Why Did God Command the Canaanite Conquest? With Clay Jones

when i run into a passage of scripture that troubles me i ask what's wrong with me that i am troubled by what the lord is saying instead of starting off with well if i don't understand it it's not understandable that's a very very arrogant position [Music] welcome to the elisa childers podcast i'm so excited to bring you my guest today he's been on the podcast before to talk about really difficult topics he's been on to talk about human evil and to talk about death and uh all things dark and difficult clay jones is the guy clay it's so great to have you back on the podcast today good to be with you again elisa yeah i've chosen to tackle the really tough subject yeah somebody needs to do it yes i guess it's me i know well we're glad you answered the call and and today actually you and i have been talking for quite a while about doing an episode regarding the whole issue of the canaanite conquest because in my experience i've watched people actually leave the faith over their wrestling with this topic of god commanding israel to go in and wipe out the canaanites and i know that this is a very difficult topic even for christians as we read the bible you know when we're little kids i think it was natasha crane that put in her book that when we're little kids we sing that joshua fought the battle of jericho song and the walls come tumbling down and it's all sweet and nice but then when you grow up a little bit and you really realize what's going on in that story it can be difficult to wrestle through and so i thought just to begin today's episode for people who may be unfamiliar with that story or maybe they've only been exposed to it through certain verses being plucked out of context give us an overarching view of what is happening in this whole story that we refer to as the canaanite conquest and then we'll dig down into some of the details on it and try to figure out what's going on there well yes uh the lord promised to give the israelites the land of canaan uh but he said he told abraham in in genesis chapter 15 verse 6 but that's not going to happen now he says in genesis 15 6 because the sin of the amorites has not reached full measure in other words the lord is saying i'm going to give you their land but it's not going to happen for as a matter of fact for several hundred years because they haven't gotten they haven't polluted themselves to the point where there's just simply nothing redeemable left in them uh but anybody does say i'm going to give you this land of of course abraham has isaac and then jacob and jacob ends up in in egypt and the israelites end up in bondage to egypt for 400 years uh by this time the lord is ready we're ready to move uh these people now have completely and utterly corrupted themselves and you're going to get their land and i mean that's just all there is to it you're going to inherit their land and i'm going to have you drive them out and it's important to note that the lord did say i'm going to drive them out now if they decide to fight yeah you're going to take their lives but they had the opportunity to flee i doubt i'm sure many of them did flee but but a lot of people as you mentioned struggle desperately with this concept of how could god drive them out well the answer the short answer is because they were completely and utterly corrupt and sinful that and as we're going to be talking alisa one of the troubles is if you just say were corrupt they were corrupt if you just say that people go yeah blah blah blah people are sinful people are bad yes i know uh big deal and so i'm going to give some very uh well almost lurid if not lured examples of their corruption and i emphasize this from primary source documents from their primary source documents uh and uh because it's not it's not we're just it's not just what the bible says about them we find everything in in fact i've got an article entitled we don't hate sin so we don't understand what happened to the canaanites and you can get that from my website uh for free clayjones.net and that goes through in details all of the sins of the canaanites from their own documents and why god would want to wipe them out so anyway that that's the bottom line and so he told israel you will go in those that remain you will go in and you'll kill all of them leave nothing alive he says that straight out uh leave nothing alive leave nothing that breathes alive and so of course people go that just seems so unfair and but that's exactly what we're talking about today yes and so i think often too especially when i read progressive christian literature it's almost just like people take for granted that this is some kind of a genocide it gets referred to constantly not just by atheists but even by some christians as a genocide but you argue and i i fully take this position as well this is not a genocide this is divine judgment or as you called it capital punishment this is capital punishment and we're going to get into that uh but i wanted to give a little bit of the opposing view for people who are watching uh just just to understand the tension that we find in this passage and so in her book on the bible rachel held evans addresses this uh passage and here's what she wrote about it and she's talking about when she's a little girl kind of like i mentioned you're singing the song and the walls come tumbling down and it's kind of this fun song when you're a kid and then you grow up and then the horror of what's actually happening hits you and so she says this it was as if the bible had turned into an unsettling version of one of those children's peekaboo books beneath the colorful illustration of noah's ark was surprise the violent destruction of humanity turn the page to joshua and the battle of jericho and peek-a-boo it's genocide and she gives a couple other uh examples there and um you know she basically says that she never found an answer that was really satisfying to her and so she writes that there there's really just two or three ways to deal with these kind of troubling stories and so she writes this when it comes to processing these troubling stories there are generally three types of people number one those who accept without question that god ordered