God Fights for Your - 250405

SPEAKER 1 Hello, I'm Rod Butler. Welcome to Let God Speak. The Book of Joshua contains disturbing scenes that on face value, may appear to be indiscriminate genocide of the Canaanites. But was it? And if it wasn't, why wasn't it? Today, we're going to delve into the serious questions raised by the concept of a divine or holy war. Did God promise to fight for the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites? You won't want to miss this. On our panel today, we have Corinne Knopper and John Kosmeir. Welcome. Hello. SPEAKER 2 Thank you. SPEAKER 3 Thank you. SPEAKER 1 Before we commence our discussion, let's bow for prayer. Gracious Father, we thank you for the Book of Joshua and the important messages that it contains. As we have this discussion now on this important topic, we ask for the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us. And please bless the viewers who will hear this program. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. SPEAKER 2 Amen. SPEAKER 1 In the book of Joshua, a huge number of Israelites, commanded by God and led by Joshua, miraculously crossed the Jordan to take possession of the land of Canaan. The only problem was that the land was home to the Canaanites. What was going to happen to them? So, Corinne, what was God's original plan for the Canaanites, the Israelites in the land of Canaan? SPEAKER 3 I'm going to go to Genesis, chapter 15, verses 5, 6, and 7, and we're going to read there and see if we can get a few answers. Then he brought him outside and said, look now toward heaven and count the stars if you are able to number them. And he said to him, so shall your descendants be. And he believed in the Lord, and he accounted it to him for righteousness. Then he said to him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to inherit it. So God's covenant promise was given to Abraham. When Abraham had no children and he was living in Canaan, humanly speaking, the promise seemed impossible that his descendants would occupy Canaan. But Abraham had faith to believe God. SPEAKER 1 And it would have taken a lot of faith, too, to believe that promise. I mean, Canaan, it was a big area to have your descendants take possession of that. John, how long before the Exodus was this promise given? SPEAKER 2 Well, according to the book of Exodus, verses 40 and 41, and I'm reading from the new King James Version, it says now, the sojourn of the children of Israel who lived In Egypt was 430 years. And it came to pass at the end of the 430 years on that very same day, it came to pass that all the armies of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. So here we have a starting, the end time. But we have to go to Galatians, chapter 3, verse 16 and 17 for the beginning. And that's what it says when the covenant was given to Abraham. SPEAKER 1 Abraham. Well, I just want to read something else in Genesis 15, picking up from where? The same chapter Corinne read from. In verse 13, it says, and he said unto Abraham, abraham, know of a surety that thy seed shall be estranged from the land that is not theirs, and shall serve them, and they shall afflict them. 400 years, Corinne, what's the difference? Why the discrepancy between 430 and 400 years? SPEAKER 3 Oh, this is from a different starting point, I think. Thirty years after the covenant was given, Ishmael, that's Abraham's teenage son from Sarah's Egyptian handmaid, was caught by mocking the young boy Isaac, or afflicting him hence. 400 years, not 430 years. SPEAKER 1 Okay, so that's interesting, A change there at the time of Joshua, which was 470 years. John, what was the condition of the Canaanites like? What was their. What was their culture? How would you describe that? SPEAKER 2 Right. Spare me. I mean, when you read it, you go, What? Deuteronomy, chapter 18 and verses 9 to 12 gives us a description of what these people were doing. When you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abomination of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or daughter. Are you listening to this? Pass through the fire? Or one who practices witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who conjures spells, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. That's what they were doing. That was their. That was their religion. And as it says, they practiced child sacrifice, divination, sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy. That's worshiping people who are dead. And spiritualism and archeology has discovered evidences of this happening back in those days. SPEAKER 1 Well, if I. If I keep reading from Genesis 15, Corinne, I've got a question for you on this. Because these Canaanites were wicked beyond description. It says here in verse 14 and 15, it says, and also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge. And afterwards shall they come out with great substance, and shall go forth to thy fathers in peace. Thou shalt be buried in a Good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again. And here's the bit, Corrine, I want you to ask about. For the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. So the question I've got there. What does that mean, not yet full? How would you explain that not yet full? SPEAKER 3 The inhabitants of Canaan were granted a time to change their ways, to be able to repent. But they were given a time