SPEAKER_00 0:00

The sermon text for today is from Deuteronomy chapter 7, verses 1 through 11, and 17 through 19. Please listen as I read God's word. The Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess it and drive out before you many nations. The Hittites, the Gergasites, Hemorites, Canaanites, Perizites, Hivites, and Jezites. Seven nations longer larger and stronger than you. And when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you, and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and Lord's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their asteroids, and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the people on the face of the earth, and to be his people, his treasured possession. The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all the peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to you, or to your ancestors, that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God. He is a faithful God, keeping his covenant to love, or covenant of love, to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. But those who hate him, he will repay to their faith with destruction. He will not be slow to repay to their faith those who hate him. Therefore, take care to follow the commands and decrees and laws I give you today. You may say to yourself, these nations are stronger than we are. How can we drive them out? But do not be afraid of them. Remember well what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. You saw with your own eyes the great trials, the signs and wonders, the mighty hand and outstretched arm with which the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the peoples you now fear.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

If I haven't had the chance to meet you yet, my name is John, and I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood. I am glad to be back here with you today. Uh the crud has been going around our household, as it has uh many of your households as well. And I got hit pretty hard with it last Monday, and uh because of uh the uh unpredictability of my cough, I was uh not open to public speaking uh last Sunday. So you're welcome for that. I don't know if this happens to you, uh, but in our family, we're never all sick at the same time. It's like Kenna gets sick and then gives it to Chloe, and then Chloe gives it to mom, and then right when I think I'm like out of the woods and I'm gonna dodge it, then I get sick, and uh that's just uh that's just the way it goes. So, anyways, glad to be back here with you this morning. Uh, as we come to this passage that you just heard read, I would like to invite you to join me in a word of prayer. God, this morning through song, we have already declared that you are holy, that you are merciful and you are mighty. We've declared, God, that you are perfect in power, in love and purity. So, God, we worship you for who you are and who you've revealed yourself to be in the Bible. And as we come to this very difficult passage, we ask that you would give us eyes to see and hearts that can understand what is before us. We ask God, as we do each week, that you would help us to see Jesus first and foremost, and that having seen him, we would become like him and that we would be changed. So help us now, Holy Spirit, in these moments. We need your help today. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen. We are in the home stretch of a series of messages uh just this week and next week, where we have uh we've been looking at questions that you all have submitted to us. We titled the series Asking for a Friend, and we ask you to submit questions to us, questions that either you personally have, or questions that you are submitting on behalf of someone in your sphere of influence that they have about God or faith or the Bible. And uh, as we've been saying, our goal in this series is not to answer these questions comprehensively, because as you uh if you've been here, you know this. Each of these messages could be an entire series in and of itself. So, really, what we are getting at here on Sunday mornings is just the tip of the iceberg, and really what we hope to do is model what it looks like to engage well with difficult questions. It matters how we answer questions and how we engage with difficult subjects. It matters that we answer difficult questions, recognizing that behind every question there's a person with different difficulties and things that lead that person to have that question. And so it matters that we are the kind of people that can face difficult questions with both conviction, believing what the Bible says, and also answering questions and engaging difficult topics with uh with empathy and with grace for people who uh who are wrestling with things very deeply. So this morning, the question that we are going to be wrestling with is how can I trust the Bible when it condones violence and genocide? Easy question, right? How can we trust the Bible when it condones violence and genocide? And specifically uh thinking of uh some of the things we see, like we've heard read uh just today from the Old Testament. And I think as is uh often the case with these, as I think is always the case with these, there's always the surface question, and then there is the question behind the question. And I think the deeper question behind this one is what kind of God would command