Why Trust the Bible?Sample

What about all the wars in the Old Testament?

Many people wrestle with the question, How could a God of love command the wars of the Old Testament? Like the tales of violence against women that we examined yesterday, it’s hard to square some of the horrors described in the Old Testament with a view of God as our loving Father.

To begin answering this question, let me remind you first of something I pointed out yesterday: much of the Old Testament is narrative, not didactic. It neither condones nor condemns war, but simply gives an account of it.

That said, it is clear that some wars were commanded by God. How do we make sense of those? It helps to bear in mind four elements of God’s work in the world:

1. Judgment
2. Accommodation
3. Time
4. Language

In terms of judgment, both the Old and New Testaments present a moral portrait of a God who judges evil. One of the means of God’s judgement in the Old Testament is war. Sometimes God’s disobedient people are on the receiving end of His judgment; sometimes they’re His means of judging other nations. When that’s the case, He lays down for His people rules of war that centre around control, justice, fairness, and kindness in the use of the sword. Only in the exceptional case of the particularly depraved Canaanites was there to be total destruction (and only then, after centuries of time to repent). With our twenty-first-century sensibilities, we may dislike the idea that God’s judgment in the Old Testament came through violence, but if we’re honest, it’s unlikely we’d want to worship an apathetic God whose heart didn’t break for the social justice issues that break ours.

The second thing to keep in mind is that for the purposes of revelation, God accommodates Himself to us. The central and foundational idea of the Old Testament is that God invites people to freely choose to love, serve, and partner with Him. This commits Him, however, to working with us humans where we’re at, with our strengths and weaknesses and within the confines of history. Therefore, God reveals Himself progressively. Imagine a parent who gets down on the floor to play with their toddler. That makes sense when the child is very young, but as their skills and faculties grow, the way the parent interacts with them evolves as well. God’s involvement in war in the Old Testament doesn’t suggest that He is essentially violent but rather that His judgment of evil took that particular form at that particular time and has evolved in the centuries since.

Thirdly, the timing of God’s judgement is in His hands alone. The people of Israel weren’t to go around fighting others on a whim; rather, at specific points in history, particular evils needed to be ended. God was willing to wait 430 years before, as a last resort, bringing His judgment upon the violent culture of the Amorites. Scripture reveals God is patient, not quick to condemn.

Finally, biblical language needs to be carefully considered if we’re to understand the wars recorded in the Old Testament. Rhetoric is key to any text (for example, we see metaphor and hyperbole employed in Joshua 10:40). We use these same techniques when we tell a friend that our sports team annihilated or crushed the opposition.

If we zoom out and look at the big picture, God’s overarching goal is to bring blessing and salvation to all nations. For a specific, relatively short, strategic time period, God sought to establish the nation of Israel with a view to fulfilling His long-term global goal of redemption. In so doing, He would also punish a group of people with His judgment after they had been given hundreds of years to repent. The hard-to-swallow passages of the Old Testament detailing periods of war aren’t a reason to doubt the Bible or the loving God who inspired it. May you be comforted by the truth that God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. He is wrathful because He is love.