We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Two Questions to Unlock Violent Divine Portraits
There are two basic questions that help us to interpret what is going on in the violent portraits of God in the Old Testament, as I propose in Crucifixion of the Warrior God.
The First Question: What does the “God-breathed” revelation of the cross teach us about the nature of God’s “breathing”?
God “breathed” his supreme revelation on the cross by both acting toward us and by allowing others to act toward him. Because God honors the personhood of others, and because he therefore works by means of the influential power of the cross (1 Cor 1:18) rather than by exerting coercive power, God’s “breathing” is a dialectical rather than a unilateral process.
This cross-centered, dialectical understanding of the way God “breathes” should shape how we interpret the way that God “breathed” the Old Testament witness. We must read it with the awareness that it reflects both God acting toward us, insofar as God’s people at that time could receive it, as well as God humbly allowing others to act toward him, insofar as God had to accommodate his people’s fallen and culturally-conditioned hearts and minds. We must read the written witness of the OT knowing that portraits of God will display the same beautiful character as is revealed on the cross insofar as they reflect the former, but they will reflect the same ugliness of sin that is revealed on the cross insofar as they reflect the latter.
In this light, the OT’s violent portraits of God can be understood as testaments to the truth that God has always been willing to humbly stoop to bear the sin of his people and to thereby take on a literary semblance that mirrors the ugliness of this sin, just as he did in a historical way on the cross.
The Second Question: How does a guilty-appearing, godforsaken, crucified criminal become the definitive revelation of God for us?
It is not what everyone can see on the surface of the crucifixion that reveals God. Rather it is only when we by faith look through the surface of this event that it becomes the definitive revelation of God for us. Only by faith can we discern the Creator stooping an infinite distance to become this guilty-appearing, godforsaken, crucified criminal.
Since the God who “breathed” this paradigmatic revelation is the same God who “breathed” his written witness to this revelation, we should read Scripture expecting that there will be times when the revelatory content of a portrait of God is to be found not on its surface, but in its depth. The first can be understood by straightforward exegesis, but the second calls for faith to discern the humble, loving condescension of God.
However, we can only interpret the OT’s violent portraits in this sin-bearing way if we place our compete trust in the character of God revealed on the cross. If we suspect that God has a dark side and is capable of doing the monstrous things that the OT authors attribute to him, we will mistake the “shadow” for the “reality” (Col 2:17; Heb 10:1).
To put it another way, if we fail to place our trust in the revelation of the crucified Christ, we are trading the unclouded revelation of the Son, who alone is the “radiance of God’s glory” (Heb 1:3) for the cloudy perspective of ancient authors who could only catch “glimpses of truth” (Heb 1:1).
Only the slain lamb unlocks the secret of how macabre portraits of God point to him.
—Adapted from Crucifixion of the Warrior God, pages 1250-1252
Photo credit: Vitor Sá Photo via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Category: General
Tags: Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Cruciform Theology, OT Violence
Topics: Interpreting Violent Pictures and Troubling Behaviors
Related Reading
God’s Non-Violent Ideal in the OT
While God condescended to working within the violent-prone, fallen framework of his people in the Old Testament—as I argue in Crucifixion of the Warrior God—the OT is also full of references to how God worked to preserve his non-violent ideal as much as possible. He did this by continually reminding his people not to place…
The Cruciform Center Part 2: How John’s Gospel Reveals a Cruciform God
In the previous post, we looked at how the Synoptics illustrate the centrality of the cross. While the Gospel of John varies in its structure and language from the Synoptics, the cross remains at the center. This centrality is expressed in a number of different ways. 1. The role that Jesus’ death plays in glorifying…
The Twist that Reframes the Whole Story
Many people read the Bible as if everything written within it is equally authoritative. As a result, people read it along the lines of a cookbook. Like a recipe, the meaning and authority of a passage aren’t much affected by where the passage is located within the overall book. The truth, however, is that the…
Was the Early Church Pacifistic? A Response to Paul Copan (#11)
In Crucifixion of the Warrior God (CWG) I argue that Jesus and Paul instruct Christians to love and bless their enemies and to unconditionally refrain from violence (e.g. Matt 5:39-45; Rom 12:14-21). Moreover, I argue that this was the prevailing attitude of Christians prior to the fourth century when the Church aligned itself with the…
It’s All About the Crucified Christ
The world was created by Christ and for Christ (Col 1:16). At the center of God’s purpose for creation is his plan to unite himself to us in Christ, reveal himself to us through Christ, and share his life with us by incorporating us into Christ. We don’t know what this might have looked like…
God’s Shadow Activity [Sermon 7/15/12]
If we believe the whole Bible is inspired, how do we reconcile the Old Testament with the self-sacrificial, enemy-loving God revealed in Jesus Christ? In this past Sunday’s sermon at Woodland Hills Church, Greg succinctly summarizes his own thoughts by echoing that of the apostle Paul: the Old Testament is a shadow of the reality which is found in Christ.