Sermon preached by Dr. John A. Huffman, Jr.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Copyright © 2005, John A. Huffman, Jr.
All rights reserved.

They burned down the city, and everything it in; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord. But Rahab the prostitute, with her family and all who belonged to her, Joshua spared. Her family has lived in Israel ever since. For she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho. (Joshua 6:24-25)

Do you remember Madalyn Murray O'Hair, for several decades the outspoken representative of atheism here in the United States? In the mid-nineties she disappeared, apparently murdered. For many years, up until her disappearance, she was the personification of anti-Christian, anti-God, vitriolic discourse.

Back in the 1970s, when I was pastoring the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I had a prime-time television interview show, probing the ethical, personal and spiritual dimensions of life. She was my guest. Ironically, as a young girl, she had occasionally attended that church in Pittsburgh that I was pastoring. Although she was making one of her typical television appearances in her inimitable, in-your-face style, I went out of my way to spend some time with her off camera. Under those circumstances, she was no longer the outrageous, preacher-baiting character with whom we had become so accustomed.

I asked her what turned her away from her childhood Presbyterianism to atheism. She described one long weekend as a teenager, when she determined to read the Bible from cover to cover. She noted that most Christians have never done that. She said the stories of God-ordained cruelty and even genocide in the Old Testament, along with the hypocritical way many Christians live, turned her off from Christianity.

Although Madalyn Murray O'Hair has represented the ultimate extreme of anti-God, anti-Christianity, her argument must be taken seriously.

Every so often, someone says to me, "I can believe in the God of the New Testament, the God of Jesus, the God of love, but not that other God of the Old Testament, the one who kills innocent babies and women, that wrathful, vengeful God. There are two Gods: The God of the Old Testament, the God of law, and the God of the New Testament, the God of grace. I can accept the New Testament God but not that Old Testament God!"

A Christian, a very honest member of St. Andrew's, said to me: "As I read the story of Joshua, I am overwhelmed by the atrocities in which God demanded that all the people of Jericho be slaughtered. This troubles me. How can a good God act in such an arbitrary way?"

These comments must be taken seriously. There are answers we need to have about God, and there are implications for how we act.

For example, the first Crusade culminated in the capture of Jerusalem and the defeat of its Moslem defenders on July 15, 1099. This victory was achieved by terrible bloodshed and slaughter. The Christian historians of that event note that some 10,000 Muslims were beheaded in the Great Mosque. The vicinity of the Sacred Precinct was choked with blood and corpses. These chroniclers, mainly Christian clerics, accounted these facts with joy, applauding the "justice" that was done. Roland Bainton, in his book titled Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, notes that a favorite text of the Crusaders was drawn from the Old Testament, Jeremiah 48:10: "Accursed is the one who is slack in doing the work of the Lord; and accursed is the one who keeps back the sword from bloodshed."

Basic to this Jericho story and other significant and historical passages in the Old Testament are specific commands of God that trouble our contemporary minds and bring us to the kinds of questions I have already raised. These are the instructions God gave the people before the battle: "The city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall live because she hid the messengers we sent" (Joshua 6:17).

Then, obedient to the instructions for battle, the Israelites circled the city in the prescribed way. They blew the trumpets, shouted and the walls fell down. This troubling historical record is included: "Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys" (Joshua 6:21).

Tell me, honestly, doesn't this make you sort of cringe? There are real questions that we sensitive Christians must honestly raise. If we who take the Bible seriously skirt these questions, we run two major risks. On the one hand, we risk losing to sad disbelief those who never get beyond these genuine questions. They deserve to hear us acknowledge the problem and at least speak to it. On the other hand, we risk losing the richness of theological and spiritual insight that is ours as we wrestle with the tough questions. There are some answers as to why God acted in these ways that trouble us.

