My Faith Is a Hot Mess (Part 5)

It's a crazy world we live in - and sometimes it's tragic and heartbreaking in a way that's almost too hard to understand. We ask why: why does God allow evil, or allow certain things to happen? Let me tell you a story, and see if it raises that question for you.

There was an invasion. Armed soldiers swept into the cities and settlements of a closely related ethnic group they'd feuded with for generations, and they leveled everything. They didn't stop at enemy combatants - they killed the women, the children, the babies, even the livestock. An atrocious act of genocide, justified, in their minds, by their religion: they believed they had every right to wipe out the infidels. By any standard of international law, these are war crimes - murder, extermination, persecution of an identifiable group.

Did you hear about this? I'm betting more of you read about it than you realized. I never said it happened recently. In fact, the details could describe several campaigns recorded in our own Scriptures - the conquests of Deuteronomy 20, or the command in 1 Samuel 15 to completely destroy the Amalekites: men, women, children, infants, and animals. The invading army was Israel. The atrocity was framed as obedience to God.

If that makes your blood run cold - if a God-ordained command to kill women and children sounds impossible to square with the Son of God who told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us - then, whether you realize it or not, you're now officially in the process of deconstructing. Welcome to the next installment of my faith is a hot mess.

A quick reminder of what we mean

For a couple of weeks now we've been examining bonus beliefs and doctrines within Christianity, and we've been talking about deconstruction. It's a scary word to some, a word that's been misused and demonized, a code word in certain circles for abandoning the faith. That is not what we mean here. By deconstruction I mean honestly examining beliefs, doctrines, and practices in order to discover the truth, or a truer and deeper form of faith. It's an honest inspection of the source material - which, as always, is Scripture - in an attempt to arrive at an accurate interpretation, regardless of prior indoctrination.

This week and next we're looking at three big words that shape how people relate to the Bible: inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility. Not all Christians believe the same things about them. You might be thinking, "Why are you doing this, Josh? I already know what I believe about Scripture." Maybe you do. But if we want to reach people for Jesus - if we want to fling our doors open wide - then we need to make room at the table for people who hold different beliefs and still want to follow Jesus, and we need to remove some of the barriers that keep people from coming to him in the first place.

So let me say plainly: this particular message may not be for you, and that's okay. Sometimes the most honest question you can ask in church is, "Am I the intended audience for this one?" If you've already made peace with these things and they don't trouble you - if Jesus and you are good - then wonderful. Take out your phone and play Royal Match or Candy Crush, watch some Mr. Beast; just silence the volume. I won't be offended at all. But the people I'm worried about are the ones who don't know Jesus yet, and the ones wrestling honestly with their faith. They're the reason we're doing this.

The ground we can stand on together

Before we wade in, let's agree on some bedrock. Whatever you believe about how Scripture came to be, these truths hold for any follower of Christ: there is one God, creator above all; Jesus Christ is his only Son, our Lord, born of Mary, fully God and fully man; he died for our sins, was buried, and rose again on the third day; he ascended and is seated at the right hand of the Father; he puts his Holy Spirit in every believer; and he will one day come again to bring us into everlasting life. Miss those, and you've missed the whole point and the thread that runs through all of Scripture.

And let's agree about Jesus himself. John opens his Gospel by telling us the Word existed in the beginning, was with God, and was God - that everything was made through him:

So the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. - John 1:14

Jesus said it directly:

The Father and I are one. - John 10:30

If Jesus is God, and Jesus and the Father are one, then they share the same essence, the same nature, the same intentions. Which means the actions, words, and attitude of Christ are the purest revelation humanity has of who God is. Hold onto that. It's the key to everything that follows.

"All Scripture is inspired"

Most Christians believe Scripture was inspired by God. But inspired means different things to different people. The proof text everyone reaches for is this one:

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. - 2 Timothy 3:16

I believe that completely. I think most of us have no trouble saying the authors of Scripture - diverse, spread across more than a thousand years, representing different kingdoms and viewpoints - were inspired by God to write about him and their relationship with him. The rub comes from another translation you've heard: "All Scripture is God-breathed." For a lot of people, that phrase conjures an image of God dictating the words of the Bible out loud while a scribe takes them down letter for letter. Some believe it was close to that. Others will tell you the process of authorship was the farthest thing from it.

Some take "God-breathed" as a proof text for a belief called verbal plenary inspiration - the idea that every word of Scripture, down to the last letter, was perfectly chosen and preserved by God, infallible and inerrant not only in history and theology but in geography and science, not only in the original manuscripts but in the copies we hold today. The most extreme forms hold that God dictated the message word by word, that everything is meant to be taken literally, and therefore that every action taken in God's name in Scripture carries God's signature - because, after all, God breathed it.

And here's where honest people hit a wall.

The wall

If Jesus is God, and Jesus and the Father are one, and Jesus is the clearest revelation of God - and Jesus says love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, be merciful as your Father is merciful - then it is genuinely hard to reconcile that Jesus with commands to wipe out every woman, child, and infant. It's hard to square "don't take revenge" with a psalmist who writes:

Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks. - Psalm 137:9

That's how the psalm ends. There's no second verse where the writer feels bad and God corrects him. It is a bleak ending - it is a death metal psalm. If every word was dictated by God, what does that psalm tell us about God? Now, context matters: that psalm was written in the Babylonian captivity, by someone who watched his city destroyed and his people slaughtered. It's a bitter, violent, deeply human cry for revenge - and I understand it. The question isn't whether it's a human sentiment. The question is whether it's a godly one.

Think about it in modern terms. The Nazis carried out the systematic murder of millions, including women and children. When the Allies marched into Germany, did they in turn exterminate German women and children? No. Because even if you could twist it into a kind of justice, it isn't just or moral toward people who had nothing to do with the evil. If we - made in God's image, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, given a spirit of discernment - can recognize that the killing of babies isn't perfect justice, why would God command it? Was it really perfect justice, or human justice peppered with revenge?

