Is God a God of Vengeance?

As a church, we have started the New Year with a brand new sermon series, entitled restart. During this series, we are looking at a letter in our Bible that records the efforts of an entire nation to restart their lives after forty years of wandering in a literal desert of hurt, pain, and failure as a result of past decisions. This letter, called the book of Joshua, records how the Jewish people experienced the same frustration, tension and trouble when it came to restarting their lives.

And in the book of Joshua, we come face to face with a question that I often hear when I engage people about the Bible or Christianity. We are introduced to this question as a result of something Joshua commands in Joshua 2:1:

Then Joshua the son of Nun sent two men as spies secretly from Shittim, saying, "Go, view the land, especially Jericho."

Joshua, as leader of the Jewish people, decides to send two spies secretly to spy out the city of Jericho. But to understand why Joshua would give this command, we first need to understand the context in which this story appears in the Bible. You see, the city of Jericho was located in a part of the world which was called the land of Canaan. God had promised Abraham that his descendants would live in the land of Canaan, so the Jewish people referred to Canaan as the Promised Land. After being delivered from slavery at the hands of the Egyptian nation, the Jewish people were commanded by God to take over and possess the Promised Land and destroy the all of the nations that inhabited the land.

And so often when I talk with people about God and Christianity, one of their biggest push backs that come sup in a conversation usually goes something like this: “How can a loving God destroy whole civilizations like He did in the Old Testament. Your God sounds like a God of wrath, not a God of love. If that is what God is like, I want no part of Him”. And maybe for you this is one of your biggest reasons for resisting or rejecting Christianity.

But to understand why God commanded the Jewish people to destroy the nations that inhabited the Promised Land and to possess the Promised Land, we first need to understand two things about these nations, which are referred to in the Bible as the Amorites. The first thing that we need to understand is that the people who made up the nations that inhabited the Promised Land were some of the most inhumane and cruelly wicked societies that ever lived. These were societies that sacrificed their infant children to false gods; these were societies that were involved in sexual behavior that was so twisted and perverse I cannot even begin to describe in detail. In Amorite societies young children were often suffocated and buried alive in the foundations of their homes as an act of worship to their false gods.

In fact, many historians and archaeologists describe the Canaanite society as being perhaps the most wicked society that ever lived. In another section of the Bible God made it clear to the Jewish people that they were not receiving the Promised Land because they were especially good; they were receiving the Promised Land because the inhabitants of that land, including Jericho, were exceptionally evil.

The second thing that we need to understand is that God did not simply wake up one morning and decide to wipe out an entire culture and society as a wrathful, angry God. Some 400 years before the story we are going to look at this week, God predicted and proclaimed to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, that after being enslaved in Egypt, the Jewish nation would return to and take possession of the land that was promised to his descendants.

And for 400 years God endured the incredible wickedness of the Amorites, which was the society and that inhabited the Promised Land. God extended grace for 400 years in order to provide that society the opportunity to change their evil ways. And after 400 years, God chose to use the Jewish people as an instrument to exercise His justice and judgment on the people of the Promised Land, who had refused to change and were left with no excuse or defense for their wickedness.

The God of the Old Testament is the same God as we see in the New Testament: A God who is gracious and compassionate; slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness, but by no means will leave the guilty unpunished. God is a God of justice who provides every opportunity for people to change and come to Him. And tomorrow we will be introduced to a woman in the Old Testament who experienced God's transforming activity in her life.

So, do you think God is a God of vengeance, anger, and wrath? Is God cruelly vindictive? Why or why not?