Hello Del,
I've been reading this thread over the last couple of days and have found MANY issues that spark my interest.
As for the passage, here's my take on it. As I've said before, there are numerous web sites that are devoted to answering questions like this. I'll give it my best though.
Many people get confused when dwelling on the fact that God is loving. Yes, He is loving, but he also has other facets to his character such as being righteous and just. Imagine if you were God for a moment (I know this may seem hard, but try anyways) and created an Earth for people to live on. You would expect them to love you and give you some kind of respect, right? Well, many of these tribes decided to make their own Gods out of metal and worship them. What would you do?
Would it be fair to not punish them? Maybe, maybe not. I believe God was acting in his righteous/fair character by telling Israel to destroy those tribes that were not worshipping Him. Why kill all of them, you say?
"lest they teach you to make any such abonimable offerings as they make to their gods."
He didn't want their evil to mess up His Israel. If you don't believe in God, then killing people is probably wrong in your eyes. But in these circumstances, I think God did what was fair in His eyes. No one said that God was easy to understand.
I hope that was at least a decent attempt of explaining the passage to you. If you don't buy it, maybe I'll do some more research for you to give you a more palatable answer. I'm still learning a lot about God and don't understand much of Him.
As for your next message where you question the historical Jesus, I pose a question for you. Can you give me a hypothetical situation of what Jesus did and said to explain the rise of Christianity including the death of many Christians soon after Christ died due to the fact that they wouldn't deny Christ as the Son of God?
God bless,
Grant
P.S. Sorry if I'm coming off a little pompus or self-righteous. I'm not meaning to. The written word sometimes is a bit tough to convey your thoughts and feelings through. |
