Is There Injustice in God?

A lot of people, both among professing believers and among unbelievers, express moral objections to the commands of God to the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites - man, woman, and child - during their conquest of the Promised Land. For example, we read in Deuteronomy 7:1-2 God's commandment: "When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them."

And we have the record of Israel's partial obedience to the commandment: "We captured all his [i. e., King Sihon of Heshbon] cities at that time and devoted to destruction every city, men, women, and children. We left no survivors" (Deuteronomy 2:34). The same thing happened in the defeat of King Og of Bashan: "We devoted them to destruction, as we did to Sihon the king of Heshbon, devoting to destruction every city, men, women, and children" (Deuteronomy 3:6).

Is that harsh? I think any sane person would say so. But does that mean that it was unjust? That I must deny!

The problem with the objections to the Canaanite pogrom is that these objectors have an unbiblical view of man.

According to the Bible, all human beings (excluding only Adam and Eve before the Fall, and Jesus) are sinners, rebels in our hearts against our Lord and Creator, the triune God in Heaven (Romans 3:23). And the consequence of sin is death: "Behold, all souls are Mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine: the soul who sins shall die" (Ezekiel 18:4). This is the point of error in the argument of those who accuse God of immorality; they fail to understand the wickedness of men or its consequence.

However, we notice that, though all are sinners, not all die at any particular time. That is certainly true. God restrains His justice for a time - for most. And that is the issue. After giving them 400 years to change their ways (Genesis 15:16), God chose to apply His justice to the pagan residents of Canaan through the Israelites at that time. If He chose to carry out His justice on those people at that time, but restrains it for a time for the rest of the world, is that injustice? No, it's mercy. When the false believer or the unbeliever accuses God of immorality in ancient Canaan, he is really denying the mercy of God to the rest of the world in the rest of history.

And that error is deliberate. Unrighteous men are not ignorant of God. Rather, they "suppress the truth through unrighteousness" (Romans 1:18). They throw up this smokescreen in their minds, so that they can avoid their innate knowledge of the reality of God and our accountability to Him. This is the moral equivalent of the child who sticks his fingers in his ears and sing-songs, "La-la-la I can't hear you," when his parents are chastising him for misbehavior. Does that exempt him from the consequences? Of course not! Nor does this smokescreen from unbelievers protect them from the justice of God.