← Ask NT Wright Anything
Ask NT Wright Anything
Jesus and God's wrath, was the Holy Spirit in the OT and did God really command violence?
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- [00:01]
Mike Bird
Before we begin today's show, I have some important news to share with you. Premier Insight's financial year ends on June 30, and it's vital we close a final funding gap of $94,000 by that date. The great news is generous friends of the ministry have offered a new $5,000 matching grant which will double your gift today up to that amount. That's why I wanted to take just a moment before we get into today's podcast to ask for your help. If you would please take a moment today to give your best gift@premierinsight.org ntrite that's premierinsight.org ntrite thank you for understanding how important your gift is today and for giving generously. And now it's time for today's podcast.
- [00:51]
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- [01:17]
Tom Wright
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- [01:19]
Howie Mandel
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Tom Wright
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Tom Wright
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Mike Bird
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- [01:35]
Mike Bird
Hello and welcome to the Ask Anti Write Anything podcast, a program where we answer your questions about Jesus, the Bible and the life of faith. I'm Mike Bird from Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, joined by Tom Wright from
- [01:52]
Tom Wright
Wycliffe hall in Oxford.
- [01:53]
Mike Bird
And Tom, how do you be this fine day? Is. Is Oxford still doing okay?
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Tom Wright
I'm a little bit busy, but Oxford is absolutely full of students and tourists and, yeah, people having a good time or people anxious about exams or whatever it is. But Oxford is full and buzzing, bustling
- [02:12]
Mike Bird
with bicycles and anxious students are the way it should be. The way it should be. Well, Tom, this week we've got some questions on the topics of Jesus and God's wrath. Was the only Holy Spirit in the Old Testament? If so, where and how? And a good question I like about, you know, violence in scripture. So let's get straight into it. We've got a question from Logan Queering from Denver in the usa. I'll be in Denver in those Rocky Mountains, that big blue bear in front of the Convention center. I'll be there. And he's got a question about Jesus and God's wrath. This is what he says. Hi, Michael and Tom. I am currently reading through Jesus and the Victory of God. Great. I love that book. And my question spawns from there. In what way did Jesus believe himself to be taking on the wrath of Rome's hostile military action if Jerusalem would still be destroyed a generation later? If Jesus took on Rome's wrath, Jew Israel for her compromise with paganism, why was Jerusalem still destroyed? I suppose I've not pulled all the pieces together quite yet. And he says, I've been so blessed by both of your ministries and not only by your work as individuals, but in the work that has been done by others because of your influence on them. All I can say is a truly grateful thank you. Oh, well, thank you, Logan. Well, this is a good. This is a good question, Tom, because in your own telling of why Jesus died, you locate Jesus in the context of restoration eschatology. You know, how would Israel be restored? Because it's through a transformed Israel that God would transform the world. Israel, sorry. Jesus called people to repent of a particular way of being Israel that would lead towards the path of violent revolution. And, and you could see it symbolized perhaps by the crowd having the choice of releasing Jesus or releasing Barabbas, who was a murderer and an insurrectionist. And they chose Barabbas as their option. And Jesus effectively dies, experiencing the penalty that many Jews would undergo when they joined the rebellion against Rome, you know, about a generation later. But if Jesus died this death, experiencing the result or the consequences of rebellion and revolution with its false ideals, its misled ideas, and yet if Israel was really destroyed, you know, is. Is God double dipping? Is he punishing Jesus for the sins of Israel, but punishing Jerusalem anyway? Is God extracting judgment wrath twice? And is that really fair? Or do you think there may be a problem with the question? Is there something else going on here? Tom, how would you answer Logan's question?
- [05:15]
Tom Wright
Yeah, this is a great question and thank you, Logan, for raising it ever since I first found myself moving in the direction of saying what I say in Jesus and the victory of God in the long chapter on Jesus death. I have been aware of questions like this hovering around and I've done my best to think through at least some of them. So here's how it goes. Let's begin, though, by making the point which I first met in my mentor, George Caird. He wrote a little pamphlet, really, on Jesus and the Jewish nation. It was A lecture.
