The Theology of the Conquest

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

Hopefully you, our listeners, can’t tell but it’s been a while since we did this. We’re engaged in a time warp, so it’s good to be back with you after a couple of weeks, and we’re continuing our discussions guided by the book of Joshua. We’re going to talk about a favorite topic of the New Atheists, that is the conquest of Canaan. We’re going to discuss whether the Lord Yahweh is guilty of genocide. What do we think?

No.

Can we just stop there?

That would be nice.

Let’s move on to the next episode right there.

Well, first we need to define genocide, right?

All right. Let me read from something I wrote once upon a time.

The word genocide is a modern one. It was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a brilliant legal scholar originally from Poland, Jewish by descent. The word literally means ‘killing a tribe.’ Lemkin’s first definition was narrow – the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. He quickly enlarged it to include “a coordinated plan aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” He included within his definitions attacks on culture, language, religion, and social/political institutions.

His group grew out of familiarity with the Turkish slaughter of Armenian Christians during the first world war and Simele Massacre of Christian Syrians in Iraq in 1933. His most important work was Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944, looking at some of Nazi Germany’s practices.

So there you go for definitions. It’s the concept of wiping out an ethnic group of people, a nation, deliberately. I assume that doing it accidentally doesn’t quite count, that you actually have to have the focused intent on destroying some people group.

When we look at the Torah, particularly Deuteronomy, though it begins as early as Exodus, and Joshua, we see God’s commands to Israel to destroy the Canaanites, so I think the first thing we probably should do is be very specific about what God said, and then secondly very specific about why God said it.

The first thing is that although he says basically, “Kill them. Kill them all,” it’s in the conquest of, “Kill them if they don’t leave. Kill them if they don’t run away.”

The point is they’re being driven out of the land, right?

Yeah, they’re being removed from the land. If they all wanted to pack up and leave, then God did not say, “And go hunt them all down and make sure not one survives.” That wasn’t part of the agenda. The agenda was to secure the land for Israel and to drive out these people.

Then the second question is why? Was it simply a matter of disposition inheritance? They have the land and God wants his people to have it, so they need to go? Or is there something more?

As we read through the law and on into Joshua, and into Judges for that matter, we see that God’s intentions have to do with the religious and ethical character of the Canaanites. They were really, really wicked. They practiced child sacrifice, ritual prostitution of both sexes, bestiality, self-mutilation, and all other kinds of wickedness in the name of religion. These were the good points. This was what they thought their gods wanted of them. This was the best they had to offer.

Their religious rituals were very seductive, as Israel found. In the years to follow, Israel is constantly being pulled into ritual fornication or just good old-fashioned marriage with your pagan neighbors that leads you into idolatry.

Since God’s goal in all this is the preservation of his worship, his Word, and the Messianic line, this poison, this cancer in humanity was simply too deadly to tolerate. God says, “It needs to go.” Now if they want to leave and go join another host body someplace else, that’s something else.

First of all, it’s God’s land. He owns the earth. He can give it to whomever he wants. That’s huge and something people have a problem with. “Well, they were there first!” God was there first and God actually made it.

Yeah, how far back do you want to go with any given plot of land?

God can give it to them. God says he’s going to give it to them. And here’s another thing – God promised them 400 years earlier, he promised to Abraham that his seed would inherit this land, but he said, “But not yet, because the iniquity of these Canaanites, these Amorites, isn’t full,” so it’s going to take some time. God gave them time to mature in wickedness.

Now, in theory that was also an opportunity to repent. Some say, “That’s impossible. No one would ever change their religions.” There actually were a few people who did.

See Nineveh.

Yeah, Nineveh repented wholesale at the preaching of one man, whose only message was, “You’re about to die.” In the context of Canaan specifically we all know the one famous woman, the prostitute Rahab, who did repent. She joined Israel’s side. But then we also have a city called Gibeon that decided they didn’t want to leave but they didn't want to die, so they bamboozled Joshua and the elders and pretended to be from far away, and got a promise out of them that Israel wouldn’t kill them. Then lo and behold, “Wow, you live just over the hill. That’s not cool.”

