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God Behaving Badly? Providing Explanation to some difficult Old Testament passages · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Centrally speaking, is the Central Schweinfeller Church's podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the Middle Way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology at the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Today we are speaking about a problem that people have had when they look at several uh sections in the Old Testament, uh, part of uh the Bible.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Our topic is God Behaving Badly, providing explanation to some Old Testament passages.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Our guest is Dr.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: David Lamb, the academic dean at Missio Seminary in Philadelphia.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Lamb has served at Missio Seminary since 2006.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: He holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Old Testament from the University of Oxford in England.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: He has extensive teaching experience, including cross-cultural projects in Nigeria, Mexico, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: In 2016, his co-authored textbook came out, The Historical Writings, Introducing Israel's Historical Future, that published by Fortress Press.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: He addressed the topic of confusing sexual behavior in the Bible in a book called Prostitutes and Polygamists, A Look at Love, Old Testament style, published by Zonervin in 2015.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: In the book that we're discussing today, God Behaving Badly, is the God of the Old Testament angry, sexist and racist.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Dr.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Lamb looked at several problems uh within the Old Testament.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this book is published by University Press 2011.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we're looking forward to discussing that with you uh today, uh, David.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh welcome to the show.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Glad to have you here.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Drake.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's my pleasure to be here.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Should say that he also uh is married to uh his wife Shannon, and uh they've lived in the Hatfield area uh since uh 2006.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So well, for many people, the God of the Old Testament doesn't seem to be the same one as the New Testament.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh some of these older portions of the Bible seeming to be uh different than some of the newer portions uh of the Bible.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: In the Old Testament, uh, as you've written about, uh David, uh he seems to be uh more harsh or mean, but in the New Testament, uh he seems uh long-suffering, kind, and loving.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and this has been pick picked up by uh a number of uh popular uh means of communication, whether it be uh comics that have been written, uh TV shows, uh movies.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I wonder if you could just share some examples of how the God of the Old Testament appears to be mean, but the God of the New Testament appears to be kind.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: It it's this perspective is pervasive.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was um on a date with my wife one time, and we ended up chatting with the server and um talked to about what my wife does for a while, and he kind of turned to me and he says, So what do you do?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Well, I teach the Bible, um, mainly the Old Testament.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: He says, The Old Testament, isn't that where God is always like smiting cities and destroying people and killing people in mass quantities all the time?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Well, there is some of that, but I think it's more complicated than that.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the God of the Old Testament, I think, is on misunderstood.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: The perhaps the most famous uh is um a Farside comic.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um uh Farside used to be in the comic strips.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: For anybody that's a little bit older, probably familiar with it, maybe uh less so with some of the younger folk.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: But um, so it the title of this comic is God at His Computer.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so God is sitting in front of a computer keyboard, and it's kind of an old big monitor.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and on his the display of his computer is uh a young guy walking down the street, um, and he's going underneath an enormous grand piano that's supported by a few thin ropes.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so this guy looks innocent, just walking down the street underneath his piano.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: And you pull back, and God uh got to to God now, because this is this is all happening on God's display of his computer, you pull back, God's got his finger over his keyboard, it's hovering over one key in particular, the smite key.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I know we all wish we had a smite key on our computer, on our computer keyboard sometimes, but this this perspective is pervasive.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is um, and the the character, the god in this comic is clearly the god of the old testament.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um the the other place that you you kind of see it again, I'm I'm dating myself a little bit was in Ghostbusters.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so if any of you guys are from this is the original with um Murray and Aykroyd and all those guys.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: So they're they're talking to the mayor of the city about the upcoming disaster, and and um Aykroyd says, the city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the mayor says, What do you mean, biblical?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: And then um uh Bill Murray steps in, he says, What he means is Old Testament, real wrath of God type stuff.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, but see, when things are bad, what do they use to describe it?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: Old Testament, the wrath of God.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: We see it all over the place.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's there's a many more examples, but um, and for me as someone who loves God and loves the Old Testament, it kind of breaks my heart.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: But um, but so we need to keep talking about it and try to understand what God is really like in the Old Testament.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting that this has gotten uh mass purvey in the media or it might p uh show up at a discussion that you have with a server at uh over at a restaurant.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh um, but it does appear that uh the God of the Old Testament uh seems to be uh uh um uh nastier, at least in some of these um uh uh more uh popular uh depictions.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you mentioned uh the God having a smite key.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Did they have a uh did he have a smile on his face, a frown?