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Hi,
Real love is tough love.
Humanism is not the love we need, but the love of man that is in accord with the love of God.1It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife.
2And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you.
3For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed,
4In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,
5To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.”
This is love too.
Quote I always get the, ” He is God, who are we to question Him?” answer. Yes, well….
GENESIS 18:25
“. . . .Is the Judge of all the earth not going to do what is right?””JOB 34:12
“Yes, for a fact, God himself does not act wickedly, And the Almighty himself does not pervert judgment.”PSALM 50:6
“And the heavens tell of his righteousness, For God himself is Judge. Se′lah.”PSALM 94:2
“Raise yourself up, O Judge of the earth. Bring back a retribution upon the haughty ones.”ISAIAH 33:22
“For Jehovah is our Judge, Jehovah is our Statute-giver, Jehovah is our King; he himself will save us.”ZECHARIAH 7:9
““This is what Jehovah of armies has said, ‘With true justice do YOUR judging; and carry on with one another loving-kindness and mercies;”Quote I have become frustrated with
never getting an answer to a question that I have about God commanding what SEEM to be immoral actions.
Some of these things might “seem” to be immoral from our limited human insight. Jehovah is the God of Justice, perfect is all his activity. All his ways are justice. If something “seems” to be immoral and God is behind it, then it only seems to be immoral.
If you were to go out and murder someone who seemed to be wicked to you, this would of course be wrong. If God does it, it is not wrong in the slightest, in the least. If God ends someone's life, we are no one to question him. We are specks of dust.Quote But are we not
told to rightly divide the word of God. If we read something in scripture that seems to be
totally unjust to even our carnal eyes, do we not have the right to seek where the justice lies?
Again, you make my point. If we have “carnal eyes,” how fit are we to judge hearts? Yes, there will be little old ladies that seem innocent, yet hold no favor in the least towards God. Oh, they 'seem' nice. A lot of people seem to be doing good. They seem to be doing everything right. Yet, simply avoiding wrong things is not enough. Today, we must also do good, preaching the kingdom good news for example. (mat 24:14)Quote When God sent the Hebrews into Cannan, he told them to kill everyone. 90 year old grandmothers,
three month old babies, sickly old men and pregnant mothers to be. It didn't matter who they were, kill them all.
The Bible says that there is to be a resurrection of the righteous and the unrighteous. I believe the unrighteous refers to those who didn't have a chance to prove themselves or hear the good news. Babies for example. How could they prove their love for God? They couldn't. So should Jehovah had destroyed all the parents and left the babies to fend for themselves? In places like Sodom and Gomarah, for example, what hope would there be for the children? They would most likely learn from their parents and imitate them. Jehovah didn't seem to think that there were any righteous ones there. But had their been, Jehovah can still make sure they are resurrected.Quote Now I am sure that to those being killed it would be hard to discern between whether they were
being killed or murdered. Only the cruelest demon leader on this planet would ever command such an evil thing from his troops in a war.I'm not certain you are fully aware of the facts of history and I don't think attempting to in any way compare Jehovah to people like Hitler is the greatest of ideas.
I have a question. Should the righteous forever have to suffer at the hands of the wicked?
Quote O.K. I wanted to wait a minute to see if I got struck with lightning or something.
Perhaps you'll have to wait longer than one minute.Quote Don't get me wrong. I am only trying to see why there is such a huge gulf between
the God of the New Ttestament, Jesus, and the God of the old testament.It is a reasonable question. I will look into it.
Quote Too many people, even in this day and age, have murdered someone because they thought that God told them to. Here's the thing. If you want to carry lamps and march around a city seven times for seven days and it falls down and the people die, then perhaps God is on your side. But if you're using a machine gun….that's a different story.