- [05:52]
Mike Bird
You can read it online, Tom, you can get that online just by searching it. And I do recommend people read it
- [05:58]
Tom Wright
Jesus and the Jewish Nation. Because Cad, like many great New Testament scholars, was basically thinking historically. He was thinking into the situation of the Judean world in the 20s and 30s AD and seeing that a lot that Jesus was doing and saying was not abstract theory about people being sinners and needing to go to heaven. So Jesus somehow doing this strange thing to enable that to happen, but that a lot of what he was doing and saying was very specific about Rome and the Jewish attitudes to Rome and ambitions for revolution and so on. And two passages struck me as particularly relevant there. One is when Jesus says in Luke, if they do this when the wood is green, what will they do when it's dry? And the image there is of trees being cut down and burnt and Jesus is saying, look, there's. They're killing me, even though I am a green tree. I was not fuel for the fire. I was not a revolutionary, I was not a firebrand. But watch out, daughters of Jerusalem, don't weep for me, weep for yourselves and for your children. And that's exactly the sequence that Logan is talking about. That Jesus is, as it were, going ahead of his people and taking the wrath of Rome onto himself, but at the same time acknowledging that if people continue the way that the young revolutionaries are going, then within a generation, Rome will do to them in a massive killing what they're doing to him now. And that, of course, is precisely what happened. If you read Josephus book, the Jewish War, which is not a happy book to say the least, then there are thousands upon thousands of young firebrands who are crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem. In fact, there's so many people crucified that they cut down all the trees and there wasn't enough wood to make all the crosses that they were trying to make. It's a terrible, terrible scene. But in a sense, therefore, the other passage which this goes with in my mind is when Jesus says, jerusalem, Jerusalem. How often I have wanted to gather you under my wings like a hen gathering her chicks under her wings. He's just warned about Herod as that fox. And it's either a fox attacking the chicken coop or a fire, maybe in a farmyard. And what the hen will do is to gather the chicks under her wings in order to take the full force of either the fire or the fox onto herself in order to protect the chicks. But Jesus says, and you weren't having it. You didn't Want to shelter under my wings. In other words, Jesus was making the way of escape, the way of coming out from under the wrath of Rome, which would be embodying the wrath of God. Remember that in, say, Jeremiah and Jesus is constantly likened to Jeremiah or echoing Jeremiah, then the wrath of Babylon is seen as the instrument or agent of the wrath of God against the sins of his people. So it isn't a question of sort of theological wrath over there and political wrath over there. Somehow they very much work together. And actually, therefore, this question is kind of the historical and political version of some questions that come up about atonement theology which results in some Calvinistic schemes where people say, if Jesus really did die as the substitute for the sins of the world, then how come there is going to be anyone in hell at the end of the day? And the answer in some Calvinistic schemes is, oh, well, he only died for the elect and the rest were going to be perishing anyway. And it seems to me that's a gross distortion of biblical theology, though I can see how people actually get there. So what I would say is this. At the beginning of Acts, when Peter is addressing the crowds, he says, save yourselves from this crooked generation. In other words, and I think this is what we see going on in Matthew 24 in Parallels. What Jesus has done is to go ahead of his people, to take the wrath of Rome upon himself, to make a breathing space, to make a time in which it will be possible for people to repent and turn and find a different way of being God's people. But this doesn't mean that what he did on the cross was irrelevant or didn't really work. It means that he's done what he's done in order, then that there is this time in which this new family can arise, a time when people will be no longer zealous like the hot heads he's talking about, but will be people of peace. And this is part of the challenge in Luke 19. If only you'd known at last the things that make for peace. But now they're hidden from your eyes. Therefore you've courted disaster, and disaster is on its way. Jesus, in saying that, is then weeping. He's riding into Jerusalem on the donkey, and. And he's going ahead of his people and saying, this is the way I am doing this for you now you have to come my way. You have to believe, trust, follow me, and this will be the way of salvation. And that's why Mark 13, Matthew 24, et cetera, have Jesus looking at the larger picture and saying, the one who endures to the end will be saved. And we have traditionally read those passages in terms of an abstract, saved in terms of going to heaven. And Logan rightly hones in on the fact that in the original text, this is very much about this worldly truths of how God is at work in the period of Jesus and the period of AD 70. It's a tough question, and it's made all the harder by the fact that most New Testament scholars have not actually, I think, seen to the heart of this one and figured it all out. Maybe there's more work, Mike, for you and me to do on this, and I'd be glad to know your perspective as well, but this is where I would cautiously approach it.
