Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Joshua 8:1-2
1 Then the LORD said to Joshua, "Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land. 2 You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. Set an ambush behind the city."
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This reminds me of Petruchio's speech to Kate (in Taming of the Shrew); wherein he tells her that he wants complete obedience from her. If he should say that it is day when it is night, she should agree even though her senses tell her otherwise.
It wasn't evil for the people to plunder cities, because they were given permission to do it here. It was just evil at Jericho, because God had forbidden it then. So the exact same act can either be sinful or permitted, simply because of the word of God.
So is there absolute good and evil? Or are those definitions simply arbitrary, and therefore changeable by a capricious God? Obviously, this must be a sacrilegious thought; because I don't want to think of my God as being capricious and arbitrary. I want to believe that He is so wise that I am simply unable to ascertain His wisdom. Yet it is verses like these in the Bible that remind me of a terrible song: "I think that God's got a sick sense of humor. And when I die, I expect to find Him laughing."
If God is capricious then the world is meaningless, and there is no inherent value in anything. If God is wise and good and true; then we must have faith in Him and love Him and obey Him always. So does God, like Petruchio, command us to obey even when His commandments seem to go against our God given senses? I suppose the answer is yes, because I think of Abraham and Isaac. I don't have Abraham's faith. I couldn't sacrifice my child. Instead I would question my own sanity and think that I must have misunderstood God, because the God I love would never command such a thing. Just as the God I love would not command the things He does in the Book of Joshua. But then am I merely loving a God of my own creation? And if so, can I truly and fully love this God of the Bible? I love Jesus, but the God of the old testament is confusing for me. Aaaah!
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