More on the infallibility of the Bible

(Hopefully a discussion will carry on! Look at comments from the last entry!)

I want to carry on this theme - then maybe I could stop writing these blogs in my head in bed when I should be asleep. Oh well better than worrying about the family :)

To me it seems interesting that it is the things we don't understand in the Bible that people seem happy to say may not be of God. The discussion of which I quoted Andy Varley carried on with someone saying what she didn't like and then going on say how we must remember that these books were written by different people in different cultures and we must look at the cultures - which I do agree with - and then we can pick out what is relevant to us to today.
I am all for the looking at the culture in which something was written but I still think we need to say that this is what God was saying/is saying and then go from there. Not this was was then and well we can just dismiss it.

One of the biggies, which did also come up at Greenbelt, was all the killing which goes on in the Old Testament. I've got another post on what we teach our children to follow up on this. But we all know of people who wont read the Old Testament because they cannot see God in this. In fact Ship of Fools, when reading out verses like that that they didn't like were adding "and this is supposed to be the word of God".
I don't know this side of heaven if we will ever understand why God seemed to order total genocide. I know there are loads of theories that have been discussed but really I'm not sure we know.
In fact when we try to work it out we have to remember what God said to Job when he questioned why He was allowing him to suffer.

I am going to stick my neck out though and say that a thought I have had is that Yes God did order this. Well it says so in the Bible so He must've. But in fact it was not that the Israelites were going to be tempted by the people - who apparently if we do look at the histories were seriously depraved - but that actually there was so much sin in the Israelite's hearts that even with the corrupt people groups totally gone still the land could not be clean because of what was in their hearts.
When doing major spiritual warfare we were always told to make sure our hearts were cleaned so that nothing we were warfaring with would have a foothold for us. I think the land was so corrupted by the sin of the previous people and there was a foothold in the Israelite's hearts that things just hooked in.
Then in the New Testament Jesus actually tells the story of the wheat and the tares saying that sometimes we just have to let the good grow with the evil as we can destroy one as much as the other, which to me is saying that with unclean hearts we can do more damage trying to bring out judgment on the world.

Some how we have to let God teach us what He is saying not just say that some of this is really not of God and that a mistake was made when the Bible came together!