God's provincial proclivities.

Today, as I rushed through Abbotsford to a job interview, I saw this sign for what appears to be a razed Bar and Grill: "JESUS IS LORD OVER ABBOTSFORD." Even though I was in a rush to get to the interview on time, I felt that I needed to talk about this one. So I did (embedded below).

I find signs like this indicative of a faith's inherent human-ness. God would not care about our politics. pic.twitter.com/buWU1FyZ7K

— Jeffrey Nordstrom (@jeffnords) August 3, 2016

Seriously. God's obsession with human politics in the Holy Land is absurdly provincial, weirdly local, and entirely irrelevant to people today, or even then. Clearly, the Old Testament is a political text intended to propagandize for particular political ends.

As I mentioned in the video [deleted] above, this bugged me while I was growing up. It was a strange contradiction to me to see how God seemed so political on such a small [provincial] scale while he also happened to run the entire universe. The largeness of God and the minuteness of his prejudices were a contradiction that I never really sorted out, no matter which apologetics I adopted.

What God cares about these sort of politics? From Judges 3,

• Therefore the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Chushanrishathaim, king of Mesopotamia: and the children of Israel served Chushanrishathaim eight years.

Doesn't this seem weirdly specific? God is angry, so an entire people get to be slaves to a neighbouring country for eight years. Why would God do this? How is slavery a good political tactic to deal with your almighty anger? And why can't you name the deliverer? Was he (I assume it was a "he") in the historian's bad books?

It just seems unnecessarily petty for a God of the Universe to use tactics like this.

Or how about this, from 1 Chronicles 11 in the KJV?

This is a whole bunch of political jibber-jabber. Why does God need to be involved in any of this? The answer is that He doesn't need to be there. All the characters would do just fine without the presence of a provincial, political, warrior god. 

Again, it seems rather peevish of God to care about this. Such an omnipotent God wouldn't be very concerned about who smiteth who, or who rebuilds a city, right?

​I love maps and pored over the maps in my Bibles for many hours in my youth. What about this map?

There we see a line dividing two nations. At some times, God liked one of them; at other times, God liked the other one. There's no way to get around the politics of this: clearly the writers of the texts would have a bias towards their own nation. Note that Jerusalem is on the "Judah" side of the line; guess which nation was usually favoured by God? And wouldn't the omnipotent God understand that political borders constantly shift, that they're arbitrary delineations of human tribal social organizations? I'd like to think that God wouldn't even notice our borders, but instead look directly at our hearts.

Again, this bugged me. And it still does. It seems strange to think that political decisions in the United States of America are often based on an interpretation of a 2000 year old political text from a different continent. 

No matter what a person believes, I think it's important to have a clear idea of what type of a being they're worshipping. I, for one, was never at peace with the provincial god who takes sides in battles and sends "his people" to be slaves in other countries. This made it easy to adopt more "ecumenical" approaches to Christianity, ones that focused on unity and personal religious experience. Unfortunately for my faith's sake, that made my faith so subjective that I couldn't seem to reconcile aligning myself with the organizations any longer.

Even though I don't believe in that God anymore, the God I once worshipped was way bigger than the God of the Bible.