DOES GOD HATE?

Violence in the name of God is ours to justify or renounce.

by Stephan and Belinda Bauman

Conflicts in the middle East have displaced over 19 million people across the region.

During a Christmas service at the Pentagon late last year, the guest preacher, Franklin Graham, quoted the well known verse from the Gospel of John: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Then he followed with a question: “We know that God loves, but did you know that God also hates?”

Graham supported his claim with an Old Testament text where the prophet, Samuel, commands Saul, the king of Israel, to “attack” and “totally destroy” the Amalekites. The Amalekites were the great grandchildren of Esau, the brother Jacob fell out with after Jacob stole his inheritance. Esau and Jacob eventually made up, but their descendants, not so much. “Do not spare them,” Samuel told Saul. “Put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (1 Samuel 15:3).

Graham concluded his sermon at the Pentagon with a rhetorical question: “Do you know that God is also a God of war?”

NO QUARTER

Throughout history, the Amalekites have been a convenient trope for those who want to mobilize hate or justify war. Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called upon Amalek history when seeking support for the invasion of Gaza following the horrific attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023. “Remember what Amalek did to you!” he said, invoking language from the Torah. “We remember and we act.”

Ancient Israel wasn’t meant to only annihilate the Amalekites. “In the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes,” commanded Moses. “Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deuteronomy 20:16-18).

Yesterday, during a press conference about the war in Iran, the US Secretary of Defense, said, “We will keep pressing, keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemy.” “No quarter” means to show no mercy, compassion, or leniency to an enemy, a “fight-to-the- death, “take-no-prisoners” approach, even killing combatants who try to surrender. “No quarter” is strictly forbidden under International law and considered a war crime.

BLOOD BATHS AT THE HAND OF AN ANGRY GOD

It’s gut wrenching to think about history’s blood baths at the hand of an angry God. The Amelek kids playing out back. The Canaanite newborns with their moms. The Hittite dads in the field. All bucolic scenes turning to terror. Of course we think about their descendants—Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Arabs—people many of us call friends, some of them stunning examples of faith and love, even now during the violence in the Middle East.

It’s also gut-wrenching to think about our country turning its back on mercy, let alone international law, while increasingly casting the war in Iran as a holy war. “Praise be to the Lord my rock, who trains my hand for war and my fingers for battle” (Proverbs 25:21-22), the Secretary prayed as he closed a press conference. It’s also disorienting, to say the least, when large swaths of the American church see “viciousness not as vice but as virtue, so long as it is employed against those they perceive as their enemies.”

Can we stomach a nation that pursues violence in the name of God? Can we stomach a God who pursues violence in the name of a nation?

Christ: Pawn of Propaganda, Kreg Yingst, woodcut, 6 x 4 in

DECRIMINALIZING COMPASSION

In his groundbreaking book, Reviving the Golden Rule: How the Ancient Ethic of Neighbor Love Can Heal the World, our friend and theologian, Andrew DeCort, invites a different view. In tension with texts that describe God as “the enemy of Israel’s enemies, (Exodus 23:22), Andrew presents a God who loves rather than indulges in hate. God reaches out to Adam and Eve, covering their shame. God denounces Cain’s evil murder but still protects him. God rewards David for giving mercy to Saul. “If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat,” said Solomon. “If he is thirsty, give him water to drink..and the Lord will reward you” (Provers 25:21-22).

DeCort highlights the story of Ruth, a “woman of noble character” (Ruth 3:11), who happened to be a Moabite. The Moabites were forbidden, massacred and enslaved over generations. Everyone despised the Moabites—Moses, Ezra, Nehemiah and David, you name it—except Boaz. Boaz was a respected Israelite who chose to marry Ruth because he loved her, and also to demonstrate God’s unconditional love for the foreigner, indeed, Israel’s enemy. Boaz and Ruth were the grandparents of David, and Jesus too. Turns out Jesus’ lineage included not just Ruth but also Tamar and Rahab, both Canaanites, and Bathsheba, a Hittite.

In the middle of his ministry, Jesus met a Canaanite woman who is desperate because her daughter is sick. “Have compassion on me,” she pled. Centuries before, Moses had “criminalized” compassion for the Canaanites as part of his genocidal order against their enemies (Deuteronomy 7:14-16).

“Jesus not only refused to follow Moses’ genocidal order, he defiantly reversed it,” says DeCort.

Jesus congratulated her for having “great faith” then miraculously healed her daughter (Matthew 15:28). All this for a woman who wasn’t supposed to exist had the Israelites fulfilled their vision for annihilation.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus brought it home: “The law says, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ but I say, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43-44).

THE FAULT IS NOT IN OUR STARS

Through the collection of books that comprise the Bible, God is telling a grand story with fallible characters—both their heartbreaks and breakthroughs—a story that culminates in the person of Jesus and intentionally course-corrects the mistakes and delusions of the past. “A new command I give you,” Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34).

Scripture is inspired. But that doesn’t mean the inspired people of the Bible didn’t get it wrong, sometimes gravely wrong. Moses struck the rock. David forced Bathsheba into his bed then killed her husband. Peter denied Jesus.

“We shouldn’t be surprised that our God-breathed Bible includes teaching, for example, killing children and committing genocide,” says DeCort, “that clearly does not reflect the character of God as embodied in Jesus and the Torah.”

Maybe Shakespeare was right when he said “the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Angel, Peter Nottrott, Acrylic on Canvas, 41 x 61 in.

MASCOT OR MESSIAH

We experience this conundrum in our lives too. You likely know people who are pillars of faith, even exemplary toward their family, their friends. But they may be dead wrong when it comes to their perspective of immigrants or their view of the poor.

“If only it were all so simple,” said Solzhenitsyn more than a century ago:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

What if we all lived as if everyone, everywhere was our neighbor? Not giving up on conviction—what we know to be true—but, instead, holding fast to fidelity while still offering mercy, neighbor love, Boaz love, Jesus love, the kind of love the Apostle Paul, himself no stranger to error, hung his entire theology: “For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14).

Franklin Graham’s father, Billy Graham, preached a God very different from his son: “You know, the whole Bible is a love story,” he said. “God’s love affair with the human race.”

Many of you know Belinda is half Jewish. Her grandfather escaped the Holocaust but two of his siblings didn’t. For some months now, we have been captivated by a proverb from her tradition that, we believe, reduces theology, both Jewish and Christian, to its essential meaning:

Before every person there marches an angel proclaiming, ‘Behold, the image of God.’

Today’s hate, violence and war in the name of God is ours to justify or renounce. How we understand God is a matter of life and death. We can bend a knee to a mascot made in our image, or to a Messiah who doesn’t let us choose who we love.

A few weeks ago, after we concluded an address to an academic community in the Pacific Northwest with that Jewish proverb, a respected leader stood to close the evening. “If all I do is live out that proverb the rest of my days,” he said, reflectively, through tears, “I will have honored God.”