the military campaigns in canaan and has likely supported others throughout history number two those who are so troubled by the notion of god condoning ethnic cleansing that it strains their faith or compels them to abandon it or number three those who can name all of the kardashian sisters kind of funny there uh but you know it is funny but here here's the thing that that i notice when i'm reading her words about it uh there's not even an acknowledgment that this might be something other than genocide or as she says ethnic cleansing this was not ethnic cleansing this was not uh based on ethnicity this very much as you make the point in your article had to do with judgment about sin and and that article that you brought up actually was recommended at one of the classes i took at southern evangelical seminary and it really helped me to make sense of what was going on so maybe we can start there regarding the canaanites what kind of a culture are we talking about before we even get into what the scripture says about it because she you know she's right about one thing that when you read the scriptures it's very clear that the lord it's over and over the lord spoke to moses you even have this scene in joshua 5 where the commander of the lord's army comes to lead the charge essentially and so you either have to find a way to get around all of that to make it something else or we we have to just really wrestle and figure out why god would command such a thing so let's start with the canaanite culture what what was going on there well of course they were completely corrupt but let me begin back up just for a minute because there's something in talking about rachel held evans and those like her there's an arrogance instead of a humility when it comes to approaching scripture because there's an arrogance the arrogance is if i don't understand it then that means it's not understandable instead of saying let me take a look here just for a minute and trust the god that this is his word and i'm going to try and figure out what's going on here a friend of mine put it when i run into a passage of scripture that troubles me i ask what's wrong with me that i am troubled by what the lord is saying and i think that that is very important uh that we come to the scripture we start off with humility instead of starting off with well if i don't understand it it's not understandable that's a very very arrogant position and and obviously so anyway back to your question obviously the our argument is the scriptures argument is unambiguous is that the canaanites were utterly and thoroughly corrupt and we're going to be going through momentarily the kinds of corruption that we're talking about and they didn't deserve to live and you're right as opposed to calling a genocide i call it capital punishment and one of the reasons i call it capital punishment is because the lord exacted on his own people israel exactly the same punishment that he met it out on them uh so it's anyway if you it's one thing if you if you take other people's lives for committing sins but you don't you let your own people get away with it the lord did not let his own people get away with it and uh and he didn't by the way order that all of the canaanites in the world would be killed only in a particular geographical area and i wouldn't be surprised if it's because they were more corrupt uh there was less corruption in the surrounding areas okay so let's get into now if there's parents listening with small kids you know just be aware that we're gonna get into some difficult uh types of behavior that was going on in the canaanite conquest so just i just wanted to kind of make you aware that you know you may if you have little ears this may be something for when they're a little older because it's really true i mean tell tell us first when we get into some of these behaviors of the canaanite culture um you know the title of your article again because it really makes a very strong point and and then you know walk us through some of these specific and i hate that we have to do this i don't like to you know talk about sinful things but in a way we almost have to to help people understand why god wanted this this wiped off the face of the planet because frankly i think that if you really if all of us really understood what was going on we would want that wiped off the face of the planet also right so so go ahead and walk us through some of that well in leviticus chapter 18 it goes through and tells israel exactly what they needed to why they needed to wipe out the canaanites and he begins the first few verses of chapter 18 are about incestuous sin and the lord goes through and lists what incestuous sin would be then he goes off into adulterous sins that you shall not lay with another man's wife then the next sin that he talks about is offering your children to molech now molech was a bullheaded idol uh with a human-like body and in his outstretched arms you could place your you you would place your child which would be burned to death people were offering their child to molech uh the next thing that he lists and there's kind of a progression that i'm seeing i think we're seeing going on in the united states today the next scene he talks about homosexuality one lays with a man as one ways lays with the women that's an abomination um they were certainly doing that and the final sin he lists is bestiality uh that you will not have sex with an animal and that a woman will not present herself to an animal uh and of course all of these things deserve to people that do these things deserve to die and we know again from pro canaanite primary source documents that this is exactly what was happening um in fact there's a when it comes to incest this is really gross and here's where you don't want your kids around uh if this is from an egyptian dream book or the kinds of things that that people thought when it comes to the dreams if uh if a man has a dream where he has intercourse with his mother that's good his companions will stick to him if a man has a dream where is intercourse with his sister good it means he will inherit something if if a man has a dream where he's having intercourse with a woman like that might just be his spouse that's bad uh it says