WHY DID GOD COMMAND THE DESTRUCTION OF CANAAN? | Joshua Explained

Why did God command Israel to destroy the people of Canaan?

Passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua describe commands to destroy entire Canaanite populations, including soldiers, families, livestock, and cities. These passages raise one of the most difficult moral questions in the Old Testament and are often used by skeptics to accuse God of cruelty or injustice.

In this topical discussion, Glenn and Steve examine the larger biblical context surrounding the judgment of Canaan. The study begins with God’s sovereignty as Creator and giver of life. Because life comes from Him, He possesses authority over life and death in a way that human beings do not.

The Canaanites were also not presented as innocent people. Their culture included child sacrifice, sexualized worship, idolatry, and practices that eventually corrupted Israel when the nation failed to carry out God’s command completely.

God’s judgment was not sudden or arbitrary. Israel remained in Egypt for approximately four centuries before entering Canaan, and the biblical pattern shows that God repeatedly warns people before judgment. Rahab demonstrates that a Canaanite who recognized Yahweh, believed, and submitted to Him could receive mercy.

The discussion also considers four possible ways God could respond to evil: permit free choices and judge them, permit evil without judgment, prevent every evil choice and eliminate meaningful human freedom, or remove children before they mature into the same evil practices.

The central conclusion is that God’s actions must be understood within His holiness, sovereignty, patience, justice, and complete knowledge of every possible outcome.

Topical Study: The Judgment of Canaan
Series: Reasoning Through the Bible Topical Series

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Welcome

The Troubling Command In Joshua

SPEAKER_01 0:17

to the Reasoning Through the Bible podcast. Today's topic, we're going to talk about a question that has arisen on many occasions around what happens in Joshua when God commands him to destroy all the people of Canaan. We've been working our way through Joshua, and for our regular listeners, think of this as sort of a parentheses. So we're going to talk about this question, and then next time we'll get back to our regular verse-by-verse Bible study. As we go through these Old Testament passages, what we find is here in Joshua and already in the Bible in Deuteronomy, we've found that God has commanded Israel to destroy all the people of Canaan. And there was some verses in there where it talks about destroying everything livestock, all the people, old people, little kids, women, destroy everything. And it's a legitimate question in our day on why would that be? Is that a moral thing to do? And of course, our enemies, the skeptics, have kind of taken that and run with it and built a lot of case with it. I think a lot of the question comes about from a taking of one or two passages in the Old Testament and reading just those commands and not seeing the big picture. So we're going to take a few minutes here today and sort of talk about the big picture. Steve, any things you'd like to add before we just dive into this?

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Yeah, just as we go through all of this, just keep in mind that God, Yahweh, is the God of Israel. And not just the God of Israel. He's the God. He's the God Almighty. He's the creator of everything. In Genesis, where he had talked about being a jealous God, and he has taken Israel out and created this nation out of nothing, in that it's his own nation. It's not a nation derived from any others.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

And one of the things he was doing was he selected this people Israel, not because there was anything good in them, but because of his purposes. So he selected these descendants of Abraham and was trying to set them apart as an example of a holy people. And that's part of the motivation that we'll get to as we go through this. First, just to point out the problem. Yes, indeed, there's several passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua where God commands Israel and commands Joshua to destroy all the people of Canaan. Old people, little kids, soldiers, everybody up and down the line.

God’s Sovereignty And The Book Of Job

SPEAKER_01 2:40

The first thing that we have to look at, and we say this very directly and with confidence, that God is God. And that that seems like a simple statement, but God is sovereign. He created everything, he created the system that we're in, he created all of us, he gave us life, so he has the right to take it back again. He has divine authority over all creation, and he has the full right to give life. He gives us good things, and he has the right to take them back again. We have here a situation where, yes, we have a legitimate question of why is he taking it back again, but we generally don't complain when he gives good things. It's just when he decides to take them back again. And we have to kind of have the good with the bad. And he doesn't really make excuses or explain himself. I'm reminded in the book of Job, the beginning of the book of Job, God approaches Satan and says, Have you considered my servant Job? And then God allows Satan to attack Job. And God says in chapter one of Job, you can go this far and no further. And then in chapter two, you can go this far and no further. Then Job loses his family, loses his business, loses his income, loses his health, and he spends a couple of dozen chapters saying, if I can just get God down here across the conference room table, then we could have a conversation, we could work this thing out. Well, at the end of the book, God shows up and basically says, Who do you think you are questioning me? Where were you when I made the world? Where were you when I decided where the sea was going to stop? When Job finally does get in front of God and he sees the majesty of God, the immensity of God, he is so overwhelmed that Job just apologizes for even asking the question in the first place. It's easy for us to sit here in our nice, comfortable chairs saying, Oh, God should have done this and why did God do that? But we don't really understand the immensity and the majesty of God. And when we are finally face to face with God, then we're just overwhelmed by it. We just unapologetically say, God gives life, he has the right to take it back again. So that's our first point. It'll permeate everything we say.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