I will be the first to admit that there are some who are not troubled. I know Christians who, for many years, have been faithful daily readers of the Bible. For them, the problems of war and God's apparent ruthless dealings are no longer a problem. It is not that they never really wrestled with it. It is that they simply take this for granted and "spiritualize" these passages of the Old Testament. This is basically what we did last week. Remember, we took literally the fact of this battle in history. We swept over these apparent atrocities, and we applied, in a spiritual way, the fact that we have a God of strange strategies and that it is important that we live our lives in obedience to Him. We rejoiced in the victory that God gives to those totally committed to Him, while neglecting to emphasize that when we read Joshua 6 as a historical record, it describes the literal slaughter of men and women, young and old, done in obedience to God's instructions. In contemporary times, such activity could very well be followed by a war-crimes trial.

Some of us are not content to simply spiritualize. We take the biblical text seriously, and we confront three major problems. Peter C. Craigie, in his book titled The Problem of War in the Old Testament, outlines them for us.

First, there is the problem of God, or what he calls the theological problem. This problem lies in the fact that one of the dominant representations of God in the Old Testament is God as Warrior. It is difficult to reconcile this conception with the New Testament description of God as the loving, self-giving Father.

Second, there is the problem of revelation. This is a complex issue. Granted, there will always be wars. Why was it necessary for so much of the Old Testament literature to include such graphic accounts of these wars. Could not God have papered over this earthy material and simply not have inspired the writers of Scripture to include this factual but question-producing material? It would be much easier on our modern-day sensitivities. I wouldn't have to preach this sermon. A sanitized Scripture would make it easier, and fewer problematic questions would be raised.

Third, there is the problem of ethics. Are we to discount the Old Testament when it comes to learning ethics? Is Christianity based on New Testament ethical precepts alone? After all, the Ten Commandments, one of the greatest divinely revealed outlines of ethics, is in the Old Testament, isn't it? If, then, we learn one kind of ethical standard from the Old Testament, are we to conclude that we are to eagerly involve ourselves in such unrelenting and totally warlike activities? Is this the model?

Our generation is not the first to raise these questions. They go all the way back to the first centuries of the Christian era. Marcion, a wealthy shipowner, came to Rome in approximately A.D. 140. He was active in the orthodox Christian community but was then excommunicated. Why? He raised these same questions and concluded that there was such a radical contrast between the New Testament Gospel and the Old Testament Law that he ultimately rejected the whole Old Testament. This God of law and righteousness he called a "demiurge," a secondary deity who made the world. To Marcion, the Old Testament and its morality became a document of an alien religion and its God a dangerous power. Marcion was declared a heretic.

This approach emerged again in the fourth century. It was called "Manichaeism." It was a dualistic system, contrasting the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. The Old Testament was viewed as an inferior and un-Christian book. In the twelfth century, the Cartharists, the "pure ones," developed this same line of thinking,

Today there are certain theological writers who hold to this same approach. The late Harry Emerson Fosdick, in his Guide to Understanding the Bible, outlines three offensive characteristics in Old Testament ethics. One, he observes that the Old Testament is exclusive and provincial; whereas the New Testament is universal and open to varying cultures. Two, the Old Testament is inhumane, class-conscious, chauvinistic, emphasizing slavery and polygamy; whereas the New Testament is humane. Three, the Old Testament emphasizes external rites, rituals, bans, a religious calendar; whereas the New Testament emphasizes the inward spiritual qualities.

I have raised the questions. Are there any answers?

Obviously, I can't do justice to this in one sermon. In fact, I don't have the intellectual powers to once and for all solve all these problems. I'm not certain you do either. However, I am convinced that to avoid raising these questions is unwise. Help is available. There are some answers. In the time left this morning, I would like to make some observations that I trust will help clarify your understanding and perhaps push you into a deeper study.

Observation one: The God of the Old Testament and the New Testament is the same God.

The Bible tells things realistically. It states matters the way they are. God could have inspired a cosmic document designed to make Him look real good. Instead, His revelation states what actually happened. This should be encouraging to us. God does not play a public relations game.

