3. The God Question: Is God violent? Yes. Read Eph 2: 1-3 By Nature all of Mankind are Children of God’s Wrath. He violently Hates all sin and will condemn all sinners to everlasting judgment – those whose sins have not been atoned for by Christ’s 100% perfect obedient life (propitiation – this makes you acceptable or now pleasing to God) and His death on the Cross (expiation – now the problem is solved as those sins have been punished and removed).
Does God make innocent people suffer? Never; Bible readers (Romans 3) unlike Sentimentality teach that NO ONE is Righteous, no not even one, no one does good in the sight of God, NO ONE seeks God. So all that are punished are receiving Just Judicial Punishment from a Righteous God.
Or is God purely just, kind, and compassionate? God is pure as in undefiled, not as in only Just or only Kind or only Compassionate. He is all these attributes and many more: like Wrathful, Jealous, Merciful, and so on. So God is Just when He condemns sinners to Hell who think that they are righteous in themselves (people like the Pharisees, Sadducees, Legalistic Baptists, any religion that teaches works righteousness or mixes or blends faith & works for the forgiveness of sins, like Liberal Theologians). And at the same time He is Merciful to us who know that we fully deserve to burn in Hell forever but God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whosoever Believes in Him will not perish but will have Eternal life. So God grants repentance and the forgiveness of sins won by Christ’s perfect life and sacrificial death on the Cross for us and we have faith (faith not in our own works nor is faith in our own faith) but faith in the faithfulness of Christ to do what He says He will. What has He said? John 6: 37-40 All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
If so, how do we deal with the passages in the Bible where God sanctions mass slaughter?
I already did – “So all that are punished are receiving Just Judicial Punishment from a Righteous God.” It would be a sin for Israelites today to go on a rampage and genocide all the Philistines of the world – that’s would be a Sin (10 Commandments) – Don’t do it. But the ideas you’re alluding to in the Old Testament are not the sins of Israel but God’s just punishment on those wicked people that He sent Israel to kill. God is the Executioner He merely used Israel as the Axe or Sword. For example Gen 19:23-29 – This is God’s judgment on Sodom & Gomorrah. “Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” The Sulfur and Fire from Heaven did not sin, Brian, even though they killed thousands and thousands. The Sulfur and Fire was sent from God (our God!) as righteous judgment for the vile, perverse sins of Sodom and Gomorrah. Let God’s righteous Wrath be what it is meant to be, a warning to the rest of us to watch our lives, our doctrine and our faith in Him who is able to save from the coming Wrath of God – Revelations 6, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 19. Hear the Word of our Lord and the song of the Saints that worship at the throne of God - Rev 11:17 - 18 “We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, who is and who was, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign. The nations raged, but your (Jesus’) wrath came, and the time for the dead to be judged, and for rewarding your servants, the prophets and saints, and those who fear your name, both small and great, and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.”
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