When reading the Old Testament casually, it seems only sparsely populated with mere sprinklings of hope between what seem to be formidable towers of evil, despair, and divine punishment. What hope can be found in the stories of Cain and Abel, the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Israelite slavery and oppression, plagues, rebellions and executions, conquests of other nations, and the largely downward path of the monarchical period?

We speak of "prophets of doom" and "prophets of salvation" but rarely of "prophets of hope." When assigned the prophetic books during my winter quarter Bible Themes class, my students write in their papers of the repetition of divine wrath that seems marked in every book. Whether they read Isaiah or Micah or Hosea or Nahum, they seem to find a God who is constantly angry with his people.

Is there any more of hope in the Old Testament than a mere glimpse now and then in isolated passages and verses?

Perhaps it might help to recall that our interpretation of the Bible (and any other document, for that matter) is only about 1–5 percent the text itself and about 95–99 percent the way we have been trained or led to look at the text, which in turn is the product of our environment, upbringing, and temperament. A sanguine, for example, will probably find far more hope in the Old Testament than a phlegmatic, and a melancholy is likely to find next to none. The lenses through which we look will largely determine the extent of the hope we find.

Another thing that might help in finding hope in the Old Testament is to understand where to look for it. If we look at the stories, we’re bound to get discouraged, because human beings who ignore God’s wise counsel and try to do things their own way can give us very little hope. Cain refuses to listen to God and murders his brother; this, in turn, leads to the earth becoming so violent that people became incapable of thinking a kind, unselfish thought. This, in turn, evokes a divine response that leads to the flood.

When we read about the flood, we tend to think, "What a horrible atrocity for God to do!" We worry that the Bible writers misrepresented him. We worry that he might have actually sent the flood. We forget the realities of the planet summed up in a few sentences. What would it be like to live in a planet where hardly one person could be found who had a glimmer of goodness left in his or her nature?

In the late 1800’s two cattle ranching families—the Grahams and the Tewksburys—moved into the little-known Pleasant Valley in Arizona. For years these two families lived happily in the small valley in the northeast section of the state. Then the Grahams brought in sheep, making the Tewksburys furious. Sheep eat the grass down through the roots; cattle leave a stub so that the grass will grow back. The Tewksburys knew that soon their cattle would be deprived of their grazing country.

Hostilities grew between the two families until one day, a Tewksbury man shot one of the Grahams’ servants, an Indian. That initiated a war between the two families that lasted for years. In a few history books, it is called, The Pleasant Valley War. Little by little, the two families killed one another until there was just one survivor from each family. These—a Tewksbury man and a Graham woman—met at a Mesa courthouse in an attempt to bring an end to the war.

Apparently, it was a cold winter day (there are a few some years in that part of Arizona!) because Ms. Graham wore her muff. As Mr. Tewksbury got up to testify, she pulled her hand out of her muff that "just happened" to have in it a small handgun. She aimed it at Mr. Tewksbury, intending to win the war. If her handkerchief had not gotten caught in the trigger, she no doubt would have succeeded.

Is it possible for a human society to become so corrupt that it could actually self-destruct? Can we really bank on the "milk of human kindness" to outlast anything? Or is it possible that before the flood—without divine intervention, without laws restricting violence, without human penal systems—society actually was on its way to self-destruction? If a whole city could come out in order to rape angels in disguise, does it give anyone hope to just let them be?

So far, I have suggested very little hope in looking at human beings. But what about God? Does he just let us kill one another off to the last human being? Or did he intervene in the flood and cleanse the world in order to save it from self-destruction?

Is it possible that he eliminated a few ancient cities in order to preserve the others? Is it possible that he did kill Nadab and Abihu to save the Israelites? Is it possible that when he appears angriest, he’s grieving the hardest (see Gen. 6:6) because he longs to turn their destructive behaviors and attitudes into hope?

When it comes to humans killing other humans, the picture is obscured. Did God command Moses to have the Levites kill their neighbors and family members as a rite of passage into ordination to the ministry? Did he intend that Jehu offer Baal worshipers as a human sacrifice to Baal? Has God sometimes had to stand behind his chosen leaders and support them even when he would prefer to take care of matters himself?

When human beings move apart from God or get in his way, there tends to be less hope. When they misunderstand him or turn to gods whose characters reflect the worst of human evil, hope quickly disappears.

Perhaps, then, the Old Testament hope may be summarized as no hope for human beings on their own, rejecting God, getting in his way, or misunderstanding his character. But with God, the true God, there is abundant hope. Every time God intervenes—whether someone dies or someone is taken to heaven—he does it ultimately to save, not to destroy.

Perhaps it’s time, then, to take the difficult stories in the Bible as stories of God’s salvation from human self-destruction and thus as stories of hope.

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