Polemics

How do you respond to the conquests and wars in the Old Testament?

2 Comments

John Berea has an article about it on his web site.

Here’s his overview:

In the Old Testament are the military campaigns of Israel inconsistent with being led by a just and loving God, and inconsistent with his own commands?  Here, I would like to make the case for consistency and justness.

1. The nations of Canaan were evil, harming others, and needed to be stopped.  They had carried out incest with children/grandchildren and performed child sacrifice by fire. (Lev 18:6-30, Deut 12:31, Deut 18:9-10, Psalm 106:35, 37-38)  They launched unprovoked attacks on Israel (Ex 17:8-9, Num 21:1, Num 21:2-23, 33) and even guerrilla attacks against Israel’s “stragglers in the rear of the march when you were exhausted and tired.” (Deut 25:18)

2. Warfare language was likely rhetorical.  There are five reasons to support the rhetorical nature of language such as “completely destroy” (Hebrew תחרימו, literally “ban”) in Deut 20:17.  It likely meant a destruction of armed soldiers, buildings, and religious icons.

  1.  Semitic language professor and NIV, NAB, and ESV bible translator Richard Hess argues that Hebrew “ban” is “stereotypical for describing all the inhabitants of a town or region, without predisposing the reader to assume anything further about their ages or even their genders” and “need not require that there really were children, senior citizens, or women there who were put to death” even when followed by the terms “men and women” (Joshua 8:25) or “young and old” (Joshua 8:25).
  2. In Israel’s destruction of enemies we see phrases like “left no survivor” and “utterly destroyed all who breathed” (Joshua 10:40, Judges 1:8).  But in Joshua 21:12-13 the author has no problem telling us these people were still there afterward: “if you ever turn away and make alliances with these nations that remain near you… God will no longer drive out these nations”.  In 1 Sam 15:3-4 Israel was to “strike down the Amalekites. Destroy everything that they have. Don’t spare them. Put them to death–man, woman, child, infant, ox, sheep, camel, and donkey alike.”  In 15:8 Saul “executed all Agag’s people” and Agag himself was killed in 15:33.  But later in  1 Sam 27:8 we’re told they’re still there and ” had been living in that land for a long time”.  Hundreds of years later in Esther 3:1 we’re even told Haman was an Agagite, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag.
  3. Most verses on the subject speak of “driving out” and “dispossessing” the land rather than language suggestive of genocide.  E.g. Num 33:51-53, in “the land of Canaan, you must drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images, all their molten images,  and demolish their high places.  You must dispossess the inhabitants of the land and live in it, for I have given you the land to possess it.”  It’s the same story in Lev 18:25, Num 23:31-32, Deut 6:19, 9:4, 18:12, Joshua 3:10, and 23:9.
  4. Jer 4:20 suggests inhabitants fled before armies arrived:  “At the sound of the horseman and bowman every city flees; They go into the thickets and climb among the rocks”
  5. Deut 7:22 specifically says that Israel was forbidden to “destroy them all at once” and instead they would be expelled “little by little”.

So either all of these verses contradict one another, or the conquest language was rhetorical.

3. Many of the “cities” were probably military outposts.  For example with Jericho and Ai, Richard Hess argues there are no references to noncombatants (apart from Rahab), no archaeological evidence of non-military use, the term melek (Hebrew מלכי)  for “king” of the cities often meant mean a military leader in Canaan (e.g. in Joshua 2:2), they were located at defensive positions, and Jericho and Ai weren’t described as a large city as Gibeon and Hazor explicitly were.

4. A just God requires wrath.  It’s not possible to have a God who is just but not wrathful–otherwise wrongdoers continue unabated. Paranormal investigator James Randi wrote in Skeptic Magazine, “I accuse the Christian god of murder by allowing the Holocaust to take place” yet Dawkins and Hitchens condemn God for judgment against the Canaanites.  Which is it? Ultimately the the problem is we view death as the ultimate judgment, when in the theological context of the bible it’s only a graduation to what’s next with accountability for what we’ve done with what we were given.

The four points are developed with links for support. If you get this question a lot, it’s a good resource to bookmark.

Also, if you’re looking for a short video to share, here is a 6-minute one featuring Frank Turek:

That’s from commenter WorldGoneCrazy. It’s really good.

News

Playboy bunnies shocked that their own free decisions did not make them happy

Leave a comment

I’m seeing a lot of stories in the news lately about how women are unhappy after being given exactly what they asked for. Feminists who wanted to abolish sex differences are mad that biological men are in their spaces. Feminists who demanded preferential treatment in colleges and workplaces are mad that men don’t earn more than they do. And now… the Playboy bunnies are mad.

Story from the New York Post:

“He was a predator,” Hefner’s ex-girlfriend Sondra Theodore, 65, told The Post. “I watched him, I watched his game. And I watched a lot of girls go through [the Playboy Mansion] gates looking farm-fresh, and leaving looking tired and haggard.”

