May 17

May 17, 2009

"Show Them No Mercy" –
The God of Love and the Canaanites
a sermon on Deuteronomy 7.1-6
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

“Why did God command violence in the Old Testament?” That question came up in our confirmation class, and I am sure it has troubled many of you. What do you do when you run across passages like our scripture reading, in which God commands the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites? What should we make of passages that seem to celebrate bloodshed? If you read the Bible, you will run across such passages. Do you just move on and try not to think about them? If not, how do you reconcile them with God’s character? God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. He does not delight in the death of the wicked, and he desires that all be saved. Our God is a God of grace. So what’s going on?

I decided the question was worth a sermon, but I am about to break one of the cardinal rules of preaching: Never open a can of worms if you can’t re-seal the lid. (I have been told that, but I don’t completely agree.) I want to warn you at the outset that I will not be able to resolve this problem to your complete satisfaction. I can’t resolve it to mine. In search of answers, I turned to four giants wiser than I am. Christopher J.H. Wright is an Old Testament scholar. His chapter on the Canaanites in the book The God I Don’t Understand helped me. Victor Shepherd is a professor of theology and a pastor. His sermon “Should the Bible Be Censored?” helped too. William Lane Craig is a defender of Christianity, and he addresses the Canaanite question in the Q&A section of his website, reasonablefaith.org. Finally, C.S. Lewis has a chapter in Reflections on the Psalms about the psalms that call down curses on one’s enemies. Four giants. Four fascinating, helpful writings. My question remains. And if these guys haven’t got it fully figured out, chances are I’m not going to deliver a definitive answer in this sermon. However, I do think I can offer you some helpful ways to approach the problem and point out some pitfalls to avoid.

Before we begin, I want to point out that our faith does not stand or fall on this question. Atheists like Richard Dawkins use passages like this to ridicule us. They offer a caricature of the God of the Bible and proceed to refute it. I began reading Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great, but I didn’t get far because it doesn’t touch real issues. As a Christian I did not recognize the god he was describing. Christianity stands or falls on the resurrection of Jesus. If he is alive, then Christianity is solid no matter how many questions puzzle us. If he did not rise from the dead, then no matter how much we enjoy church or find our faith comforting, we are wasting our time.

This question of violence is important because it forces us to think about the nature of God and of the Bible. It is also important because we live in a world of religious violence. Although in the past some Christians have used the Bible to justify violence in the name of God, they were wrong to do so. No matter how you end up coming to terms with God’s command about the Canaanites, it was limited to one specific time and place. Over and over God commands love for enemies. Only in a few historically specific circumstances does he command violence. In other words, this is a historical puzzle about God and the Bible, definitely not an example we would want to follow today.

Let’s begin by looking at some answers that don’t work. As you might guess, people have come up with a lot of ways to deal with passages like this one. Some answers have limited value, some are just plain bad, and one or two are dangerous.

The worst is to say: “This is an Old Testament problem, but now we have the New Testament, so let’s just go with it and ignore the Old.” You get rid of the problem but dismissing the Old Testament with all its judgment and gore. Problem solved, right? Wrong! You actually end up worse than before. This approach fails because it ignores three basic truths: (1) The New Testament does not stand alone. It wasn’t meant to. Have you ever noticed how often the New Testament quotes the Old? The New Testament is the Old Testament rewritten on the assumption that Jesus is the Messiah. (2) The Old Testament teaches the grace, mercy, and love of God every bit as much as the New Testament does. (3) In many ways the New Testament is as bad or worse than the Old when it comes to things like God’s wrath.

Consider (1), the New Testament does not stand alone. Jesus, the gospel writers, and the apostles who wrote the New Testament often go beyond the Old Testament. An example of this is when Jesus said, “You have heard that it is written … but I say to you,” and he expands a law from the Old Testament. Much of what he taught—love for God, love for neighbor—comes right out of the Old Testament. He goes beyond it at times, but he never corrects it. He never says, “Scripture teaches X-Y-Z, but that’s not right.” Neither do the New Testament writers. Jesus and the apostles knew the passage I read this morning. They considered it the Word of God and saw no reason to critique it. Jesus strongly opposed violence as the way to establish God’s kingdom. It just doesn’t work. But he never says Deuteronomy is wrong when it says God told the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites. Does this mean that we have qualms about Deuteronomy but Jesus did not? And if so, does that mean we are more morally astute than he was? I can’t imagine how that can be true. The problem is with us, not him; and because he loved the Old Testament so much, we should too. The Old and the New go together. We Christians cannot throw out the Old Testament, especially because we do not like something in it or do not understand it.