of probation as well, a time to discover God and his character. Through the witness of their patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who were living amongst them. They had the chance to change, but they chose their horrific practices. They just kept going with those practices. They didn't repent and change. SPEAKER 1 Well, just on that, John, at the time of Joshua, did the Canaanites know about God? SPEAKER 2 It apparently is so. Because when you go to the book of Joshua and you read there in chapter two and verse nine and said to the men, I know that the Lord has given you the land, that the terror of you has fallen on us. When they saw what Israel was able to do and was doing, they became fearful that the same sort of thing might happen to them. SPEAKER 1 Because they would have also seen, John. They would have seen that there's a people in the desert, in the wilderness, which had been kept alive by water and manna from heaven, and these other things that would have been hard to explain from a point of view of rationalizing the way. So they would have known God was with them in the wilderness, and they knew about the Red Sea. So they had ample opportunity to recognize God. And of course they didn't. Now I just want to look at the character of God for a second. In Exodus 34 we have the account where Moses was hid in the cleft of the rock and he saw God pass by. And God describes himself. And I just want to read from Exodus 34, verses 5 to 7. And the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin that will by no means clear the guilty. Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. How does this declaration of God's character apply to the conquest of Canaan? Corinne? SPEAKER 3 One of the attributes of God is patience, which means long suffering. But there is a limit I believe to God sin must reap its final consequences. And what is that? It's death. And we can find that in Romans, chapter 6, verse 23. And I'll read that for you. For the wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. To me that means that God loves the sinner, but he hates the sin. God's grace and mercy gave the Canaanites hundreds of years to change. But they did not change. And judgment Cain. Now at the time of Joshua, 470 years later, their iniquity was full. It had just grown. They were to be destroyed with their sin? Yes. SPEAKER 1 So what was the difference? Just a question to both of you. What would be the. What's the difference between the conquest of Canaan, where the Israelites had gone into under God's leadership to take possession of Canaan, and the conquest of other nations when they take over other nations? What's the differences? SPEAKER 3 What's the difference? SPEAKER 1 So Corinne or John, I'll start with you. SPEAKER 2 People who fight wars today do it to gain land, property, territory, peoples. And some of them fight just for the sake of self aggrandizement. They want everybody to think just how important they are with glory for themselves. Whereas the Canaanites were invited to join God's people and then they would share the land together and the Canaanites would learn about the God of the Israelites. And if that didn't happen, what you said took place. SPEAKER 1 That's an important point, isn't it? It wasn't God's intention to destroy. What do you think, Corinne? SPEAKER 3 I think that God was using the Israelites as his instrument of judgment for the Canaanites. But I'm going to read from Deuteronomy, chapter 9, verses 4 and 5, and we'll find a little bit more there. Do not think in your heart after the Lord your God has cast them out before you, saying, because of my righteousness the Lord has brought me in to possess this land. But it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out from before you. It's not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord your God drives them out from before you and that he may fulfill the word which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So it's not because of any righteousness of the Israelites. SPEAKER 1 So if the Israelites were on a mission from God, what's at the heart of this concept of divine or holy war? I'll stay with you, Corinne. SPEAKER 3 What is it? Oh, at the heart, we need to recognise that God is our Creator of all and is sovereign to us all. He rules as a king and a judge, and it is his right to judge his creation according to the obedience to his laws. It is his right to carry out judgment as he directs. People today who do not believe in God cannot understand or accept this. It's sadness. SPEAKER 1 Yes, pretty. Pretty terrible. SPEAKER 3 Very sad. SPEAKER 1 John, if God promised to give the land of Canaan to Abraham and his seed, what was God going to do with all the people that are in that land? SPEAKER 2 Well, when you read God's intention, this is what it was in Exodus, chapter 23 and verse 28. And I will send hornets before you which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and the Hittite from before you. So it wasn't even going to be done by soldiers. God was going to use natural means of getting these people to move. Verse 29. I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. Little by little, I'll drive them out from before you until you have increased and you inherit the land. So it wasn't going to be a quick sweep, it was going to be bit by bit, because that gives