Can We Still Worship The "Smitey-Almighty"? "“ Part 1 of 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Some see in the Bible two gods, the loving one in the New Testament and the angry one in the old, who in vengeance kills those who hate him. In our current series on the eclipse of God, Erwin Lutzer today poses the question, can we still worship the smitey almighty?

Stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, I sense that this will be a very difficult message. Well Dave, the smitey almighty, that's a phrase that did not originate with me. That's the chapter in my new book entitled The Eclipse of God. But the smitey almighty, well, that comes from someone who wrote an article in a major magazine that says nobody believes in the smitey almighty of the Old Testament.

Nobody believes in the God who smote the Egyptians or the God who judged Sodom and Gomorrah or the God who commanded the killing of the Canaanites. So that's why I deal with these issues in my new book entitled The Eclipse of God. And also, some of that material is in the message that people are about to hear. Here is what you do if you're interested in the book.

You can go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. From my heart to yours, let's not use the Bible like a cafeteria where we go through and choose only the chocolates. Sometimes we have to deal with the hard issues of Scripture and show the consistency of God between the Old Testament and the New.

Now let us listen. Tonight's topic is a very difficult one because we could entitle it, Can We Still Worship the Smitey Almighty? And the reason I entitled the message that is because of Catherine Nixie, who wrote an article entitled Nearer My God to Me. And in this article, she indicated that God is becoming more liberal. He's becoming more tolerant. And she said that as a result of that, nobody believes in this mighty almighty, the God who smote the Egyptians, the God who smote Sodom and Gomorrah, the homophobic God of the Old Testament.

Nobody believes in that anymore, or very few, she said, believe that anymore. And so what we have to do is to look at the God of the Old Testament. And it is a very difficult assignment that I have been given as I think about this because the God of the Old Testament is very complex, as we shall see.

But we have to address the issue as it exists. Now Art Linklater, some of you may remember him, he was a man who spent a lot of time with children. And he always published the funny things that kids said. Art Linklater said that one time he saw a kid scrawling something on a page. And he said to this kid, what are you drawing? And the kid said, I'm drawing a picture of God. And Linklater said, nobody knows what God looks like.

And the kid said, they will when I'm finished. The question of what God is like is the most important question that you and I will ever confront. And tonight we're going to confront it through the eyes of the Old Testament.

And it isn't easy, but it is biblical. The Old Testament God has its critics, Richard Dawkins, and he is the world's most famous atheist. He said, the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction, jealous and proud of it, petty, unjust, and unforgiving control freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser, homophobic, racist. And he goes on to say genocidal.

And then he lists some other words that I can't pronounce. He said he is a capriciously benevolent bully. So that comes from an atheist who is very clear regarding his belief in the God of the Old Testament, simply dismisses him as indeed a vindictive bully. Now that comes from outside the faith, obviously, because Dawkins is an atheist.

But what about within the evangelical world? What do evangelicals believe about the God of the Old Testament? Well, Greg Boyd, the pastor of Woodland Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, who taught at Bethel University for 16 years, wrote a book entitled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. He insists that there has to be a distinction between the God, the textual God of the Bible, and the actual God that exists. He says that the Old Testament is a literary depiction of God by a fallen, violence prone, culturally conditioned, ancient, Near Eastern biblical narrator or prophet. And this textual God, as I want to emphasize, does not really exist. What about Moses? He apparently was demonically influenced when he commanded the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites and massacre them. He says that Moses' command was under a curse, and it's ghoulish. Now once you take that point of view, what do you do with the New Testament? For example, the Bible says in the book of Thessalonians, it says that Jesus is going to return in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power.

What do you do with that? Well, Boyd says, and I might quote him also, he talks about the fact that we must understand that the Apostle Paul was vindictive when he said this. I consider it beyond question that some of Paul's language about his opponents reflects a hostile and mean-spirited attitude. I cannot deny that Paul was occasionally nasty and name-calling and inconsistent in his teaching about Jesus. And so he goes on to criticize Paul, and what he's doing is he's denying what Paul wrote in the book of Thessalonians, because after all, God is a God of love.

Jesus Christ showed that love on the cross. You can't believe in that kind of a judgmental God. Well, that's Greg Boyd. What about Andy Stanley? Andy Stanley is a well-known evangelical, a pastor. He wrote a book called Irresistible, and in it, you might be acquainted with the fact that he says that we have to unhitch the Old Testament from the new, and he gives many reasons for it. He says if we accept the Old Testament, we're going to fall into errors such as the prosperity of the Crusades, anti-Semitism, legalism, exclusivism, and judgmentalism, among a number of other things. What do we do with the God of the Old Testament, and is he the same as the God of the New Testament?

