Tag Archives: war
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 5
Some great responses to my earlier posts – I appreciate some of the pushback as well as some of the alternate possible understandings. The issue no doubt merits further review, and I should clarify that I’m not sure where I fall on this whole discussion, as I’ve been by and large presenting the views in Thom Stark’s book. I think he raises some very valid questions, and isn’t willing to settle for the usual answers or simple solutions. That said, I may not agree with him everywhere, and some of you have noted excellent other possible approaches as voiced by Greg Boyd and Walter Brueggemann among others.
The question in this post is this: did these brutalizing campaigns and slaughter of the people of Canaan and elsewhere actually happen?
I suppose many of us would initially respond to that question with, “Of course it happened – it’s in the Bible.” But I wonder if it’s that simple. 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
The Wars of the Lord 2
In my last post we wrestled with difficult texts in the Bible, particularly ones in which God commands the Israelites to annihilate certain people groups, which today we would label as genocide. How are we to understand these texts? Is it possible to square these texts with other biblical presentations of God as a God of love, mercy, and compassion?
Possibly, but it isn’t easy.
One possibility raised to my last post was that God was showing people, in a warring culture, how to act in war. Continue reading
The Wars of the Lord
What do we do with the hard texts of the Bible, like the ones where God tells the Israelites to kill everyone in a certain town, or of a certain people group, including women and children? The biblical record denotes that the Israelites wiped out the Canaanites as they entered the Promised Land, and did it in obedience to God. Continue reading
