There is a lot of weirdness in Scripture.  Mockers have great fun pointing it out, and even people who desire to be faithful are sometimes disturbed by it.  However, when we understand what is really going on, it looks different.  I don’t mean that it stops being weird or shocking, but we come to realize that it is supposed to shock us, the same way a stark warning or hard lesson can shock us.

For example, in one of the oddest incidents in the Old Testament, the prophet Hosea is commanded to marry a woman named Gomer, whom the older translations call a “wife of fornications.”  The term might be proleptic, meaning that it anticipates Gomer’s behavior afterward.  The three children of Gomer and Hosea are given names with extremely strange meanings:  Jezreel, meaning “God sows,” Lo-ruhamah, meaning “not pitied,” and Lo-ammi, meaning “not my people.”

Some interpreters think this incident didn’t really happen, that it’s a parable, like the parables of Jesus.  I think it is more likely that it’s a parable and that it really happened.  Israel, figuratively espoused to God, was repeatedly unfaithful, “whoring after strange gods.”  Although the nation would be punished, she would eventually repent and be restored by God to her place.  How scandalous that Hosea would be commanded to marry a licentious woman!  But this is no more scandalous than that God would espouse Himself to people like us.

There are a lot of acted-out parables in Scripture, and most of them are equally startling.  Several prophets warned of conquest, flight, and humiliation by stripping naked.  Isaiah, for example, went without clothing or shoes for three years to dramatize the coming exile of Egypt and Ethiopia.  Some claim that he would have worn a loincloth, but this is unlikely because the point was to illustrate how the captives would be led away bare-buttocked (verse 20:4).  Again, to show that masters should serve rather than be served, Jesus once took off his own outermost garment, as a servant would, got on His knees, and washed the feet of His own disciples.  We know from Peter’s reaction that the disciples were every bit as scandalized to see their Lord playing the part of a menial as Isaiah’s countrymen would have been to see their prophet’s naked buttocks on the street.

The incident in which Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac is also an acted-out parable.  Objecting that child sacrifice is wrong misses the point.  Of course it is; elsewhere, repeatedly, God Himself condemns it in the strongest terms.  Yet in the first place He is the divine judge, the supreme lord of life and death -- and in the second place he sends an angel to interrupt Abraham at the point of committing the act.  Now that Abraham has proven his faith even in the face of instructions he doesn’t understand, we learn that it was never God’s desire that Isaac actually be killed.  A ram is providentially provided as a substitute sacrifice, its horns entangled in a bush.  According to the age-old tradition of the Church, this acted-out parable is really about substitutionary justice.  It foreshadows the execution of the Son of God, our own ram, as a common criminal.  The substitute victim dies not for His offenses, but for ours.

The Crucifixion has always been scandalous.  As Paul says, it is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.”  For how could the sinless God submit Himself to what we deserve?

We worship a shocking deity.  God is scandalous not because He isn’t good, but because His goodness so far exceeds anything we could have imagined – and because He goes to shocking lengths to make His word clear to us.