Diabolical Evil in the Bible

Diabolical Evil in the Bible

September 8, 2020

Consider if you will the readings from the Revised Common Lectionary Daily Lectionary for September 8, 2020. They include Exodus 12:29-42, Deuteronomy 17:2-13, and Romans 13:1-7. As I read these three passages I was appalled. I already knew the story told at Exodus 12:29-42. I already knew what Romans 13:1-7 says. Deuteronomy 17:2-13 was new to me. These three passages have something in common. They are all expressions and approval of diabolical evil in the Bible. Let me explain. I’ll start with Exodus 12:29-42.

The worst part of Exodus 12:29-42 is verses 29 and 30. They read:

At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians; and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead. NRSV.

Yes, this story is part of the foundational story of the great Jewish faith. I know that, and I mean no disrespect to my Jewish brothers and sisters. Yet the truth remains. This story presents God as a mass murderer. God, called here Yahweh (rendered in the translation as the Lord) murders an unspecified but obviously large number of innocent people. This god (and I mean that lower case g intentionally) is a terrorist pure and simple. He (Yahweh is always he though God of course is not) commits an act of terror that puts the 9-11 hijackers to shame. He does it to terrorize the Egyptians into doing what he says he wants, that they let the enslaved Israelites leave Egypt. Freeing the Israelites from slavery is of course a very good thing and a worthwhile divine objective, but the ends don’t justify the means for God any more than they do for us. Killing thousands of innocent people to accomplish even a worthwhile goal is impermissible at best. The God of Exodus 12:29-30 commits diabolical evil. The Bible justifies and even celebrates that evil. I cannot. I will not. I condemn it without reservation.

Then there’s Deuteronomy 17:2-13. There Yahweh sets down as divine law that the Israelites must stone to death any Israelite who has worshipBied any god other than Yahweh provided only that the act of idolatry shall be proven by the testimony of at least two witnesses. Yahweh doesn’t commit diabolical evil in this story, he just orders his people to commit diabolical evil. In this passage God isn’t a terrorist exactly like God is in the story from Exodus. God is however so insecure and so jealous of other gods that he must see those of his people who worship another god brutally put to death. Murdered. Not understood. Not corrected (if they needed correcting, which they probably didn’t). Not reconciled. Murdered. Stoned to death. Killed through an act of diabolical evil. And it’s in the Bible.

Then we come to Romans 13:1-7. These verses are in one of the authentic letters of Paul though Paul certainly didn’t write them. That doesn’t really matter for our purposes here because whether Paul wrote them or not they’re in the Bible. Those verses begin, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” Romans 13:1 NRSV. The notion this verse expresses simply boggles the mind. How could anyone in the Roman Empire in the first or early second century CE believe that God had put Nero or Caligula on the throne? They were mad. They were evil. Nero persecuted Christians. Caligula married his sisters and went stark raving insane. Instituted by God? I sure can’t accept that they were.

How much less then can we today believe this verse? God put Stalin in charge of the Soviet Union to kill something like twenty million people before the Germans invaded in 1941? God put Hitler in charge of Germany to commit genocide against the Jews and plunge Europe into a war that killed something like forty million people? God put Mao in charge of China to kill millions of people out of some crazed atheistic ideology? God made Andrew Jackson President of the United States to kill tens of thousands of Native Americans? No way. Not on your life. God doesn’t put madmen to rule over hundreds of millions of people and kill tens of millions of them. Not in the ancient world, not in the modern one. We humans are tragically good at doing that all by ourselves. Romans 13:1’s assertion that all authority comes from God says that God does these horrible things. That assertion is diabolically evil.

There is no doubt about it. There are passages in the Bible that justify, decree, and glorify diabolical evil. There just are. God didn’t put them there. People with primitive ideas about God or with ulterior motives put them there. Our call isn’t to accept them. It is to see through them and call them what they are—diabolical human error. They are not God’s word. They are not divine truth. They aren’t any kind of truth. Diabolical evil, that’s what they are. Let’s be brave enough to say it. Let’s be brave enough to cut these and so many other evil, violent bible verses our of our personal canon. Let us relegate these verses to the ash heap of history where they belong. Our great faith of trust in God who is love demands no less.