Largely because I’m the son of a scientist, I don’t share Piper and Robertson’s Biblical inerrantist perspective. I suspect that the drought during the reign of King Ahab happened as part of a naturally occurring ecosystem, just as the conquest of Israel by Babylon occurred as a reasonably predictable sociological event in the story of ancient empires. To me, the fact that prophets attributed these acts to God doesn’t mean that the mysterious creator of the universe who is the source of being of every atom is an infinitely large invisible man who gets angry a lot and dives into history at some particular moments to punish people, but not at others. It is rather that the Holy Spirit inspired God’s prophets to use naturally occurring events in his cosmic order as teaching tools to call out God’s people on their idolatry and injustice. I would say that these inspired words of scripture are God’s accommodation of our need for divine teaching in forms that we can grasp. Where I am going to part ways with the inerrantists is when I say that God’s punitive acts according to the testimony of Old Testament prophets are provisionally conditioned to the historical needs of his Israelite people at each phase of their development and should not be analyzed as a primary window into God’s eternal character, for which Jesus is the fully developed, perfectly sufficient revelation.
Because, wow, I have never ever heard that idea before and wow, now THAT MAKES SENSE.
(the rest of his post is worth reading too)
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