NOTES for Ki2 25:1-12

How often we hear this opinion: the Old Testament, Jewish God is a punishing and cruel God, while ours, the New Testament, Christian God, is kind and merciful. For some reason Christians often make no attempt to understand the “Old Testament God”; they simply pretend that the harsh and even cruel pages of the Old Testament are absent from “our” Bible. Our Bible is all sweetness and light, and its bloody horrors are neither for us nor about us. Yet for some reason the Church does not exclude passages such as today's from the cycle of readings. Why? Because people must know, and have the right to know, what happens when God is excluded from human life. Without God there is no peace, only hunger, ruin, and desolation. Is this God's punishment? No, it is simply the normal state of a world without God.