The Problem of Free Will and Historical Context

Well, there are at least two problems that I think we need to be mindful of, not just with this passage in particular about the moms’ deal, but a whole lot of different passages on cannibalism and a whole lot of way more violent verses. There are a couple of things that are just really important that we consider. And the first is a little problem called free will. And then the second, now more familiar problem that needs to be considered and constantly kept in mind, is context.

So in your notes, you got some blanks to fill in there. That first problem of free will: just thinking, if we didn’t have free will, we’d all be machines, right? And I guess on the good side of that, there wouldn’t be evil if God controlled every move we make. But there also wouldn’t be authentic love and real relationships with him or really with each other if we were all just machines, robots. It would be a very different world. There’d be parts of it we’d love and parts of it we’d miss if we knew any better.

But the truth is, we love the fact that God gives us free will. I love my free will. I love being able to do what I want to do when I want to do it with whoever I want to do it with. We love free will. We just don’t like that anybody else has it, especially when they use their free will against me, when they do something against me or my people, or when things go terribly wrong. See, we like our free will. We love it. But we wish God would keep everyone else on a remote control, right? That everybody else was just some sort of machine. But yet God refuses to turn people into puppets, even when they are pulling all the wrong strings. And instead, he uses our pain, our circumstances, whatever tough stuff people have that comes our way—he has every desire to use our pain for his good purposes for us. He doesn’t cause the pain, but he also doesn’t want to let it go to waste. He’s willing to use it, to work all things together for his good. See, that’s free will.

But then there’s that familiar context problem. With all the violence in the pages of Scripture, we’ve got to come back to context. And just as Sarah Fletcher’s son only heard part of what was really going on in his mother’s Bible reading, we also end up doing the same thing as him oftentimes. We grab a verse, we just hear part of a sermon, and it happens way more often than we realize. We don’t know what we don’t know.

What’s really happening in these verses with these mothers is that the city of Samaria has been cut off from everything it needed to survive. There’s no more food. People were literally starving. And so two mothers make an unthinkable deal with each other. They make this unthinkable agreement to eat each other’s children, and one actually follows through while the other hides her son. The king hears about this story and tears his robes in grief. Regardless of what the memes say, it’s never celebrated. It’s never encouraged. This passage isn’t teaching cannibalism. It’s showing us, it’s revealing to us what violence, war, rebellion, and desperation do to the human heart.

And the real problem that most of us have with passages like this is that the Bible doesn’t sanitize the horror. We’re okay with watching it at the theater, but in the Bible, it records this moment so honestly we almost wish it didn’t. But why is this in there? What’s in it for us? I think it’s so we can learn from the mistakes, the wrong choices, and the sin of other people. How often do we wish our kids would learn from our mistakes? And yet how often do they? See, I think it’s stories like this that we read in the pages of Scripture to remind us how awful it can get when we turn our backs on God, when we walk away from Him, when we declare, “We don’t need you.” And yet it’s not just people in the Old Testament, it’s not just people down the street—it’s me. It’s you. At times we might not say it that clear and that plain, but there are times that we just push God aside and we go our way rather than his. See, if you keep reading this story, you’ll see that this is not a story of what God wants mothers to do. This is really a story about how far everything has fallen when we go our own way and when we leave God out.

Understanding God’s Commands in Divine Judgment

Still, that only really answers this verse. Sometimes the violence in Scripture is something people do against God’s will. But what about the places where he appears to command it? One of many examples is found in 1 Samuel chapter 15, verse 3: “Attack the Amalekites. Do not spare them,” the Bible says, “but put to death men and women, children and infants.” And the context of this is attack the Amalekites, put to death, don’t spare anyone. Like, that’s the context. Well, what do we do with that kind of verse? Or as I’ve been asked: Well, what kind of monster kills like the God of your Bible?

That’s a hard one. So there’s no cute little foreskin joke I can make here to make this one go away. And if you’ve read passages like this and you felt a little disturbed or confused, angry, even embarrassed by the Bible, it’s not that your faith is weak or that you’re not getting it—it’s that you’re paying attention, and some of this stuff is really hard.

See, yeah, sometimes the violence in the Bible is simply described: Cain murders Abel, King Saul tries to kill David. But none of that is God approving of it or calling for it. But there are some passages where God is calling for it, where He’s telling the King of Israel to carry out judgment against this people. In Joshua, he says Israel is actually commanded to take the land. And listen, if we pretend that those passages are not in the pages, wow, we aren’t defending the Bible anymore—we’re avoiding it.

And so I want you to remember what I told you to do when you find any passage that is difficult, any scripture that causes you some disturbance. You got some questions to ask, right? What kind of literature is this? What part of the library am I standing in? (And later this morning I’ve got a map of the library for you. All the books of the Bible are listed here. It’ll also tell you what kind of literature you’re reading, how to interpret that section. It’s called When the Bible Gets Weird: A Map of the Library. This is at the Connect Center. I didn’t put it in your next steps guide because I know some of you don’t care, but the rest of you can pick up one of those on your way out today. We’ll make sure you get one of them.)

