A brief answer to the question, "Why is the Old Testament so violent?" (because I'm tired of trying to give a super-super-brief answer to the complex question in ten seconds or less).

1. Violence in the Bible

2. What does ‘sorry’ mean?
What do you do with someone who
says
Sorry sorry sorry
but keeps on and on doing it again?

3. What does ‘sorry’ mean?
This person does not mean the
apology. He has not really repented.

4. What does ‘sorry’ mean?
What happens if you forgive this
person? He doesn’t understand the
difference between forgiveness and
overlooking. If you forgive him, he
will assume that you don’t really care
about what he did wrong.

5. What does ‘sorry’ mean?
There is no point in discussing
forgiveness with a person like this.
He won’t understand it.
He needs to understand the
seriousness of his sin before anything
can be said about forgiveness.

6. What does ‘sorry’ mean?
God’s dealings with the human race
show how He taught this lesson to
His Chosen People. They had to learn
the seriousness of sin before there
was any point in teaching them about
forgiveness.

7. The Bible Story is a Progression
The Bible is not a random collection
of stories. The order in which the
events happen is important.

8. The Bible Story is a Progression
If we arrange the Bible stories in a straight line,
the main events happen in this order.

9. The Bible Story is a Progression
The most important event in time is the crucifixion of Jesus.
Every event before this point anticipates the crucifixion.
Every event after this point is interpreted in the light of the crucifixion.

10. Abraham
Strange Stories among the Aliens
Abraham lived in a pagan society
where the people worshipped many
gods. He knew nothing about the One
God, so Abraham’s story begins with
the basics.

11. Abraham
Strange Stories among the Aliens
Here is the basic lesson that God
gave Abraham.
There is only one God.
He must be trusted and obeyed.

12. Abraham
Strange Stories among the Aliens
God did not give Abraham
much ‘moral’ teaching about
how to treat other people.

13. Abraham
Strange Stories among the Aliens
One very frightening story
about Abraham tells how God
instructed him to kill his son
Isaac as a human sacrifice.

14. Abraham
Strange Stories among the Aliens
This sounds barbaric to us, but
Abraham did not know any better.
Human sacrifice was the norm in the
pagan religions around him. Because
parents ‘owned’ their children, they
were entitled to kill them; it was not
considered murder.
Abraham was sad about having to
sacrifice his son, but he had no
reason to think of it as a wrong thing
to do.

15. Abraham
Strange Stories among the Aliens
Abraham was willing to sacrifice his
son – a sign that he loved God even
more than he loved his own family.
He had learned the lesson of trust and
obedience.

16. Abraham
Strange Stories among the Aliens
In the end, of course, God interrupted
the ritual and told Abraham to
sacrifice a goat in Isaac’s place.
So Abraham also learned that God is
the sort of God who does not really
want us to kill our children.

17. Moses
The Royal Executioners
Abraham learned about
God’s trustworthiness;
Moses learned about God’s
morality.

18. Moses
The Royal Executioners
At the time of Moses, God spelled
out the Law, including the idea that
murdering innocent people is wrong.
Since the time of Moses, God has not
told anyone to murder their sons.
After that time, everyone knew that
God did not want murder, so asking
for murder would not have been a
good test of commitment.

19. Joshua
The Royal Executioners
The lesson God gave to
Joshua was
Sin is serious.

20. Joshua
The Royal Executioners
Joshua led the Holy War – the
most violent section of the
whole Bible.
The Israelites conquered the
Promised Land with great
violence – because God
commanded them to do so! He
instructed them to exterminate
the Canaanite tribes who were
living in the Promised Land.

21. Joshua
The Royal Executioners
The purpose of this Holy War was to
show that God takes sin very
seriously. The Canaanites were guilty
of dire sins.
• They had rejected the Living God
to worship idols.
• They practised human sacrifice by
burning children alive.
• They practised ritual prostitution as
an act of sympathetic magic.
• According to the myths, the
Canaanite gods murdered family
members, started wars and enjoyed
mutilating their victims. This must
have encouraged their worshippers
to follow their example.

22. Joshua
The Royal Executioners
Abraham had lived among the
Canaanites 500 years ago. God
said that Abraham’s family would
have to wait to possess the
Promised Land because He was
going to give the Canaanites time
to repent. The Canaanites had
observed God’s dealings with
Abraham’s family.
Yet at that time, and in all the 500
years since, they had not repented.
In fact, the Bible text implies that
they had become even worse!

23. Joshua
The Royal Executioners
The Canaanites had been hearing
about God’s more recent actions
among the Israelites for forty years
(the escape from Egypt, their
victories over the attacking armies)
yet they still had not repented.

24. Joshua
The Royal Executioners
Israel was to become God’s own
country, and therefore there could be
no risk of corruption by the
Canaanites’ example.
It was time for the Canaanites to be
punished as they deserved. So God
sent the Israelites, who destroyed the
Canaanites with great savagery.

25. Joshua
The Royal Executioners
We know of one Canaanite who genuinely
repented. Her name was Rahab, and she
had been a cult prostitute, right at the
centre of the evil Canaanite religion.
God forgave Rahab’s whole family and
allowed them to live among the Israelites.
Rahab later married an Israelite named
Salmon, and her grandson’s grandson was
King David.
If any other Canaanites had repented, do
you think God would have forgiven them?

