We didn’t like the shallow religion of the previous generation, so we implicitly vowed to kill it off in favor of something new. Whether or not the new thing was healthy wasn’t even part of the equation we were writing on our walls. If it weren’t for God's love toward His bride, we would have succeeded. God is good even to us, and us: those who almost killed Christianity in my generation and those who implicitly vowed to be religion’s last breath in response.
God has also killed, hasn’t He? Why would a good God command that anyone be killed? What do the rocks have to say about that? This is probably one of the more difficult questions for the Christian to consider. The fact of the matter is, there is a time in Scripture when the Israelites came out of Egypt and God commanded them to destroy entire nations as they made their way to and entered the Promised Land. Entire nations! What causes alarms to ring in the minds of many people (including myself) is that the same God who commands some killing also gives a command to the nation of Israel not to murder (Exodus 20:13). With a command like this, we must decide whether we believe God is just in His own action or whether we believe He is not. If God is just, what does this mean for the faith and the trust that we place in Him? I guess we could ask Nietzsche. He would know the answer for sure now. Did the philosopher meet his maker or cease to exist? Is God dead?
Why do we prefer soft truth with our hard drinks? Let’s flip the pages of the book sitting open behind your scotch to Deuteronomy 7:1-11.
A hard truth…
What exactly does that mean? We have grown accustomed to these hard drinks, drinks that some abuse in order to forget the hard truths. A hard truth is not something difficult to understand. It is a truth that has a hard consistency, and truth that cannot be reasonably overlooked. Like the rocks in your glass.
In this part of Israel’s history, we do read that God commanded the complete destruction of the Canaanite tribes who inhabited the promised land. Here, we need to make a very important realization. There is no story in Scripture, no reporting of events, that exists out of context. What is context? The fact that the Bourbon used in my Old Fashioned was distilled in Kentucky means much about the taste that is produced. Just as prohibition had a direct impact on the current popularity of moonshine in East Tennessee and the use of grape juice instead of wine in communion. Thomas Welch marketed to churches intentionally even before prohibition, though. It was nothing more than a business move and still we find the popular brand in Christian book stores. Still, instead of wine, as Jesus had and as churches had before our friend Thomas’ business venture, churches purchase juice from the Welches company. The reason we have grape juice is not a biblical one. Kopi Luwak is so expensive because of the long, unorthodox process used to grow and transform the beans (though I haven’t worked up the nerve to try it and am not sure I ever will). Context is important. The events described in Scripture are always a result of their own history and their own current circumstances. In our day, there is nothing that occurs without the past events that have led to its occurrence. We left because we are responding to something. There is now a greater emphasis on reaching us because we left. Those attempts fall on deaf ears because people weren’t real with us before. Why would they change? Oh, yeah. Sanctification.
There is always a context. In some cases, we are not provided with context. We are provided a description of an event and we are left to induce or discover the underlying context and circumstances. In the case of the destruction of the Canaanites, the book open here in front of us actually does give us context for God’s command. We find this specific context in Genesis 15:7, 13-16. The pages sound like those flip books that got really popular in the 90’s.
He also said to him, “I am Yahweh who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to possess…” Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain: Your offspring will be foreigners in a land that does not belong to them; they will be enslaved and oppressed 400 years. However, I will judge the nation they serve, and afterward they will go out with many possessions. But you will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a ripe old age. In the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
In this earlier part of the story, God brings Abraham to the land of Canaan and tells him that the land would be reserved for his descendants (the Israelites). When God brought Abraham to show him the land, the iniquity of the Amorites (which was a Canaanite tribe) had not been completed. In fact, God, in His omniscience (that means all-knowledge), revealed that it would be at least 400 more years before the Amorites would complete their iniquities and the Israelites would be brought back to the land to inhabit it. God gave the Amorite people 400 years to repent and turn to Him and they did not. This sounds a whole lot more like mercy and grace than vindictiveness to me. I know that I do not often have the patience or the grace to give someone one year to apologize, let alone 400. Perhaps this is a fault that we all have, but God practices great mercy before administering right punishment. In one generation we tried to kill what we did not like and bring something new. We are not gods after all. We have criticized God for not showing mercy, when it is us who have not been merciful. What was that about our fallen and wretched condition? Context is so important for us to understand any time we read any document, especially this book sitting in front of us.