it means mourning so notice that when it comes to incest that they uh that the only kind of sex that the bible actually condones was considered if you had a dream about that it was a bad omen when it comes to bestiality if a woman dreams that she's married to her husband she will be destroyed if she embraces him she will be experienced grief now however if she dreams about having intercourse with a baboon or a wolf or a goat and so on and on those are good things those are positive things according to this dream book and we know from canaanite epic literature now okay we have a canaanite epic poem uh that tells us that and here's part of the poem bale raped his sister while she was in the form of a calf 77 even 88 times which of course is just you know i mean a way of saying he raped her all the time but notice that the canaanites were able to combine rape incest and bestiality in the same act and this is their god so their god is raping his sister while she's in the form of a calf 77 even 88 times raping her all the time uh and this is their god well you know people tend to ape their gods and we we have no reason to believe indeed that the canaanites weren't doing the same thing and and uh you know i mean if this is their poetry this is what they look up to this is what they consider to be admirable behavior well i mean obviously and we have a lot um there's all passages about as a matter of fact homosexuality and cross-dress i mean and by when i say canaanite epic poems what happened was is i don't remember the year i need to look that up but uh anymore but a guy i think was like 1922 is plowing a field uh in northern palestine and he hits this big rock and he turns it over and he found a library of canaanite uh documents of hittite a library of hittite that was one of the candidates a library of hittite documents and in that this is where we get this stuff knowing what they actually believed and how they actually behaved so how is this is this related in any way to the sodom and gomorrah story and and what would be that connection there um with this what happened at sodom and gomorrah well sodom and gomorrah is so instructive on this and a lot of people don't realize this sodom and gomorrah were canaanite cities and this this is so instructive and so helpful to us because the lord says to abraham i'm going to go and investigate what's going on in sodom and gomorrah because i hear that it's really bad and abraham understands he means destroy them and his son his nephew lot is there and abraham says he says surely and this this is so important surely you're not going to destroy the righteous with the wicked surely you're not going to do that in fact read the passage carefully far be it from you says abraham you would never kill the righteous with the wicked far be it from you that's terrible you would never ever do that well and so he says what if there's 50 righteous people and the lord says no problem if there's 50 righteous people spare both cities and i think abraham must have gone well wait a minute that was too easy what if there's 40 no problem i'll spare it for 40. and he talks him down finally to 10. okay what if there's 10 people surely you wouldn't destroy it if there's 10 rights to destroy everyone if there's 10 righteous people in that in those cities and the lord says fine and and and abraham goes okay i think we're pretty good now because he's probably thinking well lot is one his wife is another he's got two kids there's four i only need to find six more people in both cities that are righteous well the angels arrive at the city uh when you read the story and of course uh they uh uh you know the men of the town come out they want to rape the angels the the angels strike them with blindness the next morning the angels get up and tell lot it's time to get we need to get going now uh because the lord's going to destroy the cities this is a lot hesitated in other words even lot wasn't going anywhere uh and so finally the angels take both la take and and there's enough hands to do this if you do the count so the angels take lot's hand uh his wife's hand and their two kids their two daughters hands and they basically lead them out of the city no no no you're not getting this we're going now uh but the major point we need to get here is they couldn't find anyone righteous in fact the scripture says that the lord had mercy on lot that he was not in a hurry to leave and i think also you know by the way of course once lot goes his lot goes off into the hills his wife is killed because she turns back um his wife is killed lot goes off and his daughters get him drunk immediately and have sex with him so they can have kids even richard dawkins says that maybe we could find if this is the best that sodom had to offer he's from richard dawkins if this is the best that sodom had to offer maybe we can have some sympathy for god's judicial brimstone wow that was a rare moment of moral clarity for richard dawkins uh but but so i can't i don't know what we need to do honestly elisa do we need to have it's almost like the lord needs to have this passage in genesis um 19. it needs to be blinking these as all of our bibles should have a red neon light around it and just have it blinking going pay attention to this stupid you need to pay attention to this because i'm notice the lord's very concerned that abraham and people that read the story from now on he's very concerned that people will not think that he's destroying the righteous with the wicked right and these are canaanite cities he's very concerned that we know this uh and so anyway i just uh yeah but he doesn't destroy the he doesn't order israel to destroy the the rest of canaan because they weren't as corrupted again uh genesis chapter 15 verse 6. look that up yeah and you make a point in an article you wrote for the christian uh research institute and this article is called killing the canaanites a response to the new atheist a response to the new atheism's divine genocide claims and when you're talking about the sodom and gomorrah story and you're relating that with the the more general context of the canaanite conquest you make the point that god knows who will repent and i think something something that we've often failed to do