26. Joshua
The Royal Executioners
The Israelites learned
from this that God WILL
punish sin.

27. David
The Darkness is Within
After the Israelites had conquered
Canaan, they stopped conquering.
They had no plans to take over the
world. They just wanted their own
Promised Land.
ALL their remaining wars were wars
of defence.

28. David
The Darkness is Within
Soon after the Israelites settled in
Canaan, the Philistines (‘Purple
People’ or ‘People from the Sea’)
arrived. They too wanted to conquer
the land of Israel!
The Philistines were another people
with a murderous religion. If they had
been allowed to establish their cult in
Israel, it would no longer have been
God’s chosen land.

29. David
The Darkness is Within
So for the next two centuries, the
Israelites had to fight them off.
They eventually drove the Philistines
out of Canaan.

30. The Kings and the Prophets
The Darkness is Within
After that, God did not command any
more wars. The Israelites did,
however, fight more wars of defence
against obvious enemies such as the
Assyrians and Babylonians.
The prophets kept reminding them
Repent of your own sins first.

31. The Kings and the Prophets
The Darkness is Within
It is much easier to recognise other
people’s sins than our own.
Once the Israelites had recognised the
seriousness of their enemies’ sins,
they had to face up to their own.
It took them a very long time to learn
this lesson.

32. The Kings and the Prophets
The Darkness is Within
The goal of the Israelites’ conquest
was to set up a theocracy in one
geographic location – a community
that would be faithful to God and
formed in His image.

33. The Kings and the Prophets
The Darkness is Within
To keep the community pure, God
commanded the death sentence for
certain sins.
• Murder
• Adultery
• Idolatry
• Blasphemy
• Sabbath breaking
• Disobedience to parents

34. The Kings and the Prophets
The Darkness is Within
Why were these sins singled out for
capital punishment?
All sins are serious and all sins cause
a spiritual death. God might have
demanded capital punishment for
every sin – but then nobody would
have survived childhood! So only a
few sins were to be punished on
earth.
The death penalty was a metaphor for
spiritual death. It reminded God’s
people that all sin will cause death in
the end.

35. The Kings and the Prophets
The Darkness is Within
God sent prophets, who spoke at
length about all kinds of sins.
The prophets warned that if the
people did not repent, God would
punish them.
Most of the people failed to repent.
God did not command any of this evil
behaviour. They were doing it in
disobedience to His commands.

36. The Kings and the Prophets
The Darkness is Within
Eventually, the people took the
consequences of their sins. Most
of the Israelites were conquered by
the foreign super-powers and
carried off into exile. They never
returned home.

37. Ezra
A People for His own Possession
After the Exile, only 2-3% of the Jews returned to
the Promised Land.
However, these were the ones who were more likely
to be serious about living as God’s holy people.
The High Priest, Ezra, helped them build a new
society.

38. Ezra
A People for His own Possession
These people were finally
grasping the seriousness of
sin. They tried hard to live
lives that pleased God so they
made very strict laws about
work, crime, the family and
religious rituals. As we read in
the New Testament, they
sometimes they became silly
about just how strict they were
willing to be.
If you repent,
God does forgive you.

39. Ezra
A People for His own Possession
From the time of Ezra, the
violent punishments died
out. There is no record that
Ezraic Jews actually killed
people for breaking the
Sabbath. There was simply
strong social pressure to
keep the rules if you
wanted to keep your
friends.
Why did Ezra’s Jews ignore the harsh punishments of Moses’ law? It was
because they had finally learned something about what God really wanted.
Their focus was on the positive side of holy living, not on revenge for
mistakes.

40. Ezra
A People for His own Possession
The Jewish community
knew they were sinners and
they hoped God would
forgive them.
They expected God to send
a Messiah. Some of them
even understood that the
Messiah would bring the
confirmation of God’s
forgiveness.

41. The Messiah
A Consummation of Grace
Jesus – our guarantee
of forgiveness and eternal life.
In the teaching of Jesus, sin is also
taken very seriously – just as
seriously as in any part of the Old
Testament.
How seriously did Jesus Himself take
sin?

42. The Messiah
A Consummation of Grace
The new part of Jesus’ message was that forgiveness was now guaranteed.

43. The Messiah
A Consummation of Grace
The New Testament tells us to live a
life that reflects God’s mercy.
There is no need to act with
aggression towards other people. We
know from 2000 years of Bible
history that God takes sin seriously
and that the unrepentant will be
punished in the afterlife. We don’t
need to do God’s job for Him!

44. The Messiah
A Consummation of Grace
In the Church, nobody is
killed.
Jesus did give us a metaphor
for spiritual death (Matthew
18:15-18). It is called
excommunication.
This means that a person who
keeps on and on doing wrong
without saying sorry will
eventually be thrown out of
the Church.

45. Summary
Abraham = be ready to sacrifice everything for God.
Moses & Joshua = recognise the horror of sin.
David & the Kings = face up to the sin within yourself.
Ezra = trust in God’s mercy.
Jesus = how God has arranged forgiveness.