“God hates the sin, but loves the sinner.” This old saying often is used to resolve the tension between God being both just and loving toward fallen people. There are, however, instances in the Bible that appear to defy this principle. When David cries out, “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and the one who loves violence His soul hates” (Ps. 11:5),¹ or when Malachi prophesies, “I have loved Jacob; but I have hated Esau” (Mal. 1:2b–3a), they appear to communicate that God hates certainpeople. A closer examination of these passages in their immediate context and in relation to the overarching message of Scripture reveals these to be ways of expressing God’s opposition toward corrupt souls bent on committing sinful actions.

The Lord Hates the One Who Does Violence. Psalm 11 is attributed to David. It reflects a time when the psalmist took refuge in the Lord on being warned that he had been targeted for death and needed to fly to the mountains like a bird (vv. 1–2). The psalmist’s world was in such upheaval that he cried, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (v. 3).

In the psalm’s second stanza, David envisaged the Lord in the heavenly temple reigning over and knowing all things (v. 4), and says, “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and the one who loves violence His soul hates. Upon the wicked He will rain snares; fire and brimstone and burning wind will be the portion of their cup” (vv. 5–6).

The Hebrew word translated “hate” in Psalm 11 is Sänë´ (שֶׂנֵא). It “expresses an emotional attitude toward persons and things which are opposed, detested, despised and with which one wishes to have no contact or relationship.”² This is not hate out of ignorance or animosity; rather it is a righteous God’s opposition to wickedness. The same idea is communicated by Isaiah against unrepentant Israel, declaring, “I hate [Sänë´] your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, they have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them” (Isa. 1:14). Solomon, likewise, says, “There are six things which the LORD hates [Sänë´], yes seven which are an abomination to Him: Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that run rapidly to evil, a false witness who utters lies, and one who spreads strife among brothers” (Prov. 6:16–19).

A number of commentators believe the historical backdrop to Psalm 11 is the time when David had to flee from Saul, who sought to take him down like a man hunting partridges in the mountains (1 Sam. 18:8ff).³ Sin had so corrupted Saul that he not only tried to assassinate David on more than one occasion (1 Sam. 18:10ff), but also succeeded in murdering the priest, women, and children of Nob, who provided David sanctuary (1 Sam. 21–22). Saul was indeed in the place of receiving divine judgment, and the lyricist rightly captures the situation in poetic hyperbole with the words “the one who loves violence His soul hates” (Ps. 11:6).

Jacob I Loved, but Esau I Hated. Malachi prophesied to the Jewish people after the Babylonian exile around the middle of the fifth century BC. His oracle begins, “‘I have loved you,’ says the Lord. But you say, ‘How have You loved us?’ ‘Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?’ declares the Lord, ‘Yet I have loved Jacob; but I have hated Esau’” (Mal. 1:2–3a).

Historically, Esau and Jacob were the sons of Isaac and Rebekah. Prior to their birth, God revealed to Rebekah her sons would become two nations but “the older shall serve the younger” (Gen. 25:23). God’s word came to pass when Esau despised his birthright by selling it to his younger brother for some lentil stew, and Jacob with the aid of his mother tricked his father into giving him the elder brother’s blessing (Gen. 25:19–34; 27:1–40). Jacob ultimately fathered the nation of Israel and Esau the nation of Edom.

Malachi’s prophecy concerns the nations of Israel and Edom during the post-exilic period of Old Testament history. He puts God’s love for Jacob in antithesis to the divine hate toward Esau. The same Hebrew word for “hate” [Sänë´] is employed, signifying God’s righteous opposition to sinful Esau. The reason divine hate came was that “not only did the Edomites gloat over the ruin of their Israelite brothers, but also actively helped the Babylonian invaders by acting as informants and cutting off escape routes, (Ps. 137:7; Ezek. 25:12–14; 35:15; Obad. 8–16).”⁴

God’s opposition to Edom was further demonstrated in the nation’s expulsion from their homeland. What happed was that around the sixth century, prior to the days of Malachi, the Nabateans invaded Edomite territory. They left the Edomites’ cities in ruin and forced them to resettle in southern Palestine in an area later called Idumea. The prophet alludes to this invasion saying, “I have made [Edom’s] mountains a desolation and appointed his inheritance for the jackals of the wilderness. Though Edom says, ‘We have been beaten down, but we will return and build up the ruins,’ thus says the Lord of host, ‘They may build, but I will tear down; and men will call them the wicked territory, and the people toward whom the LORD is indignant forever’” (Mal. 1:2b–3). Edom’s sins were hostile to the ways of a righteous God, so the prophet’s hyperbolic expression “Esau I hated” is befitting.

Romans 9 similarly references Jacob and Esau as part of a sophisticated argument demonstrating that the Jewish people rightly could be judged by God for rejecting Jesus Christ. Those who rejected the Lord identified themselves as descendants of Abraham, but Paul contends, “They are not all Israel who are descended from Israel” (v. 6). Before Esau and Jacob were born, God told Rebecca that “the older will serve the younger“ (v. 12). The nations of Israel and Edom both sinned and went into exile, yet God brought back Israel but not Edom; hence, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (v. 13). Paul’s point is that “God has the right to choose among the chosen line,” and “not all Abraham’s descendants received the promise.”⁵ Their salvation would not be found in a genealogical connection to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.⁶ The Jews who rejected Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah sinned greatly and put themselves in opposition to God.⁷

Using the Clear to Understand the Unclear. God’s opposition to wickedness depicted in Psalm 11 and Malachi 1 should be considered in light of other truths Scripture reveals about God’s dealings with sinners. Readers can use clear passages of the Bible to understand unclear ones.

First, the Bible teaches that God offers common grace to all. For example, He sustains the creation, sending sun and rain on the farms of both saints and sinners alike (Matt. 5:44–45).

Second, the Bible teaches that God loves sinners and works to resolve the problem of sin. Paul writes, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). John likewise writes, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). In the same epistle, he writes that Christ “is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

Finally, the most remarkable thing the Bible teaches is that sinful and corrupt people do not have to remain that way. They can repent and enter into a right relationship with God. Zacchaeus came down from the tree, received the transforming grace of God, and committed himself to making restitution to those he defrauded (Luke 19:1–10). Paul also witnessed the resurrected Lord on the road to Damascus, which converted him from a persecutor of the church to an apostle to the Gentiles (Acts 8–28).

The God of righteousness opposes unrighteousness. It is, therefore, befitting for the psalmist to say, “The one who loves violence His soul hates” (Ps. 11:1), and for Malachi to prophesy, “I have hated Esau” (Mal. 1:3), to demonstrate God’s vehement disapproval of those bent on doing unrighteousness things. However, the Good News is that sinners can be saved by God’s grace through faith on account of Jesus Christ. —Warren Nozaki

Warren Nozaki is a graduate of Talbot School of Theology and a researcher for the Christian Research Institute.

NOTES

1. Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard version.
2. Gerard Van Groningen, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, vol. 2, ed. R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer, Bruce K. Waltke (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 880.
3. Cf. Willem A. VanGemeren, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 5, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991), 130, and J. A. Motyer, New Bible Commentary: Twenty-First Century Edition, ed. G. J. Wenham, J. A. Motyer, D. A. Carson, R. T. France (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 494.
4. Gordon P. Hugenberger, New Bible Commentary: Twenty-First Century Edition, ed. G. J. Wenham, J. A. Motyer, D. A. Carson, R. T. France (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 885.
5. Ibid., 885.
6. Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1993), 432–33.
7. Whether or not Romans 9:13 can be used to support a particular view of divine election, Calvinism, Arminianism, or another mediating position is an issue that Christians can debate but should not divide over. For further study, see James White and George Bryson, “Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility, Part One,” Christian Research Journal 23, 4 (2001): 32–41 (http://www.equip.org/articles/the-divine-sovereignty-human-responsibility-debate-partone-) and James White and George Bryson, “Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility, Part Two,” Christian Research Journal 24, 1 (2001): 23–25, 41–47  (http://www.equip.org/articles/the-divine-sovereignty-human-responsibility-debate).

Continuing my examination of Bart Ehrman’s “problems with the Bible,”¹ he is perplexed about the number of animals Noah took with him on the ark. As such, he poses the following question: “Does [Noah] take seven pairs of all the ‘clean’ animals, as Genesis 7:2 states, or just two pairs, as Genesis 7:9-10 indicates?”² First, I would like to pose a different question. Does it seem reasonable to suppose that an author capable of writing a masterpiece such as the Book of Genesis would get confused within the span of several sentences, or is it more likely that Ehrman is straining at gnats and swallowing a camel? Furthermore, is Ehrman’s question legitimate, or has he created a problem out of whole cloth? The answer to this latter question is that Ehrman has created a fictional problem. Genesis 7:9-10 does not say that Noah is to take “just two pairs.” Finally, if Ehrman really wants his question answered, all he need do is ask one of his “conservative” students-or simply read the context. Several verses back, God says to Noah, “You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female” (6:19). And in Genesis 7:2-3 God adds the following instruction: “Take with you seven of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.” Together these verses provide a sufficient answer.