when we're wrestling through um more difficult passages especially in the old testament although there are some difficult passages in the new testament as well uh but god god knows the heart of every person and so we tend to sort of compartmentalize god's understanding within the context of our own understanding of what we might do but as we know we don't have all the information about what's in the heart of every person so comment on that a little bit just even as far as the justice of god giving time for them to repent he knows what's in their hearts he knows who will repent and how does that apply to the larger context of the canaanite conquest narrative yes and part part of i'll begin by saying part of our problem most people's problem you know i've taught why does god allow evil at talbot for many years in fact i'm going thankfully going to be continue to be teaching it to their online students and and to their on-site students so i'm going to be sean mcdowell and i are teaching it together that's a long story but i'm going to continue to teach those courses uh and uh and i've written a book uh oops wrong one i was forgetting backwards why does god allow evil and i've written a book on the subject uh but i i just i just emphasize here the trouble with most with many christians coming in and even christians coming into our master of arts and christian apologetics program even those students coming in many of them really did not do not believe as when they come in that humans are desperately sinful without the work of christ they really don't believe that even though that is standard christian doctrine and so part of our trouble in dealing with this is people have this intuition of no people are basically good i would and so in fact i just wrote an article on this for world uh world view guidebook uh world view bulletin uh that's gonna be coming out soon that every genocide researcher i know to a person in fact every and every genocide victim i know to a person there's no exceptions not one exception agrees that it's the average member of a population that commits genocide well that tells us there's something wrong with humankind doesn't it yeah there's something desperately wrong well in the case of the canaanites they had allowed their evil desires to go as far as they possibly could so they're having sex with their kids um they're having sex with you know they're raping they're raping people they're having sex with whoever they want to have sex with uh including every kind of animal um you know and and this is something um that we need to wrap our minds around but we just like intuitively i think people intuit and a lot of younger christians and a lot of christians who haven't thought deeply about this intuit that no that can't be there had to be a lot of good people there yeah you don't know that uh and in fact the bible says just the opposite there wasn't anybody good there yeah i'm not sure i answered all of your questions that's good no no and that's that's a really great point as well because we tend to look at you know we live in a in a country that uh you know up until maybe recently has had a pretty you know agreeable moral foundation essentially that judeo-christian ethic of course you know we we aren't officially a christian nation in that sense but you look back at the founding documents there's this acknowledgment of a theistic god there are certain moral assumptions that are made and you know that that may of course be changing now but it's i think it's difficult for us sometimes when we have been surrounded by that culture for so long to imagine how this other culture could really be quite as bad as people make it out to be and uh in fact i'm going to read another excerpt from rachel held evan's book a progressive author who dealt with the canaanite conquest not extensively in her book about the bible but she did comment it on on it a few times and so i'd love to interact with this claim she's making here because it has to do with probably what is the most difficult thing to process about the whole narrative and that's the killing of the children so that is something that is probably you know for anybody that's going to be the hardest thing to wrestle through and i love what you said at the beginning we have to approach the text humbly first of all knowing that if we're if something if something seems out of step with the rest of the narrative of the bible that reveals god's nature and character to us there's likely something we don't understand or grasp or there's something we fail to appreciate about the justice and the holiness of god but i'm going to read this because this does have to do with the the killing of the children in this story and she's the context of this quote is she's basically saying that when she started to question the canaanite conquest uh the explanations that she was given were sort of real certain and real hurried and they kind of glossed over things and so here's what she said the explanations came hurried and certain oh god told israel to wipe out the canaanites because the canaanites were super duper evil like the worst people ever they worshipped idols and had orgies and sacrificed their children to their gods so god condemned and this is her back in her voice so god condemned the practice of child sacrifice by slaughtering children she would ask and then they would come back with well that's just how things were back then it was kill or be killed tribal warfare and all that israel did what it had to do to survive and i'm going to throw this over to you in a second but i just want to make a couple of comments just as i read through this um and i see this quite a bit in progressive christian literature and uh rachel held evans was just one of i think the strongest intellects in that world she's very smart she knew the bible she knew her arguments but notice what she's doing here she's there's almost nothing you can say now to to demonstrate how evil this people really was because she's already sort of swept that aside with oh yeah super duper evil almost like it's not as bad as we really thought but this charge clay so god condemned the practice of child sacrifice by slaughtering children how does that make sense how would you answer that