The former Sunday school teacher-turned-1977 Playboy magazine centerfold model began dating Hefner after meeting him at one of his many lascivious mansion parties.

Former Sunday school teacher. Got that? Former Sunday school teacher.

She says that she’s a victim:

“He groomed me and twisted my mind into thinking his way was normal,” she said of Hef… “He introduced me to drugs. I’d never had a drink or a drug before going up to the Playboy Mansion. And my first night there I was handed champagne and the drugs came later, and I was underage.”

So, I have two points about this. I think that Hugh Hefner was a big hero to the secular left, because he helped them to throw off the shackles of sobriety and chastity that were part of America’s Christian past. The secular left wanted freedom from Christianity’s “repressive” rules on dating, relationships, marriage and sexuality, and Hefner gave them what they wanted. I hope we learn a lesson about trusting atheists to tell us what is moral.

Second point is about the women. Did everyone see that post from earlier in the week about the woman who ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, then demanded a bailout from taxpayers? What I would like to see is women make better decisions. It would probably help that they rely more on evidence than on feelings, and call for advisors if they don’t feel comfortable.

We’re not helping women by telling them to “follow their hearts”. People don’t make good decisions when they “follow their hearts”. Even worse is to follow the crowd. Hugh Hefner was in high demand by women when he was young. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s rich, and he’s morally permissive and non-judgmental. A lot of young women wanted all that he had to offer. But just because a lot of women wanted all that, doesn’t mean that Sondra Theodore was right to wish for what what many women desired.

Another thing about the women – I don’t like how they blame men for their own free will decisions. They don’t take responsibility the way that I expect them to take responsibility. They’re saying “It was the man’s fault” instead of asking “why did I choose that man?” I’d like to see women ask themselves these hard questions. Just because these questions feel bad, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be asked. The only way to learn is to take responsibility. If everything is someone else’s fault, then you never change yourself. And you are the one you need to fear the most.

Finally, I don’t think it’s a good message to send our young men that tall, hot, rich bad boys get all the best looking young women. When a young woman chooses a bad man, it’s a signal to all the young men about what is working – what is in demand. Women need to understand that their decisions are being watched, and they are making the world a worse place when they choose to reward secular left psychopaths like Hugh Hefner. He should have been shunned by women – that would have made sure that no men imitated him.

News

What is the definition of marriage according to Jesus?

1 Comment

It’s Pride Month! This is when Big Corporations spend an entire month celebrating the LGBT community, and pressuring everyone else to celebrate behaviors and lifestyles that are at odds with the teachings of Jesus. So, since the LGBT activists are about to get 30 days of celebration, I thought I would celebrate what Jesus taught about marriage on my little blog.

Here’s what Jesus says about marriage.

Matthew 19:1-11:

1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”

8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.

To be a Christian, minimally, is to be a follower of Jesus Christ. That means that we accept what Jesus teaches, on whatever he teaches about. We don’t overturn the teachings of Jesus in order to make people who are rebelling against God feel better about their rebellion. It is central to the Christian worldview that Christians care more about what God thinks of them than what non-Christians think of them. In fact, Christians are supposed to be willing to endure suffering rather than side with non-Christians against God’s authority.

Matt Walsh had a fine article about this issue.

He said:

As Christians, our goal is not to avoid being like the big bad “other Christians,” but to strive to be like Christ Himself. This is one of the advantages to having an Incarnate God. He went around acting and speaking and teaching and generally functioning in our realm, thereby giving us a model to follow. This is the model of a loving and merciful man, and also a man of perfect virtue who fought against the forces of evil, condemned sin, defended his Father in Heaven with sometimes violent force, spoke truth, and eventually laid down His life for those He loved (which would be all of us).

[…]This is what it means to believe in Christ. Not just to believe that He existed, but to believe that Christ is Truth itself, and that everything He said and did was totally and absolutely and irreversibly true forever and always. Many Christians today — not only the ones in the video, but millions alongside them — seem to think we can rightly claim to have “faith” in Jesus or a “relationship” with Him while still categorically denying much of His Word. This is a ridiculous proposition. We can’t declare, in one breath, that Christ is Lord, and in the next suggest that maybe God got it wrong on this or that point. Well, we can make that declaration, but we expose our belief as fraudulent and self-serving. We worship a God we either invented in our heads, which is a false idol, or a God who is fallible, which is a false idol.

If you really accept Jesus as God, then you can’t think he is wrong when he explains what marriage is. Period. End of issue.

Real Christians don’t make excuses for sin. Real Christians present the gospel. The gospel is that all men have rebelled against God and fallen short of perfect submission to and obedience of him. For this, they deserve to be separated from God eternally. Jesus paid the price for this rebellion on the cross, and anyone who accepts him as Savior and Lord will be with God eternally after they die. There is no salvation apart from Jesus. That’s what Christians say. And they say it regardless of how weird they look, and how many non-Christians don’t like them for saying it.