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh maybe uh well he was from the back.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: It was hard to say, but yes, you kind of the the the picture you envision is that he is finding glee somehow in what he is doing to this this poor this poor innocent person walking down on the street.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So why don't we see if we can pick up some of the passages where the God of the Old Testament uh might seem to get um a bad reputation um and maybe comment on just a couple of them.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh for example, in 2 Samuel chapter 6, uh uh God's people are bringing uh the Ark of the Lord, um thinking the the Lord's uh property back to Jerusalem, and then uh this ark is on uh an ox cart and it tips, and there's a man named named uh Uzzah who puts his hand on it to stabilize it, uh, and then uh he pays the penalty uh for it.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um can you explain that uh to us?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, is that an illustration of a mean or a nasty god?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think that story is the inspiration for the Larson Farside comic, because in the King James, um when it says that the Lord, in more most of English translations, more modern, more recent English translations, it said that the Lord struck him, but in the King James it's um the Lord smote him.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um so yeah, that's a troubling passage.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, to Samuel chapter six.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um I a lot of people ask me about that.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um I've just I speak on a lot of college campuses about this, and I often get asked about what happened with Dapor Uzzah, it just seems unfair.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um God is just gets angry um at sort of what seems to be kind of a drop of a hat.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: The first thing when when people ask me about a passage like that or any passage like these, and and there's there's a bunch of other ones, I tell them, thank you for asking me that question.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: I want to communicate to people that are struggling, whether they're they would consider themselves a Christian, a person who reads their Bible a lot, or someone who is uh you know, an agnostic or an atheist or just encounters scripture somehow.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's good to ask those kind of questions.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I want I want to create safe places, and I think churches need to create safe places for people to ask hard questions about hard parts of the Bible.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: So that's one of the first things I want to say when people ask me about that.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the story of Uzzah and again it's it's hard to do justice to it in just a uh a short answer over a minute or two, but the there's a number of things that we could say.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: God made it really clear in um parts of scripture that come before this story in the law, the law codes of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, that no one was supposed to touch the ark.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: And Uzza should have known that.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: God, the Israelites had a had had a hard time with the Ark for a long period of time.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: They had basically been using it sort of like a magic device, almost a little like um Hitler or the Nazis wanted to do in Raiders of the Lost Ark, if you if you've seen that movie, that kind of this magical thing that's going to lead them into to the battle.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and they had been misusing it for a long time.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: And scripture makes it clear that God gets angry, but he gets angry slowly.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you could argue that God had waited a long time to get angry.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Now, in that story, David, King David himself, gets mad at God and questions God.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think as we look at some of these other passages, it's clear that both David and Uzzah should have known better, that the ark was supposed to be carried on poles, kind of like a litter, like for royalty.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: And that gave honor and glory to the God that had delivered the Israelites from hundreds of years of oppression in Egypt.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: So um it's a troubling story, but I think as we look at the text in more detail, I think we realize there's a reason that God gets angry.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um He gets angry when um his glory or honor is not taken seriously, and God had made it really clear that he wanted them to not touch the ark.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm still troubled by the story, but as we read the context, it makes more sense.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not as if there's a capricious God uh behind a computer screen with a smoke button that he's now pressing uh when uh uh Uzza uh uh places his hand on the on the ark is what you're what you're saying.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and so we we need to take, you know, the the far side cartoon makes me laugh, um, and I talk about it a lot.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I want to speak to people that that that is speaking to them about their perspective.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: But um I think as we look to scripture, we realize that these problems are not nearly as severe, and particularly as we read them in the con in their context of what was going on.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take another one then, uh, instead of uh uh a judgment on uh uh somebody carrying uh the ark.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take a one from Deuteronomy chapter 22, where God tells a victimized woman to marry a rapist.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh in Hosea uh chapter one, God asks Hosea to marry a prostitute.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why would he do this?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um it seems very odd.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think on one level we we we do need to say it's gonna be hard for us to fully comprehend who God is.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: In the book of Hosea, God is telling the prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute to signify what it's like for God to be in relationship with the people of Israel, because the nation of Israel is unfaithful.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and there's more that we could be we could say about that.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: I I've, you know, again, I speak on a lot of college campuses and I get asked about these rape laws a lot, and it's troubling.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I think part of it is we don't understand the context.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: In Deuteronomy 22, in in their context, a woman who has been has been raped would most likely never marry again because she's damaged goods.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Now, again, I'm not saying tragically, rape happens, and rape always is evil.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Let's just be clear here.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: So, what this law is trying to do is trying to bring good out of a horrible situation.