claim well that's that is the hardest question and i think people need to and and and this is what we need to spend the most time on uh again the arrogance of just there's i if i don't understand it then it's not understandable uh but this is something i that i've got some special insight into uh and i've spent a lot of time working on and thinking on i've blogged on this by the way clayjones.net a lot on i've got a blog entitled why kill the canaanite children yeah and actually just you also have a it all archived so if you go on clay's site you can see the canaanite archives and all the articles he's written on this are there yes you know thank you one of the things that first you know genie and i weren't able to have children we we had experienced five miscarriages uh and so but we took in foster children older foster children uh well we took in some babies and we took in some older foster children and one of the things that we learned is they bring their culture with them and uh the idea that you're going to just simply tell these kids okay now you're going to not be that way the way you were the raised for the first few years of your life just isn't true and i'm going to say something i'm going to be rather vague and rather is i'm going to be rather vague and i say very cautiously uh one of this one girl when she was 13 years old a beautiful young woman tried to seduce me well my you know we sat her down immediately grounded her for a long time which was always the worst punishment that you could do to her but i thankfully mature christian uh walking with jesus have a good marriage know that this isn't going anywhere this is we're gonna we're gonna kill this and we're going to kill it now uh i i cannot imagine bringing in you know literally thousands of children maybe tens of thousands of children into israelite community and saying yeah and now we're going to be okay the lord says straight out if you don't kill them all then they're going to corrupt you you're going to commit the same sins that that uh they committed and i'm going to then have to destroy you and he warns israel if you do what they did then i will destroy you uh and so there's first of all they're going to bring their sins with them that the next thing is is they're very fascinated in people are fascinated in the culture they came from again and again and again i've talked i'm always interested it's partially because of this topic i'm always interested in talking to people who were adopted and almost without exception they're fascinated about the culture they the parents that they came from the culture that they came from i was speaking on the canaanites on this topic in chicago and a woman came up to me and she said you know i had we adopted a baby from russia and if you had told me that we were not going to be able to change this baby and this baby was not going to grow up and be somebody a great part of our family she said i absolutely would not have believed you i would think that you were i would have thought you were absolutely incorrect she says but now this child is a young adult he wants he wants he's all for russia uh he wants to be in russia he aligns himself with russia and uh he doesn't want anything to do with us uh now i'm not saying by the way that this is the case for every kid i'm not saying that but he became as soon as he found out he was adopted and he was from russia he became interested in all things russia and you could not bring all these children into your lives and not have them want to bring their culture then think about this it goes a step further so you killed my parents because they were doing what what were the sins that you say my parents committed what were their practices that you said were so e that you thought were so evil that that you decided to kill them well that's a big problem too uh but then not only that think about the significance of of adopting children whose parents you killed you'd be i think you'd want to sit there and go you'd you know you'd have an eye open you know you'd need to keep one eye open while you slept as that kid got became a teenager because you don't know they're not hey you killed my parents i'm coming for you um yeah anyway it's it's i i one of the blogs i do in fact it might be the one on children i reference a woman who was a former student of mine who they uh had two children naturally and then they had they adopted 19 other children she says of those 19 children maybe one of them maybe one really considered them to be their her parents uh their parents uh and all of them were fascinated all of them were fascinated by the cultures they came from all of them wanted to know their parents i my i have a niece who works as a matter of fact in you know the the group homes the county group homes and she's now an upper level supervisor and she says that all of her kids man even if they're abused notices she says even if the kids are abused even if they're sexually molested they want to be back with mom and dad uh they don't want to be moved to a a safer home they want to be back with mom and dad and i think that that's instructive to us and the idea that you could just bring these children in without completely corrupting your culture it's just simply it's ignorant it's naive you know there's this kind of what i call you know the song level find away and and there's so many parents out there that i think that are bringing in you know kids that have been seriously molested by adults and once a kid by the way is molested and and some not all of the kids we brought in but some of them were molested certainly the one that was anyway hitting on me uh had been molested but once a child has been molested by uncles or fathers or whoever it breaks down all the boundaries the sexual boundaries are gone uh i mean if you've had sex with your dad or you've had sex with an uncle your boundaries are gone uh and anyway this is a sad story it's a it's not a story i'm sad that it is what it is but this is this is life and the israelites could not bring uh them in for this very reason um one thing i i want to i want to ask you a question still kind of in this vein but i want to make a comment here also just on this uh quote that i read from rachel held evans where she