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If God exists, and creates creation, it is His Responsibility to rule that creation. Surely, as God, such a Responsibility and Right must be His: who else would have all the facts? Who else could truly ensure Justice? Who else would have the most vested interest in the welfare of His own Handiwork? Would this God go to such trouble to make and maintain mankind (which the Bible claims He WILLS every second, nothing is on "automatic pilot")....only to throw it away like tissue paper?

We saw in the "Does God Exist?" page that God would not have it in Him to do such a thing. In order to protect people, any government must have a lawful use of force; this would be even more true in the case of "God". Proper judicial systems, policing and sentencing, are a must for an orderly society to be free of fear; how much more would this be true in the case of "God"? Absent these protections, absent Justice, the government would not deserve to rule. Who but God can monitor and ensure Justice? In all events, even lawful violence to protect the populace must ALWAYS be the instrument of last resort. How much more, in the hands of God, who in the Bible has His Own Son pay for all mankind? It isn't as though God depreciates Christ...

Now, let's look at why the claims in the OT are falsely portrayed as God committing genocide or murder.

• the warning time to the Canaanites that they should 1)believe in the Lord, or 2) leave Canaan ("drive..out" phrase in Bible passages) was a minimum of 40 years. People who accuse God of genocide tend to forget that. From the time of the Exodus, the news of the miracle/plagues in Egypt spread like wildfire across the Levant (cf. Bk. Joshua). Yet Israel did not enter the "Land" until 40 years later. Between those two points they did not fight on God's orders unless they were attacked first. [cf. Exodus, Numbers, Deut...read whole books to get the full picture, for they retell the same stories to highlight different lessons. ('Like Genesis 2 recasts Genesis 1 to explain WHY the earth was restored in those six days, so approaches the topic in reverse order.)]

  PRINCIPLE: a vast Gospel-PR campaign, in advance, gave the Canaanites plenty of time to "repent" (change-mind, in Heb or Greek), or..to leave.

• Why? Let's look at the (ahem) 'lovely' lifestyle of these people:
  • child abuse (their own, and others');
    
  • child immolation (their own, and others) --i.e.,to "Molech", among other demon-idols;
  • drug/alcohol abuse as part of the cult rituals;
  • self-mutilation, and mutilation of others, again as part of these rituals;
  • human sacrifice (for a wide variety of "appeasement" reasons, and in orgies);
  • rape (both homosexual and heterosexual, including pederasty);
  • bestiality, homosexuality of a violent type, pederasty, incest -- you name it;
  • widespread adultery/fornication as part of the "worship" of their demon-gods (which meant more rape; often the children would be sacrificed in order to improve orgasms, which apparently increased in proportion to the children's screams);
  • skinning people alive for sport (the Hittites apparently were best at this; it was a favorite way to celebrate the raiding of a town or the end of a battle);
  • widescale banditry, theft, kidnapping, extortion, done to surrounding areas (and the captives of course were used in the phallic cult, per the above);
  • frequent raiding parties that went into towns and put everyone to death (like Tamerlane was to do, later on in history, but at least Tamerlane did it for military reasons -- these people, by contrast, did it for the sheer love of being violent);
  • widescale murder/theft/abuse of visitors who had the bad luck to encounter them;
  • apparently, some cannibalism.

PRINCIPLE: God ordered their execution for all of these crimes for the sake of the people in all the surrounding territories. Should God not administer Justice?

If it were true that infants or children were ordered to be slaughtered (and after you read what follows, you will doubt such things happened), since all children who can't have had enough opportunity to believe in the Lord go to heaven anyway, isn't that a mercy, versus a life of abuse and torture in the 'lovely' society listed above?

• The Canaanites were a mix of Greek and Arabic and Persian peoples; the Arabs are a brother race to Israel (also descended from Abraham...about 13 tribes, at least). They were not the only people in the Levant; further, many of them had intermarried with Edom, Moab, and some of the protected Ammon tribes, so were left completely unscathed, at God's order (read the protection clause to Abraham's progeny and the protection clauses to these groups, which are passim throughout the OT).

PRINCIPLE: Genocide simply couldn't occur, therefore. Mathematically the number of folks in the affected cities at the time of their destruction was too small, and the races were dispersed all over the Levant.

• The Bible's list of battles in Joshua (where these alleged genocides occur) is very detailled, and a careful reading of each will prove the following:
  • At Jericho, the long-lead time mentioned above, plus the protection of all in Rahab's house meant that anyone could have left before the seige began (because it was well-announced to give everyone in the town a chance to believe in the Lord and avoid death); anyone could have left during the seige, or during the 7th day of it, when the battle actually occurred.

