History and perspective?

I may have posted on this before, but I can't remember when. Lurgy has settled in firmly, so if this is a little vague thn please accept my apologies.

Chris and I spent the afternoon with some good friends in Lemington, plus 2 more that had come up to visit the first couple from London. We all go back more than 20 years, and it's great to get together.

As it was a mostly female bash, Simon and I wandered out to the kitchen to make drinks and chat. We talked about how people interpret history from the perspective of their own current views and those of the society around them. While there is clearly some measure of independent thinking, much of they way we understand various actions and events is coloured by personal experience.

Simon then said something which made me pause. I forget the exact words, but the way I understood it, he basically said "God does some very strange things in the bible". We've known Simon a long time. He's a lovely guy and a great father to his children. And he's done alpha, been to church a bit and decided that it isn't for him, at least AFAIK.

Chris and I have had somewhat similar conversations from time to time. How could God order the deaths of all those people, men women and even babies? Why does the psalmist ask God to 'break the teeth of the wicked' with his fist, for the women and children of his enemies to go hungry and homeless? How can someone asking for disaster to come on other people then proclaim their own righteousness AND GET AWAY WITH IT? And what about all the seemingly capricious things God appears to have done.

It's tempting to just brush off these things as "God can do what he likes" and "we're all just God's clay pots to make and break as He chooses". Or worse, to take these as articles of faith to guide our actions, allowing us to do violence to others that don't agree, to behave capriciously too.

Just as we interpret events around us in the light of our understanding and culture, so we tend to perceive God. To a degree we 'make God in our image'. As Christians we expect God to interact with us, and through that process we also develop a picture of what He's like, His character and way of dealing with us. So we have this rather mixed view: some of our understanding of God is sanctified and some of it sinful and cultural.

Now imagine a culture that has seen God at work doing astonishing things. A culture less familiar with the idea of 'miracles' being done today and the impossible (in a movie at least) being normal. Imagine a culture where there are rules to follow on a purely human level - no strengthening through the Spirit of God for most people, no way into Father's presence. Consider that culture having grown out of and being surrounded by civilisations that are brutal in the extreme. For whom it is normal to use prostitutes in religious practice, to burn children to death as sacrifices, to mutilate prisoners that have been captured and to keep women as concubines and slaves.

In these circumstances, I wonder how we might describe the things we observed of God? Even if we were inspired by God's Spirit (as the writers of the bible were) how might our culture, education and surroundings affect the manner in which we described things or what we asked for?

And what about those odd things God seems to do, like being angry with Moses and wanting to kill him when he's on his way top meet Pharaoh? I have this image in my minds eye of a scene from a film, where an innocent man helps up a girl who has fallen over, has his photograph taken holding the girls hands in an apparently compromising position, and then his wife judges him on the evidence of this image 'proving' his unfaithfulness.


There's probably a great book that could be written from this stuff, and in fact may have already been written. IMO there are already too many Christian books, and I'm certainly not going to write this one, but it IS worth considering next time you read a passage and thing "how could God DO THAT?".