- [12:20]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I think people have a problem connecting Jesus in the historical context of Roman Judea, where he is warning about the dangers of, well, don't follow the Herodians, don't follow the Pharisees, don't follow, follow the Zealots.
- [12:39]
Sponsor/Announcer
He.
- [12:39]
Mike Bird
He's answering the live questions of his day. And Jesus is wrestling not with the issue of how do we find a merciful God, but, you know, what does God require of his people? What is the way to restoration? Whose way of being? Israel avails before God? And Jesus is showing the particular way because he believes he is, you know, Yahweh in person, returning to Zion. And so that's a very different way of thinking, of thinking about it. But along the way, he deals with the political questions. You know, is Rome the ultimate enemy? You know, is. Is the answer to our problems, you know, your Taurus scroll in one hand and a sword in the other. So, you know, say your prayers, recite the Shema, and then stabby, stabby, stab, stab. Is that how the. The kingdom of God's coming? Say, no, no, no. If you go that way, it's going to lead to an even greater disaster. It's going to lead to a judgment. If you trust in the glory of Herod's temple, if you trust in your own military might, if you trust in your own guerrilla campaign, that will not bring about the kingdom of God. But the theological and the political are intertwined, and I think people just struggle how to do it, which is why they want to interpret the Olivet discourse and in a far more spiritual way. So it's just about the second coming, whether it has to be about the destruction of the temple. And then there's statements about, like you said, Tom, Jesus coming into Jerusalem, you know, warning about the disaster. That's going to come the people. Like someone warning of a nation that's on the verge of civil war. Like, do you really understand the terrors and the traumas that are going to fall upon people? And someone who's desperately calling the nation back from the brink of the terror that is coming.
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Tom Wright
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's tough, but in a sense we should expect it to be tough. If the cross is what the church has always said it is, which is the awesome moment, the moment of thick darkness where the evil of the world does its worst and God comes to take it upon himself and out of love, to rescue people and to rescue the world. If that's really so, we shouldn't expect to be able just to give a nice little A plus B plus C analysis of it. We should expect to be standing in awe and saying, this is a terrible thing, a terrible time, and thank God that God himself incarnate was in the middle of it. And saying it like that is not to escape the force of the question, as I hope I've made it clear. I think Logan is. Has put his finger right on a key issue, but I think ultimately it goes back to the intention of Jesus in going to the cross. And Logan, I know, is reading Jesus and the victory of God. And in the key chapter on the crucifixion there, I have made a long and careful argument that Jesus was modeling himself on several Old Testament figures, but particularly on the servant of Isaiah, who is both the royal servant and the prophetic servant, and the suffering servant, and finally, finally the dying servant. And that Somehow in Isaiah 40, 55 as a whole, that's the way in which Israel's vocation is being fulfilled, taking the worst that the nations can do, and God as a result dealing with sin and evil. Absolutely. In order then to bring about new covenant and new creation. And I think only when we understand not just a couple of proof texts from Isaiah 53, but that whole sequence of thought, Isaiah 14:55, with the servant figure at the middle of it, can we even begin to see what's going on? Because the Babylonian context which Isaiah is addressing then becomes the Jerusalem context which Jesus is addressing. And Jesus in the Olivet discourse echoes passages from Jeremiah and so on, which basically say Jerusalem has become the new Babylon and is now under judgment in the same way. And from that we just stand back in awe and say, you know, lord, have mercy on our distracted and torn apart world.