What to Make of Ehrman’s All-Too-Convenient Cock-Crowing Conundrum? Another astonishingly easy-to-resolve “problem with the Bible” that perplexes Ehrman is the following: “In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells Peter that he will deny him three times ‘before the cock crows twice.’ In Matthew’s Gospel he tells him that it will be ‘before the cock crows.’ Well, which is it-before the cock crows once or twice?”³ First, as his more attentive students have likely discovered, Professor Ehrman is engaged in a cocky game of slight of mind. Truth is that Matthew does not tell us how many times the rooster crowed-he simply tells us that the rooster crowed.⁴ As such, Ehrman is knocking down a straw man. Furthermore, only an extreme literalist bent on undermining Scripture would attempt to make the passage in question walk on all fours. In recounting past events or telling stories we obviously don’t all highlight the same details. In the case at hand, Mark simply provides a bit more detail than does Matthew.⁵ Finally, Ehrman has set up a rigged game in which it is impossible for him to lose. Since Matthew and Mark do not provide identical testimonies, he cries “contradiction!” Conversely, if they had, he could conveniently charge them with collusion. In sharp contrast to Ehrman’s methodology, credible scholarship looks for a reliable core set of facts in order to validate a historical account. In this case, Matthew and Mark merely provide complementary perspectives.

-Hank Hanegraaff

Hank Hanegraaff is president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast heard daily throughout the United States and Canada. For a list of stations airing the Bible Answer Man, or to listen online, log on to Equip.org.

NOTES

1 Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know about Them) (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 6. I’ve addressed Ehrman’s criticisms of the Bible in recent installments of this column (see Christian Research Journal 32, 3; 32, 4; 32, 5; 33, 1; and 33, 2).

2 Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 10.

3 Ibid., 7.

4 See Matt. 26:74.

5 See Mark 14:30, 72.

First, to suggest that in Mark’s account of the crucifixion Jesus “doesn’t seem to understand what is happening to him” is more than a little baffling. Even a child reading through Mark’s words leading up to the crucifixion knows better than to think such a thing. Who can forget Christ’s poignant defense of Mary after she had broken an alabaster jar and poured perfume on His head? “She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial,” said Jesus (Mark 14:8).2 Or His anguished prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (14:36). Indeed, as Mark’s gospel makes crystal clear, Jesus knew precisely what would happen to Him and why. As He explained during the Last Supper: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (14:24). Or as He put it just prior to entering Jerusalem, the Son of Man came “to give his life a ransom for many” (10:45). Jesus had in fact repeatedly predicted His suffering, death, and resurrection (see 8:31; 9:31; 10:32–34; cf. 14:61–62). To say otherwise is both an insult to Christ and to common sense.

Furthermore, it is almost beyond belief that a scholar wrestling with the text of Scripture could conclude that Christ, in Luke’s gospel, “is not in agony at all.” As documented by Dr. Luke, Christ’s torment began in the Garden of Gethsemane after an emotional Last Supper. There He experienced a medical condition known as hematidrosis. Tiny capillaries in His sweat glands ruptured, mixing sweat with blood. Or as Luke’s gospel puts it: “Being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44, emphasis added). Subsequently He is arrested, beaten, and executed in grotesque and humiliating fashion. The Roman system of crucifixion had been finely tuned to produce the maximum of pain. In fact, the word excruciating (literally, “out of the cross”) had to be invented to fully codify its horror. To tell Colbert and vicariously the world that in Luke’s gospel “he [Jesus] is not in agony at all” takes more than a little gall.

Finally, allow me to drive a nail into the heart of Ehrman’s methodology. Unless biographers such as Mark and Luke say exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, Ehrman stands ready to crucify them on the pretext of contradiction. Here’s how he restates the shopworn charge on Colbert: “What people have done is they’ve taken Mark’s gospel and Luke’s gospel and combined them together into one big gospel, which is not like either Mark or Luke.” The very nature of biography, however, is to pick and choose elements of a congruent story that the biographer wishes to emphasize. As such, no single biographer captures every detail of a subject’s life and experience. Indeed, one of the most amazing realities with respect to the composite biography presented through the canonical gospel writers is that they were empowered to present a living portrait of the most interesting, complex, and significant being who has ever walked among us—and without contradiction or collusion. And they did so with eloquence and erudition.

—Hank Hanegraaff

Hank Hanegraaff is president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast heard daily throughout the United States and Canada. For a list of stations airing the Bible Answer Man, or to listen online, log on to www.equip.org.

notes

1 Colbert Report, Comedy Central, April 9, 2009, online at http://www.colbertnation.com/thecolbert-report-videos/224128/april-09-2009/bart-ehrman, accessed Sept. 9, 2009. 2 All Scripture quotations are from the NIV.

2 All Scripture quotations are from the NIV.

The Gospel of Mark indicates that it was in the last week of his life that Jesus “cleansed the Temple” by overturning the tables of the money changers and saying, “This is to be a house of prayer…but you have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11), whereas according to John this happened at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry (John 2). Some readers have thought that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end. But that would mean that neither Mark nor John tells the ‘true’ story, since in both accounts he cleanses the temple only once. Moreover, is this reconciliation of the two accounts historically plausible? If Jesus made a disruption in the temple at the beginning of his ministry, why wasn’t he arrested by the authorities then?

Ehrman concludes by dogmatically asserting, “Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.”¹

Is Ehrman right? Is this just one more in a litany of errors made by a pseudonymous gospel writer? Or is this just indicative of a professor gone wild?

First, it is not only uncharitable but unquestionably wrong-headed to suggest that neither Mark nor John (who Ehrman demeans as “illiterate”) could be telling the “true” story had the temple been cleansed twice. As is no doubt obvious to even the most unlettered of Ehrman’s students, neither gospel writer provides an exhaustive account of everything Jesus said or did. As the apostle John communicates in hyperbolic parlance (no doubt lost on a wooden literalist), “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written” (John 21:25 NIV).

Furthermore, the gospel of John itself provides a more than historically plausible insight as to why Jesus might not have been arrested during an initial temple cleansing. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back leading to the arrest and trial of Jesus would quite logically have resulted from a late, not an early, temple cleansing. Not only so, but the Jewish leaders did not arrest Jesus in the early stages of His ministry for fear of the multitudes who were in awe of Christ’s teachings and miracles (Mark 12:12; John 7).

Finally, as even a cursory reading reveals, John not only kairologically (see below) orders his gospel by theme (e.g., seven signs, seven-day opening, seven-day account of the passion, etc.) but presents a more highly developed Christology than that offered in the Synoptics. As such, John says that the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (1:14), which fulfills the Old Testament promise that God’s glory would again return to His temple (e.g., Malachi 3:1). Moreover, John reinterprets the meaning of Passover by revealing Jesus as the quintessential Passover lamb (John 1:29, 36). As such, it could be logically (and charitably) surmised that John might introduce his account of Christ’s temple cleansing early in his gospel narrative—and within a context in which Jesus is revealed as the substance that fulfills the types and shadows of temple, priest, and sacrifice. While such a notion does not set well with a fundamentalist reading of literature, it accords well with a nuanced and highly sophisticated reckoning of time particular to the ancients (i.e. a kairological interpretation, which reckons time not in terms of our familiar chronological ordering but in terms of a quality of purpose in which an event is said to occur at “just the right time” [cf. Genesis 1 and 2]). In other words, even if there was only one historical temple cleansing, one might logically assume that John communicates it kairologically as opposed to chronologically.

The very fact that a number of plausible resolutions have been forwarded precludes the charge that the gospel accounts are contradictory.

—Hank Hanegraaff

Hank Hanegraaff is president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast heard daily throughout the United States and Canada. For a list of stations airing the Bible Answer Man, or to listen online, log on to www.equip.org.

notes

1 Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know about Them) (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 6–7.

Western Christians have little connection with history. Events of thirty years ago are easily forgotten and generally considered irrelevant to “today.” So it is not surprising that most evangelicals are blissfully ignorant of a vitally important document on the topic of inerrancy produced by leading evangelical scholars. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, first published in 1978, remains one of the most important documents of the past century, and its importance has only increased with the slide of Western culture into ever more virulent forms of secular humanism. In a cultural context where nothing in the religious realm can ever be said to be “true,” a fully authoritative scriptural revelation will be attacked incessantly. The foundations on which the historic Christian proclamation has rested are once more under attack, and more often than not those swinging the pickaxes are wearing religious garb.

The contemporary attacks on the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture are often couched in an attitude of twenty-first century hubris. Those people did not have computers. They did not have cell phones and modern medical knowledge. They did not send men to the moon or put satellites in orbit. So how could they have possibly had any meaningful knowledge of transcendent truths? The Bible was not written using modern language and categories; therefore, how can it be at all relevant to us today? Couple this with carefully selected texts demonstrating apparent “contradiction,” and it is easy to see why many Christians are embarrassed by the historical confession of the perfection and inspiration of the Bible. “We just can’t speak like that anymore. We need a new way of looking at the Bible,” we are told.