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And a woman who had been raped in this context would most likely never marry again, which she would probably have two options.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: She would become destitute or she would become a prostitute.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: So what this rape law in Deuteronomy 22 is actually trying to br to provide security for this woman, because the man who has abused her cannot divorce her.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: She has more security than women who um, you know, she has friends who were never raped, but she would have lifelong security.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: And let's face it, in in that context, marriage was it was partly a financial arrangement.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so women who had been victimized would have a lifetime of security.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: Now, again, I still don't fully fathom this story, but if if we jump over to the story of Tamar, this is David's son and daughter.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: His David's son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar in uh 2 Samuel chapter 13.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: After David's daughter Tamar is raped by her half-brother Amnon, Amnon wants to kick her out.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: And Tamar, this is the mind-boggling thing to me, Tamar says, It would be more evil for you to get rid of me than to what than the evil you already did to me.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: So according to this woman, who ancient Near Eastern woman, it was more evil to get rid of her and not marry her than to the actual crime of the rape itself.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: She understood the context.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: We don't understand it.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: We bring we import our twenty-first century views on this situation.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: So rape is always bad.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: Scripture, these laws are trying to um ameliorate a horrible situation.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: And um as we understand the context, I think it makes more sense.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess what you're pressing us to is not to just uh take one uh verse uh here or there, but to try and understand that it's an ancient document and that it's uh that there's a whole broader context that needs to be evaluated.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: And again, I realize for a lot of people that takes work.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um and it's easy to just kind of we you know, for people who are Christians who are reading their Bible, or for people who aren't, that maybe hear somebody talk about this, we kind of go, what is going on here?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I get that.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I I think context always matters.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: And we look back on you know, slavery in this country 150 years ago, and you know, to to everybody today, it's wrong.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: How could this happen?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, slavery went on for a couple of centuries in this country because it wasn't clear to everybody that it was a wrong thing.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: Now, in hindsight, we can say that clearly, but in that context, th things things were not as clear, at least.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so things are always a little bit different.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's like like we lived in England for a while.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's easy to kind of go to England and say, why do they drive on the wrong side of the road?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's not the wrong side of the road, it's just how they do it over there.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so context always matters.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, context matters.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's and it's sort of interesting you bring up the the English and uh driving uh uh circumstances.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: I spent a fair amount of time in Scotland.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh uh but uh looking out on the street and looking left, right, left, uh I almost got run over.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you can get to get problems.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: But but I guess what you're advocating is when we come to these uh problematic passages of scripture, we should read them in broader context, and that the church should be uh a safe haven by which we can explore these things.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is that yes, am I?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely, definitely.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and again, in w for those of us who are who go to church, we need to be talking about these problematic places because we need to be helping people understand them so that when people go to the talk to their friends at work or for you know people that we're celebrating, um seniors graduating, and not all of them, some are gonna go to Christian schools, others are not.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: They're gonna talk to people that don't share their faith or their belief, and they're gonna talk about these.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, but if we've never talked about them, how are we gonna make sense of them?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we need to be talking about those for those of us who go to church, come to Sunday school.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take one more that uh we could talk about a little bit.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, how about uh the problem or the issue of uh genocide or murder, which it seems that uh uh God endorses in the book of Joshua or in Psalm uh 137?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Psalm 137 verse 9 says, Blessed shall uh he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: That seems very cruel.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um might you have uh uh something that you could uh answer about this passage that seems to be so anti-life?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, both of these are difficult, and sometimes I I I would say that some some of the most problematic parts of the Bible.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: I I think the the slaughter of the Canaanites doesn't make sense to me.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Although I think there are some things that we can say clearly in scripture that the Israelites were were a people without a country, and their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, lived in the land of Canaan.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: So and they're they are moving back to where they had lived before.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: And the perspective on scripture pretty clearly is that the Israelites, that the Canaanites were being punished for what they did.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: And on one level, the I would say the Canaanites were being punished for a lack of hospitality.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: All the Canaanites, now there aren't a lot, but all the Canaanites that showed hospitality to the Israelites were shown mercy.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um perhaps the most famous example is the prostitute Rahab.