(by Dave, 40-45 min)
The skeptic
My father was skeptical of Christianity when I was growing up. He believed Christians were hypocrites, warmly shaking your hands during the church service only to berate you if you inadvertently cut them off leaving the church parking lot. His friends as a teenager would go to midnight mass after a night of carousing, confess their sins and leave the church to continue with the night’s festivities. These behaviors drove a wedge between my father and religion that stuck with him.
I sometimes wonder what he thought about my coming to faith. Because he was kind and respectful, he withheld his skepticism and was glad my faith made me content. Only once did he voice his feelings when our conversation drifted to religion. The discussion had to do with why God would tolerate people behaving so badly. I responded that God did not tolerate it and that’s why Jesus was crucified.
Dad had no religious background and immediately responded, why did Christ have to die that way. Why couldn’t God just forgive people without making someone die a horrible death? I could hear his skepticism with all of Christianity reemerging with God rather than Christians as the focal point. On the one hand, God wants to save the world of their sins and on the other he is a brutal killer despite having the omnipotent power to avoid such brutality.
I started to answer his question, but he cut me off telling me he was sorry he said anything and that he did not want to talk me out of my faith. Having never been exposed to it, my loving father could not appreciate the Bible and how tightly it holds together. He could not understand that the behavior of sinners is not an indication that Christianity is false. It is a validation that Christianity is necessary, and the Old Testament explains why.
A weird place to find an answer
This might seem curious because the Old Testament is at times brutal only extending Dad’s question to the pre-Christ times. One disturbing section begins at verse 16 in chapter 20 of Deuteronomy:
However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them— the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites— as the LORD your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God.
Everything that breathes? This can’t be the same God who gave us Jesus with a standing open invitation to accept him and be saved. Moreover, the directive leaves people like my father wondering. Why did these people have to die? Indeed, the Old Testament hardly seems the place to go to explain why an omnipotent God permits the brutal sacrifice of Christ on the pathway to forgiving people.
The legacy of freedom
Despite the paradox it seems to present, the Old Testament holds the answer to my father’s question. To put it in context, consider something much closer to home. A young man walks into a hardware store and steals a hammer. The owner catches him and takes the man to the legal authority. The legal authority tells the man he should give the hammer back to the owner, pay a fine to society and carry an indication of wrongdoing on his public record for two years.
The thief had two choices when he walked into the store. He could steal the hammer or not. All humans possess this freedom, and societies attempt to influence one choice over another. Those encouragements are built sequentially and are needed for a society to function.
The first step is for members of a society to distinguish right from wrong; a property Webster’s dictionary calls morals. Using those morals, a set of ethical standards for behavior is developed. In the story, the society determined that stealing is wrong. They use this decision to develop an ethical standard to say stealing may not occur. These two things in place, the society decides what will happen should someone freely violate the ethical standards. This final step is called justice. Webster used to define the word just as: “appropriate in kind and degree in the generally accepted body of ethical law, a just sentence.”
Most societies build their social systems on the pillars of morals, ethics and justice. Is it possible to live without these three pillars? What if Jason were to say there is no right and wrong (i.e. there are no morals), but Carol says there is. What will Jason tell Carol when she asks him what he thinks about her position? He will likely tell her she is wrong. In responding to Carol, Jason demonstrates that he is very willing to say what is right and wrong. Alternatively, Jason might say that having morals is right for you, Carol, but not having them is right for me. But this too is a moral statement. A person deciding that their own morals are right and global morals for everyone are wrong is a statement of right and wrong. In fact, it is very difficult to conceive of human interactions in the absence of morals.
If there are no ethical standards depicting which behaviors are permitted and which are not, adopted concepts of right or wrong are just ideas and all members of the society will individually decide how they will behave regardless of societal morals. Thief and robbed will both say they are right because they interpret the morals differently.
Even if there are existing morals and ethical standards agreed on by the society, there will be some who violate them. If there is no justice, no consequences that are appropriate “in kind and degree” for violation of the ethical standards, those standards need not exist and will be quickly abandoned. This scenario is played out everywhere in the world when society breaks down and no consequences for behavior are perceived to be in place. When that happens anarchy issues.
