Show Notes
How do we make sense of the violent passages in the Old Testament while following the peace teachings of Jesus? In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland takes on one of the most common and challenging questions he receives as a pastor and author: Why does God seem so violent in the Old Testament compared to Jesus in the New Testament?
Derek walks us through:
Why Joshua and 1 Samuel 15 are such difficult passages for modern readers.
Four historical Christian approaches to interpreting divine violence: acceptance, accommodation, misunderstanding, and allegory.
The importance of foundational Christian beliefs—God’s oneness, immutability, pure love, and Jesus as the perfect revelation of God.
Why wrestling with Scripture is not a weakness, but part of a faithful Christian journey.
How we can faithfully read the Old Testament while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
This is a thoughtful, theologically rich conversation for anyone who has struggled with the tension between the God of the Old Testament and the God revealed in Christ. Key Takeaways
The God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament.
God’s nature is unchanging, pure love—even if the stories in Scripture sometimes leave us unsettled.
Christians throughout history have used multiple ways to interpret violent passages—we don’t have to resolve the tension to remain faithful.
Jesus is the final word, the clearest picture of God, and our ultimate guide.
Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
I Samuel 15:31 Samuel 15:33 John 1:18
Preorder Derek’s new book, Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us here: https://amzn.to/42jSZAs
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Get to know the host: https://derekvreeland.com
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Transcript
Welcome back.
To another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I’m your host, Derek Vreeland, and I am glad that you have joined me for this episode.
We’ve been talking a little bit about the Old Testament.
In the previous episode, we talked about why the Old Testament is necessary, why we need it, why we as Christians still read the Old Testament and receive it as holy inspired scripture.
But I know that that brings some issues up for people.
So we’re going to talk about one of those today.
But before we jump into today’s episode, if you haven’t already, let me invite you to subscribe.
to this podcast wherever you’re listening to podcasts and if you enjoy peaceable and kind if you would be so kind please leave a rating and review
Because that helps other people discover the kind of Christian content we’re producing here.
Our goal is to plant seeds of peace.
and kindness in our world that seems to lack both.
On today’s episode, I wanted to answer the question
That comes to me all the time.
As a pastor and an author, I feel like I answer this question at least once a month, if not every other week.
People who love Jesus and are devoted to the scriptures, as I am, often are wondering: how do we
Reconcile the violence of the Old Testament with the peace teachings of Jesus
And I appreciate when people are asking that question because they’re reading the scriptures and they’re they’re thinking about it, they’re processing it.
I oversee the small groups and classes at our church.
And years ago, I had a small group leader that wanted to meet with me.
to discuss some passages in the Old Testament.
And so we met for coffee and we were working through a passage in Joshua.
Joshua becomes one of those problematic books of the Bible when you see the ministry of Jesus,
Reaching out to Gentiles, showing the mercy of God to Gentiles.
And then of course the New Testament is this
exploration of how the people of God can be made up of both Jews and Gentiles.
So much of the early apostolic church was wrestling with this
I think this was primarily what Paul was writing about in most of his letters.
There’s a number of threads that work through Paul’s letters.
And one of those threads is the unity of the church, which was becoming multi-ethnic.
Both those who are ethnically Jew and those who are ethnically non-Jew, how are they going to worship together in the body of Messiah?
So Jesus told us that our mission as the church is to go and make disciples, teaching people to obey everything that Jesus taught.
And so Jesus teaches us to love our enemies, but in the book of Joshua, you see God instructing
Joshua, who took over the ministry of Moses, leading the people of Israel out of the wilderness into the promised land, we see God commanding Joshua to exterminate
The Canaanites.
And so often we will describe this as the slaughter of the Canaanites.
How do Christians read and understand that?
So I was meeting with this small group leader, and we were discussing that
And the leader said, Well, I don’t have a problem at all with it.
And I found that curious.
I said, you don’t have a problem with God commanding uh Joshua to commit what we would call genocide?
And she said to me, well, no, because sometimes God needs to wipe people out.
And I said, so you believe in
Ethnic cleansing?
Like a whole ethnic group of people need to be wiped out for God’s purposes to go forward?
And of course she backpedaled a little bit.
No, no, no.
I don’t I’m not saying I believe in that.
I just
I was my problem with in that whole conversation was that she was reading some of these passages and wasn’t bothered by it.