says so god contempt the practice condemned the practice of child sacrifice by slaughtering children i just want to draw attention to the fact that this is a little bit of a bait-and-switch with language because as you've just described there being reasons for god also commanding the children to be killed uh you know that's not child sacrifice child sacrifice is a ritualistic thing the canines were doing like you mentioned they place the child into the arms of molech and it burns to death uh to appease that god it's it's a much different thing than what you're describing as uh as a part of the larger context of that capital punishment that god was instituting that's not race-based and um and that that is something that i think is so important to to be thinking about because that removes the charge of genocide when we realized that uh god was holding the canaanites and the israelites to the same moral standard this this wasn't just about the color of their skin or their ethnic backgrounds of course as we know going back to genesis 1 all human beings are made in the image and likeness of god so this wasn't ethnic cleansing it wasn't genocide in that sense but i want to give you an opportunity here to comment on something because i've had actually several people ask me i had paul kopan on the podcast a couple years ago and i know paul's a friend of yours he's a friend of mine um and and you you guys work together a lot but you do disagree on a few of the finer points around this if i understand correctly as far as the hyperbolic language that's being used is that is that do you want to comment on that yes i do i think one of the things about that is i think and i did a blog that regarding hyper hyper the hyperbolic aspect of it and paul kopan actually commented on my blog and said you you represented me accurately because it's good i think when people hear kopan mention the word hyperbolic or hyperbole or whatever they go oh so he didn't really mean to do all this paul agrees and in this blog you'll see it you'll even see paul koppen's comment paul agrees that god did order killing of cain and i children so when he spells it he's not saying that that's hyperbole god ordered the destruction of canaanite children let me say by the way something a little bit farther about that there's only three things you can do with that israel could have done with the canaanite children one adopt them of course and that brings up all the problems that everything's going to be corrupted because you've adopted them into your family they're going to be seeking out their parents what they were like if they were old enough you know i mean obviously children are molested very young they're going to bring that into your relationships into your culture israel could not do it the lord says and the support takes humility again he says if you allow them to live they will corrupt you if you allow the israelite the canaanites to live they will corrupt you and so the first thing you can do is you can adopt them well that's not going to work the second thing you could do is you could just leave them on their own well uh wow how's that going to work you're just going to abandon be eaten by tigers and lions and other i mean you just got to leave them on their own that's not going to work the third thing that you is you can take your lives as quickly as possible and that's what taking them by the sword is about you take their lives as quickly as possible i i will paul is a good friend of mine i really appreciate his ministry justin doing a thing in november together but anyway uh he gives he brought something up that i really hadn't thought of before and i think you need to think this through it's not always wrong it'll be innocent and i think when people hear that they're like what are you talking about well uh take 911 for instance and fight 93 we know about the two aircraft that hit the world trade center well two hit the world trade center one hit the pentagon and the third one they think it was going to end up at the white house or the capital one of the two uh but we dispatched a fighter to destroy flight 93 who was full of innocent people in other words those people hadn't done anything to be destroyed and killed they hadn't done anything well we nonetheless sent scrambled two fighters uh and one of them was going to hit the cockpit the plan was hit the cockpit the other one was the tail but flight 93 crashed before they could arrive they didn't have time to arm the planes and so they just had to scramble and get them up there there was no time to arm them and one of the pilots that as a matter of fact was named penny and uh she was nicknamed by the people that she other people in her in her unit lucky penny because she didn't have to kill herself to take down flight 93 my point is we would have considered taking down flight 983 to be a tremendous tragedy if they had gotten there before it crashed on its own uh we would have thought that was a tragedy we would have said this is just terrible that these innocent people at the innocent passengers on this flight were killed we would have thought that that was terrible and it would have been terrible i don't think anybody thought would have thought it was immoral uh maybe some but but they didn't have another choice and so sometimes and i love i think paul kopan for this sometimes you have to understand it's not always wrong to kill the innocent uh sometimes they just you know i mean when we go to war uh unfortunately and we're bombing in other countries we try not to do it if we can but they're we're going to end up killing children i'm afraid that's just the way war works uh but in the case of the canaanite children they just simply couldn't allow uh them to bring to corrupt israel and this by the way there's something bigger going on here that the lord wants to know this is the horror of sin against him this is the is that sin leads to death and watches it leads to the death of innocent people two sin hurts innocent people one more thing about this that people need to get a grip of on it is christianity 100 and i mean this is basic 100 you're just being introduced to christianity christianity uh we do not believe that when someone dies it ends their existence that's