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“In thirty-five years of religious study, I’ve come up with only two hard, incontrovertible facts: There is a God, and I’m not Him.” So said Father John Cavanaugh, former president of the University of Notre Dame, to Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger in the 1993 film Rudy. I take issue with the quote a bit, since our study of religious truth should lead us to many more incontrovertible facts about the God of the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ. Still, I do like the priest’s conclusion: “There is a God, and I’m not Him.” There is hardly a more succinct way to state one of the core truths of the Bible—the distinction between the Creator and the creature.
We are like God sufficiently for us to know Him truly, and yet we are so unlike God that He has abilities and privileges that we can never possess. He is life itself, receiving it from none else (Ex. 3:14). We derive our life from Him. He is the Lawgiver who can judge us. We cannot judge Him. He is the sovereign and good King of creation who has the right to do anything He sees fit with what He has made (Rom. 9:1–24).
Keeping these principles in mind is essential, especially when we are reading biblical historical accounts such as the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan. Many people outside the church use this story to accuse the God of the Bible of being a genocidal maniac. At the same time, many people within the church find it difficult to reconcile the conquest with the love of God.
the limited scope of the conquest
Deuteronomy 20:16–18 instructs the Israelites on what they are to do to the inhabitants of the promised land: “In the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes” (v. 16). Israel was to kill all the residents of Canaan—men, women, children, and animals. Texts such as these are why some people have said that the God of the Bible commands genocide.
We should note, however, that God’s commanding the destruction of the Canaanites was not racially or culturally motivated. The Lord never told Israel to wipe out the inhabitants of the promised land because they were of a different bloodline than the people of Israel. Moreover, God did not order Israel to pursue Canaanite peoples who fled outside the boundaries of the promised land. His goal was not to wipe out a people for ethnic reasons but to get them out of the land. It was possible for Canaanite peoples to flee the territory for safety. Clearly, God was not moved by ethnic or racial hatred to order the conquest of Canaan, for we see that Rahab converted to the God of Israel and was spared while remaining ethnically Canaanite (Josh. 2; 6:25).
A true genocide seeks to exterminate an entire people no matter what, even if they flee to another land, and will spare none from that people. The scope of the destruction of the Canaanites was limited to a particular territory, and one could escape the sword of Israel by fleeing or by turning from sin and trusting in the one true God. God did not order a genocide.
the justice of the conquest
It’s likely that most people who question the moral goodness of the conquest do so because they do not really know what Canaan was like when Israel invaded. It seems that many people think that the Canaanites were just like modern Westerners, that their technology may have been less advanced but that, like us, they were generally law-abiding citizens and pleasant neighbors. Thus, the command to wipe them out is an affront to justice.
The people of Canaan, however, were not “garden variety” sinners. Leviticus 18 contains a list of practices forbidden to the Israelites, including incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, and human sacrifice (vv. 1–23). It then says that such wickedness was the reason that God was driving out the Canaanites and that if the Israelites fell into such sins, they would lose the land in the future (vv. 24–30). The Canaanites were not minor-league sinners. They burned their children as offerings to the god Molech and engaged in cult prostitution and every other form of sexual immorality wantonly and impenitently. They more than deserved the sentence of destruction from our perfectly holy Creator.
god’s patience and the conquest
The conquest of Canaan reveals God’s justice, but it also shows us the Lord’s patience. Many years before God sent Israel into Canaan, He told Abram about the coming conquest of the Amorites, another name for the Canaanites, and that it was not time to destroy them in the patriarch’s day because “the iniquity of the Amorites [was] not yet complete” (Gen. 15:12–16). The Lord did not make His decision to destroy the Canaanites lightly or quickly, but He was exceedingly patient with them, giving them hundreds of years to amend their ways. God does not act rashly, but He is long-suffering and delays His wrath until the perfect time. The Canaanites met their end because they presumed upon the Lord’s patience, not seeing that His kind delay was meant for their repentance (Rom. 2:4).
salvation and the conquest
The destruction of many but not all of the Canaanites was not an end in itself but a means to the salvation of the world. From all eternity, God purposed to send a Savior who would come in the fullness of time and die to save His people (Rom. 5:6; Gal. 4:4–5; Eph. 1:10). There was just the right time for this, but in the days immediately after the exodus and wilderness wandering, before Israel entered Canaan, that time was not yet. But because the Messiah would come from the nation of Israel, specifically the tribe of Judah (Gen. 49:10), that nation had to be preserved as a holy people until the God-appointed time for the Savior had come.
Driving out the Canaanites and their wickedness was a means to help preserve a holy line in Israel until the Messiah was born. God told His people to drive out the Canaanites from the promised land so that they would not be corrupted by Canaanite sin and so be destroyed themselves (Deut. 20:16–18). Were that to happen, there could be no Messiah, no salvation for the world.
Israel as a nation never did fully drive out the Canaanites but was enticed to follow them in their sin again and again under the old covenant. Nevertheless, God in His grace preserved a faithful line in Israel. From that line, He sent Jesus, the true Israel of God, who by His person and work drives out and destroys sin and death so as to save us from the wrath that fell on the Canaanites so long ago.