Consider (2), the Old Testament teaches love and mercy as much as the New does. I could quote passages all day, including the care God commands for foreigners. But I will limit myself to one telling example. God’s plan always included the blessing of the nations. They too, not just Israel, were to know and worship God. In Zechariah 9.7, God say this about the Philistines, a traditional enemy of God’s people: “It too shall be a remnant for our God; shall be like a clan in Judah, and Ekron shall be like the Jebusites.” The Jubusites were Canaanites who lived in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was not part of Israel until King David conquered it and made it his capital. Its former inhabitants became a part of his tribe, Judah. The point of all this? God loves even the Philistines. He wants to make them part of his people!

By the way, where do we get the moral sensibility to quibble with the slaughter of the Canaanites? Why do we believe it is wrong? The Bible tells us, including the Old Testament.

Consider (3), the New Testament is stronger on wrath than the Old. Ask Annanias and Sappira if violence is an Old Testament problem. They are the couple who died on the spot when they lied to the apostles in Acts 5. Also, Jesus had a lot to say about hell, which is more disturbing than anything in the Old Testament.

Therefore, it will not do to write this off as an Old Testament problem and claim to be a New Testament Christian. You cannot have the New without the Old.

Another answer that fails is to interpret passages like this one allegorically—what some people call a spiritual interpretation. To say it’s not really about actual people who lived a long time ago but rather it speaks to us of our fight against temptation—or something like that. When God says slay all the Canaanites, he means we must slay everything in our hearts that keeps us from him. Here is why this approach does not work: “Spiritualized” interpretations like this always depend on the historical truth of the passage. For example, Paul uses the resurrection as a symbol for holy living. He says Jesus has raised us to a new way of life. The thing is, this spiritual use depends on the fact that Jesus rose from the dead and will raise us too. Take away the plain, historical meaning of the text, and you lose the spiritualized meaning too. We might legitimately take from Deuteronomy 7 a lesson about letting nothing tempt us away from God,—we live in an age that likes to pick and mix religions, so that is what it says to us—but that does not solve the underlying problem we have with the command to slaughter the Canaanites wholesale.

Another popular answer that does not work is to say, “God never said that.” There are two variations on this, one conservative and one liberal. A conservative says, “God never told Joshua to slaughter the Canaanites, but he thought God did, so this happened, but should not have.” A liberal says, “This never even happened. Some archeological evidence suggests that at least some of the Israelites originated in Canaan, so they were Canaanites themselves. This was written much later, during the exile, to explain where Israel went wrong and why exile was necessary.” Both these answers get God off the hook by blaming the Bible. If you have to choose one to be wrong, better to choose the Bible than God, I guess; but I suspect making a choice in this case is a mistake. I do not hold to a doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, but before I am willing to say the Bible gets something wrong I need a good reason. “I find this distasteful,” is not a good enough reason. The conservative answer doesn’t work because it would not only be Joshua but the rest of scripture that backs up Deuteronomy that was wrong. Do we want to go that far? It is one thing to say a small detail is off, quite another to suggest scripture misrepresents the character of God.

The liberal answer doesn’t work because it leaves you in a dilemma: Either the Exodus and beginning of ancient Israel happened by the hand of God—in which case you have violence commanded by God—or it did not—in which case … well, where is God? Everything happens naturally without his intervention. In that case, our situation has not improved. We have taken God out of the story completely.

Many people try to get God off the hook by claiming he said nothing like what this passage attributes to him. I say God is too complex for me to psychoanalyze him and then decide what he may or may not say and do. Yes, this command seems to me inconsistent with all that other stuff about love and mercy; but the key words in that sentence are seems to me. If you have to choose one to be wrong—God or yourself—consider yourself wrong every time.

Now, here are a few answers that are not bad, but only somewhat useful. Victor Shepherd, talking about the bloodthirsty Psalms, says that their real motive is not a thirst for blood but a passionate burning to see justice done. All this business about bashing out the brains of Babylonians is really a kind of code for wanting God to prove the Babylonians are wrong and the Jews are right. He says the Hebrew mind is literal. Where we would pray for God to make our society peaceful, just, and good, the Hebrew would pray, “May the cocaine dealers drop dead.” That’s his example. I think he’s on to something. When you read the Psalms and find a prayer for your enemies to drop dead, more is going on there than vindictiveness. But this does not solve the problem completely, nor does it help with the Canaanite question. He ends by arguing we ought not censor scripture but let it have its say, and on that I agree with him.

C.S. Lewis also took up the issue of the bloodthirsty Psalms. He says, among other things, that they are there to remind us what our sin does to another person’s soul. Not only do we injure that person in some way, we also cause hatred and other evil to infect his soul. That’s a good thing to keep in mind when we read curses in the Psalms, but again it doesn’t solve the whole problem.