Have we grown so much wiser than our predecessors? Were the great men and women of God of the past naïve when it came to the Bible? Should we abandon inerrancy and speak of the Bible in postmodern terms? Or is there a reason to continue to believe that God has spoken with truthful clarity in Scripture?

CAREFULLY DEFINING THE ISSUES

There is no question that Christians have attributed things to the Bible that it never attributes to itself. Ignorance of the Bible’s authors, its historical context, languages, canon, and overall purpose has led to all sorts of odd claims about the Bible down through church history. Claims that the Bible is a handbook to nuclear physics or that it contains startling scientific secrets are easily (and truthfully) refuted.

The acts of the ignorant over the centuries do not determine the nature of Scripture, however. We must think carefully and clearly about what Scripture is so that when we speak of its authority, nature, and accuracy, we are standing on solid ground. It is just this kind of clear, careful thinking that marks the work of the scholars who crafted the Chicago Statement in 1978.1 Though the entire statement is lengthy, the summary statement is brief enough to be of assistance to us here:

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: It is to be believed, as God’s

instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

One of the clearest expressions of the Bible’s view of itself is found in 2 Peter 1:21: “No prophecy ever came from the human will, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”² The origin of Scripture is God; the means of expression is human language. Yet, even in the act of speaking that which comes from God, the authors are guided, guarded, by the Spirit, who bears them along in their speaking. This text, along with Paul’s assertion that all Scripture is God-breathed (2 Tim. 3:16), provides the foundation of a proper, sound, reflective doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy:

1. All of Scripture is God-breathed. Its ultimate origin and source is God, who determines its form, the date and structure of its revelation, and the author through whom the revelation will come.

2. God uses different individuals at different times to bring His Word to His people. He uses their circumstances, their individual personalities, and their particular experiences as the means through which His Word is revealed. This means the Bible speaks in human language, replete with differing styles and emphases.

3. Since Scripture is intended to communicate in its first appearance as well as down through the ages, it must be understandable to its initial audience. Therefore it will use language directly relevant to its human authors and audience. Later generations, seeing the progressive outworking of God’s revelation over time, should interpret older portions in light of the original context and overall intention of Scripture.

Apart from these major considerations, there is another element often overlooked. Scripture can be read by anyone, but it speaks of those who are the enemies of God, and those who are submitted to Him. There is a spiritual element to Scripture that is embarrassing to many in our technological society. While the words themselves communicate to any person capable of understanding, a desire to understand and obey is beyond the capacity of the natural man. Divine grace is needed to truly understand divine truth, as the Lord Jesus illustrated on His first meeting with the gathered disciples after His resurrection. “Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45 NASB). Just as the Lord had to open Lydia’s heart to respond (Acts 16:14), so too the mind must be opened to understand the divine revelation of God in Scripture. In other words, sound interpretation of divine revelation is not an amoral activity. Hence, those who remain in rebellion against God are predisposed by nature to unbelief and a twisting of the text before them (2 Pet. 3:16).

A MODERN CONTROVERSY OVER INERRANCY

In 2005 Baker Academic published Dr. Peter Enns’s book, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Enns was at the time an associate professor at the venerable Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Westminster Seminary was founded by J. Gresham Machen and others in response to the decline of Princeton Seminary in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Machen impressed on the school his own deep reverence for Scripture and his strong views on theological liberalism. Machen’s book Christianity and Liberalism plainly distinguished between the two, identifying theological liberalism as its own separate religion, standing in opposition to Christianity.

In reviewing Enns’s book, Dr. John Frame noted in passing, “Enns, like many evangelicals, wants to be invited to the table with the mainstream scholars.”³ This impetus is behind the gradual movement of almost every theological institution away from the foundation on which it was established. There can be little doubt that Machen himself would have found Enns’s work troubling. Though we can only speculate about that, the governing board of Westminster Seminary likewise found his views inconsistent with the historical stance of the seminary. Though the faculty voted in support of Enns, the board did not, and as of August 1, 2008, Peter Enns “discontinued his service to Westminster Theological Seminary after fourteen years.”⁴

Why did Enns’s book result in his leaving Westminster only a few years later? Why has he now been sought out by a local NPR affiliate and given the opportunity of presenting his views in that venue?⁵ The answers to these questions shed a great deal of light on whether inerrancy matters any longer.

ENNS’S ARGUMENTS

There have been a number of published responses to Enns’s work,⁶ including a full-length book, so there is no need to go in-depth in re-presenting his material. Some elements of his argumentation, especially concerning parallel historical accounts in the Old Testament, require extensive and lengthy analysis, and hence are beyond our scope here. A brief summary of his major assertions will be sufficient for our purposes.

Enns presents three areas of argumentation, all designed to support his central thesis that we need to change our traditional ways of viewing Scripture and embrace what he calls the “incarnational” model. First, he presents a number of examples of parallels and relationships between literature and stories from the ancient world and the Scriptures, raising the basic question of the Bible’s uniqueness. Next, he raises questions concerning the Bible’s internal consistency and integrity by addressing what he sees as theological diversity in the text of the Old Testament, primarily. Then he deals with the always difficult and challenging area of the New Testament’s use of and interpretation of the Old.

It is important to grasp the position Enns is promoting in this work, as it has become a common theme among those who find the old categories of speaking about inerrancy inadequate in our day. With his paradigm of seeing the Bible incarnationally, Enns wishes to avoid the error of Docetism. Historically, Docetism was a heresy that denied the human nature of Christ. Following the Bible’s own teaching on the incarnation of Christ, the early church struggled with those who would deny elements of that divine revelation. Some, mainly influenced by early Gnostic movements, came to teach that Jesus only seemed to have a physical body, for no truly good teacher could have a physical body (all matter being evil, all spirit being good). They would tell stories of Jesus and a disciple walking along a seashore, and the disciple, on looking back, would see only one set of footprints. Why? Because Jesus does not leave footprints in the sand, for He only seemed to have a physical body. The Greek word for “seems” is dokein, hence the term “Docetist” for a person who believes Jesus’ physical body only seemed to be real. Docetism, as it was later called, was strongly condemned by John in his first epistle, and later generations of Christians likewise added their rejection of this false teaching.

Biblical Docetism, then, would ignore, or at least downplay, the “human” side of the Bible. A biblical Docetist would be one who refuses to see how the Bible came to be in history, its intimate and undeniable connection to its original contexts, authors, and situations. Evidently for Enns, it also means accepting that the limitations, even ignorances, of the original authors are fully on display in the text of the Bible. It is just here that Enns’s incarnational model raises very serious questions.

First, it should be noted that the only way we know the truth of the Incarnation is, in fact, due to the reliability of the revelation God has given us in Scripture. If we are left with a hobbled revelation (due to the “human” aspect of things diminishing the trustworthiness of the text to communicate divine revelation), the entire incarnational model is left hanging in mid air unless, of course, someone wishes to argue for some form of divine revelation outside of Scripture.⁷ Indeed, any form of argumentation that seeks to transcend divine revelation and objective truths found in propositional Scripture founders on this very question, for unless we have a trustworthy revelation to start with, how do we derive these higher paradigms such as the Incarnation?

Second, a sound doctrine of the Incarnation includes within it a careful affirmation that the human nature of Christ was sinlessly perfect. There is nothing in confessing that Christ was one person with two distinct natures that necessitates imperfection or error in the man Jesus. In the same way, a sound “incarnational model” of Scripture would not therefore force us to bring in error, ignorance, contradiction, or falsehood as a constituent part of the human side of Scripture. If we wish to use Enns’s model, we would be perfectly within our rights to recognize all the human aspects laid out so clearly in the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, such as the differing styles of the authors, their life situations, and so on, as well as the original contexts to which they spoke. We will see how this applies to major portions of Enns’s examples below. But we would not be following that model properly at all if we laid at the feet of Christ’s humanity our concepts of errors, contradictions, and falsehoods.

IS THE BIBLE UNIQUE?

Many of the examples Enns provides come from ancient documentary sources that are generally not a part of the normal reading of most evangelicals. While I am not suggesting that every believer should be pouring over Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, it is just as true that some reading in the contexts of the sources cited in such discussions is often very helpful. Enns lists “similarities” between, for example, the Enuma Elish story (also known as the “Babylonian Genesis” account) and the biblical account in Genesis. Specifically, (1) The sequence of the days of creation is similar, including the creation of the firmament, dry land, luminaries, and humanity, followed by rest. (2) Darkness precedes the creative acts. (3) There is a division of the waters (waters above and below the firmament). (4) Light exists before the creation of the sun, moon, and stars.⁸

On the basis of such similarities, Enns asks how we can speak of the biblical revelation as “unique,” since it shares commonalities with other ancient works of literature, and even with mythology. As he writes, “both Genesis and the Enuma Elish ‘breathe the same air.’”⁹

But do they? Not if you read beyond surface-level similarities. First, any discussion of origins or creation will, of necessity, speak of the earth, the sky, luminaries, planets, and so forth. Any such discussion will have to have some order of creation to it, some discussion of light and darkness, and so on. Such similarities are necessary, given the subject being addressed.

