The picture is clear: God is a just and holy God who punishes sin. He has to do so because God’s perfect justice and holiness require it. That is the God of Israel. This realization has led many today and in the past to reject the Old Testament. Some of the earliest heresies in the church are connected with the rejection of the God of Israel. Marcion claimed the God of the Old Testament was an evil God that should be rejected.

I used to be a pacifist who thought the Bible taught pacifism. After many years of studying the question of the Church’s ethics of warfare, I came to the opposite conclusion: warfare can, under certain circumstances and undertaken with a certain disposition, be a just activity. It is a just activity, not merely a necessary thing that is bad. This conclusion was the overwhelming view of the Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians throughout their history. Pacifism has always been a minority position that has enjoyed growing support across denominations as of late, perhaps because the West has enjoyed unprecedented peace post-World War II so that Western Christians can entertain this luxury. Nevertheless, Christian pacifism became untenable for me because the God who punished, killed, and destroyed in the Old Testament remains the God of the New Testament.

After I became a Christian, I developed a habit of reading the Bible daily for long periods of time. When you are a college student, you can do such things. At the same time, I was reading the works of Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder, the two leading lights of contemporary Christian pacifism. I became a devout and convinced pacifist immediately. The pacifist position was straightforward: read the Sermon on the Mount. It seemed so obvious to me that Jesus was teaching pacifism that to hold to any other position was not only ignorant but immoral.

As a convinced pacifist, I continued reading the Bible daily, including the Old Testament. The whole of scripture is the inspired word of God, so I believed the whole of scripture must be studied in order to get a complete picture of this wonderful, holy, and mysterious God. What I could not square with the pacifist position was the portrait of God in the Old Testament as a just and holy God who justly punished Israel and the surrounding nations. For example, in reading about God’s reasons for sending Judah into the Babylonian captivity, the prophets and historical books are absolutely clear that God is punishing Israel for its covenant unfaithfulness, and this punishment means the violent destruction of Jerusalem and the death and enslavement of many Jews. Ezekiel 16 and 2 Kings 17 are some of the saddest words one can read in the Bible. For instance, the Israelites are described as “whores” who go “whoring” after other gods rather than being faithful to the God who brought them out of Egypt.

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