    ===> This is a pattern of the other battles. How many other "Rahabs" were there in each town? Just because the Bible doesn't list them all doesn't mean there weren't any. OT's main purpose is to teach doctine. So, its narratives are patterns for people to learn. So, the OT has a tendency only to list great believers, great failures, or great negative people. (It isn't meant to be a blow-by-blow description of history.)

  • At Ai, even greater lead-time was given (Jericho occurred first, and was one of the best-built fortresses in the ancient world, as archeologists even claim today). So, the ability to escape was even greater. Moreover, careful reading reveals that only men and women were killed. (We women can be just as evil as any man.) The children aren't mentioned, which is important, since the Bible carefully categorizes who is to be killed, what is to be destroyed, in each case. (The death penalty had to be visited upon only certain cities and groups.) So, the children had been evacuated, or had been used up in the orgiastic cults (children were often sacrificed before battles to win the demon-god's favor), or..who knows.

  • The other battles listed talk of only the armed forces being killed, or "all inhabitants" -- which would mean all who were still in the city at the time of the well-advertised advance attack. Now, think..how many people would really be left? How many would slip away in the night? What woman with child, if she is at all human, would stay there? What man? See, anyone who actually remained would be beyond-rehabilitation, given the wide "press coverage" (as it were) of the Israelite victories. (Heck, when Caesar invaded Gaul, he only had to fight a few battles, for all Gaul to want to make peace with him.) In short, the lead-time for the cities after Ai was VERY long. Read Joshua for details.

  • Not every attack was ordered by God. More often, not every peace treaty was ordered by God, either, but even so, God didn't override any of those treaties (e.g., the story of Gibeon and its allies in Joshua). Now, if God is omniscient, didn't He know in advance that He'd be disobeyed? So, why didn't He burn those people up with fire from Heaven? Well, if you look into the details, you'll find out the people were at least somewhat positive to the then-Gospel message (Christ was known simply as "The Lord" in those days). Judges lists the many peoples that Israel spared against God's orders. Numbers, Joshua, and Judges have passim references to the attacks Israel made which were NOT ordered by God.

• God did not spare Israel (who were mostly all believers, by the way), either. Almost all of the adults who came up out of Egypt in the Exodus were executed by God, because they were so hard-hearted toward Him. Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy records their insane behavior and negative attitude ("manna" is a derisive question, "What is it???" said in a nasty tone). So, they were gradually executed over the 40 years (which is why they had the delay). The incidents of
  • the quail,
  • Korah rebellion,
  • the golden calf "gold" death-penalty,
  • the cobra bitings ("fiery serpent" is "fiery" feeling...the Hebrew term is for Egyptian cobras)
  are but a few examples.
  • Thus, those who entered the "Land" were largely the children of that recalcitrant Exodus generation. Even so, as Judges unflinchingly reveals, they too later became hard-hearted. So God's Justice then had to order for them what had been ordered for the Canaanites, periodically.

PRINCIPLE: God is Impartial. As a Ruler, He must be. (See Heb2:1-2,10:18ff, and 12:5-10 if you think a believer ever gets away with anything.)

What other principles do we see here?

• Crime can only be restrained by a greater violence which is lawful and impartial. This spares the society from yet more victimization. A thoughtful, careful examination of Judges proves that because Israel did not kill those whom it was ordered to kill, the inhabitants (both Jewish and Gentile) suffered the more.

• War's right purpose is to stop tyranny and save lives. To do this, those waging war honorably must do so without hesitation, because all tyranny respects, is defeat. The A-Bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a last-resort attempt to stop the War in the East. It succeeded. Japan surrendered, and as a result many Japanese, Asian, American soldiers and civilians were saved the horrors and/or death of continued war -- bought by the sacrifice of the Japanese lives in those two cities. We owe them much.

• A half-hearted war, such as we saw in Vietnam (politicians determine policy, not generals), wastes lives and provides no conclusive, peaceful outcome. Either fight fully, or not at all. The Bible calls this "count[ing] the cost".

• No human being in his right mind WANTS to kill. How much more, God, who sacrificed His Son? (Rom5:8, 8:28-30)

PRINCIPLE: So if God kills, it is a last-resort attempt to cut through all that negative scar-tissue of unbelief, and prevent the person from going to Hell, without coercion.

Here we see the root issue: Justice must bless or punish in order to provide and protect the person. Absent Justice, the blessing or punishment may be too much, too little, bad timing, or a host of other wrongs.

• The ultimate expression of this Justice occurs at the 2nd Advent. On the first day of it, literally MILLIONS of people are killed directly by the Lord upon His Return (apparently through a explosion of blood vessels). The passages are detailled and gruesome. No "middleman" usage of humans to sidestep the issue. So, if someone wants to accuse God, here is the example to use, not the OT killings (which are small in number and tame by comparison).

