As part of my Advent readings this year, I have read most of the Old Testament law. If Christ comes to enact a new covenant I want to better understand the old covenant. The Old Testament is such a strange--in the sense of foreign--set of documents to me that I often feel while reading that I am treading on ground best left undisturbed. There is so much of it I don't get, in the same way I don't get the Letter to the Hebrews--the culture is alien to me.
Given this cultural alienation it can be easy to condemn much of the book for its harshness. The violence in the Old Testament, God-endorsed and otherwise, is staggering. Along these lines Mark Twain once quipped that it was not the parts of the Bible he didn't understand that bothered him, but those parts that he did. Every time I read the Old Testament I become sympathetic to the Manichees and their dualism.
But the Manichees were heretics and the God who set Israel to clear the Holy Land of its inhabitants is the God who shows steadfast love to thousands and who sent Jesus to die on the cross to make atonement for our sins. If you lose the Old Testament, you lose Jesus. If God is not a God of wrath then there is nothing to be saved from. If God is not a God of grace than we are not saved. If God is not a covenantal God than we can have no assurance in our salvation.
Anyway, I was reading one of those difficult passages in Deuteronomy this morning that makes our modern sensibilities shudder:
"If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, 'Let us go and serve other gods,' which neither you nor your fathers have known, some of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far off from you, from the one end of the earth to the other, you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all people." (13.6-9)
There are many such commandments in the Old Testament and in the historical books we see examples of people acting on these commands. It makes Jesus's famous words that whoever doesn't hate his mother or his father or his sister of his brother seem benign. It also makes the Bibles I had as a kid, with their cutesy pictures of serene animals and smiling Hebrews, seem far too saccharine for such R-rated material.* As I was puzzling over this issue over my morning orange juice I felt I must be missing something. And of course I was.
Right before chapter 13 begins with its kill all blasphemers commands, the Lord gives Moses a word about the people they are going to dispossess:
"When the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, 'How did these nations serve their gods?--that I may also do the same.' You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods." (12.29-31)
There are certain sins the Lord detests more than others. I don't feel it is a stretch to say this. All sin is sin, but there is a qualitative difference between speaking a harsh word to your child and throwing your child into a fire. And in setting out a people peculiar to Himself, God could not allow that type of evil to remain in the land. How could you leave any remnant of that about? For if you don't destroy it utterly it will rear its head again.**
I think we have a tendency to sit at a distance from this culture and this time period and smooth over the differences between these competing faiths. We are not talking about the difference today between a practicing Jew and a practicing Hindu or a practicing Buddhist and a practicing Christian. We are talking about a people claimed by the Creator God, Yahweh, and people who sacrificed their children to Moloch. The differences are more than stark and the danger of returning to that type of brutalizing faith was an ever present reality for God's fledgling people. If he was to fulfill his purposes for Israel, that simply could not be allowed to happen.
In John Milton's stunningly weird and weirdly stunning Christmas poem, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," he pictures the infant Christ banishing the old gods of the world, ranging from the more benign (the nymphs and Thamuz) to the more insidious (Moloch, Dagon), from the new world he inaugurates. And in doing so, the infant Christ is bringing to completion the work began in the Promised Land by the people of God so long before him. But, as Christ inaugurates a new and better covenant, so the promise to worshipers of foreign gods is better. Now rather than dying for their gods, their gods have died, and the walls between them and the true God have been removed. So while I can appreciate what the old covenant was doing, I must say that I am immensely thankful to be living under the new.
* In reading kids' Bibles to Owen I always am tempted to finish the story. For example, kids' Bibles seem to cut off the David and Goliath story after David flings the rock. Yea! He hit a guy in a head with a rock because he trusted God. The End. Violent, sure. But they leave out the part where David goes over to the not-yet-dead Philistine and picks up his giant sword and cuts his head off and holds it up for the armies of God to see. Master Caravaggio, take it away. I mean this with all reverence, that is a completely badass scene, but one I have yet to see depicted on felt-board or glistening card-stock pages.
** It should also be noted that it is not as if the Jews went on an unprecedented rampage through Palestine. It was not for nothing that the land of the Assyrians was called "The Land Bathed in Blood." Some cultures were spared, some individuals were converted to the faith. But there were certain peoples that could not be left to spread their disease to the people of God.
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