this? What kind of God is he? What kind of God would command his people to go into a place and kill the men, women, and children? Part of the reason that Deuteronomy 7 is so troubling to us, especially those of us in the modern world, is that in recent history we have seen genocide carried out. We've seen genocide in Nazi Germany during World War II where millions of Jews were killed. We've seen in 1994 during the Rwandan genocide, in 100 days, almost a million people were killed in that country. Then we could list other examples of the same kind of thing. But every single instance of genocide and anything that looks even remotely like it is rooted in what we can call only evil. Right? There's no dispute, there's no debate about this. That any time we see violence like this and any time we see genocide, it's always rooted in deep-seated evil. And so the question that we have to wrestle with is how do we deal with the fact that God commanded his people to wipe out certain people groups? What do we make of that? At the heart of this question is the deeper question of what kind of God He is. And I will repeat what I've said week after week after week. Please be kind to me. Do you wish you had my job today? Please be kind to me. I can't say all the things about all the things. There's so much that we could talk about in so many different ways we could come at this subject. So please receive this for what it is. Uh, the starting place of a larger conversation that is meant to drive you to read your Bibles and to do some research and to talk about this with friends and other people in our church community to help get a fuller picture of it. But at the heart of this question is the deeper question of what kind of God He is. And since that's really at the center of it, what I want to do is organize our time today by looking at how the Bible answers that question. And I want to suggest that there are two ways the Bible answers the question of who God is that are especially helpful for us as we navigate the subject of violence in the Old Testament. So, what kind of God is he? First, he is both holy and merciful. He's holy and merciful. There's a lot of times where I feel like a broken record when I say this, but this is super important, especially when looking at a passage like this, that we zoom out and see where does this passage fit within the story that the Bible tells. Because what we see here in Deuteronomy is situated in a story that tells us about a God who is both holy and merciful. So he's holy, which means that he is separate. It means that God is distinct. It means that he is other. It means that God is entirely unlike us. This jumps off the page at us in the creation account, where in those opening pages of the Bible, we see that he's the kind of God who speaks and things come into existence. Now, it's in our own life experiences that we take raw materials and make something of them. If you've ever done any form of cooking or any form of baking or ever built anything, there's so many things we do in life that are taking the raw materials around us and arranging them and building something out of them, but we know nothing of what it's like to speak. And in doing so, matter exists where it didn't exist before. That is, God. He is like that. He is other, he is holy. In the creation account, we see his goodness and we see his beauty and we see his creativity and his power and his love. And although we do reflect something of his nature and in his character, we see that God is holy other. He is pure and he is righteous, he is distinct, he's other, he is holy. And seeing his holiness helps us to make sense then of the horror of our sin. When Adam and Eve disobeyed the instructions that God gave them, this was not a minor sort of lapse in judgment on their part. No, the Bible says that sin is a cosmic act of treason against a holy God. We can know how bad sin actually is by looking at the fallout of it. We see that sin entered the world and everything was ruined. Every part of creation has been infected and affected by sin. Its consequences are felt in every relationship. Every part of creation bears the scars of this curse of sin that was unleashed into the world. And the Bible tells us that creation itself is groaning and longing and aching for the day when it will be released from its bondage to decay. And not just creation has been affected, we have been affected. Our very hearts are now by default turned inwards towards ourselves, which means that by nature and by choice we live in rebellion against a holy God. And it's seeing his holiness that helps us understand the horror and the magnitude and the gravity of our sin against him. So the Bible says he is holy, and that we, because of our sin, are unholy. And the good news is that he is not only holy, he is also merciful. God's instruction to Adam and Eve was eat of any of the trees in the garden. Everything I give here is for your good and for your flourishing. Consume of any of it and consume of all of it, except for this one tree. And in the day that you disobey my instructions and do what's right in your own eyes, in that day you will surely die. So God's command to them makes it very clear that death and judgment is what our sin deserves. But God extended mercy to Adam and Eve when they sinned. Adam and Eve committed cosmic treason against a holy God, and then in the