Recently,
I had a discussion with a Christian about how it is, how it can be moral, for
God to command the killing of innocent children in the Old Testament days. How
can God command that and still be morally pure and perfectly holy? The
questions about God never end and they strike even faithful Christians.
Numbers
25:16-18 - “Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Be hostile to the Midianites
and strike them; for they have been hostile to you with their tricks, with
which they have deceived you…”
1 Samuel
15:3 - “Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do
not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox
and sheep, camel and donkey.’”
Deuteronomy 20:16-18 - “Only in the cities of these peoples that the Lord
your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything
that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite,
the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the Lord your God
has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their
detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin
against the Lord your God.”
When it
comes to the troubles that we experience in life - including the question about
how the Supreme Moral Law Giver could kill children in the OT - here are a few
thoughts:
1. I do
not have all the answers. The Bible does not answer all my questions. God’s
thoughts are infinitely beyond my own (Isaiah 55:8-9).
2. I am in
no moral position to question what God does. I am not morally pure or perfectly
holy. By what moral standard can I judge God’s behavior? The nature of God is the
only pure and perfect thing in the universe, physical or spiritual.
3.
Therefore, since God is perfectly holy (Isaiah 6:3), what He does is always perfectly holy.
4. Since
God is perfect love (1 John 4:8), what He does is always perfectly loving.
5. Since
God is perfect wisdom (omnisapient), what He does is always perfectly wise.
6. That
means that, even though I
may not understand why God commanded the killing of the infants in the OT, it
was the holy, loving, and wise thing to do at that time, in those
circumstances. The Deuteronomy 20 passage quoted above suggests it was to guard
Israel from idolatry.
7. God is
sovereign over the whole universe. Thus God holds the power of life and death
in His hands. He has the sovereign right to give life and He has the sovereign
right to take it away (Job 1:21). While I do not believe that everything that
happens in this world is caused by God, if
God were to take the lives of my two daughters, He would be taking them out of
the hands of someone who loves them tremendously
and keeping them in the hands of One who loves them perfectly.
8.
For all these reasons and more, I trust God.--Paul Holland
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