Hilton Head Island, SC – October 20, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 106:1-15; 40-48
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Nevertheless, God regarded their distress, when he hard their cry. He remembered for their sake his covenant, and relented according to the abundance of his steadfast love. – Psalm 106:44-45 (RSV)
How many times have you heard a statement like this: “The Old Testament God is a God of vengeance, but the New Testament God is a God of love”? Or “The God of the Old Testament is a malicious God, but the God of the New Testament is a God of grace.” Or even more pointedly, “The Jewish God is a God of wrath, but the Christian God is a God of love.”
It should be obvious to every thinking person that both Jews and Christians have always believed there is only one God. All of them are, after all, monotheists. Therefore to speak of a “Jewish God” and a “Christian God” means either one of three things: 1) They are talking about two Gods, one Jewish and one Christian (and surely they don’t mean that); 2) They are talking about glaring misconceptions of God on both sides, or 3) There is perhaps an unconscious or subconscious slur against Jews when Christians use this kind of pejorative terminology at all.
Is there an incipient anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish sentiment in Christians calling the Old Testament God a God of wrath or punishment or vindictiveness, and the New Testament God a God of love and grace and forgiveness? Why do Christians focus on the perverted or distorted concepts of God which undeniably exist in the Old Testament, but ignore the same kinds of concepts in the New Testament? In the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, for example, Jesus contrasts those who do God’s will and those who don’t. He ends by saying of the negligent, “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Mt. 25:46). That doesn’t imply a very chummy deity to me. Jesus also is reputed to have said about those who lead children astray, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea” (Mark 9:42). That’s not too altruistic a picture of God either, is it?
Or there is that feet-of-clay fellow, the apostle Paul. In his letter to the Romans, for example, he writes, “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the vessels of wrath made for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he had prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has called, not from Jews only but also from the Gentiles?” In other words, I take that to suggest that from before the beginning of creation, God predestined that there would be bad apples among both Jews and Gentiles, and those folks are bound for hell, but the good guys, the ones who do and say and believe the right things, will experience God’s everlasting mercy.
Why do Christians remember the bad notions of God which are fairly common in the Hebrew Bible, but overlook the bad notions of God which are also readily found in the Greek Bible, the Christian part of the Bible? Anybody can have terribly mistaken notions of the identity of Almighty God! They can be Jews or Christians or Hindus or Buddhists or Taoists or Sikhs or Zoroastrians or atheists or agnostics! God does not prevent anyone from flinging at Him whatever calumnies their minds invent to place Him in a bad light.
Did God promise Canaan to the Israelites? Probably not. But they thought so. Did God tell them to kill all the Canaanites as they went into the so-called “Promised Land” to conquer it? Surely not. But they thought so. Did God really command Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac? That is impossible for me to believe. But Abraham believed it.
Bad theology can be found among every people and every culture in every part of history. Neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament are of one seamless piece of cloth. There are numerous discrepancies and errors and faulty judgments in the statements that are made there.
So again: Why do Christians remember the defective notions of God which are fairly common in the Hebrew Bible, but overlook the defective notions of God which are also readily found in the Greek Bible? Here, perhaps, is the answer: The Old Testament is almost four times as long as the New Testament. It was mainly written over a thousand-year period, from about 1200 BCE to about 200 BCE. The New Testament was written over a sixty-year period, from about 60 CE to 120 CE. If the Christians took a thousand years to write their scriptures, they might have had almost twice the atrocious concepts of God as the Jews, simply because the New Testament might have become at least twice as long as the Old Testament. Give religious people enough time, and they can cook up some astonishingly skewed ideas concerning God.
Let me give you an example. I suspect most of you know who Pat Robertson is. He owned a religious television network for decades, and has had a kind of talk show on it called The 700 Club. He also ran for the nomination as President of his political party. Years ago there was an Atlantic hurricane headed directly for the Virginia Beach-Norfolk area of coastal Virginia. Not long before it was to come ashore, it veered ever so slightly to the right, or north-by-northeast, and it hit Long Island instead, causing a few deaths and millions of dollars in damage. The right Rev. Robertson said that occurred because God loved the people of Virginia Beach, where his university and television operation are headquartered, more than He loved the people of Long Island, who are known, he implied, to be politically suspect and religiously disinclined.
If ever there was a god-awful theological idea, that is a prime illustration. But he said it, and many of those who support him and his particular kind of theology strongly agree with it. Some folks just love a wrathful God, I guess. A loving God won’t do for them.
There is another feature of the bad theology which can be found throughout the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. Might it be that the two groups of religious leaders who decided on which books were allowed into which Testaments deliberately allowed conflicting concepts of God into their canon of scriptures, the authorized list of books they approved? In effect, were they telling us, “Now look, folks, there are numerous theological ideas which are put forward here, but not all of them are of equal value.” In fact we know that both the Jews and the Christians had many other ancient texts which they might have inserted into the canon, but they didn’t. It would have been quite an experience to be a fly on the wall when the two groups were making their final choices. I can imagine the discussion was very hot and heavy. They would probably make our current Congress look like a mutual admiration society by comparison.