aftermath of that, they hid behind a bush. Like that's gonna do you much good. They hid from God behind a bush, and in the face of their rebellion, God did not pour out his judgment and give them the penalty of death, like he said, that they deserve. In the result of their sin, God pursued them. God went running after them. God did enact judgment, but he also covered their nakedness. He covered their shame, and then he promised that he would crush the head of the serpent who would deceive them. He promised that he would rescue them, that he would send a deliverer, that he would send a rescuer who would, in the end, make all things new. And this God whose holiness will consume everything that is unholy, that God restrains his holiness so that we can live. Seeing his holiness and his mercy changes the way that we approach a passage like Deuteronomy chapter 7. It gives us, I think, some much-needed perspective. Because so often our complaint in passages like this is rooted in feelings that what God commands here is simply unfair. It's unfair or it's unjust. We, you know, we we sort of our spirit rises up and says, God, God, these are innocent men, women, and children. And when we look at this passage in the context of the whole Bible and its story, it becomes apparent that there was not a single person in any one of those cities who was actually innocent. Now, please understand, I I know that that may sound cold, I know that that may sound callous, like that's diminishing the significance of what we see here, and uh just please know that my intention is not to minimize what God commanded his people to do here. What I want for us is to be able to read the Bible on its own terms, and in doing so, it forces us to have a shift in our perspective. Because taken in isolation, if we just read Deuteronomy 7, we are shocked that a good and loving God could command something like this. But the shift in our perspective that the Bible demands of us is that we see things from the bigger story and we see that He is holy. We have rebelled against him and deserve judgment and death, but he has been merciful. And when we see it within that larger story, we will be shocked. Not that God could ever command something like this, we will be shocked that a holy God would restrain his holiness and let any of us live. In Isaiah chapter 6, we see the prophet Isaiah getting a glimpse of the throne room of God, and he sees the Lord, and he's on his throne, and there's these seraphim, these winged angel-like creatures, and they've and they're flying around the throne, and they're covering their faces, and they're covering their feet, and they're in a way shielding themselves from God, and as they're flying around the throne, they're constantly crying out, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. He is a holy God, and the scandal is not that God would at times use his people as an instrument of judgment. The scandal is that he extends mercy to any of us. He is both holy and merciful. Secondly, though, we see he is a God who fights for his people. The Bible tells us what kind of God he is. He's holy and he is merciful, and the Bible also tells us he is the kind of God who fights for his people. So don't miss a hugely important part of this text in Deuteronomy, which is that God is the one who's the primary actor here. Notice how what Moses says here, he says, God is bringing you into this land. He says, God will drive out the nations before you. He says, God will deliver them into your hands. So God commands his people to go in and take the land, but God is the one who's actually doing it. And so here in Deuteronomy and in so many other places in the Bible, we see that God is the one who is fighting on behalf of his people. And listen to how Moses says it in verse 17. He says, You may say to yourselves, These nations are stronger than we are. How can we drive them out? But do not be afraid of them. Remember well what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt. You saw with your own eyes the great trials, the signs and wonders, the mighty hand and outstretched arm with which the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the peoples you now fear. So Moses says to him, says to the people, God will fight your enemies for you, and you shouldn't be surprised by this because God has just done this for you. And he points back to Egypt. He points back to the Exodus as proof that God is the kind of God who fights on behalf of his people. And of course, there's many different examples we can uh show, but let me just uh point out a couple of them. Uh the first is the Exodus. And remember that in the Exodus, the Hebrew people are enslaved in Egypt. These are an oppressed people group who have no military, they have no army, they have no uh, you know, military apparatus of any kind, they have no way to defend themselves, and even if they could rise up against Pharaoh, they would be crushed under the weight of the Egyptian army. And in the Exodus, God went to battle with the armies of Pharaoh on their behalf. Remember how the people are walking through the, and as soon as the water, the Red Sea that was parted, they're walking through on dry land, and as soon as they are to safety, God drowns the armies of Pharaoh behind them. And the whole story of the Exodus is how God went to war on behalf of his people. He was the one who went to