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You’re tired.
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Hey dad, tired. We are continuing a conversation about the question that kind of permeates a lot of minds, particularly if you're, if you're new to Christianity or you haven't studied it much. And you might get caught up with someone asking you a question about the morality of God in the Old Testament.
The conversation kind of goes like this. Well, Jesus seems to be kind of this cool, peace loving guy, and if, if he is the same in nature as the God of the Old Testament, what happened between the old and the New Testament? Did, did God chill out a little bit? Or you've got Jesus like walking around and kissing babies and raising people from the dead and being kind and gentle and crying with people who were losing loved ones.
I. It, the, the Bible tells us that he and the father are the same. That they're one in their nature, they're one in their character. And so it kind of leads to the question, what do you do then with this Old Testament God who permits the killing of, uh, whole people groups that, um, permits polygamy, that permits these things?
And that's kind of the oversimplified version of it as we're told it. And it was something that tripped me up early on in Christianity, but. What I recognized is even a cursory understanding of much of the conversation led to an a, a, a way of recognizing and rectifying this idea of God being different in the Old New Testament.
And today we're gonna tackle, um, we talked about slavery a couple weeks back, and today we're talking. About the moments that Richard Dawkins would say that God is an ethnic cleanser, or Christopher Hitchens and the God delusion accuses God of being, uh, the God of the Old Testament, of being someone who's, um, racist and intent on wiping out whole people groups.
Now, on the, on the most basic level, some of the ridiculousness of this just has to do with. What we talked about previously, which is the, an logia, S scriptura or the s scriptura, an logia, which is an analogy of scripture. What, what does that tell us? That tells us, it it people popping up. Of different ethnicities or of different skin colors or anything else like that.
The idea that that was somehow outside of God's design or that different people groups or languages would be problematic for God is it just represents a total lack of information when it comes to reading the scriptures. The book of Revelation tells us that around the throne of God forever will be people of every nation.
Tribe and tongue, different languages, different people groups, different races, different um, ethnic backgrounds. He considers that a beautiful thing. So it's not, it doesn't have to do with people's skin color, it doesn't have to do with people's, um, where they come from on planet Earth. The idea of that is, is so bonkers and just represents a misunderstanding of everything happening.
And so what I want to give for you today is an, an answer to the question in five points, what do we do? With the, uh, occasionally questioned morally, supposedly suspect character of the God of the Old Testament. So I'll give you five points on why you can rest assured that the God of the Old Testament's morality being unquestion is not just a fundamental misunderstanding of the text and of the language and of history, but also puts us in a really strange.
Position that if God isn't our moral compass, then what is? And putting God on trial, while we seem as people just intent, we don't need a God to do it. There was, there's more bloodshed and murder and, uh, genocide that took place in the 20th century under atheistic communist regimes than in the previous 19th centuries combined.
And so it, it just seems very, uh, like a taxi cab fallacy where you wanna make a point about one thing, but. Unwilling to recognize and turn around and see, um, if, if, well, if, if, if God of the Old Testament is like this, I want nothing to do with Christianity. I'm gonna be an atheist instead, but they're not really challenging atheism and saying, well, if atheism has produced, uh, murder to the tune of 120 million people just in the 19 hundreds, uh, that's a larger body count than anything else.
There's a, a study done of. The encyclopedia of wars that demonstrated that a fractional amount of every war in history had to do with actual religious, uh, was actually a religious war. And so the other 90 whatever percent of them. To reject Christianity on the altar of, well, uh, there's too much bloodshed.
Well, you, you couldn't be anything then. You couldn't be an atheist. You couldn't be an agnostic. You couldn't be a communist. You couldn't be. The real truth of it is, is that murder is in the heart of mankind and wickedness in the heart of mankind naturally. And God dealing with that in the Old Testament is.
Way different than the genocide or the ide or the, uh, racism of, um, Hitler and Whole Pot and Mao and, uh, Mussolini and all these other people. So let's jump into it. These are five points to reject the idea of God being morally suspect in the Old Testament. The first one is this, when you read different accounts of God.
Asking the Israelite people to annihilate a group. The Amalekites is a famous one, the Canaanites, Deuteronomy seven, the Amalekites one, Samuel 15, the Midianites numbers 31 verse seven through 11. When God commands those things, he, when you read the passages, the first point I would make to you is that the Bible is using.
Harem, H-E-R-E-M, ancient near Eastern War language. The Bible is using harem, ancient near Eastern war language that is meant to be understood. A hyperbolic sense. The Bible uses harem ancient near Eastern war language that is meant to be understood in a hyperbolic sense. What does that mean? That means that when the Bible is talking about these things, lemme just read these, a couple of these for you and, and help us to jump into the context here.