- [17:00]
Mike Bird
Indeed. Indeed. Well, Tom, let's change tack a bit and let's go to another question. This Time from Brian Hinkle of San Francisco, the Bay Area in the usa. And he's got a good question about the Holy Spirit. He asked this. Hi, Tom and Mike. First off, love the podcast and all the rich answers you both bring to each week's questions. You are blessing my life. My question is, I've been a little perplexed by the differences in how the Spirit is depicted in the Old and New Testaments. The Spirit comes upon people in the Old Testament, but in John 7:39 it says the Spirit has not come yet because Jesus hasn't been glorified. As to the indwelling of the Spirit, the holiness tradition that I grew up in preaches that the Holy Spirit cannot dwell in an unholy vessel requiring an entire sanctification after justification and before an Acts 2 event like baptism of the Holy Spirit. But I cannot reconcile this with anything I read in the Old Testament and the New Testament. So how does the Spirit dwell on us as language used in the Old Testament or in us as described in the New Testament? What is the difference? Does the Spirit dwell in us after justification? Or is there something to wait for, like Cornelius waiting for Peter to pray for him? Sorry for the long question. Thanks again. Well, this is a good question because the Holy Spirit is different in the Old and the New Testament. I mean, it's the same Spirit, but it has different roles and different functions. And, you know, we can legitimately ask the question, does the New Testament provide or witness to the Holy Spirit having a new form, function, and role in the life of the believer that it maybe didn't have in the Old Testament? And I think we've got a good question there from Brian. Is complete sanctification necessary for spirit baptism? Do you have to get a certain point of holiness so you can be, you know, dipped and baptized and completely immersed in the Holy Spirit? So maybe we could deal that with in two parts, Tom.
- [19:23]
Tom Wright
Yeah, two very different questions, actually. Yeah.
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Mike Bird
Yeah. What was the Holy Spirit doing in the Old Testament and what is maybe new about the Holy Spirit in the New Testament? And then we can talk about is there some sort of criteria or a. A rationale for receiving the Spirit in the New Covenant period? So let's do the first question first.
- [19:46]
Tom Wright
Yeah, I think that verse that, that Brian quotes is. Is really important. John 7:39, when Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles, quotes Isaiah 55 and says, if anyone is thirsty, let them come to me and drink. And the one who believes in me, as the Scripture says, out of their heart, will Flow rivers of living water. There are different ways of punctuating that sentence, but that's the Most people take it that way. And then John says, he said this about the Spirit which those who believed in him would receive. And then it's a rather odd phrase in the Greek. It's there was not yet Spirit because Jesus was not yet glorified, and that not yet. And then Jesus glorification is really crucial to the whole New Testament picture of the Holy Spirit. Because then at the end of John's Gospel, well, in chapter 20, the penultimate chapter in John's Gospel, Jesus breathes on his followers and says, receive the Holy Spirit. And when you put that together with John7, it's clear that Jesus being glorified in John is ultimately about the crucifixion. And then, of course, the resurrection and the revelation of God's glory in Jesus, which has been one of the major themes of John's Gospel all the way through, has now reached its climax. And the point is, something has happened on the cross and in the resurrection which now makes it not only possible, but appropriate for all Jesus followers to be inbreathed with that Holy Spirit. Something has happened to dispel the darkness and the sin which would otherwise have prevented it from being appropriate for God's Spirit to come and dwell with them. That obviously points forward to the second half of Brian's question. But let's stick with the first half. I and others have often really left on one side a theme which is, I think, quite important in the Old Testament, but hasn't always been brought out. My friend Jack Levison in Dallas in Texas has been pointing this out for ages. That, for instance, in Isaiah 63:11, when Isaiah is looking back to the time of the Exodus, he's talking about God coming with the children of Israel in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. This is God's own presence. And Isaiah says, where is the one who brought them up out of the sea with the shepherds of his flock? Where is the one who put within them his Holy Spirit, who caused his glorious arm to march at the right hand of Moses? There's a similar passage in Nehemiah, chapter 9, verse 20, similar passage in Haggai, chapter 2, verse 5, which is looking back at the indwelling of God in the tabernacle, the pillar of cloud and fire and all that, and reflecting on that, that that is actually God's own spirit being with his people. And so when then the New Testament writers talk about in Acts 2, the spirit filling the disciples and the rushing, mighty wind filling the house. And remember, wind and spirit are the same word in Greek, pneuma, and they're the same word in Hebrew, namely ruach. Then I think what we're seeing is the New Testament writers being aware that something to do with the new Exodus is happening at last. And you see that in say, Romans 8, where Paul is using Exodus language all through and he's talking about the people being led by the Spirit to their inheritance. And then when you track that back with the passages from Isaiah and Haggai and so on, it's, well, this is just like what God was doing in the Old Testament, leading the people by his own holy presence to where they were to get. But all of that said, as though until the time comes when God incarnate comes and dwells in their midst and deals with their sin and uncleanness on the cross all the time