Is God a Moral Monster?

A second point to remember is that this was a divine, God-ordained action. In other words, it was God’s call to make. Not just the punishment, but the possession of the land—who He was going to give that land to. Israel didn’t have an inherent right to the land. Neither did the Canaanites. But God did. He could give it to whomever He wanted. So if someone says, “I can’t believe God kicked the Canaanites out and gave away their land,” an appropriate response is, “What do you mean by ‘their land’?” This was God’s land. He made it. He could do with it whatever He wanted to do. Israel would never have been justified in doing this had God not ordered it. But God did. So don’t think about this as a simple invasion of one nation by another. Or a strong army beating a weaker army, as if strength or desire gives anyone the right to be aggressive. You’ll never find that in the Bible. This was God saying: “I’m telling you, this land is now yours. It is not theirs.”

But there’s a third observation to make here, and it’s about the command to “destroy every living thing” in the cities. When you read something like that it sounds over the top and unnecessary even for divine judgement. But the command was for the cities, not the outlying areas. This is a critical point. In the culture of the ancient Near East, most people lived in outlying areas, not the cities. The cities were military fortifications for soldiers and military officers. It’s not where the women and children, farmers and laborers lived. So in terms of warfare, this was not about targeting civilians. Also, in the ancient language of the day, even the phrase about destroying everyone in the city was common hyperbole. It wasn’t about literally taking every life, but ensuring that the war was won, the enemy defeated, the task accomplished. Think how in our day we talk about a sports team that blew their opponent away, or slaughtered them, or annihilated them. It’s a form of rhetoric. When you study the language of the ancient Near Eastern cultures, this was very common. They would talk about how they destroyed every man and then later talk about what they were going to do with their survivors. In other words, destroying everything meant winning decisively, not literally destroying everything. This was more about purifying than purging.

Which brings up the final point to remember in all this, one that is unavoidable: it’s the idea of God’s wrath. And that may be what bothers us the most. That God is a God angry with evil, at war with evil, livid with evil. It is as if we have determined God has no right to any emotion but love. And, if He does express anger, we have a bad or immoral God on our hands. But why does an angry God bother us so much? I once read some penetrating words on this from Yale theologian Miroslav Volf. He was born in Croatia and lived through the nightmare years of ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia—a time that included the destruction of churches, the raping of women, and the murdering of innocents. He once thought that wrath and anger were beneath God, but he said he came to realize that his view of God had been too low:

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in 100 days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.

Yes.

This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.