The Amalekites, I. Uh, one Samuel 15, verse three. Paul or God is talking to King Saul and says, now go Saul. Uh, Saul was king of Israel, the first king of Israel. Then came David, then came David's son Solomon. I. God tells Saul back in one Samuel 15, verse three, he says this, now, go Saul. Attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them.
Do not spare them put to death. Men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camel and donkeys. It says that, but the problem is later on. Never is Saul rebuked for having not accomplished that task. And guess what happens in one Samuel 27 verse eight and nine, David Saul's predecessor, it says this, now, David and his men went up and rated the The Gsites, the Gers, and the Amalekites.
Wait, hold on. Who are the Amalekites? Wait, no, no, no, no. There. There's no more Amalekites because clearly in one Samuel of 15, three, God told them to utterly destroy everything, men and women, children, infants, cattle and sheep. And and they did. And yet here we are, 12 chapters later, later on in history under King David, he goes up and raids the Amalekites.
And then it says this, whenever David attacked an area, he did not leave a man or a woman alive. Problem with that first Samuel chapter 30 verse one, David and his men. This was his. Later, three chapters later, David and his men reached Ziklag. On the third day, the Amalekites had raid the Negev and Ziklag.
Wait a minute, twice it says they were all destroyed. Not a man or woman was left alive, and here they are again. Well, guess what? The same person who wrote all this, it's not like he forgot what he wrote first Samuel 30 verse 17. This is 16 verses later. David fought them from dusk until the evening of the day and none of them got away except 400 young men who wrote off on camels and fled.
Okay, so I. He's three different times. It says he annihilates all of them. And in the last one it just tells you, except there's 400 young men who wrote off well on camels. All of that was supposed to be destroyed. The men were supposed to be destroyed. The women were supposed to be destroyed. So who's still standing?
I. The explanation is this, even though Saul was commanded to totally destroy the Amalekites, they clearly existed later and were raid Israelite town during David's time. This shows that the wor the term utter destruction and men, women, child, infant, sheep, cattles, and donkeys, and no, what man or woman was left alive, was not literal, but was a common hyperbolic way.
Hyperbolic is if you said like, I'm always tired, or I never get the first slice of pizza, or she literally was talking to me forever. That's all hyperbole. And it was very common in the time of the Old Testament for people and kings and historians to talk like this. So what we find is God doing something really cool in human history.
He's condescending and anthropomorphizing. That means he's speaking the language of mankind for them to understand the way that kings and generals and war language would've spoken in the same way, like if God came and was witnessing to us in modern day culture. And he said, go tell everyone the good news about, uh, the gospel and when you do godspeed and break a leg.
Now, if you read that 3000 years from now, you'd be like, hold on. So we have to break legs before we can share the gospel. No, no, no. He's speaking the language of the time. Or if he said, man, you really hit a home run there. Uh, if you read this 3000 years later, you would go. Oh, hold on. A home run, run a ho.
We have to do, how do you run home? How? What's a home run? If they didn't know baseball, they didn't know analogy. And so we have to remember that the Bible is written at a place in time and when everyone else is using this language, this is what God's doing. The Canaanites another example. There's a command for utter destruction.
Deuteronomy seven verse one and two. When the Lord, your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations, the Hittites, Gsites, Amorites, Canaanites, parasites, hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you. And when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, you must destroy them totally.
Joshua 10 40. So Joshua subdued the whole region, including the hill country, the Negev, the western foothills, and the mountain slopes together with all the kings. He left. No survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed just as the Lord, the God of Israel commanded. All right, so they're gone. Bummer.
There go the Canaanites, Gsites, Amorites, parasites, ides, Shiites. They're all gone. They're all dead. He left. No survivors. Okay, so later on in judges one verse 27 and 28 says this, but Bon NASA did not drive at the people of bet Sean or to knock or door or a blame or Medo, and their surrounding settlements for the Canaanites were determined to live in the land.
Wait a minute. They're back. Canaanites can't be back. If they're utterly destroyed, how would they still be in existence? Man, woman, child. Totally destroyed. He left. No survivors, so they should be gone. Wiped out. When Israel became strong, they pressed the Canaanites into forced labor, but never drove them out completely.
Wait a minute, they didn't. They didn't even drive them out completely. I thought they murdered him all completely. How is this different? So judges two, one through three, the angel of the Lord. I went to Bokeem and said, I brought you out of Egypt and led you into the land. I swore to give your ancestors. I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land, but you shall break down their altars.