until then, this is something waiting to happen. It's a signpost pointing forward. It's a promise waiting to be fulfilled. And now, gloriously, in John chapter 20 and the parallel passages in Acts and Paul, then now it can happen at last. And so there's always a danger in failing to read the Bible sequentially and imagining that you can just take a doctrine or a dogma out of one passage and sort of stick it on the shelf alongside other passages on the same theme and try then to make them together. Because it's an ongoing narrative and you have to say that actually in the larger scheme of things, God made human beings in order to come and dwell with them in his heaven and earth cosmos. And that long range purpose has been fulfilled in Jesus and is being fulfilled by the Spirit. But ever since the call of Abraham, it's been kind of hinted at and God's been moving in that direction. And so with prophets and kings and priests, there is the sense of them being anointed and anointed by the Spirit in order to do God's will. Prophets, priests and kings get this anointing, but this too is pointing ahead so that then the new thing which happens in Acts is, oh my goodness, everybody gets it now. I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. And of course that's a quote from the prophet Joel, so that it was hinted at earlier. And something I want to say at this point, when we who are English speakers say of a word like pneuma or a word in the Hebrew like ruh, that isn't it funny that they mean wind or spirit or breath, we're coming at it the wrong way. I think we should say what we think of as different things. Wind and spirit and breath, they saw as a single, glorious, mysterious, powerful whole, so that they didn't distinguish between our breath and the wind and the Spirit. And so our nice neat categories don't necessarily correspond to the way they were thinking. As though we could say, well, here it just means breath, or here it just means spirit or wind as it may be. So having said that, that, I think, is how the sequential reading works. And notice that right at the end of the New Testament, in Revelation, where the Spirit and the Bride say come, the Spirit is enabling the church to pray for Jesus to come. There's that glorious trinitarian sense of we're caught up into the inner life of the Trinity, as indeed Paul says in Romans 8 and John says in John 14. So then, in terms of the question, our correspondent here, Brian, says that he was brought up in the holiness tradition. And I honor the holiness tradition because faced with a rather lackadaisical and semi deist British Christianity, they embrace the fact that, no, we aren't just grunging along and saying prayers once a week or whatever. We are meant to be God's holy people for the sake of the world. How does that happen? And so some people prayed earnestly for fresh gifts of holiness and leading and so on. And then when they experienced that, they then looked back at the life they'd had and saw it as a kind of a second blessing. They'd been raised to a new elevation. I think the trouble was then that got theorized into a sort of fixed formula that every Christian now has to go through this and go through that and so on. And in Acts 2, well, you need to be baptized. And have you been baptized in the Holy Spirit? Have you? And how does that go with 1 Corinthians 12, et cetera? Now, Mike, you may remember, I certainly do, in the 60s and 70s when the Pentecostal movement came into the mainstream in new ways. And people were then saying, have you been baptized in the Holy Spirit? And it was, have you spoken in tongues? And some people, I remember hearing a speaker saying, you can be made entirely holy, and you have to pray that God will do that with you, within you, and then you'll be elevated to this new stage. Now, it's one of the reasons I got interested in the meaning of Romans 7, that I didn't actually find that to be convincing. And so was wrestling with what Paul is doing in those chapters, particularly an entire sanctification and I think that's really a red herring. I'd much rather have somebody who really was hungry and thirsty for true holiness than somebody who was concerned about having a logical sequence and trying to anchor that in scripture. The thirst for holiness is a good God given thing. But don't confuse it with a kind of carefully staged going up a ladder now to this rung, now to that rung, now to the other one. Because I think there isn't just a second blessing, there's a 72nd blessing, there's a 122nd blessing. And again and again I'm reminded of a friend of mine in Montreal who being asked by an interview panel, are you filled with the Holy Spirit? He answered, yes, but I leak. In other words, yes, I am filled with the Holy Spirit. But I find day by day other things creep in and I have to come back and ask to be refilled like a bicycle tower with a slow puncture. Now maybe one day God will fix that slow puncture and we will never need a new filling. But at the moment, I think all of us constantly need to be filled and refilled and re sanctified and that's okay. So the Spirit of course dwells within us and is active within us. And sometimes in ways that we don't experience, sometimes in ways that we do. Sometimes it's only when we look back and say the Holy Spirit was leading me to do that. I didn't feel any particular surge, but it just seemed the right thing at the time. And now as I look back, that was a God given moment. So there are many times like this. Rather than having to say we can rate our experiences on a scale of 1 to 10. It's just not like that. Of course Cornelius was waiting for Peter to pray for him because that's a unique moment with the Gospel going out to the non Judean world in Acts 10 and 11. But we shouldn't take that as a paradigm for then. Oh well, there are some Christians who have got to stage one, but now they need a further stage. It's just not. That's not what Acts is all about. And we get ourselves entangled if we think it is. Mike, I hope that makes sense to you because it comes out of a lot of pastoral experience for me.
