What's Up with the Bible?

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:

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

How Can Jesus Still Possibly Love the Church?

Philip Yancey, in his book, The Jesus I Never Knew tells a tragic, heart-wrenching story related to him by a friend. This friend worked with the homeless and street people of Chicago.

One day a woman approached him asking for help. The woman lived on the streets and made her living on the streets. She needed money to feed her two-year daughter.

She suddenly broke down and began to pour out her heart. She admitted to the shameful things she’d done in her life and to her daughter to make money—not to buy food, but to support her drug habit.

Yancey’s friend had heard many horrific stories doing mission on the streets. This story shocked him. Once he finally regained his balance, he asked the woman if she had ever considered going to a church for help.

This time it was the woman’s turn to be shocked. She said:

Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.

Hypocritical.

Judgmental.

Mean.

Condemning.

Holier-than-thou.

These are just a few of the criticisms leveled at the Church.

And you don’t have to look far to find the evidence:

  • Sexual scandals and abuse perpetrated by and covered up by the Church

  • Christians shunning people and trying to deny them their rights if their beliefs or lifestyles don’t align with those of church-goers

  • Acting one way on Sunday morning and the opposite way the rest of the week

  • Creating hoops to jump through and rules for people to adhere to in order to attend church

  • The blurred lines between the Church and a particular political party or ideology

  • Pastors buying private jets with cash donated by their parishioners

The history of the Church doesn’t help.

The (very oversimplified) story of the Christian movement is one of Christian leaders seeking power, obtaining power, being corrupted by power, and then abusing that power.

We see it in the abuse of the Inquisition, where the Church tried to force people to become Christians or die.

We see it in the abuse of Indulgences, where essentially Christian leaders lied by promising that if people gave more money to the Church they would spend less time in Purgatory (hell, not the ski resort!).

We see it in the demeaning of women, not allowing them into leadership roles in the Church.

And the list goes on and on.

The Church has provided—and continues to provide—an easy excuse for writing off all of Christianity.

And that’s exactly what many people are doing. In fact, it’s become somewhat of a spiritual badge of honor to say, I believe in Jesus but not the Church.

Which leads to the question, How can Jesus, after 2000 years of disfunction and abuse, still love the Church?

One could image that by now Jesus has had enough.

Certainly, many of his followers have.

Yet, surprisingly, if not shockingly Jesus holds a high view of the Church!

The Bible calls the Church, The Body of Christ, suggesting that Jesus has tied himself and his reputation to the Church.

The Bible calls the Church, The Bride of Christ, reminding us that Jesus gave his life for her.

It’s a head scratcher.

But if you know anything about Jesus, it won’t come as a surprise at all. In fact, his commitment to the Church goes to the very heart of the Gospel.

More next time.

You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org

Judge Jesus

A woman is thrown down at the feet of Jesus. A group of men accuse her of having been caught in the very act of adultery. They say that, according to the law, she should be sentenced to death. And they want to know what Judge Jesus has to say.

Jesus stoops down and begins to write in the dust.

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We have no idea what he might have been writing.

Perhaps he wrote down words like lust, judgmental, greed, hypocrisy. Maybe he wrote a question: Where’s the man who must have been caught in the act of adultery with this woman? Perhaps he just doodled to give himself time to think or calm down.

What the men wanted, what they demanded, based on the law, was punitive justice. They wanted her crime punished. They wanted her stoned to death.

But Jesus was about to deliver a body blow to their collective spiritual gut.

Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.

One by one the accusers dropped the stones on the ground and walked away.

Now alone with the woman—who was, remember, guilty as charged; whose sin, remember, was punishable by death—Jesus asked her:

Is anyone left to condemn you?

No one sir.

Again, she’s guilty. The law says she should be punished (punitive justice). And she has neither confessed anything nor has she repented.

And Jesus says:

Neither do I condemn you.

Incredibly, he lets her off the hook! No repentance! No confession! No promise from her to do better next time!

Only grace!

Now go, and sin no more!

Rather than dishing out punitive justice, rather than punishing her, Judge Jesus holds out a radically different form of justice:

Restorative justice.

He doesn’t condemn. He doesn’t punish. Instead, through the power of forgiveness, he puts her back together and gives her a brand-new start.

He reconciles her to himself.

He puts to right what she put to wrong.

And all of it an act of unrequested, unearned, undeserved, unexpected grace!

Hell demands a God of punitive justice.

Grace declares a God of restorative justice.

Judge Jesus stands on the side of grace.

For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. (2 Corinthians 5:19)

For God in all his fullness
    was pleased to live in Christ,
20 and through him God reconciled
    everything to himself.
He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth
    by means of Christ’s blood on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

According to what righteousness will Christ judge when he comes and is manifested as the Son of man-judge of the world? Surely this righteousness will be no different from the righteousness he himself proclaimed in his gospel and practiced in fellowship with sinners and the sick! Otherwise no one would be able to recognize him. The coming Judge is the one who was put to death on the cross. The one who will come as Judge of the world is the one ‘who bears the sins of the world’ and who has himself suffered the suffering of victims. Jurgen Moltmann

Punitive Vs Restorative Justice Comparison

Punitive Justice                                                       Restorative Justice

  •  God is angry                                                            God is gracious

  •  God is fair                                                                 God is gracious

  • Problem: Sin as behavior                                        Sin as broken relationship

  • Solution: Punish behavior                                     Restore the relationship

  • Justice: Punitive                                                        Restorative

  • Way out: I accept Jesus                                            Jesus reconciles me to God

God’s answer to sin is not punishment, but reconciliation.

Judge Jesus does not dispense punitive justice but uses restorative justice to welcome us home.

Here comes the Judge! And that is good news.

You can reach me at Tim@TimWrightMinistries.org