war against Pharaoh and his armies. But not just Pharaoh and his armies, God was the one who went to war against the gods of Egypt, against these demonic spiritual forces that animated the fear and the hatred of the Egyptians. And so when you read the story of the Exodus, this is not a story of how this fledgling little group of people somehow managed beyond all odds to escape Egypt. This is a picture and a story that says apart from God's miraculous divine intervention going to battle on behalf of his people, they would still be enslaved in Egypt today. God is a God who fights for his people. We see it in the Exodus, and we can see it in the conquest. As you uh go to the book of Joshua and read the stories of the Israelites actually taking possession of the land, you see the same thing that God is the one who is fighting on behalf of his people. An example of this, uh good example, is Jericho. So some of you are familiar with this story. Uh, if you're not, what happened was God gave his people the worst battle plan in the history of battle plans. Okay, there's this well-fortified, walled city, and this large, this large city with these uh people that they have no ability to conquer on their own, and God gives them this plan. He says, What you're gonna do is you're gonna go for a long walk and then you're gonna blow a trumpet. And the walls are gonna fall down, and the people are gonna be yours. And from a human perspective, this is this plan is trash. This is just a trash plan from a human perspective, and that is precisely the point. The point is that the Israelites are not successful because of their own military strength, they're not successful because of their own intelligence or anything they can accomplish. They are successful because God is going to battle on their behalf. And as you read the rest of the book of Joshua, you see that when the people do act in their own military intuition, when they say, This seems like a really good plan to us, when they act on their own military intuition, they get smoked by their enemies. And when they follow these counterintuitive, weird God whittling down the number of soldiers to make it look like it's impossible because it is, when they follow God's plan and let God do the work, their lack of size and their lack of skill means nothing. No one can stop them if God is on their side, because he is a God who fights on behalf of his people. I wish I had more time to give more examples of this because there are many, but you get the point that he is a God who goes to battle on behalf of his people. Here's a distinction I think we should keep in mind. At times, God's people have faced human enemies who threatened to wipe them out. That was certainly the case with the people who inhabited the land that God said he was going to give them. As you read the stories in the Bible, you see that they had a target on them. Those nations did not want the Israelites to be there. They hated them, they wanted to kill them. At times, God's people have faced human enemies who threatened to wipe them out, and God can't and won't let that happen. And the reason is because it is those people, it is, it was the nation of Israel. They were the ones through whom God promised to bring his blessing and his salvation into the world. And so God had covenanted with those people. God had joined himself to those people, had bound himself to them in a covenant relationship, and so he fights for his people to protect and to preserve them. But not only them. God is not just fighting for his people, the Israelites, he fights for his people so that his salvation can come to the nations. Think about this. The people who inhabited the land posed a physical threat to the nation of Israel. They posed a spiritual threat. You can see it in these verses where Moses tells the people, don't intermarry. Don't give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons for the reason, because they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods. There was both a physical and a spiritual threat and danger that those other nations posed to God's people. And God will not let his people be wiped out, God will not let his people experience that. And I know that this kind of sounds crazy, but God eliminated the physical and spiritual threat of those people because he loves the nations. Because God's heart is that the nations and the world would come to know him, and those people in that particular time in history posed a threat both spiritually and physically to God's people, through whom he was bringing his salvation into the world. And so because God loves the world and loves the nations, he will protect and preserve his people. If they are wiped out or if their hearts are turned away, there is no salvation, there is no rescue. And God has promised that he will bring it about, and so he preserves and protects his people. So there are times in the history of God's dealing with the world and in the history of God's dealing with his people, there are times when the greatest threat that God's people face is a human threat. But as the Bible as a whole tells us, the Bible makes it very clear that our greatest enemy is not a human enemy. Our greatest enemy is the Satan. Our greatest enemy is the deceiver, the father of lies who hates God and who hates you, who desires nothing more than for your life to be ruined. He is our