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You're Kidding. THAT'S in the Bible?! The Warrior God Dt. 7:12-24, Numbers 15:1-3, 25:1-24, 31:1-54 Not long ago I was in a bookstore when I came across a book called The Wine Bible. It wasn't about the wine in the Bible. It was about the wine on your table. By using that little word "Bible" it was making a claim to be the authority on all things wino. You can get all sorts of "Bibles" these days; I looked some up on Amazon. You can get The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource; The Crystal Bible; The Screenwriter's Bible; The Triathelete's Training Bible; The Cake Bible; The Mixer Bible: 300 Recipes For Your Stand Mixer. What do these authors intend to say when they call their book This Bible or That Bible? What is the implication of calling something the Bible of any topic? We use the word Bible to imply authority, don't we? The people who wrote The Crystal Bible are claiming that what they say about crystals is true - and therefore authoritative. You can trust what's in The Cake Bible to give you accurate, trustworthy information about making cakes. Everything you need to know about cake baking. That's the other implication of that word Bible: it contains all you need about the subject. You want to train for that triathlon next summer? (Not me, thank you.) Then go no farther than The Triathlete's Training Bible! It's all there; it's all you need to know; you can trust it. We use the word "Bible" in common parlance as a figure of speech to imply trustworthiness, completeness, and authority. That's because, of course, the Christian world for a very long time has viewed its sacred scriptures - we call it now "The Holy Bible" - as being true, completely trustworthy . . . and authoritative. Now, to be sure it took the Christian hierarchy 300 years or so to figure out just which a many early Christian writings should be included in the Bible. And Protestants and Catholics to this day don't agree - the Catholics have a lot more books in the Old Testament to worry about than we do. Some Protestants - Martin Luther, a rather important Protestant - would have liked to throw out a couple of New Testament books (James and Revelation). So we're not terribly sure just what writings make us "the Bible." And there are questions about which of the thousands of ancient manuscripts are most true to the original, and even if we had the original, translation always an iffy matter . . . BUT setting those not inconsequential issues aside for this morning, Christians have nevertheless held the Bible in highest regard. We've said it's true, we've said it's how God speaks to us, we've said it has everything we need to know about matters of faith and practice. The Bible is, so to speak, "the Bible" of Christian faith. And so we often hear people talk about the Bible as if it's a simple matter to read, understand, and apply the Bible to life. "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it," says the Fundamentalist preacher. But of course that doesn't settle it. If it did, no Bible-believing Christian would attend a Packers game on a Sunday. First of all because such frivolity clearly is a violation of Sabbath laws - "keep the sabbath day holy," says the 10 Commandments - it's one of the Big Ten, this sabbath-keeping that hardly anyone pays any attention to. It's right up there with lying and stealing and being an adult! But not only is a Sunday Packer game a violation of sabbath law, it consists of watching a bunch of men defile themselves every time they touch the ball - if it's still pigskin, the Bible says we are not to touch it. And I'll bet there are a few people on that field - receiving the wild cheers of the adoring crowd - who by biblical standards really should be stoned to death, for adultery or some other infraction. Besides all that, the Bible clearly teaches we are not to wear any clothing made out of two kinds of material, a law freely violated by player and fan alike these days. "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it. . . ." There's a lot that the Bible says that even the most Fundamentalist preacher in this town does not believe, or if he says he does is forced to perform a most amazing feat of tortured explanation. I know that because I was trained in such explaining away, and believed it myself. If you start ftom the base that the Bible came directly from God, inspired in every word, and that it is a system of completely harmonious teaching, you've got some ?splainin' to do, and it's not easy, believe me. No more so than in texts that portray God as a God of war, of destruction, of vengeance. In Numbers 15:3 Moses shouts with triumphant joy, The Lord is a warrior; the Lord is his name. The Lord . . . a warrior? But of course a warrior God is just what Moses needed. If you are coming out of Egypt after centuries of slavery, and you are going into a land inconveniently occupied by other people who just may not welcome you with open arms, then what you need is a warrior God. A God who will send you out in battle, and promise you victory. Nothing gets an army up for battle better than telling them they are doing the will of God, AND that God will protect them. And that's what God did in the book of Deuteronomy: 21 Have no dread of them, for the Lord your God, who is present with you, is a great and awesome God. 22 The Lord your God will clear away these nations before you little by little; . . . 23 The Lord your God will give them over to you, and throw them into great panic, until they are destroyed. 24 He will hand their kings over to you and you shall blot out their name from under heaven; no one will be able to stand against you, until you have destroyed them. [Deut 7:21-24]The conquering of the land where Israel and Palestine now battle for the same land plays a pivotal part in the story of the Old Testament. And God is portrayed as being at the head of the fight, ordering the slaughter of 10s of thousands of people. In the book of Numbers we read how the Midianites were defeated, their homes destroyed, their flocks taken as the spoils of war - all at the command of God, according to the writer. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 "Avenge the Israelites on the Midianites; [Israelite men, you see, had been taking Midianite women as wives.] 3 So Moses said to the people, "Arm some of your number for the war, so that they may go against Midian, to execute the Lord's vengeance on Midian. [Numbers 31] There follow some details about the numbers to be sent, under what generals. They attack, one of the priests waving the holy vessels from the sanctuary, to make sure everyone knows this is a Holy War, in the name of Yahweh. 7 They did battle against Midian, as the Lord had commanded Moses, and killed every male. 8 They killed the five kings of Midian, in addition to others who were slain by them;. 