But it is the dissimilarities that are most important in answering Enns’s question as to the uniqueness of the biblical narrative. For it is the foundational proclamation of the uniqueness of the Creator in Genesis that separates Genesis from Enuma Elish or any other such ancient narrative. The God of the Bible is not a part of a pantheon of divine beings and hence dependent on preceding generations of gods. He is not taking preexisting matter and re-forming it into our current creation. God speaks, and light and life come into existence. The creation is “good,” in proper relationship with the Creator, and the distinction between creator and creation is marked out clearly from the start.

A brief review of Enuma Elish¹⁰ reveals that it is firmly rooted in the bedrock of mythological polytheism. It is not the story of creation by a self-sufficient, eternal Creator who speaks and brings the physical creation into existence. Instead, it is the story of one god among many, Marduk, and his battle against his great-great grandmother Tiamat. There is no answer offered as to the origin of these many gods. The physical creation itself comes out of Marduk’s defeat of Tiamat and the division of her body into various portions of the natural world.

One of Enns’s parallels, that of light existing before the sun, moon, and stars, is not a parallel at all, since, obviously, all sorts of things in the realm of the “gods” exist prior to the division of Tiamat’s body into the various parts of the physical creation. Marduk has weapons to use in his fight with Tiamat, and, obviously, they were not fighting in darkness. So clearly, there is little relevant in observing this “parallel” given the fundamental difference between the accounts. Outside of their common topic (creation), the worldviews and answers given to the central question are as different as night and day.

The other issues raised by Enns likewise help us to gain perspective on these commonly promulgated objections to biblical inspiration and uniqueness. Enns makes reference to the Gilgamesh epic, an ancient story that makes reference to a great flood, similar to that in the Bible. He refers to the Nuzi documents from northern Iraq and to the Hittite Suzerainty treaties, both of which indicate that similar legal and cultural norms existed outside of the context of the biblical stories. Likewise, he makes reference to the Code of Hammurabi, which contains many legal parallels to what we find in the Mosaic Law.

All of these issues are perfectly valid areas of study for the student of the Bible. In fact, they should be seen for the exciting confirmation of the Bible that they are. Although many skeptics wish to remove the Pentateuch from its ancient context (preferring a much later date for its composition and thus removing Moses as its primary author), these documents demonstrate that those earliest portions of the Bible reflect very accurately the cultural and legal contexts of the days in which they were written.

This is not a problem, as Enns seems to see it, but is instead a positive affirmation unknown to earlier generations. Consider the legal and cultural aspects of the Nuzi documents and the Hittite Suzerainty treaties. What are we assuming about the biblical revelation if we find it “difficult” that similar laws and concepts existed in the legal systems of other nations? If we believe man is made in God’s image, and if we believe what the Bible itself teaches about man’s conscience, common grace, and natural revelation, would we not expect to find echoes of divine truth in the laws common to man? The errant assumption underlying the view of these things as objections to the Bible is that the inspired text must somehow transcend the context in which it was first revealed and must be unique in style and substance. That is, the false assumption is that the Bible should speak in some heavenly language at all times, even when narrating God’s acts in history, and that any evidence that God did, in fact, act in a particular historical period in a way that would have made sense to those with whom He had communication is somehow antithetical to “divine revelation.” But this is just to miss the nature of Scripture itself.

Likewise, the Gilgamesh epic is a tremendous problem for the unbeliever, not the believer. We have clear evidence of an ancient memory of a great, catastrophic event, written in this case in another language from another culture. Given the uniqueness of the event itself, to encounter such evidence is truly startling.

Yet, if such a thing as the flood took place, would it not leave a mark in the memories and stories of mankind? That is just what we find here. It is therefore unwarranted to assume that if the Bible contains a similar story, this means it is shot-through with “myth” that must be challenged.

Of course, Enns discusses the term “myth” and presents his own definition of the term, but in general usage today, the term is being used to refer to ancient stories that have no connection to history. Now obviously, it is absurd to hold ancient writers to modern standards of historiography. Everyone should recognize that. It does not follow, however, that accounts written to illustrate a particular moral, ethical, or theological point are, by definition, “untrue” or “unreliable” in the historical facts they relate. One writer may choose to emphasize certain aspects of a historical situation to make a point, but that is not a meaningful objection to the accuracy of the facts that he chooses to include in his account.

This leads us finally to Enns’s recounting of the common issues that arise in dealing with the so-called “Synoptic problem.”¹¹ We can summarize the objection in this fashion: the differences in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) force us to abandon modern ideas of “history” and “accuracy” and embrace a less-defined idea of what is “true” about the Gospel accounts. Hence, Enns notes the issue of the cleansing of the Temple recorded at the end of Jesus’ ministry, pointing to the fact that John records this as happening at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Plainly, then, John is not recording history, but is providing a different kind of literature that we need to recognize in the“incarnational” model. Enns says that it is “distortion of the highest order to argue that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice.”¹² Yet, he does not note, as Beale has rightly explained, the list of those Enns must say are guilty of such “distortion of the highest order,” such as A. Plummer, B. F. Westcott, R. V. G. Tasker, R. G. Gruenler, Leon Morris, and D. A. Carson. Likewise, Craig Blomberg and A. Köstenberger lean toward two cleansings as well.¹³

So often in the rhetoric of the current controversies, any treatment of the ancient documents that gives them the benefit of the doubt and seeks harmony between them is dismissed out of hand as “contrived.” Yet, is it not far more probable that, when it comes to apparent conflicts regarding statements of fact we, positioned thousands of years later, may well be missing basic pieces of the contextual puzzle that were quite apparent to the original authors? Do we not extend this very courtesy to other ancient works? It is ironic that many of those who seek to exhort us to “epistemological humility” are actually a good bit less humble when it comes to the standards they apply to the writers of Scripture. We should have the humility to admit we do not have sufficient information on which to judge the intentions and motivations of ancient writers.

DOES IT MATTER?

What is the foundation of a sound, lasting Christian faith? The Lord prayed on the night He was betrayed, “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth” (John 17:17 NASB). As central and important as all the means of grace God has given His people are, it is clearly His intention that the Spirit use Scripture as the bedrock of His communication with His people. No one can read the words of the Lord Jesus and come to the conclusion that He found Scripture dispensable or peripheral. “The Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35 NASB). For Jesus, “It stands written” ended the argument. So one is forced into an untenable incoherence to hold on the one hand to Jesus as Lord, as the God-Man, Savior, and King, while on the other hand believing the very Scriptures He honored (and, in His triune unity with the Father and the Spirit, authored!) are significantly less reliable than Jesus Himself believed.

Surely, if the Lord has not spoken, we are left with little more than the opinions of men. Such has never been the faith of the Christian Church. As Irenaeus said long ago, “We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith.”¹⁴

It has never been more important for the church of Jesus Christ to speak with confident authority to its own members in defense of the full inspiration, integrity, and inerrancy of divine Scripture. But it is likewise vitally important that we do so not from a position of dogmatic ignorance, but one of informed faithfulness and knowledge of the issues that surround the topic. We cannot afford to be ignorant of the developments in scholarship, but, at the same time, we must not slavishly follow secular humanism into an idolatrous exaltation of it either. Scholars are human beings with presuppositions and biases, and many today willingly dedicate their scholarship to the service of secularism. In the process their prejudices twist the conclusions they draw from the facts of their research. The wise believer in the twenty-first century will be the one who can sift through the writings of the scholars, happily accepting the nuggets of truth while recognizing the overriding control of naturalistic and humanistic presuppositions.

Let us not fear in the face of the mockery and angry denunciations of men. Divine truth does not change with the blowing winds of cultural trends. Though we may have to await patiently the Lord’s own timing, His truth will be vindicated, His people confirmed in their faith. Belief in God’s ability to communicate His will to His people through His Word is rational, historic, and defensible. We must resist the siren call of the slippery slope of cultural accommodation and stand firm in our faith that God’s Spirit will use God’s Word to edify God’s people.

James White is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and the author of more than twenty books. He has taught in a wide variety of theological fields and engaged in more than seventy-five moderated public debates in defense of the Christian faith.

notes

1 http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/creeds/chicago.htm.

2 Author’s translation.

3 http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_articles/2008Enns.htm.

4 http://www.wts.edu/stayinformed/view.html?id=187.

5 Dr. Enns appeared with Marty Moss-Coane on WHYY in Philadelphia on August 13, 2008.

6 D. A. Carson wrote a very useful and insightful review of Enns’s book (http://www.reformation21.org/shelf-life/three-books-on-the-bible-a-criticalreview.php). The full-length book is by G. K. Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism: Responding to New Challenges to Biblical Authority (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008).

7 This is exactly the direction many have gone over the past few decades, seeking in various (and often contradictory) forms of “tradition” what they have concluded can no longer be found in divine writ.

8 Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 26.

