How could God do that?

How I square an all-loving God with the Old Testament.

As a Christian with a moderate social media presence, I’m sometimes asked by atheists, and even other Christians, how I feel about the uglier narratives in the Old Testament.

Most recently, I was asked what I think about two in particular: God killing David and Bathsheba’s child (2 Samuel 12) and the provision for Israelite warriors to take beautiful captive women as wives if they so desire (Deuteronomy 21:10-14).

There’s no getting around how unpleasant these stories are, and every Christian has to come to terms with what they mean.

But it baffled me why anyone would care what a scientist thinks of these passages in scripture. If you want to know how to reconcile science and scripture, I’m your huckleberry. But when it comes to understanding God’s loving nature in the context of the Old Testament, surely it’s better to ask a theologian or a pastor?

When I asked the self-described skeptic who was pressing me about these stories why he wanted to hear from me, of all people, his answer was surprisingly reasonable. He wanted to know how a devoted non-expert looks at difficult parts of the Bible—the parts that, on the surface, make God look cruel and arbitrary—and still believes that God is all-loving.

Fair enough.

If you’re trying to figure out the appeal of Christianity to billions of people around the world, sometimes it’s more instructive to ask the rank-and-file members than to ask the experts and leaders.

You all know I’m a scientist, not a theologian or historian, and I never went to seminary. But if it helps anyone to know how a scientist and late-convert personally approaches the uglier narratives in the Old Testament, then I’m willing.

When I was a newly-minted theist, but still years from converting to Christianity, reading passages like these in the Bible for the first time was distressing. I had the notion that everything in the Bible, because it was written or inspired by God, must’ve had God’s stamp of approval. I read about Noah’s naked drunkenness and subsequent wrath towards his son Ham (Genesis 9:20-27) and Lot’s offering his daughters to a crazed mob of would-be rapists (Genesis 19), and felt confused. How could God approve of such things?

Well, he doesn’t. It took me a while to realize that.

The Bible isn’t just an instruction manual or a collection of motivational affirmations, it’s largely a history book. It chronicles God’s creation of the world, his creation of humankind, our fall from grace, his relationship with us, his covenants with us, our salvation, the establishment of his earthly church, and it concludes with a cryptic glimpse into the dramatic end of things on earth.

Why did I think the Bible would be exclusively beautiful, peaceful, and aesthetic? Why did I think every person featured in scripture, except for Satan and Judas, should be squeaky-clean heroes? Maybe because this is the impression Christians give when they mostly quote from the aesthetic parts of scripture. I don’t exactly know. But the parts that deal with humankind, which are most of scripture, are going to reflect our human nature, which is, let’s face it, really ugly at times. And how can God respond in an aesthetic way to our ugliness? He can’t, any more than a diligent human judge can respond in an aesthetic way to an ugly crime.

Okay, fine, you say. But sometimes (often) it seems as though the innocent are collateral damage when God is meting out justice. How should we think about that—how should we feel about that?

A perfect example is the aforementioned story of God killing David and Bathsheba’s infant son in 2 Samuel 12. David, out of lust for another man’s wife, effectively murders that man and then takes the woman. They have a child, and as punishment, God takes the child from them. It’s heart-crushing. It seems written on our souls that this is wrong. But God did it. How can we possibly square that with an all-loving God?

I have two responses for you: a logical one and an emotional one.

The Logical Response

You do the crime, you do the time. A perfectly loving God cannot let injustices slide. Is it loving to allow David to get away with murder? It’s certainly not loving to Bathsheba’s husband or to his family and friends.

But is the consequence appropriate to the crime? My skeptic questioner asked why God punished the child and not David, when David was the transgressor. I can only guess the skeptic doesn’t have children of his own, because no parent would consider the death of a child anything other than the worst possible punishment. And given that this child was the product of a union that happened through lust and murder, well… his death is heart-wrenchingly awful, but it does fit the theme.

The logical response on its own is insufficient. We’re emotional creatures, and if we ignore this aspect of reconciling a loving God with such an ugly narrative, we have an incomplete answer.

The Emotional Response

I don’t know how many of you reading this are parents, but maybe you can relate. When our children mess up badly, there is often a hesitation to punish them. That’s because it feels terrible to punish someone you love. No loving parent enjoys it. As a parent, there have been times I’ve thought to myself, do I really need to go through with this? But if, out of misguided affection or sympathy, we allowed our children to get away with bad behavior, we would be condemning them to the worst sort of life. Without consequences, it wouldn’t take long before they would become irredeemable monsters. Or, at the very least, by shielding them from consequences now we’d be setting them up for a much harsher reality of consequences imposed by an outside world that doesn’t love them.

If you love your children, you know you have to discourage bad behavior. And as unpleasant as it sounds, the only way to discourage bad behavior is through some form of suffering.