Now I love the Old Testament.
Described that in the last episode.
I spend time every day reading the Old Testament.
I did that this morning.
I’ve really grown to love it.
But there are times that I have questions.
And I think any serious Christian reader of the Old Testament, if you’re really paying attention to the story,
There should be some things in there that cause you to question.
And that’s a good thing.
I think we should take our questions.
to the scriptures and we should wrestle together on how do we make sense
of some of these problematic passages, particularly the hyper-violence and the divinely sanctioned violence in the Old Testament.
So on this episode, I want to explore that.
I want to give you some historical Christian ways in which Christians have dealt with this.
Because there is a way to read the Old Testament and still follow Jesus.
I have known of at least one pastor in our community.
who rejected the Christian faith actually stepped out of ministry because he claims to now to be an atheist.
And part of his journey away from the Christian faith
is he didn’t know how to make sense of some of these Old Testament passages.
You don’t need to reject the claims of Jesus because of things in the Old Testament you find problematic.
You don’t have to step away from the Christian faith.
Remember, we are modern followers of Jesus who are standing on the shoulders of those who came before us.
And for 2,000 years, Christians have been wrestling with the scriptures, trying to figure out how do we live in this tension, because there is an apparent tension
between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Things begin to change in the New Testament.
We have to rethink things
reimagine things.
For example, in the Old Testament we see that God is one.
And of course, Christians, we believe in the oneness of God.
There is only one God
That the God of Israel, the Lord Yahweh, is the one true Creator God.
But in the New Testament, with Jesus, we’ve had to rethink what that oneness looks like
Because Jesus claimed to be God, Jesus prayed to his Father, whom he called God, and then Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit who is to come, who does things that only God can do
And so Christians had to rethink that oneness.
And the way we have historically thought about that is God is Trinity, one in God’s essence and nature, three revealed persons.
So it’s God in three persons.
So we don’t have to today try to figure out how can Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Father all be God
Because the Christians who have gone before us, they’ve wrestled with things like that.
But things change.
One of the other big changes in the New Testament is that the people of God
Are no longer marked by Jewish ethnicity and circumcision and observance of the Torah, the Old Testament law.
That we had to rethink that.
We had to shift our imagination a bit.
And so I think we also have to think about and perhaps rethink
These violent passages in the Old Testament, particularly when God is the one commanding it
So, before we jump into some of these historical ways of dealing with Old Testament violence, let me start with some foundational statements.
Number one, the God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament.
There was an early heresy in the early church, which we now call Marcionism.
And Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament was a lesser God, that this wasn’t the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Uh the Marcionite movement wanted to completely remove the Old Testament.
And the early church fathers were univocal.
In that no, the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures are a part of our story.
They are a part of the Christian faith.
that the Old Testament story is our story, and that it is one comprehensive and cohesive story about the one God who has come to
Rescue God’s good world.
So we reject that idea that the God in the Old Testament is somehow different than Jesus.
The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament.
Number two, God does not change.
Christians from the very beginning, the church fathers again, they are in consensus.
that God is the big term is immutable.
That is, God does not change
So when we hold on to that value, that that foundational belief, it does create some tension.
When God in the Old Testament is seeming to act differently than the God in the New Testament, Jesus in particular
Number three, we believe that God’s essence is pure, that God’s essence is unmixed, and that it’s simple
There is only one divine essence and nature, and that nature is love.
Now this seems to be elementary, but again, these are foundational statements about what we believe.
But there are some Christians who would say, well.
There is one divine essence, but in God’s nature, God is a mixture.
He He is both love and wrath, right?
He is a God who does love and has mercy and compassion, but God also has a holy hatred and sometimes wants to kill people.
Well, we reject that.
Orthodox, and I mean little o Orthodox, Orthodox Christian teaching from the beginning has always held that God is one in God’s nature.
So even though it will appear to us in reading in scripture that God may act differently, that doesn’t reflect on God’s nature.
God’s nature, which does not change from Old Testament to New Testament.
is unmixed and it is a a single kind of nature.
Number four, and this is as important as any of the
Three foundational statements I’ve already talked about.
And number four is that God is most perfectly revealed in Jesus.