Because people are free to choose whatever behavior they want, societies try to influence these choices with morals, standards and justice. In other words, the reason for morals, ethics and justice is that we are made free.
Back to the beginning
Adam and Eve possessed the same freedom and God provided one moral to influence their choices. Obeying God was right and disobeying God was wrong. God provided one ethical standard. Do not claim for yourself through disobedience the ability to know and judge right from wrong: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2: 16-17). The freedom of Adam and Eve to choose between obedience and disobedience is the only reason for this single moral, ethic and justice code.
God-given freedom reflects the Lord’s desire for willing obedience, a choice that requires trust in the lawgiver. The couple chose disobedience because they no longer trusted God to be the arbiter of truth. It now fell to them to discern the difference between good and evil. Because they lack God’s omniscient wisdom, evil is now inevitable. Adam and Eve raise their children this way and they their children and on it goes down to us. Generation after generation knowing that good and evil exists and all believing they can accurately discriminate between the two. The justice God imparts for disobedience is death
Adam and Eve did not drop dead the moment they broke God’s ethic, but they traded obedience to God for their own reasoning ending their perfect relationship with God. Anything except a perfect relationship with God is death irrespective of our physical bodies. There is no complete life except with God.
Complete obedience
Many bristle at this perspective. What kind of relationship requires complete, unquestioning,obedience to be perfect? It’s hard to imagine this in human interactions. What if the person asking for obedience is wrong? We all know humans are fallible and can’t be trusted to always be right. But what if the person asking for obedience is always right? Not just about the issue at hand, but about everything, everywhere, for all time. What if the person asking for obedience created time, everywhere, and everything and loved you with perfect love. Would not complete obedience to that person be a perfect life where you would do no wrong? Even better if you trusted the person enough to decide that complete obedience was what you wanted to do and you loved the person who made it possible. What God demanded of Adam and Eve in the garden was no demand at all. It was the prescription for perfect life over death.
Instead of trusting obedience we busy ourselves judging everything including the existence of God. Through it all God’s perfect love for us remains. His perfect love is the reason Adam and Eve were presented with God’s single moral, ethic and justice standard. Like our own systems necessarily modeled after his, God tried to influence the behavior of free agents so that they could live in perfection with him. Because we rejected that, the author of love sets about saving us.
The conundrum of original sin
How can people endowed with free will and devoted to deciding right and wrong for themselves be saved? It is more of a conundrum that it seems because we cannot escape the impact of original sin even when God intervenes.
For example, the 10 Commandments are an opportunity for us to freely choose to be influenced by God’s ethical standards. Yet consider just the sixth commandment: “You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20:13). Sounds straightforward, but our dependence on human reason takes over. Is abortion murder? Some Christians believe that abortion is not murder if it occurs before the time when they think life begins. Others believe abortion is wrong unless there are extenuating circumstances like rape or incest. Another contingent believes that aborting a fetus is always murder from the moment of conception onward and some believe it is never murder until the baby is born. Left out of these depictions is the whole debate about a woman’s ability to choose what happens to her own body and how that might influence the definition of murder when it comes to abortion.
The debate over this single commandment is not constrained to abortion and occurs in the context of war, the death penalty, self-defense of home and property, etc. Consequently, the ethical standard of not murdering devolves into a human-based debate about the definition of murder for a given event or circumstance.
Clearly, original sin is not overcome when God provides a broader ethical code that includes prohibitions against evil. Anything God says will be run through the sieve of original sin and only what we determine is right will come through. Something in addition to guidance is going to be necessary for humanity to realize that abandoning obedience in lieu of their own decision-making is a disaster.
Experiences are needed
What does it take to convince children of original sin that they should trust God once again as the true arbiter of good and evil? We can see the challenge God encounters when considering our interactions with each other.
