Worship for Today: God and genocide.

The Lord is awe-inspiring, fearsome, fascinating, intriguing, majestic, and full of splendor: breathtaking! Here is what I saw of him in Joshua 6:21,

 

"They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys."

 

Here is a startling statement. The Israelites killed everyone in Jericho when they attacked and took the city, "men and women, young and old". God rendered the city defenseless through the miracle of the city walls collapsing and gave it over to the Israelites to do his bidding. In verse 27, as a summary to this account we are told, "So the Lord was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land."

 

There is the god of our imagination and the true God. The god of our imagination is how we define him to be according to our perception of what we think him to be. Had this been a good approach in our understanding of God there would have been no need for him to reveal himself to us through the Scriptures.

 

Knowing of our faults and weaknesses due to our estrangement from him because of sin and rebellion, he has revealed himself to us to know something of what he is like. According to the Scriptures God has two very striking qualities which he bears boldly. God is love and God is just. What we fail to see in our human weakness and frailty is the level of boldness that is expressed in his love and the level of boldness he manifests in his justice.

 

We struggle with the wonderful gift of love represented in the sacrifice of his own Son that we might have our sins forgiven. How could God forgive us so freely? We also struggle with the demand his justice requires for sin as represented in the cross. In the same way we are squeamish as we contemplate that God actually required and facilitated the genocide of peoples.

 

We fail to connect the dots as we consider this genocide with the known judgments of God. It was God who condemned all mankind to death in the garden of Eden for sin. It was he who brought the curse of sickness, pain and misery. What was the flood in Noah's day, but the annihilation of many peoples? It will be this same God who will judge all mankind, each individual for sin at his great white throne judgment and cast all who have not embrace him in faith into a fiery lake of burning sulfur for an eternity of torment.

 

Would our God do that? Would the One who gave his only begotten Son as a ransom for us, to pay for our sins, the one whose unspeakable mercy loved us so much, would he do such a thing? If we would only but read our Bibles we would find that our God is a god of love, as well as a god of frightful judgment. The horrific death of the Son of God at the hands of his Father's justice should make clear the extent of both of these striking qualities of God.

 

Anything of the Lord capture your heart from Scripture today? Share your thoughts of worship with us from your Bible reading today. We'd love to hear from you!

Trevor Fisk
trevor.fisk@gmail.com