Our Loving Heavenly Father
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the July 5, 2014
Sabbath School Lesson
“Dear friends, let us love one
another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and
knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This
is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the
world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but
that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear
friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” 1 John
4:7-11, NIV
I remember when
I first discovered Jesus, how loving He seemed. I was a lonely, awkward
teenager having mixed success at trying to fit in with my peers, an experience
common to many teens. We were all trying to understand life and what it was all
about. Members of a local protestant church said that Jesus would make sense of
it all for me. Willingly, I was lead through the sinner’s prayer. I felt
changed, bathed in the love of Jesus. I felt a joy and a sense of belonging I
had not felt before. It felt so good, I wanted more. I was told that I could
find more by reading the Bible, so I became a voracious Bible reader.
Some of what
I began to find in the Bible was troubling enough to keep me up at night
meditating on what it meant. I had been on a honeymoon with God, overwhelmed
with the love of Jesus. But the honeymoon started coming to an end as a darker
side began to creep into the relationship. I found that the God of the Bible
could be jealous, mean, spiteful and even murderous. This darker God drove Adam
and Eve from an Edenic paradise at the point of a flaming sword.[i]
Later He annihilated every man, woman, and child from the face of the Earth, leaving
only eight individuals and even one of those was cursed for laughing at his
father.[ii]
Later He
orders the death of the first born of Egypt.[iii]
Undoubtedly many of those were too young to have reached the age of
accountability but must nonetheless die. One might justify the drowning of the
Egyptian host in the Red Sea[iv]
as a military action, but the death of the innocents is a hard go to justify.
But this is only the beginning, for the Israelites who leave Egypt are beset by
repeated punishments of God that leave many thousands dead in the desert
wilderness.[v]
Then those who survive are commanded to kill all, men, women, and children
among the Canaanites.[vi]
God assists in this by tearing down the walls of Jericho to clear the way for
the slaughter.[vii] On
a later occasion, He even makes it possible for the Sun and Moon to stand still
at Joshua’s command in order to prolong the slaughter of the Canaanites.[viii]
There are
many other examples of this throughout the Old Testament. It is enough to make
a person wonder how the people of God who hacked and slashed their way through
Palestine could one day give birth to a people, called Christians, who meekly
went to be slaughtered as martyrs in the first through third centuries, C.E. The
whole thing makes God seem a little bi-polar. If He is love, how can He be
responsible for the slaughter of so many, especially children? Lest we fool
ourselves into thinking this was an anomaly from the past, we encounter this
bloody God again in the Apocalypse. There so much blood flows from the slaughter
that it reaches up to a horse’s bridle for a distance of 300 kilometers.[ix]
Reconciling
all of this with the idea of a loving God is no easy task. It is further
complicated by a God who is defined as omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.
If God was so actively involved in the battles of the Israelites and even went
to the extent of wiping out over ninety-nine percent of the population of the
planet, why does He now kick back and do nothing about the evil that pervades
society? Has God switched from being the great Avenger to being passive-aggressive?
Some might feel instead that this is the greatest argument that God does not
exist. Gottfried Leibniz, a seventeenth century philosopher created a term for
this apparent conflict: “Theodicy.” Theologians and philosophers have struggled
to reconcile what may be ultimately irreconcilable ever since.
Even the
Apostle Paul struggled with this in the first century. In Romans, chapter nine,
he contrasts God’s treatment of Jacob with His treatment of Esau and also
raises the very same issue regarding Pharaoh in Egypt at the Exodus. In the
end, however, he comes up with little more of an explanation than to say God is
God and as our Creator, He can do whatever He wants with us. We have no more right
to question Him than a pot has to question the potter. I get the feeling that
Paul was a little impatient with those who raise these unanswerable questions. So
how do we reconcile all of this? Can we?
Perhaps it
is helpful to understand what the Bible is and what it is not. Some believe
that the Bible is the literal word of God. They believe that God dictated every
word that is in the Bible, like an executive dictating a letter to his
assistant to be typed up verbatim. As such, they believe that every word is
holy and inviolable. These individuals will often advocate that one or another
version of the Bible is the only “holy” one, because if each word is sacred,
every change to the wording becomes suspect. However, as every boss who has
ever dictated a letter can tell you, the one typing the letter from his
dictation has a certain amount of responsibility to correct errors in grammar
and presentation to preserve the executive’s professional image. So even with
dictation, some changes take place.
However,
with God, it isn’t a matter of dictating to a secretary. Even the Bible writers
indicate that God’s role is not to provide the words but the inspiration.[x]
Then each writer shares that inspiration through the filtering lenses of the
culture in which he writes. If we take the Bible as a chronological gauge of
degrees of inspiration, we go from a very close relationship between man and
his Creator in Eden, then into a downward spiral in that relationship until the
flood. After the flood, the downward spiral continues until only Abraham’s
family, and not even all of them, continue to seek a relationship with God. That
downward path gets so bad that it results in the “godly line” being enslaved in
Egypt for over four hundred years.
With Moses,
the descendants of Abraham began to claw their way back out of the pit of
slavery and toward a re-established relationship with God. It was not an easy
path, and it involved another captivity, for only seventy years this time, in
Babylon. With such a vacillating path in their relationship to God, we might
expect an equal variance in their understanding as well. If we look closely at
Scripture, we find exactly that.
For
instance, in 2 Samuel 24:1, we are told that God caused David to sin in
numbering Israel. But in 1 Chronicles 21:1, the text tells us that Satan was
the one who caused David to do the census. For those who believe that God
dictated every word of the Bible, this is problematic, and to avoid the
dissonance, even many of them will shy away from a literal understanding here.
But for those who have a more liberal understanding of inspiration and how it
works, this simply illustrates the growth in understanding that occurred over
time.
If we look
at our own spiritual journey, we find that our understanding of God has changed
over the course of our lives. If we compare our statements about God when we
were a child with what we might say about Him today, we would probably see that
difference. We may even ask ourselves how we could have once thought what we
did. As we mature, so does our faith. The child who fails to mature is
considered to be developmentally disabled. Perhaps it is the same regarding
spiritual maturity.
We can see
an even more dramatic example of this growth in spiritual understanding when we
contrast the sentiment of Psalm 137 which talks about dashing infants against
the rocks for vengeance, and the words of Jesus which tell us to love our
enemies.[xi]
If we take the life of Jesus as exemplifying the acme of spiritual maturity and
the lives of those many Israelite slaves in Egypt as the very bottom of the
spiritual experience, perhaps we can understand the disparity between the God
portrayed from that cultural perspective and the one portrayed by early
Christianity, Revelation, which took much of its symbolism from the Old
Testament, notwithstanding.