“We weren’t supposed to make a treaty with you. Too late now.”

“We swore by the name of God.” From this I think we can extrapolate that repentance would have saved the Canaanites, but it wasn’t going to happen, generally. It happened a little bit.

It’s interesting that the repentance of this sort involved deception. It kind of reminds me of Jacob pretending to be Esau in order to get the blessing.

That’s a good observation, because both Rahab and the Gibeonites did practice a certain degree of deception in switching sides.

Some people will look at this and say, “But what you’re talking about is religion. Doesn’t everyone have a right to their own religion? Isn’t that one of the basic guaranteed freedoms of mankind? Who is this God of yours to tell people they can’t worship other gods?”

“Oh, what a child of the Enlightenment you are.” It’s funny. You know, one of the preconditions for the Enlightenment is actually Christianity so…anyway.

If there is no God who speaks, then we have real problems on all fronts. But specifically once you admit, “What are we going to do here? No, your God, although he is the Creator, doesn’t get to say who gets to say who gets to be worshiped. He should just let people worship. Sure, if they want to worship sticks and stones, your God should let them because that’s a basic human right.”

What are you even talking about at this point? God is God. If he wants to say, “No, your god is no more real than all these other gods. I mean every god is its own reality and gods exist only in the minds of their believers, and therefore your faith doesn’t get to nudge other people’s faith aside,” we’re back to some kind of extreme relativism. Well, that’s kind of where we live these days, I guess. But the Bible knows nothing of that.

God claims to be the God of the whole earth in the most literal sense. He owns the planet. He is the not-absentee landlord, but the very imminent yet transcendent landlord, the sovereign landlord, who can give and does give the planet to whom he will, and gives life and breath to all men, and takes it away at his discretion.

One thing we’ll come back to eventually is that yes, God ordered a lot of people to be killed. God takes people’s lives every day. He tells us over and over again, “I kill. I make alive.” People don’t like that. We want to see death as just this thing that happens, and that God is someplace wringing his hands, wishing he could save people from dying, and boy, isn’t it sad? No, God actually ends people’s lives in his sovereignty.

One of our big problems here – in fact, probably the big problem in all this discussion – is coming to terms with who the God of the Bible claims to be. If you don’t want to believe it, that’s your business, but then you have some questions to answer if you want to maintain any kind of claim to rationality. If you don’t want to claim to be rational, okay, but then don’t blame us because we are rational, because you don’t want to be rational and there’s no reason we should follow you in your irrationality because you’ve got no reason at all, because you’re not rational.

You mentioned the New Atheists. I’ve got a quote from Richard Dawkins from The God Delusion from 2008. He speaks of our Lord as “a vindictive blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” In other words, “He does stuff I don’t like and it involves people and what they have to do. He actually tells people not to do stuff that I think they should be fine doing, so God’s bad.”

That brings us to a couple issues. First of all, this is probably the order we should have gone in, but I’ve kind of committed us. The question is, “Is God evil?” Now, that’s an interesting question.

Based on what?

Based on what? Now, you can mean a couple things by that. You can mean that you look at the Bible and you see what the Bible says about who God is, what he tells us about himself and the standards he sets for us, and say God is not living up to his own standards.

That’s kind of a tenuous track because, remember, God’s not us. God says to us, “Thou shalt not kill,” but he kills every day. He tells us we should not steal, but he owns everything and takes stuff from people all the time. So we have this issue of God’s standards for us do not apply back to him the way they apply to us.

Now, the trinitarian God is absolutely faithful, absolutely pure. He keeps covenant to 1,000 generations. He keeps covenant among himself forever and ever, from eternity to eternity, so in terms of that, yeah, God is faithful to himself. Nothing he commands in scripture is at all contrary to who he is. You would have to produce some kind of heavy exegetical argument from scripture to proceed any further along this road.

