“For my angel will go before you and bring you to the land of the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites, and Jebusites, and I will wipe them out. Do not bow in worship to their gods, and do not serve them. Do not imitate their practices. Instead, demolish them and smash their sacred pillars to pieces. Serve the Lord your God, and he will bless your bread and your water. I will remove illnesses from you. No woman will miscarry or be childless in your land. I will give you the full number of your days. I will clauses the people ahead of you to feel terror and will throw into confusion all the nations you come to. I will make all your enemies turn their backs to you in retreat. I will send hornets in front of you, and they will drive the Hivites, Canaanites, and Hethites away from you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the books on the shelves in my office wrestles with the question of God’s character. The title makes the question pretty plain: Is God a Moral Monster? It tackles several of the most challenging stories in the Old Testament that are often presented as evidence for God’s being just that. One of the subjects the author, Paul Copan, spends a lot of time on is the Israelite entrance into the land of Canaan which came at the expense of the peoples already living there. The Exodus narrative doesn’t cover that particular journey, but God does give the people a bit of a preview of coming attractions. So, let’s wrestle a bit with it.

One of the ideas I come back to again and again when teaching through the Scriptures is that you have to get God’s character right in order to be able to make any positive sense out of it. If we don’t understand who God is, then we are fantastically likely to misinterpret and misunderstand His actions in all kinds of different situations. There’s a good case to be made that this idea is more true about the Israelite’s conquest narrative than it is about any other part of the Scriptures. War is not a pretty business. People die in war who don’t have anything to do with the fighting and who played no part in whatever the original cause of the conflict happened to be.

War is even harder to understand when one people group is actively trying to take the land of another people group. Most of the world is pretty clear-eyed in understanding that Russia is the bad guy in its ongoing war with Ukraine. What makes the whole thing even more offensive, especially to me as a follower of Jesus, is that Russian President Vladimir Putin consistently refers to his nations actions toward Ukraine as a kind of holy war prosecuted in God’s name. Given the totally unprovoked nature of the attack and the kinds of terroristic tactics Russian soldiers have intentionally used against the Ukrainian people, such a claim is not just ludicrous and offensive, it is even damnable.

Well, when the Israelites left Egypt and headed for the land of Canaan, their moving into the land took the form of a long campaign of conquest against the tribes and people groups already living there. Now, historically speaking, their campaign was not nearly as thorough and complete as the language God uses when directing them toward it would suggest, but they nonetheless killed people living there like any other conquest-minded, aggressor tribe around back then. What’s more, the language we find on the quills of Moses and Joshua in the Scriptures make explicitly clear that they considered themselves to have a divine mandate for doing what they did. How does all of this not make either Israel or God or both moral monsters?

We have to get God’s character right.

There are several assumptions built into this story without which it absolutely will not make positive sense. In fact, trying to defend the moral integrity of the story at all is a total fool’s errand if these assumptions are not in place. The first assumption is that God is good. He is the source of all that is good in this world. As the apostle John would much later write, “God is light and in Him is no darkness.” God is not capable of committing evil. It’s not in His character. Whatever He does and whatever He tells people to do will always be a good and right thing. This is not simply because He said it, nor is it because there is some moral law above Him within whose parameters He is operating. Rather, it is in His character to do what is good and goodness is defined by His character.

What this means for us right now is that when we see stories in the Scriptures that seem to be presenting God as doing or commanding things which we intuitively know are not good, this doesn’t mean our understanding of God’s character is wrong, it means our understanding of the stories we are reading is wrong. In other words, the problem is with us, not Him. In this present context, when it looks to us like God is telling the Israelites to randomly do terrible things, that’s not what’s going on at all. Rather, we aren’t understanding all of the what nor any of the why behind His instructions.

The second crucial assumption we have to make here comes in two parts. The first part is that God is just. He always does the right thing. When someone has done the wrong thing, He always holds them accountable for that. Sin will always be punished properly and thoroughly. This applies to individuals, obviously, but it also applies to entire nations. When a group of people have committed themselves to pursuing evil, God will eventually hold them accountable for that without fail. What form exactly that accountability is going to take we don’t know, but God will punish all sin justly. Because He is just.

