The God we meet in the pages of the Old and New Testaments is revealed, I am convinced, as a God of love.

God is not – at heart – an angry violent God who occasionally needs to do the odd bit of loving and forgiving.
God is love, and sometimes love has to act through violence.

C.S. Lewis is not the only one to describe God as a God of delegation. God delegates his creational order to Nature. God delegates his rule of creation to the image-bearing humans tasked with tending and keeping the garden. God speaks through Moses, the prophets, preachers, and donkeys.

I’d like to document here two observations about some of the divine violence in the Bible. And in no way is this to pretend to have simplistic solutions to such matters. There is something tragic and mysterious about divine violence that we are probably supposed to continually wrestle with. I just think these are helpful perspectives.

1. God uses imperfect and immoral human actors to bring his punishment. Israel understood their exile to Babylon as divine punishment for their evil and unfaithfulness. Babylon was not a picture of human flourishing. But Israel’s prophets understood the violent actions of Babylon as both allowed and used by God for their own punishment. Likewise, when Israel took the promised land, they were themselves not perfect. The point here is that God uses humans for this. God does not show up in person to do this violence. Direct supernatural intervention is rare. Usually in biblical conflicts there are natural events and elements involved, like water, wind, fire, storms, mud, thunder, frogs, etc.
2. God expels people from places meant to be beachheads of peace, flourishing and shalom. This pattern starts in the garden, where Adam and Eve are expelled. When Israel took the promised land, it was full of people (Canaanites) who were practicing child sacrifice and violence – and were being expelled from the land. When Israel were later exiled, it was for the same evils of child-sacrifice, violence, idolatry and unfaithfulness. God wanted Jeru-salem (shalom – peace) to be a beachhead for peace. He wanted his people to be a light to the nations.

Human police forces and genuine peace-keeping of armies, are a helpful picture of God working through people who show up and hold space for peace to increase. God, then, seems to have a quite consistent purpose in this. To allow violence to collapse in on itself, and to advance peace on earth.

Keen to hear others thoughts on these ways of thinking about violence in Scripture.