Some have tried to work their way around the questions we have raised by attributing these apparent discrepancies between the Old and New Testament God to the evolution of our human thought about God. They think that this can be done without radically changing the nature of the Scriptures. The fact is that the Old Testament is a major part of the Bible. It is the sacred writings of the Hebrews. It is the basic written document on which the New Testament church built its faith and the New Testament writers quoted it with frequency. Peter C. Craigie puts it in these words:

To be faithful to our Christian legacy, it is necessary to keep the whole Bible; alternatively, one may reject the whole Bible. It is very difficult, however, to settle in a half-way house, for the canonical Scriptures include both Testaments; while the relationship between those Testaments may be difficult to understand, nevertheless to question a part of the canon of Scripture is to question the whole: To oversimplify a very complex issue, the canon of Scripture places us in a "take it or leave it" situation; either alternative may be chosen in honesty, but the logic of a midway position is dangerous.

This is one God, the same God, who is associated with the wars of ancient Israel and, at the same time, is the God who yearns for peace, who begs you and me to love one another, even our enemies. To simply dismiss the Old Testament would dismiss a part of God and remove from Him a certain quality that actually enhances His holiness, His majesty, His sovereignty and His grace. This brings us, then, to a second observation.

Observation two: This God has not chosen to remain aloof, but has come incarnationally into this mixed-up world to involve himself in our painful existence.

Just what does this mean?

Let me ask you some questions. You have studied history, haven't you? When you studied history, what did you spend most of your time studying? Perhaps you have never thought of it this way before. Did you spend your time studying the history of culture? Did you spend your time studying the history of science? Did you spend your time studying the history of religion? All of these are major themes, and I am quite certain that you studied them all. However, I suggest that at least as great a part of our study of history is devoted to the history of war as to the rest of these topics combined.

War is a human activity. The annals of history are filled with the specific records of one war after another. Even the history of our past twentieth century, our "enlightened era," is outlined by the history of World War I and World War II, along with the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and now the Iraq War, to say nothing of those decades simmering with what we called "The Cold War." Not only is war a human activity, it is sinful human activity. War shows human inhumanity.

Now we come to what may very well be the most powerful discovery that you and I will ever make. You and I are privileged to see God as a God who involves himself in our lives, as sinful as are our lives. The point I am trying to make is that God could have functioned antiseptically, separate from us. He could have chosen not to get His hands dirty. After all, He is God. He is righteous. He is clean. He is holy. He can function entirely in a transcendent way, over and above us. He could miraculously wipe out the entire human race and start over. He has a number of options. He could simply turn His back on us and move on out into some other part of the universe and let us simply rip ourselves apart with whatever pathologies are ours.

Instead, God chose, from the beginning, to enter into conversation with that part of His creation that bears His very image, fallen in rebellion and sin as we are.

He walked in the Garden with Adam and Eve, promising that One would come who would crush the head of the serpent. He entered into a covenant with Abraham, and God has kept His side of that covenant all through history, to this very present moment, no matter how sinful and rebellious we human beings have been. His participation in human history, through our human lives, does not primarily give us a glimpse of His moral being. Rather, it demonstrates His will and activity. He offers us salvation. He doesn't just lower it miraculously on a silver platter. He enters into our lives. He participates in every aspect of human existence. He is involved with sinful persons. He employs for this purpose the very human beings who need salvation. In the process, God gets His hands dirty!

This doesn't mean that God likes war. He doesn't. The fact is that we human beings create wars. It is no surprise that there are wars among nations. Peter C. Craigie states it with such strength:

The participation of God through evil human activity has a positive end in view; that is to say, the judgment of God, in the larger perspective, is the other face of the coin which is the mercy of God. Hence, on some occasions the reasons for God's exercise of sovereignty in war may be made evident (e.g., the punishment of evil men and nations by Israel, or the punishment of Israel by foreign nations), but they may remain as much a mystery as the initial mystery of God's creation of, and gift of, life.

Yes, war is horrible, isn't it? What is most on the minds of people who have gone through the brutal realities of war? What do they yearn for? They decide that they want peace, don't they?