Yet you have disobeyed me. Why have you done this? And I asked you, I will not drive them. I, I have also said, I will not drive them out before you. They will become traps for you and their gods will become snares to you. So not only they're not all dead, God doesn't even drive them out completely. So even though Joshua 10 40 says there was no survivors and everyone was utterly destroyed, all that breathed, the book of Judges continues to tell us how God instructs the people to interact with the Canaanites still living in the land.
Showing again that the language in Joshua is hyperbolic rather than literal. So does this mean God is lying? Is Joshua being deceptive? Did this person who wrote first Samuel 15 not write the later chapters? Is this con, is this contradictory language? Is this, no, it's condescending, anthropomorphic. God is speaking the language of the time in the ancient He East.
There's other examples of this exact same rhetoric style. I'll give you an example. Um, Egypt's Mosi III in the 15th century BC boasted that the army of Mitani was overthrown within the hour. Annihilated totally. And now we non-existent. The problem is. They're elsewhere in the later annals of history for being a fighting force.
Clear into the 14th and 13th centuries bc Uh, here's one that has our name on it as believers Rames II in 1230 BC declared this. This is on the EPT to steely. It's a, um, um, an ancient steely that was found, or steel that was found, and it is inscribing into it. It says this. Israel is laid waste. His seed no longer exists in 1230 bc but is that true?
No. I can show you Israel today. I can show you those same people are still living all around the world today. Moabs King Mesha in eight 40 bc. This is later. So this is after Ramsey said Everyone in Israel is dead. Moabs King Mesha 400 years later said, I have destroyed Israel, and they have been perished for all time.
Even though the closest thing to the destruction of Israel is probably Assyria actually in 7 22 BC where they still weren't destroyed, this happens again and again. So God is using ancient ne and that's the first thing God is using hyperbolic harem. Harem means, um, people prepared for destruction.
Ancient Tian war language. It is not to be understood. Literally. The second thing is this. That's the first point. The second point is this. The remarkable difference between ethnic cleansing or racism and purging of a people group because they look different than you or act different than you, is profoundly different than the good king, the God of the universe, bringing judgment on profound wickedness.
Again, the war language idea, but also one Samuel 15, two through three. There's judgment on the Amalekites. The Amalekites longstanding aggression against Israel warranted divine justice. Christopher Wright, who's a biblical ethicist, writes this as a historian. The Canaanites were not innocent. They regularly practiced, child sacrificed, and they ritualized violence to the bales and to their gods.
Gleason Archer is a biblical scholar and linguist and wrote this, the destruction of the Canaanites was a judgment on an extremely corrupt and degenerate culture. I. We find out in one Samuel 15, two and three that when God says, I'm going to punish the Amalekites for what? Because they're dark skin. I'm gonna punish the Amalekites because they're not they, they don't look like my people.
I'm gonna punish the Amalekites 'cause I wanna get one less ethnicity. Off the war. Off the planet. Nope. I will punish the Amalekites for what they have done to Israel. Now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. This aligns not with ethnic cleansing, but with a righteous and just, and holy God pronouncing punishment after giving them so much time to turn, which is our point Number three, God gave.
Extraordinary opportunity for repentance and mercy. Joshua two, eight through 14 and 6 25, God provides escape routes to Jericho, Uhha, and her family in Jericho. He gives escape routes. He gives mercy. We find out that people in all these different groups turned away and were spared by God. Richard Hess is a Old Testament scholar and archeologist writes this.
The narratives includes examples of Canaanites who turn to the God of Israel, and they are spared. I. How long did the people of Jericho have to turn to God? Hundreds, 500 years. People in Jericho have heard the stories, have understood that they've been asked to move and to retreat and to stop interfering with what God is doing.
And they refuse. They do not turn. They worship foreign gods. They, they have sacrifices that are inappropriate in God's eyes. They, um, they sacrifice. Children on the high places, they're whipping themselves. Like in Elijah, Mount Carmel, the Baal, the prophets of Baal. This is not God's people. This is not God's morality.
John Walton, the biblical historian, writes Rahab's story proves that destruction was not indiscriminate. The, the, the thing about Egypt, any Egyptian in the Exodus who put blood on their doorpost was spared. Not every Egyptian had to sit there while Egyptians was destroyed. If they listened to. To God, listen to Yahweh, they were spared Rahab's story proves that destruction was not indiscriminate.
