Transcript from podcast (so sorry for the spelling mistakes)
Wildfire podcast is an extension of Wildfire, which has a focus of igniting men and women of God into a deeper discipleship with Christ, instilling people with a passion to radically and relentlessly pursue Christ wherever that leads.
That God's truth will spread like a wildfire.
Hey everyone, how's it going?
So welcome back to another video.
This is going to be the second part of a video that I done with regards to is God a moral monster?
And we addressed this idea of slavery in the Bible.
In this video, the point of contention that we're going to be talking about is does God command genocide?
How do we address that?
Is that something that needs justified?
If it's true?
Is it true?
These are all questions that we just want to address and answer.
We want to leave all of our presuppositions, our biases on the table.
And we just want to address these ancient texts and just see what they're trying to say and extract the character of God that is being presented within these.
So, let's just jump straight into it.
So, we obviously read in the Bible, within the Book of Joshua, how God then commands his chosen people, which is the Israelites, to go in and to destroy the Canaanites.
The commandment is to kill every male, woman, child, and to take possession of that land.
Why is this commandment being given?
Whenever, from our perception, is that this is grotesque, and this is horrible.
So, we want to address these questions, and we want to have clarity by the end of this video.
So, point number one is that God is the objective standard of good.
Whenever we address this question, we need to take a time out, and we need to ask, whenever you say that God is immoral, what is your moral standard?
And again, this is the debate about morality.
The reality is you need something that is objective in order to give an account for your morality.
That is, we can do good, but what is your account for that which is good and that which is bad?
It is a necessity that God is a reality in order for good and evil to exist.
If someone comes up to me and says, I'm gonna murder this person, why is it wrong?
I can't give them an account without God, because there's no objective standard.
Everything is just subjective.
If I say, do you don't murder that person because of the following reasons, that's just my personal prerogative.
And then if he says, well, here's my reasons for killing this person, that's his prerogative.
What then, what's the account?
Who's right, who's wrong?
What's the objective standard?
And this is the question that we all have to ask ourselves, and it's one that I think, the only answer is that we need God in order for morality to flourish.
If you extract God from this, from the equation of what is good and what is bad and how we give an account, the closest thing you can come to is moral relativism.
That is, you have a group of people, they come together and they decide that which is right.
But even that doesn't work, because if you think of the Nazis in Germany, they had a large group, a majority of people, and what they thought was right, and they then followed it.
So moral relativism doesn't work.
Again, we can't give an account of that which is right and that which is wrong without the objective standard, which is God.
Which is important to understand whenever we address this, that God is the objective standard.
He is the one that decrees that which is good and that which is wrong.
So if the Israelites went into Cain on their own prerogative and decided to just go and kill everyone at their own accord, that would be wrong.
However, whenever God, the objective standard of that which is good, decrees that they go in and do this, this then becomes a divine commandment.
God is the one who sets the parameters for that which is good and that which is wrong.
Okay, I agree that God is the objective standard of good.
He then decrees that which is good and what should be done and that which is wrong.
And then you then say, I look back on this and God decreed this, I think this was wrong.
Again, that's your subjectivity and it doesn't detract away from the objectivity of God and what he has decreed.
And so, your premise is that God does exist, yes, but because he commanded this, I don't want to accept him.
Because you think that God is cruel and sinister, but whenever you say God is cruel and sinister, that's your own subjective morality.
And how can the creation decide what the creator is?
Rather, the creator decides what the creation is and everything that is within that.
God determines the parameters of right and wrong, of objectivity, and we, as humans, we just reside in subjectivity.
And this is self-evident throughout society.
We decide with our own self-egoism what is right, what is wrong, that sort of just really benefits us and our own sensitivities.
If we go into Acts 17, this is self-evidently clear whenever Paul is addressing the Greeks in Athens.
Verse 24, Then God, who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God and perhaps fill their way toward him and find him, yet he is actually not far from each one of us.
For in him we live and move and have our being.
God is the one who gives all life, God is the one who gives all existence, God is the one who decrees that which is right and that which is wrong.
And we cannot say otherwise.
If God commands us to do something, then that is good because God is inherently good.
Anything that God decrees is good because that is the source.
God is the source of all goodness.
God is the source of all objectivity.
And so the creation can then not determine the creator, rather the creator determines the creation and all reality, whether we like that or not.
It's a real problem whenever people say that God commands genocide because it seems like a paradox because God decrees when everyone should die.
So does that mean that God, assume God by definition just commits genocide whenever he creates people?
Because he and whenever he then determines when people should die?
Because everyone lives and everyone dies, and God determines when everyone lives and when everyone dies.