• Why do this? At the 2nd Advent, think: according to the prophecy, these folks have witnessed the Lord "riding" on horseback in the air (God can do what He likes), with angels and believers en train, visible all over the atmosphere (it's pitch black, then suddenly light! from this long train of riders-on-horseback). They are seeing it. Yet they don't believe. This process of arrival has to take some time..hours, at least. Yet they don't believe. All the clamor about "why doesn't God give a sign?" ..but they get many, and still don't believe.

• So, by the time He reaches the Mount of Olives, and splits it in an east-west direction* to create an escape route for the fighting Israeli forces (thus making Jerusalem a seaport for the duration of history), folks all over the world have seen His arrival. They have had plenty of time to believe. Yet do not.

  So, what else can break through to the hearts of those still refusing? Only a painful death. The Bible doesn't say how long it takes to die, but it does say that for those slain in Israel (the war is worldwide, but not all the details are given) the blood of those slain flows like a river 180 miles long and about five feet(!) high (I'm estimating how high a "horse's bridle" is). ('Ergo my conclusion of exploding blood vessels, since combat doesn't have so much bloodletting.)

PRINCIPLE: Shouldn't God go to such extremes, to most jolt these people into believing in Him, so they can choose Heaven instead of Hell? Wouldn't any sane person do everything possible, short of coercion?

• We don't know how many of them will, by their last breath, change their minds and believe. We do know this is not gratuitous violence. After all, what kind of person would still disbelieve? Someone as bad or worse than the Canaanites. Someone just as bloodthirsty, probably even worse (given the events of the Tribulation, which total 7 years of signs and wonders, yet still people scoff). It's hard to imagine such people can exist..until one picks up the newspaper, or turns on the TV. Murder, rape, torture, all over the world; terrorist activity in the name of "democracy" or "freedom". We hear it daily.
  Need more proof? Get the book Dangerous Places from Amazon, if you don't believe we have any "Canaanites" today. ('Book is written by Robert Young Pelton, who is apparently not a believer, so not "biased" to favor Christianity.) Or, look up details on Hitler's Germany (Shirer's book); or the French "Terror" (aka French Revolution); or the wanton destruction in Russia by Communist and peasant alike, when the Czar's family was imprisoned. ['Flight of the Romanovs, or any of the Communist biographies (Beria, Stalin, Kruschev, Grigorenko, etc.)]

• Justice must be executed. It is, by a Lord who paid for all these people, with His Own Blood, first. Love must take a back seat to Justice. So, Isa63:1-6 and Rev19 thus occur (among other cites): the Day of the Lord, Operation Footstool.

So Hell is not going to be populated with "nice" people. After all, it takes an extraordinary amount of arrogance to accuse God absent any homework in the Bible, doesn't it? Imagine how much more arrogant, in a whole lifetime? How "nice" is such a person? For more on how "not-nice" people who reject God become (including Christians!) -- and why they become not-nice, click here (it's a LOT to read, though).

May we all learn to be less guilty of accusing God...

Or, at least more creative. Look: we get sick. People die tragically, senselessly. Every Day. All kinds of natural disasters happen. Clearly God must control them, since only He can order such things. Evil governments oppress people all over the world. Can't God stop them? Of course He can. People are robbed, maimed, raped, even maligned every second the Earth 'turns'. Criminals aren't caught. Christians do horrible things every second. Why not blame God for all of that, too? If you're gonna blame God for what you don't even know the Bible really says, why not go all out -- blame Him for every mishap? Every snagged nylon? Every speck of dust? Don't be coy about it -- be honest, instead. God blesses honesty, you know: talk to Him. Be frank with your accusations. Why not?

But why then does God let bad things happen? "To teach". See Deut8:3-4. See, God turns every bit of "bad" into a blessing (i.e., Ex20:6-7, Num20:18). The only way to avoid the blessing, is to reject God. Even then, there's a de minimis level of blessing God nonetheless transmits to the rejector: why, that's the only reason why 'the wicked prosper'. As we just saw, above, with those who Israel was ordered to kill: they got plenty of advance notice, so they could leave -- or, accept the Gospel. Was that not a blessing? Their lives were horribly insane. Was it not a blessing to be warned? In the only language they could understand -- violence? Right up until the very last minute?

Don't we all sometimes need a bit of suffering as a wakeup call that something's wrong? That's the purpose for pain sensors in the body -- to alert us to a problem. What happens if we ignore the body's correct transmission that something's wrong? We get sicker. So, what happens if God ignores our wrong? We get sicker. Should God do that? Should our parents, while we are young, avoid punishing us? What happens if they do not? We get sicker. So, is punishment a blessing, then? Of course. Surgery hurts -- but it hurts in order to heal. That's a good way to look at God's punishments: hurting in order to heal.

PRINCIPLE: Shouldn't God go to such extremes, so we can stop getting sicker in our souls? Wouldn't any sane person do everything possible, short of coercion?

