Question 109
How can the God of the New Testament, of whom Peter says, “He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9) also be the God of Joshua who commanded the annihilation of every living being in the city of Jericho (Joshua 6:17–18)?
The resolution to this dilemma is that God is both a God of love and a God of justice. The two exist in a fine balance throughout biblical history, for which we can be infinitely grateful. We can be glad that God’s justice is tinged with mercy, for if any of us got what we truly deserved, we’d be, as my kids like to put it, dead meat.
We can all cope with the notion of God’s judgment at the end of time, but the notion of God judging in the here and now somehow sets us back on our heels. It’s almost as if we don’t think He ought to be trespassing into our territory while we still have time left on the clock.
But God has been intervening since the beginning of time. The Bible opens with an act of divine love in creation, moves almost without pause to an act of human sin, to be followed by the first act of divine judgment. From that point on, human history is a litany of sin punctuated by periodic judgments.
Although God sometimes used natural forces as His tools of judgment (the Red Sea is about as natural as you can get) and sometimes supernatural, as often as not He arranged the affairs of nations to coincide with His plans for blessing and judgment.
While pestilence and famine accompanied the fall of Samaria and the fall of Jerusalem, they were natural companions of siege warfare. God used human armies to judge Israel and Judah.
Is it any surprise then that He also used a human army to judge the Canaanites? The conquest of Canaan was no afterthought with God. Some time around 2,000 B.C. He promised that land to Abraham. But even though He spoke about the land as if it had already been delivered, Israel wouldn’t take delivery until generations had passed.
It used to trouble me that God’s promise wouldn’t be fulfilled until long after Abraham was dust. But the delay was necessary. God used the time to help the patriarchs to grow in their faith. But the interval had another side to it; to give the land to Israel, God had to first throw out the Canaanites.
He wouldn’t arbitrarily evict His current tenants, even to give a gift to His chosen people. That would be unjust. Instead, He waited because “the sin of the Amorites [a name sometimes used for the residents of Canaan] has not yet reached its full measure” (Genesis 15:16).
Even in judging the Canaanites, God was gracious and patient. His justice demanded that their sinfulness be punished, but by His grace the punishment could not come until there was no other alternative. God was not willing that any should perish. But when the fullness of their iniquity had come, the armies of Israel were the tool God used to enact judgment.
~ Today's Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties
