Worshiping a God who Commanded Genocide

Several times lately I have heard people object to believing in the God of the Bible on the grounds that he commanded the Israelites to commit genocide. They said that a deity who commands ethnic cleansing obviously cannot be a good God. He cannot be a God worth believing in or worshiping. In fact, the idea of such a God is abhorrent and should be scorned. I heard a Jewish commentator try to defend God by saying that God never commanded the genocide; rather, it was Moses who told the Israelites to do it, because he believed it was what God wanted.

So is it true that God commanded genocide? Moses certainly commanded it: “When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, . . . and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them” (Deut. 7:1-2). The Israelites obeyed. Speaking of Sihon, king of Heshbon, Moses says, “And we captured all his cities at that time and devoted to destruction every city, men, women, and children. We left no survivors” (Deut. 2:34). Or the following, “So the LORD our God gave into our hand Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people, and we struck him down until he had no survivor left. . . . devoting to destruction every city, men, women, and children” (Deut. 3:3, 6).

These passages are pretty clear. The Israelites did not limit themselves to killing combatants only. Moses states explicitly that they killed all the “men, women, and children” in these two kingdoms. If you can stomach it, imagine what is being described here. A mass of Jewish men armed with swords, spears, and other weapons ran into each city, killed the men who tried to withstand them, and then went about chasing down and slaughtering all the women and children. Can you imagine grabbing a two-year-old little girl and stabbing her through the chest in the name of the Lord? Our minds recoil in horror at such actions!

Was it really God who commanded this kind of killing, or did the Israelites act on their own? Was Moses mistaken about what God wanted? Of Og, king of Bashan, God said to Moses, “‘Do not fear him, for I have given him into your hand, and all his people, and his land. And you shall do to him as you did to Sihon king of the Amorites, who lived at Heshbon.’ So they defeated him and his sons and all his people, until he had no survivor left. And they possessed his land” (Num. 21:34-35). We already saw from Deuteronomy that Israel annihilated every person—man, woman, and child—of Sihon king of Heshbon, and here God tells Moses not to fear Og, king of Bashan, because they will do the same to him. It seems clear that God approved of what the Israelites were doing. “I [God] have given him into your hand, and all his people,” God says. “All his people” means every man, woman, and child. God wanted the Israelites to annihilate all the Canaanite people. Today, we would call this genocide, or ethnic cleansing. It was God’s will.

So the question is, how can we love and worship a God who commanded such slaughter? You can imagine what the headlines would read if Israel did this today: “Israel commits genocide! Guilty of ethnic cleansing! Perpetrating war atrocities! Civilians targeted! Non-combatant men, women, and children massacred! International outrage!” I can understand why people would reject the God of Israel when they read of his approval of these kinds of massacres. Who would want to believe in such a God?

How are we as Christians going to respond to this problem? We could appeal to the apparently degraded debauchery of the nations the Israelites were killing. In Leviticus 18, God prohibits the Israelites from engaging in immoral sexual behavior, including adultery, incest, bestiality, and homosexuality. He says, “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean” (Lev. 18:24). So the nations the Israelites were annihilating were guilty of gross immorality. God says, “Do not say in your heart, after the LORD your God has thrust them out before you, ‘It is because of my righteousness that the LORD has brought me in to possess this land,’ whereas it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out before you” (Deut. 9:4). God judged these nations to be guilty and deserving of destruction. They deserved what they got.

But what about the children? Surely the children were innocent and shouldn’t have been lumped in with the adults. How could it be right to kill a six month old baby just because he was born to a certain tribe? The babies didn’t have any choice, and they hadn’t committed any conscious sins, yet God approved of their being killed along with everyone else in their nation.

So we are still left with the question, how are we as Christians going to respond to this problem? Here are several options:

1) Defend God by rejecting the parts of Scripture that describe God in this way.

2) Defend God by interpreting these passages in such a way that it is not God’s fault.

3) Don’t defend God. Submit to and assert all of God’s self-revelation in the Scriptures.

