I've been having some good dialogue over the past couple days with my wife, friends, my pastor, and a former seminary professor. What I've included below is originally from an email I wrote yesterday to my wife and buddies.
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I have a question. I'm racking my brain preparing for the lesson I'm teaching in youth group tomorrow night on "The Bible." This isn't on any specific content from the Bible, rather, simply teaching about the Bible generally. I have found that I usually formulate main points for my talks in the form of questions. One of the main points that I want to hit on tomorrow night is "Why is the Bible So Confusing?" I'll likely talk about things like weird laws from Leviticus, random stuff like long geneologies, the book of Revelation etc. But also, and maybe this is the hardest one, I want to be sensitive to the question, "Isn't God really mean sometimes, especially in the Old Testament?" Specifically I'm thinking of using the Battle of Jericho in Joshua 6 as an example. I'm wrestling with the notion of God's apparent sanction of the genocide of the Canaanites. I mean, really?? All living things destroyed including women and children? How do we reconcile that with a God who is supposedly the very embodiment of love? And okay, I've considered the fact that this story in Joshua (and others) really might be a symbolic reality, a myth so to speak with truth and meaning beyond the literal details of the story (hows that for a seminary answer). The real point then being in the provision of God for God's people when faced with adversity. "And the walls came a tumblin' down" may be metaphorical. But in that case, how do you explain that to a group of 13 yr olds?
any thoughts?
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