Tag Archives: Israel
The Wars of the Lord 6
Someone responded to the last post with, “OK, so what? How do we read these texts in light of some of this stuff?”
Let’s try to get to that in this post. I think this is our last one on the subject. (For now!) Continue reading
The Wars of the Lord 4
Some readers no doubt remain dissatisfied with our attempts to understand the conquest narratives in the Bible, in which it appears God is commanding wholesale warfare and destruction.
So what to do? Perhaps we should ignore such texts. Perhaps we should shrug our shoulders and just say, “I don’t know.” (This might be the best idea).
Some would prefer to say, “God is so holy and beyond our understanding that it is not our place to question him or his Word.” (I can hear some “Amens” at this point). Continue reading
The Wars of the Lord 3
In our last post we looked at the possibility that God was simply working within a warring culture and showing improvement amidst that.
On further review, it seemed that perhaps that wasn’t entirely true.
Perhaps we need to understand [these texts] another way, within the broader framework of God’s overarching plan for Israel, expressed in the form of his promise to Abraham – that through his seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.
I think many of us resonate with this, because it seems to echo so much of what we see in the life of Jesus and the early church in the New Testament. Continue reading