Suppose two lawyers are talking about the best way to approach a particular judge to dismiss the case against their client the hammer thief. The lead lawyer wants to argue the client did not understand English very well. Therefore, his Miranda rights were violated. The supporting lawyer emphatically tells him he should not do that. The lead lawyer is convinced he is right on the law and the judge will have to grant his petition. He ignores his supporting colleague and makes the appeal having seen it succeed before other judges. The judge here becomes enraged, refuses to dismiss the case, and reprimands the lead lawyer stating that there are plenty of ways for non-English speaking people to learn enough English so they can understand what they’re being told. The lead lawyer now recognizes his blunder and wonders if his actions will produce hostility towards his client from the judge.
The reprimanded lawyer refused to accept the advice of his colleague because he had no experience with the judge. We believe our own reason until experience teaches us otherwise and sometimes not even then. The supporting lawyer witnessed this judge on other cases where a similar appeal for dismissal produced the same response from her. The lead lawyer had never seen the judge in this context and so had no experience. Consequently, he was convinced that his argument alone would win the day. He was wrong but the experience taught him perhaps he should trust and listen to his colleague.
I believe God choose a people with whom to interact so that we could see several thousand years of human experiences with God. The Old Testament is the story of God trying to influence free agents toward obedience once again. If original sin makes the provision of guidance inadequate, direct experiences are going to be required for us to realize the wisdom of obedience.
Old Testament experiences and the wisdom they impart: why so violent?
Abraham and Isaac
In Genesis, Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac to God. Abraham moves forward and is prepared to do what God commanded despite the horrendous nature of the directive. Many will look at Abraham and consider him depraved and God to be horrible. Would any of us hearing a voice or receiving a vision be willing to take our child to an altar of sacrifice? Our sense of right and wrong says this is a horrible thing to do. It is likewise appalling to ask someone to do such a horrible thing even if you plan to stop him. Think of the turmoil within Abraham as he took his son to the place where this was to occur.
However, if the challenge to Abraham’s obedience had remained as simple as pick your family up and move, would we understand the true nature of obedience to God? God’s moral code is obedience no matter what our reason says because our reason is corrupted and lacks omniscience. In addition, the obedience God asks of Adam, Eve, Abraham, and us is obedience based on loving trust for the creator. It is an obedience performed with confidence that only good will come. The Abraham story in Genesis 22:3-5 beautifully illustrates this:
Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” (Genesis 22:3-5)
He doesn’t say I will come back to you. He says we will come back to you. Abraham doesn’t believe the God of goodness is going to take his son as a human sacrifice and so he follows God’s command trusting there is a reason and moving forward obediently. We see Abraham’s confidence in God a second time as his son Isaac begins to wonder:
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”
“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together. (Genesis 22:6-8)
Abraham obeyed God in the face of extreme countermanding human love and reason because he trusted that God would only do good. After the sacrifice was stopped by God, the result of that obedience is detailed:
“I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed because you have obeyed me.” (Genesis 22:15-18)
Through Abraham’s descendants the entire earth was blessed because he was obedient. Indeed, God’s ultimate resolution to original sin, Jesus Christ (more on this in a bit), is the direct result of Abraham’s trusting obedience. The challenge to the man had to be extraordinary for us to understand what trusting obedience means and the blessings that come from it.
The required obedience to God’s moral code is comprehensive and may or may not be consistent with our own reasoning since we are not omniscient. We are to see this interaction in the Old Testament and learn from it the same way the lead lawyer learned about the judge and came to trust his colleague.
Deuteronomy 20:16-18
The same lesson is harder to see in the passage from Deuteronomy cited above, but is there nonetheless. Once again God requests obedience in the face of countermanding human reason. Much like Abraham when informed of the impending complete destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, our reason says surely there are some people in the resident communities who are decent and there must be other ways to accomplish the goal.
However, God provides an explanation anticipating the impending disobedience of Israel as they enter the promised land. The people who live in the land will teach them: to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God. God’s chosen people are supposed to be a light to the world not a purveyor of darkness. To be that light they must trust God and adhere to his moral code. They will not do that when the society that surrounds them constantly calls into question their trust in God. We need only look at the correlation between our own increasingly secular societies and the diminishing percentage of people holding a religious worldview to see that the societal culture and trusting God are related to each other.