The second part here, though, is that God is love. God always tempers His doing of the right thing liberally with mercy and compassion. He is absolutely committed to seeing us become fully who He created us to be. This is the case even when we have veered rather wildly off of that path. Rather than forcing us angrily back in the right direction, though, God woos. He takes an approach laden with compassion and patience and kindness and generosity. When you combine this part with the first part, although God is perfectly just and will deal with sin thoroughly, He waits on bringing the full weight of judgment as long as He possibly can to allow the maximum amount of time for repentance. If we show even the slightest sign that we are going to turn from our sin and walk His path of righteousness, He’ll call off the judgment and celebrate our movement in the right direction. Ultimately, His great love led Him to sacrifice His only Son on our behalf so that none of us has to face the consequences of our sin. We only need to place our faith in Jesus and by His wounds we will be healed.

There’s one last assumption that is critical to make here. There are others beyond these three, but these are the most critical to make. God is the creator and sustainer of the world. And because God is the creator and sustainer of the world, it belongs to Him. All of it. The land, the animals, and the people are all His first and foremost. He is totally sovereign over the whole of creation. What He does with it is entirely His prerogative and we don’t get a vote in the decision making. Our only role is to do what He commands with gratitude that we get the privilege of living in the first place. As the apostle Paul put it to the Athenian intelligentsia, “…he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live.”

With all of that in mind, there are a handful of facts that are relevant to our understanding of what’s happening here. The various Canaanite peoples had cultures that were grotesque in their immorality. They were crude, hyper-sexualized, and nearly all of them practiced child sacrifice to appease their gods. This was generally performed by burning babies alive. They were also rife with injustice of every kind. They hadn’t moved all that far beyond the moral perversion of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, and we know how God handled that situation. Well, because God is good and just and sovereign, He determined to bring judgment on the Canaanite peoples for their sin. He told this to Abraham some 400 years before his descendants would move into the land God had promised Abraham to deliver to his descendants. That 400-year gap, though, brings God’s love and compassion racing into the picture. These peoples had 400 years to repent and turn from their wicked ways.

By the time the Exodus journey was unfolding, the time had finally come for God to bring the judgment He had so long withheld. And, He happened to choose Israel to be the vehicle for the deliverance of that judgment. He was using the occasion of His fulfilling a promise to Abraham to bring judgment because He is God and that’s His prerogative. God could have used the actions of another people to bring this judgment, though. There was nothing particularly special about Israel that made them uniquely suited for this task. In fact, God told them that directly. And, many centuries later when Israel had fallen into sin, God had given them plenty of opportunities to repent, and finally brought judgment on them, He used the nations of Assyrian and Babylon to bring the same kind of judgment on them that He was using them here to bring judgment on the Canaanite peoples.

As for what we see here in this text, this is all God’s encouragement to them. He wanted them to understand several things, but three in particular. First, He was going to prepare the way for them. They were not doing any of this on their own. If they tried, they would fail. Second, they needed to continue to walk a path of faithfulness to Him, which necessarily included a vigorous rejection of the false and evil religions of the Canaanite peoples. Third, if they walked this path, He was going to bless them for it. The blessing list here is similar to those we find in other places in the law, but especially in Deuteronomy. It is not intended to be exhaustive. It borrowed on language that was common in that day when people were being assured of their gods’ blessings for obedience. The point was to encourage them that God was going to be with them. The fact that we don’t really see these blessings unfold very consistently or very often goes hand in hand with the fact that Israel wasn’t obedience to God’s commands very consistently or very often. But when they were, He was too. He always is.

The thing about the life God offers is that it is only for those who are willing to stick with Him to receive it. If we only stick with Him half of the time, we’re not going to experience the full weight of glory He has planned for us. When we are with Him, the blessings are there. When we aren’t, they aren’t. Now, sometimes we experience good things even when we aren’t being faithful, but that’s because we serve a God who is good and loves to give us good things even when we don’t deserve them. And, on the other side, sometimes we experience hard things even when we are being faithful, but these aren’t a sign that something is wrong, but that the world is trying to force us off the path of faithfulness in some way. It could also be the lingering results of past sin still being worked out in our lives. Either way, God allows it to help us learn to lean into Him more in order to find the hope and help we need to remain on the path of faithfulness.

Sometimes the stories we find in the Scriptures are hard. But when we learn to look at them through the right set of lenses, we are able to make a bit more positive sense out of them. When we properly understand God’s character, a whole lot of life becomes a whole lot easier to navigate. That’s a goal worth pursuing.