And I want you to hold on to that because what we see in the Gospels and in the Epistles in the New Testament
Is this ongoing statement that Jesus reveals to us what God is like?
John in his prologue in John chapter 1 and verse 18, no one has ever seen God.
It is God the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart who has made him known
And can you imagine John and his gospel making this statement that nobody has ever seen God?
It’s almost like John.
Have you read the Old Testament?
People had visions of God.
Moses saw at least the backside of God.
There are appearances of God throughout the Old Testament, but John says
As compared to the revelation of God in Jesus, no one at any time has ever seen God.
It is God the Son, close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known
And it’s interesting to follow that theme throughout John’s Gospel, because time and again you hear Jesus saying, well, if you’ve seen the Father, you’ve seen me.
Uh the Father and I are one.
I only do what I see the Father doing.
I only say what I hear the Father saying.
And so Paul carries this on in various places through his letters that Jesus is showing us what God is like.
So as we wrestle with the peace teachings of Jesus and the violence of the Old Testament, hold on to these
four foundational beliefs.
There is only one God, Old Testament, New Testament.
This is the same God.
This is one story.
God is not changing, though our perspective of God changes
God is pure, unmixed in God’s nature, and it is Jesus who perfectly reveals God to us.
So, in all of our wrestling in the Old Testament, we as followers of Jesus are going to default back to Jesus and let Jesus have the final say.
Now, there are a number of passages in the Old Testament that speak of violence, and I’m just going to pick one verse.
For us to hold up.
It’s one of the worst verses, one of the most problematic verses.
And it’s 1 Samuel 15, verse 3.
And this is the prophet Samuel speaking on God’s behalf to Saul.
Now, if you remember the story of Israel.
Israel wanted a king, an earthly king, like all of their neighbors.
They were getting jealous.
All these other tribes and nations, they had their king
But God was always supposed to be the king of Israel.
And so the people cry out, We want a king.
Samuel goes to God.
God, they want a king.
What am I supposed to do?
And God says, I will point out and show who you are to anoint king.
And God even tells Samuel, they’re not rejecting you, Samuel, they are rejecting me.
So God accommodates to the people’s wishes and gives them a king, and the first king of Israel is Saul
And so Saul, like the other kings, were involved in warfare.
And so in 1 Samuel 15:3, Samuel is giving these instructions to Saul
Now go and attack Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have
Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey
All right, take a breath with that one.
First Samuel 15, 3 is not a verse that people are using to create bumper stickers.
This is not a verse that you put on your refrigerator.
You will not find this verse.
in any of those Bible promise handbooks.
But this is a part of holy inspired scripture.
And it hopefully for you is a bit problematic.
Samuel, speaking on God’s behalf, is telling Saul to destroy all of the Amalekites, all that they have, and to kill men and women.
To kill children and infants?
Even killing all of their farm animals, including the donkeys.
What did the donkeys ever do to Saul?
But he was commanded by God to utterly destroy all people and animals.
Now, as the story continues,
Saul goes and fights the Amalekites and destroys most of them, but he keeps King Agag as sort of a trophy to offer to God.
Now, God is displeased by this, and because of Saul’s disobedience, God rejects Saul and his entire household.
From royalty in this new kingdom of Israel.
As the story goes on, David is anointed king
But God rejects Saul, according to 1 Samuel, because he doesn’t kill everyone.
He keeps King Agag alive.
Hey friends, I wanted to pause for just a second to let you know that my next book, Incarnation, 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us, is available for pre-order.
This Bible study is for individual devotional use or for small group discussion.
Link to pre-order is in the show notes.
And there is another verse in 1 Samuel 15 that’s also awful and really hard to hear.
But Samuel goes to fulfill what God has called and kills King Agag.
In fact, it says in 1 Samuel 15, verse 33, and Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.
Oh man.
Such a difficult passage.
Every time I’m reading through 1 Samuel, and I was reading in 1 and 2 Samuel this summer, in fact.
Every time I come across that, I just sort of am taken back for a moment.
So what are we to do with this?
very violent passage in the Old Testament.
And again I just want to focus on first Samuel fifteen three, God’s command through the prophet to Saul to kill every man, woman, child, infant, and all of their animals.
Well, historically, Christians have taken different approaches.
And there are more ways than just this, but I’ve sort of put them in four different categories
Four different ways to interpret or to make sense of Old Testament violence like this.
