We all know the story of Job. After everything goes wrong for him, his friends arrive. They give him advice, which turns into a debate about God. A very large chunk of the book is this debate. God then appears in a whirlwind and sets the record straight. Job’s friends are horrendously wrong.
When I look at the Old Testament I think of it as the debate between Job and his friends.
The Old Testament starts with a warning about religion: “Eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and you will surely die”. Humanity does eat of the fruit, and the Old Testament is the story of the establishment and growth of formal religion (the formal construct of “the knowledge of good and evil”), and its failure. It is the story of the death that was warned about.
Then at some point, God steps in and sets the record straight. The Word became flesh. As Jesus says “no one knows the Father, except the Son”. Essentially “you are all wrong” and thank God for that.
In Jesus’s death we see the end of the idea of a wrathful God. I expand this idea in this post.
The god of religion is dead and religion is a farce.
In a public display Jesus cuts down the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, just as John the Baptist says He would.
When reading the Old Testament, I do not “take it with a pinch of salt”, I read it as I would read the debate between Job and his friends. People inventing theology out of necessity, but ultimately fumbling around in the dark.
I find it interesting that even though Job is not the first book in the Bible, it is the oldest book. If the story of the fall is the prologue: giving us a context to what we read in the rest of the Old Testament; then maybe the book of Job is an overture: summarizing in a broad sense what is to come.
*When Jesus says “no one knows the Father, except the Son”, He also adds “those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him”. There are places where the Father of Jesus is revealed in the Old Testament, but it is not the norm. I would add that the test whether something is true in the Old Testament is whether it fits with the Father as reveal by the Son.
“The Lord is my Shepard” sounds like the Father of Jesus.
The god who sends bears to kill children who teased a thin skinned grumpy old man… absolutely not.
Life in the Garden 