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God and Hitler
I recently heard about a bumper sticker which read:
“The only difference between God and Adolf Hitler
is that God is more proficient at genocide.”
The person who wrote that was actually raising an issue that has perplexed many believers in God.
In his book The God Delusion, atheist Richard Dawkins affirms that the God of the Old Testament is a bloodthirsty, genocidal ethnic cleanser. Many others use this as their reason for refusing to believe in or worship God.
Is it right to equate the killings in the Old Testament with the genocidal atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and others?
Let’s begin by looking at the conquest of Canaan. First, consider what God commanded the Israelites:
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. - Deut 20:16-17
Was that genocide - the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial or cultural group? Or is it possible to view it in another way?
In Gen 15:13-16 God told Abraham,
Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years . . . Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.
That last phrase shows that the reason God would eventually come in judgment and punishment upon the Canaanites was their sins. (The Amorites were the most numerous of those nations so they were spoken of as representative of them.)
In Lev 18:24-25 God warned the Israelites:
Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.
We learn from this that the extermination of those pagan nations was God’s punishment upon them for their sin, and that He even patiently delayed that punishment.
Going back to Deut 20, notice also what follows in verse 18:
. . . 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.
The elimination of the pagans was also designed by God to help prevent Israel being influenced to imitate them.
For many people the question remains, “What about the innocent children ?” To be quite honest, that is hard for us to understand, but consider this:
- innocent people often suffer because of the sins of others
- the eternal destiny of those infants will surely be better than if they had lived to maturity
Let me conclude by reminding us that we need to be cautious when we are tempted to question something that God has said or done.
God once announced to Abraham His intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their gross immorality. In the dialog which followed Abraham said, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen 18:25) That was not an indictment against God, but rather demonstrated Abraham’s confidence that Jehovah’s actions are always totally righteous.
God is infinitely wise. He knows better than we do what is right in every circumstance, and He will act accordingly.
“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” - Isa 55:8-9
- Leonard White
Wayfaring Stranger
That’s the title of an old folk song/hymn recorded by Burl Ives and many others. There are conflicting views as to its origin. It has also been known as The Libby Prison Hymn, because the words were found inscribed by a dying Union soldier incarcerated in that Confederate prison, notorious for its harsh and squalid conditions.
Some of the lyrics read:
I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger,
Traveling through this world below,
There is no sickness, no toil, no danger,
In that bright land to which I go.
John Bunyan’s famous Pilgrim’s Progress also portrays us as travelers on a journey through life toward heaven.
The apostle Peter wrote, “Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts.” - 1 Pet 2:11
And so we sing:
This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through.
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.
The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door,
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.
- Leonard White