If God had let David get away with murder, it would not have been loving to David. How depraved might someone like David get if he could do whatever his power and influence allowed without any consequence? David was a man after God’s own heart, and in spite of his evil act, God still loved him. If God could save David through justified suffering, isn’t that much better than allowing him to reach a state of ultimate depravity?

So, if we accept that David needed to be punished, where does that leave his child? If God simply killed the child, and that was the end of the story, I don’t know that I could square that with God’s loving nature. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

This earthly existence is temporary. We aren’t meant to be here very long. Our true home is with God in eternity. So, when God takes a child, he doesn’t simply snuff out a life, he brings that child home.

This is where it gets really emotional, friends.

For better or worse, I can speak about this from experience. I’ve lost a child. My first daughter, Ellinor, was stillborn 11 years ago. After the shock of losing her, I fell into deep despair. There was a brief time after her death that I wasn’t sure how I could go on. I didn’t get any relief until I had a vision of God—her ultimate parent—gently taking her into his arms. I knew in that moment she was home, and it gave me peace.

After Ellinor’s death, I read books on heaven and near-death experiences. Many of the accounts of near-death experiences are credible, and they gave me a genuine sense of optimism about what comes next. Why? Because the word most commonly used to describe these experiences was love. The incredible, overwhelming, turn-the-dial-up-to-a-million sense of love these people felt when they had that brief sojourn into heaven’s foyer.

Biblical theology is that children get a ticket straight to heaven. So, while the loss of Ellinor was painful for me and her father, the pain is that of longing, not despair. I can imagine how David and Bathsheba felt when they lost their son, particularly under the circumstances. But knowing God’s perfectly loving nature, they likely knew that his death was not the end.

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When I encounter ugly narratives in the Bible, I remind myself that the ugliness is ours, not God’s. The Bible, despite what many detractors say, isn’t a book of fairy tales, but a realistic account of human behavior. All you have to do is look around to see that nothing about human nature has changed since day one of human history.

But God’s ultimate response to our ugliness was the Cross. Jesus’ sacrifice was the single most loving act in the history of the universe, and it was for us. So, even when I encounter difficult passages in the Bible that I don’t fully understand, I keep in mind two things:

1. We are not perfect. We’re so far from it that I doubt we'd recognize or comprehend moral perfection if we did see it, any more than the inhabitants of Flatland would comprehend a three-dimensional object if they saw one. I’m content to not fully understand everything God does, because it’s just not possible.

2. I can trust God in spite of not understanding him fully, because I know he loves us. He loves us more than we can possibly know. He allowed his precious, perfect Son to die in the worst way imaginable, to take on all of our immorality, all of our transgressions, all of our awfulness, and wiped our slates clean so that we can be with him in eternity.

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We have to keep in mind that, while human nature hasn’t changed over our history, our collective behavior actually has. There has been real progress in many parts of the world over thousands of years, such that most of us would find the rules of battlefield wife-acquiring in Deuteronomy 21 unthinkable. But how did it get that way?

My dad worked with severe behavior problem teenagers in the public school system. These were mostly boys who came from terrible backgrounds, and many had been convicted of violent crimes. His job was to rehabilitate them and eventually mainstream them into the normal school system. As he explained to me, you can’t change people overnight. It’s a gradual, difficult process, that starts first with establishing loving authority and trust.

For my dad to be successful with these kids (and he was astonishingly successful), he first had to convince them that he cared about them and that he would never let even the slightest bad behavior slide. Every action had a consequence. Changing their behavior gradually led to a change in attitude, and with most of these kids, they effectively became whole new people by the end of the process.

When God stepped in to make a covenant with the Israelites, the ancient near-eastern world was brutal and harsh. I don’t think we have any concept of just how terrible it was. Every kind of horror was happening, from institutionalized rape to human sacrifice. If God wanted to change us, as the school system wanted to change those boys, I can only reason that without violating our free will, God was constrained by his nature to use a gradual, incremental process. Which, by any reasonable and informed standard, has worked.

War still exists, but there are rules. Battlefield rape is no longer acceptable, let alone glorified, and it’s a scandal when prisoners are mistreated. While, sadly, slavery still exists in some parts of the world, the worldwide slave trade was abolished, thanks to the efforts of conscientious Christians like William Wilburforce. Billions of people around the world have been lifted out of grinding poverty to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle. Most of us look with disdain on forced marriage, child soldiers and child labor, and on human sacrifice.

We didn’t accomplish that on our own. It was through God’s loving authority that we were able to make those changes, such that we now read those ugly narratives in the Old Testament and do anything other than shrug our shoulders.

For more discussion of the gradual redemptive process, see Scot McKnight’s blog entry, “When the Bible Ain’t Pretty.”