Be Like Jesus This is Wrong: A Second Look at David

David is probably my favorite character in the Bible. It sounds cliché, David is everyone's favorite character, you would expect me to choose someone completely random just to be different, but no, I choose David. The reason is because David is the most real character in the Bible. The story of David was written by someone who actually knew him. It describes his character in all of its shades and the result is the story of a man. David is not some ethereal being made up by the fancies of some fiction writer. Many of the stories in the Bible, let's be honest, are embellished. In fact, many of the stories of David are probably embellished; but David is, more than likely, the least embellished character of all, because not only do we have the stories that other people wrote about David, but we have David himself who writes about his own experiences and developments of character. David lays himself bare to the world.

First off, David was a man of extreme passion. David felt like no one else. David was in tune to his emotions. As you read through the Psalms, you often read of David weeping and crying. You could say that David was in tune with his feminine side. He was intensely religious. I believe he developed one of the very first true deep friendships with God ever written of in the Bible. His relationship was deep, abiding and honest. David's relationship with his friend Jonathan was all ushy gushy lovey dovey. David was soft. Yet then, you pick up with David where the Bible starts and what do you find? David, a young man, in a fit of rage he grabs a lion by its beard and kills it with his bare hands! The guy was intense! He had a reputation long before he slew Goliath. David was a violent man. What kind of man does it take to face down a lion and rip its throat out with your hand? David had such a fierce reputation that when Saul first heard about David, several years before Goliath, Saul's servant said, "Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, and a comely person, and the LORD is with him." (1 Samuel 16:18) David, before he ever fought in a battle, was known as a valiant man of war. David was already known by Israel for his violence, long before they looked to him to be king.

Then we arrive at the story of Goliath Itself. That same David, the one in tune with his emotions. The one that he-men today would call a sissy and weak, that man, enraged that someone would so despise the armies of The Lord that they would taunt them without fear, he grabs 5 stones from a brook and he faces down the giant unafraid, confident that he would kill him. David takes his stones and he knocks Goliath flat out He then runs up, grabs the sword of Goliath and cuts his head off with it and walks back to the camp of Israel carrying the head of this man who dared defy Israel. Your idea of a sweet singer living a peaceful life on the green, rolling hills of Israel should be shattered at this point. David was an extreme individual. The Bible glorifies his actions, but David is not the little shepherd boy that so many people like to think of him as.

I know what you are thinking, "David only did that because the Spirit of God was on him and he was possessed by God." I call the bluff. David did those thing simply because that is how David was. David was a man of action and extremes. His emotions were pure and strong. The fact of the matter is, David did not kill because God chose him to kill, God chose David because David could kill. Look at what happened when Saul thought to kill David by promising his daughter's hand in marriage if only David would go out and kill 100 philistines. This was a suicide mission meant to kill David and his men, instead, David goes out, slaughters 200 philistine soldiers, he cuts off their penises and brings them back to Saul as proof that he was worthy of Saul's daughter. Does that shock you? Have you been lulled to sleep by the fancy translations that make it sound less gruesome than it was? David did not do this for the glory of God, he did this for love. David was a man on a different caliber, what kind of man today would take such trophies from battle? Imagine the most skilled Special Forces operative, imagine the most violent marine you can think of, and you might come close to what David was. Now imagine that man who also loves poetry, with a love for nature and a relationship with God. What a combination! It is no wonder at all why the women of Israel would come out to sing the praises of David when he would return from battle. David was every woman’s dream.

What I love most about David though, is not all these aspects of his character. He was an amazing man; no doubt about it, but what is most amazing is what David reveals about who God is and what God desires of us. What I love most about David is what God himself has to say about him. "I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart, which shall fulfill all my will." (Acts 13:22) David, a man of violence, full of purpose driven anger and extremes of passion, this man who killed thousands upon thousands, who committed adultery and murder, this same man was considered by God to be a man after His own heart. Does this mean that God is like David? Is God violent, does God have extremes of passion that lead him to act on impulse? No, David was a man after God's own heart in spite of his character, not because of it.  The story of David says something incredible for us today. God desires you, as you are, with the character that you have developed. He desires you to be his friend. He does not desire that you change who you are, he desires that you develop a relationship with Him.

