Hello readers!
I am terribly sorry for the long delay since my last post…setting up a new business in January (Freedom Ability Marketing and Consulting) and having a new daughter in February (Isn’t she cute!) put a bit of a premium on my time…and I let my work on Rational Faith slide…like I told myself I would not do!
This is just a quick post to let you know I am working on a topic for Rational Faith Online and should get the first part posted this week. As I was working on it, it started to get a bit long so I wanted to send my apologies separately to avoid too much verbiage on a single post!
I will be talking about a question that most of the ‘New Atheists’ like Hitchins, Harris and Dawkins like to bring up…the apparent ordering by God for His people, the Israelites, to commit genocide in the Old Testament. It can be a hot topic, and for good reason. As a Christian who tries to base my life on three things…Jesus, The Bible, and the leading of the Holy Spirit, I need to be able to come to grips with such issues if I believe Christianity is a Rational Faith.
If God ordered the Israelites to commit genocide, I need to have a plausible reason why he may have done so if I want to reconcile the message of Jesus with the killing of the Canaanites. I also need to reconcile the rest of the Old Testament with the killing of the Canaanites. “Thou Shall Not Murder” seems to contradict this period in Israelite history. As discussed in previous posts, some things have changed between the Old Testament Law and the New Covenant with Christ…but genocide wasn’t part of that change. It was wrong according to the laws of the Old Testament, and still wrong when Jesus came to fulfill the law.
Did God really order genocide, or was the real scenario a bit different than Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins would describe? Or different than what we may have been taught in our churches and Sunday Schools? Could God have a morally sufficient reason to order the killing of an entire nation? Some liberal Christian scholars believe the stories of genocide were made up.
Hopefully the points raised in the next few Rational Faith posts will shed some light about what the bible and history says about Old Testament genocide…a few may just surprise you.
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