9 Ibid., 27.

10 See James B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East: Volume 1: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 31ff.

11 A huge array of resources exists on this topic. See Robert L. Thomas and David Farnell, The Jesus Crisis (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 1998); Robert L. Thomas, ed., Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2002); Mark Goodacre, The Synoptic Problem: A Way through the Maze (London: T and T Clark International, 2001); David Allen Black and David R. Beck, eds., Rethinking the Synoptic Problem (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001).

12 Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 65.

13 Beale, The Erosion of Inerrancy, 50. [Editor’s note: for a different approach to resolving this problem see Ask Hank on p. 62 of this issue.]

14 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book III, 1:1.

SYNOPSIS

The “new atheists” call God’s commands to kill the Canaanites “genocide,” but a closer look at the horror of the Canaanites’ sinfulness, exhibited in rampant idolatry, incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality, reveals that God’s reason for commanding their death was not genocide but capital punishment. After all, the Old Testament unequivocally commands that those who do any one of these things deserves to die. Also, God made it clear in His conversation with Abraham regarding the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that He knows who would or would not repent, and in the case of those cities, not one person would heed the warning and even Lot’s family had to be forcibly pulled away from the coming destruction. In Leviticus 18 God then warns Israel that if they commit similar sins that the land would similarly “vomit” them out. Later when Israel disobeys God and allows the Canaanites to continue to live among them, the corruptive and seductive power of Canaanite sin results in the Canaanization of Israel. Subsequently, God sent prophets to warn Israel of their coming destruction, but they didn’t repent and God said that they became “like Sodom to me” and He visited destruction on Israel for committing the same sins. This again reveals that God’s motive isn’t genocide, but capital punishment. That we commit similar sins today renders us incapable of appropriate moral outrage against these sins and thus we accuse God of “genocide” to justify our own sinfulness.

Richard Dawkins and other new atheists herald God’s ordering of the destruction of Canaanite cities to be divine “ethnic cleansing” and “genocides.”¹ With righteous indignation, Dawkins opines that the God of the Old Testament is “the most unpleasant character in all of fiction.”² But was the killing of the Canaanites an example of divine genocide? If you think the Canaanites deserved to die because of their own wickedness, Dawkins will zealously compare you to acting like the Taliban.³ A closer look at several key facts will help explain God’s reason for the destruction of the Canaanites and reveal how our own sinfulness demonstrates our incapacity to judge rightly.

That atheists are incapable of judging spiritual matters leads some Christians to wonder why we even need to answer them at all, especially if they lack any objective, moral, or epistemological foundation for their claims. Moreover, most atheists do not customarily condemn the very practices that God condemns, for example, idolatry, adultery, and homosexuality. Predictably so, their values conflict with what God hates.

Concerning the destruction of the Canaanites, atheists especially like to exploit the Christian condemnation of genocide. They reason something along these lines: (1) Christians condemn genocide. (2) Yahweh’s command to kill the Canaanites was an act of divine genocide. (3) Therefore, Christians should condemn Yahweh for commanding genocide.

The second premise is false, however. Part of the goal of this essay is to offer evidence to show that God had good reason to command Israel to kill the Canaanites. In Leviticus 18 and elsewhere, for example, the Bible reveals that God punished the Canaanites for specific grievous evils. Also, this wasn’t the entire destruction of a race as God didn’t order that every Canaanite be killed but only those who lived within specific geographical boundaries (Josh. 1:4). Canaanite tribes (especially the Hittites) greatly exceeded the boundaries that Israel was told to conquer. And since, as we will see, He punished Israel when they committed the same sins, what happened to the Canaanites was not genocide, but capital punishment.

This wasn’t merely punishment, however. God sought to reveal His standards of righteousness to a thoroughly corrupted humankind, and He chose Israel out of the nations to exhibit the requirements for relationship with Him (Deut. 4:5–8). Before He redeemed humankind, He needed to unambiguously demonstrate what exactly He was redeeming them from: a blatant and unrestrained evil that resulted in a worthless, nasty, and cruel existence. God knows what is best for humankind, but He allowed free creatures to rebel and find out on their own that He is right. If Jesus had died to redeem humankind prior to humankind’s comprehending the depth of their sin, then people would question the need for Jesus’ death. Why would Jesus die for basically good folk? God waited to redeem humankind until they had the chance to be, as 2 Live Crew once put it, “as nasty as they wanna be.”

THE CANAANITES WERE WICKED

The Bible is explicit concerning the sins of the Canaanites: idolatry, incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality. Much of what follows is horrific, but if we refuse to look, will we really understand the reasons for God’s judgment?

Idolatry. The Canaanites worshiped other gods, which the Old Testament frequently denounced as no more than sticks or pottery made by human hands that could not “see or hear or eat or smell” (Deut. 4:28 NIV). Yahweh derided these handmade gods that cannot speak and must be carried because they cannot walk (Jer. 1:16; 8:2–5).

The Canaanites took seriously the testimony of the Old Testament witness of Yahweh and His revelation, if for no other reason than intentionally to transform the scriptural depiction of Yahweh into a castrated weakling who likes to play with His own excrement and urine.⁴

Of course Dawkins complains that “God’s monumental rage whenever his chosen people flirted with a rival god resembles nothing so much as sexual jealousy of the worst kind.”⁵ But does anyone think that if Dawkins’s wife left him for a gingerbread man of her own baking, and then she began to tell everyone that he liked to play with his excrement, that Dawkins would tolerate the characterization of his feelings as no more than “sexual jealously of the worst kind”?

Idolatry perverts our ability to love what Yahweh loves. Consequently, we love what He hates, and we hate what He loves. The story of Canaanite incest, adultery, child sacrifice, homosexuality, and bestiality flow out of the plot line of idolatry. The tragedy of this story is that not only is idolatry an offense to Yahweh, but it fails to supply a happy ending for human communities as well.

Incest. Like all Ancient Near East (ANE) pantheons, the Canaanite pantheon was incestuous. Baal has sex with his mother Asherah,⁶ his sister Anat, and his daughter Pidray,⁷ and none of this is presented pejoratively.

Although early Canaanite laws proscribed either death or banishment for most forms of incest, after the fourteenth century BC, the penalties were reduced to no more than the payment of a fine.8 In the larger ANE context, it is helpful to consider that in an Egyptian dream book dreams of having sex with your mother or your sister were considered good omens.⁹

Adultery. Canaanite religion, like that of all of the ANE, was a fertility religion that involved temple sex. Inanna/Ishtar, also known as the Queen of Heaven, “became the woman among the gods, patron of eroticism and sensuality, of conjugal love as well as adultery, of brides and prostitutes, transvestites and pederasts.”¹⁰ As University of Helsinki professor Martti Nissinen writes, “Sexual contact with a person whose whole life was devoted to the goddess was tantamount to union with the goddess herself.”¹¹

The Canaanites even remake the God of the Bible, El, after their own image and portray Him ceremonially as having sex with two women (or goddesses). The ceremony ends with directions: “To be repeated five times by the company and the singers of the assembly.”¹² About this John Gray comments, “We may well suppose that this activity of El was sacramentally experienced by the community in the sexual orgies of the fertility cult which the Hebrew prophets so vehemently denounced.”¹³

Child sacrifice. Molech was a Canaanite underworld deity¹⁴ represented as an upright, bullheaded idol with a human body in whose belly a fire was stoked and in whose outstretched arms a child was placed that would be burned to death. The victims were not only infants; children as old as four were sacrificed.¹⁵ Kleitarchos reported that “as the flame burning the child surrounded the body, the limbs would shrivel up and the mouth would appear to grin as if laughing, until it was shrunk enough to slip into the cauldron.”¹⁶

Homosexuality. No ANE text condemns homosexuality. Additionally, some ANE manuscripts talk about “party-boys and festival people who changed their masculinity into femininity to make the people of Ishtar revere her.”¹⁷

Let us also remember that the problem with the Canaanite city of Sodom wasn’t just sex among consenting adults: the men of Sodom, both young and old, tried to rape the visitors (Gen. 19:5).

Bestiality. Probably the ultimate sexual depravity is intercourse with animals. Hittite Laws: 199 states, “If anyone has intercourse with a pig or a dog, he shall die. If a man has intercourse with a horse or a mule, there is no punishment.”¹⁸ As with incest, the penalty for having sex with animals decreased about the fourteenth century BC.¹⁹

There should be no surprise that bestiality would occur among the Canaanites, since their gods practiced it. From the Canaanite epic poem “The Baal Cycle” we learn: “Mightiest Baal hears / He makes love with a heifer in the outback / A cow in the field of Death’s Realm. / He lies with her seventy times seven / Mounts eighty times eight / [She conceiv]es and bears a boy.”²⁰

There were absolutely no prohibitions against bestiality in the rest of the ANE.²¹ In fact, in an Egyptian dream book it was a bad omen for a woman to dream about embracing her husband, but good things would happen if she dreamed of intercourse with a baboon, wolf, or he-goat.²² In short, their sexual fantasies involved everything that breathes.