As you can see from these responses, the real issue is not the nature of God—is he the kind of God who would desire ethnic cleansing? The real issue is the nature of the Scriptures—is every part of our Bible an authentic revelation from God, or are some parts flawed?

The Jewish commentator I heard tried to follow option 2 by interpreting these passages in a way that proves God innocent. It wasn’t God’s fault. It was the Israelites’ mistaken notion of what God wanted, and this was understandable given their historical context. But this course will not do, for we saw that the Scripture is clear that God approved of what the Israelites were doing. The Bible presents God as one who desired ethnic cleansing.

What about option 1? Can we expunge these passages from the Bible? Maybe the biblical author was simply mistaken when he wrote that God approved of the Israelites’ actions. The implications of following this option are huge. If the biblical writer was wrong about God’s desire in this case, then he could be wrong in other places, also. How do we decide where the biblical author is correct, and where he is wrong? To what authority do we appeal to cut and paste the Scriptures? Do we look at the loving God of the New Testament and reject the barbaric God of the Old Testament on that basis? How do you know the New Testament author was right about God being loving? What it comes down to is this: if not all of our Bible is an authentic self-revelation from God, the only criteria we have for knowing God is our own opinion. You see God as you want to see him, and I’ll see God as I want to see him. If you like the idea of a loving God, then you believe those parts of the Bible. If I like the idea of a vicious, warrior-God, then I’ll believe those parts. We are left with no objective knowledge of the true God, just a billion personal gods made in our own image.

This is what most people truly want. They have an inbuilt desire to worship, but they want to believe in a God they can be comfortable with. Most people—even some Christians—do not submit to God’s full self-revelation found in the Bible. They pick and choose what they want to believe about God so that God might be acceptable to them. If they don’t like the idea of God sending people to suffer eternal torment in Hell, they reject, ignore, or reinterpret the parts of God’s revelation that teach this. If it doesn’t fit their sense of fairness that it is ultimately God’s choice, not man’s choice, as to who is redeemed and who is condemned, then they reject, ignore, or reinterpret the passages that teach this. And if their understanding of justice is violated by the idea of a God who approves of ethnic cleansing, then they reject, ignore, or reinterpret those passages, also.

The truth is, either all the Scriptures are an accurate self-revelation from God, or we can never be certain we know the true God at all. Will we accept God as he reveals himself to be, or will we only allow him to fit the mold we create? Do we trust God when he says he is loving and just and allows—even approves—the killing of millions of people? Do we submit to God as God, and recognize his right to do as he pleases with his creation? Or do we get offended at God, reject him, or reinterpret him if he violates our personal understanding of fairness or justice? Will we let God be God, or do we insist that he submit to us?

Rather than trying to defend or excuse God when he shocks and offends people, we should be unembarrassed to assert the authority of God over all. Does it offend you that God wanted the Canaanites destroyed? Well, if you don’t love this God, he’ll destroy you, too. He’s not the tame, domesticated, sophisticated God that modern people want to believe in. He is a God whose holiness and sense of justice has moved him to kill millions throughout history. He is a frightening God to those who do not belong to him, and we should not try to remove the fear of God from them by trying to make him acceptable to sinners. They need to see that the issue is not whether or not they can accept God. The issue is whether or not God will accept them. They need to stop judging God and start submitting to him.

To those who do not know him, the true God will always be frightening. But to those of us who do know him and are known by him, he is not a terror. We still fear him as we believe the Scriptural revelation of his wrath and power, but we know we are no longer under his wrath. The warrior-God who kills millions is our loving Father. We don’t judge him for being ruthless. Instead, we humbly thank him that we ourselves were not destroyed as we deserved, and we ask him to extend his grace to others. We know he is not merciless, for we have experienced his mercy. We can love and worship a God who commanded ethnic cleansing because we submit to him as Supreme, and we trust him completely when he says he is loving and just, even if his self-revelation sometimes shocks us.