A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
THE November 4 opinion piece by Martin Hanson (The Old Testament as antidote to biblical fundamentalism) begs to be answered.
For every quote from the Bible that Hansen uses to prove the bloodthirstiness/violence/sadism etc of God, I could find an Old Testament (OT) verse to counter it. Unfortunately such an approach would inevitably lead to a game of Biblical ping pong and thus is of dubious value.
Despite the fact that Hanson’s unrepresentative selection of quotes is incredibly biased with no context provided and therefore quite misleading, it would take more than my allotted 800 words to provide explanation and context to them.
I provide some balance with the following quotes:
Ezekiel 33:11- “. . . as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.”
Exodus 34:6,7- “ . . . the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin . . .”
Psalm 145:9 “The Lord is good to all; He has compassion on all He has made.”
Hanson appears to make a distinction between the God of the Old Testament, who he describes in a variety of unflattering ways, and the God of the New Testament.
There is only one God, and the Bible offers us a “big picture” which needs to be read as such. This picture is painted with both dark and light brushstrokes and both are needed.
In the OT, God provides us with a historical account of beginnings and an explanation of why things are the way we find them to be.
Having made people with a free will, God provides a plan to rescue them from the consequences of their bad choices.
By the end of the OT it is apparent that being given a set of rules to follow will never make people good; what is needed is a changed heart. It is impossible to legislate morality.
The NT provides us with an explanation of the further steps God took to save us from ourselves; the book of Romans gives a good explanation but a very brief summary is that God took upon Himself the responsibility of paying the price of our disobedience and foolish choices, and made it possible for people to receive that necessary new heart by being in a personal relationship with Him.
I myself, and many people in this district, are witness to the life-changing power of a loving God working within us.
I could answer Hansen’s comment about adult humans believing the nonsense of divine creation rather than evolution by reminding him that Fleming, Lister, Morse, the Wright brothers, Copernicus, Galilei, Kepler, Pascal, Faraday, Kelvin, Boyle and Pasteur are a small selection of “adult humans” who were presumably of sound mind and would have both believed in creation and considered the OT to be a moral guide for life.
I could also counter Hansen’s use of Richard Dawkins by providing a less well-known quote where Dawkins demonstrates his antipathy is specifically against the God of the Bible rather than anything alien or extra-terrestrial:
Ben Stein: Well then, who did create the heavens and the earth?
Richard Dawkins: Why do you use the word “who”? . . . You immediately beg the question by using the word, “who”.
BS: Well then, how did it get created?
RD: Well, um, by a very slow process.
BS: Well how did it start?
RD: Nobody knows how it started ... We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.
BS: And what was that?
RD: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.
BS: And how did that happen?
RD: ... we don’t know.
BS: So you have no idea how it started.
RD: No. Nor has anybody.
BS: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution?
RD: It could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time somewhere in the universe a civilisation evolved (by probably some kind of Darwinian means) to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded on to, perhaps, this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility, and I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry ... molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer. That designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe (2008).
I’m not sure whether Hanson is genuinely interested in an explanation of the seeming contradiction between a loving God and one who commands the destruction of whole people groups, but there are several articles available online which provide a good starting point for genuine enquirers:
www.christiancourier.com/articles/467-old-testament-events-and-the-goodness-of-god
www.michaelwaustin.com/gods-goodness-and-difficult-old-testament-passages/