people the time to think and to change their ways. SPEAKER 1 Well, that brings my next question, which is, if they were to be driven out, why then were they killed? SPEAKER 3 Oh, apart from Rahab and the Gibeonites, the remaining Canaanites decided to retreat to their cities and fight against the God and Israelites. They were choosing to cling to their sin and defy God. This was their rebellion against God. And we can find this in Deuteronomy, chapter seven, verses 16 and 20. So let me go to verse 16. No, I've got the wrong one. I'm sorry. Verse 16. Here also. You shall destroy all the peoples whom the Lord your God delivers out to you. Your eye shall have no pity on them, nor shall you serve their gods, for they will be a snare to you. And then down into verse 20. Moreover, the Lord your God will send the hornet among them until those who are left who hide themselves from you are destroyed. Like you said, John, the hornets will come out. So to stay with this sinful lifestyle meant their destruction with their sins. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, the key point there in that text is that they've chosen to resist. They've chosen to Resist God, Basically to rebel, not to go, but to double down on what they want to do and not to change. So, John, what else were the Israelites to do after people were gone? SPEAKER 2 Yes, if the worst came to the worst. It's described here in Deuteronomy, chapter 12, verses 2 to 3. You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations which you shall dispossess serve their gods on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. And you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars and burn their wooden images with fire. You shall cut down the carved images of their gods and destroy their names from that place. So God didn't necessarily want to kill the people, but he wanted to get rid of everything that they worshipped until they learned how to worship the true God. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, because those remaining relics of their. SPEAKER 2 Evil culture would be to the Israelites. SPEAKER 1 Yes, definitely would be. Corinne, let's sort of bring this home to us today. I mean, this is, you know, thousands of years ago, and it has to be relevant to us. Do we see a lesson in this story that we can apply to our lives today? SPEAKER 3 I believe we do. We must examine our lives, and we've got to uproot and destroy those things in our lives and our lifestyle. They're not in accordance with God's requirements. We have to focus on Christ to overcome all our sinful traits. And I think that's the best way to move forward. Focus on Christ. I can't call myself a Christian if I'm not Christ. SPEAKER 1 Like, it's interesting because they had to eradicate all the remembrance of sin. And in our lives. If we have sin in our lives, that sin is going to cling to us and God destroys sin. What does it say? God loves the sinner but hates the sin. Which is lesson. So I'm just going to read now. Deuteronomy, chapter 13 and verses 12 to 16. Deuteronomy, chapter 13 & 12 to 16. And it says, if thou shalt hear, say in one of the cities which the Lord thy God hath given thee to dwell there, saying, certain men, the children of Belial, have gone out from among you and have withdrawn the inhabitants of that city, saying, let us go and serve other gods which you have not known, then shalt thou inquire and make search and ask diligently. And behold, if it be truth and the things certain that such abomination is wrought among you, thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly. And all that is in therein and the cattle thereof with the edge of the sword. Now, John, what does this say about the importance of the total destruction of sin? SPEAKER 2 There is no neutrality. You can't be neutral. You're either for God or against him. And God has to utterly destroy sin. And so if we choose, like the Israelites, to follow God, all is well. But if we choose not to, then God has to treat everybody the same. And so with the destruction of sin will come the destruction of the people who take part in that sin. And the wages of sin is death, regardless of who you are. SPEAKER 1 Yes, even though they had been on the winning side, so to speak, they'd be worshipping God, but they, they backtracked and they started following the, the ways of Canaan. Then destruction was for them. So, Corinne, just on that again, as an example, how could we take the example of this story from the Old Testament about a city which was saved, but then they rebel? How do we apply that to ourselves today? SPEAKER 3 Oh, yes. Even though we may have given our lives to God and experienced God's wonderful blessings, we still have to remain faithful and loyal to what God asks us to do, his requirements. So if we choose to go back to our old sinful ways, whether it's deliberately and we're knowing that we're doing the wrong things, then we'll be in danger of losing our salvation, which is so sad. