God is not a Monster

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations ... and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy” (Deut 7:1-2).

A lot of people read the Bible and decide God — if he exists at all — is a horrible, horrible person. Some today decide the God in the Old Testament must be different from God the Father of Jesus in the New Testament, just like the early heretic Marcion, because the two seem to act so differently. In The God Delusion, “new atheist” Richard Dawkins famously summed up the complaint:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

The most frequent example they offer is the “genocide” of the Canaanites. (Here “Canaanites” is a short-hand referring to the people who lived in the land given to Israel before them, “the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites”.) YHWH told Israel “destroy them totally” as quoted above. They weren’t supposed to conquer them. They were supposed to wipe them out. Is that cruel? Is that evil?

To answer that, we have to remember who we’re dealing with. This is the God who made heaven and earth. He is the owner of everything and everyone. God decides when everyone dies; no one dies before God decides they will, and no one dies after God says they will. He is also the Lawgiver; he has standards by which he expects people to live. And he is the Judge when they fail to do so.

What does all of that have to do with this question? The Canaanites were horrible, horrible people. Everyone’s a sinner, but some people are wicked beyond belief. Some revel in immorality to such an extent that it turns the stomach of even immoral people.

One of the many gods the Canaanites worshiped was the “detestable god” (1Kings 11:5) Molech (aka Moloch or Molek). Molech was worshiped by child sacrifice. And they didn’t just kill their children. They were burned alive.

Because of this and other immoral things they did, God was giving Israel their land and requiring their execution. God told them, “It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you” (Deut 9:5). God didn’t just want to take the land away. If they were left alive “they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God” (Deut 20:18). (Which is exactly what happened, cf, Judg 3:5-7, 1Kings 11:5-6.)

So this was not a case of “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak” calling for an ethnic cleansing. This was capital punishment.

And, yes, God did other things like this: the Flood, the plagues in Egypt, Sodom and Gomorrah, and, eventually, Israel. God punishes wickedness. But that’s not his preference:

“Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, people of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and live!” (Ez 18:31).

You remember the story of Jonah, the prophet who didn’t want to preach to Nineveh. Remember why: He knew if they would repent, God would forgive.

“Isn’t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:2).

God wants people to repent. He gave the people before the Flood 120 years to repent (Gen 6:3). He gave the Canaanites 400 years to repent (Gen 15:13-16). He sent a prophet to Nineveh, and we know how he pleaded with Israel:

“Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD:
“though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool” (Is 1:18).

And that sounds very much like the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.


If you’d like to read more about the Canaanite question, here’s a link to Clay Jones, “We Don’t Hate Sin so We don’t Understand What Happened to the Canaanites: An Addendum to ’Divine Genocide’ Arguments,” Philosophia Christi n.s. 11 (2009): 53-72.

image credit: "Offering to Molech", illustration from the 1897 Bible Pictures and What They Teach Us by Charles Foster