"God's Love in the Old Testament" - Chapter 23

    

   

Chapter 23: "An Old Testament Hotch-Potch"

     

 

 

Chapter 23 – An Old Testament Hotch-Potch

 

And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets, who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. (Heb 11:32-34)

 

 

Contents of Chapter 23

23.1 Introduction

23.2 Lot  

23.3 The Levite

23.4 Abraham

23.5 Jephthah

23.6 Idols  

23.7 Midian   

23.8 Baal

23.9 Joshua and Ethnic Cleansing

23.10 The Death Penalty

23.11 To Conclude

 

 

Definition: “Hotch-potch” - odds and ends: a motley assortment of things

       

23.1 Introduction

 

Arriving at this point in the book, I wondered how many more chapters I should include, how many more specific incidents from the Old Testament I should cover. Then I was reminded of Richard Dawkins' chapter on the Old Testament from his infamous and much criticised book, “The God Delusion”. I wrote an appraisal of that book, working through it paragraph by paragraph, and chapter by chapter, and concluded that it might be useful to pick up on his complaints and use them to:

•  provide specific answers to specific queries, AND
•  observe the nature of bad arguing that is so often employed AND
•  provide some suggested guidelines for dealing with such issues.
    

I will, initially use the material from my assessment with a few additional comments.

 

Richard deals with some 10 subjects in that chapter and so I will take each one as a separate section. The first one he covered, Noah, I have already covered in the chapter on the flood, so I will not go over that again. I therefore start with the second Biblical character he speaks about. The Page numbers are the pages in The God Delusion covered by the character.

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23.2 Lot       p.271-272     Genesis 19

 

His approach to Lot is to recount the Biblical account making slightly edgy comments along the way. It is not a harsh critique but he does, indirectly, object to Biblical treatment of women, the judgment of Sodom and the behaviour of Lot's daughters.       

REALITY RECORDED: Lot is a good illustration of something of which Richard and many others appear to be completely unaware, that what we find in the Bible is often historical narrative of what happened, and that the record includes men and women doing great and wonderful things AND/OR terrible and stupid things. Merely because some historical action is recorded in the Bible, that does not make it right. We'll say some more about this later, but we simply need to observe this as a principle for the present.

 

BALANCED COMMENT: I think I would be more accepting of Richard's concern for women if he had at the same time condemned the unrestrained desires of the homosexual community. As it was a homosexual group outside the door, I suggest that Lot's offer of his daughter was somewhat ingenuous, although in the later example below that was clearly not so.

 

CULTURAL REALITY: I am glad we live in the day we do. I am part of a church where women exercise equal roles in leadership etc. and (to my knowledge at least) there is no male-female conflict. The reason for that is that Jesus Christ came to establish an equality of relationship while maintaining a distinction of role. The imbalance of male-female equality etc. has not been a religious thing but a cultural issue throughout the world, flowing out of the tendency for the man to go out and do the heavy manual labour and fight off marauders, and the woman to bear children and raise the family. To pillory the religious community for an individual following cultural norms – as alien as they may appear to us three thousand years later – is naïve and ingenuous.

 

I use this word ‘ingenuous' increasingly because the more I went through this book, the more I feel that some of Richard's comments appear in a spirit of frank, innocent comment, but actually have a snide motivation behind them. For example, the part-sentence, “the respect accorded to women in this intensely religious culture.”   Now I may have to apologise here because it may be that he is simply genuinely ignorant but it seems otherwise he is making a tongue-in-cheek point. Let's explain.

 

THE LIMITS OF GODLY RELATIONSHIPS: By godly relationships, I simply mean relationships between men or women and God. What is patently obvious to anyone who reads through the first book of the Bible, is that Genesis 12 onwards is the history of growing relationships between those we refer to today as the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob & Joseph) and God.

 

That there were pagan superstitious beliefs among other cultures is quite clear but the only ‘religious' people – being those entering a relationship with the One Creator God revealed in the Bible – were these Patriarchs and their families, and it was a very embryonic level of relationship, as we will later see.