The two hard truths we see in this text are that God keeps his loving kindness to a thousandth generation with those who love Him (Deuteronomy 7:9), and that He repays those who hate Him to their faces (v. 10).
So, we want social justice,
but we have not been socially just on either side. If we are to look at the context and God’s action in this particular record of events, we can know that God always has a reason for doing the things that He does. The Amorites hated Him for 400 years before He brought destruction upon them. Secondly, God always acts with grace and mercy. He could have destroyed the Amorites much sooner than He did and gave Abraham the land from the start. In Genesis 18, flip, flip, flip, we read of God’s judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah. His promise to Abraham was that if there were just a few righteous people in the cities, He would spare all (yes that right, all) of the people. Yet, no righteous people were found. If we apply this aspect of God’s mercy and care to the Amorite people, then God would only command a people to be destroyed if there were no righteous people (or if their iniquities were completed). While God has every right to take life that He creates, He still provides more than sufficient reason to declare His own justness in His action. God is beyond reproach.
We are a moral people,
and the reason we left is because we saw what we perceived to be immoral or moral standards that didn’t make much sense. The reason we were pushed is because people were defending what they desperately believed to be morally correct. We are not the standard for morality and neither are they. We come to the understanding, on both sides, that God is the standard for morality; human reason, nurture, and responsiveness are not. Have we acted in love toward God or have we acted with hate toward Him? One is the measure of right action (yes, short for righteous again) and the other is the measure of action that is morally wrong. If our morality is centered around our wants or what we feel like our needs are or our own nature, we are a people morally detestable before God. Sadly, in our case, this means that most people on the earth are morally detestable (even many within the organized church and in this place). What we understand, here, is that it is God who decides when and how to punish nations who have hated Him. Why wouldn’t He do so? He is our creator. He is king. A king cannot rightly or generously rule without just punishment. A father cannot even lovingly raise his son without just and rightly applied discipline. Without hazardous conditions in the distillery, there is no Old Fashioned. Without stress and without this fallen condition, we are not fashioned for glory. It seems as though God might be working all this together, and the rocks, also formed under stressful conditions, cry out.
We come to the understanding that genuine morality is important for us. God, again, draws a parallel between our love for Him and our keeping of His commandments. If we love Him, we will strive to keep His commands. Jesus made this exact statement in John 14:15 and 14:23. Our obedience to God comes as a result of our love for Him, but cannot cause us to love Him. Behavior modification doesn’t work. It’s why we left, remember? When we love God, the result is obedience. If we are still concerned about justifying our own action rather than changing for God, then we have proven not to love God. Morality is, then, absolutely important for us. If we reject the commands that God has given, then we act in hate toward Him. There is no other option. We either love God or we do not. We are responsible enough. We have used unhealthy religiosity as our excuse to hate God and to be unjust in our rejection on both sides. All the while, we make up arguments to try to justify what we have written.
God is just
as He brings one nation against another. This is an especially difficult realization when we recognize that nations are composed of children as well. In this, we have to trust that God is both just and merciful. Some arguments can be made to make God look good to us in these circumstances, but I find them to be largely unsatisfactory. When considering this, our trust in God’s just nature must carry us because we don’t have all of the information. In fact, in the vastness of creation, we don’t really have that much information at all. I know, that sounds odd to those who know how to pronounce ten-duotrigintillion and who use that search engine everyday. God is also always merciful and shows grace. He stands up against those who hate Him and shares His loving-kindness with those who love Him and keep His commandments.
With the Canaanites, God would no longer delay. His punishment on the nation was imminent. There will be a time when God will judge the nations and people and generations of the whole earth. It is His responsibility and His alone (we cannot be arbiters of God’s wrath and we, as individuals, cannot punish on God’s behalf). When it is time for God’s judgment, will we be found to have loved God, or will we be found to have hated Him?
When we flip to Deuteronomy 7:12-15, we read of some of the rewards that God would give to the Israelites if they kept His commands in love to Him. While these rewards are material for the nation of Israel and we are not promised material rewards as God’s people in our own day (though God may still grant them), we learn another important aspect about God’s just nature. Just as He punishes, He also rewards. Let us love God and receive His reward rather than His punishment.