What a powerful outcome it is, when an individual establishes a relationship with Jesus without trying to be something they are not. God took David as he was, he did not change David to be something that David wasn't. God established a relationship with David and used his own passions to do the work God had called him to do. Character, rightly directed, is a powerful thing. Did David make mistakes? Yes, huge mistakes. If David lived today, he would be executed for war crimes and murder. David was not a tame man, but his emotions in the hands of God worked a powerful result.  God does not desire you to be like your pastor. God does not desire you to become just like your bible worker. God does not desire you to be just like mother Teresa, God does not wish you to be like David, God does not desire you to be like Jesus. What God desires you to be, is like yourself. God desires you, and He desires a relationship with what that is in its entirety. God has never desired to change humanity to be mere automatons that are a copy of something else. God loves individuality. Why does God love individuality? It is because no matter what type of person you are, you are an aspect of the character of who God is. God's character is so multidimensional that in order for us to understand who He is, we must understand who we are and have relationships with other people to understand who they are. Every one and everything reveals aspects of God that we would not know any other way.

I am not saying that we shouldn't strive to be like Jesus, but we must understand, Jesus was a man, with a specific character type, with specific circumstances that developed who He was. You will never be exactly like Jesus because you are a separate human being with a different personality and a different set of circumstances. None of this alters your value, or lessens your worth to God. Your personality is no greater, and no less than that of Jesus, for all personalities or relevant to God. You must have all of the personalities in order to even begin to grasp the character of God, if of course God could be said to have such a thing as a character.

Are you a violent person? God desires a friendship with you. Are you emotional and soft? God desires a relationship with you. Are you indifferent? God desires a relationship with you. Do you enjoy adventure? Do you love business and making money? Are you in love with nature? Do you love power and leadership? Do you have extremes of emotions? Is risk something you love? Are you a timid person, afraid of even driving on the highway? No matter what type of person you are, God desires you. Everyone has value in the kingdom of God. God took a violent young man, a man ruled by his emotions and passions, he took that man and He did something amazing. He did not change David; he did not take away his violence, or remove his extremes of emotions. Through the relationship that David built with God, David channeled his character to spread the knowledge of God to everyone.

I love David because in David I see the glory of God. In David I see myself, in David I see every individual who has ever lived. In David we gain a deep understanding of what God wants from us. He wants to be your friend. He meets you where you are. He does not change who you are, you do not have to lose your identity in order to follow Jesus. I will end with my favorite Bible verse written by the son of David. "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment." (Ecclesiastes 11:9) Live your life, explore who you are, find out what makes you happy and discover your individuality. But remember, that no matter what you are, God desires a relationship with you. Everything you do will affect that relationship one way or another. Will you allow your personality to truly change the fate of the world, as David did, or will your character be wasted by a world that does not value it? The world professes to value individuality, yet in reality there is only one thing that truly values you, that is the source of your personality, God himself.

When God Regrets: A Second Look at Noah

         300 years ago our nation was just a collection of small little towns along the eastern coast of our continent. There were no skyscrapers, no cars, no TV, no computers, there was very little technology involved in day-to-day life. Our forefathers lived very primitive lives, we drank out of streams or wells we dug, we ate food out of gardens or we foraged for it in the woods and valleys. Life was simple. The rivers were pure and untainted, the water was clean, the air was sweet, the animal life plentiful. Most everyone worshiped God and believed him to be a daily part of their life. Little did they realize then what would become of their budding colonies and what those colonies would do to this wonderful new land they had discovered.

