Challenging Passages, Challenging Questions | Sunday, April 30, 2023

Now the LORD said to Joshua: "Do not be afraid, nor be dismayed; take all the people of war with you, and arise, go up to Ai. See, I have given into your hand the king of Ai, his people, his city, and his land... only its spoil and its cattle you shall take as booty for yourselves. Lay an ambush for the city behind it." ... So it was that all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand—all the people of Ai. ... So Joshua burned Ai and made it a heap forever, a desolation to this day. (Joshua 8)

When the Bible turns harsh, do we skip the hard text—or wrestle with it until we find God's justice?

A Good and Challenging Question

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I went to dinner with some friends. The wife has been a Christian a long time; her husband is not yet a Christian, but he is a genuinely interested seeker. I know that because he asks me really good and challenging questions every single time we get together—and I love them. As we were leaving, he said, "I've been reading the Bible, and I've got a question." As a pastor, you can't get more excited than when a not-yet-Christian says he's reading Scripture.

His question was this: "Jesus in the New Testament is presented as God, and He seems nice, merciful, and gracious. But God in the Old Testament doesn't seem like that—He seems harsh and severe. What's going on?" That's a challenging question, but a really good and honest one.

First Peter tells us to "sanctify the Lord God in your heart, and always be ready to give a defense for the hope that you have, with meekness and fear." As a pastor who is engaged outside the walls of the church—I've been a fire department chaplain for more than twelve years—I get these questions often. If I were not a Christian, these are exactly the questions I would be asking, because many of us in our culture are bred to be skeptical. Even as a Christian, these are questions I have wrestled with for a long time and continue to wrestle with.

Wrestling Is Not a Bad Thing

If you find yourself wrestling with faith, with God, with the Bible, even with doubt, that is not a bad thing. The very idea of wrestling with God is connected to the name Israel. The man who first bore that name was Jacob, and in Genesis 32 there is a wrestling match that many scholars believe was with God incarnate. Afterward God changed his name from Jacob to Israel—"one who wrestles with God."

There are questions I will probably still be wrestling with right up until I depart this life. I may not know the full answers here and now, but I trust that God will vindicate His answers. What bothers me is that sometimes Christians—not just average churchgoers, but leaders, teachers, and pastors—sidestep the hard questions. When I have a question about a difficult passage and turn to a commentary, a YouTube video, or a podcast of someone I respect, it makes me angry when they skirt the issue and dance around the elephant in the room.

When we returned to the Old Testament a few years ago, after more than a decade in the New Testament, I knew we would hit passages with challenging questions. The temptation is to sidestep them. But I can't bring myself to do that, because these are issues I wrestle with too, and I want there to be an answer.

The Setting: Jericho and Ai

At this point you might ask, "Pastor, what exactly is the issue?" Look at what precedes Joshua 8. In Joshua 6, Israel experienced a great victory at Jericho, a city far too big for them to overcome by their own power and strategy. Yet the walls fell flat, and Israel took the city. If Jericho was a behemoth, then Ai—the next town—was the JV team. Israel sent only two or three thousand soldiers, and they were routed; thirty-six men died.

In Joshua 7, God revealed why: there was sin in the camp. Everything taken from Jericho was to be devoted to God. The Hebrew word is harem, which carries a dual meaning—devoted, but also accursed. If something is devoted to someone, it is their property; to touch it is to steal it and bring a curse on yourself. A man named Achan took of the devoted things, became accursed, and that curse spread through the whole nation, so God would no longer go with them.

The way that sin was dealt with was severe. Achan and his entire household were stoned, then a heap of stones was piled over them, and their belongings burned. That seems harsh. Why was his whole family judged? If you think about it, his household was complicit—they knew what he had done and were involved. Still, it seems severe. And it gets worse in chapter 8.

"Arise, Go Up to Ai"

God says to Joshua, "Do not be afraid, nor dismayed... arise, go up to Ai." Those words are a repeat from the beginning of the book. In Joshua 1:2 God said, "Arise, and go," and in 1:9, "Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed." Why are they repeated in chapter 8?

For at least two reasons. First, to remind Joshua of the promise God had previously made. Second, to assure him that God was now with him again. When Achan's sin entered the camp, God said, "I'm no longer with you." Now that the sin has been dealt with, God says, "Be strong; I am with you." This gives us our first point: Israel's victory depended not on their power but on God's presence.

This is an important truth, not just for Israel 3,400 years ago, but for us. The danger when we experience victory is to assume it came by our own strategy or strength. When we start trusting in ourselves, we tend to fall flat on our faces and be humbled. My victory is dependent not upon my own power but on God's presence in my life.

The Battle and the Hard Verses

Joshua chose thirty thousand mighty men and sent them by night to lie in ambush behind the city. He and the rest would approach Ai from the front, and when the men of Ai came out as before, Israel would feign defeat and flee, drawing them away from the city. Those in ambush would then rise, seize the city, and set it on fire.

