In my preparation to preach Numbers, one of the hardest things to wrestle with has been the fact that Israel are called to drive other people out of the Land that the Lord has promised them. It’s hard to get our heads around why the Lord would command His people to do that. And the danger is that we put Him in the dock and accuse Him of being an immoral monster. What has helped me has been to go back to Jesus. Our reading of the OT is shaped by Him. And He, the most loving person who ever walked the face of this planet, totally endorses the Old Testament. So I have a choice. Either I decide that I am right and He is wrong. Or when I stand before Him I concede that I do not stand on the moral high ground. Of the two of us, I am the morally twisted one. That means I need to be ready for Him to untwist my thinking on this.
Here are the very brief bullet point headings I gave during question time on Sunday. If you want to chase down the background to some of these points, check out some of the resources below.
1. Let’s be clear, nowhere in the Bible are the events of the conquest held up as an example for us to follow. They were a particular chapter in God’s plan to save the world. It is dangerous when people seize upon historical events in the Bible and declare them to be normative. The Bible cannot be used to justify genocide.
2. The destruction of the Canaanites is presented as God’s judgement on a people who have had a long history of rejecting Him. He does not judge without having warned them about judgement and called them to repent. That is an important dimension to the conquest that is easy to overlook.
3. There is no getting away from it, the Bible presents us with a God who judges sin. We see that in His judgement on the Canaanites, but also in His judgement on Israel.
4. His judgment on the Canaanites AND on Israel serves a similar purpose: the Lord has chosen a nation through whom He will bless all nations. The salvation of the world turns on His preserving this one nation, from whom the Saviour of all nations will come. Preserving them means preserving them from being destroyed both by their enemies and by their own sin. So in His judgement there is a kind of mercy.
5. Jesus warns of the judgement to come in terms that are even more sobering than the kinds of things we see in the OT. So we cannot pit the OT against the NT. And I am left asking myself, “Why is it that temporal judgement disturbs me more than the judgement of eternity?”
6. As we face up to the reality of a holy God who judges sin, let us remember that He is the God who, on the cross, bore that judgement in Himself.
I want to go on thinking these things through, not least because my friends who are not Christians, look at the OT from a distance and decide that, even if He exists, the Lord is not good. And if there is one thing that He is, it is good.
Here are some further resources...
A good short article on this subject from the Gospel Coalition.
A good slightly longer article from Bethinking.org
And here's a short clip from a sermon by Peter Adam (formerly principal of Ridley Theological College, Melbourne) where he has a go at this question too:
The blog of the Emmanuel Bristol churches
