IS GOD GOOD?
10 minutes
Get your young people to suggest words that describe God. Write these on a flipchart and ask them to split the words according to whether that characteristic of God better fits what we see in the Old or New Testament or both, circling each in a different colour.
Ask: Are there things in the Bible that surprise you? If something is recorded in the Bible does that mean God approves of it?
Say: There are tricky bits in the Old Testament, such as when God commands war. Read Deuteronomy 20:16-17. Are there any words you want to add to the flipchart? Read the Richard Dawkins quote at here: does if God seems different in the Old Testament?
BIG PICTURE
10 minutes
Ask what the overarching message of the Bible is. Say: throughout the Bible, we see a God who stops at nothing to offer people the best life possible (John 10:10). God constantly steps in to stop people hurting themselves and each other and brings them back into relationship with him. The Old Testament is the story of God’s passionate love for the world, which is ultimately revealed in Jesus’ death (John 3:16). We must read the Bible with this big picture in mind .
KEY POINT 1
The prodigal son parable sums up the whole Bible: God longs for us all to come home where he’ll throw us the party of a lifetime.
CONTEXT
10 minutes
View the out of context photos here and say: the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, was written a very long time ago in a completely different culture so we need to understand a bit of this history. It’s also important to consider the genre of Bible passages – is it poetry, history, law, parable?
The background of the biblical war passages is bloody. War was rife and the surrounding nations were completely corrupt. In the midst of this, God’s laws about war were incredibly counter-cultural. Read Deuteronomy 20:5-10. War should be the last resort and there is compassion for those who don’t want to fight, those who’d recently bought a house or vineyard, those who were engaged and even the ‘faint-hearted’. There’s even concern over preserving the trees (v19)!
God is counter-cultural throughout the Bible. In a patriarchal society that championed the strong and remarkable, God uses the nobodies and champions the widow and the homeless.
JUDGMENT
15 minutes
Ask: Have you ever been hurt by someone who got away with it? Share a personal example if you have one.
When someone has done something to hurt us, we want justice. Deuteronomy 20:16-17 needs to be read in context of the whole chapter. The next verse explains why God commands war: the surrounding nations practiced horrific things such as child sacrifice (Deuteronomy 12:31) and God did not want anyone else to ‘follow the detestable things they do’.
Ask: What if God didn’t care that they were sacrificing children? Is that the kind of God you want to follow?’ If he didn’t judge this behaviour could he still be a God of love?
In the Psalms judgement is an occasion for joy (Psalm 96:11-13). It was welcomed, not feared by those who suffered. Judgement is not just confined to the Old Testament, the New Testament speaks of a raging battle between good and evil.
IS GOD BAD?
10 minutes
While God commanding war seems awful, we have to consider:
God gave them time to repent: In Genesis we hear of the sin of the Amorites. God had been waiting for them to turn from their awful behaviour for centuries; this wasn’t a whimsical burst of anger.
God uses our methods: Watch the baby language clip here and say: sometimes the only way to get through to us is to speak in our own language which, in Old Testament times would have been war. It’s also important to remember that these wars happened within a very limited time frame.
The casualties may have been predominantly military: In early Hebrew the word for ‘thousand’ is identical to the word for ‘fully armed soldier’ so we may have misinterpreted facts. Jericho was a military fort so it’s likely that the only people killed in this battle (Joshua 5) were soldiers.
Language: Read and decipher the statements here. The biblical accounts of war are similar to Ancient Near Eastern conquest narratives. These often used hyperbolic expressions such as ‘not leaving any survivors.’ People at the time would have known not to take these literally. Even within the Bible we see that people who have been ‘completely annihilated’ appear later (Joshua 10:36-7 and Judges 1:10). Deuteronomy 7:2 commands ‘destroy them totally’ yet in the next verse it says not to intermarry so it’s clear there would still be many inhabitants left.
KEY POINT 2
While we see glimpses of Jesus in the Old Testament, they also prepare the way for him. Some of the ceremonial rituals that are hard to understand begin to make sense in light of Jesus. Previously, people could only approach God through the sacrifice of a perfect animal and this is ultimately fulfilled through Jesus, the perfect sacrifice (Hebrews 9:11-14,22,28).
JONAH
10 minutes
Summarise the story of Jonah and read Jonah 4:1-2 from The Message. The words ‘I knew it’ are important. God had a reputation for loving people who didn’t deserve it. Jonah was angry because God was too merciful.
CLOSE
5 minutes
The God of the Old Testament is the same throughout the New – he has to judge sinful behaviour because he is love. But he deals with the consequences of the judgement through his own son, Jesus. Read 2 Peter 3:7-9 and remind your young people that although God judges, he wants ‘everyone to come to repentance’. Reflect on God’s mercy through a worship song such as Bethel’s ‘Mercy’.
