The God of the Bible

When I was being introduced to Christianity as I approached the end of my schooling I was encouraged to learn Bible verses.
One of those was 2Tim3:16, “all scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness”.
I did not realise at the time that that meant the Hebrew scriptures, but a small matter.
Similarly I did not fully appreciate that the scriptures that formed the basis of Christ’s meditation while on earth did of course not include the new Testament.
I understood by this verse that all scripture was of equal standing, worth and authority.
Later I began to realise that some books and verses were valued more highly than others and emphasised more within my particular tradition.
Over the years I have had to form my own way of reading the whole Bible in some way that does not leave me with a for example a rather dark view of the God it reveals.
So for example in a recent sermon when the preacher described the God of the Bible as genocidal on the basis of his commissioning of the children of Israel to kill the inhabitants they found in the land of Canaan it was as well that I had such a methodology for such a moment as that.
For either the accumulating text of scripture is concerned with a particular people and a covenant God who seems at best little concerned with other peoples and at worst is downright vengeful.
Such a view of course comports with a Zionist reading of the Bible in which the promised land will be restored to the people of Israel and will usher in the day of God’s wrath and judgement of the entire world.
This is to need to read the Bible as if the vengeance and wrath of the Hebrew God has merely been delayed by the events of the Incarnation and the two millenia that have followed.
It is to read the Bible literally and from cover to cover rather than to reread the Hebrew scriptures in the light of the Incarnation and teaching of the Christ not to mention his death and resurrection, as it seems to me we are required to do by the story of the Emmaus road.
The fulfilment of the city, THE symbol of humanity’s collective resistance to God, rather than being its rebuilding in geographical earthly Jerusalem is the new Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven. The fulfilment of the Temple the fascination of so many in the earthly city of modern day Jerusalem being Christ himself. And the fulfilment of the land flowing with milk and honey is not that strip of land in the Middle East but rather is the New creation in which there is no more tears, pain or death and that is populated by all peoples. This rather than some particularistic, dualistic us and them vision is the vision that Jesus by his Spirit enabled the Apostles to see.
It is this universal vision of which the church is but sacrament that tragically has been so lost for so long and that it is the churches duty to recover.
As I walked into church I spoke to someone who has recently started coming in his older age and that was precisely what he said that he was “rediscovering the church”.
A church that is inclusive, not judgemental, accepting and is attempting to play a new game of non-violence modelled upon Jesus rather that the understanding of the writers who wrote the Hebrew scriptures and yet who progressively were enable to begin to see signs of an altogether alternative manifestation almighty god than those around them, fully revealed of course in the person of Jesus.





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