 

That is what makes these men even more incredible and, as we'll see, they are very ordinary men getting into very ordinary messes in life! To call this an ‘intensely religious culture' shows total lack of understanding of ‘religious' development of that time. An ‘intensely superstitious culture' might be a better description, but the more an individual entered into a relationship with God, the less superstitious he became.

 

The story of Lot 's family would probably stir most of us to agree with Richard's description that this was truly a dysfunctional family – except that after the horror of the destruction, its enormity might have left these girls thinking they were the only people left on earth and felt this was the only way to promulgate the earth's population. They were not directed by God so this was purely a human thing.

 

LESSON: Learn to distinguish between cultural practices and God-directed practices, and between human-inspired activity and God-inspired activity. Don't blame God for cultural, human-inspired activities.

   

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23.3 The Levite      p.272-274         Judges 19 - 21       

     

CULTURE AGAIN: The story of the unnamed Levite is thoroughly unpleasant from a number of angles but perhaps not as mysterious as Richard would make out. Yes, it was a day when there were still concubines and outside of the Middle East today, most of us do not feel comfortable with the idea of a ‘lesser wife', but culturally that was what happened in those days – and it wasn't just ‘religious' people.

 

PROGRESSIVE HISTORY: The period of the judges is exactly what the title of the book says, a period where the twelve tribes of Israel occupying this Promised Land, are ruled over by judges. Being in the early days of their relationship as a nation with God, they were really very slow on the uptake and didn't realise that every time they drifted away from God, despite Him calling them back when they turned from Him, He would not force Himself upon them but would leave them to their own devices. (We considered this in some detail in Chapter 10). This was a time, as we saw, when Israel frequently drifted away from God and got it wrong.

 

Living in a very hostile age (isn't any in the history of the earth?), even as now, nations fought over boundaries and rights and every time Israel turned from God they found themselves weak, and were subsequently defeated by those round about who wanted land.

 

The Levites, part of the priestly tribe, would have been particularly sensitive to the moral and spiritual climate. Thus when the culture within one of the tribal areas allows flagrant and open and violent sexuality that blatantly went contrary to God's laws, and resulted in this man's concubine being gang-raped to death, on return to his own home he cuts up her dead body and sends parts of it to all the tribal elders throughout the land. Nothing more could have been designed to grab their attention!  I almost like Richard's comment, “Actually, it is not quite as loopy as it sounds” because it was designed to bring about an end which, yet again, Richard gets wrong. It wasn't to provoke revenge, but to provoke justice and a re-establishing of order within the nation.

 

Yet again he gets it wrong in the way he says, “Judges chapter 20  lovingly records, more than 60,000 men were killed.” There's no sense of rejoicing over this. Indeed it's quite to the contrary, for chapter 21 shows the anguish that there was in the nation. The reason that so many had died was that the tribe of Benjamin had not followed the Law and had not followed the correct procedure for coming in confession and repentance before God. They had instead banded together against the rest of the tribes and had stood their ground over tolerating the awful behaviour that seemed commonplace in their part of the land. in the war that followed, many died.

 

As for Richard's closing remarks about similarity with the story of Lot, where he wondered if it was from the same manuscript, he falls into the trap that careless readers fall into, of failing to note the incredible differences in the development of Israel. In Lot's case there was not a nation of  Israel, only one nomadic family working out its relationship with God; in the Judges story there is a totally different social structure with twelve tribes in existence, as a nation, and established in the land. There is no social similarity whatsoever.

 

LESSON: Learn to

•  recognise the primitive state of the nation of Israel in the early books of the Bible,

•  recognise the desire of the nation to hold to God's laws and to be a nation that stood out for goodness in an otherwise bad world,

•  distinguish between God-directed activity and the activity of men trying on their own to be righteous and sometimes falling short of perfection!

•  not blame God for the failings of human beings. 

     

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23.4 Abraham     p.274-275        Gen 12,20 & 22       

  

This next part of Dawkins' chapter attacks Abraham for being the less-than-perfect individual that he was. He attacks him for his failure with his wife in Egypt and in Gerar, and for his act of going to sacrifice Isaac.

