Why Didn't God Conquer Palestine Himself?

Tough Question for Christians #18—The Promised Land
Tough Question #18

AZ asks a new twist on an old question. Israel was supposed to kill off the Canaanites to get the land. But rather than asking the usual question about genocide, AZ puts a different twist on it: Why did the Israelites have to kill them themselves? Why didn’t God do it for them?

At the end of this video, AZ is grinning with glee, and I can only figure this is because he knows he’s got a killer question here.

This is a good question and I have to say the whole subject makes me uncomfortable. One of the themes of the Bible is how the Canaanites shouldn’t exist, and how their sin was so horrible that they deserved to be destroyed completely. Then God rescinded his command to have the Israelites kill the Canaanites in Judges 2, and Jesus actually welcomed at least one Canaanite into the kingdom, claiming that faith redeems everyone (Matthew 15).

I’ve got a lot of answers for this. First of all, I don’t hold to the commands of the law, but I follow Jesus, who commands us to love our enemies, so I don’t have to defend commands to do war or genocide or anything else. Also, in the NT, warfare for Christians is supposed to be spiritual, not physical, and the only enemy we battle against is Satan (Eph. 6).

I’m satisfied with this on a moral basis, but AZ is really asking about consistency within the Bible. God can take these people out, He’s taken people out before—see, Sodom and Gomorrah, Genesis 19—so why not do it here?

The fact is, God promised that He WOULD do it. Exodus 23:20-23 says that God will send an angel ahead of them and destroy the Canaanites. And certainly there is a hint of this at Jericho. God did the hard work—getting rid of the walls—but nevertheless the Israelites had to do the actual work of killing.

I honestly don’t have a good answer for this. Not one that makes sense of Scripture. Anybody else want to give it a shot?