Today's readings are from Joshua 10-12:6.
I have found it hard to read about all this murder and plundering. I have just wondered why children had to die? Why women in a family where it may have only been the husband who sinned?
The verse that really had me puzzled and I guess a little upset today admist all the murder and plunder and what not was 11:20 when it says God hardened the hearts of the people in these places. To me that isn't free will, is it?
Does anyone have a good explanation for this?
Tomorrow's passage: Joshua 12:7-15:19
5 comments:
You know, I've been thinking a lot about this since the earthquake in Haiti. "All those innocent people," we always say, but then I got to thinking about verses like Romans 3:23 and 6:23 that say, "For ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" and "the wages of sin is death."
No one on the face of this earth is "innocent" by God's standard. We are all sinners. Jeremiah 17:9-10 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? 'I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve.'"
All of us deserve to die. I believe there is grace for those who've never heard The Word and for those too young to understand it, but NONE of us are innocent.
I don't know that God specifically wipes out large groups of people because of sin in our day and age, but I think it's a bit presumptious to say He doesn't. He's God, and because of God's inability to sin, everything He does is right, even when we don't understand it.
Another thought I had (in reading about the man who stabbed a bunch of little kids at an elementary school in China) is this: whenever someone does something horrendous like this, we always think "How could God let this happen?" But then I think about all the "little" sins I commit on a daily basis and I realize He didn't stop me from doing those either. If there are no "degrees of badness" in God's eyes, the little covetous thoughts I have are no worse than someone murdering a child. They're both sin. And God allows it because He's allowed us to make a choice between good and evil. Both sins are the product of our own free will, the ability to choose, that God so graciously gave us so that we'd have the ability to demonstrate real love for Him.
That's maybe a bit of a tangent to your question, but both speak to the issue of God allowing (and in some cases, even commanding) what we think of as atrocities.
PS. I think these hard passages about slaughter are also a good indication of what our attitude should be about sin in our own lives.
I agree with you 100%, LL. Those are many of the same thoughts I had after reading Nicole's questions and then re-reading some of the passage.
I guess I never actually answered the "free will" part of the question. I don't understand why it says in Exodus that God harded Pharaoh's heart either ~ and there were a lot of Egyptians that paid with their lives because of that, too. Hmmm, maybe we need to look back at what was said about those passages!
I'm no theologian (sp?) but I think of it this way...
God knows our hearts. He also knows our choices in advance. That doesn't negate the fact that the choice is ours. Pharoah wasn't disposed to allow the Israelites to leave and God knew that. There were times where Pharoah hardened his own heart. God's hardening of Pharoah's heart was just strengthening Pharoah's pre-disposition. The 5 kings in this story made the choice to attack Gibeon. They chose to wage war initially. The verses prior to the hardening of the heart verse say that Joshua waged war against all these kings for a long time. Is it not possible that in order for God's commands to Moses not to leave any of the people alive, hardening of the opposing kings' hearts was necessary for them to keep fighting rather than turning tail and running?
Let's also remember that these people had no hope of redemption. The people were wicked. Christ had not yet died for their sins, and there was no recourse for them. It seems harsh, especially as nowadays we seem to think people are basically good and undeserving of the bad things that happen to them. We've talked about that before at length, so I won't go into it, but I think we've all understood that we all deserve death. The scales of justice don't apply - the good we do can never outweigh the bad. The bad must be removed by repentance and forgiveness. That was not available to these people, so they were essentially dead already, so to speak.
I welcome anyone else's comments.
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