Recently a few friends decided to start up a Bible study with one another, and I am pretty excited about it. The little get together has been dubbed “Bibles, Buddies, and Beers”. It seemed appropriate since we are buddies reading and discussing the Bible over a couple of beers. What else would we call it? I thought for awhile about what book of the Bible we should so diligently read through. We could have done Romans, and discussed the intricacies of Paul’s arguments throughout the book. Or we could have read through the gospels, focusing on the parables and the sayings of Jesus. We could have read through the Psalms, and create a discipline of prayer based around the reading of those prayers and poems.
Yes, we could have discussed any one of those books, but in the end the decision fell upon the book of Judges. Yes, Judges. One of the most confusing, disparaging, gut-wrenching books in the Bible. “Why Judges?” You may ask. “Is it because the Bible study group consists of only guys, and they just want to read a book about war, fighting, and machismo?” Nope. That would be stupid.
Ultimately, the book of Judges was chosen BECAUSE it is one of the most confusing, disparaging, gut-wrenching books in the Bible. Read Judges 19, for example, throughout the course of an entire night a woman is brutally raped and murdered by a group of men. Read Judges 11, where Jephthah makes a vow with God that ultimately leads to him having to sacrifice his own daughter. It sounds a little bit like the story of Abraham and Isaac, but in this story…there is no angel that holds back Jephthah’s hand.
The book of Judges and, indeed, the rest of the Old Testament has been disregarded in a lot of churches as, well…the Old Testament. There is no need for it because we Christians now have the New Testament, what is the point of having the Old Testament? It seems that the only parts of the Old Testament that are used are the Psalms, the suffering servant passages, and anything else that Jesus or Paul might have happened to quote. Treating the Old Testament in this way is disrespectful to the entirety of Scripture. Ironically, it is generally churches that claim to have a “high view” of the Bible that disregard the Old Testament.
I don’t know for sure, but I am guessing that part of the reason that the Old Testament is sort of “written-off” is because of passages like Judges 11 and 19.
But the reality is that these passages are in the Bible. The same Bible that we elevate as holy, inspired, and authoritative. Every Sunday morning when we read Jesus’ words on love and grace and forgiveness, stories of rape and murder in which God remains disturbingly silent are just a few pages to the left.
So what do we do? Do we close our eyes and ignore those stories? Get rid of the Old Testament altogether? Call it uninspired?
No. Of course not. Any healthy reading of the Bible should involve struggle. A struggle for understanding, a struggle to find God in the words of Scripture. It’s a struggle we will often lose. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel of God, we must stubbornly take hold of the Bible and wrestle with it. We have to fight, yell, kick, scream...and sometimes, we have to disagree. Jephthah is honored as a faithful man for sacrificing his daughter, not only in the narrative of the Old Testament but also in (gasp) Hebrews 11 (The New Testament). Do I think he is a faithful man? No. The dude killed his daughter. But that does not mean that I write off the story as some folk-tale based in a culture that I am light years away from.
The struggle is finding God in these words. The God most perfectly revealed to us as a loving and forgiving God by Jesus Christ is in those stories. Somewhere. He is speaking to us through our reading of those words, but sometimes we don’t have the ears to hear. We have to wrestle with the words in order to find God and hear what He is truly saying to us. Like Jacob, we will often come away from the struggle limping and defeated...but with a renewed passion for God, and a new respect for the Scripture that has been handed down to us. We cannot ignore the tradition that our faith was born out of. Finding God as he has revealed himself to us in the Bible is difficult, and sometimes can seem impossible. But through prayer, meditation, and an actual ATTEMPT at passages like Judges 11 and 19 I have complete faith that God will somehow be revealed.
How do you feel about the way the Old Testament is handled at your church?
How much have you read the Old Testament?
(Thanks to Scott Knees for the "Jacob wrestling with the angel" analogy)
2 comments:
I have been thinking about the same thing recently and that is why I got two books out of Willard J. Houghton Library dealing with this exact issue. I've just started reading "Getting Involved With God," by Ellen Davis and just her introduction was inspiring. She says that the New Testament is only important and relevant to its readers because it builds off the foundation of the Old Testament. The church doesn't seem to have given creedence to the Old Testament, and that's a shame, but also understandable because of its graphic and confusing nature. Because of that, and my own hesitance towards the OT, I know little to nothing about it. But that will change, oh yes sir. I am gonna be the most well versed in it of anyone on earth. I dare anyone to top me in my OT knowledge once I gain some. by the way this isn't ailie. it's marc.
Great post Jimmy,
I agree that people like to shove out these sorts of passages and explain them away or try and ignore them. People have been doing things like that for the last 2000 years or more!
What about passages like 1 Samuel 2:22-25 "for the Lord desired to put them to death"
What do you do with that? What about that forgiving, loving God we have so perfectly revealed to us in the person of Jesus?
what about the fact that fact that in Deuteronomy 2:30 it says God hardened Sihon's heart?
Hebrews 12:17 says "furthermore [Esau] found no place for repentance though he sought it with tears."
Our God is hard to understand sometimes! Why would he do these things? All for His glory, because He is in the heavens and does whatever he pleases. That's a God I can worship.
There is no limp-wristed vegan hippie vending machine God in the Bible.
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