Even war itself is supposedly designed to usher in an era of peace. For example, World War I was supposedly "the war to end all wars." That was the rhetoric of idealistic President Woodrow Wilson, who, with reluctance, finally went to war. World War I was a terrible war. Read the stories of the trench warfare. One of the bloodiest battles in human history was the battle of the Somme. I will never get the images out of my mind created by BBC's historic report of that ghastly battle.

Then came World War II, which makes the first world war look like kids' play. Not only was there the horrendous loss of life of soldiers in battle. Think of the innocents destroyed by that conflagration that caught up all of Europe on both the western and the eastern fronts. Think of the atrocities of the Japanese throughout China and Southeast Asia, added to by the holocaust that destroyed at least six million Jews, to say nothing of our own dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now in our enlightened twenty-first century, we have created an environment in which we have tiptoed to the edge of a nuclear precipice, no longer held in check by the dominance of Russia and the United States. In its place is random terrorism which can strike at any time, any place, with the indiscriminate use of nuclear warheads in the wrong hands.

Do you think God enjoys all this? Violence begets violence. God is simply exercising His option of staying completely above it, turning His back on us, forgetting us, or loving us so much that He walks through all this with us, whether back some 3,300 years ago or today.

Our God is a God of solidarity. He identifies with us as we are, not as He would like us to be. That's why the Bible is a story of people, ordinary people, warts and all. God acknowledges the fact of sin. God enters into a covenant with us. He keeps His side of the covenant, even when we do not keep ours. The God of the Old and New Testaments is the same God. The only difference is that in the New Testament He actually fulfills what He promises in the Old Testament prophecies and becomes a man and goes to the cross in that ultimate act of solidarity, identification, incarnation, taking our place, bearing our sin in all its ignominy, in His passion on the cross.

Observation three: This God does judge, but He does it consistently.

God hates sin. He may get His hands dirty by being in contact with us, but this doesn't mean that He has compromised His holiness. When God refers to those things within Jericho that ". . . shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction" (Joshua 6:17), He is referring to objects or people that threaten to pollute the faith and the practices of Israel. These were banned from ordinary use or contact. The word in the Hebrew is the word herem. The word herem applies to something separated or banned from ordinary use by a ritual act. In Deuteronomy 7:26, it is seen as the "accursed thing" and the polluted person is viewed as "cursed." A city that has turned away from God (Deuteronomy 13:12-14) becomes herem. It must be heremized, utterly destroyed. This includes its inhabitants, its cult objects, its cattle, all of the spoils--as a "whole burnt offering to the Lord."

The precedent for this is in Deuteronomy. Long before they actually came into the Promised Land, God outlined for the Israelites the importance of their remaining separate from the people of the land. They are to be a holy people, maintaining the covenant. There is a purpose to what God commands:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you--the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you--and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly (Deuteronomy 7:1-4).

Again, in Deuteronomy 18, God specifies certain practices which are an abomination to Him. It isn't that God arbitrarily hates these people. He hates their practices. He stands in judgment of what we do as human beings that destroys our humanness. He wants us to be a holy people, uncontaminated by those things that would destroy us. We have very strong teaching in the Mosaic Law, which reads:

When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you must not learn to imitate the abhorrent practices of those nations. No one shall be found among you who makes a son or daughter pass through fire, or who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or one who casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead. For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord; it is because of such abhorrent practices that the Lord your God is driving them out before you (Deuteronomy 18:9-12).

God is not functioning from whim. He is not an immoral God who arbitrarily devastates innocent people. As early as Genesis 15, hundreds of years before when He promised the land to Abraham, He referred to His people coming back into the land in the fourth generation, "'. . . for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete'" (Genesis 15:16). God is not going to bring His judgment down upon innocent people. God, in His foreknowledge, knows that several hundred years later Jericho, an Amorite city, will have to be judged. That judgment will be severe. Jericho will join other doomed, sinning cities, such as Babel (Genesis 11:4), Sodom (Genesis 19:4-29), Ninevah (Nahum 3:1); Tyre (Ezekiel 26:17-19), Babylon (Jeremiah 50:23) and even Rome (Revelation 18:10).