The first is acceptance.
The first way to interpret it is just to say that, well, this was a historical, literal event that God literally commanded Samuel to tell Saul to kill
babies to kill men, women, and children.
This interpretation is built upon the divine command theory.
An ethical theory that says, well, if God commands it, it must be right.
Everything that God commands is right.
And in this interpretation, acceptance, the interpreters would say, well, it was necessary
for God to command the killing of certain people in order to sustain Israel
Israel needed to be protected.
Israel needed to flourish so that God’s salvation story can move forward
And that’s where a lot of Christians are.
These would be the Christians that aren’t really bothered by it.
They think, well, if God commanded it, it must be okay.
So acceptance.
The second way of interpreting violent passages like this is accommodation.
That is to see, well, this was a historical event.
But not an expression of God’s true will.
Rather, passages like 1 Samuel 15:3 are an example of God accommodating
God’s self to the people’s desire to kill, to murder
So it’s it’s it’s revealing God’s willingness to not say that this is my will, but rather God so desires to work with humanity.
God accommodates God’s self to a very violent culture.
Of course, in in Bible times, this was just
a given.
I mean it was these tribal Semitic groups were always involved in tribal warfare
They were always attacking one another and killing one another, and it was just accepted as the norm.
So just like God did not desire Israel to have a king, God chose to accommodate God’s self to
human desire and gave them a king, even though it wasn’t his expressed will.
In this interpretation, the accommodation view
The violence here was necessary, but it was limited.
It was very specific.
The third way of interpreting hyperviolent passages like this is simply to say it’s a misunderstanding.
That while this was a historical event, that Saul did go and slaughter the Amalekites and save King Agag, but Samuel had to chop him up into pieces.
that this was a misunderstanding, that it wasn’t God’s desire to kill people
But Samuel didn’t rightly hear or understand God’s instructions.
Somehow there was miscommunication.
And in this view, the a misunderstanding interpretive view, it would say that, well, this kind of violence is not necessary.
This is another example of Israel missing the mark.
The fourth way of interpreting passages like this is the allegorical interpretation.
This was really popular by a number of early church fathers.
I’m thinking Origin in particular.
Would emphasize that scripture is holy, it is inspired, it is given by God, but there are layers of meaning.
Aquinas in the Middle Ages would go on to say that scripture actually has four different layers of meaning.
There is a historical literal.
There is an ethical.
There is an allegorical.
And so a number of the church, early church fathers, would emphasize that.
that when you read things like 1 Samuel 15, 3, it wasn’t a literal historical event.
This is not an expression of God’s will.
This was
not necessary physical violence, but rather as followers of Jesus, we see it allegorically
So when there’s divinely sanctioned violence, that is violence that we are to take against sin.
against the temptations of our own hearts, the own our own darkness within.
And so we don’t utterly destroy literally men, women, children, donkeys, and the rest.
Rather, we are killing and utterly destroying the sin within our own hearts
And again, there are perhaps other ways to interpret it, but to me, these four categories give us options.
One is acceptance, two, accommodation, three, a misunderstanding, or four, allegorical.
And all four of these are Christian interpretations.
Historically, Christians have used these four ways of dealing with Old Testament violence
So that sort of begs the question, well, which is the best one?
And perhaps you’re wondering my own opinions, like, which of these four do I choose?
But before I talk about my preferences, I just want to say that you have some freedom here.
Like you get to pick which of these four that you want to use.
Now, personally, most of the issues that I have are with that first option.
I do not think accepting
divinely sanctioned violence in the Old Testament helps me in any way figure out the tension between that, 1 Samuel 15, 3, and the peace teachings of Jesus.
So the number one option, which is a Christian option, and you’re free to take that option, hasn’t really helped me.
You can accept
Old Testament violence and still make the case that God does not change.
Remember, we had our four foundational ideas, and one of those is that God doesn’t change.
So you could accept Old Testament violence and say, well, God is not changing, but God is changing in and through Jesus, how God chooses to relate to humanity.
So God’s nature is not changing, but God’s actions are changing.
And honestly, that doesn’t satisfy me a whole lot.
Because again, the fourth foundational principle that Jesus perfectly reveals God
That causes problems for me.
