Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Does God Fight Holy Wars? | Historical Books | Joshua 8:1-29

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

What's with all the violence in the Old Testament? Why does God allow suffering? Is God a moral monster? In today's episode, Patrick gives us seven things to remember when we read of the destruction of Ai in Joshua 8:1-29. Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Joshua 8:1-29

Welcome to 10 minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. As we've been reading through Joshua, I suspect we've all had some moments of uneasiness. Because we're all wondering, what do we do with all of this violence? What do we do with holy war? What do we do with religiously sanctioned violence? What do we do with a God who commands his followers to kill? Some of you listening to this are old enough to remember 9-11. And so you remember the consequences of religiously motivated violence. You might remember them viscerally. Thousands of lives lost in a holy war. Now, all of us listening to

this are old enough to remember when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021. And if you don't remember, the Taliban are a group guided by Sharia law. They instigate Holy War. And people in Afghanistan were so desperate to avoid religious violence that they knew the Taliban were going to enact, they were so desperate that we saw videos of mothers throwing themselves on barbed wire fences to get their babies over. We saw people falling from jets because they were clinging to the jets as they were taking off trying to escape. In such moments, we all ask, how could a good God allow these kinds of things to happen? How could he not intervene? And the Bible's answer is dark, and it's realism.

I mean, it's just totally realistic. And here's what it is. God chose to limit himself the minute he gave humans free will. The minute he allowed Adam and Eve to be thinking, choosing beings, and not just robotic automaton. He took a tremendous risk. The goal was that they would follow him, choose to follow him, and fill the world with his love by their own choice and volition that he gave them. but of course the result was quite different. We've instead built violent empire after violent empire.

We've abused the weak. We've discriminated against the powerless. We've crushed the poor. And yet, the Bible is the most sustained critique of human power in human history. The second book of the Bible, Exodus, sets Israel in opposition to the megalomaniacal child murdering Pharaoh of Egypt. Later on, the prophets Christ, foul against Israelite kings who bent their knees to idols and carried out injustices that

idolatry always demands. God's answer to the suffering caused by humans redefining good and evil is that he never gives up on us. He called Abraham and Israel and eventually one true Israelite Jesus to reboot his original mission to fill the world with love, justice, and mercy. God's ultimate answer to the problem of human evil is that he became a human himself, a poor human who spent his entire life as a non-citizen under the occupying forces of Rome, a human who experienced desperation like few of us know, who was tried under false charges and wrongly sentenced to an excruciating death on a cross. And on that cross he became human sin, and God poured out his wrath on that sin as he hung

there broken and betrayed. God's answer to human suffering is to suffer, to end suffering. And it's not just that. He also set forth a promise that one day all things will be set back into joint. There will be justice against the Taliban and every oppressor. And yet, there will also be forgiveness for those who come to him, anyone who comes to him, and resurrection for those people into a new reality where life is the way it's supposed to be. But there is no suffering, no more pain, no more violence. But I think there's another question that comes to mind as we look at the religiously motivated violence in the book of Joshua. And that's how is the warfare of the Israelites in the Bible that God sanctions.

How is it really any different than the warfare of the Taliban or ISIS in the name of Allah? Joshua is full of stories that make us ask this question. and today we land in the middle of yet another one of those stories. In Joshua 8, God calls the Israelites to take the city of Ai by means of a pincor attack. While one part of the army drew the city's fighting men beyond the walls, the other part of the army snuck into the city to burn it and destroy it. Once the burning was completed, they left the city and attacked I's fighting force from behind. Here's the passage that might make our jaws drop.

Joshua 8, verse 24. when Israel had finished killing all the men of I in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them. And when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to I and killed those who were in it. 12,000 men and women fell that day, all the people of I. The story continues in verse 28. So Joshua burned I and made it a permanent heap of ruins, a desolate place to this day. He impaled the body of the king of eye on a pole and left it there until evening. At sunset, Joshua ordered them to take down the body from the pole and throw it down at the

entrance of the city gate, and they raised a large pile of rocks over it, which remains to this day. So is God no better than the God of the Taliban? That's a complicated question that no one could answer in the five minutes remaining in this episode. So instead, let me make seven observations that I hope will help you sort out this passage by showing you seven angles on why the so-called holy wars advocated in Joshua are radically different than the holy wars executed today by other religions. First, you have to take a geographical angle. Israel's war is appropriate only within a specific geographical space which God gave Israel.

