If we are candid, there are depictions of God in the Bible that are troublesome. God comes off as tribal and militaristic in places, even violent. It is difficult to reconcile such depictions with the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
Brian McLaren, as well others, suggest that we understand less than savory depictions of God in scripture as particular ways in which our ancestor perceived God in their given time in geography and place in history.
In A New Kind of Christianity, McLaren writes: ". . . [H]uman beings can't do better than their very best at any given moment to communicate about God as they understand God, and the Scripture faithfully reveals the evolution of our ancestor's best attempts to communicate their successive best understandings of God. As human capacity grows to conceive of a higher and wiser view of God, each new vision is faithfully preserved in Scripture like fossils in layers of sediment."
Peace.
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