Defending the Wrath of God

When God gave instructions to Joshua to conquer the land of Canaan, He generally said to kill everyone including women and children. Sometimes even the animals were to be slaughtered. This seems excessive. It is certainly offensive to most modern peoples’ sense of justice or fairness. I wrote about the mental conflict this causes several years ago in Daily Bible Reading. In that article I pondered how one could explain God’s wrath to an unsaved neighbor. I concluded somewhat weakly that we had to let God be God and stop trying to understand the incomprehensible.

There are reasons we can give for God’s harsh instructions to Joshua. For one thing, we know that the people inhabiting the promised land were there under God’s judgment. God told Abraham that neither he nor his immediate descendants would inhabit the land God promised because, “the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.” Amorites was a catch-all name for the various people groups that lived in the land of Canaan. Either God was exhibiting the patience Paul speaks of hoping for repentance, or He knew they would eventually get so bad they would have to be wiped out. This answer won’t satisfy a modern non-believer, but it is justifiable to anyone who believes in the sovereignty of God.

Another reason why God wanted Joshua to exterminate virtually every living person in the conquered land was because God knew the Israelites would be tempted to intermarry with the indigenous people (a forbidden act) and to follow the pagan gods they worshipped. Both of those things occurred, and there is a curious reason given by God to explain why He let Joshua get away with only partial genocide in several cases. In the book of Judges, God admits He left some of the pagans, “in order to test Israel whether or not they would observe the way of Yahweh, to walk in it just as their ancestors did.” Again, this is an unsatisfying explanation if you are not willing to let God write His own script for the plan of redemption.

The incident that sparked this visit to the topic is a dream that I woke from early this morning. I couldn’t recall the details of the dream, but when I awoke, I heard myself defending God’s reasoning for total extermination of the Canaanites. I explained that God knew that the pagan gods worshipped by the people in the promised land were actually demons posing as gods. Paul supports this idea telling the Corinthians that the things pagans sacrifice, “they sacrifice to demons and not to God.” This reveals the fact that the land was infested with allies of Satan, God’s arch enemy. Eliminating the people who worshipped the demons was part of the cosmic battle being waged through the millennia. (For more on the battle see America is Not the Promised Land and It’s Not All About You)

God’s harsh treatment of the demon worshippers also had a benefit to Israel beyond the cosmic victory. If the people had been allowed to remain, the demons they worshipped would also be present because demons often inhabited people. This may also explain why in some instances God insisted that they kill all the animals too. We have only to remember when Jesus cast the demons out of the Gadarene demoniac; the demons asked to be allowed to enter a nearby herd of pigs. It is a reasonable, even loving act by God to require the extermination of anything that would permit His enemy to have a foothold in or near His people.

We don’t talk much about demons these days even in our churches. There is a line of reasoning that says demonic activity accelerated during the time of Christ on earth due to the importance of the events of the day. This seems to avoid the obvious fact that the demons were there in the centuries before the incarnation, and there is no reason to think that they suddenly became extinct at the Cross of Calvary. Paul did tell the Colossians that Christ triumphed over the evil powers on the cross, but he also reminded the Ephesian believers that our battle continues primarily against wickedness in the spiritual realm. Until Christ puts all the enemies under His feet, the battle rages. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis aptly pointed out that there is no better strategy for the enemy of our souls than to make us believe he doesn’t exist. The cosmic battle continues; we are pawns in that war whether we know it or not.

Getting queasy about the wrath of God is a corollary to ignoring the spiritual battle that we all participate in. If we honestly regarded the faces of evil we encounter in our daily lives, I don’t think we would despise the wrath of God that is due His enemy. We are soft on sin, and we deny the depth to which it has pervaded our society. My woke neighbors will hate me for saying this, but when political correctness becomes a cloak for evil, we have surrendered the field without firing a shot.

Paul made the point clearly in the first chapter of Romans: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all impiety and unrighteousness of people, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” The silence of believers concerning the “impiety and unrighteousness of people” gives aid and comfort to the enemy. I know that vengeance belongs to the Lord, not me. But if I don’t warn people of the wrath to come, don’t I become complicit in their evil deeds? Their destiny is in their hands, but should we not tell them what’s coming? According to Jesus, and Paul and Peter (quoting the Psalmist), genuine Christian witness will never win a popularity contest, but you have to ask yourself this: do you want to be popular, or do you want to be right? I like the tone of the old Rich Mullins song: “Our God is an Awesome God”. His wrath is part of what makes Him so awesome. We can celebrate that with no shame whatsoever. 

Related posts: Not Our Father’s God; That’s Not God; The Goodness of Wrath