Mercy was extended to those who acknowledged God. So it's really hard to say these people were just walking around innocently mining their own business and here comes God indiscriminately, ethnically cleansing. Well just, you gotta read the text. Okay. Um, in the historical record. We find the same thing taking place from the Babylonian story of Lulu Ben Nki in 1700 BCE.
The same thing kind of takes place. Divine favor is restored after the Joe Blake character seeks mercy. There's a Babylonian tale called the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, uh, where divine restoration happens after repentance, and this falls directly in line with what God is doing if you. If you repent, you will be spared.
If you, if, if Jericho decides to leave and stop invading the land, God doesn't go and chase them down and do anything. Um, so the Joshua 6 25, but Joshua spared Ray have the prostitute with her family and all who belonged to her because she hid the men Joshua had sent and had believed in Yahweh. That's what she's credited with in Hebrews 11 also.
So this demonstrates God's willingness to spare those who turn to him. So it was not indiscriminate. It wasn't, let me see your DNA. Yeah, you're dead. Absolutely not. Also to recognize that when you look at the places that God is asking them to attack, like Jericho, Jericho was a fortified city where the vast majority, if not every single person in there would've been a military.
Personnel. It was not the average civilian that was living un behind the guarded area, but Jericho was on a pathway to that, that people didn't, didn't wall in their whole uh, 'cause you had to go outside of the walls. You had to do so besieging. It was way different than annihilating men and women and children.
That was not what we see take place. We see the hyperbole in it, and a lot of the places that God calls them to attack are military outposts and not like the preschool and the daycare. So we just gotta make sure that we understand those things. Jericho itself was a four acre piece of property. It did not represent everyone in the land all in one place.
It was a military outpost. I. So number four, the fourth thing. So the first thing, ancient nu and war language. Second thing, this is judgment on wickedness. The third is they were given opportunity for repentance. Number four is they were gradually de displaced. Displaced, not immediately annihilated the gradual conquest of Canaan.
If you read Exodus 23, 29 through 30, the conquest was slow. It allowed inhabitants to leave. Okay, Kenneth Kitchen. Here's an Egyptologist writes this. The conquest that is recorded and demonstrated in the archeological record was a slow process with many Canaanite cities continuing to exist for some time.
James Hoffmeyer archeologist writes evidence, supports a gradual infiltration rather than a swift military conquest. This is what he, this is what is written by God in Exodus 2330. Little by little I will drive them out before you until you have increased enough to take possession of the land. This aligns with ancient near Eastern practices of thus gradual displacement, and also demonstrates the harem war language being different than the reality of everything.
Number five. Did I say five things? Great. I'll say five things. The fifth thing is this God calling for this annihilation was to protect and to prevent cultural and religious corruption. His fear ultimately was not just that the Amalekites were sacrificing people in their own town, but that they would.
Yes, there was a sense in which God brought his people to come and be a moralistic policeman to the other nations where innocent women and children were being raped and murdered and sacrificed. So yes, God did use them like a police force, but he also had a concern that the surrounding nations were going to begin to infiltrate and change the morality of Israel.
And in doing so, changing the promised uh, movement of God, restoring. Mankind through Israel, his chosen nation. Deuteronomy chapter 20 verse 18 was an avoidance of Canaanite idolatry. So the destruction aimed to prevent Israel from adopting Canaanite idolatry falls in line with God being very concerned that his people are not beginning to adopt these processes.
And as someone now sitting in the 21st century who's grateful that I was able to hear the message of the gospel that was carried through the people of Israel. And so God protecting them in order to preserve everyone in the future who would turn to the gospel for me is a far cry from thinking that God is unjust or unmerciful as someone who benefits from that.
I'm very grateful that he used them as moral police against uh, I mean, could you imagine being in Canaan and then all of a sudden here comes God's people coming to exterminate these military outposts where people are sacrificing children. I would be grateful for that. And we see the same thing now, we see almost an obligation for nations that are either wealthy or they're powerful, that we, we believe that they have a responsibility to take care of the moral injustice around the world.
And that's what God was using with the Israelites over and over again. And the extermination of the Canaanites was necessary to prevent Israel from falling into idolatry. This is what Merrill Unger, who's a biblical archeologist, wrote. And lastly, Eugene Merrill Old Testament scholar writes The Canaanite religion was so debased and corrupted that its continued existence posed a severe threat to Israel's spiritual health.
The mesh steely actually, uh, confirms this at eight 40 BCE we found a piece of archeology that said the Moabite King actually claimed that his God mosh drove out Israel to protect Moabite worship. So the Assyrians, likewise in the royal inscriptions of the ninth century, BCE, Assyrians justified conquest by claiming they were getting rid of.
