JOS-02 Victorious Conquest (1:1 - 12:24)

How could a loving God command Joshua to completely destroy the inhabitants of Canaan?

In Joshua, God commands the destruction of the Canaanites, not because it’s the ideal. I mean, the ideal is love your enemies and win them to Christ, but obviously that wasn’t an option available in the time of Joshua. If they didn’t destroy their enemies, they were going to be infiltrated by pagan customs — for example, the killing of babies who were then often sacrificed and buried in urns and so on. We’ve found the remains of where Canaanites have done that. Also, anything less than total war would not have eliminated them, which is what we see happening. They didn’t have total war, they didn’t eliminate them, the Canaanites didn’t flee, and so those influences did infiltrate Israel… In Genesis 15, God said that this wouldn’t happen, the conquest of Canaan wouldn’t happen, until the Amorites had become wicked enough for it to happen. At this point it’s kind of like a corporate capital punishment that God is executing on this society.

There is a very important question, a very, very important and sensitive question that asks, how should we as believers understand the genocides in the Old Testament… First, for the sake of argument, let’s say that the God of the universe has the right to destroy all people. Because all have sinned against God, he has the right, with full justice and without blame, to destroy us. Without exception, there is no one among us who does not deserve condemnation. He has the right to condemn… However, towards evil, he has always been patient. In other words, he waited patiently until the sin of the Amorites was complete. Or to put it another way, if God had punished them before the allotted time, that would have been wrong, or after the time, it would have been wrong. But he is always on time to fulfill his promise to condemn sin and evil… But there is another thing Scripture reveals. The same Holy Scripture that gives us an image in the Old Testament about God’s justice and holiness, this same God took on a human nature and hung on the cross, so that he would, in himself, experience the same punishment that he inflicted on the people of Canaan. He took it by himself, on himself. He is the same God, the same, totally the same… There is a former terrorist who told me this phrase — he came to believe in Christ and told me this phrase — he said, “Terrorists claim that we die for the sake of God, while the message of the gospel is the opposite: God died for us. The situation is quite different.” So, the genocide in the Old Testament is an image of God’s holiness. It only occurred once and allowed us to understand the suffering that he endured, so that this doesn’t happen again, so there will be everlasting life. It’s an image about love, about how much God loves us. He showed us the suffering he experienced in order that we would be saved forever. The wrath was absorbed. The revealed wrath became absorbed wrath through Jesus Christ. Hallelujah!