Evening Sermon: Exodus 15:3--The Lord God is Warrior-- We have to wage a life-giving war

"The Lord God is a warrior; the Lord is His Name"-- I cannot believe the awful, false interpretations of this passage that fill the internet. It is clear from the Tradition of the Church that the text means that God has zeal for the destruction of evil. In other words, he wants to set right what is wrong in His creation. Many of the misconceptions are due to the reading that is so common from the Authorized Version, "The Lord God is a man of war." Certain extra-Christian sects use this text to justify their strange belief that God used to be a human being. This amounts to a strange confusion of the Church's doctrine of deification. As St. Athanasius says, "God became man that man might become God." This means that God wants to share His life with us, so that we, while remaining separate beings to the glory of God, might share, at the same time, the life of God, growing into everything by grace that God is by essence. Notice that Athanasius says, "God became man." He is talking, of course, about the incarnation of the Word. Athanasius, nor anyone else in Christian Tradition ever said that God used to be a man. Our comfort is in the fact that God is a warrior, Who wants to right what is wrong in our lives. It is, of course, analogical language. We know that no one can be a warrior who is not afraid of something. No one takes up arms except, at least initially, from fear. Yet, God has nothing to fear. That is the analogy. God "fears" the loss of His creature (that His very image will become something less than it was created to be). Thus, He takes up arms to defend his creature.

In this He also gives us an example. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. So, the warrior analogy has to apply to our lives as well. We have to take up the arms that He has given us, in order to put to right what is wrong in our lives. We have to cooperate with Him in this task of re-creation and purification.

In a very real sense, the Law of God, the Torah, is itself a war, since it calls human beings to do violence to themselves in order to become that, which they were created to be. In just the same way, the Gospel calls human beings to the same kind of warfare: the warfare of self-denial that must be waged in order to grow to perfection in faith, hope and charity. It is amazing and, in fact, thrilling to see the consistency of the ethical/spiritual message throughout the corpus of both testaments.

Another fascinating thing is the stark difference between the Lord's warfare (which is an analogy) and the warfare that is continuously seen among men. The Lord's warfare brings healing and health, not death and destruction, because the force is turned inward toward the elimination of evil. The Lord is the Creator of everything that exists, and, for this reason, everything that exists is good. Whereas warfare among men is aimed at the destruction of creatures (which are good in themselves), the Lord's warfare is aimed at the destruction of evil, which does not actually exist in itself, but only as a deprivation of a due good.

Thus, the Lord's weapons are not death-dealing, but life-giving, and His warfare is, in fact, a medicine.