Religious corruption, Deuteronomy 2018. Otherwise, if you don't destroy them, they will teach you to follow the dete detestable things they do in worshiping their gods. It's ultimately God's perfect authority and divine morality that instructs. When we read the Old Testament, we have to remember it's really easy to sit behind American coffee cups or wherever around the world.
You're listening to this and simply say, God should be a God of this and that and the other. But. We didn't live then. We weren't watching our pregnant, um, uh, wives being picked off at the ba. This is what they were doing. The Amalekites would wait until the strong men of Israel had walked by in their, um, procession and the weak and infirm at the back of their, the Israelite procession.
The women who were pregnant, people with disabilities, the elderly, they would come and wait and they would capture and murder them. It would be very different, I think for us to create any sort of moral categories about God being wrong. If I told you your children, your grandmother and your pregnant wife just got picked off by the Amalekites and they were went and sacrificed on an alter to the bales.
You wouldn't have a lot of problem with God going, that's it. They become a extension. My nostrils. You're gonna go take them out. I, it, it is very, it's much easier to talk about morality sitting here, not having been a part of it, or seeing firsthand the destruction of some of these people at the end of the day.
As creator, God holds the moral authority over life and death. And I want you to think of it like this for us, because the human condition and, and us for whatever season of life, however long our life is, we get to exist in the flesh. I. Remember that in God's economy, the human soul, when it's created is never destroyed.
So when a man dies or when a woman dies or anything else happens, God is just transitioning the soul from a body into another body, into its eternal state. So. We also have to remember that when, when, when God, uh, let's, you know, uh, talk about in the Book of Job where God takes job's, family, he's transitioning a group of Jewish people from their state in the flesh to their state in the spirit forever, and it would be really hard to say he doesn't have the right to do so, or that he's not merciful in doing so or whatever.
Right. It would be like if I've got. Um, a thousand dollars in this bank account and I transferred into, into that bank account. It all belongs to me. It's my money. I can do with it what I please, and yet God is still sub subject to his own morality. Murder is always wrong. It's, it's wrong for God to do. To commit murder, but God can't commit murder.
He can transition a life from one state to the other state. But murder has to do with intent. God does not kill people because he goes, um, I couldn't control my blood lust, or, no, God has a moral, a morally righteous reason to do anything. And we recognize that even in our culture, we find morally right reasons for the taking of human life.
Romans 13, the, the country is given the permission to carry the sword. Defense of a home invasion if someone's trying to kill my kid, and death is the only way I can prevent it. I'm given that permission even in a, a modern comfort society. We recognize that as being just, and God's taking of life is always just because he's the author and perfecter and giver of life.
Alvin Plana, who's a, uh, philosopher, maybe the most brilliant philosopher of our generation, if God is sovereign and perfectly good, his commands are just, even if we don't understand his reasons. William Lane Craig is one of my favorite. Apologist writes, God as the author of life, has the prerogative to give and to take life according to his purposes, even if we don't understand it.
So Job 1 21, the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. May the name of the Lord be praised. So he prevents religious corruption. Obviously he has divine and moral authority. He has. There's a gradual displacement over an immediate annihilation. There's opportunities for repentance and mercy. There's a judgment of profound wickedness and first and foremost.
When it talks about the slaughter of this, it's using a REM ancient Near Eastern War language that is meant to be understood as hyperbolic and not as literal. Hopefully, this is helpful as we begin to navigate this for our kids, with our family members, even maybe in ourselves. How do we worship a God who could command ethnic cleansing?
I hope this is a really good example of how that's not what we see here. We see a God who loves and preserves his people to bring about his kingdom purposes, to save mankind from their sins, protecting his chosen people in Israel from the corruption. He's executing judgment on their wickedness. He's patient and long suffering with them.
But there is an end to his patience, and we see that taking place time and time again in the Old Testament. Hopefully this has been helpful for you. Um, again, if you have any questions, feel free to email me, Chris at Dad, tired. We're really grateful to have you guys listening into this. I know that there's a lot of dads out there.
A lot of, um, what I'm finding here, even in San Diego at my church is a lot of young adults that are just these young men who want to become better dads in the future. Even so some young women, and I know a lot of you moms sneak in here too, and we're just, we're really grateful to have you and to, especially for some of these conversations that have to do with how do we.
Answer these difficult questions about the Bible and God and morality. So hopefully this was helpful for you guys. As always, we love you here at Dad Tired, and we're grateful you guys are part of our community.