       

‘HISTORY' OR ‘MORAL TEACHING': Before we move on to consider Abraham's story we need to confront the falsity of Richard's initial premise in this chapter. Early in this section he asks, “What modern moralist would wish to follow him?” If Richard, and others who might think like this, knew anything about Biblical Interpretation, they would know that one of the rules scholars use for interpreting the Bible is, “Narratives only can be used to form doctrine if they are confirmed by teaching.” In other words no one decides on morals by simply observing behaviour within the Bible.

 

GROWTH OF A GODLY RELATIONSHIP:   As we have already noted above, the Patriarchs, of whom Abram was the first, were the first recorded in the Bible who were called by God to work out lifetime relationships with Him. The purpose was ultimately in order to bring about a godly nation, yet the reality was that it was more by occasional interaction than any designed relationship course given by God! They had no Scriptures to guide them, merely the sense of God's presence that they felt and ‘heard'.  As Abraham, as he later became, was the first of these men, it was not surprising that he struggled with his life and relationship with God. What is amazing, about the account of his life, is that he starts out as a nomadic pagan from Mesopotamia, and eventually becomes an incredible man of faith who is both rich and consulted by kings.

 

SPECIFIC BEHAVIOURAL FAILURE: Richard first focuses on Abram's response to a famine shortly after he has arrived in Canaan, going down to Egypt and denying his wife by saying she was his daughter.

 

Having said what we've said about behaviour not being ethical teaching to be followed, and Abraham working out an embryonic faith with God, we can look on his behaviour in respect of his wife in Egypt more charitably than Richard does. In Genesis 12 Abraham is simply afraid and takes the coward's way out.

 

When it comes to the matter of God sending ‘serious diseases' (Richard – ‘plagues') what is surprising is that God hadn't sent them before, because it is quite probable that, as later occurred, they worshipped gods and idols and so on, and could have incurred judgement way before. As one theologian has commented, when it comes to the judgment of God, what is surprising is not that He occasionally brings judgment, but that He doesn't judge us all. To understand that comment you need to understand the depth and significance within each of us of this terrible thing the Bible calls Sin.

 

What should also be noted here is that death did not come with these diseases; they simply come in the second category of forms of judgment that we considered in Chapter 11: Corrective action in order to bring people to their senses so that they will return to God, to a place where they are able to live as He designed them to live, receiving all the goodness He has planned for them, i.e. it stops a person following the course they are following so that they follow a new path that is not hurtful, harming or destructive.” This was a good example of that working out exactly according to the description here.

 

SPECIFIC BEHAVIOUR AND MISUNDERSTANDING: As to the matter of Isaac being sacrificed by Abraham (Genesis 22) there are two points to be observed. The first is that from God's perspective He never wanted Abraham to kill Isaac but wanted to see how far Abraham would be prepared to go in terms of obedience to Him. The second point to be made, is that from Abraham's perspective we are told that he believed that God had the power to bring Isaac back to life again (Heb 11:19).

 

Now we may from our perspective today consider his action horrific, yet in his day what he was doing was what the pagan religions often did (we'll see that shortly). As something to be imitated, a basis for morality, as Richard keeps saying, there is no question that anywhere else in history or in the Bible is there an indication that God ever wants such a thing. How real the thing was to Isaac is uncertain and so the question of trauma is equally uncertain.

LESSON: No Christian will ever say that they get their morals from all of Scripture. The standard rule of interpretation is don't make rules out of observed behaviour.

       

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23.5 Jephthah          p.275-276               Judges 11   

     

This is a notorious story. Jephthah is a military commander of dubious background, dragooned by the elders of Gilead to be their leader to fight for them against the Ammonites who were attacking them. He made a vow to God saying if God would give him victory he would sacrifice whatever came out of the door of his house on his return.

 

AN EXAMPLE OF GETTING IT WRONG: We have already stated that you don't form morals by observing other people's behaviour. That it was God's intent from the outset to overcome the Ammonites is clear and the presence of the Holy Spirit coming on Jephthah to give him courage is one thing, but the man clearly does not understand the Lord and does not realise that you don't need to do anything to get God on your side, especially when you are one of His people. This was a stupid vow and had nothing to do with the outcome of the battle. When his daughter came out of the house, if he had known God and known His ways, he would know that the right way to deal with sin is to offer an animal sacrifice – not a person! If he had known the Lord he would have known that he could have gone to the Lord to seek His forgiveness by saying, “I'm sorry I got it wrong.”

