Question: What are we to make of
passages of Scripture in the Old Testament in which God commanded the Israelites to slaughter entire cities or
tribes, including the women and children? How do we square such a vengeful God
with the merciful God we find in the New Testament?
Answer: This is a question that is often raised by
atheists to attack the Christian Faith, but it is also raised by sincere laymen
who are unsure of how we should understand these passages. To answer the question
requires that we consider several issues, and not look at the question in a
superficial way.
What is
interesting is that people do not generally raise moral objections to the flood
in the days of Noah, even though every man, woman, and child, except Noah's
family, was drowned. Nor do they raise moral objections to the fact that God
destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even though women and children were no doubt
killed. And no one raises moral objections when the Scriptures talk about God
sending other nations to destroy the Israelites, even though men, women, and
children were killed as a result.
The problem
we have with God telling the Israelites to kill women and children is that we
live in a rationalistic age, and people are not so sure God really talked to
people like Joshua. Also, we don't want folks to go around killing people
because they claim God told them to do it. But if God could wipe out a city
with fire and brimstone, there's no reason why He couldn't do it via the
Israelites if that was indeed His choice. And so if He did indeed tell the
Israelites to utterly destroy a city, He had the sovereign right to do so, and
the people of Israel, who had seen so many miracles worked by God had every
reason to believe that God was speaking to them through, Joshua, and later
through their Judges. The Church has not taken this as a precedence, but has seen
it as something of literal application only to that specific time and place.
The applications we can make from these passages today would be primarily of an
allegorical nature, from a patristic perspective.
Another
thing that we should keep in mind is that, if you really believe in God and in
the afterlife, death is not the worst fate that could befall someone. Far worse
than physical death is spiritual death, and it was for the salvation of future
generations that these things were commanded. Death is a punishment for sin,
but it is also a mercy in that it puts limits on the evil men may do, and also
gives them cause to repent and turn to God. God sometimes allows people to die
young in order that they might be spared worse things that would come their way.
For example, the wicked king Jeroboam’s son was allowed to die at a very early
age, “because in him there is found something good toward the Lord God of
Israel in the house of Jeroboam,” and so of the house of Jeroboam, only this
child died in peace, and was properly buried. And no doubt, in his early death
he was also spared the evil influence of his family (1 Kings 14:13).
God
judges nations in history. Nations do not have an afterlife in which they can
receive punishment or reward. God dispenses His justice upon nations in
history, and so this justice by its very nature is dispensed collectively. If a
nation is wicked, it will suffer the fruits of that wickedness, and
unfortunately that means even the youngest children in that nation reap the
bitter harvest sown by their parents. Our culture is very individualistic, but
in Scripture, we find a view of the human race that sees us as having a
corporate personality as well as being individuals. We are ultimately judged as
individuals in eternity, but in this life we are not just individuals... we are
part of families, tribes, and nations. If our forefathers make wise decisions,
we reap benefits that are not due to our individual choices or merit. If our
forefathers make wicked decisions, we also reap what they have sown. This is
why you find people in Scripture not only repenting of their own sins, but of
those of their forefathers. Of course if we come from a line of unbelievers, we
can make the decision to embrace the Gospel and change the future for our
descendants for the better. Is it “fair” that a child who is born in a
Christian home hears the Gospel, and is more likely to grow up as a Christian
than a child born to an unbeliever? Is it fair that a child born to a drug
addict will grow up facing challenges that other children do not? If you look
at this with a purely individualistic mindset, it might seem unfair, but the
Biblical worldview is that we are not islands unto ourselves. We are not just
souls who had the misfortune or fortune to be born to a particular set of
parents, but we are their offspring, and are connected to them on a deeper
level. Adam and Eve’s choice to sin has affected all of their offspring – we
were not consulted before they made their decision, and yet we have suffered
the effects of their decision. However we have been given the option of placing
ourselves under a new head, and aligning ourselves with a new Adam – Jesus
Christ (1 Corinthians 15:20-49), and so we can change the future for our
offspring for the better, though they have not been consulted either.
The other
thing that has to be kept in mind is that the level of civilization at the
time, made things like internment camps impossible. If the Israelites were
going to spare the children, they would have had to have spared the mothers,
and unless they were going to marry the mothers or keep them as slaves, they
would have needed to spare the men also. But the Canaanites were an incredibly
evil people who engaged in ritual prostitution and child sacrifice, and so
leaving Canaanite culture in their midst would prove to be a snare to the
Israelites, who were like children spiritually, and more likely to be
influenced by the Canaanites than to be able to convert them to a better way of
living and thinking. It was God’s intention that the Canaanite culture be wiped
out, and that could not be accomplished if the adults of the Canaanites were
spared. Even the pagan Romans were shocked by the evils of the Carthaginian
culture, which was Phoenician colony, that shared the same religion as that of
the Canaanites – which is why their battle cry was "Carthago delenda
est!" (Carthage must be destroyed!).