I mean, I just can’t imagine Jesus ever telling any of his disciples, now go into that city and kill men, women, and children
I mean, today, if anyone were to say, well, I was praying and God spoke to me and God said, go kill babies, right?
We followers of Jesus are going to say no.
So you can choose acceptance, although I think it is very problematic.
So for me, I have bounced around between options two, three, and four.
That either God was accommodating God’s self to human violence, or maybe Israel misunderstood the commands of God, or maybe it’s just better to take an allegorical approach
Often when I’m reading the Old Testament, just in my morning Bible reading, and I come across violent passages like 1 Samuel 15, I draw a sad face in the margin of my Bible
Because I’m thinking, if you had the revelation of God that’s in Jesus, you wouldn’t be doing that
First and 2 Samuel spend a lot of time with David, and David is quick to grab the sword.
And so last summer, when I was reading in 1 and 2 Samuel in the Old Testament, I was reading in the book of Acts in the New Testament at the same time.
And the contrast is stark.
David was always reaching for the sword.
In fact, God tells David ultimately that he cannot build the temple because David was a man of bloodshed
That’s a little hint there as to where we’re going in Jesus.
And so in reading 1 and 2 Samuel and the book of Acts, I noticed how often that David is reaching for the sword.
In the book of Acts, you never see the disciples grabbing the sword.
Their intuition was to preach the good news, right?
This is the sword of the spirit
It’s the preaching of the gospel of Jesus.
And so when I’m in the Old Testament and I see verses like 1 Samuel 15, 3, I just draw a little sad face and I keep on reading.
uh because this it it makes me sad.
I think over and over, David, if you knew Jesus, who is going to be your great, great, great, great, great, great grandson, if you knew Jesus
you wouldn’t be doing half the things you were doing.
And and that speaks of of David’s uh quick uh impulse to grab the sword.
Uh David and Bathsheba, David multiplying wives, like all these things.
I’m like, David, if you knew Jesus, uh, you wouldn’t be doing those things.
But I read the Old Testament
In its context.
And David didn’t have the full revelation of God who is in Jesus
So, for me these days, in addition to the little sad face, I typically allegorize these passages.
I just go with option number four, and I make some kind of analogy.
So when David’s fighting his enemies, I think of the enemies of my soul.
When David is taking his sword against his enemies, I think, what are those enemies assailed against my soul that are tempting me?
Away from the ways of Jesus.
I need to take the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, to those enemies.
So when I’m reading the Old Testament, I simply let the story be the story.
And I recognize that any
point in the old testament.
This is not the end of the story.
Jesus is the end of the story
Well, I do have good news for you, and that is you really don’t have to resolve the tension.
It’s okay for there to be tension.
You can choose any of these four, but you can continue to wrestle with the scriptures and and work through it in community and in Bible study and in conversation.
But you don’t have to resolve the tension because at the end of the day, we are followers of Jesus.
We’re not followers of the prophet Samuel
We are not called to walk in the ways of Joshua or Samuel or Saul or David or any of the kings of Israel.
We are called
to follow King Jesus, to walk in his ways.
So sometimes when I’m reading the Old Testament and I I’m I’m reading something I don’t quite understand, I just let the story be the story and I keep reading.
Because I don’t have to apply verses like 1 Samuel 15, 3 to my life.
That’s not why that scripture is in there.
That scripture is a part.
of the spirit-inspired story that leads me to Jesus.
So however you interpret the Old Testament, that’s up to you.
What I want to encourage you to do is follow Jesus.
Obey Jesus.
Walk in the ways of King Jesus
Like his disciples said, it is Jesus who has the words of eternal life.
And if we will walk faithfully in the footsteps of Jesus,
We will find the ways of peace.
We will find a peaceable and yes, kind of life.
Well, I know this was a bit of a deep dive today.
Wrestling with scripture, doing theology, but I hope that it has encouraged you.
And if you want to have a conversation, reach out to me.
On social media.
I am at Derek Vreeland all over social media.
All my social media accounts are in the show notes.
Reach out to me with your questions
I would love to help you wrestle with these scriptures because I love the Bible, the whole Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament.
I delight in daily Bible reading
And for me, I wrestle a whole lot less with the Old Testament because I’m fine with
Fixing my eyes and attention on Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
Well, that’s all we have for today’s episode.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.