But there’s a bunch of questions that I’ve also listed on that that we need to be asking when we’re reading these disturbing verses: Who was this written to? What did it mean back then in their language? What was really going on? Is this descriptive or is it prescriptive? Was this something that somebody else was commanded to do, or are we commanded to do it? And whoa, what’s in that for me? What’s in the “kill them all” or “take the land” scriptures for us today?

When God clearly commands violence, I think there are a few things that we need to consider. First, in your notes: We’re looking at a unique moment in history. This is a judgment against a specific nation. This is not a universal command. Israel was not being given permission to attack everyone they don’t like. These were limited commands tied to a particular people, a particular land, a particular moment, part of a much bigger redemptive story.

Now, Christians are never told to repeat Israel’s conquests. Jesus tells his followers to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, put away the sword. But these Amalekites—well, when we keep reading, which is what we’re supposed to do when we find a difficult passage—when we keep reading, we learn that God actually waited generations—not a few hours or a few weeks, a few months, or years—generations while their evil continued. So think about that. While their evil continued, if God does nothing, people would ask, “How can he allow this to continue?” And if he does something, we ask, “Why did he end it that way?”

It kind of reminds me of when I have to deal with something I don’t want to deal with. When I’ve got to deal with behavior or issues that I don’t want to deal with and I handle it, the person I handle it with would almost always say that I handled it wrong. I mean, forget what they did and why I have to handle it at all—let’s gloss over that and go to how you handled this! It’s easy to criticize how God handled the Amalekites while glossing over their evil for generations. See, when Israel embraced the same kind of violence, exploitation, and idolatry, God also judged Israel too. See, the standard was never ethnicity; the issue was entrenched evil.

So the second thing we need to consider in this situation, and in any situation you come across like it, is that ancient war accounts used sweeping victory language. They talked in extremes. We don’t usually talk like that today, unless you’re Donald Trump. When a decisive battle is won, ancient kings would use phrases like, “destroyed them all,” “wiped them out,” “took the land.” And the writers who were recording this wrote in much the same way. They used the same battlefield language, and then a few chapters later they reveal and tell us that the people from those very groups were still living in the land. Now, that doesn’t mean, “Oh, I guess they were wrong the first time.” It means not that nobody died, but it means a complete military victory without meaning that every last individual in every single village had literally vanished. See, even with the Amalekites, they appear again after 1 Samuel 15. The language is forceful, but it shouldn’t be read like a modern-day police report. It was a different people writing a different way.

And so the third thing we need to be mindful of, the third thing we need to be considerate of, is, I believe, the most difficult in our culture to accept: God’s judgment is not the same as human bloodlust. See, the Bible claims that God is actually the giver of life, that God is also the judge of evil, and he’s the only one with complete knowledge and perfectly clean motives. You and I, we don’t have any of those qualifications, even though we think we do. I don’t have a clever sentence to tie this all up and make the death of children emotionally comfortable. I don’t think I’m supposed to. These are among the hardest pages in the library. Faith never requires us to call tragedy pleasant, but it does ask whether the God judging evil can actually be trusted. And see, one of the reasons I trust him is I know that there is always more to the stories that I’m judged for. There’s always more to the story than gets explained. And I think that’s probably true of you too when you know what you know, and yet they accuse, they think, they judge. So unless I’m God himself, I’m gonna believe that he might know something I don’t. Maybe.

Principle 4: All of It Points to Jesus

And that brings us really to the fourth thing of the five things you gotta know to really understand, apply, and explain scripture. You should be able to fill in these blanks by now all by yourself:

1. It’s a library.
2. It was written for us, not to us.
3. It needs to be read in context.
4. All of it points to Jesus.

And not every verse is a secret code where you turn 200 foreskins or “kill them all” into foreshadows of Jesus. Don’t try to do that. That’s not what I mean. I mean that the whole library is one unfolding story. It is messy, it is horrific, and it is beautiful in places. And Jesus? Jesus is at the center of the entire library—Old Testament and New Testament. He’s foreshadowed, he’s present. He is the Bible’s clearest revelation of God. Jesus is the library’s ultimate destination. It is the point of the whole library. Jesus is the point.

Hebrews chapter 1, verses 1 through 3 says that God spoke in many ways through the prophets, but now he has spoken to us through his Son, and Jesus is the exact representation of God. Colossians calls Jesus the image of the invisible God. And Jesus himself said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” If you want to know what God is really, really like, look at Jesus.

