It strikes me as strange when someone complains about all of the violence in the bible, because it is that one thing that lends the bible, to me, its value and worth to us as believers.
There is war, rape, murder, patricide. There are atrocities, floods, natural disasters and betrayals throughout.
Good.
Such is life. Such is human history. But more importantly, such is man’s story.
The bible, to me, is a perfect representation of the human soul, opened up to us in all of its glory and ugliness. It is the truest and clearest picture of man AS HE IS. It doesn’t hide anything from the reader. It doesn’t turn away from incest, from the horrors of war, from the deep darkness inside the soul of man. Instead, it presents man to us exactly as he is.
This is important. Because in order to fix man, we must first have an honest accounting of the human condition. It cannot be a manipulated narrative, or a distorted assessment, but must be accurate, incisive, and truthful.
If you refuse to accurately diagnose a condition, you have no chance of ever curing it.
The current profile of man given to us by the psychologists is all wrong. Their profile sterilizes man, then assesses him. It ignores his needs, for sex, for blood, for war. They aren’t viewed as part and parcel of who man is: fallen, sinful, hopeless, and in need of salvation.
When a nonbeliever says that the bible is repugnant, violent, and scatological, I proudly affirm his description. The bible is a book about the history of the soul of man. It seeks to diagnose and provide a remedy for the ills of the human heart.
It provides a fix for man, as he really is.
We must not hide from who we are as a species. We must not be unprepared for the horrors to come, or begin to believe that politicians or ideological systems installed by governments are going to fix everything. We cannot allow naiveté to delude us into thinking that we can build a tower that reaches into heaven.
Instead, we have to find hell within ourselves, put out the fire, and then adopt the goodness that is left, and spread it out far and wide.