- [30:59]
Mike Bird
Yeah, it does. You've got to understand the Holy Spirit in the storyline of the Bible. I mean, the way I tend to describe it is the Holy Spirit is there in the Old Testament. I mean, at creation, with the patriarchs, with the judges, with the people, Israel. But what is new in the New Testament, I think, is that the Holy Spirit goes deeper and wider. So it's not, it's not just on Israel, it's now being poured out on all flesh and on Gentiles and it's also deeper. So there is a, A, a filling, there is an indwelling, there is a baptism that is maybe qualitatively different to what was on offer in the Old Testament, but it's precisely what the Old Testament was pointing to when God's spirit would be poured out in a new way by the Messiah, who is the giver of the Holy Spirit. And I like what you said about, you know, getting blessings. It's not a performance based task list that if you get to this level, then you get more of the spirit. It's simply the ongoing effects of the Christian life of, you know, keeping in step with the spirit, you know, to use the language of Galatians. So, yeah, I like what you said, Tom.
- [32:09]
Tom Wright
Yeah, thank you. Great.
- [32:12]
Mike Bird
Well, we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to get into one of the more difficult questions I think we've had for a while, and that's what do we do with those parts of scripture that have a bit of violence in them? What do we do with those parts? More on that in a moment.
- [32:38]
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- [34:41]
Mike Bird
Welcome back. Our final question for this week is from John Delaney in Adelaide in South Australia. I'll be going to Adelaide in a few months, Tom, for the International sbl and he's got a question about violence in Scripture. This is what John asks. Thank you both for this excellent podcast. I have been following it closely for years. I've been a Christian for a long time, yet I continue to struggle with the realities of God ordained violence in Scripture and in history. I understand that God is holy and that his holiness must be revealed and upheld before his people, and that this can result in a level of severity that may be unexpected, like when Uzziah was struck dead after touching the Ark of God. I also recognize that God is the giver of life, has authority over it, and that he has used even violent death as a means of judgment against sin and rebellion. Even so, what troubles me is the extent of collateral damage, especially where children and infants are concerned. I think of the Flood with children and babies drowning as the waters rise of those swept up in the conquest narratives or even of practices like Abraham's circumcision in his old age. There is a kind of barbaric dimension to these things. When I am at church singing songs of praise of adoration, I sometimes have the thoughts lurking in the back of my mind. So I find myself asking, how am I to wholeheartedly celebrate a praise of God of love in light of these realities? Is there something I have misunderstood or perhaps failed to take into proper account? Many thanks for your insights, John Tom. I do find from time to time students asking questions. Can a holy and good God sanction any type of violence? I mean, hasn't God read the United Nations Charter on Human Rights? How can a God who is good? How can the God of Jesus who teaches the Sermon on the Mount? How can A God like God like that, endorse violence or use violence. I mean, this is a tricky question and it comes up a lot when I'm talking both to Christians and to non Christians. Tom, do you have a default response or a ready to go answer on this one?