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: And Rahab, and it wasn't just Rahab, but she risked her life to welcome the spies into into the city of Jericho where she was a resident.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: And not just Rahab, but her entire family was welcomed in.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: And um she ends up showing up in Jesus' genealogy in Matthew 1.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: This is this Canaanite prostitute is welcomed into the family tree of Jesus.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's pretty shocking.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Psalm 137 is a very is very troubling to me, you know.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: Blessed is the the the one who bashes the heads of these babies.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: The thing I say about that psalm is it's a prayer.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: And it's pretty clear from the context that what happened to the Israelites was that what this this prayer is about is something that happened to them.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_02: It talks about payback.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: The Israelites witnessed their own children being brutalized by the Babylonians when they conquered uh Jerusalem and Judah in in 587.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's there's there's a little bit more details we could say about the these conquests.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: But the Israelites had the had witnessed this.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think what we see in this prayer is someone who was in a lot of pain working through that and giving that pain over to God.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: One of my professors says that the Psalms are 150 things you can say to God.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: And just because God, this is in Scripture and God authorizes this, I believe all scripture is divinely inspired.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: But it's not saying that this is not God saying this, but this is a human who is in a lot of pain praying this to God.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: But notice in Psalm 137, there's not a there's not a there isn't a uh record of the psalmist actually doing that.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's just they're venting.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I think for any of us who have been victimized, abused by spouses or parents or family members or even employees, verbally, physical, otherwise, there's a lot of pain there.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what the the these psalms, and there's a lot of intense psalms.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um scholars call them imprecatory psalms, psalms of of cursing almost.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's helpful to find voice to my intense feelings.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: But we what we do is we give them to God and we say, God, this is how I feel, but I'm gonna trust you to bring justice and vengeance in your way and your time because ultimately you're judge.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's where I see it.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: These are helpful explanations.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and these uh passages need uh uh further explanations.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's since you uh have been on college campuses and have talked about these, uh I'm wondering how have people received your line of argumentation?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Have they uh how have they responded?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you have a testimony or or two that you might share.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: I love talking to people.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: I love you know, I I give a talk and then I have a QA time.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: I or maybe I it's a a Q and Q time, question and question time.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, I love when someone asks me a question, I love to re respond with a question because to be honest, that's how Jesus often responds to questions.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I've had a I I've had a lot of deep conversations.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, one of the most significant was when I was speaking on a college campus probably like eight years ago, and the the atheist club came.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: So there were there were a hundred people there, but the atheists filled up a row.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: So there were like ten of them there.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, they asked really hard questions, but uh one of the things that may might have been a little bit frustrating to them is I asked them a lot of questions back because I wanted to listen and learn.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that learning for effective learning to happen, it needs to be a two way street.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what ended up happening is the These a couple of these atheists found my blog, and I blogged about this incident, you know, and they started coming after me, and it was just it was kind of like troll comments.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: There was some harshness.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I tried to respond graciously on my blog and a few other times.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so we just kind of went back and forth, but I felt almost kind of hurt because I was felt like we had had some good conversations, but then I discovered some in the blog post that I could figure out the name of one of the people, and it was the name of one of these women that I actually had, I thought I had a pretty deep conversation with.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, this is a woman that's part of the atheist club, she graciously apologized.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: And um and we had some really deep interactions over email as a result of this.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think for me that was success.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: I had a lot of people say that I've they've appreciated my book.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, an another story, there's a a conference put up by Intervarsity called the Urbana Missions Conference.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's one of the largest missions conferences in the world.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: And um I've I've done my wife works with the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, the organization that sponsors this event.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I was helping out at Urbana a few years ago, and I was working alongside um it was the communion service.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: So it was like 15,000 people.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: We were all involved in this communion service.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: I was working with a couple of undergrads, and um we we were chatting, and this woman sees my name and says, Whoa, Dave Lamb.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Wait a minute, did you write the book, God Behaving Badly?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Yeah, that was a couple years ago.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: And and then she kind of almost teared up and said, This book spoke to me in a really dark time in my life.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: And and she like she came up and gave me a big hug.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Well, thank you for sharing that with me.