Kethuvim

If you read the prophets for, oh say, 3.5 seconds, you get the impression that God is generally one step away from wiping Israel off the map.  To some people (like the psycho leader of Iran), that doesn't sound like a bad plan.  I've always wondered why God is so angry.  I've always had trouble balancing this God with Jesus, who came to show what God was like.  Jesus always seems sort of emotionally balanced.  It isn't that he doesn't get angry, but he wasn't as up and down as the God of the Hebrew Scriptures.  So why is God so angry?

I think you have to look at some history to understand why God seems so harsh to the Jews. Judaism represented the first monotheism.  Every culture to that point had numerous gods, usually taking the form of something in nature (i.e. the sun, water, etc.).  One day, God speaks to Abraham, basically stating that he's the only true God.  Thus monotheism is born.  He promises to make a great nation out of him and tells him that his descendants will be as numerous as the sand on the seashore.  So God's plan is for all people, everywhere, to acknowledge a monotheistic existence (hence the reason he tells Abraham that his descendants will be "as numerous as sand on the seashore").  So if you're God, and I'm assuming that you're not, you probably need more than one guy to make this happen.  You need an example to the nations to show that this monotheism thing is ok and worth giving a shot.  So you need a "chosen" people to be an example of what all of this looks like, and what it means to put God's world back together after we wrecked it in the first place.  Enter Israel.  

A lot of people see the idea of a chosen nation, such as Israel, as the height of arrogance.  If I'm honest, I always thought that way, until I read Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' excellent tome "To Heal a Fractured World."  He reveals that this idea of being chosen is really a giant responsibility.  God needed an example of what monotheism could bring to the world, especially in the areas of justice, mercy, and righteousness (this word came to be understood in the Hebrew language as "charity").  So when you read the prophets, you see God getting ticked off when Israel falls short of his standard in these areas.  He even says in Isaiah, "Take your evil deeds out of my sight!  Stop doing wrong, learn to do right!  Seek justice, encourage the oppressed.  Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow."  

God is ticked because they were basically acting like everyone else and, frankly, their example to the nations sucked.  By threatening to wipe them off the map, he was trying to wake them up and remind them that they have a huge responsibility to the world to advance his name through doing good in the world; seeking justice, defending the fatherless.  His anger, far from being unfair and ridiculous, is a corrective anger.  It's a broken-hearted plea from a father who wants to see his created realm fixed by the ones he created.  His call remains to all of us today.  Tomorrow, I'll look at the ways in which Jesus took up this mantle as an example to the world.