They're commanded not to take lands that he gave to others. So unlike modern holy wars that have no limitations, well, this one has a geographical limitation. Second, we need to look at this from the angle of holy distinction. This conquest is for the sake of preserving Israel's distinctive morality, worship and vocation. The threat of becoming idle worshippers, like the Canaanites that they were fighting, well, that threat was dire. Israel is always falling into idolatry. Israel could not be God's bridgehead of justice and love into the world, the means by which his mission to renew and restore all things would happen. They couldn't be that if they committed idolatrous injustice. Third, we need to look at this from a justice angle. According to Genesis 15, Yahweh gave the

Canaanites hundreds of years to repent of their evil. You see, the people that are being attacked here, they were well known for their abuse, for their murder, the murder of children, for their sexual abuse of women, for their injustice toward the poor, and a lot more than that. And Yahweh gives them hundreds of years to change their ways, but they refuse before he enacts justice. And I think it's worth noting that Yahweh also judges Israel with impunity. So when Israel falls into these same patterns later in their history, Yahweh brings his justice against them. So this is not ethnically motivated. Yahweh is just just and he hates when people murder and abuse one another. Fourth, we need to look at this from a rhetorical angle. In ancient Near Eastern warfare,

literature, and that's what Joshua is. Hyperbole is often used. This means that even though Joshua describes these wars as being total, everyone being killed, everyone being destroyed, the reality probably wasn't the same. And that might sound like a lie, but what you have to understand is that ancient readers understood the genre that they were reading. They knew to expect hyperbole in warfare literature. And so they likely understood that these so-called total wars were not nearly as total and totalizing as they sound. In fact, the book of Joshua highlights this, because throughout it we have stories like the story of Rehab, individuals who are spared because they turn to God.

Fifth, we should look at this from a chronological angle. Historically, this war, it takes place largely within a single generation. And later wars that Israel tries to enact, well, they're actually condemned by the prophets. This means that Israel is not only limited to a specific geographical location, they're limited to holding this holy war within a specific time frame. And once they leave that time frame, they're not allowed to continue it. Six, we have to look at this from the justice angle. God is carrying out justice against the Canaanites again for hundreds of years of

intergenerational sin, idolatry, and injustice. He's bringing his future judgment into the presence. Now, that's not something that humans are normally invited to do, but you have to remember, this war is not a human idea. God has the right to enact his justice. and he is doing so in this story. Seventh. And lastly, we need to look at this from the perspective of universal blessing. You see, God, in his sovereign goodness, he uses this particular act of justice in a particular place to ultimately bless all nations. Yes, the Canaanites are judged for their wrongdoing, but that judgment is not the end of the story for planet earth.

Because God's going to work through Israel to restore all creation. And so you see that the ultimate aim here is not violence and subjugation. The ultimate aim is blessing. A closing thought. In light of all the wars and violence in the world right now, both religious and secular, look, we can't help but be horrified by the depravity of humanity. In fact, the last century and a half has been the bloodiest in human history. So we should be careful about looking down on the past.

And it's really worth noting here that the vast majority of the lives, lost in the last century and a half. They weren't lost in religious wars. They were lost in secular wars for secular causes. And that suggests that secularism can be a far more bloody god than the gods of various religions. That means we can take away at least one thing. The world is more corrupt and more broken than we ever want to admit. Yet, Jesus did not let the wheel of violence carry forward as an endless cycle of succession, death, conquest and destruction. Instead, Jesus threw himself onto that wheel. And that wheel crushed him. It killed him, but he rose again. Ever since that day, the wheel has been stopped. And through

his resurrection power, he is actively turning it backwards until it really begins to spin. And one day, death and suffering and war are no more. They're nothing but a distant memory.