This explains why, in certain cities, Yahweh sentenced to death everything that breathes. If they had sex with just about every living thing they could get their hands on, and they did, then all had to die. Dawkins objects that it adds “injury to insult” that “the unfortunate beast is to be killed too.”²³ But Dawkins doesn’t seem to grasp that no one would want to have animals around who were used to having sex with humans.²⁴ Moreover, this might also explain why God used a flood to destroy what Dawkins called the “presumably blameless” animals in the days of Noah.²⁵ If pre-flood humankind frequently had sex with every imaginable animal, then even though it wasn’t the animals’ fault, it would be harmful to allow these animals to be a part of God’s start-over society.

ISRAEL SEDUCED AND CORRUPTED

Israel’s response to Canaanite sin is a parable of how their own sinfulness empowered them to ape the sin of the Canaanites and thereby procure God’s judgment on them. For God does not show favoritism. Israel was warned not to let the Canaanites live in their land, but to completely destroy them (Exod. 23:33; Deut. 20:16–18), lest the Israelites learn the Canaanite ways (Exod. 34:15–16). If they did not destroy them, the land would “vomit” them out just as it had vomited out the Canaanites (Num. 33:56; Lev. 18:28; Deut 4:23–29, 8:19–20).

Instead, the Israelites worshiped the Canaanites’ gods and “did evil” (Judg. 10:6; 1 Kings 14:22; 2 Kings 17:10). They had “male shrine prostitutes” (1 Kings 14:22), committed acts of “lewdness,” adultery, and incest (Jer. 5:7; 29:23; Hos. 4:13–14; Ezek. 22:10–11; Amos 2:7), and even Solomon set up an altar to Molech (1 Kings 11:5, 7–8). But instead of repenting when things went badly, they concluded that their misfortune was because they stopped burning incense to “the Queen of Heaven,” Inanna/Ishtar (Jer. 44:18). So the Lord said that Israel became “like Sodom to me” (Jer. 23:14). In short, Israel was Canaanized.

Although prophets warned the northern kingdom (usually referred to as Israel or Samaria) of impending doom, they didn’t repent, and in 722 BC the king of Assyria killed or deported most of them, and filled the land with conquered peoples from other nations. Similarly, the southern tribes (usually referred to as Judah) were deported when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem beginning in 586 BC. Just as God had demonstrated his knowledge of who would repent in the Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, before he destroyed Jerusalem He told Jeremiah that if He could find even one righteous person He would spare the entire city (Jer. 5:1).

It doesn’t stop there. In Luke 20 Jesus told the Jews the parable of the tenants and the vineyard. Servants were sent to the tenants of the vineyard, but had been mistreated, and so the owner of the vineyard sent his son, but the tenants killed the son. Jesus then warned, “What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” Then, in AD 70, forty years after Jesus was crucified, the Roman emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem. Josephus records that the Jews in Jerusalem “were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were then crucified before the wall of the city….So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest, when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.”²⁶ Titus then renamed the region Palestine and for almost 1,900 years one couldn’t find “Israel” on the map.

What God commanded Israel to do to the Canaanites wasn’t genocide—it was capital punishment. In both Testaments we see that God hates sin and will punish it.

GOD KNOWS WHO WILL REPENT

Could there have been any righteous Canaanites, especially in view of the pervasive, seductive, and corrosive nature of Canaanite sin? Abraham asked the Lord this exact question in Genesis 18 regarding the coming destruction of two Canaanite cities—Sodom and Gomorrah: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city?…Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”²⁷ Ultimately the Lord then agrees to spare both cities if only ten righteous people were found.

When angels arrive, however, the men of the city try to rape them and not only does Lot not find anyone who will repent, Lot himself tarries so long that the angels take Lot and his family by the arms and all but drag them out of the city. Later Lot’s own daughters get him drunk to have sex with him and so even Dawkins, in a surprising moment of moral clarity, writes, “If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.”²⁸

Skeptics often complain that children were killed in Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction. Such a complaint usually masks an unspoken premise: God shouldn’t have killed the children because that wouldn’t give them the chance to reject Canaanite sin. Curiously, this simply relates back to the entire dialogue of God with Abraham. God knows who will or will not repent of his or her sin and if He concludes that all the children would have been similarly corrupted, then He is perfectly right to institute capital punishment.

Moreover, given the evidence of Canaanite sin, it is no stretch to realize that even many young children would have already learned Canaanite ways. Thus, if God wanted to rid the world of their wickedness, then He couldn’t have them grow up wanting to imitate their birth parents with whom they bonded. Imagine the teenage rebellion in those households! Wouldn’t even infants, as they grew, begin to ask, “What practices did my parents do which resulted in your killing them?” As sad as this is, it also points to the horror of sin. Parents can corrupt their children.²⁹

But why should we take seriously the skeptic’s advocacy for Canaanite children? Doesn’t the new atheist’s complaint ring hollow, since they are often at the forefront of defending a woman’s right to suction, dismember, or scald to death her unborn baby at any time and for any reason?

Perhaps what the skeptic is really concerned about is whether the just destruction of the Canaanites is license for Christians to resort to killing the wicked. The answer is: absolutely not! We don’t live in a theocracy anymore and, as Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 10:4–5, we don’t fight with “the weapons of the world,” but “we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God” (NIV). In other words, we now wage war in prayer and in the realm of ideas.

OUR SIN AND THE NEW ATHEIST CLAIMS

The new atheists immaculately exemplify what the Bible has proclaimed all along: sin corrupts our authority to judge rightly; what we think is justified prosecution against God Almighty turns out to be, on further illumination, a raucous rant full of the noxious fumes of the sinful heart.

Consider one basic example of how new atheist rationalizations echo the propensities of “Canaanite sin,” and indeed, echo the rationalizations of the human heart. Concerning sexual desire, Dawkins questions why evangelical Christians are so “obsessed” with “private sexual inclinations.”³⁰ The apparently not obsessed Christopher Hitchens considers “dangerous sexual repression” so serious that he calls it one of the “four irreducible objections to religious faith.”³¹ Dawkins and Hitchens are not just encouraging a sort of sexual libertarianism per se. They are insisting that God and Christianity are in fact poisonous and must diligently be resisted and defeated. In a recent debate with William Lane Craig, Hitchens exhorted the Christians in the audience, “Emancipate yourself from the idea of a celestial dictatorship and you’ve taken the first step toward becoming free.”³²

Although Dawkins nowhere endorses sex with animals, he does endorse Princeton atheist and ethicist Peter Singer as an “eloquent advocate” for our need to become “postspeciesist.”³³ According to Singer, to claim that one species is better than another is to invoke grave implications because, after all, “We are animals….This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”³⁴

The problem with new atheist divine genocide claims is rather simple: God hates sin, but the new atheists do not.³⁵ Consequently, they complain of divine genocide in the face of Canaanite sin! So let’s not kid ourselves: at the end of the day no amount of explanation will cause today’s illuminati (or “brights,” as some new atheists like to be called) to consider God’s commands justified.³⁶ But our job as Christians is to proclaim unambiguously, especially to strongholds set up against knowledge of God, that humankind is sinful, that the wages of sin is death, and that by trusting Christ’s sacrifice we can be saved from the wrath of God and enjoy resurrection life in and with Him forever.

Clay Jones is assistant professor in the Master of Arts in Christian Apologetics program at Biola University and specializes in issues related to why God allows evil.

notes

1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 247.

2 Ibid., 31.

3 Ibid., 246.

4 See Ulf Oldenburg, The Conflict between El and Ba‘al in Canaanite Religion (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1969), 172.

5 Dawkins, 243.

6 For the story of Baal having sex with Asherah, see: “El, Ashertu and the Storm-god,” trans. Albrecht Goetze, ed. James B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East: Supplementary Texts and Pictures Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1969), 519.

7 W. F. Albright, Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1968), 145.

8 Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., “Incest, Sodomy and Bestiality in the Ancient Near East,” in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. (Neukirchen Vluyn, Germany: Neukirchener Verlag, 1973), 82.

9 See the Papyrus Chester Beatty III recto (BM10683) from about 1175 BC as referenced in Lise Manniche, Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 1987), 100.

10 Gwendolyn Leick, Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature (New York: Routledge, 1994), 57.

11Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective, trans. Kirsi Stjerna (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 33.

12 John Gray, The Legacy of Canaan (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1965), 101–2.

13Ibid., 101.

14 John Day, Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989), 62.

15 Shelby Brown, Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in Their Mediterranean Context (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic, 1991), 14.

16 Kleitarchos, Scholia on Plato’s Republic 337A as quoted in Day, 87.

17 Stephanie Dalley, “Erra and Ishum IV,” Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford: Oxford University, 1989), 305.

18 Hoffner, 82. HL §§ 187–88, 199.

19 Ibid., 85.

20 Mark S. Smith, trans. Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, ed. Simon B. Parker (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), 148.

21 Hoffner, 82.

22 Manniche, 102.

23 Dawkins, 248.

24 For an example of how embarrassing and dangerous this could be, see Robert M. Yerkes, “The Mind of the Gorilla: Part III. Memory,” Comparative Psychology Monographs 5, 2 (1928): 68–69.