- [37:13]
Tom Wright
I don't really have a default response or a ready to go, and I meet it from time to time and I've heard various other people writing about it. My colleague Carmen Imes, who does the Admirato, is on the Admirato platform as I am. She, I know, has written about this, though I confess I haven't yet written read her full account and I'd be interested to know where she's going with that. I recently heard John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, speaking about it as well. And there are several different ways in. But I do have a sense that all these ways in are ways of going very slowly and cautiously into a dark, mysterious and troubling area. That I think if we had an easy solution to it, some wise person would have come up with it by now. And so I certainly wouldn't claim to have such a thing. I take the point about collateral damage. I know that when a generation ago, John Wenham, who was a New Testament scholar, he wrote a book on the goodness of God, and he took a rather robust line, which some people found quite shocking, that if God was judging the Canaanites because they were doing all kinds of wicked and terrible and horrible things, and the Amalekites particularly, there's that line in Genesis 15 which says, the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full as long as the Amorites, that God is going to judge a whole people. But if he's going to judge a whole people, it'd be very hard for the babies and children to be left orphans without all the adults around. When I read that, I found that a very difficult argument to swallow, though I can see a certain almost inhumane logic about it. But I think there are a couple of things going on. One is the perspective of the biblical authors that the people who wrote up the Old Testament stories were looking back at a time, say, the time of conquest, and they were saying, well, this is what God had to do in order to cleanse the land so that his people could go into it. And that's a difficult idea. I don't have an easy way in, except to say that from the call of Abraham on, God is faced with a world where human beings still are messing everything up. And God has called one human family to be the means of rescuing the world from that messed up state. But the family he calls are themselves composed of messed up human beings. And if we think that's not so, we'll read the patriarchal narratives where, you know, you've got Isaac and Ishmael, you've got Jacob and Esau, you've got Joseph and his brothers. Already there's all kinds of terrible things going on, but God is saying again and again, I'm going to work through this family despite it all. And as the scriptural story goes forward, it seems that God himself is present with people and is active in and with that story. And it's as though God, in order to rescue the world from disaster, God has to come himself and become almost, dare I say, part of the disaster, in order ultimately to take the disaster upon himself. And I think the only real way to approach this is in the light of the cross. And when you look at the cross of Jesus, when you look at it in the New Testament perspective, which is to say this is God incarnate taking the worst that the world can do on himself, it's almost as though God is saying at the end of these 2000 years of very turbulent and difficult history that this is how it all had to end. And the cross then retrospectively makes sense, that this is God's own passion and God is with the children and babies drowning in the flood, and that God is with the families and children who are slaughtered in the invasion, etc. Etc. Just like in Jonathan Sacks book Not In My Name, which is about Jew and Muslim relations, really. He says, if you read the account of Genesis, the Isaac and Ishmael story, the way that the Hebrew writers are telling the story is constantly throwing the sympathies onto Ishmael, even though we know that in the great Jewish story it's Isaac who comes out on top, as it were. And so Sacks was wrestling with the same questions in different ways, as though the biblical writers themselves are saying this is how it had to be because God is cutting against the grain of the world and this is how it's going to work out. But in the middle of that, we are called to think wisely and humanely and yes, ultimately to produce things like the United Nations Charter or whatever it is, even though that has its ambiguities, of course, but. So I don't think there's an easy answer. And as I say, if there was some clever person or some wise and profound and prayerful person would by now have found it. I'm not quite sure what John Delaney means when he talks about practices like Abraham's circumcision being somehow barbaric. That's a different sort of issue. What do we mean by barbaric? Many peoples in many years have had many different customs, some of which have involved things like circumcision. Some people today find that barbaric, some don't. But there's there just a hint of a kind of a post enlightened enlightenment chronological snobbery. You know, we wouldn't dream of doing anything like that now. And the answer is, oh, wouldn't we? I'm not so sure about that. But. So, yes, ultimately we look at Jesus on the cross and we say, this is God's own answer to this question. And if we don't fully understand that, it's because we probably do need to spend more time at the foot of the cross thanking God, but also confessing our own failures to understand who God is and what he's about.