It happened exactly so. The king of Ai hurried out against Israel, not knowing of the ambush. Israel fled, the men of Ai pursued, and the men in ambush entered the city and set it ablaze. When the men of Ai saw the smoke ascending to heaven, they had no power to flee, and Israel turned and struck them down so that none remained or escaped. "All who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand—all the people of Ai... according to the word of the LORD." Joshua burned Ai and made it a desolation.

A couple of weeks ago my friend asked why God in the Old Testament seems so harsh and severe. Here it says, "according to the word of the Lord," they utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. Challenging passages invite challenging questions—especially from the antagonistic skeptic who says, "Wait a minute, does this mean your God allows or condones genocide?"

Two Common Ways Around the Problem

This is one of those passages pastors are tempted to skip. One common approach is to allegorize or spiritualize its meaning. Bishop Robert Barron, following the early Church Father Origen, says passages like this should be read metaphorically: what God commands here is what you should do to the sin in your life—utterly destroy it. That is true, and it is not a horrible way to read it, but it leaves questions on the table.

Another approach comes from the Reformed Bible teacher John Piper, who says it is right for God to slaughter in this way anytime He pleases—God gives life and takes life, He governs everything, and everything He does is just. From a theological standpoint, if you believe God is sovereign and Creator, that is true. None of it is off, but it still doesn't silence the genuine skeptic who says, "I don't get it."

The Language of War Texts

This isn't the first time we've faced this. When we went through Deuteronomy 7 a couple of years ago, we met the same "utterly destroyed" language. If you read other writings of this genre from the period—called war texts, from the Hittites, the Hivites, the Babylonians, or the Egyptians—you find similar hyperbolic language.

So when it says they were utterly destroyed, man, woman, child, and beast, they may not literally have destroyed every one. It's like saying, "I hope the Padres crush the Giants." You probably don't mean dismemberment. How would we know it's hyperbole? We would know if the same groups Israel "utterly destroyed" in Joshua 8, 11, 12, and 13 still show up later in the text—and that's exactly what we find. The language probably is hyperbole. But even so, I still have questions.

Is It Just for God to Judge This Way?

We live in a society that highly values justice and fairness—companies even have divisions for diversity, equity, and inclusion. So we read texts like this and ask, "Is it right for God to condemn and judge groups or individuals in this manner?" That's the first question.

The second: how do we reconcile the apparent contradiction between Yahweh in the Old Testament and Yeshua in the New? People say, "I like Jesus—meek, merciful, gentle—I just don't like His people, and I don't like that Old Testament guy Yahweh, who seems like a punk teenager looking for the next guy to beat up." And third: what is the significance of a passage like this for me today? Should I just ignore it, as many "New Testament Christians" do? I've gone looking for help on Joshua from well-known teachers with huge ministries, and many of them have nothing to say about Joshua 8.

An Ancient Objection

This is not a new question. It was asked 4,000 years ago by the first man to follow God by faith—Abraham. When God told Abraham He would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and three other cities, Abraham essentially said, "Objection, your honor." In Genesis 18 he asks, "Suppose there are fifty righteous in the city; would you destroy it and not spare it? Far be it from you to slay the righteous with the wicked." Then comes the question: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"

It's a 4,000-year-old question. When confronted with the justice of an almighty Judge, the question rises in our minds too. If there is one Judge who will judge all, we expect that Judge to be right and righteous. We are privileged to live in a culture where we can even expect justice—much of history and the world has not enjoyed that, and we are not guaranteed it will continue.

God does not answer Abraham with words; the question hangs in the air. But in the very next chapter He answers with His actions. When Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed—never rebuilt, with archaeological evidence today—God rescued the one righteous man, Lot, along with his daughters and his wife (who didn't make it). He would not slay the righteous with the wicked. He did the same at Jericho, rescuing Rahab and her family.

The Moral Argument

The skeptic's objection actually fails to recognize that the very sense of justice he appeals to is only explained if there is a God. If we exist by random chance and mutation over billions of years, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong—everything is subjective. If there is no God, there is no moral law, because there is no moral Law Giver to say this is right and that is wrong.

This is the moral argument for God, popularized in the last seventy-five years by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity—a book he actually spoke as radio lectures during the bombing of Britain in the Second World War. If God does not exist, you have no basis for saying anything is wrong or right; it becomes "might makes right." Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps history's most famous atheist, said that if we have killed God, we can expect nothing more than bloodshed and death, because there is no right and wrong. So when your skeptical friend says, "This seems wrong," his sense of injustice actually challenges his atheism. This is the second point: objective morality depends upon a moral Law Giver.

Four Reasons God's Judgment Is Just

First, God does not judge arbitrarily or randomly—He judges with cause. Employers know that phrase: you don't fire someone because you slept badly; you fire them with cause. God's judgment of Ai was not without cause.

