Is God Against Interracial Marriage?
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Also, I should say this, that when we come to the Canaanites, God is bringing temporal judgment on the Canaanites, but it is not something that is a long-term consideration. In fact, the text that I mentioned should actually be Psalm… I mention it, where is it? Yeah, Psalm 83, I believe, or 87, 4 through 6, rather than the other text that I gave you. But God is actually concerned about the salvation of even Israel’s enemies, Philistia, Babylon, Moab and so forth. Even we see the Jebusite, one of the Canaanite peoples mentioned in Zechariah chapter 7, verse 9, who is to be part of the redeemed people. God is concerned about redeeming all. In fact, we get to Matthew 15:22, where Jesus is addressing a Canaanite woman.
So we see in a sense coming whole circle, that she receives the benefits of the Messiah who has come to bring salvation to all the people of the Earth, including those who had been the enemies, who had been living in a degraded way. But salvation is still available to them through Jesus, the Messiah. Final point in the introduction. You think, “Man, this is just the introductory stuff.” Yeah, I know. But I think this is important for us to lay the groundwork, and we’ll have a porch time tonight too, and we can tackle more of this into the evening if possible. I guess Frank [inaudible 00:01:33] going to be speaking, but as much as we can do. And again, I’ll be around on campus. If you want to follow up on this with conversations, I’m happy to do that.
But the primary concern is destroying Canaanite religion rather than Canaanites themselves. The Canaanites are actually very much similar to the Israelites. So it’s not as though there’s some vast ethnic difference, and so there’s some sort of ethnic concern. They dress the same. They had the same pottery and everything. So it wasn’t as though you could tell them apart. If you had a Canaanite and an Israelites side by side, they would look the same, dress the same, talk the same even. So this was what the concern was, was that the religion be destroyed. And this is mentioned in Deuteronomy chapter seven, where God says, “Wipe them out.” Interesting. And then he says, “Don’t make any treaties with them. Don’t intermarry with them because they’re going to lead you into idolatry. Rather, destroy their idols. Destroy their alters, their high places and so forth.”
Why? Because God is more concerned about the corruption of the religion. I mean, if the gods are having incest and engaging in beastiality, the people themselves are going to do that sort of a thing. So God doesn’t want to have any sort of influence in that way. So again, that’s laying a bit of the ground work here. Now let me address some of these texts. And I think I have till about-45.
45, Oh, good. That’s that’s a relief. I thought I was having to finish up in 10 minutes, so good. All right. Well, let’s move forward with unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, and majestic instancy. What about some of those warfare texts that we read about in the Old Testament? As I mentioned before, the phrase drive them out or dispossess them harks back to God’s telling the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that this land would be given to them. God had promised it to them. God told them that it would be theirs, but again, there had to be a waiting time for them to properly occupy it, waiting until the Canaanite peoples had become so fully morally depraved or degraded that then judgment was ready to fall, and the people could take the land.
Now, some of you might find this next point perplexing and even troubling, but let me try to assuage your concerns. The language of utterly destroy, of leaving alive nothing that breathes was a common feature in ancient Near Eastern war texts. And people understood that when you said that, you did not mean you destroyed every last person. It does not mean that you left alive no one that breathes. In fact, you could eek out a victory. You could have a narrow victory, and we see this documented in ancient Near Eastern war texts. No, you barely beat them, and then you go on to say, “We left alive nothing that breathed. No one survived. There were no more. We turned them to ash.”
Well, you just read the history. You read what actually happened. These people that have been left turned to ash, all of a sudden are there, fighting battles just shortly thereafter. So what’s going on here? Well, we see this in ancient Near Eastern war texts, and we also see it in the scriptures themselves. But don’t let this trouble you. This is part of the ancient Near Eastern genre, a type of literature that people understood utilized hyperbole or exaggeration. Sort of like in Mark, chapter one, verse five, it says that “All Jerusalem and all Judea came out to see John.” Well, does that mean that Jerusalem was totally empty? No one was there? No. Again, you could talk about a large number of people going, but we have to be careful about literalizing this.
In the same way, we see in texts like Deuteronomy and Joshua and Judges, that on the one hand… And I’ve given you a chart on this, so you can look at that handy dandy chart, and see that on the one hand, it looks like everybody’s been destroyed. And then there they are, popping up again in the text. What’s happening? Well, if you understand that this is exaggeration, hyperbole, there is no problem. Now, some people say, “Well look, I had a…” You find this on YouTube. I was on doing a debate with Norman Bacrac, who’s the head of the London Humanist Society, and it’s on Premier radio, Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable. And he is often having debates between Christians and non-Christians or Christians who disagree on certain issues. And so I was going up against Norman Bacrac, and he was saying, “Well, the Bible is so clear on this.” He said, “I mean, how much clearer can it be?”
I said, “Well, what you need to do is you need to keep reading the text.” I said, “Why is it that you’re taking literally these texts that say utterly destroy, leave alive nothing that breathes, and then when you see a bunch of these people showing up again, why is it that you don’t take that literally? You’re assuming that they did intend to wipe them all out, that this is what was behind it all.” And I say, “No, that’s not being fair to the text. Some people say, “Well, what about the Resurrection of Jesus? I mean, are we going to say that that’s hyperbole too?” Well, think about this. All the texts that we have indicate that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. We don’t have any indication that Jesus rose from the dead, but his body rotted in a tomb. Not at all, nothing like that. The consistent witness is that Jesus’ body came out of the grave.
But when you read these texts of utterly destroy, you have, very nearby, indications that those people are still there. Those Canaanites are still around. In fact, read not only in Joshua, where it says in chapter 23, it says that “the land had rest,” earlier on. And then it says, “God tells Joshua, ‘There’s a lot more work to do. There are lots more Canaanites around.'” What happened? I thought that the land had rest from war, that basically Joshua had done all that Moses commanded and so forth. Well, what were all these people doing there? And then you keep reading in Judges, which is the next text in the biblical canon. And what do you see? You see over and over again, the Israelites could not drive them out. They could not drive them out. They could not drive them out. And they’re there to this day.
Well, what’s happening here? Well, if you understand this ancient Near Eastern hyperbole or exaggeration, you understand very clearly that you can’t take both literally without contradiction. And so you need to recognize that there are people who survive. We can go on to talk about various scenarios here. Some people say, “Well, what about the Midianites?” Well, actually let me just go back here. I should add this. As you see Israel’s battles, first they’re going, interestingly enough, they’re going to citadels or fortresses rather than places that are typically occupied by ordinary civilians. So that’s one thing to keep in mind. And there’s good evidence for this, and I go into it in the book Is God a Moral Monster? And we touch on in the book, did God really command genocide? But again, these were places where you had small kind of fortresses that were the… There were the first line of defense against the people living in the hill country, if they were being attacked. And it gave them an opportunity to flee, to get out of the way.
So you had the political, the military and the religious elite who were in these citadels. Also, these were used for granaries that had… For taxes, they would collect grain and so forth. So you’d have these vast storehouses of grain from the people that they would pay to the leaders and so forth. And you might have a tavern keeper like Rahab who is there, but generally speaking, these cities were not inhabited by civilians, but more the leaders and the military in these locales.
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