It Doesn’t
Matter
July 7, 2020
1 Samuel 15:1-3, 7-23
I have heard people say
that they lost their belief in God and left the Christian faith because of one
particular story in the Bible. It’s the story of God’s command to King Saul to
kill every living thing among a people called the Amalekites. For no apparent
reason the Amalekites had attacked the Hebrews during the Exodus at a place
called Rephidim. The Hebrews fended off the attack. At some time that had to be
at least a couple of centuries later Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, has the
prophet Samuel tell King Saul that Yahweh would punish the Amalekites “for what
they did in opposing Israel when they came up out of Egypt.” 1 Samuel 15:2.
Yahweh has Samuel tell Saul to attack the Amalekites “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.” 1 Samuel 15:3. Saul attacks the
Amalekites as directed. He defeats them, but he doesn’t quite do what Yahweh
had told him to do. He takes Agag, the king of the Amalekites, alive. He also
spares the best of the Amalekite livestock. 1 Samuel 15:8-9. Yahweh is not
pleased that Saul hasn’t quite done everything Yahweh had told him to do. He
says to Samuel: “I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from
following me, and has not carried out my commands.” Samuel tells Saul: “The Lord [Yahweh] has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this very day,
and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you.” 1 Samuel
15:28. Samuel then anoints David as king in Saul’s place.
I have indeed heard
people say that they lost their faith in God and left the church because of
this story. Why? Why would this story cause someone to lose their faith? It is
of course a horrible story. In it God commands the complete destruction of the
Amalekites because many, many years earlier their predecessors has attacked
Israel in the wilderness. It would be bad enough if God had just ordered Saul
to defeat the Amalekites militarily, but that’s not what God does in this
story. God tells Saul to kill even the children and infants of the Amalekites.
Saul apparently did kill every Amalekite person of any age, children and
infants included, except the Amalekite king. He didn’t quite kill all the
livestock either but kept the best of it, he says, to offer as a sacrifice to
Yahweh. 1 Samuel 15:21. We would accuse Saul of the war crime of killing
innocent noncombatants. Not so Yahweh. Not in this story. Yahweh is so mad at
Saul that he deposes him as king of Israel. It is a truly horrid story indeed.
OK, but why would it
cause anyone to lose their faith? It’s just an ancient story, isn’t it? Well,
yes it is. The problem however is that the Christian church has told people for
a very long time that it and every other story in the Bible is more than that.
The church has told people that the Bible isn’t just another book. It has
called the Bible “the Word of God,” never mind that the Bible says that Jesus,
not the Bible, is the Word of God. The church has told people that if the Bible
says it happened then in fact it did happen just the way Bible says it did. So
people read the story of Saul and the Amalekites and accept the story as
historically accurate. If the Bible says God told Saul to kill every living
thing among the Amalekites, even children and infants, then God did tell
Saul to do that horrible thing, and we must accept that God did that horrible
thing. These people who read the story that way and lose their faith because of
it are quite properly repulsed by it. They can’t believe in a God who would
order such a crime against humanity. They can’t believe that there is any truth
in a religion whose God would command anyone to commit such an atrocity. So
they give up on God. They give up on Christianity. They lose their faith
altogether.
I can’t believe in a God who would do such a thing either. I certainly
wouldn’t be an ordained minister of a faith whose God would do such a thing.
Yet I do believe in God, and I am ordained to the ministry of Jesus Christ in
the United Church of Christ. How is that possible? It’s possible because I don’t
believe that God ever has or ever would tell anyone to kill anyone else. The
God I know, love, and seek to serve never told Saul to kill one single
Amalekite much less all of them. The Bible says God did. God didn’t.
Many Christians would find it shocking, or even blasphemy, to hear an
ordained Christian minister say such a thing. In order for me to say it I have
to have developed an understanding of the Bible different from the common one
that says that everything in the Bible is a product of divine inspiration and
therefore is and must be factually true. I have such a different understanding
of the Bible. I developed in my book Liberating the Bible.[1]
I explain there that belief that God wrote the Bible or that everything in it
was inspired by the Holy Spirit will not survive even a modest scrutiny of what
is actually in the Bible. The book is full of contradictions and impossible
things the couldn’t possibly have
happened. There is no way to tell which parts of it are divinely
inspired if it isn’t all divinely inspired. I won’t go into all of that here.
If you’re puzzled or curious please read my book.
Here I will just give you my suggestion of how we can read the Bible
without losing our faith. On the last page of Volume One of the book, in what I
think is the best paragraph I’ve ever written, I say:
Let me suggest that you think of the
Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient
authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient
forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and
Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these
pages. So come on it. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of
really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own
discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here
will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern
God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same things. We didn’t
all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human
nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom
here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite
you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but
sacred work of study and discernment. May God we with you in that work. Amen.[2]
Do you see how liberating that way of understanding the Bible is? There
is, after all, a reason why I titled that book Liberating the Bible.
When we approach the Bible this way we take everything in it seriously, but we
don’t accept anything in it uncritically. We Christians at least ask of
everything in it: Does this sound like Jesus? Does this story speak of God’s
love and grace? If so we accept it and work with it to discern what it has to
say to us and our world. If not we treat it as an historical record of ancient
thought that just doesn’t ring true today.
Does the story of Saul and the Amalekites speak to us of God’s love and
grace? Certainly not. The God of this story is vengeful and violent. The God we
know in and through Jesus Christ is loving not vengeful, peaceful not violent.
So let us relegate this story to the annals of the ancient past where it
belongs. Some ancient Israelite author or storyteller thought God had told Saul
to kill every living thing among the Amalekites. Perhaps he was simply trying
to give a divine reason for something that had actually happened, or maybe not.
We know how this story has come down to us over the centuries. We know what it
says. Someone well over two thousand years ago understood God to be like the
God of this story. We don’t. Someone many centuries ago thought that God had
ordered King Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites. It doesn’t
matter. We can rest assured that our God of love and grace never did any such
thing and never will. Thanks be to God!
[1] Sorenson,
Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians,
Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, Briarwood,
NY, 2018, Stop 11, pp. 193-211.
[2] Id.
p. 211.
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