I will continue my examination God’s command to slay entire nations. Yesterday I responded to the defenses that suggested this never actually happened, that either God was exaggerating, or that He was incorrectly attributed as the source of those commands when, in fact, they came from man. I generally dismissed these arguments, but I do find the next two categories of defense far more compelling. Today, I will look at the defenses that say that such a slaughter is justified. Here are two examples of this argument:

1. God has every right to take life, and to use whatever means He chooses, be it a flood, a meteorite, or the armies of His chosen nation.
2. The destruction of the evil is karmic. “Those that live by the sword, die by the sword.” These nations were evil and had caused violence, even upon the innocent, and so they reaped the consequence of violence, even against their innocents.

I think this is a credible position, and it brings to light some interesting realizations. It helps me to recognize that I, and I think many others, are accepting of terrible things happening as a result of karma, or nature, or some sort of cosmic law. If people reap destruction by foolishly testing the forces of nature, it is still just as tragic, but we don’t typically blame the passionless and impersonal hurricane, tornado, or force of gravity for it. The laws of human morality simply do not apply to those forces of nature. Where we struggle, though, is when that force of nature becomes personalized in the form of God.

Christians do believe that there is such a cosmic force of justice which is laid at the very foundation of nature, and which gives the wicked their due, but we also believe that that cosmic force is one and the same as God. And even though we separate that God as being of an entirely different order from ourselves, we still see Him as a person, and we subconsciously apply our own morals and emotions onto Him. We are not supposed to kill the family of our bitter enemy, so we feel that neither should a person-like God.

I do believe that this point of conflict depends on one’s conception of exactly who and what God is. The less that God falls under the category of “just another person,” the more we stop applying the rules of “just another person” to Him.

However, that does still leave a point of discomfort with the passages where God orders the destruction of the Canaanites. Even if we come to view God as being of a separate order that the laws of human morality do not apply to, that is not the case for the Israelite soldiers who actually carried out the slaughter. When God rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, when He sent the flood in the time of Noah, surely there were many innocents that died, but at least God carried out those actions by His own hand. Or maybe it was the earth that carried out those actions based on the designs God had laid at its foundation. But for the wars between the Israelites and the Canaanites, it was men with swords that carried out the destruction, and that is a much harder pill to swallow.

Of course, we also bestow our governments with the freedom to carry out great acts of destruction that we feel the common humanity should not wield, and then those governments employ our own populace as soldiers to carry out that task. So, to some degree we are already allowing for the act of destruction to be delegated from a higher authority to the common man. We even allow for the fact that even a moral war is sure to have collateral damage and destroy some of the innocent.

Summary)

I’ve been on one side of this argument and then the other, and in the end, I am still left divided. On the one hand, I really do think these defenses of God’s commands have a solid foundation. They are logical, and they point out that these passages are similar to other acts of destruction that we accept, such as the destruction caused by nature and a justified war.

However, even if I accept these arguments intellectually, I still feel an unease about the whole thing. Some of that might be due to a fundamental misconception I have of who and what God really is, but I don’t think that accounts for all of it. I believe the remaining unease comes when I shift from thinking of the destruction of an entire nation to thinking of the individual destruction of a single innocent. At the macro level I can see the downfall of a corrupt nation which serves the greater good, but at the micro level I see an innocent baby being killed. Let us see tomorrow if the third defense for God’s commands can help me here.