I have had a number of opportunities to talk about the Bible with co-workers over the years, but I am usually careful not to do it on company time. Our Human Resources department takes a dim view of employees talking politics, race, religion or any other controversial topic in group situations where someone may take offense. Generally speaking, I try to respect their wishes.
There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes an opportunity is just too obvious to pass up.
Documenting Death
A few years ago, a woman who used to occupy the desk to my left on Monday evenings was chatting with another co-worker, a vocal Catholic, about a documentary she had seen on TV a few nights before on the subject of genocide. The documentary referenced the biblical conquest of the Canaanite tribes and talked about the ethical issues related to God-sponsored genocide. She found the concept of God commanding one group of people to exterminate another absolutely appalling, and her Catholic friend had no answers for her.
I couldn’t help it; I leaned over and quietly intruded on the conversation. “Did the documentary mention that the Canaanites used to sacrifice infants to their gods?” Nope, they seem to have left that bit out. “Did the documentary mention that God gave the Canaanites nearly 400 years to repent before commanding their genocide?” Nope, they had left that bit out too.
My co-worker has two children. She found those omissions surprising, and it caused her to at least partially re-evaluate her earlier opinion of Israel’s God as way too harsh.
Less-Satisfactory Answers
My co-worker’s visceral dislike of a God who could command the execution of an entire ethnic sub-group is a common emotional reaction today. Such a command sounds uncomfortably like an early version of the Holocaust or other human-sponsored exercises in ethnic cleansing which we rightly deplore. But the extermination of nations is right there in our Bibles, and Christians uncomfortable with ignoring those passages must find some way of dealing with them. Some Christians settle for saying, “He’s God, and whatever he commands is right.” That certainly answers the question, but not in a way that will satisfy everyone.
We should be able to do better than that, shouldn’t we? God’s ways are indeed higher than our ways, and we must concede not all of them are perfectly understandable to man, especially men and women marinated in the culture of omnitolerance. At the same time, there are often discernable reasons for the difficult things God sometimes commands that we tend to overlook. I’d like to consider several of those in today’s post.
God’s Ways and Man’s Ways
We should probably start by recognizing there is a vast difference between a genocide ordered by almighty God and a genocide hatched by murderous men; differences in purpose, provision, perspicacity and pervasiveness:
1/ Purpose
When men commit genocide, it is almost always out of hatred or greed. They want territory or goods possessed by another group, or they have a longstanding grudge against that group. When God orders a genocide, he is acting on behalf of the victims of evil men who murder and oppress others. When men shed innocent blood, it cries out to God. In Genesis, God speaks of the “outcry that has come to me” over Sodom and Gomorrah. To Cain, he said, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” In the Law of Moses, God speaks of purging the “guilt of innocent blood” so that judgment would not come upon the nation.
Some people think human life is so important that nobody’s life, no matter how wicked and worthless, should ever be taken, because that removes once and for all any opportunity for change. But every delay in carrying out justice against wickedness is also an opportunity for the wicked to reoffend, and the risk of yet another victim. Every year you let an evil man live is a year in which he may continue to do evil. When that wickedness is cultural rather than individual, and that murderous spirit is pervasive in a society, the problem is correspondingly greater and the number of potential victims multiplies.
When God calls for genocide, it is because comparatively innocent people are being hurt, and the perpetrators simply will not stop unless somebody stops them. He is acting on behalf of justice, not greed or hatred.
2/ Provision
Human-sponsored genocides are indiscriminate. They kill righteous and wicked alike. God never does. He makes provision to exclude the righteous in any group under judgment from experiencing his wrath. When he called for judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah, he separated the righteous from the wicked, making provision for Lot and his family. When he flooded the earth, he preserved Noah and his family. When he judged Jericho, he made provision for Rahab and her family. When he sent plagues on Egypt, the Israelites among the Egyptians were excluded from judgment.
With God, condemning a culture to extinction never prevents individual repentance. Human-sponsored genocides are based on race, ethnicity, geography or religious affiliation. God’s are based on loyalty to him.
3/ Perspicacity
When men commit genocide, it is usually because they believe there is no better way to proceed. But they don’t know that with any certainty. God knows the future, and he knows the hearts of men, their capacity for change and their propensity for carrying grudges and nursing hatred. That makes him uniquely equipped to judge whether it is better to send them a missionary or a mob with swords.
That’s a huge difference between a genocide instituted by men and one instituted by God. We don’t know whether people will change or not, and we like to believe they will even if they never do. God knows exactly who will repent and who never will. He can weigh the consequences of letting evil continue unrestrained against the consequences of annihilating it completely and make a truly moral choice. We are never in that position.
4/ Pervasiveness
Several thousand years ago, God gave Israel the daunting task of dealing ruthlessly with the wicked inhabitants of a land he had promised to Abraham. The first God-sponsored genocide, if we must call it that, occurred around 1450 BC; the last, about 400 years later when God commanded Saul to exterminate the Amalekites. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t.) Genocide was a tactic God used during a brief period of human history. It is not a method God uses today. Even when their motivations are arguably religious, no perpetrators of modern genocide or exercises in ethnic cleansing can provide evidence they were acting on the commands of God. For example, God had nothing to do with the Crusades, and he has nothing to do with Islamic jihad. These were programs sponsored by men for their own reasons with God’s name attached to them as a marketing tool. We live in the Church Age, a period that has so far lasted two millennia, and I can safely say God will never call us to exterminate some ethnic group or other in his name. That’s a good thing. Some of the worst moral offenders of the last century are living in the West.
Human-sponsored genocides have no such limitation period; they have existed throughout all of history. They will probably continue until the Lord returns.
Sin and Contamination
There are certain kinds of evil that can only be dealt with by removing every last trace. Sin is a contaminant. Left alone, it spreads faster than the later versions of COVID-19, and can be orders of magnitude more deadly. Wickedness gets passed on from generation to generation. Children often become like their parents. Bad ideas circulate through societies. When promoted, they circulate even faster, and more people begin to believe them. Legalize pot, and more people will smoke it. Promote LGBTQ values, and you get more people identifying as LGBTQ. This was a danger God talked about when Israel went into Canaan. He said to Israel, in effect, if you do not do what I am asking and completely cut these tribes off, what will happen is that you will eventually become like them. And that’s exactly what happened. Israel let many of the Canaanites live, and they learned from the Canaanite tribes to sacrifice their own children on the altar to Molech. Personally, I think God’s remedy for the problem was kinder.
Human-sponsored genocide and a genocide ordered by God are nothing alike. For me, the difficulties with exterminating an entire population disappear entirely when you look at how God thinks and operates.
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