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: That means a lot to me that you found it helpful.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I think we need to keep talking about these things and kind of create safe places to talk about some of the harder parts of the Bible.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so this is uh by by talking about some of these uh difficult passages, it's a it's an opportunity to uh interact with others and uh find uh uh out about how they uh react to uh scripture or uh portions of the Bible.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I think uh ultimately uh helps us uh in figuring out who God is like.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, uh you say that in in uh towards towards the end of the book, uh God Behaving Badly, uh that it's ultimately about uh who God is like or what what is he like.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: One of my favorite stories is uh one of our board members was given a copy of the book, and it was an older gentleman, and he said, I saw that, and he said, I don't like the title.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: God doesn't behave badly.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: Why would you say that?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds like heresy.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: And and I said, but then he's he it was on his shelf for a while, and he finally picked the book up and he realized, well, I'm not really arguing.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I would tell people the title of the book is a question.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: God behaving badly is the God of the Old Testament, angry sexist and racist.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: But as he read the book, he realized the book is really about the character of God.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I would argue that God is not angry, sexist, and racist, but God is the creator God.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: God is good, God is the deliverer of his people.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: We see this both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, obviously, ultimately in Jesus.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I think to struggle a little bit with God, and if anybody of you guys, and if you any of you listeners are struggling, I'd say this is a great question for God.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: Pray about this.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: God, reveal yourself to me.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't always make sense.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: Your word doesn't always make sense to me.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: But I I focus people on the first couple chapters of Genesis because in that we see God is a wonderful creator, he is the creator of good things.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: I love nature, I love being out in nature.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: I connect to God through his creation, and we also see how God is an amazing provider uh in the first couple chapters.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: We see it through it throughout scripture.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus, you know, provides um, you know, he heals people, he um provides food for people, but we see it in the very beginning of the Bible in the first couple chapters.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: God is an abundant provider and he loves his people who are made in his image.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: We reflect God.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I think that's those are profound things to say about who God is and we are like him.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: So there's more to be said, but I think of passages uh like uh Exodus 34 where God proclaims his name, that he's compassionate, uh gracious, slow to anger, abounding in uh steadfast love.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh are there other passages in the in the Old Testament that you would say really display the um the main essence of uh the God of the Old Testament?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean again, the first couple chapters of Genesis, I I I love Exodus 34.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in fact, that whole context, the it's the golden calf.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: They create, they make this idol, they worship it.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: God has just delivered them from hundreds of years of slavery.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the first thing they do, and and they they've made a commitment to not worship other idols, and they make this golden calf because Moses is delaying up on the mountain on Mount Sinai, but God reveals his character there, and God says he's gonna punish, but in a in a passage that I don't fully comprehend that God says he's gonna destroy them, and he changes his mind.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think we see that God is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: And we see that throughout the Old Testament.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: The other, the other passage I like to talk about is the end of the book of Jonah.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of people are familiar with Jonah, the story of Jonah gets, you know, he doesn't do what God wants him to do.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: He gets thrown overboard, um, out into the sea, gets swallowed by a big fish, a whale or something.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um he gets vomited back out on the ground and goes speaks to the the people of of of Nineveh.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: Finally.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: And the Ninevites, these Assyrians, these really, I mean, the the Assyrians were just evil.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: And that's partly why Jonah didn't want to talk to them, to tell them to repent.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: But in chapter four, we see how Jonah knew what was going to happen, and this is why he didn't want to go.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: He knew that God was going to show mercy.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and and and it bothered him because he wanted God to hit the spite key on the Ninevites.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: He wanted that, and God refrained and wanted to use Jonah, the prophet, to show mercy to these people.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the story for me of scripture, that God is always sending his prophets to tell people to repent and because he wants to show mercy, um, which to me is a powerful symbol of what God is really like, because he's slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and wants to show mercy to to repentant sinners.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much for coming uh today and uh speaking with us on uh uh the uh our broadcast uh Centrally Speaking.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: We've been talking about uh Dr.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: David Lamb's book, uh God Behaving Badly, and uh we encourage you uh to read it.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have copies at the church if you are so interested.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: You've been listening to Centrally Speaking, a broadcast ministry from the Central Schweinfelder Church in Worcester, Pennsylvania.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: See our website for service times if you're in the area.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: We warmly welcome you to join us.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us today.