2. Since there is a progression, God meets people where they are.
When God reveals himself to fallen human beings, he meets them in particular times, places, languages, customs, and cultures. That means he often begins with people where they actually are, not where they ought to be.
At times, this can look to us as if God is indulging wrong behaviors and wrong assumptions among his people. Cultural norms concerning violence, slavery, patriarchy, polygamy, divorce, and sexual ethics can seem disturbing—and in many cases, they are disturbing. But that is part of the point. The Bible is not a record of God waiting until human beings have become morally impressive enough to receive revelation. It is the record of God entering a fallen world and beginning the long work of redemption.
We should be careful here. “God met them where they were” does not mean “God approved of everything they were doing.” Sometimes you do not begin by saying everything that eventually needs to be said. You begin at the point where the person can actually hear you, and then you move him forward.
3. Even in those times of apparent indulgence, there is critique and correction.
Yes, God meets people where they are—but he does not leave them there. This is very good news.
Many passages that seem harsh to modern readers are actually dramatic improvements over the practices of the surrounding world. The law restrained vengeance. It protected the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner. It required justice even for the weak. It limited the power of kings. It gave slaves protections that were almost unheard of in the ancient world. It condemned the sacrifice of children. It insisted that human life was sacred because every human being bears the image of God.
So, we should not read the Old Testament as though God simply baptized ancient brutality. He was correcting it, restraining it, judging it, and redirecting his people beyond it. That work was often incremental. If we find God’s incremental work offensive, we should remember that this is often how he works with us. He does not show us all of our sins at once. In mercy, he teaches us step by step.
4. God’s wrath is his unusual work.
In Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God, Matthew Lynch makes this point well. When Scripture is taken as a whole, it becomes clear that for every example of divine judgment there are scores of examples of patience, mercy, warning, and grace. The Lord judges, but he does not delight in judgment.
Moses records the Lord saying that he visits the consequences of sin “to the third and fourth generations,” but shows faithful love “to a thousand generations” (Exodus 20:5-6). In other words, God’s mercy vastly outpaces his wrath. The prophets make the same point. God warns before he judges. He sends messengers before he sends destruction. He waits. He pleads. He gives time to repent.
This is important when we come to the Canaanites. Genesis 15 says that Abraham’s descendants would not immediately inherit the land because “the iniquity of the Amorites” was not yet complete. That is a remarkable statement. God was not in a hurry to judge Canaan. He waited for centuries.
Perhaps the question is not only, “Why did God judge the Canaanites?” Perhaps the question is also, “Why did he wait so long?”
5. We believe that God is good, but he is not safe.
C. S. Lewis memorably made this point with Aslan. He is good, but he is not safe. That is a biblical instinct.
God is not a tame deity. He is not the projection of our moral preferences. He is the Creator, Judge, and Lord of all the earth. There are things God has the right to do that no human being has the right to do. God gives life, and God may take life. He placed the curse upon Adam’s descendants. He judged the world in the flood. He judged Sodom and Gomorrah. He judged Egypt. He judged Israel. He judged Judah. And the New Testament warns us of a final judgment still to come.
So yes, the Canaanite conquest is disturbing—so is the judgment of Amalek. But if those passages are disturbing, we should recognize that Scripture gives us even larger and more sobering doctrines of judgment. The question is not whether God judges. The question is whether the Judge of all the earth will do what is right. Abraham asked that question in Genesis 18, and the entire biblical story answers “yes.”
6. The Canaanites were no exemplars of peace-loving humanitarianism.
The Bible’s indictment of the Canaanites is not that they were merely in the way of Israel’s national ambitions. Scripture presents the conquest as judgment upon a culture whose wickedness had reached its full measure.
Their most explicit atrocity was child sacrifice. Deuteronomy says that the nations of Canaan did detestable things in worship: “They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31). Leviticus and Deuteronomy also condemn occult practices, divination, sorcery, necromancy, idolatry, and a cluster of sexual sins that Scripture says had defiled the land.
This does not mean that every Canaanite personally committed every one of these sins. Nor does it mean that Israelites were morally superior. Deuteronomy 9 goes out of its way to say that Israel was not receiving the land because of its righteousness. Israel was stubborn, undeserving, and frequently rebellious. God was judging Canaan’s wickedness and keeping his promise to Abraham.
It is also worth noticing that Canaanite ancestry itself was not an automatic death sentence. Rahab was spared. Her family was spared. The Gibeonites were spared, even though their story is complicated by deception. The point is that the issue was not ethnicity as such. The issue was a religious and moral order that had become profoundly corrupt.
7. Where did we get the idea that genocide is wrong?
This is a question worth asking, especially when modern skeptics treat the moral horror of these passages as self-evident. Where did that moral horror come from?
Not from the ancient Greeks and Romans. They often celebrated conquest, enslavement, and the slaughter of defeated peoples. Alexander the Great destroyed Thebes and sold its survivors into slavery. Julius Caesar devastated Gallic peoples and presented his campaigns as evidence of Roman glory. The Assyrians boasted of flaying rebels, impaling captives, mutilating enemies, and deporting whole populations. The Aztecs incorporated human sacrifice into the center of public religious life.
Now, this does not mean that every ancient person was a monster. Ancient people could be compassionate, thoughtful, noble, and humane. But their moral world was not founded upon the conviction that every human being possesses equal and inviolable dignity. That conviction is not obvious in human history. It had to be revealed, taught, and learned.
In Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland argues that many modern critics of Christianity are, morally speaking, standing on Christian ground even when they do not realize it. The very instinct that recoils at slaughter, protects the weak, values the victim, and insists that every human life matters has deep biblical roots. Genesis opens by declaring that every human being bears the image of God. The law commands love for neighbor and care for the stranger. The prophets denounce oppression. Jonah forces Israel to reckon with God’s mercy toward Nineveh. Jesus commands us to love not only our neighbor but our enemy.
So when someone says, “I cannot believe in a God who would command the destruction of a people,” I understand the objection. I feel the weight of it. But I also want to ask, “Where did you get the moral categories that make the objection so powerful?”
The biblical story gives us those categories. And then it requires us to bring even the hardest passages under the lordship of Christ.
All things, including the difficult passages where God renders a death sentence upon entire cultures, must be interpreted through Jesus Christ. When we consider who he is, listen to what he taught, and understand what he has done on our behalf, things become properly ordered.
Jesus does not make every question disappear. He does not give us a neat answer to every historical and moral difficulty. But he does show us the heart of God. At the cross, God’s judgment and mercy meet. Sin is not excused; it is judged. Sinners are not simply destroyed—they are redeemed. The Judge bears judgment in order to save his enemies.
That does not remove all the mystery from Joshua. But it anchors our faith. We may not have every question answered to everyone’s satisfaction. But we know enough to trust the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ. He is good. He is holy. He is merciful. He is not safe. And he is our hope.
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