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, we can't sort of say we've been saved, therefore it doesn't matter what we do, we're always going to be saved. We've got to stay saved by, by loving Jesus and keeping his commandments, basically. That's, that's the important difference. So when we look at this example of this war of conquest and we sort of see that God is leading, you know, what are the differences? And John will go to you, what are the differences between the conquest of Canaan and the religious wars that we may see today? Because we, let's face it, today there's, there's jihads and there's wars. There's everything going on. What is the difference between the book of Joshua and what we see today? SPEAKER 2 Well, I've listed here five differences. First of all, back there, the conquest of Canaan was carried out under divine instruction. In other words, God was leading it and he was using Joshua to do that. Because the Israelites point to, is that they were former slaves, they weren't soldiers, they didn't know how to fight. And so here they were amateurs at war and were not to enrich themselves with plunder. That's an interesting concept because usually it's free for all. Once you're the victor, you take it. Point three, they were to be obedient to God and have spiritual preparation from circumcision and Passover, because that's how they had been released. Point four, the battles were won miraculously with God's intervention. God took over to make sure that the victory gained was theirs. And then another point is territory once gained was not to be expanded. In other words, it wasn't a land grab that just went on and on and on and on. SPEAKER 1 Whereas today we see a conquest of land and countries to take that religion or whatever it is. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, by so called freedom fighters who. SPEAKER 1 Usually are professional soldiers, trained and have all the military equipment. Let's just say these were amateurs. These were just people that were former slaves brought out of Egypt that God was leading. That's a big difference. SPEAKER 2 And God wanted peace, not war. And that's still the same today. SPEAKER 1 Well, when we consider basically the book of Joshua and the wholesale destruction of some of these people who didn't want to change, who wanted to stay in their sinful ways, how do we reconcile a God of love with a God of wrath? There's a question to both of you, I guess, starting with you, Corinne. SPEAKER 3 Oh, yes. Well, God's wrath is not a topic that people like today at all, but it is biblical and we can find that in John 3:36. And it says, he who believes in the Son has everlasting life. And he who does not believe the Son shall not see life. But the wrath of God abides on him. So God is holy and sinful. Humanity cannot exist in the presence of the holy God. We just can't. And you'll find that in several other verses in the Bible. Daniel 10, 8, 9 in Revelation 1:17. So God is righteous and he is just. And people today demand justice when they're faced with injustice at the human level, but struggle with the idea of God as the ultimate judge who administers justice by condemning and destroying those who embrace all the evil in this world at this time. SPEAKER 1 Pretty heavy. What do you think, John? SPEAKER 2 Well, God has given to us the freedom of choice. What we choose will determine the end result. And so the Bible says God is love. So if we follow him, then we too will become people of love. If God were indifferent to us, we'd be on our own and wouldn't know anything about love. SPEAKER 1 It's interesting too, because parents put boundaries on their children, don't they? Because they love them. SPEAKER 3 Yes. SPEAKER 1 It's not A free for all. If they just let their children do whatever they wanted, that would be indifference which would be probably to their harm because God had boundaries. John, staying with you with a question. Apart from the wars of the Old Testament, is there a bigger theme, a happier theme here in the Old Testament? SPEAKER 2 The book of Isaiah is God's gospel in the Old Testament. And here In Isaiah chapter 9 and verse 6 it says for unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. The government will be upon his shoulders and his name will be called wonderful counselor, Mighty God, everlasting Father, the Prince of peace. That is what God is and that is God requirement for his whole universe including this world. And the day will come when people together with the lion and the lamb, they'll all be able to spend time together in the peace that God is and wants to be. SPEAKER 1 And we saw in the life of Jesus that peace and loving your enemies which is what it was all about. Well, that's all we've got time for. Thank you John. Thank you, Karine. Well, the justification for the war of conquest of Canaan by the Israelites is perplexing to modern thought. And to understand its complexity, it's necessary to know God's intentions for humanity. War was never part of God's plan for this world. He is working to restore everlasting peace in our world and the universe. And to do that he needs to justly eliminate evil once and for all. He wants all to follow him and live well. We're glad you joined us today on Let God Speak and Remember. All past programs plus teacher's notes are available on our website 3abnaustralia.org au. Email us on lgsabinaustralia.org au Tell your friends about the program and join us again next time. And God bless. SPEAKER B You have been listening to let God speak, a production of 3ABN Australia television. To catch up on past programmes, please visit 3abnaustralia.org.au. Call us in Australia on 02 4973 3456. Or email [email protected]. we'd love to hear from you.