Second, God does not condemn and punish quickly. We all know someone with a short fuse who snaps at one wrong move. God is not like that. Scripture reveals He is slow to anger, patient, long-suffering. He gave the people of Canaan more than 400 years to cease their wickedness and repent. Before the flood, He gave 120 years. The challenge is that we turn a few pages in our Bibles and jump forward centuries, not realizing how patient God was through all that time.

Third, God sends messengers before He judges, calling people to repentance. He sent the reluctant prophet Jonah to Nineveh—and Jonah only resisted because he feared God was merciful and would forgive them, which He did. We have an entire section of Scripture, the Prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Obadiah, Micah, Habakkuk—committed to God calling sinful people to repentance. He sent Noah, a preacher of righteousness; He sent Lot to Sodom and Gomorrah; He sent Isaiah to Judah.

Fourth, God is righteous in His judgments. Think of jury duty: we take twelve people to hear testimony and weigh evidence, and we trust their united decision—though we recognize it sometimes fails because we judge by what we see and hear. But Isaiah 11 says of God, "He shall not judge by the sight of His eyes, nor decide by the hearing of His ears, but with righteousness He shall judge." God judges the heart. And He does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked, as we so often do when we cheer videos of "swift justice." God delights not in the death of the wicked but judges with righteous judgment.

A Comfort and a Terror

We have a sense of justice; God is the embodiment of perfect justice. In the end His judgment will be complete, true, and good. This is the third point: we can depend upon the complete truth, goodness, and justice of God. Many people throughout history who lived under severe injustice, with no hope of justice in this life, took comfort that God will judge—as they sat in Birkenau, Treblinka, or Auschwitz, their only hope was that God will judge. But while that comforts some, it is also a terror to many, because there is no escaping it. God will judge.

No Real Contradiction

How do we reconcile the apparent inconsistency between Yahweh in the Old Testament and Yeshua in the New? There is no inconsistency at all. To object to one only reveals an elementary understanding of the Bible. Read Genesis to Revelation and you discover that God in the Old Testament is merciful and gracious. In Exodus 34:6 He reveals Himself: "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious... slow to anger... forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty."

This is the fourth point: we can trust that God's nature is dependable and unchanging. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He was merciful and gracious to Israel, to Rahab's family, to Noah, and to Lot, and He continues to be merciful and gracious to you and me in our failures. He says, "Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

The Significance for Us

Should we ignore passages like this? The reason we take the time to go through them—passages many pastors skip—is that they reveal essential truths with a multi-dimensional significance.

First, it is practically and historically significant. God did, in times past, judge sin. This judgment came because of sin, but also for the purification of a people and a place for His redemptive purpose—a one-time purging of the land of Canaan so Israel could occupy it and God could bring about His redemptive plan in Jesus, salvation for all humanity.

Second, there is a personal and spiritual significance. As Origen noted 1,900 years ago, there is an allegorical dimension: we are daily engaged in a spiritual battle and must seek to utterly destroy sin by the power and presence of God, because a little leaven leavens the whole lump.

A Coming Judgment

Finally, there is an important eschatological significance. In history past, God has judged humanity for sin; prophecy reveals that in the future He will judge humanity for sin, and His judgment will be severe and complete. There is a day of judgment. Though our Lord is called the Prince of Peace and we Christians are called to be peacemaking ambassadors, He will one day return to judge the world.

Do you suppose the people of Jericho, Ai, and Sodom were more worthy of judgment than we are? I tell you no—but unless you repent, you will also likewise perish. So much end-times teaching is speculative Bible-code cryptography, most of it fiction that sells books and fills seats. The primary reason to study eschatology is this: God will judge, and those He has judged were no more worthy of justice than you and me.

This was the question Jesus answered in Luke 13. When people told Him of some killed unjustly, He said, "Do you think they were worse sinners than the rest? I tell you, no; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." The bad news is there is a day of judgment. The good news is that God was gracious to Noah, to Rahab's household, to the righteous in Sodom, to Nineveh—again and again God is slow to anger, merciful, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. And in Jesus Christ you can be forgiven as well. That is the only way to escape.

Closing Prayer

As we close, let me leave you with the fifth point: my salvation depends upon trust in God and His ability to save. There is a day of judgment coming, and God does not delight in judgment—neither do I—so He has made a way that we might receive His grace and forgiveness in Jesus Christ.

Father God, I pray that You would meet us in this moment. We thank You for Your word, which does not mince words or hide truth, but makes it so clear that we are without excuse. You offer salvation, grace, and forgiveness, because at Your core You are merciful and gracious, long-suffering and slow to anger. You said that if we confess with our mouth that You are Lord and believe in our heart that You raised from the dead after dying for our sins, we shall be saved; whoever believes on You will not be ashamed, and whoever calls upon You will be saved.

If you would like that salvation, pray with me now: Dear Jesus, I recognize that I am a sinner. I have not lived up to Your perfect standard, but You died in my place. I thank You for Your love, Your forgiveness, and Your grace. I pray that You would come into my life, forgive me of my sin, and help me to follow You by faith. In Jesus' name, amen.