Did God command women's hands to be cut off without pity?

[Paidion]

Perhaps a negative aspect of the open theist position is that you can't simply believe that God allows or initiates things that seem repulsive, because you can rest on the belief he knows the end from the beginning

Steve, I can't make sense of this statement. Perhaps you could expand on it a bit?

Are you saying that I, Paidion, "simply believe that God allows or initiates things that seem repulsive"? This is not the case if you mean by "allows" does nothing to prevent it. In this sense of "allows", God obviously allows the most horrible tortures, rapes of little children, which are far more atrocious that "things that seem repulsive". However, I also believe that God "initiates things that seem repulsive" in order to bring about repentance or some other "higher good". But again, "things that seem repulsive" are a far cry from atrocites such as I just mentioned. I affirm without qualification that God NEVER initiates that sort of thing.

And what does all of this have to do with open theism?

I am utterly at a loss to understand that the reason I supposedly "can't simply believe that God allows or initiates things that seem repulsive" is because I "can rest on the belief he knows the end from the beginning."

[steve7150]

Steve7150 wrote:
Perhaps a negative aspect of the open theist position is that you can't simply believe that God allows or initiates things that seem repulsive, because you can rest on the belief he knows the end from the beginning

Steve, I can't make sense of this statement. Perhaps you could expand on it a bit?





Sorry, i meant to say that if one believes that God knows the future then it may be easier to accept harsh commands from God , like the one you referenced because you can be assured that God knows it will be for a greater good in the end. If you believe God can't see the future then i would imagine it would be harder to understand why God would give the kind of command you referenced.

[Paidion]

Thanks for the clarification, Steve.

I can see that God might do something unpleasant or command something unpleasant in order to bring about a greater good. Good parents do that with their children in order to train them. They may confine them to their room for a short while, deprive them of privileges, etc. But would a good parent cut off his child's hand if he caught the child stealing? I don't think so. And God must be at least as good as the best parent on earth!

[steve7150]

Thanks for the clarification, Steve.

I can see that God might do something unpleasant or command something unpleasant in order to bring about a greater good. Good parents do that with their children in order to train them. They may confine them to their room for a short while, deprive them of privileges, etc. But would a good parent cut off his child's hand if he caught the child stealing? I don't think so. And God must be at least as good as the best parent on earth!







Well if God knows the future perhaps he knew that this warning would prevent this event from ever happening. Maybe since the Israelites had been exposed to pagan religions in Egypt , this action was something that occured during some kind of pagan ritual for some weird reason such as a transfer of power , therefore God warned against it in a very harsh way , knowing it took this harshness to prevent it from happening.

[Homer]

But would a good parent cut off his child's hand if he caught the child stealing? I don't think so. And God must be at least as good as the best parent on earth!

Sometimes metaphors are pressed too far. God is spoken of as "Father" metaphorically. There is a comparison to a human father but God is probably as much or more different than He is the same as human father. Especially when we consider the difference between our western view of a father and the ancient patriarchical view.

[Roberto]

Thanks for the clarification, Steve.

I can see that God might do something unpleasant or command something unpleasant in order to bring about a greater good. Good parents do that with their children in order to train them. They may confine them to their room for a short while, deprive them of privileges, etc. But would a good parent cut off his child's hand if he caught the child stealing? I don't think so. And God must be at least as good as the best parent on earth!

So do you believe that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?

[RICHinCHRIST]

Does He make requirements of us that He doesn't practise Himself? Christ asked His disciples not to seek vengeance, but to love their enemies and do good toward them. But it's okay for God to avenge His enemies?

I don't see why God cannot, in good moral standing, avenge His enemies. Yes, He loves His enemies, and does good to them and shows them mercy. But isn't there a point where He will avenge them? Isn't that what Paul quotes in Romans 12, that God will repay His enemies, since the vengeance is His?

"So how can we truly be sons of our heavenly Father? Jesus indicated that we can be such sons if we do as the Father does, that is do good to all people, good and bad. Jesus also instructed us not to seek vengeance, to turn the other cheek, and to do good to those who persecute us. If we do these things, will this show that we are truly sons of God? Similar to God Himself in character? Or would we be similar to God in character if we cut off a woman's hands for defending her husband by grabbing the genitals of her husband's opponent? Would we be similar to God in character if we took revenge upon our enemies? If we killed a person for touching our fancy new car? If we killed all the people in a country in order to take over that country for ourselves?

I agree with you. We should reflect God's character in all our dealings with our and His enemies. But I don't think it has been clearly proven that this command (as well as many others in the OT) definitively portrays God's character any different than what is revealed in the New Testament. If God was trying to preserve Israel as a nation, He had to give harsh commands. The people understood and agreed to their responsibility to live according to His stipulations. The culture at that time was very different than our own. I think we would be making a mistake to claim that God's commands and actions in the Old Testament are actually immoral. We would have to claim that the very God who sent Jesus was a fraud. Or, like you affirm, we'd have to say the only prophets who knew God on an intimate level were actually mistaken. This would bring even further questions to the reliability of the Old Testament and the prophets who wrote it. Is it impossible to view God's actions and commands in the OT as morally justifiable? I don't think it is. We may have questions about it because some of it rubs us the wrong way, but I think it would be a mistake to say that these commands are not from God.

One of Jesus's main missions while on the earth was to reveal the Father as He really is! If I must choose between the OT depiction of the Father, and the Father as Jesus revealed Him, I will choose the latter. That's because I am a Christian, a disciple of Christ.

Thankfully, I don't think I have to make a choice between the depiction of God in either Testament. I think they equally portray the same God. Like I said earlier, if I come to the conclusion that the OT isn't reliable, it will cause many problems. You won't be able to trust much of what the prophets said, because you won't know if they heard correctly or not. Also, the very reliability of the New Testament hinges on the OT's credibility. I think I'll stand on God's side on this issue even though I don't fully understand the morality behind it.