Skip to main content

I was angry about the blood and violence

My Bible: reasons to believe in the power of the Bible

Previous Next

'I was angry about the blood and violence in the Bible for many years. After my initial enthusiasm for the Bible, when I was 19, I felt that I had to defend it. But I felt that it was misogynistic, patriarchal, stuff worse than I believed before I knew Christ.

After a while I was just reading the Gospels and then just the Sermon on the Mount. That became my little sanctuary of Jesus where I could feel safe. The thing that brought me up with a start was seeing how Jesus, and then Paul, read the texts of horror.

In Romans 15.10-13 Paul is really saying that there is no more violence, no more blood lust. There is peace. For Jesus and Paul, there was a way of coming to terms with that horrific stuff, rather than backing away from it as I had done for decades.

I moved in 2002. It was a chance to start again. One of the things on my mind was whether I was going to go to church and go through the motions of Christianity. I was seeing contradictions between the life of Jesus and the life of the Church. I felt I wasn’t going to bother with Christianity.

But I was reading through Romans and it was this passage that tilted me back towards a way of reading the Bible with Jesus, of him taking me into the texts of terror, of seeing his compassion for the villagers and townspeople conquered by Joshua, of seeing him weeping with Hagar. That made the difference, and still does.'

Do you have a story to share? Email [email protected]

More Stories

My wife and I were told we’d likely never have children

My wife and I were told we’d likely never have children – even if we went through certain procedures. I was born with a “defect”, and after both of us went through some tests, I discovered I had one or two other issues...

I was furious. I had just come back from being interviewed by a college

‘I was furious. I had just come back from being interviewed by a college with a view to being trained to be a Baptist minister. The last thing my minister had said to me before I left was, “The one thing they won’t ask...

I became very ill when I was 20 years old and was hospitalised

I became very ill when I was 20 years old and was hospitalised, nil-by-mouth, on a morphine drip, etc. This illness led to me being in and out of hospital for the next year or so. At that time I wasn’t a Christian but my...

I’m sometimes guilty of thinking I know better than everyone else

I’m sometimes guilty of thinking I know better than everyone else. That mindset often extends to thinking I know what I need better than God. When my wife and I were moving house, I found that I tried too often to force...

I was an executive in a company. A colleague had retired and died very suddenly.

I was an executive in a company. A colleague had retired and died very suddenly. He was a lovely man, and I went to his memorial service. We sang, “Do not be afraid for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name...

I keep coming back to John 6.67–68

I keep coming back to John 6.67–68 where Jesus has been teaching and people are finding it hard to understand and lots of his peripheral followers are falling away.

Want to share how the Bible has impacted your life? Email [email protected]

Read the Bible icon Read the Bible