A mild surface reading saying, “Well, God is love and yet he killed all these people, so that’s a contradiction,” – no. You have to do things like define what in the world love is, and why did he kill all these people, and was it not loving to kill the evil people that are trying to destroy the promise that will save the world? It gets a little more complicated than just, “All this blood makes me feel bad.” There’s more to talk about.

Pulling back from that, the other thing that more often these critics mean is, “We have a standard that is not in scripture, because we do not like scripture. We do not approve of scripture. But this standard – whatever it exactly may be – says that you should love everybody and not commit mass murder. Your God apparently does not love everybody and does order mass murder; therefore, your God is evil.”

At which point we say, “All right, what standard is this exactly? Where did you find it? Why is it binding on anyone? And in particular why would it be binding on the God who made the universe? Now if you want to say God doesn’t even exist, then you’re saying that this fiction we’ve created is violating a world that you’ve created, and your literary creation, your fiction is better than our fiction. I think that’s a literary argument on the order of is Marvel or DC better?”

Why should it bother you that our fiction is objectionable to you?

Yeah. You don’t want to watch our movies? That’s fine, but that’s not a real argument of any sort to appeal to anything. Where will you appeal?

“Well, most people at most times have thought that killing lots of people is bad.”

Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, the American abortion industry, the Soviet Union, the SS. No, most people in most times have not thought that mass murder is wrong. An awful lot of people have. A lot of people apparently think it’s just fine, given the right circumstances.

But even if you could get that consensus – let us say that somehow we could take a vote of all the human beings who have ever lived to this point, and more than 50% of them said, “Yes, mass murder is wrong,” so what? Why should that bind anybody? Why should I let other people define my standards of living, how I will live? Let alone, how should a God who claims to stand outside of humanity, to be in fact the maker of humanity, who transcends our physical reality at all levels – why should he care what we think? Or why should it do any more than perhaps amuse him or anger him? What kind of argument is this?

Will you look for something rational above God? More rational than God? There’s some kind of rational thing that says we don’t kill people? Where is this idea? Is it a natural law? God created nature. Is it behind nature? Is it supernatural? Where is this thing coming from?

The moment you say God is evil, you’re admitting that there is some kind of moral absolute in the universe, which is a big mistake if you want to argue for atheism, but at the same time you’re saying, “And God’s not it.” Then you have a god who’s bigger than God. You have some ultimate authority, and then that gets embarrassing.

So then once you know what this ultimate authority says – and by the way, how do you know that? – have you obeyed all of its standards? You have the Bible telling you you’re a sinner. How about this other authority? Have we just shifted from one god to…the whole thing is a bunch of nonsense.

We’ve brought up Van Til’s parable. Actually, I think it was a real incident on a train where he saw a little girl climbing up into her grandfather’s lap so she could slap him.

She can only reach his face because he let her onto his lap.

Yeah. These New Atheists have to assume a Christian idea of moral absolutes in order to attack the God whose moral absolutes they actually are appealing to. So it’s a self-defeating argument, and if it weren’t so tragic and so sinful it would be rather amusing.

Something that ties into all this, though, is the question, “Well, if God ordered Joshua to go out and kill Canaanites because of their perverse religion, does that still bind Christians today? Should we go out with swords or machine guns and exterminate particularly wicked people of the world who practice perverse religions or perverse morality or are a threat to, say, the church?”

We can think here of people who have advocated assassinating abortionists or assassinating extremely wicked liberal political leaders, or entire countries because they’re evil and are a threat to us all.

To make sense of this, I think we have to fall back aways and get a big picture here. The Bible here and there, often just in passing, speaks of the wars of Yahweh, the wars of the Lord or the battles of the Lord. The way this phrase is used is not that “Israel has battles and, by the way, we hope God is on our side.” The point is that God has a battle to fight and he expects his people to be on his side, but these battles take different forms at different times.