         Now, just 300 years later what do we find? We have a population of over three hundred million people. We throw away half of everything we produce. Our landfills occupy the area of some small countries. The water is no longer safe to drink from streams; the air is brown, not blue. Skyscrapers reach as high as mountains. We have more cars than people; from the sky, our once untouched terrain is crisscrossed with concrete roads. Giant holes have been dug a thousand feet deep to supply the rock needed to build those roads. A flying machine can take you from one side of the continent to the other in just 5 hours. Whole species of animals have been killed. Millions upon millions of Buffalo have been slaughtered, other animals killed for food, clothing, and for fun. Rivers have been diverted, valleys made in to lakes, and mountains cut down to hills. Mankind has left in its wake a scared and broken wilderness. No longer pure in its existence. Very few places on this continent have never felt the impact of man. In just 300 years, we have come close to destroying what was once the most diverse country ever discovered.

         300 years has seen the invention and use of electricity, motored vehicles, airplanes, the telephone, television, and the Internet. We have amassed knowledge beyond compare. We know the answers to most complicated questions, and we have ruled out God to a large degree. We have been to the moon; we have explored our solar system and have sent satellites even beyond it. We have done all of this, and it only took a few hundred years.

         Imagine with me then, the state of our nation in 2,000 years. What inventions will we have created? What knew knowledge will we know, what knew destruction will be wrought? If you can imagine it, than you are probably imagining the state of our world before the flood. Imagine people with vastly more intelligence, living a thousand years or more. What could be accomplished? What inventions could be invented, what cities could be built, what destruction could be performed? Perhaps whole animal families were eradicated, mass murder of God's creation, and the utter ruin of the world. There was probably massive global climate change with shifting of tectonic plates and the rising of the oceans with sudden changes in pressure. The earth was a mess, in fact, the earth had gotten so bad that the Bible writes, "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." (Gen 6:6) How bad does the earth have to be for the creator who said, "It is very good." to then turn around and say that he regretted that he ever created it?

         Some people, who watched the recent movie "Noah", thought that the violence was too much. Some felt that Noah would never have been such a violent man. They picture Noah as a meek and holy man who listened to the voice of God. I actually believe the opposite, if Noah was not a violent man, then I doubt he would have survived. Tell me, in a world where you are the only man alive who still chooses to worship The Lord, living in a culture of extreme violence, what kind of man do you think you would have to be in order to stay alive in a community who hated you? No, I think the movie portrayed the character of Noah probably better than any story ever written about that man. I guarantee you that Noah had to fight for his freedom to serve The Lord. What happened when the church was persecuting the Waldenses? They fought back and rolled boulders down on top of the forces sent to destroy them. What happened when Israel was persecuted by the nations around them? Violent men arose to protect God's people such as David, Saul, Samson, Gideon, and many more. No, I highly doubt Noah was as meek as many would prefer our children believe.

         So the earth was pretty bad, there was more than likely not a man on earth that wasn't violent. Was this why God regretted making man? Do you really think that God did not see this coming when He created man? Do you really think it is possible for God, who created everything and can see the trajectory of man throughout the ages, to miss what was coming? If your answer is no, then why do you think that same God would turn around and destroy everything that He created on purpose? Was it because, all of a sudden, God realized that his creation was worse than he anticipated?

         God does nothing by accident. As I explored in another blog post recently, God is the originator of all things created. Everything that can be created is created or will be created. God is not a created being. He does not have a brain, or a will, or a body, or any such created idea of existence. He is not capable of making a mistake because anything created ceases to be a mistake and instead becomes reality. There is a popular question thrown around by people poking fun at the idea of an almighty God, “Can God create a square circle?” The answer to the question is yes, but it would not just be the creation of a square circle. If God made a square circle it would instantly become reality and no longer appear strange to us. It would be woven in to our understanding of reality; God is not capable of making a mistake because He does not exist in any type of dimension whatsoever. (These topics are discussed at length in my posts about quantum physics, relativity, and reality).