So rather, your point of contention when you say God commits genocide is that throughout all history, whenever God determines everyone should die, that's just genocide.
Rather, you can't.
God is the objective standard.
He gives the creation.
He's the one who creates it.
He's the one that determines when again they should die.
Because in all being, exists and is comprised within God and God alone.
So God decrees that everyone should die at some point.
Not ethnic cleansing, but instead, this is capital punishment.
Divine execution predicated upon divine sovereignty.
Again, we take the immutable characteristics of God, his omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and all these are underpinned within the goodness of God.
Because he is a compassionate, loving father, and there's so many scriptures that we can find relating to this.
God is the one that determines that which is right and that which is wrong.
And you cannot associate the term genocide with God as he determines and decrees when everyone should die.
For example, whenever Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed, God used creation to then execute judgment.
God decreed that these people were immoral and that they should die.
And God, the objective standard, of course, God can do whatever he desires, whatever he wants, and he is totally just in doing so, especially whenever we take into consideration the depravity of man and our sinful nature, and all that we are deserving of is death, because that's what we ourselves has brought upon ourselves.
God doesn't have to intervene at all or extend any grace or mercy.
And so Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by creation of fire and brimstone.
In this case, the Canaanites are being destroyed again by God because of their immorality, just like Sodom and Gomorrah, but by the creation of humanity.
So God the Creator is using his creation to then execute God's judgment.
So it just is paradoxical whenever you say that God commands genocide, because that just can't be associated with God only within the realm of humanity.
So point number one is that God is the objective standard of good, and we need to understand that in order to call a straight-line cricket, we have to understand what a straight line looks like beforehand.
That's something that CS.
Lewis said.
So what is your straight line?
What is your objective standard whenever you approach this conversation?
Point number two is that God decrees that everyone should die.
You can't associate genocide with God.
It just doesn't work.
And in this case, in this scenario, God is executing divine judgment through his creation, just like he does throughout all history, from eternity past to eternity future.
It is no different here.
God is just using his Israelites, his chosen people, this form of creation with regards to mankind, to execute judgment.
We see whenever we go back to Genesis, in Genesis 15, 15, that the Canaanites were extended grace and mercy for over 400 years.
It says that, as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace, you shall be buried in good old age, and they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites, that is the Canaanites, is not yet complete.
God is then saying, with regards to the Amorites, which is the Canaanites, their sin has not yet reached me.
That is, God has set a threshold.
That is a threshold of mercy and grace.
And God has said that they, their sin has not yet reached me, and God has given them 400 years of mercy and grace and compassion to turn away from their ways before God executes just, just justice.
That God decrees that what they're doing is wrong and it is immoral, and that it needs corrected.
And again, we need to understand that we are not obligated to receive anything.
Rather, God gave us life, and God gave us prerogative to have a relationship with him, and we sinned and we rebelled against him.
And what we are deserving is death.
That's all we're deserving of.
Anything other than that is just grace and mercy.
And we hear, we see that God is giving this immoral society in the form of the Canaanites grace and mercy for 400 years.
And then we are now in the story, at the end of the 400 years, how they have not turned away.
And thus their subsequent judgment, which comes in the form of the Israelite nation, being the vessel to which God uses to execute that judgment.
If you go to Genesis 18.25, Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked.
Far be that from you, shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just.
Abraham is having a dialogue with God here, with Sodom and Gomorrah, and he is saying, is it just, God, that you destroy this nation?
Okay, now if you think of, again, the creation asking the Creator, the one who is omnipotent, the one who is all-knowing, the one who knows that which is right and wrong, and the one that decrees it.
And God, again, extends mercy and justice and allows us to ask these difficult questions.
Why, God, are you allowing this?
And God allows Abraham to ask these questions, the same questions that we're asking today.
And the reality is, the conclusion of the matter is that there was no one righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, and thus, judgment need to be executed.
In the same way, we can trust that God, the objective standard, the one who decrees that which is right and wrong, and the one that knows all things, can determine that the Canaanites, after 400 years of grace and mercy and a chance to repent, they did not.
And so there's subsequent judgment that they cannot deny.
And the conclusion is that won't the judge of all the earth do that which is right?
And the reality is, God will, even in these circumstances that we find ourselves in, with regards to looking at this passage in Joshua, about the Israelites going to execute the Canaanites, won't the judge of the universe do that which is right?
We can trust that when God decrees this, as we've already highlighted, through philosophical understanding, that God is the objective standard, and he does decree that which is right and that which is wrong.
And here we see that this is totally right.
