Special seminar with guest speaker, Joshua Ryan Butler, pastor at Redemption Church in Tempe, AZ and author of The Skeletons in God’s Closet and The Pursuing God.
God is a loving God who relentlessly pursues us. But many of us struggle with difficult parts of the Bible, like violence in the Old Testament. Did God command genocide, telling his people to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan? Old Testament violence can seem like a skeleton in God’s closet, raising questions of whether we can truly trust him and causing us to keep him at arms length. In this talk, we’ll confront some popular caricatures to see the beauty and power of what’s really happening in the biblical story here, and how it’s wrapped up in God’s broader loving pursuit of his world. You’ll reclaim a bold confidence to draw near to God in all his glorious goodness.