  

GOD NOT INTERVENING: It is a valid question to ask why God didn't intervene. How does God intervene and why does He intervene? Already in a previous chapter we have discussed the impossibility, in a world of free will, of God intervening every time there is a wrong thought or wrong word or wrong deed. Thus in the world many wrong people do many wrong things and that includes harming others. We should understand that God is not happy about that, as Scripture clearly testifies, but that is different from expecting Him to step in and stop all wrong actions. Sometimes we have to live with that for that is the cost of free will in a Fallen World.

LESSON: Understand that silly people do silly things, even in the process, sometimes, of seeking to do right things. Understand that because of free will we cannot expect God to step in and forcibly stop people doing silly things – even though He may speak clearly to them.

      

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23.6 Idols   p. 276            

    

CONTROLLED ANGER: For a reason that is not made clear Richard then jumps on to talk about idols. The opening sentence in the part about God getting upset about idol worship indicates both a lack of understanding of God and a lack of understanding of life. His emotive language sneaks in again: “God's monumental rage”. That sounds like an out-of-control emotion that perhaps Richard has experienced, but it not the way God's righteous anger works, as we have noted in previous chapters. Sometimes we need to catch God's behaviour as well as the words.

 

I wonder how you respond to your misbehaving children, particularly when they are doing something that is dangerous and could harm them? “Stop doing that please.” “I said stop doing that!” “Did you not hear me? I said stop doing that!” “If you carry on doing that you will be in big trouble, so stop doing it now!” Four times? Hmmm.

 

IMMENSE PATIENCE: Read through Jeremiah sometime and list the number of times God called to Israel, its leaders and the people of Jerusalem – far more than four times! The apostle Peter marvelled over the Lord's patience and ended up writing, “He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance .” (2 Pet 3:9). This is a very different picture from the one Richard paints!

 

A PURE JEALOUSY: Richard speaks of God's jealousy saying it “resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind.” What? This obviously comes from only reading the Bible to pick out bits to criticize! If we read his Old Testament (in a modern version!) carefully and intelligently, we would see that God's jealousy is born out of what is referred to in the Bible as a covenant relationship. This we have seen a number of times in earlier chapters.

 

Now all that required Israel to do was keep the design-laws that God had given them and acknowledge the Lord as their one God, and He would bless them and ensure great provision for them so that peace, harmony and prosperity would be the primary characteristics that you might use to describe them.

 

The climax of this was seen in the reign of God's first king, David, and then in his son, Solomon. During those years, peace harmony and affluence were known by every one in the nation. Now this was supposed to be God's role-model for the rest of the world. There was nothing negative about it whatsoever. In fact it probably made the idol-worshipping surrounding nations pig-sick!

 

The jealousy that God had for   Israel   was a protective one that knew if they turned to the habits of the surrounding nations they would end up in the same mess as those nations. THAT is the point of the frequent injunctions against veering towards idol worship.

 

JEALOUSY GENERALLY: There is a right jealousy, a good jealousy. It is the emotion that fights to save a covenant relationship, a marriage. It is the emotion that fights to protect children from drugs or whatever else might harm them. Modern couples, it seems, rarely fight for their marriages. We've lost the belief that jealousy is a good thing in a right context.

LESSON: Perhaps we need to study the life and behaviour of nations that worshipped idols to understand the pure superstition and horror and fear that so often goes with idolatry.

      

In the paragraphs following (p.276-277) there is a denunciation of Moses at Mount Sinai but as we have already covered that in a previous chapter we will not cover it again here.  

 

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23.7 Midian    p.227-278 Numbers 25

 

Although no linking thought is given Richard takes us on to talk about God's instructions to destroy Midian. It may be the link was Moses.

