Response Submission
If you walk into one of the more popular megachurches today and start attending it regularly for a year, it is unlikely that you will ever hear a sermon from the Old Testament. The stories from the gospels, and the principles of St. Paul, with perhaps an occasional look some of the other letters, will dominate the sermons that you hear. The reason for this is that the lessons of the gospels and letters are fairly simple to tie up in a homily of 20 minutes or half an hour’s time. The parables of Jesus are short, and he explains them, for the most part. The letters of Paul contain teachings, not stories, and it is fairly simple to connect those teachings to a relevant story from modern life. The stories of the Old Testament, on the other hand, may make for nice flannel-background stories in children’s Sunday school classes, but they do not resolve as easily behind the pulpit. The vision of Noah lining up animals two by two in front of the ark makes for an interesting children’s story, but the vision of people drowning in droves, as rain falls and water inexorably rises to cover them and their dwellings. As much evil as there is in the world in our own time, it is difficult for us to imagine things getting so depraved that God would choose to wipe out the entire planet. These elements of the Old Testament are troubling to me as a believer. It is hard for me to understand how the death of Job’s children and his own disease was worth God’s wager with Satan. It is hard for me to understand how God could have chosen Samson, with such flaws, to lead the Israelites as a judge. I’m not sure why Moses had to be excluded from the Promised Land, just because he struck a rock instead of speaking to it.
As a future minister, it seems to me that the stories of the Old Testament are too valuable to be stored away in some dusty chamber of the canon. The story of Samson’s dissipation – until it is almost too late – and God’s redemption at the end of his story is an instructive one for those who pursue destructive habits. While it is true that God did come to Samson’s rescue, by letting him pull down the building on the Philistines, Samson lost so much of his potential by sleeping with prostitutes and carousing. The story of Solomon is not dissimilar from Samson’s, although Solomon built his nation into one of the most glorious on the earth at that time. If he had not had the distraction of 300 wives and 600 concubines leading him into idolatry, he might have been able to do even more – instead of making his country a beautiful one that would quickly split into two after his death, he could have built a strong spiritual foundation that would have rivaled the new Temple in its beauty. The importance of character, while certainly important to Paul, is played out in story after story in the Old Testament. The struggles that many of the leaders of the Israelites faced – from David’s lust to Saul’s pride to Hezekiah’s illness – all ended up shaping the history of God’s people. While God has been able to achieve his redemptive ends, one wonders how much more could have been accomplished through his leaders, if they had not fallen prey to their own personal flaws.
Works Cited
Anderson, Bernhard W. Understanding the Old Testament. 4th edition. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall, 1987.
Bandstra, Barry L. Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Grand
Rapids, New York. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995.
Flanders, Henry J., Robert W. Crapps and D. A. Smith. People of the Covenant: Introduction to
the Hebrew Bible. 4th edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
