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Bulletin 118 Date : 21st Nov 2007
The Overhead Projector

I was leading a service many years ago in a Methodist chapel not far from here and I was preaching on how we percieve God in the Old Testament. I had with me a group of people who were helping with the service and they had brought an Overhead Projector (OHP) – the sort of thing we used before Powerpoint took over the world.

In a flash of inspiration I asked the person operating the OHP to twiddle with the focus. I then asked the congregation if they could see the picture on the screen. Naturally they couldn’t see as clearly as before and said so. “Funny,” I said walking over to the OHP and looking at the slide I was projecting. “You see, the slide is still as clear as it was a minute ago.” I then asked the OHP operator to refocus. The picture on the screen became clear again and the congregation relaxed.

This was my illustration of how we perceive God in the Old Testament. God is like the OHP slide – He never changes and is the same throughout time. However, the way God is portrayed can be distorted by the culture in which we live. It must seem strange to someone of another faith coming to Britain, which is supposedly a Christian country, and seeing violence and sex portrayed on the television, cinema screens and on newsagents’ shelves. Also, seeing the level of crime, drug addiction and family breakdown must be puzzling too. “Is this a true representation of a Christian country?” they may ask.

So, when we read in the Old Testament that God apparently condoned the removal of thumbs and big toes (Judges 1:4-10), the slaughter of the inhabitants of the Promised Land (Joshua 8:24-27) and the massacre of the opponents of the Jews (Esther 9:5), what are we to make of them? Do these accounts come to us through a cultural lens where this kind of behaviour was seen as the norm and they just assumed God was endorsing their actions? After all, in the time of Wilberforce and the abolitionists, their battle was not just against the slave trade but against the mindset within society, and even the church, which condoned the slave trade. Did God really expect us to pack black people like sardines into the hold of a ship and throw some of them overboard when the water supply ran low?

Some Bible scholars would say that the Old Testament is a ‘progressive revelation’ of God’s true nature which is only fully revealed in Jesus. Other Bible scholars might try to approve of these barbaric acts on the grounds that the recipients deserved it because of their immoral life-style. However we view it, surely we need to measure these passages against the yardstick of Jesus who we believe is the full and perfect revelation of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, we see Jesus having to change the mindset in passages like Matthew 5:43, 44 (“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...") where the people had inherited the notion that love should be restricted to their own people.

So, is the Church guilty of projecting a false image of God to the people we are trying to reach with the gospel? Do we need to adjust the focus on our overhead projectors in order to create a clear image?