My Thoughts

The Old Testament in the Bible is very difficult to understand. Many people that do not want to take the time to understand it create reactionary explanations for what they pick out of the text, usually out of context. Here are a couple of thoughts:

1) Slavery in the Old Testament and the New Testament was OK so today we would expect slavery to be OKay. First of all our culture can't even understand what a bond servant is, so to truely understand some of the comparisons, our minds have to think outside our culture and that's just too difficult for many people. So instead of just saying, slavery wasn't the same in ancient time as it is today is just to hard for some to understand. Be that as it may, the ancient and modern offices of slavery are very different offices of culture which brings a very important bearing to the discussion. Secondly though is that we must realize that what's written in the Bible is real life, not perfect life. It's a historical document of real people like Moses, a murderer; David, an adulterer and murderer; Gideon, a courageous warrior, and many many more. The emphasis being on God, who forgives and washes away our sins no matter how bad they are. These stories are an example to us so that we can see the deep love and deep mystery of God that he would forgive even us.

2) God commanded entire countries to be killed. This is troubling if you have the worldview that only can see the human perspective of life. To have a proper perspective we have to think of a bug in an operating room. From the perspective of the bug, being squished on the wall is very troubling. From the sterile people also in the operating room, the extermination is a valid end. The more amazing thought is that the head surgeon, God, instead of just annihilating all the bugs in the ER decided to become a bug and rescue all the other bugs from being squished on the wall. It's an amazing image of Love, where satan turns it upside down to focus only on the just punishment of the sinner, which he calls unjust.

Think about that.

Love,
Dad

Quote

Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.
Benjamin Franklin