In addition, God already interacted with Abraham in a previous experience from which the Jewish people were to learn. In Genesis 19, God is about to execute his justice for disobedience on Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham asks him if he will save the city if there are 10 righteous people within it. Abraham would only ask this question if he suspected there might be some innocent people in the cities and wondered if God was killing the innocent with the guilty.
Through his discussion with God Abraham’s trust is restored. God truly is just and will only execute his justice on the disobedient. The town is then destroyed because there were no innocent people which of course God already knew. With this experience under his belt, it’s not surprising that Abraham trusts and obeys God’s command regarding Isaac in Genesis 22.
Even in the context of Abraham’s past experiences, the command in Deuteronomy is sobering because there is no reprieve like there was with Isaac. However, the Jewish people did not move forward as directed the way Abraham did with Isaac. Therefore, we don’t know if God would have stayed this command as well and allowed that to be the lesson for us all to see about trusting obedience.
Because Israel did not trust and obey as Abraham did with Isaac, Israel enters a protracted era of Kings who either insisted on obedience or were disobedient. Those who were disobedient were corrupted by their reason as they believed it right to take up the practices of the people who remained within the land, and once again we see that God was right.
Through the nation of Israel God reveals the outcomes of trusting obedience and disobedience repetitively through several thousand years of interactions. We see firsthand that obedience produces Abraham and Isaac kinds of outcomes and disobedience produces hardship, exile, death, and misery. God reveals his moral code at work for all the people of the earth to see in extraordinary interactions with the Jewish people and we are to learn from those experiences.
So much to learn to answer my father
If one steps back from decisions about whether or not God’s individual commands offend our sensibilities, the Old Testament reveals a number of profound truths. Chronologically summarizing those lessons leads directly to my father’s question about why Christ had to die so brutally and why people are not just forgiven. Beginning in Genesis and moving forward the Old Testament teaches:
- Human beings were created free to choose how they will behave.
- Because freedom exists, God created morals, ethics and justice to influence our choices and wove it into the fabric of the created order. We depend on it for all interactions with each other.
- God provided one moral for influencing our decision-making. Trust and obey God because God alone has the exclusive wisdom to know true right from wrong.
- God gave us one ethical standard for implementing his moral code. Do not claim for yourself the ability to judge good from evil for the moment you do, trusting obedience will be impossible. Violating the ethical standard is met with instantaneous justice: spiritual death.
- God loves you and everyone else very much. Therefore, he set in motion the pathway to guide and educate us toward his solution for our condition. This is necessary for people of free will because we only believe what we ultimately determine for ourselves is right.
- Direct guidance is provided that includes prohibitions against evil that comes with disobedience. Using the most extreme examples, God then challenges our human reason with historical demonstrations of trusting obedience and disobedience. We learn firsthand (i.e. through humans) the outcomes of obeying and disobeying.
- These demonstrations reveal that original sin cannot be overcome by anything we can do. Obedience is possible, but transitory and only when our reason happens to conclude as God would. Because we do not trust God, our own self-discerning abilities about good and evil remain preeminent. God revealed this truth through historical, experiential events for all of humanity to see.
The death of original sin
Why did Jesus have to die brutally?
Jesus is the pinnacle of God’s revelation reflecting all the lessons of the Old Testament in one human being. Endowed with free will and entirely human, Jesus elects to trust God with comprehensive obedience. His life is the ultimate demonstration of a free-will human comporting with God’s moral code. Because his father is God and he is one with God, his reasoning is God’s omniscient reasoning. Every decision he makes is the right decision. In Jesus, we see God’s moral code fulfilled and original sin defeated.
If we are to understand the quantum leap forward Jesus represents in God’s testimony to us, the challenge of trusting obedience put before this human must be greater than the Israeli people faced and greater than that of Abraham. Jesus must utterly subjugate human reason with complete obedience. Consequently, he is asked by God not to sacrifice a son, but himself. Not to put a quick end to his life, but endure a brutal one. Not do so when powerless to prevent it, but when possessing all the power to stop it. And yet against all possible human reason, Jesus trusts God and obeys.
