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The God of the Old Testament – Part 19: Genocide or Justice?

By Mark L. Carlton 

We come now to the charge that the God of the Old Testament ordered genocide.   As with other charges brought against Him, the answer the Bible gives is, “not guilty”. 

Some will no doubt protest that God’s ordering the invading Israelites to destroy the Canaanite civilization is genocide by definition, and there is any number of definitions that could be cited in support of this contention. Consider for example, this one from Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary: ”The deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.”  So, given the definition of the term how can a claim to believe the Bible and yet maintain that God is not guilty of genocide?

I begin my defense by pointing out that all of the definitions of Genocide I have read are vague in that they do not say who can and cannot commit this crime.  Certainly human beings can be charged with it and they have often been guilty of it, but can God rightly be charged with genocide?  

What I am asking is this: Can God, acting in his official capacity as the Judge of all the earth[i], be rightly charged with this crime?  Let me explain the logic behind the question.  Judges in every age and in every culture have been granted certain discretion and granted certain authority.  It is because they have been granted this discretion and authority that they are to order sentences and punishments in other ways that the rest of us cannot.  When acting lawfully we do not consider their sentences criminal.  Rather, we understand that retribution is part of justice and we recognize the right of the judge to order that the life, liberty or prosperity of their fellow citizens be taken from them if they are guilty of crimes worthy of such retribution.   

I also note that the actual punishment of the guilty is always delegated to others.  In modern society the sentence decreed by the judge is carried out by police officers, prison guards, and in some cases, executioners.  Their authority is actually an extension of the judge’s authority and as with the judge we do not consider these men and women criminals, though their actions would be considered criminal if they were acting on their own authority.  We, for example, would go to prison ourselves if we imprisoned someone.  But a judge can order it and a jailer can do it and no one considers their actions criminal.   

Judges can certainly abuse of their power.  Sometimes they have.  And police officers and jailers have been guilty of abusing their authority, not to mention those entrusted to their care, but the fact that some have abused their power does not cause most of us to conclude that we would be better off without judges and law enforcement personnel to enforce their decrees.   

In the same way, God, who is presented in scripture as the Judge of all the earth, is surely entitled to judicial discretion and authority to pass sentence on the wicked.  In fact, the very skeptics who accuse him of cruelty and condemning His judgments in the Old Testament are the first to complain that He does not do enough about the evil in our world today.  It would seem that skeptics are terribly hard to please.  When God judges the wicked they say He’s a sadist, but if He does do it they condemn him for allowing such evils to exist.  So do they want a God who judges wickedness or a God who ignores it?  It seems to me that they want it both ways.  

Let us now consider a second question: Is the destruction of a civilization always a moral evil?  To answer this question I would invite you to consider the brutal destruction of the Third Reich.  In the history of human conflict few nations have been destroyed more completely than Germany in the Second World War.  Nothing in the Old Testament comes close to the devastation visited upon the German people by the United States, Brittan and the Soviet Union, particularly in the last brutal year of the war.

Now consider again the definition of genocide I cited at the beginning of this message.  Unquestionably the allies set out to deliberately systematically a political philosophy and a culture that had been constructed on its basis.  They succeeded.  In fact, more Germans died in the destruction of Hitler’s Germany than in the death camps.  Was this genocide, then, or do we need some other term to describe it though its final result was the same?  Let me suggest another word, justice.  

Historian Max Hastings chose an interesting title for his history of the last year of the war in Europe, Armageddon.  As I worked through his book I often thought that he had named it well.   One does almost get the feeling that something more than the winning of a war is being described in its pages.  I, at least, got the distinct feeling that somehow a cruel but well deserved judgment was being poured out on a nation that richly deserved it.

At one point the author commented on the fact that to this very day there is very little sympathy for the terrible suffering endured by the German people during the last year of the war.   I believe the reason for this is that most people look at crimes of the Third Reich and find it hard if not impossible to sympathize with the people who created and supported it in the first place. Thus, few consider the destruction of the Third Reich genocide.  But if we consult only our dictionaries without reference to our innate sense of justice, this is exactly what it was.  

But consider another possibility, that the destruction of Hitler’s Germany was Divine retribution and the allies who destroyed the Reich were divine agents. [ii]  I am not saying that the “agents” did not go too far, or that many of them were not guilty of terrible crimes themselves.  It can be argued that the Soviet Union, for example, was worse than Nazi Germany.  So I am not suggesting that those God used to bring his wrath upon the third Reich were without sins of their own.  I am just suggesting that the Righteous Judge of the universe may use imperfect means to carry out his righteous judgments upon the earth, and if He sometimes uses human agency for this purpose it would seem that He has no choice but to do so because there are no other kind of human beings.

Let me now begin to bring all of this to a conclusion.  First, if we say that God exists at all then surely He has the right to judge His creatures, and if God is Holy, is not He the best qualified Person to make such judgments?   Second, judges are allowed to order things that would be crimes were anyone other than a judge to order it, should not the Divine Judge have the right to do the same?   Third, the exaction of a just sentence is not a pretty thing, but we recognize that such things are necessary.  Can we not assume the same in the case of a Divinely decreed judgment?  Fourth, if God has a right to judge then should He not have the right to delegate the execution of His decrees to human agency?   Fifth, with things such as Nazi Germany, does it not make sense that certain civilizations can be weighed in the balances of justice and found wanting, and if they are, is there really a moral problem with the destruction of these civilizations?

And so we come to the specific case, that God ordered destruction of the Bronze Aged civilization of Cana.   It seems to me that the only real question was whether they deserved to be judged, not God’s right to judge them.  You see, it is not a question of genocide, it’s a question of justice.  So we will be taking a look at the civilization God ordered the Israelites to destroy in next week’s message.

[ii] Romans 13:3-4