Chris Knight
This is one of those questions Christians should not answer too quickly. When we read Old Testament accounts where God commands judgment against entire cities or nations, including passages involving the Canaanites, it can be disturbing. We should not pretend otherwise. If your first reaction is, “That seems awfully difficult to reconcile with a loving God,” you are paying attention.
The first thing we need to understand is that the Bible never presents these events as God losing His temper. God is not having a terrible Tuesday and deciding to wipe somebody out. His judgment comes after extraordinary patience with deeply entrenched evil.
Consider the Canaanites. Long before Israel entered the Promised Land, God told Abraham that his descendants would have to wait because “the sins of the Amorites do not yet warrant their destruction” (Genesis 15:16, NLT). That waiting period lasted roughly four centuries. God delayed judgment for generations. What eventually brought judgment was not ethnicity, nationality or Israel simply wanting somebody else’s property. Scripture describes cultures increasingly characterized by idolatry, sexual corruption, violence and even child sacrifice (Deuteronomy 12:29-31).
That distinction matters. God was not commanding genocide because He hated a particular race of people. He was exercising divine judgment against persistent evil.
We also have to remember something uncomfortable about God’s love. A loving God must eventually confront evil. We sometimes imagine love and judgment as opposites, but they are not. If God watched generations of people abuse, murder, exploit and sacrifice children and simply shrugged because He was loving, we would not call that love. We would call it indifference.
God’s judgment also was not limited to Israel’s enemies. When Israel eventually embraced the same kinds of idolatry, injustice and rebellion, God judged them too. Israel was never given a divine exemption card. God warned them, disciplined them and eventually allowed both Israel and Judah to experience conquest and exile. God’s holiness did not change depending on whose jersey someone was wearing.
At the same time, God’s mercy repeatedly appears in these difficult stories. Rahab was a Canaanite woman living in Jericho, yet when she turned toward the God of Israel, she was rescued and welcomed among God’s people (Joshua 6:22-25). She eventually appears in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). That is an important clue about God’s heart. Judgment was never simply about someone’s ethnicity. Those who turned to Him could receive mercy.
Ultimately, the tension between God’s love and judgment leads us to the cross. The God revealed in the Old Testament is not different from Jesus. God is both perfectly holy and extraordinarily merciful. At Calvary, He did not ignore sin. He dealt with it, and astonishingly, Christ took judgment upon Himself so sinners could be forgiven. “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8, NLT).
The difficult judgments of the Old Testament should make us uncomfortable, but perhaps not for the reason we initially think. They remind us that evil is more serious than we sometimes believe, God’s patience is greater than we realize and His mercy should never be taken for granted.
The question eventually becomes personal. If God is holy enough to judge sin and loving enough to bear that judgment Himself, how will I respond to Him? The Bible’s answer is not to run from God in fear, but to run toward Him in repentance and faith. The God who judges evil is also the God who went to extraordinary lengths to save sinners. That is not a contradiction in His character. That is the breathtaking intersection of His holiness, justice and love.