 

THE CASE OF MIDIAN:   In a day of apparently ‘civilised war' where the media is able to spotlight exactly what is happening, we have remarkably short memories – of indiscriminate bombing of Dresden and wholesale devastation by nuclear holocaust. Our logic in both the cases cited was that it was necessary to avoid a much greater evil, but in both cases all men, women and children were wiped out – and we justified it, and would, no doubt, do it again in the future if the circumstances were sufficiently bad. For instance, suppose an eco-terrorist, wanting to attack the USA released bubonic plague (or worse) on Hawaii . I suspect that the rest of the world would quickly agree that for the safety of the whole world the entire population of Hawaii should be burnt by bombing to utterly destroy that plague escaping and wiping out most of the rest of the world.

 

THE CRUCIAL ISSUE: What is missing from Richard's understanding is the enormity of what was going on. God has separated out this nation and is teaching them to live in relationship with Him, with all the tremendous benefits that the Old Testament (when read completely) shows us, so that they be an example to the rest of the word, as we saw in chapter 9.

 

The most crucial point, that Richard and other critics completely miss, is that the success of this experiment relied upon this people living in relationship with God, following His leading and His design-rules or laws. The threat to that was the counterfeit religions that prevailed in the surrounding nations which threatened to lead astray the people of Israel and threaten their very existence.

 

The history of the early church shows, similarly, a major attack on it was through heresy, seeking to lead believers into all sorts of wrong beliefs and then, subsequently, wrong behaviours. It has been a battle that has continued right down to the present time.

 

UNDERMINING   ISRAEL: A more careful and wider reading of the book of Numbers, would reveal the account of how the king of Midian had sided with the king of   Moab   and hired a seer to specifically curse   Israel . His objective was specifically to destroy   Israel   and, failing by this means, took the counsel of the seer and sent his women to seduce the men of   Israel   and lead them away from God to their own idol worship. Again, and the importance of this cannot be overstated, the very existence of Israel was under threat. The undermining that took place created a very real threat to Israel and the only way to ensure that Midian did not keep on coming back to attack or undermine them was to fight them and completely obliterate them.

 

Ignoring our own recent history enables us to have a holier-than-thou view of what took place three thousand years ago in what I described earlier as a very primitive society, now fighting for its very existence. I'm not willing to be such a hypocrite. It is clear from accounts in Numbers that it was a case of wipe out or be wiped out by this neighbour who felt threatened by Israel. (Not a lot changes!)

LESSON: We need to come to an intelligent understanding of how crucial it was that Israel did not get seduced and overrun by an enemy nation and be led into foreign pagan worship.  

     

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23.8 Baal      p.278-280               

 

Perhaps it is a continuation of this same theme that Richard then moves into deriding “the extraordinarily draconian view taken of flirting with rival gods.”

    

FALSE RELIGIONS: Hopefully something of what has been said above will shed some light on the ongoing negative descriptions of what took place. Perhaps the descriptions of God's “characteristic fury” and “God's maniacal jealousy” say more about his own feelings of authority, rather than accurately portraying what happened here. There may also be a measure of ignorance about what was involved. To talk about ‘false religions' may invoke the wrath of the author who would wish to do away with all religions, but it is necessary to consider this in the life of Israel.

 

THE THREAT OF BAAL: When the Israelites entered Canaan they found that every piece of land had its own deity, its ‘owner'.  The Hebrew word   ba'al   means ‘master' or ‘possessor' or ‘owner'. There were, therefore, many Baals in the land. However two of these Baals became prominent, Baal, the son of El (son of God), who was revered as the god with power over rain, wind, clouds, and therefore over fertility, and Ashtoreth, a goddess thought to be the consort of Baal, who supposedly brought fertility to the people who worshipped her.       

COUNTERING SUPERSTITION: One has only got to look at the world today, and see the areas of the world where people worship shrines with idols or, in our own country, people who are influenced by ‘following the stars', to see that people are incredibly susceptible to superstitious nonsense. As a pastor I know that many people are bound by superstitious fear and my role is to free them from that fear by facing the truth about themselves and about what the Bible genuinely teaches about God.  I simply wish Richard could see these. I would also like to hear if the enlightening ‘truth' of atheism also brings such wholeness and life transformation as is seen when the Gospel of Jesus Christ is accepted.

