Is it okay to dislike God?
Or maybe is it okay to dislike what the Bible shows us of God?
Or of the Bible authors view of God?
Dislike isn’t really a strong enough word to describe how some of it makes me feel.
God demanding Abraham sacrifice his son. A test of faith perhaps, one that Abraham supposedly passed. A test set by a God who knows everything, who already knew how Abraham would respond. How does it feel to be a young boy, a teenager at most, and to know your father was willing to kill you, to cut your throat and burn your body in sacrifice?
Or just before this, how about being one of Lot’s daughters and hearing your father offer you to the crowd to rape in place of their guests?
But then later God’s law also commanded that a rapist married the girl he had raped. Yes, there is a cultural thought that it ensured she was provided for since no one else would now marry her, but really, being forced to marry the man who raped you?
Or how about the slaves? When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and through the dessert the Bible tells us they were delivered from slavery. They didn’t have a problem with owning slaves though and the Old Testament shows God giving them laws on how to treat their slaves. God condoned slavery. True, it was common practice in the ancient world, but there are several instances where the Bible states that the laws they are given are to distinguish them from the surrounding nations…they could have been told no slaves.
You could also beat your slaves as much as you wanted and view them as property as long as they didn’t die within two days of the beating.
There are more passages in which the depiction of God concerns me…
The many commands about genocide, about wiping out, killing, not just the fighting men, but the women and even the children that are resident in the land they are to conquer. Don’t forget as well that here the Israelites are the invaders. They had lived there centuries before, but as a nomadic people alongside other nomadic tribes. One family left for Egypt, a nation returned, ready to kill all who now lived there.
Some kids tease a prophet for being bald, shouting at him as he walks down the street, so God sends bears to ‘maul’ them. There is debate amongst translators about if this is a tearing apart or a ‘mere’ mauling but either way it is rather an excessive response to youths shouting “Oy, Baldie” at Elisha.
I’m not exactly happy with the story of Noah either. This isn’t really the smiley happy children’s story it is presented as. God wasn’t happy with the way humans were going, they were sinful, not believing, doing evil. So he not only wipes them out, but destroys all the animals as well except for a pair (or 7 in some cases) to reproduce afterwards. Again this destruction will have included children.
I could list more, but I think I’ve said enough to show that there are stories of God, especially in the Old Testament, but also in the New, that trouble me. No doubt some of you now are ready to either cast me out or to argue with me. That isn’t why I’m writing. I’ve read and heard lots about all these stories and more. Apologetics, offering a reasoned defence of faith, has had to answer questions about these verses over and over again, and is likely to continue to do so. There are lots of ways to take, to argue cultural and historical circumstances; to argue God’s ways being higher than ours and to accept it without questioning because we can’t understand God; to argue God’s holiness and justice demanding these actions; to argue New Covenant over riding all these Old Testament events. That is of course a rather broad covering of some of the apologetics, there are more and much deeper and detailed answers, but I think that is what they really boil down to.
To be honest, none of those arguments really answer. If the Bible is inspired in the way a lot of the evangelical church teaches, then God, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, issued those commands and did those things. If…
If…well the inspiration of scripture and what that actually means (yes, breathed out…so what does that mean then…) is something I’m thinking about a lot. It is rather important to know what the Bible is and what it isn’t since we base our faith on it.
Back to disliking some of what I see of God in the Bible. Is it okay to dislike? I don’t know. I don’t have answers to this. However, what I’m coming to see is that it is okay to hold things in tension. I don’t have answers, but it is okay to say that the apologetics don’t work and that the tension between God revealed in these passages and God revealed in Jesus does exist. Trying to pretend that it doesn’t, that there is black and there is white leads to doublethink. Doublethink can’t work for too long. There are shades of grey.
I can’t answer, but I’m learning to see grey as a colour, to hold the tension, to continue a lifelong search to learn, to admit I don’t know.