25 Dawkins, 237–38.

26 Flavius Josephus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. William Whiston (Hartford, CN: S. S. Scranton, 1905), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, 822.

27 Genesis 18:23–25 NIV.

28 Dawkins, 240.

29 Although no Scripture is definitive that all children will be saved, many Christians point out that it is possible (based on verses like Matthew 19:14). And if all children are saved, then a Canaanite child would benefit by being alive in a better place.

30 Dawkins, 238.

31 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Boston: Twelve Books, 2007), 4.

32The debate between Craig and Hitchens occurred on April 4, 2009 at Biola University. The quote is from Gail Patches, “The Great Debate: Craig, Hitchens ask ‘Does God Exist?’” Whittier Daily News, April 5, 2009, A1, A4.

33 Dawkins, 271.

34 Peter Singer “Heavy Petting: Review of Midas Dekkers, ‘Dearest Pet: On Bestiality’ (London, 2000),” Nerve.com, 2001, http://www.nerve.com/opinions/singer/heavypetting/main.asp. Accessed 5 November 2008.

35 Sadly, all too often, neither do we.

36 Dawkins, 338. A special thanks to Joseph Gorra for his many helpful suggestions and to my wife, Jean E. Jones, for her extensive reading of ANE primary and secondary sources and for years ago explaining to me much of the Old Testament.

O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,

How blessed will be the one who repays you

With the recompense with which you have repaid us.

How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones

Against the rock! (Ps. 137:8–9)²

What nasty person would say such things? Well—a pretty angry psalmist! This portion of Psalm 137 is one of various “imprecatory psalms” (Pss. 7, 12, 35, 55, 58, 59, 69, 79, 83, 109, 137, 139). “Imprecation” is the calling down of curses or divine judgments on someone. Imprecatory passages have shocked some modern editors into performing “psalmectomies” on psalter hymnals, excising these verses altogether!³ Biblical poetry contains prayers that God break the arm of the wicked (10:15), scatter their bones (53:5), or slay His enemies (139:19). C. S. Lewis calls them “terrible,” “contemptible,” “devilish,” “profoundly wrong,” and “sinful” prayers.⁴ Shouldn’t we love and pray for our enemies (Matt. 5:43–48)? How can we make sense of these harsh-sounding passages? Perhaps the following acrostic (I-M-P-R-E-C-A-T-I-O-N) can offer guidance.

Irate reactions to terrible injustices are understandable. Psalm 137’s setting is Israel’s distressing sixth-century BC exile in Babylon following “unshakable” Jerusalem’s destruction (Ps. 46:5)—a very tough pill to swallow! Their captors taunted them to sing “songs of Zion,” which added insult to injury. Of further insult was the fact that Israel’s brothers, the Edomites (descendants of Esau) also joined in the destructive rampage and pillaging. They even blocked fleeing Israelites from escaping, treacherously handing them over to the Babylonians (Obed. 11–14).⁵ This psalm expresses legitimate moral outrage. Consider how you would react if a neighbor tried to seduce your daughter or give your children drugs. Outrage indicates that we care and take injustice seriously.⁶ These psalmists cry out to God with understandable, honest, hot-off-the-emotional-press responses.

Modern Western standards should not be imposed on an ancient Near East context. C. S. Lewis wrongly assumed that the Hebrews “cursed more bitterly than the Pagans.”⁷ We read of standard curses in other ancient Near East “prayer books.”⁸ In response to devastating injustices of an earlier war, “The (Babylonian) Curse of Akkad” (2400 BC) expresses the wish: “May the cattle slaughterer slaughter his wife” and “May your sheep butcher butcher his child.” An Assyrian text (from 672 BC) wishes leprosy and death followed by the feasting of vultures and jackals on enemies’ corpses.⁹ Harsh-sounding prayers were common back then.

Passionate responses are upset exaggerations, not calm contemplations. The prophet Jeremiah, after being beaten and placed in stocks, curses the day he was born, wishing he had remained in his mother’s womb until he died (Jer. 20:14–18). Jeremiah does not literally mean this; he simply hasn’t yet “cooled off.” He thus gives a white-hot immediate response to the deep humiliation and injustice he suffered; Jeremiah wants us to feel his pain.¹⁰ Old Testament (OT) scholar John Sailhamer observes that Psalm 137’s imagery “is no more intended to be taken literally” than that in psalms that speak of “rivers clapping their hands and mountains singing for joy.”¹¹

Repression of righteous outrage obstructs justice and healing. Naming evils and calling perpetrators to account is the first step toward correcting injustice. Victims of sexual abuse or of a spouse’s adultery often experience healing after they articulate their pain. Consider how Rwanda’s genocide and South Africa’s apartheid have led to commissions in which perpetrators must face surviving victims who name evils, hold their persecutors accountable, and (begin to) heal festering wounds. To love our enemies, we must know who they are and what they’ve done. Hate should be prayed, not stifled. Apathy, not hate, is the opposite of love.¹²

Enemies are not hated personally by the psalmists. Despite the psalmists’ harsh words, they often exhibit graciousness and personal concern toward their enemies (Pss. 35:1, 12–13; 109:4–5). The psalmist David treated Saul, Absalom, and others with kindness despite their mistreating him (2Sam. 1:1–16; 2:5; 16:11–12; 19:12–23).

Concern for God’s purposes is the psalmists’ passion. The indignation of the psalmists was not primarily personal, but God-oriented. Defying God’s redemptive workings through Abraham/Israel to bless the nations meant opposing God’s purposes. Commitment to God’s plan and reputation prompts David’s use of uncomfortable, harsh terms (“hate,” “loathe”) toward God’s opponents (Ps. 139:21–22). He nonetheless immediately asks God to search his heart, saying, “see if there be any hurtful way in me” (vv.23–24). When the psalmists call on God to do to the wicked what He has promised (Ps. 58:9–10), then, personal vengeance isn’t the point. Our relativistic society could learn from the psalmists’ moral outrage and their passion for God’s will.

Anger takes a back seat to mercy. God desires repentance, not judgment (Ezek. 18:23). Needing conversion himself, Jonah evaded Israel’s enemy Nineveh, knowing that God likely would show mercy in response to repentance: “I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God” (Jonah 4:2; cf. Exod. 34:6). The wicked indeed can avert promised calamity by their repentance (Jer. 18:7–8). Evil king Manasseh’s penitence shows that no matter how morally depraved one becomes, God may be moved by humble repentance (2Chron. 33:9, 12–13). This theme of compassion over judgment is well known to the psalmists (see, e.g., Ps. 106).

Triumphalism does not characterize the psalmists. Hardly self-righteous, the psalmists know that Israel, when rebelling, isn’t above God’s righteous judgment. They exhibit no double standard—they know that unfaithful Israel can expect God’s promised wrath: “As I plan to do to [the corrupt Canaanites], so I will do to you” (Num. 33:56; cf. Josh. 23:15; Lamentations). In Psalm 89, God is “full of wrath,” having “cast off and rejected” His “anointed” (v.38). He isn’t playing favorites.

Inspiration for the New Testament’s emphasis on loving and forgiving enemies is rooted in the Old Testament. Reinforcing Jesus’ message to love one’s enemy and pray for one’s persecutors (Matt. 5:43–48), Paul exhorts: “Never pay back evil for evil to anyone.… ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink….’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:17–20), citing Proverbs 25:21–22 (“if your enemy is hungry…”) as the ideal. Other OT Scriptures emphasize the same theme (Exod. 23:4–5; Lev. 19:17–18; Prov. 24:17). Believers must move beyond imprecation to the higher ideal of desiring the salvation of their enemies, blessing rather than cursing (Matt. 5:43–48; 1Pet. 2:23; 3:9; Rom. 12:14–21). This is God’s own attitude, whose love is “complete” or “perfect” (Matt. 5:48): He doesn’t just love those who love Him, but also loves His enemies, and sends rain and sunshine on both groups of people (Matt. 5:44–45). This point, here and elsewhere in Scripture, does not negate the New Testament emphasis on God’s judgment against those resisting His rule; it does, however, stress the primacy of God’s love, who reluctantly allow people to go their own way and separate themselves from Him permanently.