The battle is for the life of the world, for the salvation of his people. God sent his son into the world that the world through him might be saved. That’s the goal, and there are a lot of things, particularly in the first 4,000 years of human history, that tried to get in the way of that, and most of them were directly or indirectly motivated by Satan, his demons, the powers of darkness.

They understood the threat of the garden. There’s going to be this hero, this seed of the woman, and he’s going to crush the serpent’s head. He’s going to win, you’re going to lose, but he’s going to come into this world in some sense by natural birth. He’s going to be human – at least human. So real early on, the devil wages a warfare against that promise, against God.

He can’t go to God directly and attack God, but he can attack God’s work and he can attack God’s promise and he can attack God’s people. Throughout history, Satan’s strategy – I believe there are basically three things:

Kill them. Kill them all, because that would work.

Lead them into idolatry so that God kills them all.

Get them married to unbelievers so that their children will defect, and then see Point 2 above.

Satan is not original. He’s not creative, and that’s pretty much what he’s got to work with. If he can turn God against his own promises, if he can turn God’s holiness and justice against his grace and love, then this fight might have a chance. So for the first 4,000 years of human history we see God pushing his promise through history, defending it, and at times obliterating the enemy.

You start with Cain, and the battle there is very simple. “Get out of here. Stay away,” until God’s people go after them and intermarry. Then there’s this flooding of an entire planet and destroying a worldwide population, someplace between a few million and a few billion people, not to mention all the bunny rabbits and squirrels. God did not approach that one with sweetness and gentleness. We really need to take this seriously. God destroyed the planet. The entire civilization that spanned the globe, it’s gone, it’s buried.

On the other side there’s the Tower of Babel, and again people are turning against God’s promise. God doesn’t resort to a lot of violence on this occasion. He simply splinters human language to create nation groups who will inevitably fight each other for territory, resources, and such.

As we go down through history we come to the patriarchs, who do very little fighting. Once or twice they get engaged in some kind of armed conflict, but mostly they’re just sheepherders and prophets and doing their own thing and minding their own business, waiting for the promise, until we end up in Egypt.

Egypt tries to enslave God’s people and then destroy them all, and God intervenes again with blood and frogs and locusts and hailstone and fire and the death angel and the crashing down Red Sea. Then on the other side, we find God’s people really for the first time picking up swords and taking on the Amalekites. They don’t really do a whole lot else until we come to Joshua.

Then from Joshua through Judges and through the beginning of the reigns of Saul and David we see God’s people taking up swords to defend a particular geographical plot of land that has very specific promises with it.

During the kingdom era there’s not a whole lot of that. In fact, often God’s people are fighting each other. Sometimes they’re fighting Syria or the Philistines or somebody to maintain their existence. Then they go into captivity, and except for the brief Maccabean conflict, they never really take up swords again.

So as we scan this whole panorama of biblical history, the time during which God put swords into his people’s hands and said, “Here, swing this. Use the pointy end,” is not the major point of it. Most of the time God himself is walking through history waging war against his enemies, by means sometimes subtle, sometimes extremely violent and wholesale.

And sometimes very confusing. Jesus going into the wilderness to do battle with the devil – it’s not intuitive. That doesn’t look like a battle to us.

No, and as I was growing up I think I saw that as just sort of “Jesus the victim.” I was much, much older before I understood, “Wait, Jesus did this. The Holy Spirit moved him deliberately. Jesus went deliberately to face Satan.” This was combat, and Jesus blew the devil away, but it wasn’t the kind of battle we’re used to, or were used to historically to that point, often because we’ve been mis-reading because it is the kind of battle we fight every day. We can’t pull out a sword or a light saber or a wand of demon banishing and take on the devil. We have to stand by faith and by the promises of God, by the work of the Spirit.

The coming of Christ was his definitive redemptive work. His death, resurrection, ascension, the outpouring of the Spirit. We’ve entered a new phase of the conflict. Yes, if a mugger tries to attack us we have permission to defend ourselves. If someone tries to break into our house, we have permission to pull out a shotgun. Before a nation invades ours, we have permission to join a regular army and defend our liberties and our families.