I think also to add to that, Glenn, is that we're looking at it from the understanding and the moral question from a human perspective, to where we think that we're a good people or we're a good person. And why would this be done? Why would such a command be given for people that might be good or basically good when we're not? It's looking at it from a perspective of God rather than looking at a perspective of mankind. And then just the one last thing when you said about the majesty at one of the previous sessions, we talked about the reaction that was made with Joshua and others that when he realized that they were in the presence of God, the immediate thing that they do is just go down completely to the ground because of that awesomeness that they see and realize that they're in the presence of God.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

In the Gospels and the Mount of Transfiguration, when Jesus appears in his glory, what do the people do? They hide their eyes and cover their faces. When we realize the majesty of God, we're just overwhelmed. That's the first point. Next,

Canaanite Evil And Child Sacrifice

SPEAKER_01 6:01

the people of Canaan were not innocent people. These were not mild-mannered, innocent people. These were very evil people. And just to give a small taste of some of the things they did, one of the idols mentioned for the people of Canaan, and it's mentioned several times in the Old Testament, is the god Molech. And Molech was an iron idol, metal idol, and it had outstretched hands. And the way the process worked, they would build a fire either inside the statue or underneath the hands. Then they would sacrifice their children. They would fry them alive, basically, over this metal idol. This was done repeatedly. And this was one of the practices of the people of Canaan. And that was just one.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

So one of the things, too, and when they would sacrifice to Molech, they would have loud drums beating and things like that to help drown out the cries and the screams of the children that were being sacrificed and people that were being sacrificed. A lot of times you think of sacrifice of just kind of a quick death, but something like that, just put placing somebody and especially a child on a hot metal and just letting them basically die that way is not a that's not something that good people do.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

It's not it's not pretty. It was it was very, very ugly things. Another one was they had idols that had to do with sex worship. The venereal disease alone would have been rampant in that people. Another thing that we run into is that the people of Canaan ended up influencing the people of Israel and not the other way around. It was not the case that the people of Israel came in with good and fair laws and then influenced the people of Canaan for good. In fact, it was the other way around. One of the questions that comes in, and part of the original question, was God moral when he ordered the destruction of Canaan?

When Israel Copies Canaan’s Practices

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Well, we don't have to guess at what would happen if God didn't give that command. The reason we don't have to guess is because we know what would happen if the people of Canaan weren't destroyed. Reason being is as we go through Joshua, the people of Israel didn't follow through. Joshua and the people of Israel did not follow through and did not kill all the people of Canaan. So, yes, we have this command of God to go do this, but we don't have to guess at what would happen if God had not ordered that. Because we know what would happen. Because if we just read the rest of the story, read the rest of the Old Testament, we find that over time, Israel did not kill the people of Canaan. And in doing so, the people of Canaan were in around them and in them, ended up influencing Israel for these pagan practices. So that if we read by the end of Jeremiah, for example, the end of 2 Kings, we have Israel had started to sacrifice their children to Molech. Israel had started the sex worship. Israel had taken on these pagan practices to the point that God had to judge Israel. He ended up sending Babylon in because Israel was sacrificing their children to Molech. And so we have a situation here where if Israel would have followed through and destroyed the people of Canaan initially, way back here in Joshua when God first commanded it so, then less evil would have occurred. Because they didn't, because they allowed Canaanites to live, more evil resulted.

