"When God Seems Nasty"

by Revd Bruce Waldron - 21st September 2008

Exodus 12: 1-14

The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt:

“This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbour in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it.

Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.

Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn.

This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the LORD.

For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”


How do you deal with a story like this? We’re told by Jesus to not repay evil for evil. We’re told that God’s justice is different to our ideas of justice, that it’s about grace. This story is about something really horrible being done by God to the Egyptian people because they’ve done evil to the Hebrews. How do you match that up with the idea of Jesus that God makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the just and the unjust?

In this story, the writer understands that God becomes like the evil that Egypt puts onto the Hebrew people. “I will execute justice.” God says. But what does “justice” mean. Eye for eye? Tooth for tooth? It seems to in this story.
This is a difficult passage to deal with, especially when we try to hold that there is a vast difference between justice and revenge. My Dad used to teach me that two wrongs don’t make a right. I’ve learned, as I’ve got older that justice is a very different thing to penalty.

There is a strong historical argument that around the time of the Norman conquests, the idea of justice in Britain changed. It used to be if you did something wrong, you did it to a person, and justice was about making right the wrong you had done, to that person.

After the Norman conquests, the idea changed. A wrong wasn’t against a person, it was against the rule of the King, and so the state responded with penalties, deterrents against crimes rather than responses to create justice. That sort of distinction is what stands at the base of the difference between retributive justice and restorative justice.

What we have in this story is a bit of both. It’s a response of like to like against the Egyptians, to get them to free the slaves, and to punish them for what they’ve done.

We’ve come a long way in our understanding of God since then. When South Africa was emerging from the injustice of apartheid, Bishop Desmond Tutu, recognising the human drive for retribution, warned his people, “We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.”

I suppose you could argue that this Exodus event was not about revenge but force, to combat a greater evil, the evil of slavery. But that’s hardly tenable either. Israel used slaves too; Solomon’s temple was built using massive slave labour, all the people who used to be the inhabitants of Canaan – Israel had become like the Egyptians but God didn’t rescue the Canaanites, didn't kill the firstborn of all the Israelites.What needs to be understood is that the Bible is the story of Salvation History; it is about their movement from early perceptions to later perceptions, about their growth, being led by God, towards a better understanding of themselves and God. It is a story of a God who doesn't desert them, even when they really get it wrong.

A critical issue in this passage is the understanding that the Bible isn’t just a book about what God does, but about what God does with the Hebrews. It’s their story, seen through their eyes, and they are a fallible, learning people. They interpret their history in the context of their faith in God. What the Bible is a record of, is their understanding, at each specific point in time, of who this God is that they are dealing with. And the idea grows and develops.

Their perception of the actions and nature of God is very different in the days of the later prophets, to what we read in the days of the judges. Except, there is elements of later understandings of grace, of God who is God of all people… it’s there in the older stories, but it’s muted, part of an argument that is going on behind the scenes, an argument that will, later on, move from the sort of ideas found in Exodus, to the sort of ideas found in Amos. The Hebrew Bible is the story of people on the way, learning and interpreting and learning as they go. It is not the story of people who just suddenly hopped into a perfect understanding of God.

We shouldn’t be surprised at this. We are still learning. Our understanding are imperfect and partial. So was there’s. Whatever the truth behind the early Hebrews understanding of the way God works, we have learned something that goes beyond this.

A chap in Australia, an academic had a discussion blog running for a while and I was a part of it, for a short time. One of the people on this blog suggested that the Bible needed serious revision. It was like an anchor, holding the church back in the dark ages. What the comment showed was that he had no understanding of what the Bible was. It is not a blueprint for faith but a story of how patiently God leads people, even through the centuries, from the imperfect content of their understanding and actions, nearer and nearer to the God whom they serve.

The Scriptures are the story of people along the way. Look how far it’s come by the time of Jesus' eruption onto the religious scene. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is recorded as addressing the issue of how to act when someone sins against you. (Matthew 18:15-20) You go to the person, you try and talk it out. If it works you’ve won a brother. If it doesn’t, you go with someone else, then to the church council and, if that doesn’t work, you take it to the whole church. So at every stage, you are putting your own interpretation of events on the line too. And then, finally, if that doesn’t work, you treat him like a tax collector or gentile. And in Jesus cosmology, you treat them with love and compassion.

Look at the care with which trespass is addressed. Model of dealing with trespass that the Lord’s prayer gives. It goes “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” In other words, be very, very forgiving because that’s the way you want God to be to you.
Look at the movement that has occurred over time. And still we learn. God is doing this to us also.

We are people still on the move in our understanding of God. Way back in 1620, the early reformers were addressing this issue. One of their great, John Robinson once preached:

For my part I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the Reformed Churches, who are come to a period in religion and will go at present no farther than the instruments of their reformation. The Lutheran can't be drawn to go beyond what Luther says; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things.

I beseech you, remember, 'tis an Article of your Church Covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you ... He charged us before God and his blessed angels, to follow him no farther than he followed Christ. And if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his ministry; for he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word.

Pastor John Robinson to the Pilgrim Fathers 1620

So we leave the Hebrews, on the way, learning bit by bit, as are we, moving from partial insight and blindnesses, as are we, learning from what life throws at them, as are we, but still led by the God who by grace, works with imperfect understanding, imperfect obedience, and loves with perfect love his flawed and very human people.