Willima Barclay once told an illustrating story about how a little girl is questioned by a skeptic friend about “the love of God”, and confronted with questions about how a loving God could order the deaths of everyone in the city in one of many Israeli army victories depiected in Scripture. The little girl replied ” “That’s before God became a Christian”.

Now, of course, God hasn’t “become a Christian”. God is whom God has laways been. What HAS changed is how humanity understands God. And in Scripture, we have a definite evolution. Jesus himself quotes almost exclusively from the Psalms and the Prophets, and when he quotes the law, it is almost always in the context of some point he is making about putting “people” over the Law. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”, and when Jesus objects to the Pharisees complaints about the disciples violating some temple law by eating some grain, and Jesus appeals to how David and his men were allowed to eat the temple bread (and this debate partner insists that this shows how Jesus endorsed the use of military violence; the fact that he was using THAT particular example. Similarly, he says that the fact that Jesus did not condemn the Roman centurion , whose servant he cured, shows implicit endorsement of the soldier’s job. He never answered my retort as to whether this means that Jesus approved of prostitution since he not only did not condemn the prostitute who annointed his feet, but defended her against the disciples, who did just that. If that’s not “implicit endorsement” of prostitution, then neither did Jesus imply endorsement of the soldier).

The sin we all often fall prey to in reading Scripture is that Scripture often says exactly what WE WANT it to say. Garrson Keillor , in one of his Lake Wobegon stories, was talking about a “scary uncle” he had , who was an itinerant evangelist, who never married. Keillor said he never married becuase “he didn’t act unless he heard God telling him IN HIS HEAR ‘That’s the one’. Keillor goes on to say:

“For some people the threshhold of the Lord’s will is lower than for other people. Some people, they just look at something they like and they hear the Lord telling them to go do that”.

That’s exactly what has plagued the history of God’s people. The prophets railed against it, Jesus did, and dissenters since, have called into question the abuse of Scripture , often by those who persecute others for their “heretical views” of Scripture (meaning, not as orthodox and therefore righteous, as theirs), and often the most accomodating to the culture andto “nationalistic” viewpoints, and assimilating that into their “Gospel”; their “canon within the canon”; their “American Bible” (which has included, throughout history such thngs as “The European Empire Conqueror’s Bible”, the “Slaveowner’s Bible”, the “Capitalist Bible” and the “America is a Great and Christian Nation Bible”