Series: Conversations with an Atheist                                                                   May 6, 2007

Sermon: The Challenge of Scripture                                              Exod 3:1-22, II Tim 3:16-17

THE CHALLENGE OF SCRIPTURE

Let me explain what I mean by the title of this sermon.  By “The Challenge of Scripture” here I do not mean “How does the scripture as the word of God challenge me to live a better life?”  The challenge I refer to here is “How do I believe the scriptures as the Word of God when there seem to be so many problems?”  How do I believe in scriptures when many biblical scholars and archaeologists claim that there is very little of historical value in the Old Testament (or New)?  More than this, the scriptures have many passages which strike us modern people as deeply immoral and unnecessarily violent.  Deut. 13 is a case in point.  Some scriptures seem to indicate that God sponsors not only violence but fraud.  You can hardly read the Old Testament without asking yourself, “How can this be?  How could God do this?”  We’ve already talked tangentially to this topic, but now we examine the issue head on.

THE DESPOLIATION OF EGYPT

My dissertation dealt with just such an instance in the book of Exodus.  If you read the exodus story carefully, there seem to be some pretty severe moral problems.  These were noticed even in the period of Jesus Christ and responses were developed.  Besides the question of the justice of the death of the firstborn of Egypt (how are the children responsible for what their parents are doing?), there is the fact that it seems the whole story is based on deception.  Moses never once says what Charlton Heston says in the movie, “Let my people go.”  In the burning bush story, God tells Moses that he is to go to Pharaoh and say, “The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us.  Let us take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the Lord our God” (Exod 3:18).  Every time Moses meets with Pharaoh, this is what he says.  Never once does Moses say to Pharaoh, “Let me people go!”  He always adds the rest: that we may worship the Lord in the desert three days journey away.” 

Now, you could say, “Pharaoh would have known they were not coming back.  But the logic of the story demands that Pharaoh completely expects their return, at least to the very end.  Why?  Because as the plagues progress, Moses and Pharaoh dicker over the terms.  Pharaoh first says, “I’ll let me men go alone.”  Moses says, “No, everything goes with us.”  Pharaoh clearly expects them to return because he only allows the men to go leaving their wives and children at home.  The story assumes that we understand there to be deception going on.  The reader is meant to say, “Look at this dufus!  Pharaoh fell for the oldest trick in the book!  We tricked them and tricked them good!  And we got away with their treasures as well.”

Now there are many attempts to explain this away but I don’t think they work.  And Pharaoh clearly expects they will return and only at the end, when they’ve left, does he realize they are leaving for good.  That is why he sends out his army to fetch them back.  But the writers of this story were comfortable with the notion that God had encouraged Moses to lead Pharaoh on.  We’re not comfortable with this.  But there are many deception stories in the Bible.  Atheists pointing out things like this is nothing new.  My dissertation dealt with traditional ways that early Jews and Christians argued for the moral righteousness of the OT God.  And there are good ways of doing this.  But we need to come to terms with the problem fully as a starting point.

The text clearly implies that when the Israelites asked for the Egyptian treasures, they were asking for a loan they knew they would never return.  How could these Egyptian treasures be considered plunder if the Egyptians knew they were giving gifts free and clear.  If I give you a gift, you haven’t plundered me.  But if I loan you something you never return, now that is plunder.  There is simply no getting out of this.  It seems to me that we have a God-sponsored fraud described.  The writers of the text were apparently comfortable with this deception motif.

HOW MANY GODS ARE THERE?

There seems to be disagreement between various OT texts as to how many gods there are, and as to whether God has a physical body similar to ours.  Let’s stick with the first.  We always think of the religion of the OT as highly monotheistic.  Isaiah 44-46 speaks about Yahweh saying, “I’ve searched the whole universe to see if there is another god like me.  I know not any.  You worshippers of idols are fools because you take a log, burn part, and turn the other part into an idol and worship it.”  No other beings like God are out there.

On the other hand, you have the Psalmist saying, “Who is like unto you, O Lord among the gods?”  Who are the gods Yahweh is among?  What about Gen 1:27, “Let us create man in our own image?”  You cannot use the Trinity explanation initially because there was no concept of Trinity until the NT period.  How about the Ten Commandments number one, “Thou shalt have no gods before me.”  Seems to leave quite a bit of wiggle room. 

JEHU’S REBELLION AND HOSEA

Another Biblical text/nexus that is used by atheists to disprove the Bible as the Word of God (or to prove a contradiction) is the apparent contradiction between 2 Kings and the prophet Hosea.  Let me explain.  God commanded the prophet Elijah to anoint Jehu the king of Israel to avenge for the blood of the prophets Ahab had killed.  Jehu’s job was to put an end to the dynasty of Ahab and Jezebel.  Jehu does just that, and in a terrible act of bloody vengeance in which he executes not only Ahab and Jezebel but their seventy sons.  It is very grotesque – too grotesque to describe in this august place and in this cultured company.

 After the bloodbath was completed, the writer(s) of 2 Kings said this of Jehu's actions at Jezreel:

And Yahweh said unto Jehu, Because thou hast done well in executing that which is right in mine eyes, and hast done unto the house of Ahab according to all that was in my heart, thy sons of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel (II Kings 10:30).