Christopher Wright, dealing specifically with the Canaanite question, suggests God accommodated himself to that time and place—which were more prone to bloodshed than our own. There’s probably something in that, although ultimately it doesn’t satisfy. Yes, God has often accommodated his work to a given time and place. We were not ready for the whole truth, so he gave us as much as we could handle at the time. However, if the slaughter of the Canaanites is morally wicked, it is hard to write it off as accommodation. True moral good does not change over time. If it would be wrong today, it would be wrong then.

OK, enough of partial answers. What answers do I find really useful? Four quick truths that may not solve the problem, but they at least get us moving in the right direction.

1. We do not judge God. William Lane Craig seemed to feel the most comfortable and confident about this question. His position is: If God commands it, it must be good. He ends up straining a bit to put the Canaanite extermination in the best possible light. He asks: Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? Craig says it is good because God commands it, and I have to agree. Otherwise, “good” would be a standard that exists separate from and above God. But God is the ultimate reality. Nothing stands behind, before, or above him. Good is good because it is from him. This whole problem arises because the command in Deuteronomy 7 seems so different from everything else we know about God.

I am just a human being. I am in no position to judge God. I am convinced that God is good. So when I find something like this command, I scratch my head, but I also trust God about it. If God commanded this, he must have had a good reason. Although it seems morally questionable from my perspective, God has a better angle. Therefore, I may have to live with some confusion, but I do not have to say scripture misrepresents God or that God is wicked.

2. Christopher Wright helpfully points to God’s justice. The Bible presents the holy war against the Canaanites as God’s just judgment against them for their great wickedness. In other words, the Canaanites had it coming. Scripture accuses them of a laundry list of sins from idolatry and immorality to human sacrifice. Wright points back to when God promised Abraham the land of Canaan. In Genesis 15, God says Abraham’s descendants would possess the land, but not yet: “They shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” [v. 16]. The Amorites were a dominant Canaanite people. In other words, these people are bad, but they have not yet become totally intolerable. Until they are, I will not bring judgment upon them. Recall how God agreed not to destroy the city of Sodom if even ten righteous people could be found there. Recall how God sent Jonah to the capital of one of the cruelest, most evil empires in history to call them to repent. Does God’s command in Deuteronomy 7 become easier to accept if we consider it a just condemnation of a stubbornly wicked people? Certainly it does.

God is God, and I have never had trouble with events in scripture where God judges and punishes. We ought to want God to deal with evil. I have no moral qualms with the incident at the Red Sea where he drowns the Egyptians. Who am I to say God was wrong to do that? Where I do struggle is when he uses human beings as agents of judgment. If God thinks the Egyptians need a plague, so be it. But why does he command the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites? Why employ human agents? I would prefer if he did not, but he didn’t ask me. According to the Bible, God used the Assyrians to punish Israel, the Babylonians to punish Judah, and the Persians to punish the Babylonians. God has a plan and a purpose in history, and he uses human agents to unfold it. This leads to …

3. The conquest of the land of Canaan, like everything else in the Bible, is part of God’s unfolding plan of salvation. Bringing Israel to the Promised Land was an early step on the road that led, ultimately, to Jesus. All along God’s purpose was to save the world. His desire is that every people, every nation, every person know him and receive his blessings. That’s why Jesus commanded the good news go forth from Jerusalem to the uttermost parts of the earth. It is why on Pentecost the Holy Spirit turned the tower of Babel upside down, and the apostles spoke in the tongues of many nations. The role of the Canaanites in this story is an unhappy one, much like that of Judas Iscariot. But it was the part they chose to play, in a sense—if the Bible is right about the justice of God. And, it is not so bad as it appears in Deuteronomy 7. Rahab and her family, the Gibeonites [see Joshua 9], and the Jebusites among others were Canaanites who found their place within the people of God.

If we asked the question: Did God have mercy on any of the Canaanites? My answer would be: Yes, on as many of them as would receive his mercy. If this business about judgment bothers you, the whole Bible and the Christian faith will bother you. God loves us so much that he will not settle for anything less than peace, justice, goodness, and love among us. We do not cooperate. He gives us the option to repent and become, through Christ, a new creation. If we refuse, we tie his hands (in a way) and bring destruction on ourselves. He would prefer to establish his kingdom with you in it, but if you refuse, he will establish it just the same.

4. Finally, it may trouble us that violence plays a part in God’s plan of salvation. What I find most bizarre, however, is that God does not exempt himself. The climax of his plan was the cross, on which God himself suffered horrific violence and abuse. What are we to make of that? It may not solve our issues with Deuteronomy 7, but it should not be forgotten in the discussion.

In the end, the best I can do is to admit that I am not God and do not stand in judgment over him. I marvel at his mysterious ways. I rejoice in his love and mercy. I stand in fear of his justice. I give him humble thanks for his great plan of salvation because it means a Canaanite like me can not only become a part of his chosen people but also an adopted child of God. More than that I cannot say. Amen.

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