This is totally right, the judgment should be executed, especially when we take into context the sin that's being committed by the Canaanites and their lack of repentance and the fact that they're deserving of nothing but to receive the consequences of their actions.
And we see that the Canaanites and all humanity, whenever we sin, the resulting judgment is death.
The Bible says that the soul that sins dies for the wages of sin is death.
So it is simply the natural trajectory of our own decision-making, whenever I sin, that I deserve death.
Okay, and here we see the Canaanites, they deserve death, they're deserving of nothing of this, nothing else, because of their sin.
But God, in his grace and his mercy, extends to them grace.
He allows them to respond and to turn from their ways, which is something that they're not deserving of.
Point number three is that what was the sin that was being committed by the Canaanites?
Why is this justice being executed?
The reality is that God simply escalates the judgment that is already coming their way.
For example, all humanity, we sin and we then go to death.
And so, that's just the reality.
Here we see that the Canaanites sin and that they're going to death.
But instead of getting 70, 80 years or 40 or whatever, God then determines that I am now bringing forth the judgment that is going to happen.
It is now come, it is here and it is now.
And again, God decides when justice should come in to our lives.
So again, the natural trajectory of our sin is death.
God simply just escalates the implications and effects of our sin and our decision making.
We see in Leviticus 18, the sin that is being committed by the Canaanites.
So if we go to that, their passage, you shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech and so profane the name of your God and the Lord.
Plutarch, a Greek writer, highlighted that within the nation of the Canaanites, they would offer their children as a sacrifice to appease their God that was Molech.
They would simply place their child upon a statue, and they would heat the statue up, and it would literally just sizzle and burn the child to death.
Plutarch addressed that they would beat drums louder so that the Canaanite nation couldn't hear the screams of the children or those in the surrounding area.
Again, this is the level of sin that is being committed by the Canaanites, and God allows grace and mercy for 400 years.
And again, remember, we are not obligated to receive anything because we don't deserve anything because of our sin and the trajectory towards death.
And here we see that God allows grace and mercy for 400 years, and here we see the sins that is being committed by the Canaanites.
We have to ask ourselves, is intervention just?
Well, we look in World War II, and the six million Jews that were killed was intervention just?
Of course it was.
Intervention is required.
So how much more is God the objective standard?
How much more is he just whenever he intervenes in humanity in order to right the wrongs?
And this is something that we then say, why does God allow so much suffering?
Yet whenever he engages to stop suffering, we then question that God is in just for doing so.
So God is the objective standard, which is point number one, he gives all life.
Point number two is God decrees that everyone should die.
It is rather capital punishment, not genocide, and you can't associate that term.
God extends grace and mercy for 400 years in understanding that we are not obligated to receive anything except death, and anything outside of that is grace and mercy.
The grace and mercy that is being extended is 400 years of grace and mercy.
And then we've highlighted in point number three, the sins that were being committed by the King of the Night Nations.
And thus we see again the grace and the mercy of God in the law in it to take place for so long, but we see God's intervention and how intervention is 100% just.
Point number four is that God did extend grace and mercy.
We see that Rahab, she was a King of the Night, and she responded in choice and progrive to them protect, to Israelites, allow them to escape, the spies.
And then she was then extended grace and mercy by God.
Now this was something that could be extended to all the King of the Night Nations.
They were all extended grace and mercy.
They all could have turned away from their ways, just like Rahab did, but they chose not to, and thus subsequent judgment comes.
But we see Rahab escaped that.
We see in Jeremiah 4, verse 1 says, If you return, O Israel, declares the Lord, to me you should return, if you remove your detestable things from my presence and do not waver.
Okay, now this is specifically addressing God's chosen people, Israelites.
However, the principle applies to the Canaanites, because it replies to all mankind, and it applies to us today, especially whenever we take into consideration 2 Peter 3, where it says, God desires that no man should perish.
Here, God is saying, Israel, we can just put in Canaan, declares the Lord, to me you should return, remove your detestable things.
And here we see that the Canaanites did not remove their detestable things, they just maintained the trajectory of sin, and thus death was the inevitable conclusion.
And here we see capital punishment being executed.
Again, you can go into other passages, such as Isaiah 65, where God literally pleads that the Israelites should return to him.
And again, God pleads that we should all come to him, and that we should all repent from our ways.
And here we see the Canaanites did not do that.
Read Deuteronomy 20, Joshua 11, 19.
We get further context, right?
I'm taking this from the Bible Project, and I'm gonna link the article down below, but I think it really has a lot of utility for us.
It says here that, furthermore, the offer of peace was always available.
This is with regards to the laws that is being stipulated within wartime as to how the Israelites deal with these surrounding nations.