         So then, what was God trying to get across when Moses was led to believe that God repented that He had made man? God designed free will in to the very fabric of our universe. Free will is not just the ability to make decisions; it is the ability of a cause to exert an affect. Everything in the universe is equipped with this very same principle of cause and affect. Every asteroid flying through space, every planet, every black hole, has this inherent free will to act a certain way. This is the way that God chooses to interact with the universe, by giving it absolute freedom of movement and action. God has allowed the universe to follow its laws without interruption. In just a moment we will take a look at why God did this. It seems unfair at first glance. Almost like God just created the universe and then stood back and said, “see ya, hope you enjoy dying.” Yet there is so much more to the story than that.

         Science is just beginning to realize that our brains are vastly more complicated than they had originally thought. They used to assume that the human brain was just a complicated network of electrical impulses sent down axons to terminals. We thought that we were on the road to solving intelligence once and for all. Yet recently it has been discovered that even as complicated as those networks are, they would only be able to hold about 35 MB of memory. We have computers that hold millions of megabytes of memory, yet the human brain can always outperform a computer. This baffled science until a very recent study. It has been demonstrated that the human brain actually operates on a quantum level. It draws memory from a quantum source. This gives the brain, for all practical purposes, an endless ability to store and use information. It also means that the human action can never be absolutely calculated. Yes, we operate based on our experience and learned behavior, but at any moment, a free will agent has the ability to make a completely unexpected decision. God designed a brain that not even He could control without altering the way the universe works. So why did God do this, knowing that it would lead to such catastrophic results?

         God looked down throughout the ages, He saw what was coming on the world. He saw where free will would lead his creation, both angels and man alike. He recognized that it would lead ultimately to bad decisions and terrible affects. Yet He made it anyway. Why would God do that? If He really is good, why didn’t He design a perfect system? The answer is very simple, because love cannot exist inside a perfect system. If God had designed a perfect system that could be calculated, planned, and directed into only being good, He would have only created a computer with the ability to follow complex programming. We humans have already done that. We can create robots that follow complex algorithms to perform specific functions. Yet that is not what God had in mind. He designed something that had the ability to create its own algorithms. That is the secret behind artificial intelligence. The reason why man has not be able to create an intelligent robot is, for one, we have not created a working quantum computer that can work with, store, learn and use the amount of knowledge necessary, and two, we cannot create a computer that can write its own code and program itself. It is possible that we may some day, but not yet.

         The question then is not, “How could God do this?” but rather, “How could He not?” God created man for relationship; He created us to contemplate, to understand and to explore. As Carl Sagan once wrote, “We are the universe contemplating itself.” Creation required us to exist. The universe is so complex that it required an intelligent, autonomous creation in order to make sense of it all. God designed the universe to require intelligent life. Without something to comprehend the universe, the universe would cease to exist at all, there would be no point to it. So then, knowing that God did all of this with a purpose and a goal in mind, what did He mean when He told Moses to write that He regretted making man? Notice that it doesn’t just say that God regretted making His creation it says that the state of man grieved Him in His heart. God did not regret his creation of man. Mankind was not an accident, what God grieved was the choices we made. It grieved him that the cost of knowing love was the ability to cause pain and destruction.

         In Noah’s time, the earth had become so bad through the choices of man, that the Bible tells us that the thoughts of everyone were only evil continuously. No one person, besides Noah, even considered choosing what was right. The character of God had been so twisted that no one understood who He was. The movie portrayed this in a way I’ve never seen done before. Not even Noah understood who God was. The story was passed down from ages to ages that God had caused the flood, that God was angry at the world and sought to destroy every last human on the planet. Yet we missed the point of the entire event. Moses missed the point when He wrote down his account of Genesis. We have subsequently missed the point today as we continue to tell the story, write movies about the story and preach about the story. Just as i stated in my article on the story of Job, “God did not do it!” The story of Noah is not a story of divine wrath for the sins of man, the story of Noah is a story of God seeking and saving those who otherwise would have been lost. It is in fact, a story of the love of God poured out for, not merely humanity, but all created things.

