Dear Church Family,

We welcome back our Serbia team and pray for our team going to Columbia. I’m so thankful we have these opportunities to serve the LORD with these kinds of trips. Please continue to pray for the children and students who made decisions at VBS and camp as our pastors follow up in discipleship. Speaking of discipleship, we are right around the corner from our Fall semester. There will be many opportunities to grow. Allow me to mention one that is returning and that is Re-Engage. This is for any and all married couples. It will strengthen your marriage and help it grow. We have had tremendous testimonies in the past when we have hosted it and we hope it will continue.

The following is based on notes I took listening to John Lennox, a mathematician from Oxford. Hope it encourages you!

OLD TESTAMENT GOD OF JUDGMENT

A common objection skeptics have is about the God we read about in the Old Testament. Has God changed His mind about judgment?

For example, Psalm 109, this particular psalm is noted for some of the most frighteningly severe curses in the Bible. It says, “Let there be none to extend mercy unto him; neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.” It goes on to say, “Let his prosperity be cut off, and in the generation following, let their name be blotted out.” Also in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, we read about God’s commandment of genocide in the invasion of Canaan. So, God seems to have His mind made up in the Old Testament. How do we put the actions of God in the Old Testament, together with a God incarnate of the New Testament, a God of love, a God of peace, a God of healing, and turning the other cheek?

In Psalm 109, that isn’t God speaking. That is the psalmist speaking. Not everything recorded in the Bible is good.

We’re told the story of David committing adultery, and God later disapproves of it. We’ve got to open our minds, as C.S. Lewis pointed out, to the idea that in some of the Psalms there is a record of what certain people thought, but it’s not necessarily a reflection of the attitude of God, but it helps us understand somebody who’s suffered terribly. You hear all the time of people wishing all kinds of vengeance on their enemies. So I would give God the benefit of the doubt there, and say these are recorded, and they’re inspired, but they’re not necessarily attitudes that reflect God’s heart. I think they are there for us to see that there are people who are genuine people who have a whole range of emotions. Some of them are very good and some of them are very suspect that we’ve got to learn to deal with them.
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The second objection is about when God steps in. In Deuteronomy the command is to go into Canaan and wipe everybody out.

People say, “But this is ethnic cleansing. This is genocide, and this is God behind it.”  First, this event is described in a book that defines the very morality with which we criticize it. The laws of humanitarian war, the first ones in history, are in the same book, Deuteronomy. They’re very humanitarian. Spare the women and children. Spare the trees, and so on. Seek peace before you do war. They’re all in the very book that describes this event.

So the first thing you’re faced with is this must be extremely unusual. The second point is that the reason given in Deuteronomy for that invasion of Canaan is moral.

It’s because of the extreme wickedness, and it involved some of the worst excesses of child sacrifice that the world has ever seen. And in fact, the bigger biblical picture is that God waited for 400 years, and waited and waited and waited, and He allowed that entry into the land of Canaan to coincide with the zenith of that wickedness, and judged it.

The next point is that God told Israel if they behave the same way, they will receive the same punishment. So this isn’t a question of an arrogant nation coming into ethnic declines. They’re told you must deal with that because it’s morally evil. But if you compromise with the same thing, you’re going to get the same punishment, and that actually happened.

All this business to kill them all, kill them all, and it’s repeated. He points out that it’s repeated so often that it must be an ancient formulaic. Now, if I said to you, “All England came to the funeral of Princess Diana,” well, some people were in bed with flu. But we know it means a substantial quantity. And Walter Dorset’s conclusion, as one of the world’s leading biblical scholars is that what this means is—score a decisive victory over, and the reason it’s in one of the most moral books of the Old Testament is that the rules of war contained in that book were not actually broken, because if you ask yourself the question, “Were all these cities wiped out?” The answer is no, because they all reappear again, populated. So it wasn’t carried out in the literalistic sense, and so for all of those reasons, I think we’re beginning to get a picture that changes this idea that the God of the Old Testament is an angry God.

God is a God of mercy, long suffering. All of that is from the Old Testament, not from the New Testament. The reason this question comes up is because we don’t like the concept of judgment. We like it even less if human agency is involved, like Joshua, to judge a tribe. People were killed, but  there are many innocent people who will die before the end of our session. So we’ve got to face this, and it is really that final question, that question of judgment and justice, and this is a very important part of Christianity.

Dawkins says the world has no justice. Now here’s the tragedy. I talked to him about this in one of our debates, and he said we must work for justice in this world. I said yes, Richard, we must. But let’s be realistic. How privileged we are here. We have some hope if something goes wrong that we’ll get justice. But there are multi millions of people in the world who will not get justice in this life, and if death is the end, they will never get justice.

I take that very seriously indeed. Here we are as human beings that cry for justice, and as Lewis points out, it would be a very strange world in which we got thirsty, but there was no such thing as water, in which we felt sexual desire, and there was no such thing as sexual satisfaction. That would be a very strange world, and it would be a very strange world if we cry for justice without justice. And justice is a huge concept in our society, and yet we adhere to a philosophy that denies that ultimately there’s no ultimate justice. So in the end, the terrorist who destroys you, your family, and maybe part of your nation and shoots himself at the end gets away with it. That seems to me to contradict every basic thing that constitutes us as humans, and what the Bible says is there will be a final judgment, and that’s announced as a wonderful thing to be greeted, that God will judge the world because the person He’s going to judge the world through is the same person that suffered on the Cross and rose again, and that’s where I bring all this together, that I believe. Let me put it very provocatively. I believe that if we could see what God has done with people who suffered innocently and so on, we would just be silent and have no more questions. Because if there is a God of love, as I believe there is, who’s like Jesus Christ, I believe He will compensate in a way that’ll leave us all with nothing more to say, but we’ll only see that when we’ve come to see the whole picture.

Press On!

Mark