Missing God in the Bible
David Plotz, of Slate, read through the whole Bible in a year. By his own writing, he is a “lax, non-Hebrew-speaking Jew”. The beginning of the article is exciting as he recounts how reading the Bible gave him insight into his Jewishness.
Reading the Bible has joined me to Jewish life in a way I never thought possible. I trace this to when I read about Jacob blessing his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh at the end of Genesis. I suddenly realized: Oh, that’s why I’m supposed to lay my hand on my son’s head at Shabbat dinner and bless him in the names of Ephraim and Manasseh. That shock of recognition has been followed by many more—when I came across the words of the Shema, the most important Jewish prayer, in Deuteronomy, when I read about the celebration of Passover in the book of Ezra, when I read in Psalms the lyrics of Christian hymns I love to sing
Things become sad very quickly, however
You notice that I haven’t said anything about belief. I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn’t really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I’m brokenhearted about God.
He then writes
the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.
and refers to God’s acts as “crimes” and God as “unmerciful, unjust, unforgiving, and unloving”.
What Plotz completely misses is the truth that God is merciful (Luke 1:78), just (Deuteronomy 32:4), forgiving (Nehemiah 9:17), and loving (Titus 3:4). God is sovereign, completely above us, yet Plotz “must submit (God) to rational and moral inquiry”. By attempting to reduce God to our limited, sinful, minds, we attempt to make ourselves into gods, into our own functional saviors. What we need to do, instead, is humble ourselves before God and trust in God’s righteousness (Psalm 48:10) and holiness (Leviticus 11:44). Because God is perfect (2 Samuel 22:31), He can never do anything that is wrong or unjust or criminal. That is a hard concept for humans to grasp because we judge based on our view of right and wrong. When we fully embrace God, however, we see how rebellious we really are and understand how we rightly deserve judgement, but in God’s wonderful and loving grace, He has chosen some us from the beginning of time to commune forever with him. Hallelujah.