When I was in seminary, one of my favorite professors was George Knight. He and his wife Nancy were both natives of Scotland. It was he who convinced me to attend Glasgow University for my second year of seminary, and he arranged for me to get a position as the student assistant minister at the Glenburn Parish Church of Paisley, a city just west of Glasgow. He also preached the sermon at my ordination as a minister in 1964. On the bulletin cover is a quote from his most important book, A Christian Theology of the Old Testament.
I learned whatever Hebrew I know from George Knight (which I regret to say is not nearly enough), and I took other elective courses from him. One of those courses I particularly remember was called “Eighth Century Prophets.” It was about four of the Hebrew prophets who lived in the middle of the 8th century BCE, which was 750 years before the birth of Jesus. The four prophets were Isaiah and Micah in the southern kingdom of Judah, and Amos and Hosea in the northern kingdom of Israel.
One of Dr. Knight’s favorite Hebrew words was chesed. Chesed is one of those words which really needs several sentences or a short paragraph fully to explain what it means. It is usually translated as “loving kindness” or “steadfast love.” It is the kind of love that is described in the text of our final hymn this morning, O Love that wilt not let me go. The hymn was written by a Scottish minister, George Matheson, who wrote the poetry for the poem on the day the young woman he had been engaged to marry married another man. It was out of the extraordinary agony of that experience that George Matheson turned to God for comfort in the midst of his inexpressible grief. If his poem had been in Hebrew rather than English, he would have used the word chesed to refer to the Love of God, which he knew would never let him go.
I looked in my trusty Young’s Analytical Concordance of the Bible, and I discovered that there are thirty references to chesed. Every single one of them refers to the loving kindness of God, and only God. There are other Hebrew words for “love,” but chesed alone refers to the love of God. No human being is ever described in the Hebrew Bible as exhibiting chesed: other kinds of love, yes, but “loving kindness” or “steadfast love,” no.
Psalm 106 begins with a song of praise to God for His love; “Praise the Lord! O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (v.1) Then it launches into a litany of the rebellious attitudes of Israel over the centuries, and how God’s people frequently turned away from God. In the last verses of the Psalm, it declares that God was angry with Israel, and He allowed their enemies to conquer them. But his loving kindness prevented Him from abandoning the people with whom he made His covenant, and He responded to them in their self-imposed sorry state. Verses 44 and 45 of Psalm 106 say, “Nevertheless he regarded their distress, when he heard their cry. He remembered for their sake his covenant, and relented according to the abundance of his steadfast love.”
God has reason to be angry with all of us from time to time. But anger does not represent His essential nature. God’s essence is love (chesed.) Again and again that proclamation is made in the Hebrew scriptures, but Christians, for whatever reason, ignore that truth. “God is love,” it says in the First Letter of John (4:7). God has always been Love Deified, from before the Big Bang to the last syllable of recorded time. There is only one God; the notion of an “Old Testament God” and a “New Testament God” surely gives God the divine heebie-jeebies.
Psalm 118 is a companion-piece to Psalm 106. It begins with these four verses: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever! Let Israel say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever.’ Let the house of Aaron say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever.’ Let those who fear the Lord say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever.’”
Then it launches into a long description of how the unnamed writer of the Psalm had a whole phalanx of unspecified calamities which befell him. Through it all, however, God remained with him and upheld him. He ends the Psalm as he began it, “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (118:29)
Anyone who thinks God is a God of wrath, wherever that idea comes from, has a very sadly distorted image of God. God is always and only a God of chesed love, of loving-kindness, of steadfast love. If at times we feel He is angry at us, He probably has reason to be. However, surely God is above all human emotions, whether positive or negative. God doesn’t deal with us at all in the same manner that we deal with one another. If God is like any of us, even the best of us, in carrying out the particulars of His divine job description, we are in serious trouble. But the truth is this: the God who is given the most accurate personifications in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, is thankfully not a God who fundamentally behaves as we behave. He is “Love Divine, all loves excelling,” as the hymn proclaims. “God is love; His mercy brightens all the path in which we rove,” as another hymn tells us.
Does that mean God is a pushover? Certainly not. Does it mean He is willing to ignore or overlook all our sins and mistakes? Of course not. By means of our conscience and our God-given ability to apply reason to complex situations, God works on us to overcome our errors and to improve our behavior in His own way, which is most assuredly not our way.
Nonetheless, after all our miscalculations and missteps and mistakes and whatever might be our crimes and misdemeanors, God is still and primarily a God of love. If you think the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath, get rid of that noxious notion. However you came to think that, stop thinking it. If you think the God of the New Testament is preferable to the God of the Old Testament, stop thinking that. There is only one God, for heaven’s sake, and there has always been only one God, and that God is a God of love. In their best moments, of which there are a great many, both Testaments proclaim it
Are you alive? God is love. Has your life been more positive than negative? God is love. Negative factors have entered your life, but eventually they lessened or disappeared altogether. God is love. Someone you loved more than life itself died, and it has left a large hole in your heart, but somehow you got over it, and you healed. God is love. “Nevertheless, (God) regarded their distress when he heard their cry. He remembered for their sake his covenant, and relented according to the abundance of his steadfast love” (Ps. 106:44-45; my italics).
God is love. Carry that profound truth in your heart always.