Love and ethnic cleansing

A couple of blog writers have recently posted reminders on not being too smug about God's character, particularly when it comes to reconciling both God's violence and love. John Luke Rich began the dialogue by discussing God's instructions in Deuteronomy 20:16-18 for the Israelites to utterly annihilate the Canaanites:

A modern term for one people killing all of another so that there will be no intermingling of ideas is ethnic cleansing. And yet it is God who is the author, in the plainest of terms. This isn't a quirk of translation. The essential meaning did not change from the original Hebrew.

This is where so-called mainline churches leave the room. Their God is love, don't you see, and would never ever countenance such a wicked thing as leaving alive "nothing that breathes." This is the same God that sent His only Son to die on the cross like a common criminal, without raising a finger to resist?

Short answer is "yes." God took pains from the creation through this very moment to show us how deadly serious He is. You may wish it were not so. You may claim that, somehow, God was a "vengeful" God in Old Testament times, then, somehow, went on some sort of a heavenly retreat with some Buddhists or somesuch, and became the God of love, who would not harm a fly.

But, as John Luke points out: he's the same, unchanging God. And why would God do such a thing? Because God loves his people. John Schroeder--no slouch when it comes to intellect--reminds us that human beings simply cannot get our minds around God's love:

I am struck by how complex the character of God truly is, and how little we can understand it. God is love, and yet He orders His people to do something that to our eyes seems utterly evil.

Is God; therefore, evil? Of course not! But we certainly are not smart enough to figure out why not.

We cannot hold God to our standards, in fact only the opposite can happen - we must he held to His. Clearly He understands love in ways that we cannot begin to get our heads around.

Amen.