When Kings go off to War

So I was reading a blog post by Catholic Answers Live radio host Patrick Coffin the other day, specifically this one. It's an interesting commentary about the attitudes that many atheists tend to have towards believers, but what really stood out to me was the silly rationalization that Dr. Richard Dawkins gave for not debating Dr. William Lane Craig. He doesn't debate people who support genocide? Really? I feel like if I was given the chance to confront a man on (what I considered) his dangerous ideological fallacies, I would jump on it. How else can progress be made?

But regardless, the point I found interesting was one that many, many atheists I know have thrown out there, and one that most of my Christian friends try to duck or ignore. Namely, how can we justify our belief in an all loving God, a God that is, in fact, Love itself, when that same God ordered the genocidal butchering of entire cities that occur time and again in the Old Testament? How could that possibly jive with Christ's message of "Do to others as you would have them do to you"?

Modern Christianity has many advantages. We have the ability to look backwards over thousands of years, and see a lot of the big picture. What may have been confusing for a Jew in antiquity can become crystal clear for those of us that can look and see how the hardships of his life pointed so definitively towards its fulfilment in Jesus. But it also has its disadvantages. We are so disconnected from the culture and norms of the apostolic age and beyond that we often fail to see the context in which some of those hardships could have occurred.

God chose to reveal Himself to the world through the Israelites. He set these people aside as His chosen, to slowly but surely prepare the world for His coming as the incarnate Son. We know this already, because we get to look back on the entirety of the now-closed canon of Scripture and this this as we read through the New Testament. But we often forget that it was slowly-but-surely. The Bible was written over the course of thousands of years, and in that time God's chosen people changed in many ways. We can see the covenant grow from a marriage with Adam and Eve, a family with Noah, a household with Abraham, a tribal nation with Moses, a kingdom with David, and of course the fulfillment of it all with Christ when the world was ready to begin accepting Him.

And just as we see the covenant grow, we see the challenges posed by the world around them grow as well. For much of their existence, the Israelites were a collective of a fiercely tribal system surrounded by polytheistic paganism on every side. If they didn't have that danger to face, I have my doubts as to if they could even have lived with each other without resorting to full-time violence. The only thing holding them together over the long run was their desire to defend themselves from the darkness around them, and even that wasn't enough oftentimes.

How could the nation that was was meant to be the light in the darkness, to be the catalyst of salvation in the world and gather all people to itself accomplish any of this when it couldn't even keep itself together?

Last week, we talked about the idea of Just War. The world that ancient Israel existed in was one of violence and war. It was commonplace for a city-state to simply up and lay siege to the lands of another for little to no reason, so much so that spring was even considered the time of year when kings go off to war. If you did not go conquering, you were likely to be conquered.

As I said before, the development of God's people was progressive. Christ even noted this when He told the leaders of the Temple that their understanding of marriage was incomplete, that Moses had allowed divorce because the people simply were not yet ready to hear the full truth that Christ was now presenting to them. Things that they had always regarded as truth and law were being challenged by the very one who put them into law in the first place, as He showed them the next and final step in the story of salvation.

Because in the end, it is a story of salvation. As I'm sure you've noticed has become a semi-common theme in my entries, people are messed up, and as a result salvation history is messy. In it, Israel represents the children of God, those that are meant to be pure and holy. But as in our personal lives, sin finds a way to creep and slither in, infecting and tempting the people of God. The nations and paganism around them represent that sin, that temptation. Although hard to understand then you look at the individual event from the comfort of your 21st century home, in the grand picture it begins to make sense.

If you have cancer, you do not sit by and wait, you attack it. And you do not stop when you've eradicated 99% of it. It's a zero-sum game. You get it all, or you die. When the ancient Jewish tribes were commanded by God to eradicate the pagan nations around them, they were being commanded to respond to sin in the only way they culturally and contextually were prepared to. God tolerated an evil in order to work it towards the ultimate good, as He does all things. Although initially counter-intuitive, without war and violence Christ's message of peace could never have happened.

Ultimately, these are hard verses for us to understand, and oceans of ink have been spilled trying to make sense of them. There are many mysteries of our faith that we will never fully grasp in this life. Grasping how evil can ultimately produce good is one of the most profound. A particular theme in the ancient scriptures is that as God is ordering His people to do one thing or another, although that thing may have immediate practical uses (destroy this city before they destroy you or you become landless nomads for all time), it fits in the grand design in a way that can only be understood in the light of Christ a thousand years later (eradicate sin before you are damned).

But the unfortunate reality is that when an atheist, or anyone else who has no desire to see scripture in any sort of context, comments on these passages, there are too few of us who stand ready to challenge them on any sort of intellectual level. So my challenge to you is to steep yourself in scripture, and never forget both the narrow and wide context of God's mercy.