But the
fact is, the Israelites did not obey God. They did not kill all the Canaanites,
and in fact the Canaanites and their culture were a thorn in their side that
continually led them astray up until the time that God finally sent the
Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem, and to take the people into exile. When
Israelite farmers had Canaanites telling them that if they wanted their crops
to grow, they had to make Baal happy, they repeatedly gave in to the temptation
to cover all the bases, and engage in the ritual prostitution and child
sacrifice that the Canaanites believed were the only sure way to ensure good
harvests. As it says in Psalm 105 (106):34-39: "They did not destroy the
heathen, concerning which the Lord had spoken to them. They mingled among the
nations and learned their works; and they served their graven things, and it
became for them a stumbling-block. And they sacrificed their sons and their
daughters unto demons. And they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their
sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the graven things of Canaan. And
the land was befouled with the blood of murder, and it was defiled with their works;
and they went a whoring with their own inventions."
It was
only after this experience of the exile that the Jews matured spiritually
enough that they would never again be tempted into idolatry by their neighbors,
though they often lived in a diaspora, in which they were a small minority
surrounded by a pagan majority. Having the fullness of Gospel, we are better
able to resist the temptations that come with being surrounded by evil people,
and in fact, we are called to bring the Gospel to those wicked people, and to
change the spiritual climate by the power of the Gospel, and not by the sword,
as before, in the Old Testament.
What is
perhaps most ironic about this issue is that the atheists that point to these
passages to argue against Christianity are appealing to a Christian sense of
morality, love, and mercy, in order to be outraged. But the fact is, as
Dostoyevsky pointed out, if there is no God, all things are lawful. If there is
no God, the slaughter of innocent children is of no more moral significance
than when a colony of ants is washed away in a flood. There is no moral
standard that one can appeal to. There is only power, and those who have the
will to use it. And in fact, if you want to see the worst and most monstrous
examples of the brutal slaughter of innocents by the millions, no one has
surpassed brutality of militant atheism in the Soviet Union, Communist China,
Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, etc.
The only
moral standard that can have any real meaning is one based on what God has
revealed. God has revealed the most excellent way of the Gospel to us, and that
is the standard we live by now. God, who is the giver of life, does not have to
answer to us when He chooses to take it. We know that He is Love, and we know
that He is Holy. We know that He always seeks the salvation of men, but we also
know that He punishes the wicked, and places limits on their wickedness by His
judgments, and that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous
altogether” (Psalm 18(19):9).
None of
this means that we should read these accounts and feel no sense of grief over
what happened. In fact, we have an entire book of the Bible that is called
"Lamentations", and it was written by the Prophet Jeremiah, who
prophesied that the judgment of God would fall on the Kingdom of Judah, and he
lived to see it come to pass. And this book is a lament over the fulfillment of
Jeremiah's prophesy, because the people did not listen before it was too late.
Obviously, he knew that the judgment of God was just, but he nevertheless
wrote:
"Oh,
that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep
day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" (Jeremiah 9:1).
"My
eyes fail with tears, my heart is troubled; my bile is poured on the ground
because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, because the children
and the infants faint in the streets of the city" (Lamentations 2:11).
"The
young and the old lie on the ground in the streets: my virgins and my young men
are fallen by the sword; Thou hast slain them in the day of Thine anger; Thou
hast killed, and not pitied" (Lamentations 2:21).
But even
in the midst of the Prophet Jeremiah's lament over the destruction of his
people, he also confesses:
"But
though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according to the multitude
of His mercies. For He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of
men" (Lamentations 3:32-33).
We should
grieve over such destruction, but we should grieve for the right reason – not
because God wished to destroy the Canaanites for some arbitrary reason, and
that this was unjust of Him; but rather because sin and rebellion against God
inevitably lead to such horrible ends as this.
It should
also be pointed out that one finds a great deal of God's mercy revealed in the
Old Testament, and one finds a great deal of God's wrath revealed in the New
Testament. There was a heresy in the early Church called "Marcionism"
and this heresy taught that the God of the Old Testament was not the same as
the God of the New Testament, and so Marcion, the heresy's founder, rejected
all of the Old Testament, but also much of the New Testament – he only accepted
the Gospel of Luke and 10 of St. Paul's epistles, but he also edited those
books he did accept in order to come up with a version of Scripture that
matched his views. But the Church decisively condemned Marcionism as a heresy,
and so the God of the Old Testament is the same God that we find in the New. He
find God more fully revealed in the New Testament, but rejecting what we find
in the Old is heretical.
Finally,
it is a tempting approach to this problem to simply say “Those Israelites were
primitive people, and God wouldn’t have really said those things.” However, if
you say that about the passages in which God commanded the Israelites to kill
all of the Canaanites, there is no reason why someone else could not come along
and apply the same logic to the question of sodomy, for example, and say “Those
Israelites were primitive people, and God wouldn’t have really said those
things.” In fact, once you go down that road, there’s no reason why you
couldn’t dismiss just about anything in Scripture that you may happen to not
like. However, if we believe, as the Church always has, that the Scriptures are
fully inspired, this solution to this question is unacceptable.
Source: http://fatherjohn.blogspot.com.by/2013/06/stump-priest-what-about-violence-in-old.html
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