That's the question. Before I begin my remarks, I want to say a word about the context in which the Old Testament was written. It was written in a context in which there was tribal warfare, there were primitive views regarding justice, there were no central governments, so it is a very difficult book. In the middle of this, God put his word, and he gave the Israelites a revelation. It isn't as if God is approving of such things such as slavery. Years ago, I used to teach apologetics in the 1970s, and the big question at that time was, is the Bible true?

Nobody asks that question anymore. The question is, is the Bible socially regressive? Is it up to date regarding its view of slavery and women, for example? That's the criticism that the Bible is receiving these days. But let's talk about slavery for just a moment.

This morning, I read the 21st chapter of the book of Exodus. I reread it regarding slavery, and what you must understand is that the Bible actually elevates the role of a slave in a way that no primitive culture does. God doesn't approve of slavery, but he does humanize it. For example, the first thing in that chapter is this, that slaves can go free every six years, on the seventh year they can be free, they can decide whether they want to stay with their master or whether they want a different master or whatever it is that they want to do. Also, later on in the chapter it says, if you go out and you capture a man and you force him to become a slave, you should be put to death for that. So yes, slavery was tolerated in the Old Testament, but you must understand these slaves had nothing, nowhere to go. And so it was a matter of mercy of making slavery in a way that was more tolerable. That's what the Bible does. And as a matter of fact, it helped the poor people.

They had no place to go, and oftentimes working for someone was the means of their livelihood. What about the New Testament? Sometimes contemporary people criticize Paul, they say, well, why didn't Paul speak against slavery?

Why didn't slavery was a part of the Roman Empire? And what Paul says to the masters and the slaves is groundbreaking. For example, he tells the masters to be good to their slaves and to stop threatening. This is actually in the sixth chapter of the book of Ephesians, verse six. And he says this, know that you have a master in heaven and you are going to give an account to your master, just like you're expecting the slaves to give an account to you. So Paul is elevating the role of slaves. And of course, he does this in the book of Philemon. But of course, Christianity, with its tremendous emphasis and power, it became the means by which slavery was abolished.

People like Wilberforce and others. Sources of scripture showed that in the New Testament, slaves had absolutely the same rights and the same privileges and should be welcomed into churches just like their masters. One of the best verses in this world in which there's so much discussion regarding critical race theory is Colossians chapter three, verse 11, that in Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek bond or free. And then it goes on to say, circumcised or uncircumcised, whether they be Scythian, barbarian, all are one in Christ.

What the New Testament teaches is that because of the work of Jesus on the cross, all who believe have a transcendent unity, including slaves, bond or free, including circumcised or uncircumcised. And this is the unity to which our churches should be working. Critical race theory today tears all of that apart.

Critical race theory says we have to divide on the basis of our skin color to put it in a single sentence before I move on. Critical race theory tears apart everything that Jesus died to bring together. So as we think about the New Testament and the Old Testament and its conception of God, we must always put everything in context.

Well what I'd like to do now is to discuss three areas of criticism of the God of the Old Testament. And the first is the Genesis flood. A number of years ago, it is quite a few years ago, I was watching a PBS program with Bill Moyers and he was discussing with a panel the Genesis flood. And they basically agreed that God was like a child who built a sand castle.

This was their illustration. And then something went wrong and he lost his temper and he took that sand castle and destroyed it. And then he felt bad. And that's what God did. God created the world, he created people and things got out of control. God felt bad and therefore he gave a rainbow as a kind of apology.

I'm so sorry that I did this to the world. Now you must understand what's going on in a discussion like that. And we won't take time to turn to the passage.

I was going to, but I can see that time is hurrying on. You have to understand that they believed that the Bible is a record of what man thinks about God. It's not a book from God, but it's a book about God written by human beings whose view of God is constantly changing.

As a matter of fact, in the program they said, take any citizen at random and he will have better morals than the God portrayed in the Genesis flood. Well, once again, we must understand that we're dealing with a God whom we cannot control. And if you look at the text, it will say that God regretted that he made man.

And that is an anthropomorphism. It doesn't mean that God actually regretted it because he couldn't foresee it. The Bible sometimes speaks in these terms because what it's saying is that we are viewing God as if he were a man so that we understand him better. The Bible says that God therefore had sorrow for what was happening in the world, but that the whole world was filled with wickedness. And during that period of time when it began to rain for 40 days and 40 nights, I have no doubt that those who really called upon the name of the Lord seeking mercy would have received it.

Furthermore, there was grace shown in the rainbow, which is being hijacked today with the LGBTQ plus community, but there was grace shown in the rainbow. And not only that, but he spared Noah, of course, as all of us know, but you can't look at this passage and say, well, this couldn't be God because then you have the New Testament to deal with. Jesus spoke about the days of Noah. It referred to the flood as an example of coming judgment. So as we read a passage like this, what we have to do is to realize that this is a historical passage.

