The Content of God's Character

Christianity for the Next 1000 Years

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

I am having so much fun thinking of the Bible as God's story.  

Let’s begin with character.  Dr. King said that we must judge people by the content of their character.  This is true in fiction and life.  Both, I would argue, are often very nearly identical.

If God were a person living on earth, that is, one living specifically as a world ruler, then God would not be able to become what God became in the Bible.

For one thing, God would be locked up by an international court, and the key would be thrown into the fires of Mordor.  It is difficult to transform in prison from a person who kills thousands to a person who loves so much that when people speak of love they speak of the one imprisoned.  

In the Jewish Bible, God transforms from a fiend to the God of steadfast love for the nation.  In the Christian Bible God has become the very essence of love empowering Being-itself.  

First, the fiend:  God uses weather to commit genocide, and then to nuke two cities.  God murders individuals such as Onan.  God told Moses to return to Egypt to set his people free, but on the way, he meets Moses in some godforsaken place and seeks to kill him until a flesh bribe is paid.  

The argument that God does not murder because God is God is lame.  It would be like a president saying anything he does is legal because he is the president. 

Back to God:  he (and this god is most certainly a man) inspires other people to waste whole families because one among them disobeyed a silly commandment.  

As far as commandments go, Yahweh's obedience test for Adam was also silly.  If Yahweh did not want Adam to eat from a certain tree, then he should have created the garden in Utah or some other place away from where the tree had been planted.

But those of us who love stories know that the Hebrew story of humanity would have ended if Adam had died for his disobedience.

Back to God:  to punish the people he loves, he raises armies in order to teach them a lesson by destroying their homes and lives.

Imagine those Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans who thought they were merely expanding their worldly influence, but in reality, they were pawns sent to punish disobedient Hebrews.  Think of empires as various switches God yanked off the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  

We love to say, rather piously, that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  That expresses a Platonic yearning for a place where goodness is real and unchanging since in the world of experience we find goodness is often commingled with the bad.

However, there is a beautiful dynamic shift in God's character that is expressed among Hebrew poets, those whom we call prophets.  In their verses, God becomes a God of love and justice.

Blessings...