We have seen that the title of Israel to Canaan falls back upon God’s prior title—upon his right to deed it to whom he would. On the same principle the question whether it was right and just for them to extirpate the Canaanites falls back upon two prior questions—(a.) Was it right and just for God to extirpate them?——(b.) Was it wise for Him to command the Israelites to do this work of extirpation, rather than do it himself by miracle, and without human hands? Here are our two great questions.
(a.) As to the first—the right of God to destroy them for their crimes and the justice of doing it—I see not how it can be denied or questioned without denying to God the right to punish sin at all. Has God any right to govern his own universe—any right to resist the influence of sin and rebellion in his kingdom—any right to protect innocent children from being burned to death in homage to the devil? Alas for the universe if this doctrine can be maintained!——Truly we may say—If God has no right to exterminate from the earth any one individual sinner, or a nation of many thousands who are too corrupt to live, then he lacks the essential rights of a God! If he has not the power to do it, he lacks the power necessary to a God. If he has not the firmness—the nerve (shall we say?)—the sense of justice and right that would forbid his evading the duty, then he lacks the essential attributes of a God. If he has so little love for his offspring that he can see their welfare sacrificed in the worship of the devil and in the sweep of unutterable social pollutions, then he is incompetent to govern a world of sinners!
(b.) But the objector will make his chief stand upon the secondary question—Was it wise for God to employ Israel to extirpate the corrupt Canaanites?
The objector will perhaps say—He might have sunk all Canaan under a second flood like that of Noah’s time, and no complaint could stand against him. He might have engulfed those cities in fire as he did guilty Sodom, and all the living, cognizant of the moral grounds of the act, would have said, Amen! But that he should set such an example of war—the most horrid of all wars—before the nations of all history—before the ages of all time, giving it his holy sanction—nay more, setting his own most holy people to the bloody work—this is unpardonable. That he should put them to such barbarities—subject them to such demoralization of all the finer sensibilities of the human soul, seems too horrid to be thought of!
It is perhaps well to meet this question in its strongest form, with its objectionable points in their most revolting aspect.
I do not feel called upon to say one word to soften down any man’s sense of the horrors of war. War is horrid—but sin is more horrid—certainly such sin as that of the old Canaanites. In fact war is horrid—not mainly because of the suffering but because of the sin that may be in it. And this suggests the true and just reply to be made to the objection now before us, viz. that such a war as that of Israel against the Canaanites, waged in obedience to God; waged for the destruction of such sinners and to cleanse the earth from such unutterable abominations and pollutions, is not demoralizing—is not so either necessarily or even naturally; but if done in honest obedience to God and with a due sense of the grounds on which God commanded it, must have been the very opposite of demoralizing; must have educated the nation of Israel to a juster sense of the abominations of idolatry and of the righteous moral government of God over the wicked in the present world. It can not be doubted that these were the ends which God sought to secure in putting this service upon Israel. A lower object to be reached was to vacate the land of Canaan for Israel to occupy; but the far higher object was to wash the land of its moral pollutions; to break down and blot out nations too corrupt to live. The Lorddevolved this extirpation upon Israel that they might thereby get a deeper sense of his abhorrence of such sin—not to say also, a juster view of the intrinsic abominations which God commissioned them to punish.
Or we may put the argument thus: Given—the great historic fact, the moral corruption of the nations of Canaan and the moral purpose of God to exterminate those nations for their corruption. The choice of methods lies between miracles on the one hand, and the war-force of Israel, backed up by God’s providential agencies, on the other:—miracles as in the flood and on Sodom: or the war-commission given to his people Israel.
Now consider.——1. Miracles had already been employed repeatedly before the eyes of mankind, and the Lord might for this reason wisely vary his methods, for the greater and better effect.
2. As already argued, the moral effect upon Israel of being made the executioners of God’s righteous justice may be presumed to have been naturally wholesome. But not to push this argument—we may at least maintain,
3. That seen historically—estimated in the light of the facts of the case, this method was morally impressive, instructive, elevating, wholesome. Recur to the first war—that against Amalek; and to the scope it gave for illustrations of prayer, and to the sense it inspired of their relations to their covenant God. Turn to the record of the war against Moab and Midian (Num. 25 and 31). Mark its powerful protest against the lewdness involved in those forms of idol-worship, and note how Phineas arose to the sublime grandeur of the emergency and made a record for himself and for his whole tribe indeed in the history of the nation (Num. 25: 11–13 and Mal. 2: 4–7). Study the wars of Joshua and the moral heroism developed there, and ask if any generation of Israel appear on the page of her national history, exhibiting a truer consecration to God or a more conscientious devotion to his will. And what shall we say of Deborah and Barak, and of the heroism that shines and gleams in the record of their achievements, or of the piety that flavors their triumphal song? The same may be said of the wars under David, Jehoshaphat, and Hezekiah, and of the songs of praise and of proud triumph in Israel’s God which gave expression to the moral results of thosewars and victories. That man reads the history of the heroic age of Israel very imperfectly who does not see in it ample demonstration that staunch obedience to God in this matter of war against the idolatrous, corrupt Canaanites, fostered piety, developed Christian heroism and toned up the standard of morality. When they compromised, accepted tribute, and tried their own policy of living side by side with such idolaters instead of God’s policy of vigorous extermination, then came disaster, religious decline, and most perilous moral corruption.