Your Big Question

There are verses in the Bible that, as modern people, we do find difficult. To quote just one – Deuteronomy 20. 

“When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.

 16 However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy ^[a]them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you.”

This does come as something of a shock to modern readers doesn’t it.

However we do need to see the picture in the round and understand the historical time in which this was written. The Old Testament records the struggles and history of the Jewish people, The surrounding groups and tribes were a genuine threat to Jewish identity and nationhood. This in itself doesn’t justify war, but it explains at least something of the warlike times.

We need to move beyond this and understand something of the nature of God. God abhors evil and wickedness. The Bible is clear that part of the message is the punishment of evil. God found the evil civilizations intolerable and had them wiped off the face of the earth because evil is like a cancer that spreads. Evil had spread into every area of life – the sacrificing of children, male and female prostitution in the Temple and the worhip of idols. God acted becuase of the danger of this evil infecting his people.

But there is another huge piece of the story – God’s extrordinary grace and forgiveness as shown through the resue mission of Jesus Christ. God does not blink at sin and walk away. He is determined to deal with it and so he burst into the human situation with a huge promise of hope, forgiveness and reconciliation.

It is the same God throughout the Bible, and although we may find the idea of justice hard to accept, accept it we must. Jesus took on all the sins and wickedness of the world so we need not be punished. We call this grace and it must be seen as part of the same loving God that shines throughout the Bible.