It says, in Deuteronomy 20, it lays out the rules of warfare for the Israelite nation, a sort of ancient Geneva Convention.
In that passage, God instructs Israel to offer terms of peace to their enemies before a battle.
The Book of Joshua doesn't include detailed accounts of the offers of peace, but Joshua 11, 19 indicates that the offer was made and consistently refused.
This is from Joshua 11, 19.
There was not a city that made peace with the people of Israel except the Hivites, the inhabitants of Gimian.
So here we see that again, whenever we nuance with other scriptures, that they were to offer peace to these other nations before they entered.
And then we see in Joshua 11 that we see that when the peace was offered, only one nation responded.
The Gimianites were not one of these nations.
A final point is that we shouldn't take these things out of context, which is a thing that really does happen.
Whenever people say that God commands genocide, again, we've sort of analyzed why that's just not a correct statement.
But if I were to give you an analogy of a person who was lying numb and you have a group of people and they're digging into the brain of the person, they've sliced them open, they're digging into the brain and they were removing pieces of the brain, and I ended the story there.
You would conclude, wow, that's pretty cruel.
What's going on there?
Why is this being allowed?
These people are definitely wrong for taking a person, putting them asleep, and then slicing their head open and taking parts of their brain out.
That is immoral, right?
And that's what's being presented here.
This is an immoral act that is being committed by God.
However, if we actually place some context, this person who's lying numb and getting their brain cut open is actually in surgery, and the people who are cutting them open and taking the pieces of the brain are actually removing tumors from the brain.
Okay?
Context is vitally important.
And here we see that within the analogy of the surgery, that this one moment of pain would then reap lifelong effects.
It would bring forth life.
And here we see that the God of the universe is the Divine Surgeon.
And in this one moment of pain with regard to the execution of judgment on the Canaanites would bring forth fruit and life.
And this is something that we have to trust and not rest on our own subjective, arbitrary lens on things and say that God is totally wrong here because God is the one who is omniscient, he is the Divine Surgeon who determines that which is right.
So the conclusion is that God is the objective standard.
Acts 17 affirms this.
Point number two is that God declares that everyone should die at some point.
It's not ethnic cleansing, but instead is capital punishment, divine execution predicated upon divine sovereignty.
We see that in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Canaanites' sin had not reached the Lord, Genesis 15, 15, Genesis 18, 25.
We see that the natural trajectory of their sin was death, and God simply escalates the effect of this.
We see the sins that were being committed by them in Leviticus 18, and how there was a necessity for intervention, especially from the God of the universe, who won't he do what is just and what is right?
We see that mercy and grace was extended repeatedly throughout the Old Testament.
Rahab was one person who responded, and how they were offered a chance to run and flee, and how they were offered a chance of peace in Deuteronomy 20 and Joshua 11, 19, and we can infer that they did not accept this, and thus they had to receive the subsequent judgment.
And then point number five was the cancer analogy.
How it is important that we give context, and how it is important that we highlight that God is the divine surgeon, and one moment of pain brings forth decades, centuries of life, and God is the one who knows better than we do.
There is another interpretation that is provided whenever, like did God really command the killing of all of these people was their exception.
Again, we've highlighted the peace treaties that were highlighted, and people could repent.
However, another point of argument within this topic is that there was battle idioms used, that there was just hyperbolic language of that time.
Ancient cultures had literary idioms, or figurative language that says one thing, but means another, just like we do.
When someone tells you it's raining cats and dogs outside, they don't mean the animals are falling from the sky.
They just mean it's raining hard with idioms.
To take the words literally is to misread them.
So this is just what is happening here.
The redic often employs figurative language and conforms to the conventions of illiterate tradition.
In this case, the conventions of ancient warfare narratives are observed.
Redic is meant to be persuasive.
It has an agenda and a story to tell.
As Paul Copeland explains in his book, It's Got a More Monster, Joshua used the radical Provado language of his day, asserting that all the land was captured, all the kings defeated, and all the Canaanites destroyed.
The point of this redic was to assert God's total supremacy over the Canaanite idols.
However, Joshua didn't believe all the Canaanites were destroyed, that is clear if you read the whole book.
So this is another point of argument that you can take.
However, I have presented the other argument that this was literal, that God commanded it, and that they were instructed to do so, and the failure to do so, which the Israelites didn't destroy all nations.
I've highlighted the difficult scenario.
This one you can simply just take, okay, so all children were not executed, it was just idioms, hyperbolic language.
That one doesn't require further secondary explanation, so I left that and just presented it at the end, and I just left with some of the more difficult points of contention.
So that's it for this video, and I shall see you guys on the next one.
Bye.
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