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Monday, May 17, 2010

Three things about genocide in the Bible.

Mikey preaches here about understanding God's call to occupy the land of Canaan and destroy it's people. It's a difficult apologetically to explain and partly because you have to enter into the Christian worldview to understand the justification.  Essentially he argues from these three presuppositions; God intervenes in history, morality is a theocentric construction and Scripture must always be interpreted within a larger Scripture-wide narrative.  God's command to destroy the people of Canann is therefore bound by the following three parameters, beyond that we need to soberly accept that's part of the Biblical canon and worldview.

  1. Violence is always illegitimate but sometimes force for a specific purpose is permitted. 
  2. These particular commands are localised to the context of the ancient Israelites.
  3. God doesn't spring destruction on people, they know what's coming.