In each of those cases, we’re not being targeted as Christians. It’s not because of our role in society as a Christian that the mugger has pulled his knife.

Right. It may be a Christian duty, but it’s not a normal part of the Christian life. We’re not commissioned to go around stopping muggers and evangelizing them or some such thing, although we can. Once we’ve brought him down and have his knife we can say, “Look bud, while we’re waiting for the police I’ve got a story to tell you.”

Although if someone comes at you with a knife, there’s no stopping him. Just run. Guns are different. Guns you can stop. Not knives.

Also just to sort of add to what you’re saying, with the coming of Christ we no longer have a paradigm that is “This is the nation that God has chosen to bless,” because that role has now found its fulfillment in the everlasting covenant people, which is the church.

The church is the holy nation of priests.

Yes, so we can’t say anymore, “England is God’s country,” or “Poland is God’s country” in a way that any other nation is not also God’s country.

Right. He does own them all.

He does own all of them. There are two ways to answer the question, “Are Christians supposed to go around killing people?” The first answer is no, because we don’t have a particularly Christian nation that’s under attack by specifically Satanic nations because they realize we’re a Christian nation or anything like that.

The second is, “Well, yes, if by killing them you mean letting them die to the flesh by telling them the gospel.”

The image that the Spirit uses in Revelation 19 is of Christ galloping through history on his white horse slaying the nations with the sword of his mouth. And the armies of heaven, that would be us, follow along in his train. He’s the one who does the fighting, and again it’s not phasers or light sabers or B-52s or some such thing. It’s the Word of God, the sword of the Spirit.

This is the question I’ve been asking my kids at school a lot lately, and I think they pretty well have figured it out. “When the prophecies in the Old Testament talk about destroying a sinful nation – Moab or Edom or something – what can that mean?”

They’re very good and say, “Well, it can mean that they’re going to die. It can mean they’re going to be converted. Those people as they were will die to self and be raised to newness of life.” That, of course, is the right answer.

The Old Testament regularly speaks in terms of the Messiah’s kingdom in terms of slaying his enemies. But when we get to the New Testament, and the New Testament starts reinterpreting that for us and setting our hermeneutics straight, we see that at least in many cases what that means is the conversion of these people. That’s how we get rid of the bad guys. We win them to Christ. On the road to Damascus, Saul of Tarsus died and the apostle Paul rose in his stead.

So this is our new Great Commission, and the Great Commission is the New Testament corollary of what Joshua was commanded. Joshua, whose name is Jesus, led the armies of Israel with an iron sword to take the Promised Land. We follow in the pathway of our Joshua, our Jesus, who with the sword of the Spirit is also conquering the world, but he slays people by bringing them to resurrection life.

So yes, at one time God did that. That time is past, for the reasons you’ve described. Thank you, Bryan, for dealing with that. Historically redemptively we’re not where we were and for now, until Jesus comes, we likely aren’t going to be there ever again, but there will be a day when Jesus will come back and it will no longer be to pass out tracts or go on Christian radio or make guest appearances on Christian TV and try to winsomely win people to Christ. He will come in fire and glory, blasting his enemies to pieces. It will not be a pretty sight.

He’s not going to be the keynote speaker at a Christian conference.

Exactly. That time has passed. He came once, meek, mild, humble, the smoking flax he does not quench, but when he comes again next time it will be in glory and power, and the wars of the Lord will change tone and timbre very dramatically real fast, as angels accompany him in flame and fire.

God is consistent. God does not change. But our historical circumstances – this prism through which God reveals himself – does change. We see history before Jesus came. We see history before God selected a people and gave them a particular land for particular reasons. Now we see Jesus enthroned in heaven, but it’s the same God. It’s the same grace. It’s the same justice and holiness.

History by definition is a place of transition, of change and development, but there are absolute standards that govern this and they are rooted in the very character of God himself, and for that we don’t apologize. We have absolutes.

