I’ve read the Bible. That’s why I’m an atheist! (Online meme)
As a Pastor, and as one who loves the Bible, I get it.
After all, the Bible is filled with violence, either at the hand of God or commanded by God. There’s a lot of smiting going on in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament.
Women seem to be demeaned over and over again. Patriarchy seems to reign.
The Bible hard to understand. It’s archaic to say the least.
Sure, it has some beautiful poetry. Psalm 23 comes to mind (The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want...). Or the Genesis 1 creation story (In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...). Or one of the most moving passages in all of literature, Luke 2 (In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus…)
Sure, it has some interesting insights into life (see Proverbs).
Sure, Jesus, in the Bible, offers a radical view of God and life.
But on the surface, the Bible seems to have far more to overcome than is worth the effort.
Then again, the Bible is the best-selling book in the world. Not bad for a book that’s thousands of years old.
Some great and not so great movies have been made based on the Bible from Samson and Delilah (starring the late, great Victor Mature) to The Greatest Story Ever Told to David and Bathsheba to The Ten Commandments.
Many of the “catch phrases” we use in culture come from the Bible:
Scape goat (Leviticus 16:8)
Good Samaritan (Luke 10)
Turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39)
A stitch in time… (that’s not actually in the Bible… just seeing if you are paying attention)
David vs Goliath (1 Samuel 17)
A cheerful heart is good medicine (Proverbs 17:22)
A house divided against itself cannot stand (Matthew 12:25)
Do to others as you would have them do to you (Matthew 7:12)
But that doesn’t negate the fact that the Bible is filled with so much violence. That the God portrayed there seems to be so cruel and hell-bent on destroying us.
Or… is there another way to read the Bible?
Let’s start here: The Bible is a difficult book to read. Because it wasn’t written to us. It was written to people who lived thousands of years ago, in a very different part of the world from many of us, with a very different world-view.
They didn’t have 21st Century science available to them. They didn’t have social media. They didn’t have access to the international information we have today.
When we try to read the Bible as if it were written to us, we quickly get confused or frustrated.
Another way of saying it—the Bible needs to be read as the Bible wants to be read, not as we think it should be read from our 21st Century world-view.
For example, the earliest Bible characters, like the cultures around them, lacking modern science, assumed that anything and everything that happened, good or ill, happened at the hands of the gods (or God). If it rained, the gods made it rain. If there was a drought, the gods caused the drought. They didn’t have a Farmer’s Almanac to guide them in their planting seasons… only a primitive view of the gods.
They had a pre-modern world-view. And as the Bible writers wrestled with issues of God, life, and faith, they did so through that world-view.
It was easy for the people of Israel to assume that their God was like the other gods—petulant, angry, condemning, one to be afraid of. And we see that view of God again and again in the Bible.
But alongside of that view we also see something shockingly radical about God—that the God of Israel is nothing like the other gods. That the God is Israel is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.
The God of Israel, unlike the other gods, despises child-sacrifice. The God of Israel is not a tribal God, but the God of all creation—a God who creates out of love and grace, not out of violence like the other gods. The God of Israel created male and female equally, in God’s image.
The Bible is an amazing journey of discovery as the people of Israel, living with a pre-modern mindset, surrounded by the gods of other cultures, encounter a radically different kind of divine being: one who loves, saves, and rescues.
That journey reaches its highpoint in the story of Jesus—the One who shows us the true face of God through a cross.
The Bible needs to be read as the Bible wants to be read. That starts with context: The Bible was not written to us.
But the Bible was written for us.
Once we understand the context and how the text was understood originally, we can then ask the question, what, if anything is that text saying to us today?
More next time.
You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org