- [43:32]
Mike Bird
Yeah, I mean, I've heard some glib responses to this ranging from, you know, human sentimentality is not the yardstick of divine justice. So don't be sentimental about all these people dying. It's just, you know, it's a brutal world. What can you do? And I've also heard others who say, well, you know, when Moses said, you know, kill all the Amalekites, all the Canaanites, I mean, he just heard God wrong. You know, the. They should have gone in there with some of them out. And, you know, Moses and Israelites, they. They got things messed up. But I'll tell you what I find interesting, Tom. I've been doing a lot of flying between Nashville and around the world, and I've watched a couple of documentaries, and in one of them, it's talking about how, you know, Homo sapiens moved out of Africa and went into parts of the Levant. And this one historian points out that you could have Neanderthals living on one side of the mountain and Homo sapiens of the other, and then the Homo sapiens just disappear and they either starved out, died out, or they got wiped out. And similar thing happens, like when the Neanderthals get wiped out and these other genetic historians, you know, who do archaeology, they found it very disturbing that they would be studying a tribe, say, somewhere like, you know, north of the Black Sea, modern day Ukraine, Crimea, or somewhere in the Neander Valley of Holland. And you would have various tribal groups that you. They can see they existed for a time. They get wiped out and another group moves in. And these historians, these Archaeologists were confronted with a very brutal reality that tribal violence to the point of genocide was in fact very normal in the ancient world. And that's the thing we find very hard to accept. But if you read the warfare of the Assyrians and what they did, or the Babylonians or the Persians, these are levels of brutality that make the Spanish Inquisition look like Sunday school teachers in comparison. This is a, a world of terror and cruelty that is absolutely off the chart. And when we read the Old Testament, the, the, the, the stories of warfare, this is not the way the world is supposed to be. This is not God saying, well, here's the problem. Too many Canaanites. Now I'm going to show you the clinical way to annihilate your enemies. It's more like this is a world that is bloody, brutal and dark, but in order to achieve a better world, we've got to go through this one. And this is how God's people will survive so we can reach that point. I think that's a better way of understanding it rather than engaging in the, what they call the presentism or the anachronism. Like, oh my gosh, haven't you read the Sermon on the Mount? Or haven't you read, you know, the rights of man? Haven't you read all this literature? You know, if you went up to the king of Assyria, the king of Babylon, or to the king of the Amalekites, and you showed them, you know, the UN Charter on human rights, it just would not make sense to them. You know, the strong, this is a world the strong dominate the weak. You know, you, you want to steal more crops, you want to destroy the surrounding tribes. That's just what you do. How does God lead his people in that world? And I think God has to do business with the world that is fallen to the state of absolute violence. And sometimes you've got to plow away through it. I mean that, that's my initial thoughts.
- [47:24]
Tom Wright
Tom.
- [47:25]
Mike Bird
I don't know. I mean, I think they resonate with, with what you're saying.
- [47:28]
Tom Wright
Sure, yes. No, that's very similar. I mean, it remains dark and mysterious like the so called cursing psalms. And I've heard people say, well, when we read the psalms, which are calling down curses on the enemies of God's people, what we're looking at is poets who have suffered horribly at the hands of wicked people, who have seen themselves being tortured or their families being killed or whatever. And this is the natural human cry which comes from the heart. Faced with terrible events and disorders, it says Lord, do something about it. And to be honest, Mike, at the moment, here we are, we're recording this in the middle of May 2026. I'm looking out at a world in which there are dictators doing horrible things in various parts of our world. And when I'm reading the Psalms, there's all those passages which say, let them fall into the pit that they are digging for other people. Now, for much of my life, I've never really wanted to pray that prayer. I now really do want to pray it in relation to seriously wicked and seriously powerful people who are doing horrible things to innocent people. And I want to say, lord, please judge them. And as I say that, I think, help. Am I allowed to pray that and am I in danger of being proud myself, or should I remind myself that every time you point the finger at somebody else, there are three fingers pointing back at you? Yes, I should remind myself of that. But that doesn't mean that we say so we'll just let them get on with it. I think we have to pray for God's justice to prevail and that we live in this ambiguous situation where, yes, we're Sermon on the Mount, people, but yes, God will one day put the whole world right. And those who have embraced idolatry and wickedness will find that they've dug a pit into which they will fall themselves.
- [49:29]
Mike Bird
Yeah, well, that's probably a dark note to end, but it's probably the note we have to end on. And I want to remind our listeners that you can subscribe to our bonus episodes because that's where Tom and I do things like go through his latest book in, in the latest instance, God's Homecoming. And we address hot topics of the day like political violence, you know, the assassination of leaders, world affairs, and a lot of theology and biblical studies as well. And Tommy, we can't forget that if people want to send us their questions, they go to askantyright.com and if you're listening to this, but you want to watch us, you know, in person, then go to the YouTube channel Skntright and there you can subscribe and share. In our next episode, we're going to discuss rewards in heaven, the value of human life, and what did Jesus mean when he talked about my Father's house. All that and more to come in the next episode of Ask NT Wright Anything. But until then, I'm Mike Bird.
- [50:36]
Tom Wright
And I'm Tom Wright.
- [50:37]
Mike Bird
And we look forward to you joining us on the next episode of Ask NT Write Anything. Until then, God bless you. And take care.
- [50:52]
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