Old Testament moral perspectives, however, are sometimes tolerated as less-than-ideal. We can reject the psalmists’ cries for brutal vindication in its most literal sense, and look toward Jesus’ example of blessing instead of cursing—prayer instead of imprecation—in response to personal enemies. We have seen that bashing-babies-against-rocks imprecations are not literal, but remember also that certain ancient Near East practices Israel adopted—slavery, polygamy, tribalism, patriarchalism—are permitted in the Scriptures because they are expressions of humanity’s hardness of heart (cf. Matt. 19:8)—rather than reflections of God’s ideal (Gen. 1:26–28; 2:24), which Christ’s redemption seeks to restore (cf. Gal. 3:28). So, as Christians reflecting on the imprecatory psalms, we should desire God’s ideals—our enemies’ good and their salvation—but we also should desire that God’s justice prevail, like the martyrs did in Revelation 6:9–11. This, however, will mean judgment on the unrepentant. John Stott reminds us that we can’t desire sinners’ salvation “in defiance of their own unwillingness to receive it,” and we should desire their—and our—judgment if we repudiate or ignore God’s grace.¹³

New battle lines have been drawn for God’s people, the church. OT (national) Israel’s enemies were often other nations—with their idolatries and immoralities. The psalmists’ curses on Babylon or Edom flow from this profoundly religious framework.¹⁴ Unlike the church—the new, true interethnic Israel (Rom. 2:28–29), national Israel fought physical battles against enemy nations that opposed God’s purposes. Christians, using imprecatory prayers, fight spiritual battles against the forces Christ came to defeat (Matt. 12:22–29; John 12:31; 16:11; Col. 2:14–15); we must pray that the gospel and its influence may spread (2 Cor. 10:4; Eph. 6:19; 1 Pet. 5:8–9).

With certain qualifications, then, we can learn from the imprecatory psalmists by identifying with their outrage and dismay when humans and spiritual powers oppose God’s just and good purposes. Anger is often understandable, but grace-receiving Christians should pray for grace on their enemies—and also for God’s just reign to be established: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).

—Paul Copan

Paul Copan (Ph.D., Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is Professor and Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University (West Palm Beach, Florida). He is the author and editor of many books on philosophy of religion and apologetics, including When God Goes to Starbucks (Baker, 2008) and Loving Wisdom (Chalice Press, 2007), and a contributor to the Apologetics Study Bible (Holman, 2007).

notes

1 Shortened from a chapter in Paul Copan, When God Goes to Starbucks: A Guide to Everyday Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker 2008).

2 All Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible.

3 Eugene H. Peterson, Answering God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1989), 98.

4 C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), 20–33.

5 Elizabeth Achtemeier, Preaching Hard Texts of the Old Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998), 105–10.

6 Peterson, 100; Lewis, 30.

7 Lewis, 30–31.

8 I draw from William Webb, “Bashing Babies against the Rocks” (paper presented to the Evangelical Theological Society, Atlanta, November 2003).

9 D. J. Wiseman, The Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon (London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1958), 60–78.

10 D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 97–98.

11 John H. Sailhamer, The NIV Compact Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 346.

12 Peterson, 98.

13 John Stott, Favorite Psalms (Chicago: Moody, 1988), 121.

14 Leslie C. Allen, Psalms 101–150, Word Biblical Commentary 21 (Waco, TX: Word, 1983), 242–43.

In his book Jesus, Interrupted, Bart Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, posed the following as the first of many errors and inconsistencies in the Bible:

The Gospel of Mark indicates that it was in the last week of his life that Jesus “cleansed the Temple” by overturning the tables of the money changers and saying, “This is to be a house of prayer…but you have made it a den of thieves” (Mark 11), whereas according to John this happened at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry (John 2). Some readers have thought that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end. But that would mean that neither Mark nor John tells the ‘true’ story, since in both accounts he cleanses the temple only once. Moreover, is this reconciliation of the two accounts historically plausible? If Jesus made a disruption in the temple at the beginning of his ministry, why wasn’t he arrested by the authorities then?

Ehrman concludes by dogmatically asserting, “Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.”¹

Is Ehrman right? Is this just one more in a litany of errors made by a pseudonymous gospel writer? Or is this just indicative of a professor gone wild?

First, it is not only uncharitable but unquestionably wrongheaded to suggest that neither Mark nor John (who Ehrman demeans as “illiterate”) could be telling the “true” story had the temple been cleansed twice. As is no doubt obvious to even the most unlettered of Ehrman’s students, neither gospel writer provides an exhaustive account of everything Jesus said or did. As the apostle John communicates in hyperbolic parlance (no doubt lost on a wooden literalist), “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written” (John 21:25 NIV).

Furthermore, the gospel of John itself provides a more than historically plausible insight as to why Jesus might not have been arrested during an initial temple cleansing. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back leading to the arrest and trial of Jesus would quite logically have resulted from a late, not an early, temple cleansing. Not only so, but the Jewish leaders did not arrest Jesus in the early stages of His ministry for fear of the multitudes who were in awe of Christ’s teachings and miracles (Mark 12:12; John 7).

Finally, as even a cursory reading reveals, John not only kairologically (see below) orders his gospel by theme (e.g., seven signs, seven-day opening, seven-day account of the passion, etc.) but presents a more highly developed Christology than that offered in the Synoptics. As such, John says that the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (1:14), which fulfills the Old Testament promise that God’s glory would again return to His temple (e.g., Malachi 3:1). Moreover, John reinterprets the meaning of Passover by revealing Jesus as the quintessential Passover lamb (John 1:29, 36). As such, it could be logically (and charitably) surmised that John might introduce his account of Christ’s temple cleansing earlyin his gospel narrative—and within a context in which Jesus is revealed as the substance that fulfills the types and shadows of temple, priest, and sacrifice. While such a notion does not set well with a fundamentalist reading of literature, it accords well with a nuanced and highly sophisticated reckoning of time particular to the ancients (i.e. a kairological interpretation, which reckons time not in terms of our familiar chronological ordering but in terms of a quality of purpose in which an event is said to occur at “just the right time” [cf. Genesis 1 and 2]). In other words, even if there was only one historical temple cleansing, one might logically assume that John communicates it kairologically as opposed to chronologically.

The very fact that a number of plausible resolutions have been forwarded precludes the charge that the gospel accounts are contradictory.

—Hank Hanegraaff

Hank Hanegraaff is president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast heard daily throughout the United States and Canada. For a list of stations airing the Bible Answer Man, or to listen online, log on to www.equip.org.

notes

1 Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know about Them) (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 6–7.

First, what Ehrman considers a problem I would submit is a profound and glorious truth. For implicit in the name “Yahweh” is the profundity that we as mere mortals perceive God progressively in the performance of His promises. Abraham caught but a glimmer of reality when the infinite I AM brought him from Ur of the Chaldeans. For Abraham, God was indeed the Almighty provider and sustainer (the meaning of El Shaddai in Genesis 17:1), though the promises God made to Abraham remained largely unfulfilled. Moses, however, experienced the glorious revelation of Yahweh, the eternal “I AM that I AM” (or “I will be as I will be”)² in a progressively greater and more intimate way, culminating in the awesome Exodus out of Egypt. Yahweh’s deliverance of His people manifested ever more clearly His enabling power and enduring presence.

Furthermore, as those of Ehrman’s students who have grappled with Jewish law know full well, the words of the Torah are deceptively simple and deeply profound. As such, a wooden literalist is rendered impotent to grasp its profundities. A case in point concerns the Book of Revelation, which draws heavily on the Torah. As the venerable New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham rightly points out, “The Apocalypse of John is a work of immense learning, astonishingly meticulous literary artistry, remarkable creative imagination, radical political critique, and profound theology.”³ Even John’s so-called defective Greek grammar is due to literary artistry, not deficient linguistic acumen. An apt example of a deliberately chosen grammatical construction for which John is often unjustly chided is found in the following greeting to the seven churches in the province of Asia: “Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come” (Rev. 1:4 NIV, emphasis added). Though technically the words “from him” should be in the genitive rather than the nominative case, John uses this peculiar Greek construction to make a point about the unity and nature of God. As Dr. James Moffatt explains, this is “a quaint and deliberate violation of grammar in order to preserve the immutability and absoluteness of the divine name.”⁴ Contra Ehrman, a similarly subtle and sublime sophistication is at work in the Torah accounts of the divine name.

Finally, let me state forthrightly that there is an unsettling lesson to be learned here. If we harden our hearts against divine revelation, the very words of Yahweh will become to us an indecipherable parable. In the words of the Master Teacher, “They may be ever seeing but never perceiving and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:12 NIV). God’s revelation is an occasion to receive and be healed, or to reject and be harden ed. No one can remain unaffected.

—Hank Hanegraaff

Hank Hanegraaff is president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast heard daily throughout the United States and Canada. For a list of stations airing the Bible Answer Man, or to listen online, log on to www.equip.org.

notes

1 Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions In the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York: Harper One, 2009), 10.

2 Exodus 3:14; the divine name, YHWH, is closely connected with the verb hayah, “to be.”

3 Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (Edinburgh, Scotland: T and T Clark, 1993), ix.

4 James Moffatt, The Revelation of St. John The Divine, in W. Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor’s Greek Testament, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1976), 337.

— Hank Hanegraaff

NOTES

1. Excerpted from Hank Hanegraaff’s The Bible Answer Book 2 (Nashville: J. Countryman, 2006).
2. All Bible quotations are from the New International Version.
3. For further study, see Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Peter H. Davids, F. F. Bruce, and Manfred T. Brauch (eds.), Hard Sayings of the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996); on related issues, see Hank Hanegraaff, TV’s “The West Wing” vs. The Bible, available through the Christian Research Institute (CRI) at http://www.equip.org.