The Bible is a tough book to read and understand sometimes.
I have been reading 1 & 2 Samuel each morning and following the story of Saul and David. There’s a section in 1 Samuel 16:14 that states quite clearly that ‘God sent an evil spirit to torment Saul’
“ Now the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him.”
It is repeated in verse 23, again with the evil spirit attributed to God.
So how do you read this? I sense how we read it depends on where we start with our thinking. If we begin with the authority and inspiration of scripture then chances are we will take it simply as it is stated and accept that God did something we can’t ever imagine him doing.
If we begin with God as revealed in Jesus and then try to imagine him intentionally sending an evil spirit to torment someone it becomes extremely difficult. That isn’t an action I would ever attribute to Jesus so I can’t imagine God doing it.
Conclusion? Whoever wrote this attributed Saul’s actions to God.
I sense we have been trained to interpret scripture using the lens of authority and inspiration first and any time a difficult passage like this arises we accept that God sometimes does things we can’t understand. That’s a fair position as I don’t think we can ‘understand’ God.
The problem it raises is that God sometimes seems ruthless and cruel. Flick across a few chapters to 2 Samuel 6:1-7 where the ark is being brought back and the oxen carrying it stumble. A man named Uzzah sees it about to fall and reflexively reaches his hands out to prevent it.
7 The Lord’s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down, and he died there beside the ark of God. 8 Then David was angry because the Lord’s wrath had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah. 9 David was afraid of the Lord that day and said, “How can the ark of the Lord ever come to me?”
It’s ‘clear’ in the text that ‘God struck him down’, because of his ‘irreverent act’. The problem is that once again it just doesn’t sound like the God I have come to know.
Having been raised evangelical I am very conscious that scripture is always our authority and everything else runs a distant second. I get it. But I wonder if we have so needed to protect the integrity of scripture that we have allowed God to be portrayed as a monster sometimes.
It is Peter Enns who says ‘God let’s his kids tell the story’. In other words, the person writing this story has perceived the event as the work of God – and it may not be. While I was raised to simply take the words at face value, the more I get to know God, the more I question whether this was actually him doing these things.
So do we begin with scripture or with the character of God?
And yeah, I know… I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘yes’…