But this “Marcionite” solution forgets that the New Testament is based on the Old, that Jesus saw himself not as abolishing the Old Testament Law and Prophets, but fulfilling them (Mt 5:17). The New Testament constantly quotes the Old, and when St. Paul refers to “Scripture”—and how it is God-breathed and useful (2 Tm 3:16)—he is referring primarily to the Old Testament, since the New Testament had not yet been compiled. Matthew, Paul, Peter, and other New Testament writers constantly quote Old Testament texts to prove their points, to show how Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. The two Testaments are inextricably linked. New Testament religion is founded upon Old Testament religion. Even if you wanted to keep the New and not the Old, you would have to cut out vast portions of the New that quote the Old. Marcion’s solution can’t work—again, it sidesteps the issues rather than addressing them.
The fourth bad solution gets closer to the truth, but misses the mark. This solution suggests that each time we confront a “problem” we are really confronting a misunderstanding. For example, those who embrace this view would argue that God did not really command the Israelites to kill the Canaanites; they just misinterpreted what God wanted. Or when Elijah executes the prophets of Baal, these interpreters would argue that he wasn’t really doing what God wanted, but overstepping and engaging in a vicious human act, a crime of murder. The trouble with this approach is that it does not treat the Bible as divine revelation. Rather, it treats the Bible as a storybook that must constantly be supervised, judged, and reinterpreted in light of some external code of morality or justice. The external code—whether it be the New Testament or a philosophical concept of justice—places limits on God’s “behavior” and forces every Old Testament conundrum through an extrinsic intellectual funnel. It prevents the Old Testament from teaching us who God is and instead places us above the text, dictating to it what God must be like and how he must act. This perspective destroys the revelatory power of the Old Testament and confines its role to showing us the acts of many people who misinterpreted God’s commands. Rather than the Old Testament revealing God to us, we must reveal God to it by straightening out all of its imperfections. There must be a better way!
Finding God in the Dark
I don’t want to suggest that I will be able to solve all of your Bible-reading problems, but I can promise not to dodge them. This book is really an introduction to the difficulties.3 My aim is to give you the tools you need to not just apologetically explain—that is, defend—some challenging moments in the Bible, but to show others how even some of the darkest passages reveal God and his plan of salvation to us. For many who reject the Bible or embrace one of the “bad solutions” I’ve mentioned, the Bible seems to present a contradictory vision of God—a God of wrath and a God of mercy, the “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New Testament.” I want to show you how these two “Gods” can be reconciled, how it is that we can fully embrace the God of justice and fully receive the God of mercy. In fact, I will argue that the tension between justice and mercy is absolutely necessary for a good understanding of God and of what he has done for us.
Struggling over some of the details in the problematic passages of the Bible should help us arrive at a deeper knowledge of God.
Not only is it theologically necessary to wrestle with these issues, but it is particularly timely. A few years ago, Pope Benedict XVI mentioned “those passages in the Bible which, due to the violence and immorality they occasionally contain, prove obscure and difficult.”4 He wrote that “it would be a mistake to neglect those passages of Scripture that strike us as problematic.”5 Even he rejected the “shrug” solution! Struggling over some of the details in the problematic passages of the Bible should help us arrive at a deeper knowledge of God, of who he is and how he operates. To abandon some parts of Scripture for the sake of others is to ignore certain parts of God’s revelation to us, to set aside things that he considers important enough to record for us in his Word.
While it may be tempting to give in to your gut reaction, turn the page in disgust, and avoid the hard work of thinking through the difficult problems the Bible presents to us, this book will help you dig in and stand your ground, to let the texts that have proven challenging to you become a source not of frustration but of revelation. In fact, the early Church Father St. Augustine suggests that God deliberately put difficulties in sacred Scripture in order for us to take the time to ponder them, meditate on them, and strive for better understanding.6 He considers the obscurity of Scripture to be “beneficial” in this way. I hope that you will find this brief study of scriptural obscurities to be intellectually beneficial and spiritually fruitful. I envision us looking through the window of Scripture at God. Let’s clean the glass so we can get a clearer glimpse!
Chapter 2
Justice vs. Mercy
American culture is bipolar when it comes to punishment. On the one hand, we hate the idea of doling out punishments. On the other, we are the most punitive nation in the world.
In 2008, when the body of a two-year-old Orlando girl was found with duct tape over her mouth in the woods near her family’s home, and evidence of chloroform and human decomposition were found in the trunk of her mother’s car, no one was brought to justice. Though the mother, Casey Anthony, had searched the Internet for “neck breaking” and “how to chloroform,” she received nothing but a hand slap from the court. In a different case, the 1994 Menendez trial, two brothers murdered their parents with shotguns, but the original jury ended up undecided after the defense argued that the brothers had no moral responsibility for the murders because of their abusive upbringing. However, such leniency should not be surprising in a culture that doles out trophies for everyone and punishes teachers for giving failing grades to students. Yet somehow our culture not only despises but also embraces the handing out of just deserts.
Packed Prisons
While we can’t stand the thought of a student failing a class, we love to put people in prison—and for a long time, too. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Many states have mandatory sentencing rules that force judges to give years-long sentences for certain offenses, without wiggle room for mitigating circumstances. While most countries imprison fewer than two hundred people per one hundred thousand residents, the United States imprisons over seven hundred, more than three times as many! So we seem to like a stiff dose of justice when a person has been officially convicted of a crime, but a blanket of wishywashy clemency for most behavior.
Part of our cultural bias might be rooted in our out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality. Most of us don’t visit the local courthouse (let alone prison!) to watch justice being dispensed. Such an experience might make us feel uneasy when we watch the consequences of a person’s actions tear his or her life apart. If other people, whom we pay and to whom we give strict rules, take care of the decisions and actions involved in criminal justice, then we don’t have to worry about it. We can go about our business and keep “troublemakers” out of view. If we were tasked with the job of the prosecutor, judge, or jury, our feelings might be different. Jury service, which we usually see as an arduous annoyance, is one of the few times we actually get to participate in the process. It might even modify our perspective.
Abstract rules such as mandatory sentencing requirements or laws that prohibit certain behaviors are comforting because they are detached from the actual human beings whose lives will be affected. Once we get our hands dirty in the execution of justice, it’s hard to be so coldly rational. So we vacillate between justice and mercy. We might incarcerate almost one percent of our citizens, but at least we pay their cable TV bills.7 Mercy is easier to dispense because it seems to require nothing of us, but we’ll see that this is not really the case.
The problem with the American approach to punishment is that it doesn’t work. The prison system might punish a person for criminal behavior, but, generally, it doesn’t change people. Politicians talk about the issue of “repeat offenders,” recidivism, and the lack of “rehabilitation.” There’s something missing in our approach to justice and mercy. We like to exact serious penalties, and yet those exactions don’t have the results