(These laws regulated Israel’s God-ordained warfare in the Promised Land. Wars of selfish aggression or conquest beyond God-given limits were strictly forbidden)
Wars
To be only wars of Jehovah (Nu 21:14; 2Ch 20:15)
Soldiers were sanctified before going into battle (1Sa 21:1-6; compare Le 15:16, 18)
Age of soldiers
Twenty years old and upward (Nu 1:2, 3; 26:1-4)
According to Jewish Antiquities, III, 288 (xii, 4), by Josephus, they served until 50 years of age
Exemptions from military service:
Levites, as ministers of Jehovah (Nu 1:47-49; 2:33)
Man who had not inaugurated newly built house or had not used newly planted vineyard (De 20:5, 6; compare Ec 2:24; 3:12, 13)
Man who had become engaged and had not yet taken his wife. The newly married man continued exempt for one year (Man had the right to have heir and to see this heir) (De 20:7; 24:5)
Man who was fearful (He would tend to break down morale of fellow soldiers) (De 20:8; Jg 7:3)
Cleanliness was required in camp (since soldiers were sanctified for warfare) (De 23:9-14)
No women were allowed as camp followers for sex relations; relations with women were abstained from during campaign. This ensured religious and physical cleanliness (Le 15:16; 1Sa 21:5; 2Sa 11:6-11)
No raping of women among enemy was allowed, for this would be fornication; and no marriage with such women was permitted until campaign was over. This provided for religious cleanliness and it also was an inducement for enemy surrender, for they would be assured that their women would not be molested (De 21:10-13)
Military procedures against enemy cities
If city that was attacked belonged to one of seven nations of land of Canaan (mentioned at De 7:1), all inhabitants were to be devoted to destruction. (De 20:15-17; Jos 11:11-14; De 2:32-34; 3:1-7) If left in the land, these would be a danger to continued relationship of Israel with Jehovah God. He had let them live in land until their iniquity ca
me to completion (Ge 15:13-21)For cities not belonging to the seven nations, terms of peace would first be proclaimed. (De 20:10, 15) If city surrendered, inhabitants were put to forced labor. If they did not surrender, all males and all women not virgins were killed. Others were spared as captives. (De 20:11-14; compare Nu 31:7, 17, 18.) Killing all men removed danger of later revolt by city and also marriage of these men to Israelite women. These measures also helped to avoid phallic worship and diseases among Israelites
Trees producing food could not be cut down and used for siegeworks (De 20:19, 20)
Chariots were burned; horses were hamstrung to incapacitate them for battle, and later they were killed (Jos 11:6)
Jehovah instructed Israel as to military procedure in the conquest of Canaan. The seven nations of Canaan, named at Deuteronomy 7:1, 2, were to be exterminated, including women and children. Their cities were to be devoted to destruction. (De 20:15-17) According to Deuteronomy 20:10-15, other cities were first warned and terms of peace extended. If the city surrendered, the inhabitants were spared and put to forced labor. This opportunity to surrender, together with the assurance that their lives would be spared and their women would not be raped or molested, was an inducement to such cities to capitulate to Israel’s army, thus avoiding much bloodshed. If the city did not surrender, all males were killed. Killing the men removed danger of later revolt by the city. “The women and the little children” were spared. That “women” here no doubt means virgins is indicated by Deuteronomy 21:10-14, where prospective war brides are described as mourning for parents, not for husbands. Also, earlier, when Israel defeated Midian, it is specifically stated that only virgins were spared. Such sparing of only virgins would serve to protect Israel from false worship and no doubt from sexually transmitted diseases. (Nu 31:7, 17, 18)
Why did Jehovah decree the extermination of the Canaanites?
The historical account shows that the populations of the Canaanite cities conquered by the Israelites were subjected to complete destruction. (Nu 21:1-3, 34, 35; Jos 6:20, 21; 8:21-27; 10:26-40; 11:10-14) This fact has been used by some critics as a means for depicting the Hebrew Scriptures, or “Old Testament,” as imbued with a spirit of cruelty and wanton slaughter. The issue involved, however, is clearly that of whether God’s sovereignty over the earth and its inhabitants is acknowledged or not. He had deeded over the right of tenure of the land of Canaan to the ‘seed of Abraham,’ doing so by an oath-bound covenant. (Ge 12:5-7; 15:17-21; compare De 32:8; Ac 17:26.) But more than a mere eviction or dispossessing of the existing tenants of that land was purposed by God. His right to act as “Judge of all the earth” (Ge 18:25) and to decree the sentence of capital punishment upon those found meriting it, as well as his right to implement and enforce the execution of such decree, was also involved.
The justness of God’s prophetic curse on Canaan found full confirmation in the conditions that had developed in Canaan by the time of the Israelite conquest. Jehovah had allowed 400 years from Abraham’s time for the ‘error of the Amorites to come to completion.’ (Ge 15:16) The fact that Esau’s Hittite wives were “a source of bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebekah” to the extent that Rebekah had ‘come to abhor her life because of them’ is certainly an indication of the badness already manifest among the Canaanites. (Ge 26:34, 35; 27:46) During the centuries that followed, the land of Canaan became saturated with detestable practices of idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed. The Canaanite religion was extraordinarily base and degraded, their “sacred poles” evidently being phallic symbols, and many of the rites at their “high places” involving gross sexual excesses and depravity. (Ex 23:24; 34:12, 13; Nu 33:52; De 7:5) Incest, sodomy, and bestiality were part of ‘the way of the land of Canaan’ that made the land unclean and for which error it was due to “vomit its inhabitants out.” (Le 18:2-25) Magic, spellbinding, spiritism, and sacrifice of their children by fire were also among the Canaanites’ detestable practices.—De 18:9-12.
