised Land.

However, these were the ones who were more likely to be serious about living as God’s holy people.

The High Priest, Ezra, helped them build a new society.


These people were finally grasping the seriousness of sin. They tried hard to live lives that pleased God so they made very strict laws about work, crime, the family and religious rituals. As we read in the New Testament, they sometimes they became silly about just how strict they were willing to be.

If you repent,God does forgive you.


From the time of Ezra, the violent punishments died out. There is no record that Ezraic Jews actually killed people for breaking the Sabbath. There was simply strong social pressure to keep the rules if you wanted to keep your friends.

Why did Ezra’s Jews ignore the harsh punishments of Moses’ law? It was because they had finally learned something about what God really wanted. Their focus was on the positive side of holy living, not on revenge for mistakes.


The Jewish community knew they were sinners and they hoped God would forgive them.

They expected God to send a Messiah. Some of them even understood that the Messiah would bring the confirmation of God’s forgiveness.

The MessiahA Consummation of Grace

Jesus – our guaranteeof forgiveness and eternal

life.

In the teaching of Jesus, sin is also taken very seriously – just as seriously as in any part of the Old Testament.

How seriously did Jesus Himself take sin?


The new part of Jesus’ message was that forgiveness was now guaranteed.


The New Testament tells us to live a life that reflects God’s mercy.

There is no need to act with aggression towards other people. We know from 2000 years of Bible history that God takes sin seriously and that the unrepentant will be punished in the afterlife. We don’t need to do God’s job for Him!


In the Church, nobody is killed.

Jesus did give us a metaphor for spiritual death (Matthew 18:15-18). It is called excommunication.

This means that a person who keeps on and on doing wrong without saying sorry will eventually be thrown out of the Church.

Summary

Abraham = be ready to sacrifice everything for God.

Moses & Joshua = recognise the horror of sin.

David & the Kings = face up to the sin within yourself.

Ezra = trust in God’s mercy.

Jesus = how God has arranged forgiveness.

Spiritual

Violence in the Bible