extremely important when is when canaanite children were killed or when any child is killed when any child dies of anything it's christianity 100 that we do not believe that it ends their existence in other words these children were brought into the next world and next point i think you can make the argument that they were saved because i think that i think that children before a certain age we don't know what that age is but we are saved jesus said in matthew 18 bless the little children let them come to me for of such belongs the kingdom of heaven and so we uh in what sense the kingdom of heaven belong to children not actually in it so we don't know that for sure but we do have reason to believe that maybe these children are saved so when you put this all together this is the whole package it's not always wrong to kill the innocent it doesn't end their existence they're immediately transferred into the kingdom where they will not be harmed where they will not be molested uh or burned to death and um they may be saved for all of eternity and so i think this is the kind of thing that we need to take this fuller picture of what's going on here it's often ignored in this conversation and and that is such a valuable point because when we hear the this sort of charge from both atheists and from people who would be more in the progressive christian realm uh both of those ideologies both of those world views are very here and now focused right progressive christianity uh isn't all that focused on the next life it's focused on this one and that's why we see so much emphasis on social justice and emphasis on uh advocating for certain causes uh in fact rob bell's book i've made this point before on the podcast his book that was really supposed to be about how and about questioning the historic christian view of how he really doesn't do a lot of speculation about what happens in the next life he he sort of turns hell into the the consequences of the choices we make in the here and now and then he speculates in this one section that maybe that's what the next life will be more of the same but when you're focused on the here and now it it sounds a lot more horrific than it does when you consider the overarching story of god's redemptive acts throughout history and and i agree with you clay children who uh you know were coming out of that so abused in all of this ultimately instantly being i believe uh transferred into the presence of the lord with no more tears no more crying no more pain and so i think sometimes we fail to consider that that broader context but that is the christian worldview if we are bible-believing people if we're christians that is our worldview we and as you wrote a whole book on on heaven that we that is what we believe about the nature of humanity and what will happen ultimately and um i want to ask you to comment a little bit about god holding israel to the same standard that he did the canaanites because i think in my view when we realize that that just disintegrates the genocide charge because god was essentially doing the same he held everybody to the same standard so talk a little bit about uh what god expected of israel in the same sort of vein absolutely because that's such a huge part of this in leviticus in leviticus at the end it says because of these sins uh the land is going to vomit out the canaanites but if you commit their sins the land will vomit you out too that's how leviticus ends uh and and people don't understand when it comes to the old testament that you have this situation where this is the first half of the old testament is god setting the ground rules and you have the histories and getting everything started the second half of the old testament roughly speaking is the prophets coming and saying you're committing the sins that i commanded you not to commit and now i'm coming for you you are going to be captured and that's exactly what happened in 722 assyria captured the northern tribes of israel and in 586 babylon captured judah and they were all exiled and most of them were slaughtered in other words god enacted the same penalty on them that he enacted on the canaanites and here's a passage i've got to read to you before he does this jeremiah the prophet jeremiah who's warning judah right he's warning you to do you're committing their sins but here's what the lord says to him he says in jeremiah 5 1 go up and down the streets of jerusalem and look around and consider search through her squares if you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth i will forgive this city although they say as surely as the lord lives they're swearing falsely jeremiah then went around the squares of jerusalem went around looking for a righteous person he couldn't find one righteous person he couldn't find one honest person all of them had become corrupted and so then the lord enacted judgment on judah this is the lord is punishing his own people the same way now understand something and here's what a lot of people don't want to come to grips with god hates these things god hates incest he hates you know adultery uh he's also not popular he also condemns homosexual practice bestiality has gone and he says those who do these things deserve to die and guess what he's coming back and he's going to judge the world and those who have embraced unrepentant sin are going to be are going to be judged you know i was it when i was working at talbot i checked i was checking a bunch of canaanite documents out the primary source documents and there's this blonde i'd say co-ed not uh i'm gonna guess sophomore and i'm checking all these canonies books out she's working behind the counter there taking him up with me she says oh i said i'm writing on the canine she says i've always wanted to know why god ordered the destruction of the candidates and i said well that because they were committing rampant incest uh adultery they were offering their children to a bullheaded island named molag uh there you know there was beastiality and homosexuality and she kind of gave me what i would what i call a homer simpsonian bling i like covers like i don't get it i don't understand what what do you what i what yeah okay but i'm asking why the lord ordered their destruction and it was like see