I'm not saying I have a hatred of God. I have a disgust and anger toward those actions.
Ok. I'm very glad to hear you say that. I was asking because I needed to know what I had to work with.
If you love the Lord Jesus Christ, then please consider what I tell you. I can deal with every passage you quoted one by one, and will at least deal try to deal with one or two here. But to start with, every single passage you quoted was Old Testament, and when you are reading Old Testament commandments you have to understand what God was dealing with: A people
in the flesh.
Let me explain. Suppose God chose as His holy people one nationality today, be it all Americans, all Mexicans, all Brits, etc. Or more accurately, say He chose one specific race, like the blacks or hispanics. As with any race or nationality, He would have some who loved and obeyed Him willingly out of love, but the rest would go into it kicking and screaming, and be very prone to rebelling against Him whenever things started rubbing them the least bit the wrong way. This was the situation our God was in when He chose the Jewish race. He knew full well most of the Jews would rebel against Him, and it's a miracle He didn't destroy them all more than once (Deuteronomy 9:13-14). There has ever always been only a remnant who truly loved God, and that is still true of you and I today. It is part of why the Lord turned to the Gentiles.
But He
needed a people, A. through whom He could give the law, much of which allowed Him to prophetically foreshadow what would take place in New Testament times (through sabbaths, Jewish feast days and holy days, circumcision, clean and unclean foods, a whole list of things) and B. more importantly, He needed a people through whose genealogy the Son of God could be born. The Messiah would have to be born of a woman to fulfill God'd word (Genesis 3:15), and that meant God would need a race of people through whom He could make this happen.
Why I it important? This meant that He, of necessity, would have to work to keep a rebellious people in line until the Messiah could be born, and that meant bending His ultimate will and desires to theirs somewhat, to keep them from rejecting Him altogether. Several times Jesus explained that He allowed the Jews to have things that were never His perfect will for them, but that they nevertheless insisted upon. For instance, they insisted on having a king. The Lord told Samuel that was
not His will, but the people insisted "We want a king," so they got their king (1 Samuel 8:1-9). Jesus explained to His disciples that God never intended to allow divorce, but the Jews would have went bananas if He had not, because they were carnal and given to strife and couldn't live in peace with their wives (Matthew 5:31-32). There are actually numerous things in this sermon where Jesus told them that things the Jews had been allowed by God to do were not His will, nor were they ever, including killing one's enemies, and retaliating against those who cheated you out of money or cruelly mistreated you (Matthew 5:38-48). But He could only tell these things to those who would become the true sons of Israel, the spiritual Israel; those who would willingly obey these commandments and His true will because they truly loved Him and trusted in Him.
You could include among those things God never wanted, slavery, and the subjugation of women, both of which have since been outlawed in
Christian nations around the world, specifically as a result of Christian leaders leading the fight in decrying how immoral these practices were.
Some of your passages would take more explanation, like Deuteronomy 20:10-14, but let me deal with a few of them more specifically:
For the LORD had said to Moses, ‘Exempt the tribe of Levi from the census; do not include them when you count the rest of the Israelites. You must put the Levites in charge of the Tabernacle of the Covenant, along with its furnishings and equipment. They must carry the Tabernacle and its equipment as you travel, and they must care for it and camp around it. Whenever the Tabernacle is moved, the Levites will take it down and set it up again. Anyone else who goes too near the Tabernacle will be executed.’ (
Numbers 1:48-51 NLT)
When they came to the threshing floor of Nodan, Uzzah reached out his hand to the ark of God to steady it, for the oxen were making it tip. But the Lord was angry with Uzzah; God struck him on that spot, and he died there before God. (
2 Samuel 6:3-7NAB)
Both of these passages deal with coming too close to the Presence of a thrice Holy God. Both Jews and Gentiles needed to understand that when they were considering approaching the God of the Jews, they were approaching the Creator of the Heaven and earth. This was not like approaching some stone idol erected to replace some demon that manifested long ago in the form of some god. This was coming into close proximity with a Being who could blow the entire universe away with the slightest move of His finger, and although He was a merciful God,
NO ONE was coming near Him without Holiness. He is and will forevermore be a God to be feared. Anyone who sees Him as He truly is in Heaven yet does not fear Him will be stone-cold crazy. Scratch that. Even crazy people will know to fear the Living God if they see Him as He truly is. But through Christ's sacrifice we can now come
boldly to the throne of grace. That means that spite of how immensely powerful He is, we can still do so because of the price His Son paid for us, through His
death.
It is said that the beginning of wisdom is to fear God, but that the greatest wisdom is to love Him. This is what John meant by the words "Perfect love casts out all fear." But this perfected love that finally eliminates all fear of Him, such that we can walk into the very Presence and Power of the Creator of the universe Himself, and abide in the blinding Power of Almighty God, will only come to us when we have finally
perfected obedience, for without holiness no one will see God.
I could say more, but I'll leave it there for now. When I have time I'll come back and deal with the rest of your passages.
Hope I didn't offend you,
HiH