We were talking about the death of the sinner as dying to sin and to self. One of the most beautiful aspects of Lutheran hermeneutics is this constant idea that every week what the preacher does is bring the law to kill the listener, to kill the sinner, to kill the sin, and the gospel to raise to life. If you have a confessional Lutheran pastor, that’s what they’re doing every single week. They’re saying, “Here’s the text. In here are law and gospel. How do we rightly divide those?”

I think there are more robust hermeneutics – covenant theology – but as a starting point I think it’s a pretty good division to draw in scripture, and a nice tool to use as you’re starting to learn to read through scripture and think about these different areas of redemptive history.

It’s easy in such a Lutheran hermeneutic – although not unavoidable by any means – to say, “This verse is law and this verse is gospel,” and that’s a mistake. The issue is how are we receiving it? If you receive “repent and believe” as a command that can be fulfilled in the flesh, it’s still law for you. And if you hear the command that says “love and fear the Lord” as an offer of free grace where God’s promising to change you, that’s pure gospel, so we need to be careful.

All that is law is holy and rooted in God’s own nature, but as it comes to us, if we receive it as a bare command whereby we can grab hold of it and make ourselves alive, where the zombies can crawl out of the tomb, then that’s the flesh. That’s the law in the negative sense and that’s nothing but corruption and danger.

But however the word comes to us, and we see it as the good will of our God toward us in Christ, that he has said these things that we might live, and we trust him for their fulfillment in us rather than trying to do it ourselves, then we have gospel. So that would be my only caution there, and I don’t think that simply distinguishing law and grace by any means leads you to that.

I think that error certainly has cropped up in Lutheranism a lot. There was, of course, the Lutheran Pietistic movement in the 19th century, I think it was. And of course I can think of that in Scottish Presbyterianism as well. We have the whole Marrow Controversy, where the question was, “Does God require something of your own effort in order to be initiated into the kingdom?”

The big issue of that was who are you actually able to address the gospel to? What is the gospel message? Can you tell someone “repent and belief,” or is that casting pearls before swine if you accidentally give that to the non-elect.

A slightly unrelated aspect of the Christian life is when Zwingli outlawed the singing of hymns and psalms in church because he was worried that if there were non-elect in church then they would be heaping condemnation on themselves.

I mean, at that rate you might as well just not have church.

Do it in your own home and then it’s on your own head.

Yeah, we don’t like that.

My roommate in college, one of them, was from a small Reformed sect which shall remain unnamed, but the people in this little denomination were warned. They followed the Heidelberg Catechism, but they followed it in an overly-literal mechanistic fashion. You need to know how great your sin and misery is before you can know how you’re redeemed, before you can be thankful. So until you really know your misery – and by misery they understood an emotional condition of misery – you can’t go forward. And since they’re theoretically Calvinists, only God can make you miserable, so there’s nothing you can do to make yourself miserable. There’s nothing the pastor can do to make you miserable.

You can go to church, and should. I’m not sure why that followed, but you did. If you’re a covenant child you go to church and you just sit there not doing anything, not expecting anything, not hoping for anything, because that would all be fleshly. And maybe at some point God’s spirit will just strike through all of that and suddenly make you feel miserable, and then you can proceed to trust in Christ and so on.

Sounds like Gnosticism. Where’s my bell?

It’s hyper-Calvinism. Up to that point I thought hyper-Calvinism was a myth, and then I found out, “No, there are actually people who believe this.” But it was down to you can’t tell people to believe, because that would imply that they have some sort of natural freedom to do so. No, it implies no such thing. It implies that God can supply the freedom through the very words you speak, should it be his good pleasure, and you have no idea what he has in mind, so quit trying to be smarter than God and do what he said and preach the gospel.

And then don’t be surprised when he blesses it and saves someone.

Yeah. “Oh wait. You sound like you’re a Christian. What do I do now?”