    

SELECTIVE   READING: Of course one of the aspects hardly touched upon here, apart from the superstitious fear that was there, was the frequent tendency to occult practices involving occult prostitution and child sacrifice, and it was against these things that   Israel   was constantly warring, but of course those haven't been mentioned in the book. It is only a selective reading that can possibly portray Moses as a violent warrior. A more careful reading finds a man who was described as ‘the meekest man in the world'. Yes, he led Israel   out of Egypt, and yes, he led them through the wilderness and against pagan kings, but no way was this man as portrayed in that book.

LESSON: Don't pretend that these pagan idol-worshipping religions are healthy and good and that many of their adherents aren't full of fearful superstition, and don't be selective in your reading of the Bible.

         

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23.9 Joshua and Ethnic Cleansing    p.280-281               

 

We have already touched on Israel 's invasion of Canaan in great detail but there are some aspects of the complaint we did not cover, leaving them to emerge here. We repeat first of all what we stated previously in the opening part of those chapters, just in case you jumped them.

 

ETHNIC CLEANSING?: A full reading of the earlier part of the Old Testament reveals that there were in fact THREE options for the inhabitants of this land:

 

1. They could leave the land peaceably – it is quite clear from the way Israel came up from the south and the way that they approached the kings of the south, that death was not high on their agenda. Who wants to risk death if there is a peaceful way through?

 

2. They could join Israel – this is clear from the story of the Gibeonites. As we've noted before, that wasn't a bad deal and in fact would have given them a much more stable and secure life than they had previously experienced under superstitious paganism.

 

3. They could resist and fight and either win or lose. Some lost and some won and stayed in the land despite the Lord's instructions to   Israel . In fact when they failed to clear them out, the Lord said He would allow them to stay to act as a constant provocation to   Israel   (to encourage them to constantly rely on Him!)

 

None of these options is anything like the ethnic cleansing we have heard about in recent decades around the world. Claiming a land for God, yes! Ethnic cleansing, no!

 

MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN?: But there is one further aspect that is often spoken about but we did not cover it earlier, and this is the matter of men, women and children being included. Now when we realise the three options that are given above, we see that there is a misunderstanding that is so often so obviously in people's minds. The instruction is to completely clear the land, yes, but there is absolutely no reason whatsoever why women and children had to be included.

 

It is very clear from the account of Jericho that we considered in an earlier chapter, and accounts of the kings who tried to stop Israel peacefully passing through their lands, that we didn't cover previously, that all of the people infront of the oncoming tide that was Israel, KNEW they were coming, KNEW that God was with them and KNEW that He was giving them victory. Moreover it is clear that the fear of the Lord fell on these people. So why did they stay their ground and more specifically, why did they keep their woman and children with them?

 

This gets even more incredible when you consider that the Israel men comprised an army of over six hundred thousand – that's a might big army appearing over the horizon or pouring down the hillside at you! It is especially so when it is clear that the inhabitants of Canaan dwelt in little tribal groupings that would have no way been able to withstand such an army. (Some only did eventually remain because after the initial thrust Israel started dividing up the army). So again, why did the inhabitants stand their ground?

 

We would suggest the answer lies in what, courtesy of Richard we have just considered, the fact that every piece of land had its own deity, its ‘owner', its ba'al. It is virtually certain that the occult influence in the land was much greater than most of us realise and that the fear of the Baal turned out to be greater than the fear of Israel. This was a land of immense spiritual darkness.

 

The sensible thing to have done, if the Canaanite men were going to stay, would be to have sent their women and children on as trek outside the land until the outcome was determined, yet the occultic forces at work kept them there.

 

So did Israel have to kill them? Well they could have chased them out of the land if they would have gone, but their presence clearly stated that they were committed to the occultic Baal worship which they would never give up. (Remember, they could have joined Israel if they had wanted to join the Lord – the text is quite clear on that). So what do you do when you are setting up a new land and nation with clear guidelines as to how to return to the Designer's laws and you have a large bunch of people who are steadfastly refusing to be part of that. Today we might export them to another land (perhaps???) but this was a primitive time of warfare. We think we know better than God's wisdom, that He was wrong when He declared that this was the only alternative, and yet modern world politics leave us wondering.

