Friends,
This week during worship we will hear the story of Deborah, Barak, and Jael from the book of Judges. I had a pastor friend who refused to preach from Joshua or Judges, dismissing them as not being the gospel that Jesus Christ preached and too much trouble to try to redeem. Having grown up in a strict Baptist tradition, it was a very courageous approach for him to take and one that did not come easily. I share his concerns, but I still listen for the Word of God in these stories. To be sure, we have interpretive choices to make regarding how to read them and yet more interpretive choices to make when trying to understand and live into them. It helps me to approach the Scriptures as a series of ongoing conversations about life before God, rather than as a series of “chapter and verse” final answers.
Violence is a real part of the biblical stories, not just in the Old Testament, but also in the gospels – the crucifixion story being chief among them. We struggle with how such a violent world fits within God’s good creation. The story that we will hear this week, begins – as many stories in the book of Judges do – with the note that “The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD,” so God gave them over to an oppressor. That simple beginning points to a common but contested presumption in the Scriptures – the nation that is faithful will be blessed; the nation that is unfaithful will suffer. While that formula doesn’t always hold in the stories, the question behind it is an enduring one, namely the question of God’s sovereignty.
Some friends recently reminded me how the Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper once said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” When we say, “God is great,” declaring that God is the almighty sovereign over all the earth, then the ebb and flow of life bring hard questions. When a nation is defeated, when people are oppressed, when the able-bodied are taken away in exile and the feeble are left to suffer – Is it God’s doing? Is that what it means to say, “God is great”?
One person in US history courageous enough to address God’s sovereignty was Abraham Lincoln. In his First Inaugural Address, facing the prospect of a civil war, Lincoln urged patience and to trust that “If the Almighty Ruler of Nations, with His eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.” Four bloody years later, in his Second Inaugural Address, he quoted the 119th Psalm saying, “Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” Lincoln was wresting with what it means to say God is great in the context of violence, just like the bloody stories in Joshua and Judges.
While some of the actions, presumptions, and even conclusions in Joshua and Judges are hard to accept at face value – Jesus will contend with some of them – I think we are missing the point if we just bypass the books altogether. I do not see them prescribing violence as God’s way of exercising sovereignty in the world but insisting that God is great even in a world filled with violence. Even in the US, where we are usually shielded from the violence of bombings and invasions pertinent to war, we are daily exposed to violent stories of school shootings, racialized and sexualized violence, as well as a plethora of violent imagery through gaming, streaming, and movie-going. We carry anxieties about the grids on which we depend and the controllability of the artificial intelligences that we create. Within our own context of violence we ask, along with the communities of the books of Joshua and Judges, “What does it mean to say, ‘God is great’ in such a world?”
Next week we will explore the accompanying statement, “God is good.”
See you in worship,
Mark of St. Mark
