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Is it murder when God kills someone or what about when he orders the destruction of a whole nation?

Most people have a family member that they just don't want to be seen in public with -  they’re awkward. They say things they shouldn't at the wrong times, things like that. For Christians, if there's a part of the Bible that they're most likely to be embarrassed about or not know how to handle, it's probably what some people have called, "The morality of God." How do we deal with God killing people or ordering their death or those types of things. There are numerous examples of this. We have Abraham and Isaac. You have a father ordered by God to kill his son, and he almost does it.

We have God killing Ananias and Sapphira in the New Testament, they just drop dead. And we have the largest example of God-sanctioned killing with the Canaanites, a whole people group that God ordered the destruction of. What is often said by atheists and non-Christians is “this is immoral. How can you believe in a God who would do these things? Your God can't be good. He is fundamentally evil.” Christians don't often know how to respond to that, so we are going to address that topic today. This is going to be the third and probably the last for a while in our little mini-series on Old Testament issues.

We've looked at women in the Old Testament, we've looked at slavery, and now we are going to look at the destruction of the Canaanites, that people group, for whom God ordered destruction. Here's a passage from Deuteronomy where we see this command given: "For the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is going to give you as an inheritance, you must not allow a single living thing to survive. Instead, you must utterly annihilate them - the Hittites, the Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites - just as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they cannot teach you all the abhorrent ways they worship their gods, causing you to sin against the Lord your God."

In this we are given a glimpse into the heart and mind of God as He orders the destruction of lot of "ites." Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, and on and on and on. "Just as the Lord has commanded you, don't allow a single living thing to survive. You must utterly annihilate them." Well, that doesn't fit with the warm, lovey, fuzzy — God loves kittens, unicorns, and rainbows — image of God that all too often Christians like to portray, where God is love. That's the primary thing when we think of God. But we have to have an idea of God that encompasses passages like these - passages where God seems to be wrathful, where he is exhibiting judgment and justice.

God is just as wrathful as he is loving. God is just as just as he is loving also. There isn't a hierarchy of attributes in God, but for some reason we always want to talk about his love and not his holiness. We always want to talk about his love but not his justice, and this is a skewed concept of God. 

We're going to look at the specific example of the Canaanites and their destruction and what we should say about that and how we should understand these passages as Christians, and then we're going to reason to the general issue of what is God's relationship to human life, what responsibilities does he have, what moral obligations does he have.

The first thing we should say about the Canaanites in this example is that God was willing to wait more than 430 years before he destroyed them. They were sinful, they were depraved and wicked and yet God says the sin of the Amorite people has not yet reached its limit, and we see this in Genesis 15:16. He didn't judge them right off the bat. He gave them opportunity to turn from their ways. Now they didn't, which is why he ultimately judges them. Now, what are we tal…