Understanding the shocking verses in the Bible

They are there; we all know they are there, lurking in the background – the God-inspired words that we find quite appalling. We know the Old Testament is full of them; words that, by today’s standards, seem abhorrent and truly and utterly shocking. Because we all know they are there, I am not going to quote anything specific – but there are, I will be the first to admit, verses and accounts in the Old Testament that I find appalling, and can hardly believe they are there in a book that claims to be (and I believe is) the word of God. The reason I won’t cite specific verses is because if the problem is to be addressed satisfactorily, it will have to be done by providing a framework explanation for them all, rather than looking at them individually. Although it is true that each verse will have its own context that requires intrinsic examination, I think looking at them individually might well impair the conceptual theme of this article and take our minds off what we are really looking for here.

 

In finding what I hope will be a satisfactory answer to the matter of those Old Testament verses that bother us, I am going to have to ask for your patience, for we cannot move on to this area of analysis just yet without considering further related matters.

 

To begin with, I think we all know what we are objecting to – it is that an all-loving God would sanction some of the acts that He appears to sanction – the killing of tribes of people, the injunctions for dispossession, but perhaps more so, the verses which seem to advocate a man’s desire for the worst pains imaginable for his enemies. Surely this goes against Jesus’ words that if someone sins against us we should forgive them no matter what – if a man strikes our right cheek, he should be shown our left cheek as well. 

 

Of course we all know what we can do with these shocking verses; I suspect it is what many have been doing for as long as we can remember – we can overlook them; that is, we can take our Bible a la carte and live only by the majority of it – the agreeable bits. After all, Christ has made the law perfect, so some will say we don’t really need to get bogged down by those Old Testament verses that are so utterly disturbing. But do we? In one sense, we can embrace enough of Christ’s teachings so that we almost forget about those Old Testament verses….almost….not quite - we never really do forget, do we? 

 

One thing we can assert straight away is that there will be very little hope of getting to grips with these verses unless we have a pretty good purchase on the complete Biblical context – so the atheists who have written off the Bible as barbaric without understanding anything about what is going on add very little to the discussion. Their situation in relation to the Bible is a little like this. Think of Beethoven’s Autumn Sonata piano concerto. To the man with no music playing prowess whatsoever, playing it would seem very complex. To the man that knows a few keys and chords it would be a little simpler but still difficult. To a professional musician it wouldn’t be very difficult at all. Imagine watching a set of individuals attempting to play it, all with differing ranges of ability from ‘none’ right through to ‘professional musician’. You would see huge variances in the quality of sound, but at no point would you question the Autumn Sonata piano concerto itself; that is, you wouldn’t say the original composition was rubbish just because you heard a few amateur musicians playing it incompetently. This is a little similar to the situation we have with the Bible here, but in this case, God is the only faultless musician. The rate of success in playing a good version of the concerto is likely to be roughly proportional to the amount of time, energy, and practice consumed by the project.

 

Perhaps we have been missing a vital aspect – an opportunity to swing this round into something positive. If scripture is supposed to be God-breathed and for our own edification, and if all the words of God have been commissioned by His Spirit, we might be unwise to ignore them – in fact, we might even find something astounding; that the verses we thought most shocking and most disagreeable may actually teach us something more profound than we could have possibly imagined before we began our investigation. 

The first thing I noticed when thinking about them is that in the deepest parts of my mind the verses that perturb are often examples of a crying out for mercy or justice or fairness or retribution, the sort of feelings that might come over us just after we’ve been wronged, and just before we calm ourselves down and remember Christ’s instruction for composure and graceful forgiveness. The verses that expressed these views were, in fact, conveying the same emotions that all of us feel but they were uncovered, unadulterated emotions - there was no veneer of positivity veiling them. Deep down the people of the Old Testament were a lot like us – there are congenital facets to being human that we all possess, and I think it is by exploring the commonalties that we can learn their true worth. Nowadays we live in a society where our most impassioned feelings ought to be curbed and restrained, for the sake of the culture and environment as well as the law. It might not be illegal to shout and swear at the car driver who cut in when he shouldn’t have done, but it does not look good for those in the car with you if you do. What is clear is that the people in Old Testament times had much less reason for restraint than we do now, yet clearly those same congenital emotions are in all of us.

 

We also know from our deepest contemplations that the new way that Jesus introduced is, of course, a much better way – not only living under His grace at Calvary, but also reflecting His manner as best we can. We can see the unbelievable hurt in victims of horrendous crimes, yet we know that if our son or daughter had been murdered we too would probably find it just as hard to forgive as many of them do. But we also know that not being able to forgive someone is ultimately a burden on the self and an outrage against our own consciences. Hoping that you will feel better by not forgiving is a bit like drinking a cup of arsenic and expecting it to poison the person that wronged you.

 

And if that isn’t challenging enough – we must look even deeper for a sister solution to the problem, because the first thing we are beginning to realise is that the actions of those that caused so much hurt and pain are, it has to be admitted, abhorrent and should be viewed that way, even by the most righteous men. In fact, the more righteous a man the more abhorrent he might find these evil acts – therefore if we see God acting in a way that confers retribution on a sinner or a group of sinners, if that punishment shocks us, we ought to think of how God felt about the action and the punishment; for you can be sure that whatever we feel, God’s perfect nature sees things that we cannot comprehend. Perhaps the corrective that we possess through our sheer diligence in trying to be righteous for the sake of God was absent in the sinner or sinners in the Old Testament that caused us such offence. But although that solves one difficulty, it doesn’t help with the other side of the argument, because often it is not the sinners who we are angry at, it is God – for some of the Old Testament verses elicit in us a feeling that God did not behave quite as we would expect our Heavenly Father to behave. 