I actually came up across that once. It’s one of the great failures in my life, which God snatched out of the fire for me. I was invited to talk to a young prosperous couple who knew nothing about the Bible. They knew nothing about Christianity, but a guy at their work had been witnessing to them and they were beginning to come along.

I thought I was supposed to explain Christianity to them, and I did the whole history of scripture in an hour, which I do sometimes for people, and they really enjoyed it, because they knew nothing. I said, “Samson?”

“No.”

“Noah? Flood?”

“Oh yeah! We just got a little book for our girls and there was this boat.”

With the giraffes.

With the giraffes, yeah, that one. I got to the point of saying, “It sounds like you’re Christians,” and rather than saying – and this was one of those horrible moments of being afraid I’m going to sound like an Arminian – “What you need to do is get down on your knees and ask Jesus into…”

What I should have said is, “I think you’re ready to become Christians. Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, the Savior of the world, and he died for you?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go get you baptized!”

I backed off and said, “I think they are Christians….blah blah blah.” Fortunately, about a week later a pastor came on the scene and said, “You’re Christians. Let’s get you baptized.”

It was one of those times of being surprised at how powerful the gospel is in this circumstance. These were wealthy, bright, handsome, intelligent, successful people, like people you see in infomercials.

I wouldn’t describe people I see in infomercials as intelligent or bright.

But God brought them to himself just like that. We actually have to believe the gospel does have the power to change people’s lives. I think sometimes we Calvinists are really bad at that. We misunderstand predestination. We misunderstand effectual calling. We just sit back and know that only God can save people, and kind of get the idea, “Well, of course he’ll probably save our kids, because they were baptized as infants,” and then don’t know what to do with the rest of the world. “If it’s going to happen, God will do it. He probably won’t, because we’re mostly amillennial on that matter.”

Because the gate is wide that leads to destruction.

Yeah, but we made it in so we’re okay.

This is way far afield, but the power of the gospel to change lives – not just hypothetically. I was talking to a young man whose marriage was in danger because his wife was not living up to her profession of faith. I looked at this guy and said, “Do you believe in the power of God to change your wife’s heart? I don’t mean hypothetically like ‘Well, yeah, of course he has the power and he could.’ No, I mean do you believe he really can and will and maybe has already begun it?”

He was quiet for a while, then he looked at me like, “Of course he can, but I don’t…”

I think that’s where a lot of us are.

We forget that God has told us his intentions in scripture, as well as of his power.

He has the power. What’s his intention? He sent his son to be the Savior of the world.

I suppose that draws a nice conclusion to this. We look at times where God warred against sin, and that means against sinners. But his ultimate intention, where we started, is God sent his son to be the Savior of the world. God loved the world in such a way that he gave his only begotten son, that the world through him might be saved. That’s the intention.

If we’re going to stand with Joshua, we not only say, “Yeah, Joshua, you were right to kill these people,” but we have to turn around and look at ourselves, and we will only be right if we reach out to save these people. Yes, of course, the results are with God, but he’s told us to be the means, and we better get with it.

We look at the imprecatory Psalms. “Lord, slay your enemies before you who blaspheme your name,” and I think a lot of modern-day Christians, evangelical types, are a little bit like, “Ooo, we don’t like that. We don’t want to sing those. Those are not the God that is loving and New Testament-y.”

There are whole books written to say Christians should not sing the imprecatory Psalms, or pray them.

Exactly. I think you can definitely take those and use them as ways of trying to get God to take down your political enemies.

Exact your own vengeance.

Exact your own vengeance with a nice Christian veneer. However, the proper way of looking at them is to recognize that the penalty for your sin is described in those Psalms, and that Christ himself took those upon himself at the cross. The judgment, the death, the slaying for the most minor of your sins has been brought upon Christ, and we can pray those, we can sing those psalms with a clear conscience if we understand that we deserve that, and Christ took it for us. Yes, there will be people at the end of the age upon whom that judgment falls in the most literal sense, and it’s our duty to bring the gospel of Christ to as many people as possible so that God’s elect will through that means be saved, and their punishment will fall on Christ instead.

