God and Violence in the Old Testament

Today, we’re going to try and tackle a big old hairy tough subject — the idea of violence at the hand of God, particularly in some of the Old Testament passages.

This is a stumbling block for a lot of people. And there are all sorts of thorny points around this issue. But the crux of it  involves a number of Old Testament passages that give us pause. We read, for example, about the total annihilation of Sodom and Gommorah (Genesis 19:23-29). We read about God’s command to Saul to destroy Amalek including “both man and woman, child and infant” (1 Samuel 15:3). And we read the book of Deuteronomy where in several places, God commands the people to utterly destroy the people in the lands they would be invading (Deuteronomy 2:34; 3:6; 20:16-18).

And that bothers us (and of course, it should). But then we tend to either do one of two things — we either reject God because we find those kinds of things repulsive, or we come to the conclusion that there was a different God operating in the Old Testament than we find in the New Testament.

So what do we do with all of that? Well, that's what we're going to try and sort out in today's episode.

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Music and audio production by Nathan Longwell Music