The verse people use to end the conversation

When you raise these questions, the usual response is to quote Isaiah:

My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts, and my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. - Isaiah 55:8

It's deployed to shut down the questioning: God's ways aren't our ways, so let it go. But notice - his ways are supposed to be higher than ours, purer than ours. And in context, Isaiah tells us exactly how they're higher. Look at the verse right before:

Let the wicked change their ways... Let them turn to the Lord that he may have mercy on them. - Isaiah 55:7

This isn't a passage about slaughtering children. It's a passage about God showing mercy to the wicked who turn to him. His higher way is mercy. That lines up perfectly with Jesus:

Love your enemies... Then your reward from heaven will be very great... You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate. - Luke 6:35-36

The rationalizations don't hold

I used to defend these passages myself, with the rationales I'd been handed. "Those nations were so far gone there was no redeeming them; even the children would grow up to seek revenge." That might satisfy your mind for a while, especially coming from someone you regard as an authority. But examine it honestly and it falls apart. Genocide doesn't remove evil; it removes a group of people. Sin is a human condition, not the property of one tribe - and it always comes back in another form. The attempt rarely even works: the Amalekites show up again fifteen chapters later, and again in the days of Hezekiah, and Haman in the book of Esther is described as a descendant of their king.

Worse, these explanations put God in a box. If God wanted to judge those nations, why not rain down fire as he'd done before? Why involve the Israelites at all? Better yet, why doesn't the God of mercy that Jesus describes send an emissary to call them to repentance, as he did with Jonah and Nineveh? The unanswerable questions all share one unstated premise: why does the all-powerful, all-loving, all-wise God of the universe so often respond in ways that look exactly like the violent, tribal norms of the ancient societies that existed a thousand years before Christ - rather than higher than them?

The same verse that breaks people can also free them

Here's the irony. The very verse that triggers the crisis - "all Scripture is inspired by God" - is also the one that can set us free. The word translated "God-breathed" is a Greek term, theopneustos, that Paul may well have coined himself. It's actually closer to the way we use inspire today than people assume; our English word comes from the Latin for "to breathe into." And the way the phrase is built implies an intermediary - a human being who was inspired by God and then wrote.

That, to me, is one of the amazing things about Scripture. God inspired human authors to tell his story in their own voices - their walks with him, their relationships with him, their understanding of him, and sometimes their lack of understanding. He let his broken creation tell his story in ways that resonated with their cultures and time periods, in images those ancient people understood. And because they were limited human beings trying to describe a God whose ways are so far above theirs, their fingerprints are on the page. Sometimes they portrayed God as a mirror of their own culture and experience. That's why God is represented so differently from chapter to chapter, author to author, era to era - sometimes that speaks to the nature of God, and sometimes it speaks to the way people in that time and place imagined him.

But here's the anchor: no matter how God is portrayed, every idea we form about him and about Scripture must submit to Jesus, who is the purest revelation of God - God in the flesh. Whatever words we read, inspired or otherwise, must bow to the Word as John describes him. Can you imagine the Word - Jesus - commanding you to go into the next city over (Torrance, let's say) and kill every man, woman, child, baby, and pet? Yeah. Neither can I.

Jesus corrects the record

Watch how Jesus himself handles Scripture. The Law said, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Jesus quoted it - and then said something startling:

You have heard the law that says... "An eye for an eye." But I say, do not resist an evil person! - Matthew 5:38-39

You have heard the law that says, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say, love your enemies! - Matthew 5:43-44

Jesus used Scripture - because it is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. And sometimes the correcting he did was correcting wrong human ideas about God, his will, and his nature, retraining us to follow his example instead. So here's a question for the verbal-plenary view: if every single word was dictated by God, why did Jesus - who is one with the Father - have to come and correct the record? Why wasn't it clear the first time? That's worth sitting with.

Whatever you land on regarding inspiration, this much is clear: from the Law to the Prophets to the Gospels, all of Scripture tells one story - a loving, holy Creator, our separation from him through sin, and the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ. The law couldn't save us. All have sinned and fallen short. But the gift of God is eternal life through Christ.

The point of the whole story

For this is how God loved the world: he gave his one and only Son. Jesus, fully God and fully man, gave his life on the cross and took the sins of the world - past, present, and future - upon himself. Three days later he rose from the grave, showing his power over death and offering us eternal life in a place he's preparing for us, and abundant life as we follow him here.

If you've never put your faith and trust in Jesus and you'd like to do that today - to make him the Lord of your life and receive his gifts - you can pray a prayer like this:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I'm a sinner. I know I've done wrong things. Please forgive me of my sins. Right now I ask you to be the Lord of my life. Help me to turn from my sins and follow you. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins, for rising again on the third day and taking those sins away, for saving me, and for preparing a place for me. In Jesus' name, amen.

If you prayed that prayer, congratulations - welcome to the family. You've probably got questions, and that's more than okay; we'll look at Jesus' answers together. Come see me after a service, or email me at josh@seacoastredondo.com.

At the table together

It's the first Sunday of the month, which is when we celebrate communion at Seacoast. We do this because Jesus asked his followers to, on the night before he gave his life:

This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. - Luke 22:19

Communion is a time to remember Christ's gift, and also a time to examine our hearts - to ask the Lord for a clean heart and come to the table with a clear conscience. It's the body of Christ coming together as a family before the Lord. All who have put their faith and trust in Jesus are welcome to take the elements.

Thanks for hanging with me through some challenging material. We'll look at related ideas next week. Until then, may the Lord deliver us from judgmental spirits, so that we wouldn't condemn but love those with whom we disagree. God bless you.