SPEAKER_00 9:36

And there's also another side of this morality coin. The first one that we're dealing with here is where is why would a loving God make a command such as this? But the other side of that morality coin is, and a question that is asked, is that why doesn't God do something about evil in the world? This is a situation where he is doing something about evil. It's just that we don't may not like the particular way that he's dealing with it. You have two sides of this coin and morality questions that are asked. You know, you have to think of that as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Yes. People legitimately ask another question, which is why is there evil in the world? Why doesn't God snuff out evil? Here we have a situation where God is snuffing out evil and he gets criticized for both paths. And we'll explore a little bit of that here in just a bit. Another

Land Promise And Warnings Before Judgment

SPEAKER_01 10:24

point, and just kind of going down the list here, and we'll have a resource on this on the resources page on our website that'll have all these reasons in it. But the land of Canaan that actually belonged to the ancestors of Israel all the way back in Genesis, Jacob, who was name was changed Israel, lived in that land. So at the very least, they had a legal claim to the land. And they were going back to the again, as we had talked in our Bible study, God had given this land to Abraham and had moved the people of Israel out for a period of time into Egypt while there was a famine. And then because of God's picture of his divine grace and providence and salvation was bringing Israel back into the land, but they at the very least had a legal claim to the land. And again, that doesn't directly answer the question of the morality of it, but nevertheless, it's not a just total war where they're just going over and taking other land. They had a legal claim to the land. Now, another major point here is that if we look at other places in the Old Testament, again, you can't just take one or two commands out of Joshua or Deuteronomy and build a case over it. You have to look at the big picture. And the big picture is that repeatedly in the Old Testament, God sends messages to people prior to when he casts judgment on them or when he pours out his wrath. It's never the case that God just lands on people with no warning. And we can prove that in examples. For example, Jonah. In the book of Jonah, Jonah was sent to the people of Nineveh with a message. What was the message? Repent and uh believe, or else you're going to be destroyed. And so the people of Nineveh did repent and God relented. So that's one example. The book of Isaiah is another. The first half of Isaiah, there's eight or ten messages in there to people groups that were around Israel, where God is giving them a message through the prophet Isaiah about coming judgment. So we have examples in the Old Testament where God reached out to people groups, both in Israel and outside of Israel, with a divine message that this is what I expect of you. In cases where they don't repent, he then follows through on the judgment because again, he is a righteous judge. And if he didn't deal with the evil, he'd be guilty of that. So I think we could build a pretty solid case that in the 400 years that Israel was in Egypt, God most likely sent prophets to them warning them. And we've seen, as we even now up through Joshua, we've seen how the people of Canaan fought against God. They didn't relent. All the way back in what Rahab told us, they knew that it was God they were fighting against and not just a people group. They knew it was God that had parted the Red Sea. They knew it was God that had parted the Jordan River. It was God that did all these things, not just some military might. They didn't repent and ask, what happened to Rahab? She was a Canaanite and she worshipped the true God and submitted to him and he let her live.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

And it says that Rahab told them and the scripture also that their hearts were melted because they knew it was the God of Israel, Yahweh, the God of Israel that was there. So again, you have the backdrop of them wanting to continue to worship their own gods and not repent and change their minds and worship the one and true God, the God of Israel, Yahweh.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Everywhere in Scripture, God always shows love towards repentance, and he always sends a prophet in with a message before he pours out wrath. So we can safely conclude that that happened here to the Canaanites, even though it's not necessarily recorded in scripture.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

One last thing on that, too, in regards to when you mentioned the far sending Jonah to Nineveh. Jonah, in his worldly mind and his own self, didn't think the people of Nineveh were worthy to have God as their God.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yeah, Jonah didn't want them to repent.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

So that's the lovingness of God that he essentially forced Jonah to go to the people of Nineveh. So you have two things. You had the loving kindness of God to force Jonah to force the message. Because he knew that they were going to repent. It's something that God knows and a situation where he forced it. And again, it's not up for us to question or to doubt. It's for us to believe and to know that this is something that needs to be done.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Now

