The possibility of a madman having his finger on the nuclear button is our reality: one who would happily despoil the planet for economic gain, support genocide to build a resort, threaten the extinction of a civilization, beginning with the slaughter of children, and one who has threatened nuclear retaliation, asking repeatedly, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” – the mad possibility is now reality. What this madness exposes is the contradiction of destroying the world to possess it, and the singular solution. It is oxymoronic to say peace alone will save, but it should be obvious (and apparently is not) that nonviolence, nonviolence toward the Earth and its inhabitants (which cannot be separated in this nuclear age), is the only hope for human survival. As Martin Luther King said, “The choice before us is no longer violence or nonviolence. It’s nonviolence or non-existence.” The extinction of everything and personal extinction may be equally difficult to grasp but contained in facing this possibility is the singular solution. The meek will inherit the Earth because peace (meekness) is the means of obtaining land, gaining an inheritance, making a civilization, building a city, establishing life, creating the world, and this enfolds the human with the Earth, in a singular destiny – at least this is the story of the Bible summed up in Christ.
Violence and Meekness as Opposed Means of Inheriting the Earth
The Bible pictures the alternatives in a tight axis, spilled blood pollutes the land, while those who “humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways,” will find forgiveness and their land will be healed (2 Ch 7:14). People who do not recognize God pollute the land with violence, so true possession is making the land a fit habitation (for God) through nonviolence: “So you shall not pollute the land in which you are; for blood pollutes the land and no expiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it . . . You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell; for I the LORD am dwelling in the midst of the sons of Israel” (Nu 35:33–34). Cycles of war and revenge destroy human habitation, and God’s presence and inheritance of the land are synonymous with forsaking bloodshed. The Psalmist ties shedding of blood and pollution to idolatry: “they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with the blood” (Ps 106:38). Ezekiel also describes a land polluted by false sacrifice (Ezekiel 36:18) and Isaiah promises the Earth “will disclose the blood shed on it and will no longer conceal its slain” (Isaiah 26:21). As God told Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Gen 4:10).
Innocent blood, crying from the ground is answered, not through the vengeance of Cain or the multiplied vengeance of Lamech, but through Christ: “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel” (Heb 12:22–24). The place names, “Mount Zion,” “the City of the Living God,” “the heavenly Jerusalem,” “the church,” are synonymous with the “righteous made perfect,” as they are cleansed by the one giving voice to all innocent slain victims.
Those who would inherit the Earth through violence are cursed as their land is cursed, due to their bloodshed, however the Bible poses the opposite possibility: “But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace” (Ps 37:11). In the beatitudes Jesus sums up the divine plan for Earth’s inheritance, for ultimate satisfaction, for seeing God, for attaining peace: “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Mt 5:5–9). Seeing God, being peaceful and merciful, being peacemakers, and inheriting the Earth as God’s children, are a singular realization. The Bible is bookended in Genesis and Revelation with God’s presence in a peaceful garden city, an Edenic sacred place, in which healing and the earthly inheritance are realized, not through violent conquest but through recognition of the victim. This means of inheritance is the story, summed up in Jesus.
True Israel Recognizes God in the Victim
It is to people that are not a people, without a distinctive genealogy, or a distinctive place, to whom God reveals his name and will become a name in which they can dwell. As Anthony Bartlett notes, it is one of the great ironies of the Bible story: “a people and a meaning based in escape from an oppressive king and his state apparatus turn to exactly those political features in order to maintain themselves.”[1] The Hebrews would possess and maintain the land through violence, and yet there is a competing means and understanding of God throughout.
If we read the conquest of Canaan as God’s participation in genocide, and leave aside the counternarrative, necessary to reading the story through Christ, we are left with a contradiction, but if we recognize the identity of God is under contention (in the two methods), we catch the story resolved in Christ. The true name of Jacob unfolds directly when Jacob sees the face of God in the victim he has pinned. He obtains his identity as Israel, in recognizing God in the face of his losing opponent: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved” (Gen 32:30). Seeing God’s face in his victim is the preservation of his life, and thus he is dubbed Israel (“he who struggles with God,” Gen 32:28). The character of God is under contention, and it is rightly reflected in the face of Jacob’s pinned opponent. Immediately after, Jacob says to Esau, “I see your face as one sees the face of God, and you have received me favorably” (Gen 33:10). Jacob is metaphorically pinned, and Esau now bears the divine visage, precisely because Jacob recognizes in his brother the loving mercy he found in his visitor the previous night. The promise is given by Zechariah of a form of deliverance for which there was long preparation: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the LORD of hosts” (Zech. 4:6). After being shaped as a people and then destroyed the original possibility presents itself: “Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zech. 9:9).
