Apologetics: Debunking Deconstruction – Is God a Genocidal Maniac?

After answering the question of “Does God condone slavery?” it’s only fitting that we also address the question stated in the title. This question is a hard one and is one that many people struggle with because God did indeed order the Israelites to get rid of the Canaanites and Amalekites. So how can Christians worship a God that ordered that? Well, here are some reasons why this order was just.

First of all, there were certain rules set in place about how to proceed when fighting anyone (Deuteronomy 20:10) and this case is no exception. Before going to war with these people, they were supposed to extend peace terms to the enemy. If accepted, everything would be fine, no war needed. If not, destruction would ensue. Before going and fighting the Canaanites, the Israelites did just that, but the Canaanites flatly refused the peace terms even though they knew what would happen if they did so, especially because they had heard of God and His power. Because of this, the Israelites besieged them and commenced the slaughter.

This incident also shows something about God’s character. He gives us a chance to repent, and we see what would’ve happened if the Canaanites had repented in the story of Rahab (as told in Joshua 2). She was a prostitute that expressed faith in the God of the Israelites and she, helping the spies, was saved from the destruction of Jericho (and later earned her a spot in the genealogy of Christ (Matthew 1:5), and her actions are commended in Hebrews 11:31). What this tells us is that – to steal a quote from one of the guys at my youth group – it’s a grace thing, not a race thing. If the Canaanites had repented, they could’ve been saved from destruction.

Further proving this is my second point. The Canaanites were absolutely terrible people. Leviticus 18 gives us a list of sins that Israel was to avoid at all costs including: incest, homosexuality, child sacrifice, and bestiality, all of which we’re told that the Canaanites practiced (Leviticus 18:24-27). Archaeologists have even found cemeteries full of urns in Tophet containing the charred remains of infants and animals that had been used as sacrifices. God had allowed the Canaanites to live in the area for 400 years and practice their religion and in that time, they could’ve recognized that “Hey, maybe killing our children so we get better crops isn’t really working,” and repented, but they didn’t. Thus, getting rid of them not only served as a sort of Judgement Day for them, but it also rid that part of the area of their atrocities. It also provided a ready-made home for the Israelites who had been promised Canaan to dwell in and fulfilled the curse that had previously been set on Canaan all the way back in Gensis 9:25.

The third reason why this was a good thing was because it helped mitigate the risk of Israel compromising and accepting other gods. This might sound like something that’s not a big deal, but we see how not getting rid of all the Canaanites did eventually lead to them committing idolatry, which led to some big consequences for the Israelites later down the line.

The last reason why God commanded that the Israelites get rid of the Canaanites was to prevent future problems. While the Amalekites were not the Canaanites, we see what happened when the Israelites didn’t get rid of them. They ended up being captured and enslaved by the Amalekites and later in the book of Esther, Haman (a descendant of the Amalekites) tried to exterminate the Jews. Getting rid of these people would ensure the safety of Israel.

Finally, I would like to point out that if deconstructors (primarily those who have turned to atheism) are going to complain about genocide, that they should take a look at what their own worldviews say about genocide. In the 20th century alone, over 100 million people were killed under the regimes of communist atheist states from everything ranging from executions to deportations. In Nazi Germany, 6 million people were killed in the name of eugenics, a belief that had stemmed from the British scientist, Francis Galton in 1883, who had been influenced by the work of his cousin, Charles Darwin (an atheist). As shown by the author Michael Crichton in his excellent essay “Why Politicized Science is Dangerous” (which you can find in Appendix I in his book State of Fear), this belief in eugenics was widely accepted as scientific fact by pretty much everyone in the scientific and political world as Gospel. Some notable atheists who were in support of it were Teddy Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Raymond Pearl, Luther Burbank, and Margaret Sanger.

Keep Margaret Sanger in mind here because it was she who founded Planned Parenthood and it was also Sanger who said that “Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty…there is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles.” And now, while the world now claims to decry eugenics when it was once considered the salvation of mankind, the World Health Organization now reports that about 73 million induced abortions occur every year worldwide, and that’s not counting the ones that go unreported. In Iceland, only one or two babies are born every year with Down Syndrome not because they’ve found a miraculous cure to the genetic mutation, but rather because they abort almost 100% of Down Syndrome babies. Denmark follows this number with 98% of Down Syndrome babies being aborted and the United States aborting 67% of them. Already, due to policies created and promoted by atheists, there has been worse bloodshed than that of any genocide in the Bible for completely arbitrary reasons stemming from man wanting to play God, which was ultimately the original sin that brought death into the world in the first place.

Until next time,

M.J.