Jesus is not the nice son protecting us from his angry Old Testament dad. That’s what the meme would make us out to believe: angry Old Testament dad, kind son, “Take a pill, Dad.” That’s the meme, not the Bible. But that meme creates two gods: an angry God and a gentle Jesus. But the Old Testament repeatedly describes God as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. And Jesus speaks seriously about judgment in the New Testament—he confronts evil and famously topples tables when worship becomes exploitation.

See, there aren’t two gods; there’s one God, and Jesus is the clearest picture that we have of who God really is. As we say to the kids, Jesus was God with skin on. And it’s at the cross where we see both characteristics come together. God does not shrug at evil as if it doesn’t matter on the cross, and God does not stand at a safe distance demanding that someone else pay. In Jesus, God enters our violence. He bears our sin and our judgment. He forgives his enemies, for they know not what they’ve done, and defeats evil through self-giving love.

See, the cross tells me that whatever I do with the violence of Scripture, I cannot use it to make God cruel, tribal, or bloodthirsty. The clearest picture of who God is, is Jesus: arms stretched out, absorbing the violence rather than authorizing his followers to spread it.

This kind of a Jesus-centered, grace-filled, loving, contextual reading of scripture also helps us with a thousand smaller controversies that you’ve been writing about on your connect cards. Again, I need your contact information in order to answer it, but someone has asked, many have asked: Doesn’t Leviticus say something about tattoos? Like, aren’t tattoos evil? Ooh, uh-oh, says they are right there: “Don’t cut your bodies for the dead.” See the context: God is trying to differentiate his people, his called-out ones. He’s trying to differentiate Israel from the mourning and grieving rituals and identity practices of the nations that were surrounding them at that particular time. It’s not a free-floating sentence saying that every maple leaf, wedding date, or butterfly is evil.

And while we’re here regarding mourning rituals, nowhere in Scripture does the Bible actually prohibit cremation. It’s another myth or another misunderstanding. But listen, Christians can become strangely selective with Leviticus or other passages, laser-focused on somebody else’s forearm. Don’t grab one line from Israel’s covenant law, ignore its setting, and use it as some sort of spiritual weapon against somebody. It’s a library written for us, not to us. It needs to be read in context. It all points to Jesus.

Principle 5: Guided by the Holy Spirit

But even with all of that spelled out, we still need that fifth and final thing. You can know Hebrew and you can know Greek, you can understand ancient history, identify every literary genre, and still be a jerk with a Bible. You can use it to make yourself look superior, excuse your own prejudices, defend your politics, or avoid doing what God says just by picking the right part of a verse. But the Bible isn’t to be used merely for information—it’s intended for transformation.

And that leads to the final thing we need to know: We need the Holy Spirit to understand and apply it. Here’s what the Bible says: the person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, and they consider them foolishness. You ever hear somebody say to you, “You’re on the wrong side of history! This is foolishness! You actually believe that stuff?” Yep. Every chapter, every verse, every line—because I also have the Holy Spirit living in me. And oh, how the God who communicates wants you to have the Holy Spirit living in you!

There’s resurrection power in every believer, and it makes sense of this. But man, some people think it’s all foolish, and they can’t understand these verses, these truths, because they’re discerned only through the Spirit. See, Jesus promised that the Spirit of truth would guide his followers into truth. The Holy Spirit does not mean that whatever pops into my head while I go to prayer is what the Spirit’s trying to say. The Holy Spirit always points to Jesus, exposes what’s happening inside of us, and empowers us to obey what we’re reading. Yeah, we still have to study and read the paragraph in context. See, prayer is not a shortcut around responsible reading, but responsible reading without prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit leaves us informed and completely unchanged. After all, the Bible also says that knowledge just puffs up. It’s love that builds up.

Closing Challenge

And that’s where we land this series: on God’s incredible love. Here’s the weirdest part of the entire Bible for me: the weirdest part of this whole book is how much God loves me and you in spite of all we say, do, and think, and that he allows me to keep coming back, that his grace is somehow sufficient. That while we were so far from him, the Bible says God demonstrates his love to us—not after we get ourselves fixed up and cleaned up—he demonstrates his love to us in that Christ died for us. That’s love. That’s weird, and it’s so good.

And the same God who died for me and came alive gives me new life. He wants to do that in you, with you. Some of you have kept God at a distance for a long time because somebody handed you a difficult verse, maybe even an abusive interpretation or a version of Christianity that is nothing like Christ. Honestly, I’m sorry that happened. But don’t confuse someone else’s misuse of the library with the God who’s revealed at the very center of it. At the center is Jesus: coming near, taking sin seriously, welcoming outsiders, forgiving enemies, giving his life, rising again, and inviting you into a new relationship, or inviting all of us into a renewed relationship with him.

I think as you dig into this book, as you come to Christ or back to him, you will find, as I have found: things don’t last, grass will wither, beauty falls, but the word of our God endures forever. Will you stand with me?