9 The Israelites took the women of Midian and their little ones captive; and they took all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods. 10 All their towns where they had settled, and all their encampments, they burned, 11 but they took all the spoil, both people and animals.If the numbers are to be taken seriously (this is the Bible, after all) we are talking about tens of thousands of dead. It is a horrific story of destruction, at the command of God. But the story is about to get worse. Moses is not satisfied. 15 Moses said to them, "Have you allowed all the women to live? 16 These women here . . . made the Israelites act treacherously against the Lord [that is, these women made them do it, they seduced them] . . . so that the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. [It's the women's fault - they caused the plague.] 17 Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has slept with man. 18 But all the young girls . . . keep alive for yourselves.Theologian Phyllis Trible calls this and other such passages, "texts of terror." For indeed it is a text full of terror for those girls - 32,000 of them, boasts the writer - young girls given over to the men who masaquered their parents and destroyed their civilization in the name of their God, in the name of Holy War. Given for their pleasure, to be their slaves. Because Moses, the spokesman for God said so, claims the text. The flocks of the Midianites were to make the Israelites rich. The gold and silver and jewelry the Israelites plundered, was given over to the priests, an offering made to God at the Tabernacle, to adorn His house, this house of the warrior God now rich with the spoils of war. I can remember hearing this and other stories read from the Bible, at my church, or in my home. We studied them in seminary too. And astonishingly to me now, I don't remember ever being very bothered by them. Well of course the Midianites were slaughtered . . . they were the bad people. They were against God. And God was after all on our side, and if God wanted the slaughter to go on it must have been the right thing to do. Because it was in the Bible, and because we had the view that whatever the Bible says is right - whatever it says about God must be true. And even when God is portrayed in brutish, terrifying terms . . . well, it must be OK somehow. For everything in the Bible - our holy, perfect book - had to be true, so I had been told, and so I believed. About a year ago we took the Confirmation class to visit another place of worship, to hear what they would say about what they believed. We were welcomed warmly and then the pastor started talking about his faith. The centerpiece of his faith, the foundation for everything they did, was the book, the sacred, inspired, inerrant, holy book. He talked about how that holy book was like no other, directly inspired by God, and therefore without error, completely trustworthy. He said that it had been miraculously preserved down through the centuries, not a single word corrupted by centuries of copying. He said that in this holy book were the answers to every question we could have about God and about life. It was truly a unique, miraculous book. He loved and revered the book, he studied, he believed God's book. But his holy book called God Allah. For his holy book was the Qur'an. Isn't it supremely ironic that the three faiths - Judaism, Islam, and Christianity - that are at each other's throats, the cause of so much hatred, suffering, and injustice are all three "people of the book." All three claim to have the authoritative holy book, and all three can and have and still do support their wars against one another, and even amongst themselves, citing passages from their holy book. Passages like I have read this morning. There has been debate of late about just whether or not verses from the Qur'an justify and even command war against unbelievers. The jihadists of the world certainly think so. Moderate Muslims don't. The Pope himself, a man much more learned than I, got himself into a whole lot of trouble when he dared suggest that Islam countenanced violence. Knowing as little as I do about the Qur'an I certainly have no right to venture an opinion. But I do know something about our Bible. And I suggest to you today that there are texts within our Holy Book which make God out to be a terrorist. There are stories that, when we have finished reading them, we should not mumble a mindless "Thanks be to God!" but rather we should rise up with an angry "This is not our God!" I'm sure that the writers of these stories wanted God to bless their invasions and the slaughtering of their enemies. (Christian preachers all over this country by their patriotic rhetoric gave the blessing of God to our invasion of Iraq because their Bible told them that God is a warrior God.) And I'm sure that looking back on the holocausts they led, the Israelite kings wanted to believe that they had, after all, only been doing God's bidding. But wishing God were on our side doesn't make it so. In the light of Christ - and that is always where Christians must begin; in the light of what Jesus taught us about God, we must judge what had gone before. In the light of Christ let us say that a God of war, who leads his people into battle to kill innocent people, taking vengeance on them is simply not God. It's time that we admit that there are terrifying stories of God in our scripture - stories that we should disavow as having anything to do with the God we worship. As long as we or any faith - Judaism, Islam, or others - insist on hallowing in our holy books' stories about God that distort rather than reveal God's nature, stories that can be used to justify future hatreds and wars, then we will never go forward. I was amused last week over the furor about congressman Keith Ellison from Minnesota, a Muslim, wanted to be sworn into office with his hand not on the Bible, but on the Qur'an. Amused not because Representative Virgil Goode of Virginia thought such an act threatened traditional American beliefs (!). Amused because the good Christians who wanted the Bible to be used must not have read in that Bible where Jesus himself explicitly forbids swearing by anything! [Mt. 5:33-36] We all pick and choose what we like to hear in the Bible, don't we. Ellison was sworn in with his hand on the Qur'an - interestingly a Qur'an once owned by Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson! Did you know that Jefferson made his own New Testament? It's called The Jefferson Bible. Scissors in hand he literally cut out of the Gospels anything he thought was not authentic - miracles, and the like. That's a pretty bold thing to do. I wonder though. What if all the religions got serious about living in peace with each other? What if we really believed that God is not a God of war and violence and vengeance, but of peace and justice - and were willing to say so unequivocally? What would happen if we all cut out of our holy books stories that portray God as a warrior, a terrorist, a killer of innocent children? I can't help but think that we'd have a lot better chance at finding peace. Because we'd have a lot better idea of God, and of what God is calling us all to be and to do. Amen. |
