rumitoid

Consider some stories from the OT. Are we more moral than God? Today, we find slavery and genocide abominations. Yet God supposedly approved of both, giving laws for one and commanding the other. Is that a God you want to worship? Putting it down as "God's mysterious ways" is cowardly. Who are we to question the mind of God? It is not God I am questioning; it is the Bronze Age writers. I do not question God. Why not? Because he is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. (Hebrews13:8)

The Bible is totally of God, first page to last. However, it is just as much a test of our spiritual maturity as it is a source for our spiritual maturity. We need not take everything in the Bible as God's will, but as God's challenge as well.

The Canaanite genocide, for example. That is not my God and his mysterious ways. It is a Bronze Age man excusing the actions of his tribe. He even goes on to say that his people were sickened by the slaughter. Did God command this? No, but you need the eyes to see. Extremely courageous to do so.

Knowing and actually being with God is the freedom from belief. No?

Consider this: The book of Samuel implies that it required actual fulfillment: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox, and sheep, camel and ass,”(Samuel I, 15:3). King Saul struck down Amalek as he was commanded but he then took mercy upon King Agag and upon some of the Amalekite animals. God and the prophet Samuel harshly criticized Saul for not fulfilling God’s word. Is that your God? I hope not.

Boo_Boo Loc: Jellystone

You are so far from understanding.....there's a difference between what is legal and what is moral—between the practical need to deal with reality and the existence of an ideal. The Law was not meant to be a list of everything moral and immoral. It functioned as every national set of laws functions—as reasonably enforceable rules to govern a society. Your mistake and inability to understand that our Father did not make robots, he made creatures with free will and the ability to learn, grow, make choices. You may be just learning to stand, you have a long way to go before you understand how to seek the goodness of G*d's ideal.

Deeply ingrained cultural patterns do not change overnight, but must be redeemed over time. Slavery was intricately woven into the cultures of the day, so, as with divorce (neither being the situation G*d desired), G*d made rules to keep the evil of the practice to a minimum. For example, if you kidnapped someone and made him a slave, you were put to death (Exodus 21). If a slave escaped from his master for whatever reason, you were not allowed to return him. If you harmed so much as a tooth of your slave, you had to let him go free—in other words, no person was allowed to keep a slave if he mistreated him or her. Slavery in Western countries would never even have gotten off the ground had these rules been followed; the first rule alone would have prevented.

Canaanite were not wipped out....so accusing G*d of genocide is wrong. Marc Haber, Claude Doumet-Serhal, Christiana Scheib and a team of 13 other scientists recently published their DNA findings in The American Journal of Human Genetics (AJHG). The researchers sequenced the genomes of five individuals who were buried in the Canaanite city of Sidon in Lebanon around 1700 B.C.E. as well as the genomes of 99 individuals from Lebanon today.

The results of their study demonstrated a connection: “We show that present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age,” wrote the researchers in AJHG.

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

Casting out the Nations

Deuteronomy 7:1-6 ►

1When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess, and He drives out before you many nations— the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—
2and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you to defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.…
…3Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons,
4because they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD will burn against you, and He will swiftly destroy you.
5Instead, this is what you are to do to them: tear down their altars, smash their sacred pillars, cut down their Asherah poles, and burn their idols in the fire.
6For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His prized possession, above all peoples on the face of the earth.…


The Judgment of the Canaanites

“This brings us to the question: what did the Canaanites deserve? Did they deserve life? Did they deserve heaven? No one deserves life, and no one deserves heaven. The evidence suggests that they were a very sinful people on whom God’s judgment is therefore entirely just.”

It is a fairly common objection to the Bible and to all forms of biblical faith that a God who would order the extermination of all the Canaanites by the Israelites cannot be a loving God, and therefore cannot be any kind of god that they would want to worship.

The point is this: what does anyone deserve? The simple truth is this: none of us deserve a single day of life on this earth. We have no right to demand anything of God any more than the pot has the right to demand anything of the potter.

If one wants to talk about the most evil event that has ever happened in human history, we cannot look to the genocide of the Canaanites. That was God’s judgment on a wicked people. God used the judgment as simultaneously giving Canaan to His people to be the promised land. Later on, when the Israelites became terribly wicked, God did the same kind of thing: He used another nation to judge Israel. But the most evil event cannot be the genocide of Canaanites. It cannot even be the Holocaust, as horrific as that was. The most evil event in history is the crucifixion of the Lord of Glory.

God has infinite dignity. A sin against God is therefore a sin against an infinitely holy God with infinite dignity. Try this thought experiment: contemplate the differences of the consequences that a slap in the face has with regard to the following people: what would happen if you slapped a hobo on the street, a fellow citizen, a police officer, the President of the United States, and the God of the universe?

The same action has drastically different consequences depending on the dignity of the person being offended. Imagine, then, the heinousness of putting to death a person who is both God and man in one person, and therefore has infinite dignity; but who is also absolutely innocent and perfect. Not only this, but the method of putting Christ to death was the most humiliating kind of death on offer in the Roman world (it was reserved for traitors to the Roman empire: Jesus Christ the most resolute non-traitor, died the traitor’s death in place of traitors). So, it could be said that the most humiliating death a person could die being inflicted wrongfully upon the Son of God, who was and is perfect in every way, is the most evil event in all of human history.

This raises the question: why would the genocide of the Canaanites stick in our craw if the death of Jesus Christ of Nazareth does not? The truth is that God brought amazing and infinite good out of the infinite evil (the power of God is manifest in its most amazing form just here and at the resurrection of Christ from the dead) of the cross. As Joseph says of his brothers, they meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.

What is the good, then, that came out of the genocide (I prefer the term “judgment” for obvious reasons!) of the Canaanites? The Canaanites were judged for their sin, while the Israelites received the promised land from God. This event, in fact, is part of the stream of the story that culminates in the very death of Jesus Christ Himself. Therefore, there seems little point in objecting to the judgment of the Canaanites, which was just. The real question is the marvelous, amazing, and inexplicable mercy of God in sending His Son to die for us.


Lane Keister, pastor of Momence OPC, Momence, IL. This excerpted article is used with permission.

bahmer

Amen and Amen

bahmer

Amen and Amen very good there Pennylynn thanks for the insight into the ten commandments.