Cross Centered
Mar 19 2017 • Greg Boyd
The violence in the Old Testament is a huge barrier to people understanding the true character of God. Jesus most perfectly represents what God is like, but how can we imagine Jesus doing some of the nasty things in the Old Testament? Greg, our senior pastor, has spent nearly a decade wrestling with this dilemma and wrote a book about it that will be released in April. Not everyone will agree with it, but during our Cross Centered series he’ll offer his proposal with the hope that all of us go away with a clearer picture of God and his infinite love for us.
Sermons in this series:
If we read the Old Testament assuming that it all is about the cross of Christ, then we can see how God stooped to the level of the cultural conditioning of the Old Testament authors to allow himself to be portrayed as violent. In addition, when we read carefully, we can actually see, within the passages of violence themselves, the nonviolent character of God breaking through.
Topics: Judgment,
Non-Violence,
Problem of Evil
God is a God who stoops down, out of love, in order to meet people where they are. He is a heavenly missionary who accommodates that which he is against in order to win people over to the truth. This metaphor of a heavenly missionary helps us understand what God was doing when we read about the violent depictions of God in the Old Testament.
Topics: Controversial Issues,
Non-Violence
The Old Testament often portrays God as either doing, commanding, or threatening violence. For many, this is a huge problem because these depictions contradict the way Jesus lived and commanded. What are we to do with this contradiction? In this sermon, Greg invites us to see that there is something else going in these portrayals of violence, and we can only see this something else when we understand what was going on when Jesus died on the cross.
Topics: Controversial Issues,
Love,
Non-Violence