        As has been the case with every civilization from the beginning, man destroyed himself. We were created to give order to the part of the universe we were put in. We were made to be the guardians of creation, to direct the cause and affect of reality; instead, we acted as the cause to bring it to ruin. Noah may have misunderstood the character of God as he passed down the story of God to his children and grandchildren, yet He did indeed have a relationship with God. Noah saw the destruction that man was bringing on himself and he prepared to save the innocent from the destruction that man would ultimately bring. Noah saw the compassion and love of God, that no other human alive had stopped to contemplate. Contrary to what the movie portrayed, God did indeed desire for man to live, and He saved the one man who was still listening to the voice of God speaking to him through creation.

        It is left for us to speculate how mankind brought this destruction on themselves. Perhaps, in their thirst for power and as the need for energy increased, they sought to harness the power of what the bible calls “the deep.” Maybe they thought they could contain the water that God had placed under the earth to keep it a constant temperature, but instead, in releasing that energy, they caused the entire earth to flood, they caused an ice age to occur, and they shifter the earth’s rotation and altered its climate drastically. Will history repeat itself? Will mankind yet again destroy itself? The Bible is clear that it will not happen by flood again, it is obvious why not; we no longer have pressurized water under the earth, or in the sky above. All of our water is contained in the oceans that cover 70% of our earth. The waters are contained now, but never underestimate the destruction of man. Nuclear war, mass genocide, what will be next? More importantly, who will stand up to save those who desire a better existence than the thoughts of man can conceive?

         The Bible speaks of hope for the future, and indeed the very last book contained in the Bible we have today is dedicated to the subject of restoration of humanity and an eternity spent with a loving God. I believe that God desires that once again. He desires to restore us to our original function. He desires to reveal character to the universe and to direct the free will of creation. God desires us to once again enter in to that love He originally created us to know. Do we desire that love to be a part of our life? Are we willing to allow that love to abide with us and change the way we view this life and those around us? Like Noah, will we be the voice of reason calling others to end the destruction that mankind often brings through the exercise of free will? The message is not to end free will, but to direct it toward choosing to understand the ultimate character of God. God desires you to live, but He desires you to live more abundantly than you do now. There is more to this life if we just desire to find it out.

Substitutionary Atonement

Substitutionary atonement, the idea that Jesus died because His father required the penalty of sin be paid. This idea stems from a misunderstanding of the sacrificial system. People see the lamb slain for the sins of Israel and extrapolate that it is because God required blood to save. That is false. The sacrificial system was put in place during a time and a culture when people relied heavily on symbolism and system. Why do you think idol worship was so essential back in that day? People knew the gods weren't the idols, but they relied so heavily on symbol that they worshiped the idols to understand who God was. The sacrificial system was set up by God, for a people inside a specific culture and time. It pointed toward the ultimate love of God for his creation. It is a revelation of character, not the atonement for sin. Without the shedding of blood, no one then would have understood the character of their God. God, as He often does, chose to relate to humanity inside their culture and in ways they could understand. This is how God has always operated. 

The sacrifice of Israel was so much different compared to the animal sacrifices of those days. It was humane, it was reverent, it was not the slaying of animals for the pleasure of their God, it was a symbol that actually represented their God, the animal was a symbol for God Himself. You know how crazy that would have seemed to the nations around them? What kind of God would represent himself as an animal dying for the sake of humanity? That is a huge distinction between killing an animal to appease the wrath of God, vs. killing an animal to symbolize the love of God. It is the same today. Without the death of Jesus on the cross, no one would understand the real character of God. No one would be saved because no one would understand what type of God they were actually choosing. The death of Jesus is not, and never was to appease the wrath of God against sin. It was to reveal to humanity the ultimate love and character of God, that He desired an intimate relationship with his creation. The God of non-existence, the creator of everything desires relationship with you. That is the story of atonement, that we were meant to be at one with a loving God.