 

Two things ought to be remembered here. In the first place, it will not help us if we react to this by separating the Old and New Testaments and claim that our God of the New is different and much better than the God of the Old; for the more we read of the New the more of the Old we find in it – not only is it quoted and cited repeatedly, but the standards that face a renewal in the New have been, to the greatest degree, present in the Old from the beginning. Our God does not change – He is the same today, yesterday and forever. In the second place, we must see the bigger picture of God choosing the Jews as His people - after all, if one looks at the history of the world and the anthropological studies with which so many great scholars have furnished us, it seems that God could have chosen as ‘His people’ a much more passive race of people than the Jews.

 

It is when we ponder these things carefully that we hope some astounding revelation will come upon us – that some spark will be ignited in our minds that answers a question we have let linger for years, or in the case of many, centuries. I may have had no such spark; the best I can come up with is something I have figured out gradually in my time on earth – that the greater an extreme at one end the greater potential at the other end too – the man who can be the very best at something is so often the one that can be closest to the negative connotations that can accompany prodigious gifts and talents. Those to whom God has given some of the best gifts often have a hint of the troubles about them – the genius might feel isolated, the best communicators the most frustrated, the bravest also the most deadly, the best writers sullied by the most vices, there are many examples. But surely this does always follow, after all, we do not see in the most righteous men a proclivity for destruction, far from it – but perhaps they are the fortunate or skilful few who can master the balance exquisitely. For most of us, as a rule, the greater the potential for being world-beaters or life-changers the more contentiousness they will have to face in their lives (and one need only look at those most influential in the Bible to see that this is true). But how does this help us? 

 

I think it helps in the following way. If the stakes are high the temptations for a stirring passion will be high too; after all, a group of card players are not likely to lose their temper if the stakes are pennies, but if the stakes are pounds, tempers are more likely to flare. Yet one cannot look at the man who never gambles and praise him for restraining his temper, for his stakes are nothing (although we can, of course, praise him for his discipline in not getting caught up in gambling in the first place). Just as we would not praise the man not gambling for not getting worked up, I can conceive of situations where an inverse situation might stir up outside that a man should become impassioned even though he is not involved. If I met a man who showed no sign of anger over the events of September 11^th in New York, or over the rape and murder of Sally Ann Bowman, or the cruel activities of Joseph Fritzl, it is likely that I should reprimand him for not feeling some form of impassioned anger or disgust. 

 

Of course those Christians who can forgive in spite of the horrors they experience, they are the ones closest to saints – but for the others, to not feel any disgust for the actions themselves is a different, and absolutely alarming thing altogether. Now clearly this ought to add a new dimension to our perception of those Old Testament verses that we tried to block out of our minds for so long, for whatever else we can say about them - one thing is abundantly clear – the Jews who were so angered and so vindictive towards their enemies were at least displaying the symptoms of people who identified as well as anyone the sharp distinction between right and wrong, and between good and evil. That may well mean that when God commissions an action of retribution that to us seems harsh and shocking, we are in fact sampling the perfect conflation of justice and mercy that suffused the Divine sensibilities – that in fact, the evils of those being punished were so bad that if we had known all the facts and saw that God had not acted, it would have been to us like seeing a man read in the newspaper an account of the rape and murder of a young girl and claim that no feelings of anger and disgust could be justifiably elicited and no calls for punishment justifiably administered.

 

 

We must never forget that we have a God of justice as well as a God of mercy, and to me it seems clear that the two can co-exist. Who could read the words of the Psalmist above and not breathe a slight sigh of relief when one thinks of the worst wickedness that people have brought to the earth? Yet paradoxically who could feel that way without being a little ashamed that feelings of revenge crossed their path when really they wished it would have been feelings of mercy and outrageous grace, as demonstrated by Jesus Christ? 

 

There are two things that come to mind. In the first place, when thinking of those shocking Old Testament verses I can sense an even greater wonder in Christ’s virtual reversal of those precepts. Would ‘turn the other cheek’ have been so powerful if I had never heard of ‘an eye for an eye’? I doubt it very much. For me, the newness of Christ is supplemented, enhanced and gloriously enriched by the contexts observed in the Old Testament. In the second place, when calling for justice, as we observe the very worst that is in humanity, our calls will be inimical to progress and growth if we take our eyes off our own sinfulness. Indignation at others’ atrocious acts was never meant to be employed as a substitute for contemplating our own character faults, and if a man were to turn into one of those haughty people who, with great sententiousness, continually exalted himself by rebuking or castigating the worst humans in society, he would end up a pretty wretched person. 

 

So as long as one doesn’t use scolding criticism as a tool for haughtiness and contentedness and self-exaltation, I think it is true to say that those who are most appalled at the wicked acts we are discussing are those who are nearer to God’s own view of them; that is to say, we ought to be appalled when appalling things happen, because only when the right feelings match the actions can we do our best reparation work. And that, of course, applies most, and is so much truer, regarding our own sins and bad actions and feelings. 

 

This might be our best and most helpful way of dealing with those verses we find shocking. When I find something appalling or shocking, like some of the verses in the Old Testament, the best I can do is to turn the situation onto myself and wonder whether those feelings impair my trust in God. If I can trust Him on everything else, what a solecism against my own existence to not trust him on the things I, as a human living several centuries after the events, cannot hope to fully understand. The answer I find, as I find in everything, will be found in Jesus. In a sense His dying must have caught all the things that we could not possibly understand. We can conjecture, and sometimes I think we make a pretty good job of it, but the answer to the problem of those shocking verses is found in our trusting Christ right to the end, for in doing so we find that He has already answered the most difficult question and He has already allayed our worst fears.