Tag: israel

God’s violence

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

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.

    If your enemy is leprous, heal him…

    ~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

    2 Kings 5 neatly contains the story concerning Naaman the Syrian.

    One gets a strong sense why Jesus (in his famously offensive sermon at the Nazareth synagogue – Luke 4) chooses – of all the stories in the Hebrew Bible – this story as one of the two stories to reference. The reason seems to be the particularly strong example the Naaman story provides of love for enemies.

    The concept of loving your enemies is and always will be inescapably baffling. If the love we are talking about isn’t baffling, it can’t be enemy-love.

    We tame this concept by talking about enemies as though they are not really that bad or hard to love. Enemies are the ones trying to kill you, shame you, discredit you or otherwise take you down. They are in direct opposition to you. To love your enemy is to think and act in favour of a person who is anti-you.

    Loving your enemy is the ‘wrong’ thing to do, but nonetheless is ‘right’ in God’s economy.

    There are a number of Godly ‘wrongs’ in this fascinating story:
    We’ll just look at two. One by God, and one by a young girl…

    God gives victory to Israel Syria!?

    No, this passage is not written by someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder. God is for Israel! (verse 15) God is for Syria? (verse 1) No, this is indeed the Hebrew Bible, and the God revealed in this story is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Israel).

    What we see here is not God switching teams willy-nilly, but rather we see something about the generosity and sovereignty of the God of Israel. We are told provocatively in verse 1 that “the LORD had given victory to Syria” through Naaman.

    To say that God is the God of Israel is not to say that God only does things for Israel. God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. The God of Israel also gives land to other nations, and (as Paul says in Acts 17) is sovereign over the times and places where all people live. God has a specific salvation story playing out through a particular nation, but remains the universal cosmic Lord over all creation, all humanity and all nations. We see this in God giving victory here to Syria, and also in places like Deuteronomy 2 which describe God’s provision and protection for Moabite land.

    Enslaved girl seeks her captives’ death healing!?

    One doesn’t need a vast knowledge of ancient socio-political dynamics to grasp the tension between in this passage. Verse 2 makes it clear:

    Now bands of raiders from Syria [a.k.a. ‘Aram’) had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife.

    2 Kings 5:2

    It reads like a horrific newspaper headline. “Raiders… Taken Captive… Young girl.” Imagine this girls’ family reading the positive description of Naaman in verse 1!?

    She must have been able to see Naaman’s humanity. Instead of wishing him dead, she wishes him healed. Verse 3: “If only” Naaman could see “the prophet who is in Samaria…”

    This “young girl” is a shining example of one of the highest commandments in all of Scripture – “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:43-45).