Amen.

Amen.

Let’s wrap up with some recommendations.

I have a frivolous one, except it stops being frivolous the moment you actually have to do it. I recommend defrosting your refrigerator and freezer on a regular basis, before they get iced over and you have to suddenly late at night find ice chests and neighbors’ refrigerators and whatever to put all your stuff in so you don’t lose it while you’re defrosting your refrigerator.

Ours in this case wasn’t that bad. Someone left the freezer drawer open and it began to ice up the whole thing, so we had a little bit of warning, and it only took about five hours to defrost. We vacuumed the coils and everything.

I’d known this. I’d seen this about two months earlier. “This thing’s a mess. The coils are filthy. I need to do something,” and I didn’t do it, so I ended up staying up till 2 in the morning finally putting everything back in the re-started freezer, and praying that those numbers that were kind of going down on the temperature controls accurately reflected the future of the refrigerator, because otherwise in the morning everything would be spoiled and we would have to buy a $2,000 refrigerator.

Address problems up-front. Be responsible and defrost your refrigerator/freezer when you don’t have a ton of stuff in it, and save yourself some money and problems.

A funny story. Before we left for our honeymoon, my dear sweet husband tried to preserve as much food as possible in our apartment freezer. In fact, he tried to preserve so much that the door would not close. So for three weeks, when we were not home, the freezer door was open. So when I got home from the honeymoon, I cleaned out the freezer. It was a fun time.

Did your refrigerator and freezer still work?

It did, yeah. It was an adventure. Bryan?

I think I will go next, yes. I’m going to recommend road trips. As our listeners may know – I don’t know how much I talked about it on here – I have moved to Wisconsin and there is a thing in Wisconsin that California doesn’t have, and it’s called winter where it snows a lot. I moved here just at the tail end of it, so so far my Wisconsin experience has been comparatively warm in comparison to the yearly average. I get all the lovely spring and summer weather.

We had a thunderstorm last night that was beautiful, lightning just filling up the entire sky. I’m getting off-track. But while the weather is nice and the roads are clear and you have less chance of black ice and things like that, it is very lovely and wonderful to just drive wherever you feel like it.

We went up to Green Bay, my fiancé and I. We went out to Viroqua, which is far on the west side of Wisconsin, about a four-hour drive out, just seeing the beauty of God’s creation. There are these beautiful – I don’t even know what to call them. They’re basically hills, but they just come straight out of the ground. It looks like one of those old woodcuts from Asian mythology of the giant sea turtles with the islands on the back. It’s that kind of sphere and they’re just densely, densely packed with foliage. There were hundreds of them on the way out there. It was gorgeous!

So I’m going to recommend road trips. Drive somewhere with family or friends or loved ones, if you have time, and enjoy God’s creation. Meet people at the end of the trip and enjoy fellowship with God’s saints as well.

Sounds good. I pled going last because I didn’t know what I was going recommend, but now I know because I was recently on a road trip, a long, long road trip. By far our best rest stop was Little America, Wyoming, so I’m going to recommend Little America, Wyoming.

It’s a town of population, I think, 86, and they have 75-cent soft-serve. They have a little playground. There’s a dinosaur to climb on. There’s a bison to climb on. There are penguins on the roof. It’s pretty much the magical wonderland of rest stops.

A friend of mine mentioned that they had not been able to stop there on a recent trip, so they said, “Stop there if you can, because I need to know if it’s as weird as it sounds,” and it definitely was and it was 100% worth it. So if you’re in the vicinity of I-80 on the western side of Wyoming, go to Little America. It’s great.

Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, who has not had any freezer misdeeds since that first one.

Thanks also to you our listeners. We really appreciate you tuning in. I hope you’re enjoying our return to normal scheduling. Thanks to our financial supporters. We really appreciate you. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. You can send us an email at [email protected]. Tell us about your favorite road trip stops and your favorite freezer disasters. We look forward to hearing from you. See you next week.