greatest enemy. And the good news of the gospel is that Jesus came to do battle with our greatest enemy. He came to fight for us. As you look at the life and ministry of Jesus, you can see Jesus going to battle for his people on a number of different occasions. In the wilderness. Jesus has fasted for 40 days and 40 nights, and he's hungry, and he's famished, and his body is beginning to shut down physically without food for that long. And as he's in the wilderness, the Satan is there tempting him, saying, Man, wouldn't it be so nice if you could just turn these stones into bread? Think about the temptation and how good it would be to smell fresh baked bread. Think of how that would taste in your mouth after 40 days of fasting. And the tempter is tempting Jesus. Jesus in the wilderness is going to battle against our enemy. See, while they were in the wilderness, Israel grumbled and complained against God. While they were in the wilderness, they failed the test. God brought them into the wilderness to test them and to refine them, and they failed the test. But Jesus passed the test. Jesus resisted the evil one. Jesus went to battle against our greatest enemy in the evil one. We see this in the wilderness. We see him going to battle for his people in the garden of Gethsemane, where through prayer Jesus is entrusting himself to the plan and to the will of the Father, knowing it was the Father's plan to crush him. He knew exactly what he was going to face. And in the garden, he's going to battle against the temptation of the evil one, which is to do what is good for him. See, whereas Adam and Eve did what was right in their own eyes and they failed in the garden, Jesus laid aside what he wanted and chose to live in obedience to the Father's plan. He prays, Not my will be done, but your will be done. And in doing so, he's resisting the temptation of the evil one to do what is good for him, to do what is comfortable for him. And of course, this all comes to a head on the cross, which is the climactic place where Jesus went to battle against our greatest enemy and succeeded on our behalf. As Jesus hung on the cross, naked and beaten and bloodied and treated in a shameful way, all the spiritual forces of darkness were unleashing their full rage and fury upon him. And of course, it looked like they had won. Where Jesus' lifeless body was taken off the cross, it was wrapped in cloth and burial spices, as any dead body would have been at that time. And everyone expected to come back in a year or so and find his body had decomposed to nothing but bones. That's what everyone expected. It looked as though the forces of darkness had won, but through Jesus' death and through his resurrection, Jesus dealt the death blow to the evil one and to all the spiritual forces of darkness. Jesus went to battle for us. Listen to how Paul says this in the book of Colossians. He says, When you were dead in your sins, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us. He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross, and having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them triumphing over them by the cross. Jesus went to battle against our greatest enemy, and he triumphed on our behalf, and because he is victorious, we are now victorious in him. So in the wilderness, in the garden and on the cross, Jesus fought for his people. In every single one of those places, Jesus fought for you. That's just the kind of God He is. He is holy, He is merciful, and He is the kind of God who fights for His people. My goal this morning has not been to erase the tension that we feel as we come to passages like this. My goal has been to help us see who God is, not so that that tension is fully relieved, but so that in the midst of that tension we can know that He is a holy, good, loving God, and ultimately that He is trustworthy. Maybe you think this too. In my vast, very vast, human wisdom. You shouldn't have laughed at that. Yes, John, you're so wise. In my vast human wisdom, I think it would have been better if God worked out his plan in some other way. That didn't include Deuteronomy 7. That didn't include the conquest of the land. And let's just be clear about what that means. I think that I'm wiser and more compassionate than God. I don't know in the end why God chose to work out his plan this way. But what I and what we do know from looking to the cross is that he is holy, that our sin matters more than we care to admit, and that he is merciful beyond what we could ever fathom. That's what we know would be true about him. That doesn't answer all the questions, doesn't uh make all this tension go away. But as we think about the difficult topic of violence and specifically God commanding his people into acts of violence, we have to remember these things that we know to be true. As we come to the communion table today, uh let these let these elements, the broken body and shed blood of Jesus, let these elements remind you that he is a God who fights for his people. And that's what those elements represent. That's what the cross shows us. He is a God who fights for his people. Remember that by allowing himself to be crushed for you, he crushed our greatest enemy. We get to remember and celebrate that today as we come to the table. Let me invite you to take a moment for silence and confession, and then we'll come to the communion table together.