Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Biblical Genocide

March 7, 2018

Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. From the Holocaust to the struggles between Tutsi and Hutus or Serbs and Armenians, the words leave a bitter taste in our mouths. As Christians, condemn such barbarous actions, while we have to deal with instances in the Bible where God himself apparently ordered such slaughter, particularly during the conquest of the Promised Land. How do we condemn it in the present while we accept it in history?

It is always tempting to judge history according to modern sensitivities, but our modern convictions didn’t just appear out of thin air. In the 1800s, cocaine was readily available and praised for its energizing benefits. Where do you suppose the “Coke” in Coca-Cola came from? Our beliefs about smoking are quite different from when I was growing up. Back in that Stone Age, tobacco companies had physicians in their advertisements touting the benefits of smoking. When I was young, no heads would turn if a teenager drove into the schoolyard with a shotgun or rifle mounted in the back of his pickup truck, and when conflict erupted between a couple boys, they would settle it with fists after school, without it even entering our minds that someone should call the cops to put a stop to it. I don’t think we are necessarily more righteous today than back then; after all, we think nothing of murdering millions of babies every year, which would have been unthinkable years back.

But we are dealing with the Word of a God who tells us he never changes. Does this make the wholesale slaughter of a people acceptable? In Deuteronomy 20:16-18, God commands complete annihilation of entire cities, man, woman, and child. But there is an explanation which while it may not soothe our sensitivities, at least gives a reason for such brutal treatment: “lest they teach you to do according to all their abominations which they have done for their gods, and you sin against the LORD your God.” Back in Genesis 15:16, God spoke of a judgment that wouldn’t fall for another six hundred years (more or less) because “the sins of the Amorites are not yet complete.” In other words, in Abraham’s time, they hadn’t gotten bad enough, but by the time of Joshua, their perversion had become so utterly corrupt that the only way to prevent their moral and spiritual cancer from spreading was annihilation.

Since nothing like this has happened since, we can’t know just how bad things were, but as we watch current events in our nation and all around the world, I can’t help but wonder where the tipping point is. I am hesitant to pronounce this or that catastrophe as the judgment of God; after all, Jesus himself told his disciples that it doesn’t always work that way (See Luke 13 and John 9); but it is a historical fact that most nations crumble from inner moral and spiritual decay. The invasions of other peoples serve merely to drive the final nail into a coffin already loaded with corruption and decay and ready for burial.


These Scriptures, and the portrayal of God that they present remain problematic, but life isn’t always as neat and pristine as we would like. I am thankful nonetheless for living when and where I do, and for knowing the grace and mercy of our Lord that at the very least has preserved me from self-destruction and given me the promise of a future filled with hope.

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