What is under contention in the Hebrew Scriptures is how to be a people, how to inherit the land, and this is tied up with the identity of God. The resolution is to turn once again to the outcaste, the one pinned to a cross: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15). As Anthony Bartlett concludes, “the God whom Israel is in relationship with is a God who does not win by violent means, who in fact loses – and needs “a man” to signify as much![2] The pattern is thematic in Scripture, with Jacob, Esau, Joseph, Job, and Jesus (see here).
The Originary Peace of Creation Extended through the Garden
Genesis begins with a nonviolent creation (over and against typical creation myths), perhaps as part of an understanding worked out in both Genesis and Exodus. There is an originary peace, which explains the garden or the Earth as the shared dwelling of God and humans. John Walton describes the creation story in terms of a temple dedication ceremony, in which the cosmos itself is the resting place for God, reading the six days of creation through the lens of the seventh day. “The temple was made functional in a typically seven-day dedication ceremony” in which “the functions of the temple were initiated, the functionaries installed, and then, on the seventh day, the symbol that represented the deity was brought in and placed in the central room of the temple.” The seventh day is key, “Only then could the temple begin functioning as it was designed to do.”[3] Creation as temple construction is not aimed at describing how but why or for what purpose creation was brought into being. The seventh day as interpretive key for the previous six means that Genesis is not so much concerned to provide a history of material origins as it is to provide an understanding of the theological purpose of the cosmos, which is captured in the image of God’s dwelling come to Earth.
Adamah, or the one of the earth, is appointed caretaker over that from which he is taken (the earth into which God breathed). The earthly garden is the place God meets the humans, and this place is reduplicated in the temple, which is at once a representation of the garden and of Earth, made a fit dwelling for God. When Jesus comes to the temple in Jerusalem, the garden expansion comes to include the whole Earth, as he identifies himself as true temple, the earthly dwelling reconstituted with God’s earthly presence extended to all. Paul consistently pictures salvation under the rubric of new creation, bringing about a universal inheritance, fulfilling the promise to Abraham (Rom 4). This is for all people everywhere: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor 5:19), as “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” to “obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). This is all inclusive, so as “to reconcile all things unto Himself — by Him, I say, whether they be things on earth or things in heaven” (Col 1:20).
In Revelation the heavenly Jerusalem descends from heaven to Earth, not to destroy the world, but to remake it or complete it (Rev 21-22). The Bible begins and ends with the world constituted as a temple. The biblical story is not one of souls departing Earth for heaven, but of heaven coming to Earth and being made a fit dwelling for God. Earth (adamah) come alive with God’s breath, is ultimately breathed into by God coming to Earth (in the divine adamah, the second Adam), through whom he pours out his Spirit on the world. The prediction of Isaiah, picturing the Earth as the Lord’s Temple is fulfilled: “The mountain of the Lord’s dwelling shall be established atop all mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills and all nations shall flow unto it” (Is 2:2). The Lord’s dwelling place with man brings about an all-inclusive extension of Eden: “Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Rev 22:1–2). Restoration of mankind, to and through Eden, is a life-giving identification between Earth and God. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city” (Rev 22:14). Citizenship in this city, in this place, is salvation. The tie between inheriting the Earth through nonviolence and the presence and identity of God, are a saving integration.
The Nonviolent Will Inherit the Earth
Jesus is the true Jacob, the true Joshua, in whom the inheritance of Israel is not a piece of land in the Middle East, but the Earth and its people and all that it contains. This is not a diminishment or displacement of Israel, but an expanded understanding and obviously a reworked method of obtaining the land, combined with a revised understanding of God. Killing Palestinians is no more in God’s plan than Esau killing Jacob (rather than being the merciful face of God). The land is not gained, the Earth is not inherited, by military conquest, and the divine kingdom is not established by might, but by a cross (the ultimate meekness). It may be that Israel is behind the attack on Iran, and we know the genocide in Gaza is possible only under support of American presidents, dedicated to serving the expansion of Israel. The sad note is that it is often Christians who confuse this violent expansion with God’s method and with true Israel, supporting this policy which stands opposed to the peace of the Gospel, presuming that slaughtering the meek is the means to inherit the Earth.
[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022), 15.
[2] Bartlett, 35.
[3] John Walton, “Creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the Ancient Near East: Order out of Disorder after Chaoskampf” in Calvin Theological Journal (CT/43 (2008): 48-63).