Of course, a lot of the bad stuff which happens is the natural consequence of our bad decisions. We naturally have quite a difficult time admitting we are to blame -- it's sooo much easier to blame someone ELSE -- God, for example. Frankly, a lot of the Divine Discipline folks receive is simply God's allowing the natural bad consequences of their own decisions to occur. For more on how this works, click here.

Furthermore, God doesn't gerrymander reality. If your body will get sick at a certain time, He already knows that. So, he 'baptised', as it were, that illness with some blessing you can get out of it, which is FAR bigger than the suffering. Why would He do that? Because He Himself has to KNOW that pain. (God is Infinite, so is not emotional: so 'pain' etc. are knowing-things, not feeling-things.) In short, for His Own Sake He blesses. So, He blesses everything. Of all persons, Christ was the Most-Blessed, right there ON the Cross. For more on how that could be true, click here (it's a LOT to read, though).

The deeper reason God doesn't gerrymander reality: God loves Truth. See, "Truth" is an attribute, not merely a collection of facts. Being Omniscient, God knows everything all-at-once. It's like a bizillion TV screens playing the same scenes over-and-over. All at once. "Truth", though, is much more than this: "Truth" is a QUALITY, a STANDARD of "being true, faithful" to truth. To what's Right. Well, "right" includes Reality, for reality is true. To be unfaithful to reality is to be UNtrue to a thing which is true. If God only allowed to exist facts He LIKED, none of us would exist, for the fact of how we are His Righteousness won't tolerate -- it's unJust that we offend Righteousness, see. That's why there is a Cross -- to make our badness 'okay' before Holy Righteousness. That frees His Love, so it no longer matters how bad we are. (See, all other definitions of "God" fail to recognize that Righteousness must be propitiated. That's a BIG HINT that the Biblical God is the "right" one.)

Moreover, God loves Freedom. Why? Because God is totally Free. So, you ALSO are free. He made you with free will. No one can take it from you. NO ONE. So, shall God take your free will from you, or from anyone, by gerrymandering reality? Of course not.

Galatians 5:1 says: "It is for Freedom that Christ has set you free." That's the root point. (Again, 'big hint as to why the Biblical God is the right one -- what other version of God provides for a person to get free of this choking life? Only a dingdong believes he can truly free himself. Life beats us all down.) God will not restrict freedom. He foreknows what will occur and without altering freedom, He will turn every evil into benefit for all parties. To obtain this benefit, sometimes the prospective recipient must be positive toward God; at other times, Justice requires the benefit, irrespective of the attitude in the recipient. The Bible explains some of the underlying principles in Leviticus 26, and Deut 28, which apply to believers and unbelievers alike. For believers, added principles are in 1Jn, Hebrews, James 4, to name but a few added places.

Because of Christ's Payment on the Cross, even if you have never believed in Christ -- GOD LOVES YOU. He made you PERSONALLY, at birth. No one but God made your soul. That's the real "you". Now, think: why would God go to all that trouble, if He didn't want you? Would He want you just to be sadistic? If He were sadistic, why not just torture animals who procreate? On the other hand, if He does love you (and He does), IF HE IGNORES PUNISHMENT, that would mean He didn't love you. Don't you WISH God to love you? See John 3:16,18,36; Romans 5:5-11. Again, God's Justice must punish to PROTECT the person, give him recourse to change his mind. For "God is not willing that any should perish" -- 2Pet3:9. See also Heb12:5-10. No one gets past the Loving Justice of God. It's not FAIR to the person to leave him alone in his error. The person is helpless! Would he have gotten into the error in the first place, if he really knew how bad the error would hurt him? Shall not God help, by hurting him for a little while?

As a person who was kidnapped and tortured as a child, I solemnly attest to the fact that God's blessing is FAR greater -- forever! than any suffering ever was or could be. Even if the person never believes in Him. Of course, why not believe in Him, since it costs you nothing, but it cost Him everything? And, to Him, that cost was pure joy (Heb12:2)? After all, "it is for freedom, that Christ has set you free." You've got the free will He gave you. You can use it, right now -- "Believe in Christ, and you shall be [permanently] saved!" [Acts 16:31 -- "permanently" is conveyed by the culminative aorist tense of Greek verb sozo, "be saved". Because "believe" is also in the aorist tense, it hooks up with the aorist of "saved" to mean that the SECOND you believe, you are saved. (Aorist was a point-of-action tense, at the time the Bible was written.)]

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*Recently some geologists from (I think) University of California at Berkeley found that that location is an earthquake fault-line, which, if activated, could trigger a kind of earthquake making Jerusalem a seaport. I have the information in writing somewhere, and if you'll email me I'll look up the exact citation. (The Lord can do anything He likes, and creates the laws of nature, some of which we know, so I don't need this data to feel the Bible is genuine, but it is true.)