In a recent response to an earlier post of mine Burgy reaffirmed his belief that the authors of Scripture wrote down what the believed God was saying to them, and that sometimes they were flat wrong. His focus was not on alleged factual errors in the Bible but on ethical shortcomings, particularly in the Old Testament. He challenged me and anyone else holding to an inerrant Scripture to justify three putative utterances of God: (1) Psalm 137:9, which states approvingly, "happy is he...who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks"; (2) passages commanding the entire destruction of various peoples in and around Canaan; (3) Num. 31:1-18, where Israelite men are permitted to take Midianite maidens for their own after slaughtering all men, boys, and women who have already had sexual intercourse. Burgy has other passages in mind that simply cannot have been spoken by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but he lays these before us as starters.
It's a fair challenge. Bivalve made some excellent points in response to Burgy in his post of June 17. I will offer my insights in a series of three posts (being wordier than Bivalve, I don't want to generate one super-long essay). This post deals with Psalm 137.
To begin with, we need to consider the communicateve purpose of 137:9. It is not a ccommand to the Jews, or even the Medes and Persians, to do such a horrible deed if and when they have the power to do so. Neither is it a prophecy that God has ordained the destruction of the Babylonian infants. It is rather a declaration that the sins of the Babylonians towards the Jews were so great that the pious could rejoice at such catastrophic punishment.
137:9 is an application f the more general statement in 137:8. Vv. 8 and 9 are rhymed in the Hebrew style, which rhymes thoughts rather than sounds. For the psalmist, the horrific act of dashing Babylonian infants against the rocks is an application of the general biblical principle that justice demands that we reap what we sow (or that a Redeemer suffer for us).
To be sure, the Babylonian infants themselves were not responsible for their parents' and grandparents' actions in conquering Judah, destroying Jerusalem (with all the attendant horrors), and taking the Jews into captivity. But the death envisioned for the infants would have been virtually instantaneous. It would have been their bereaved mothers and fathers who would have suffered unbearable sorrow, not only as they watched the slaughter of their infants, but for every waking moment of the rest of their lives. The psalmist clearly believes that such suffering would be just: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
"But," I can hear Burgy saying, "what you say actually proves my point. Jesus explicitly rejected the lex talionis, viz., an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:38-48). Christ enjoins us to love and pray for our enemies rather than retaliate in hatred or even rejoice in their anguish. Only by loving our enemies do we prove ourselves to be sons of Him who is merciful and loving towards them that hate Him. The God of Jesus is simply not the god portrayed in Psalm 137."
Not so fast. Jesus also explicitly taught that the impenitent wicked will suffer for their sins in a hell of fire (Gehenna). A just God must punish sin or he is not just. The NT, where we learn virtually everything the Bible has to say about hell (most of it from the lips of Jesus himself) clearly speaks of a hell whose torments make any anguish the Babylonians would have experienced when the Medes and Persians conquered them look like a slap on the wrist.
One of the most terrifying pictures of the wrath of God in the NT is found in Rev. 16. In 16:5-6 the angel enunciates the same principle the psalmist does in Psalm 137:8-9: God is just when he inflicts on the wicked the same treatment they inflicted on God's people. Burgy, would you say that Revelation presents a different god than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? And what about the terrifying texts from Jesus' own lips (e.g., Matt. 10:28, 11:21-24, 13:40-42 and 49-50, 22:13, 23:15 and 33-35, 24:50-51; Luke 10:12-15, 16:19-28 ff.). Would you excise those texts from the Bible so as to have an authoritative Scripture worthy of your conception of God? Would you conduct your own one-man Jesus Seminar down in Durango? My questions are rhetorical: I don't seriously suppose you would do that. But I want to establish the point that the NT approves the same principles of judgment that the OT does.
Yet God has been merciful in sending Christ to take the sins of his people upon himself. He does not deal with us as our sins deserve (an OT insight, incidently; Psalm 103:9-14, Ezra 9:13). He is even merciful towards those who are not his people; the book of Jonah makes that point. And, as Bivalve pointed out, God didn't even punish the Babylonians as their sins deserved: the Persians (God's instruments, Is. 45:1-3) were more humane towards the Babylonians than the Babylonians were towards those they vanquished.
"Again, you prove my point," I can hear Burgy say. "If the psalmist were really moved by God when he wrote he would have expressed a desire for God to be merciful towards the Babylonians rather than the desire that they get it in the neck for their sins. Matthew 5:43-47 is the Christian standard. If the God of the NT is also the God of the OT, we ought to see a forgiving spirit on the part of one whose writings are supposed to express God's sentiments."
In answer to this objection I would point out that God is merciful and gracious to the penitent. At the time Psalm 137 was written Babylon had already had the opportunity to turn to God and had rejected that opportunity. Daniel and his three friends had borne faithful witness to God at the Babylonian court and had had some positive influence on Nebuchadnezzar. That influence didn't last. Daniel 5 tells how Nebuchadnezzar's grandson Belshazzar and his guests profaned the temple vessels in the banquet and praised the gods of wood and stone. Daniel points this out to Belshazzar in 5:18-28, a passage worth reading in its entirety. Babylon had turned away from the repentance that saved Niniveh for a generation.
Jeremiah could tell the exiles at the beginning of their captivity to pray for the peace of Babylon (Jer. 29:7), but by the time the psalmist wrote it was too late for that: Babylon had summarily and irrevocably rejected the true God. The words of Hebrews 10:26-27 apply here: "If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God." This is the sin that leads to death (1 Jn. 5:16), where we are not to pray anymore for God's mercy. At such a time it is appropriate to pray and look for God's righteous judgment. While I am loathe to make that kind of judgment about anybody (though John indicates we can know without some special revelation), the inspired psalmist certainly knew that the Babylonians were beyond the point where they could repent and turn to God.
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