what's happened in our society is we don't think things are very bad in fact our society now is basically embracing all of them uh now today's society peter singer an ethicist at princeton university says it's not beneath a human's dignity to have sex with an animal uh there's movies now being made about people having sex with animals there's one movie called when sleeping dogs lie no i haven't seen it but i read the plot uh it's about a woman who has sex with her dog and she tells her fiance uh that this happened and her fiance is mortified breaks off the engagement but that somebody would make an icky movie like that is that surprising but rolling stone in their review of that movie and i quote this and like we don't hate sins we don't understand what happened to the canaanites article rolling stones said that honesty ruined her life it wasn't sleeping with a dog that would it was honesty see so the trouble is alisa is the present day we don't think those sins are such a big deal and because of that of course we're going to go well god's just barbaric well you know what i've got news for you everybody jesus is coming back to judge the world and you need to get right with him i don't mean i'm turning this into a time to preach but you want to get right with him you need to repent of these sins because you will be judged for them yeah well and that that should uh that that should disturb us a little bit right we should be thinking about you know what god considers holy what he considers to be sinful and in just a moment we're going to continue our conversation with clay for our patreon subscribers so if you are not with us on patreon i just want to invite you to join our community you can go to patreon.com alisa childers there's several different tiers that you can choose from you can choose tier number two for early access to these podcasts you get three days of early access if you go to tier three you're going to be a part of the patreon only facebook group and it's in that group that we actually let you guys ask the questions for the bonus content that we do and you can get that bonus content if you select tier four tier five is going to get you a copy of another gospel and a couple of other surprises throughout the year so you can check out all of those different tiers there but clay as we close out this segment of our discussion what would you leave our readers with i'm very well aware that there are probably people watching this where you're just preaching to the choir they are on board and they're like yes we know that that this does not implicate the moral character of god but i also recognize that there are probably people watching this because they're trying to make sense of this they're wrestling through it it's very difficult for them to understand how god could claim to be good and yet command israel to wipe out the canaanites just what advice would you give to our our viewers and our listeners today about how to approach these texts and and how to wrestle through this stuff when it when it is something that they might be really disturbed by yes i think that's a very important thing to look into and i would start with something that we called you and i've already talked about a couple of times and that is start with humility uh approach the text if you're a sincere christian uh obviously if you're not a conservative and you're just looking for oh i just want to show how god is bad um you're going to look for examples well that's a whole different thing but if you're a sincere christian you need to approach the text with humility and prayerfulness and say lord these scriptures these passages are troubling to me help me to understand them and and if anything you need to ask maybe what's wrong with me that i not terribly offended by all of these things being committed that i've gotten to the point where this is okay it's not okay it will be judged those who are unrepentant of of these and and for that matter any other sins if you are living in unrepented sin you will be judged and so come to it with that kind of humility and then you know i would encourage people this little self-serving but i'd encourage people to look at my blog plate and you if you go down to the bottom where it has categories you click on canonize you'll find a whole bunch of blogs where i discuss the various aspects of killing the canaanites and why this was necessary in other words become informed and the third thing that i would emphasize is again the whole council of god and our physical death is not the end of our existence this is christianity 100 i mean the basic most bottom line of christianity it's not our it's not it's it's not the end of our existence and guess what everybody uh we're all going to stand before a god who sent his son jesus to die on the cross for our sins to be stripped naked scourged uh and then spikes were driven through his wrists and through his feet and he was tortured to death for our sins and i think whenever we talk about why this or that looks uncomfortable or or from the bible we need to remember that if the creator of the universe allowed his son jesus to be tortured to death for our sins we should never lose that thankfully he was also raised from the dead and that if you repent of your sins and come to him you can have eternal life in jesus love it well i want to thank my guest today clay jones uh talking about such a difficult topic i encourage you to go to clayjones.net for more resources not just on the canaanite conquest but on the problem of evil on heaven of course he's been on the podcast to talk about both of his previous books so definitely check those out if you're listening on itunes please give us a good review that really helps get the word out to more people if you're watching on youtube it really helps us out if you subscribe even if you leave a comment if you click the bell icon to get notified every time we release a new video we're just trying to get the word out to as many people as possible so thanks so much for watching and listening today and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Alisa Childers

Views: 33,791

Keywords: apologetics

Id: I-S2D5l4qVo

Length: 53min 41sec (3221 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021