Maybe you find it hard to swallow that there is a God who is intimately involved with the world.  Maybe it is stuck in the back of your throat that this God would ask us to put down our weapons. And maybe you are choking on the idea that God would put down His.

And maybe that’s because you’ve actually read the Hebrew Bible.

Maybe you’re asking, “Why do the Scriptures follow a story of God putting down his weapon—His bow—with a series of stories about holy war against the Canaanites and their neighbors?”

Well, I thought you’d never ask.

In the ancient Hebrew book of Joshua, we read about the people of God entering a land and “devoting” whole cities to God.  Now, the word for “devoted” is the word herem, which means that they destroyed the entire city.  They slaughtered the fighting men…and the cattle and flocks…and the women…and the grandmothers…and the toddlers and infants.  Herem meant everything was destroyed. 

We have names for this today: terrorism, war crime, genocide.

All in the name of God.

And the texts push us further.  We are told that God commanded them to do it.  Later we hear of God punishing those who are unwilling to carry out these massacres.  And then—get this—we see God blocking any attempt at diplomacy that might preclude the people from committing genocide.

Seems like God picked back up His bow.

And following the book of Joshua is a book called Judges.  And in this book, things seem to be getting darker: the violence becomes more explicit, the behavior of the people of God more appalling, the end results more gruesome and depraved.

But notice what Judges might actually be doing here.  Perhaps it is not more darkness, but instead more light.  Maybe it is shining a light on what happens to a people that not only perpetuate violence, but go further and blame it on God.  Instead of Joshua’s sterile panorama of violence under the guise and distance of “devoted”, maybe Judges forces us to see the violence up close and personal: fat and stench billowing out of knife wounds, tent pegs being driven through skulls, a woman raped and torn to pieces, a child sacrificed.  

We want to look away, but we are implored to stay tuned.

Because next is a picture of what happens to a people who engage in this kind of war-mongering: we are told that they experience less and less peace, that they sacrifice their children and women, that they devolve into civil war amongst themselves.  Judges is what happens to a people who trust in violent solutions and blame it on God.

And then comes the book of Ruth.

In the book of Judges, we are told that God instructed His people to go down and wipe out the Moabites.  But we are forced to question the divine command, because earlier in the book of Deuteronomy we hear this, “Do not harass the Moabites or provoke them to war.”  And so already, you can hear Judges questioning whether or not God is really telling the Hebrew people to extirpate their Moabite neighbors, or anybody else.  And then the book of Ruth comes along, and tells the story of a Hebrew man blessing, sheltering, and marrying a foreign woman who is a Moabite.

Do you see what just happened there?  In the span of three books—Joshua to Judges to Ruth—we see the Scriptures moving the people of God from a view of God that provokes them to violence toward their enemies to a view of God that invites them to see their enemies as family.

Perhaps this is how the sacred texts work.  Perhaps they are an accounting of God taking a people and slowly shifting them from a violent and punitive view of reality and the divine, to a non-violent and restorative view of reality and the divine.

Isn’t this how change really works?  Not in an article read, or a flash of inspiration, or a moment of clarity, but rather in large and small events and revelations that continue to work on us over a long period of time.

Perhaps the people of the ancient Near East were no different.  Perhaps it was going to take them a long time to shift their hope from violent conquest to redemptive love.  Perhaps it was going to take them a few generations to move their allegiance from violent kings to a benevolent God.

Perhaps it will take us a long time to shift our allegiance.  

Perhaps it is time we did.