LESSON: We need to seriously think about the reality of life in Canaan before Israel arrived, and also about the possibilities open to the occupants before we make judgmental comments about what happened.

       

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23.10 The Death Penalty p.281-283           

   

It might be more comfortable to avoid this subject but it is another area of query that arises and was specifically raised by Richard.

MODERN LIFE: I have already referred to this briefly in earlier chapters. As to the list of things for which the death penalty was required, Richard's scathing comments are more an indication of the laxity of moral life in the West today than of the awfulness of life in Israel three thousand years ago.

 

What is instructive is that a number of Westerners in recent years have turned to Islam simply because they have observed a law-keeping in some Arab nations that comes out of Islamic law which, by Western standards, is usually considered very harsh. While never wishing to be under such strict and harsh laws, I can, nevertheless, see the order and lack of crime in those nations almost seems refreshing in the face of the increasing lawlessness of Western nations.

 

Modern liberal thinking in the West decries capital punishment and so our prisons become fuller as the days go by. Increasing numbers of people feel unhappy about our present stance but recognise, unhappily, that with a breakdown of moral standards in society as a whole, it is increasingly difficult to obtain safe verdicts. We are caught between two bad things.

 

In Israel, with all of the checks and balances built into the Law, the laws were certainly there in respect of the death penalty but it is unlikely that, even as happens in more open Islamic nations, it was more than rarely required. It was almost certainly, generally a more harmonious and crime free society than anything we experience today in the West.

LESSON: We need to learn to see the death penalty as part of an overall scheme of ethics which works as a fair deterrent when society holds to those ethics generally.

       

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23.11 To Conclude

 

We have used in this chapter, Richard Dawkins' chapter on the Old Testament from The God Delusion, to provide a selection of otherwise random events in the Old Testament that raise questions. We have thus briefly considered the events in respect of Lot, the Levite, Abraham, Jephthah, Idols, Midian, Baal, Joshua and Ethnic Cleansing, the Death Penalty.

 

As we have done this I have unashamedly picked up on Richard Dawkins' frequent failures to understand the text of the Bible, and have gone on to suggest the following as lessons to be learned:

    

•  Learn to distinguish between cultural practices and God-directed practices, and between human-inspired activity and God-inspired activity. Don't blame God for cultural, human-inspired activities.

•  Learn to

•  recognise the primitive state of the nation of Israel in the early books of the Bible,

•  recognise the desire of the nation to hold to God's laws and to be a nation that stood out for goodness in an otherwise bad world,

•  distinguish between God-directed activity and the activity of men trying on their own to be righteous and sometimes falling short of perfection!

•  not blame God for the failings of human beings.

    

•  Not get their morals from all of Scripture. The standard rule of interpretation is don't make rules out of observed behaviour.

•  Understand that silly people do silly things, even in the process, sometimes, of seeking to do right things.

  

•  Understand that because of free will we cannot expect God to step in and forcibly stop people doing silly things – even though He may speak clearly to them.

  

•  We need to study the life and behaviour of nations that worshipped idols to understand the pure superstition and horror and fear that so often goes with idolatry.

  

•  We need to come to an intelligent understanding of how crucial it was that Israel did not get seduced and overrun by an enemy nation and be led into foreign pagan worship.  

  

•  Don't pretend that these pagan idol-worshipping religions are healthy and good and that many of their adherents aren't full of fearful superstition, and don't be selective in your reading of the Bible.

   

•  We need to seriously think about the reality of life in Canaan before Israel arrived, and also about the possibilities open to the occupants before we make judgmental comments about what happened.

   

•  We need to learn to see the death penalty as part of an overall scheme of ethics which works as a fair deterrent when society holds to those ethics generally.

  

Some of these things you may need to think about while others of them appear more obvious. If we are able to understand and apply them to all questionable events we find in the Old Testament, we may find we understand the events in a different way.

 

   

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