Baal was the most prominent of the deities worshiped by the Canaanites. (Jg 2:12, 13; compare Jg 6:25-32; 1Ki 16:30-32.) The Canaanite goddesses Ashtoreth (Jg 2:13; 10:6; 1Sa 7:3, 4), Asherah, and Anath are presented in an Egyptian text as both mother-goddesses and as sacred prostitutes who, paradoxically, remain ever-virgin (literally, “the great goddesses who conceive but do not bear”). Their worship apparently was invariably involved with the services of temple prostitutes. These goddesses symbolized the quality not only of sexual lust but also of sadistic violence and warfare. Thus, the goddess Anath is depicted in the Baal Epic from Ugarit as effecting a general slaughter of men and then decorating herself with suspended heads and attaching men’s hands to her girdle while she joyfully wades in their blood. The figurines of the goddess Ashtoreth that have been discovered in Palestine are of a nude woman with rudely exaggerated sex organs. Of their phallic worship, archaeologist W. F. Albright observes that: “At its worst, . . . the erotic aspect of their cult must have sunk to extremely sordid depths of social degradation.”—Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 1968, pp. 76, 77;
Added to their other degrading practices was that of child sacrifice. According to Merrill F. Unger: “Excavations in Palestine have uncovered piles of ashes and remains of infant skeletons in cemeteries around heathen altars, pointing to the widespread practice of this cruel abomination.” (Archaeology and the Old Testament, 1964, p. 279) Halley’s Bible Handbook (1964, p. 161) says: “Canaanites worshipped, by immoral indulgence, as a religious rite, in the presence of their gods; and then, by murdering their first-born children, as a sacrifice to these same gods. It seems that, in large measure, the land of Canaan had become a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah on a national scale. . . . Did a civilization of such abominable filth and brutality have any right longer to exist? . . . Archaeologists who dig in the ruins of Canaanite cities wonder that God did not destroy them sooner than he did.”—PICTURE, Vol. 1, p. 739.
Jehovah had exercised his sovereign right to execute the sentence of death upon the wicked population of the entire planet at the time of the global Flood; he had done so with regard to the entire District of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of ‘the loud cry of complaint about them and their very heavy sin’ (Ge 18:20; 19:13); he had executed a decree of destruction upon Pharaoh’s military forces at the Red Sea; he had also exterminated the households of Korah and other rebels among the Israelites themselves. However, in these cases, God had employed natural forces to accomplish the destruction. By contrast, Jehovah now assigned to the Israelites the sacred duty of serving as principal executioners of his divine decree, guided by his angelic messenger and backed by God’s almighty power. (Ex 23:20-23, 27, 28; De 9:3, 4; 20:15-18; Jos 10:42) The results, nevertheless, were precisely the same to the Canaanites as if God had chosen to destroy them by some phenomenon such as a flood, fiery explosion, or earthquake, and the fact that human agents effected the putting to death of the condemned peoples, however unpleasant their task may seem, cannot alter the rightness of the divinely ordained action. (Jer 48:10) By using this human instrument, pitted against “seven nations more populous and mighty” than they were, Jehovah’s power was magnified and his Godship proved.—De 7:1; Le 25:38.
The Canaanites were not ignorant of the powerful evidence that Israel was God’s chosen people and instrument. (Jos 2:9-21, 24; 9:24-27) However, with the exception of Rahab and her
family and the cities of the Gibeonites, those who came in for destruction neither sought mercy nor availed themselves of the opportunity to flee, but instead they chose to harden themselves in rebellion against Jehovah. He did not force them to bend and give in to his expressed will but, rather, “let their hearts become stubborn so as to declare war against Israel, in order that he might devote them to destruction, that they might come to have no favorable consideration, but in order that he might annihilate them” in execution of his judgment against them.—Jos 11:19, 20.Joshua wisely “did not remove a word from all that Jehovah had commanded Moses” as to the destruction of the Canaanites. (Jos 11:15) But the Israelite nation failed to follow up his good lead and completely eliminate the source of pollution of the land. The continued presence of the Canaanites among them brought infection into Israel that, in the course of time, undoubtedly contributed toward more deaths (not to mention crime, immorality, and idolatry) than the decreed extermination of all the Canaanites would have produced had it been faithfully effected. (Nu 33:55, 56; Jg 2:1-3, 11-23; Ps 106:34-43) Jehovah had warned the Israelites that his justice and his judgments would not be partial and that for the Israelites to enter into relations with the Canaanites, intermarry with them, practice interfaith, and adopt their religious customs and degenerate practices would mean their inevitably bringing down upon themselves the same decree of annihilation and would result in their also being ‘vomited out of the land.’—Ex 23:32, 33; 34:12-17; Le 18:26-30; De 7:2-5, 25, 26.
Judges 3:1, 2 states that Jehovah let some of the Canaanite nations stay “so as by them to test Israel, that is, all those who had not experienced any of the wars of Canaan; it was only in order for the generations of the sons of Israel to have the experience, so as to teach them war, that is, only those who before that had not experienced such things.” This does not contradict the earlier statement (Jg 2:20-22) that Jehovah allowed these nations to remain because of Israel’s unfaithfulness and in order to “test Israel, whether they will be keepers of Jehovah’s way.” Rather, it harmonizes with that reason and shows that later generations of Israelites would thereby be faced with the opportunity to demonstrate obedience to God’s commands concerning the Canaanites, putting their faith to the test to the point of endangering their lives in war in order to prove obedient.
In view of all of this, it is clear that the opinion held by some Bible critics that the destruction of the Canaanites by Israel is not in harmony with the spirit of the Christian Greek Scriptures does not accord with the facts, as a comparison of such texts as Matthew 3:7-12; 22:1-7; 23:33; 25:41-46; Mark 12:1-9; Luke 19:14, 27; Romans 1:18-32; 2 Thessalonians 1:6-9; 2:3; and Revelation 19:11-21 will demonstrate.–Insight book, Vol 1, page 399
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