What if obeying God for Jesus had been dying in his sleep? Indeed, Christ prays in the garden to have the cup of the cross taken from him so that another form of obedience could occur. Would that give testimony to the level of trusting obedience God’s moral code demands? I think most of us would be able to obey the command to die in our sleep. For us to understand what obedience means Jesus had to be confronted, like Abraham and the Israeli people approaching the promised land before him, with a directive not supported by human reason. From the Old Testament to the cross, God continually lays before us the stark reality that our human reason must be overruled by trusting obedience.
There is a second reason for the brutality. The religious leaders of the Jewish people absolutely believed they were right in dispensing with Jesus who could not possibly be the Messiah. They convinced themselves that retaining their own power would save the Jewish people from Roman oppression. Hiding in the background was that it would also save their social position and status. They were utterly ruled by original sin ignoring the evidence of God before them.
Jesus died a brutal death to demonstrate what corrupt human reason produces; an unspeakable evil that brutally tortures and kills an innocent man. When confronted by absolute Godly perfection, human reason denied it and chose stark disobedience. There is no better convincing evidence that we are spiritually dead than the choreography of Jesus’s death by the religious authorities of his time.
The third reason for the brutal death of Jesus is the shift in motivation the sacrifice induces. God influences the behavior of free-will agents through his moral, ethic and justice code which stands undiminished forever. The brutality of Jesus’s death forces humanity to look squarely at the profound consequences of disobedience being endured by the only perfect human to ever live. He endures it so that we can enter a right relationship with God once again. While the moral code of God continues to influence us through consequences, the brutal sacrifice of Jesus evokes the higher-level motivation of gratitude. If you have ever watched The Passion of the Christ, then likely tears of gratitude spilled down your face as they did mine.
Why did Jesus have to die at all?
My father not only asked why did Jesus have to die brutally, but why did he have to die at all? Once again, the Old Testament provides the reason. God shows us that neither guidance nor observing God’s interactions with humans over thousands of years can undo original sin. We exist outside of union with God even within the context of beneficial obedient and destructive disobedient decisions. But our loving God is at once unsatisfied with our state and steadfast in upholding his moral code. There is no undoing the requirement for justice. We are already spiritually dead through disobedience and only God can rescue us.
However, to rescue us absent Christ God must revoke the penalty which would undo his perfect moral code. If God is not truthful and consistent, how could we possibly trust him? Moreover, God is incapable of being untruthful or inconsistent. His moral code will stand undiminished because it is as perfect as its author. The only rescue that can suffice is to substitute someone for us to pay the just penalty.
What single person, group of people, number of animals, etc. is sufficient to satisfy justice for all original sin past, present and future? Something enormous must die on our behalf and Christ represents exactly that. By sacrificing himself, God and Jesus pay the highest price conceivable for our debt and allow us to walk with God once again.
The resurrection of Jesus spiritually and physically comports beautifully with God’s moral code. One would expect nothing else of a consistent and steadfast God because Jesus was always obedient and never violated God’s perfect moral code even when obedience meant a horrible long-suffering death. His death is sufficient for all original sin but cannot stand as a permanent feature within God’s created order. If this were to occur, God’s moral code would be violated because Jesus was undeserving of death and chose it for us out of love. Because God is steadfast and true, Jesus is alive and sits at the right hand of God. His death and resurrection confirm the lessons of the Old Testament that God’s moral code is inviolate, and that trusting obedience is the pathway to all good things including the salvation of humanity.
Concluding remarks
I hope the title of this piece, Why We Need the Old Testament, was answered for you in a way that helps encapsulate the loving God of both the old and New Testament. I despair when people ignore the Old Testament. Without it, my father’s question has no good answer. Hopefully, my interpretation of the Old Testament here might serve you or someone you love who has a question similar to my dad’s. I wonder if I could’ve done more to persuade my father. Since he has passed this post is perhaps the best I can do now. I surely hope it is helpful to someone.
May God be with you this and every day of your faith journey.
Dave
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