Yes, God does judge, but He does it consistently. He judges not only the pagan people. He also judges Israel as they disobey Him and accommodate themselves to these abominable practices. Foreign powers, as insignificant as the city-state Ai and as overwhelming as Assyria and Babylon, are agents of His judgment on His own chosen people. God cannot wink at sin.

Whatever contaminates the religion of His people, leading to inevitable compromise, was to be utterly destroyed. Sin is contagious. It cannot go unpunished. A malignancy must be surgically removed.

Observation four: God is also the God of grace, even in these Old Testament times.

The wilderness journey is over. The people of God, Israel, stiff-necked, stubborn people, have now humbled themselves, reconsecrating themselves by circumcision and the observance of the Passover. God is ready to move in great spiritual power.

We see an amazing case study of Rahab and her family. What more likely person would qualify for destruction than a Jericho Amorite prostitute? Yet we see here the fleshing out of that ongoing promise that God makes in His Word: "If with all your heart you truly seek me, you shall truly find me." One could say that the Jericho story is one of promiscuous massacre. Frankly, it is much more than that. This is the story of a God of sensitive, infinite grace.

Did He send spies into Jericho for intelligence alone? I question that. What great discovery did they make that influenced the military strategy? God already knew His strategy. I am convinced that God knew that inside the walls of that doomed city was a sinful woman who had heard rumors of a God who had parted the Red Sea, who had won battles for His people, who had held back the Jordan River. He knew that this woman hungered for righteousness, for a new life. Even as Jesus must "needs go through Samaria," to bring spiritual deliverance hundreds of years later to a similar woman sitting by Jacob's well, God sent those spies into Jericho as witnesses to His grace and deliverance to save this woman who was open to learn of Him. She had truly sought the Lord. Now, faithful to the promise God made to her, God delivered her from Jericho and ultimately grafted her into the very genealogy of the promised Messiah.

This is the same God who yearned for His people to be a holy people, a people uncontaminated by that which would destroy their spiritual and personal vitality. It is the same God who is no respecter of persons, whose judgment is severe upon sin and whose grace extends to all who will trust Him. He is a God, not of violence, but of peace; the God who breathes His shalom into the lives of those who genuinely trust Him. He is the God who wants to convince us that violence only leads to more violence. War only makes for more war. He is the God who talks, even in the Old Testament, about the lion and the lamb lying down together.

Don't tar and feather God with responsibility for violence that is done in His name or violence that He would repudiate. God yearns for shalom. Peace is not just the absence of conflict. In its ultimate sense, it is "wholeness." It involves not only the cessation of war; it also involves the absence of injustice and falsehood. It involves the presence of justice and truth. God's grace and peace are not sentimental notions. They can only become operative where both His judgment and His love function in a strange and delicate tension.

Even here, in this ethically puzzling story of Jericho, we see that out of the smoldering embers of a doomed city emerge a woman and her family who discover that liberating dynamic of the peace of God that passes all understanding and experience God's amazing grace.

Two different Gods? One who is vengeful, a god of judgment and wrath, the story of whom produces a Madalyn Murray O'Hair? Not on your life. We worship the one true God who brings together righteousness, justice, judgment, wrath into that dynamic oscillation with grace, mercy, peace, incarnation, atonement, forgiveness. As finite persons, we can only imagine this God so far and then the reality of who He is becomes shrouded in mystery until that day when we will meet this infinite God face to face! And every tear shall be wiped away and every cloud be rolled back, and we will understand what we only now take on faith, the privilege of worshiping a God so much greater than we, in our broken and limited human condition, can understand.

Let's let this God be God! Let us bow in humble worship before Him, surrendering those things we cannot understand, even as we receive His mercy and grace and are empowered by His Holy Spirit to live one day at a time, following His self-revelation in Jesus Christ!