We have to accept it for what it is if we believe the Bible at all, because once you begin to deny that the flood happened or say that God just lost his temper, from there on, everything in the Bible begins to fall apart. What do we do about the Canaanites and their destruction? Maybe I will turn to this passage in Deuteronomy chapter seven, and I'm sorry that we are bouncing around somewhat tonight, but we have to. Deuteronomy chapter seven, when the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering in to take possession of it and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the megabytes for sure, more numerous and mighty than you. And when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must devote them completely to destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. Wow.

Men, women, and children are to be killed. That's difficult. We all admit that it is difficult. But let's ask a couple of questions. First of all, did the Canaanites know about Israel believing in the true God?

The answer to that is yes, actually. They knew better. How do we know that? Because the harlot Rahab, here she is, she's a prostitute of all things. And when the spies come to Jericho, what does she say?

You can read it for yourself. She says, we heard about the miracles that God did to bring you across the Red Sea and so forth, and she said, we know that you are the worshiper of the one true God. Now, if a harlot knew all that, it is very clear that the leaders of the various tribes knew that Israel was a worshiper of the true God. And yet, of course, the Canaanites clung onto their idols. Is it a matter of the whole issue of ethnicity?

Is it just ethnic cleansing, like some people say? The answer is no, and the reason we know that is because in the 16th chapter of the book of Ezekiel, the Bible says that the Israelites were actually at one time Canaanites. It says they have the very same origin.

As a matter of fact, it says your father was an Amorite and your mother was a Hittite. Now, of course, in Egypt, they developed their own identity, but they are really of the same origin, the same ancestors, if you trace them back far enough. And furthermore, if it was a matter of ethnicity, why is it that the harlot Rahab was spared and actually becomes a part of the genealogy of Jesus Christ? It wasn't because of ethnicity. Was it because they had the wrong religion? Not really, because they didn't have the revelation that Israel had.

So it wasn't just simply that we are here to force you to switch religions. The reason that the Canaanites were massacred are two in number. Number one, this was a matter of warfare. God was giving people the land. That is to say, God was giving Israel the land and the people were being killed, as oftentimes happens in war. The second reason, though, is because the cup of the Amorites, the cup of the Canaanites was full of iniquity.

Archaeologists have uncovered a lot of artifacts and a lot of material that shows that the Canaanites had descended into the deepest kind of sexual immorality and perversion that you can possibly imagine. And so they were being judged for that. And of course, if you're going to kill the parents, the children also are a part of that. God gives life and God takes life.

And what we need to do is to see this in context. And often they were offered terms of peace. We know that because there were some tribes that accepted peace from Joshua, such as the Gibeonites, and they were not killed.

So the warfare was to claim the land. And let's remember this, God was not a respecter of persons in some sense, because Israel, when it disobeyed and fell into deep immorality, God judged them justice severely. And you have the Assyrian captivity, you have the Babylonian captivity. And when they were there in captivity in Babylon, God did not suggest to them that they should set up a theocracy. It was this land and this land alone that we call Israel today that was given to Abraham. And now the descendants of Abraham were there to claim it. So it's a difficult thing to experience this, but it's also very complicated.

We don't have time to get into the nuances. But there are instances when it says that they wiped out the Canaanites and then later on a few chapters later, it shows that there were still Canaanites there. It wasn't always that all were killed. But if we can think of a military operation where the chief leaders of the tribe and the military were killed, then, of course, the others had to submit to Israel. And throughout Israel's history, you oftentimes have aliens and those who were Canaanites existing among them. But it's a difficult passage of scripture that we must deal with. Well, my friend, this is Pastor Luther, and as I emphasized at the beginning of this program, we should never try to evade the difficult passages of scripture. And speaking of the Canaanites, one of the points that I make in my new book entitled The Eclipse of God is that it was not ethnic cleansing. There's proof of that in the text.

It isn't what people think it is. But at the same time, as I've already emphasized, it is a very difficult passage of scripture, and let's not try to avoid it. For a gift of any amount, we're making available for you a book I've written entitled The Eclipse of God.

And the next chapter, after dealing with what we call this mighty almighty, I also ask the question, and it's one of the longest chapters of the book, is God more tolerant than he used to be, even as we try to understand the New Testament? For a gift of any amount, we're making this resource available for you. Hope that you have a pen or pencil handy. Go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com, or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337. Let's think through the true nature of God as revealed in the Bible.

Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. And your investment in this ministry helps us get the gospel of Jesus Christ to millions around the world. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. In our current series, we're learning about three areas of criticism of the God of the Old Testament. So far, we've covered the Genesis flood and the Canaanite destruction. Next time, a tough third area planned to join us. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.