Four Logical Options For God

SPEAKER_01 15:06

I want to spend just a minute going through some logic. So the listeners just hang in there with me. There's four logical possibilities that God could have done. And those four possibilities exhaust all options. So I'm going to go through those four. And these are the four logical possibilities that God had before him that he could have done. The first is that God could have allowed the people of Canaan to have freedom to make moral decisions and then punish them for it. And that's what happened here. He could have let them make a free moral decision and then when they committed evil, punished them for it. And that's what generated our original question of whether this was a moral thing to do. So that's one option. Another option is that he could allow people to make that moral decision, but not punish them, right? That's a second logical possibility. Now, that's basically what happened in the years prior to when Israel goes through with Joshua and judges them. God left them for 400 years and sent messages to them. So when God shows patience in allowing evil to happen, he gets criticized, as we pointed out earlier. If God doesn't immediately judge evil, then okay, God, why are you allowing all these evil things to happen? But when he then does send in people for judging evil, well, why are you judging evil? Option number one, he could have allowed them to commit evil acts and then punish them for it. Option number two, he could have not punished them for it, but that's allowing evil in the world. That's another logical possibility. Third logical possibility is he could have stopped the evil before it occurred. And that's one of the common questions. How come God doesn't just stop all evil before it happens? Well, first of all, how do we know God's not doing that already? How do we know God's not restraining evil now? Even gross evils like the Holocaust, we could always think of more people that got killed, or we could have thought of slower death or more suffering, more people die or suffered longer, or things like that. So how do we know that God's not already restraining evil? That's one question. And then another one is stopping every human from committing every evil act would violate human freedom and would essentially turn us into a machine, a robot, or a tool. And humans would be at most a pet, not someone capable of love. I mean, I can make a machine that when I get home at night will say, Welcome home, dear. I missed you, I loved you. But that machine is just doing it because I programmed it to say that. It doesn't have free moral choice. Stopping people from making free moral choices violates human freedom. It eliminates the possibility of true love, and it's not the best situation. So God created us in his image, he gave us the ability to make free moral choices, and we've chosen evil.

SPEAKER_00 18:07

And then that's a key principle in regards to God and his loving kindness towards us is that he wants a creation or created being to love him and to worship him on their own through their freedom to do that. He's not going to force anybody to worship him or to love him. It's for them to do it voluntarily. And that goes for all of his creation, not just mankind, but also we see in the with the angels and other beings as well that's been created. They're all there and given that choice to worship and love him on their own.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

And then the fourth logical possibility is that God could have taken children to a glorious state of heaven before they reach the age of accountability and before they end up choosing evil. He could have taken them in his sovereign right to a glorious state of heaven before they commit evil acts. And that's exactly what happened here in Canaan. He judged the older people that had committed the evil acts, and he sovereignly decided I'm going to take these children prior to them committing evil acts and being having to punish for them. I'm going to pull them into a glorious state of heaven where they can enjoy me. That's what they get criticized for too. So again, the four logical possibilities exhaust all options. God gets criticized in every option.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

This is the reason why our podcast is called Reasoning Through the Bible. It's just things, just such as what Glenn did there of actually thinking about it, going through not just uh the scripture itself, but reasoning through it, going through logical choices in regards to what might be in any type of scripture that we're studying at that time. And then just one last uh comment, Glenn, and you alluded to it earlier that the people knew that this was the God of Israel. And it wasn't just the miracles that he had done. They had already captured the eastern side of Jordan through those people. Remember, there were three tribes that were there already, Manasseh and Gad, but they had already done some conquering on the side. So the people on the west side, these Canaanites, before they come in there, they already know that this is God, and he's not just done miracles showing who he is through parting waters and other things. They've also conquered some people as well. So they also knowing, know that this is an option or an outcome that might happen to them if they resist as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

So,

Parent Child Analogy And Closing

SPEAKER_01 20:35

in wrapping up, God had several options before him. He most likely sent people to Canaan with a message, and as we've seen, the people of Canaan rejected it and dug in. They fought God all along the way. And God could have restrained evil, and he did that for 400 years and sent messages to them. He could have taken the children to a glorious state before they committed evil. He could have turned us into robots, but didn't. He sovereignly and wisely decided, I'm going to let them make free will choices. I'm going to warn them. And then when they don't repent, I'm going to judge them for it. And that's what we have here in Joshua. And I'm also sort of reminded of one of the ways that the Bible describes human is children. I've seen children that, oh, if you take the candy away or you take the toy away, oh my goodness, the two or three-year-old just think, oh, this is just horrible. The life's coming to an end. But it's really good for them in the long run. And they don't understand yet. So God could sit down and try to explain these things, but it would be sitting down and trying to explain things to a two-year-old. You can sit and explain about, okay, later on in life, you're going to need to eat your vegetables. They're just not going to understand. So what does every parent ever do? Because I said so. You have to do it because I said so. That's basically where God is with us. He's got his reasons, and there are divinely wise reasons. And if we look through the whole story and not pulling out a verse or two, then we can we can find God's wisdom in here. We can trust God for being holy and right and good and doing the right things. And that's what we have here in Joshua when he deals with the Canaanites.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

And also because of what you mentioned is that the parent knows what you're bringing out, what's going to happen in the future. And so that's why they treat the child that way. The same thing. So that's going to be our episode today in this reasoning through the Bible. You can also find the material that the Glenn mentioned on our website, reasoningthrough the Bible.com. We will pick you up in the next session as we continue our journey through studying Joshua.