A century later, however, the prophet Hosea had a different view. He opened his book with a pronouncement of judgment upon the house of Jehu in the latter days of Jeroboam, the third-generation of Jehu's descendants mentioned above:

(F)or yet a little while, and I [Yahweh] will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause the kingdom of the house of Israel to cease. And it shall come to pass at that day, that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel (1:4-5).

How can two biblical passages, both inspired by the Holy Spirit, contain directly opposite views of the same events?  In II Kings, Jehu is the instrument of Yahweh to complete his will.  In Hosea, Jehu has committed a crime which God is going to judge.  This is exactly the kind of things atheists point out and there is no good putting our heads in the sand on this.

MY JOURNEY

In 2001, I went through a period of deep personal spiritual crisis.  I felt like I had descended into the abyss in terms of my ability to believe in the scriptures as the “Word of God.”  I was studying Bible with a man who seemed to be a functional agnostic.  I asked him if he believed in a personal God and he said, “No.  I believe in the importance and value of religion and belief in God.  I believe in the power of love.  But that’s it.”  He had a Ph.D. in Bible from Brandeis.  I remember once when we were commenting on “Who is like unto you, O Lord among the gods,” his comment was, “Any non-Israelite could say this.  Who is like you, O Marduk among the gods.  Israelite religion was not distinct from all ancient religion at least initially.”

I felt as if every day of class took a little more out of me.  I was so glad I had studied Philosophy of Religion before the program started, because without that background, I think I would have lost my faith completely.  I had a great theologian professor named Jerry Walls who had given me the foundation I needed.  I called Jerry up and said, “What should I be reading that will help me to build an understanding to face these challenges?”  He recommended a few things.  And I took off.

I literally went to a monastery and cloistered myself away for a few days of prayer and reading.  Later I told Dr. Aaron about this, and he was fascinated that he had had such a big impact on me.  I told him, “You are shaking the foundations, but I’m keeping the faith.”  He was pleased overall.  So what I’m going to say next comes out of this process of earth-shaking.  I will respond on two fronts; first is a narrative approach to canonical authority and second is a new way of understanding biblical inspiration.

THE NARRATIVE/PROGRESSIVE APPROACH

How can we understand the scriptures as the Word of God in light of the kinds of problems we’ve seen?  First, we must understand that the authority of scriptures is not static but progressive.  Think of a time when you’ve read a book, and for the first ¾, you thought you knew the direction it was headed.  Then, it takes a completely unexpected twist and you end up in a very different direction.  If you go back and read from the first section, when you know the end, you can shake your head at what you initially thought.  It is clear once you know the ending.  You can see characters who are completely misguided, but still under the creative care of the author.  But they just didn’t know what you know having read the end of the book.

Another way to say this is to use the term ‘progressive revelation.’  God works with people where the are.  Abraham didn’t understand what Moses knew, and Moses didn’t understand what Paul knew.  We have to read the OT in light of the fact that many things of God it describes, we simply reject because we’ve read the end of the book.  We know that God couldn’t really have wanted acts of violence and fraud to be perpetrated.  Those are their cultural understandings that hadn’t attained to the moral developmental level of “Love your neighbor as yourself.  Do unto others.  Turn the other cheek.”  The NT understanding of God is more enlightened and we follow that direction.

EDUCATIONAL INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES

You might ask, “But in what sense is the Bible inspired?  How could the writers of various texts be in complete disagreement?”  Inspiration for me does not mean that God come down and took the hands of the writers so they wrote exactly what God wanted them to write.  It means exactly what we mean when we say, “I heard a speaker that really inspired me!”  The prophets heard God but God was like a roaring of a lion or the voice of a whirlwind.  They still had to interpret what God was saying.

You might take different people to hear the same speaker, and they may all have different impressions on exactly what was being said.  But if you polled them all, you could pretty much guess what the speaker was really saying.  We have a community of people who have heard God but still have to interpret it through their own understandings.  It is much the same when we read scripture.  It is the word of God, yet it is also the words of men.  Just as Jesus is all God and completely human, the scriptures are the same.  It is all God’s word yet it is all the word of humans and of a specific community of faith.

Let’s give a NT example.  Do you all really believe what the NT teaches, that God really wants all women to worship only with your heads covered?  This is what Paul taught.  You obviously don’t believe it because I don’t see any scarves here.  Somehow, implicitly, we know that this comes from Paul’s culture.  It’s not that we’re simply rebellious, it is that we cannot understand the point of covering a women’s hair.  We can say, “That part of the NT is culturally based and comes from Paul’s background.”

The value of this perspective is that it forces us to focus out central part of our attention on what is central in the gospels.  Remember the analogy of interviewing people to determine what the speaker said?  You would focus only on what they all mostly agreed upon.  The same is the case here.  We try to focus the emphasis of our discipleship and faith on the main themes of scripture.  This keeps us majoring on the majors and minoring on the minors.  Most spiritual errors come from majoring in the minors.  See, this is a very healthy perspective and it allows for a high view of scripture while making room for biblical criticism.

LETTING THE BIBLE READ YOU