God’s Commission to Kill the Midianites (Part 4)

  1. Could God not have achieved the destruction of the Canaanites/Midianites through natural calamities?

Ø  Torrey doesn’t answer the question directly. He claims that God allowed the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites/Midianites, so that they could learn a lesson about sin and rejection of God. By carrying out the holocaust, God’s holiness and hatred for sin were imprinted on the minds and hearts of the Israelites. In other words, they saw the consequences of utterly rejecting God and embracing evil.

My View
Did God have to use this particular method of teaching the Israelites a lesson? “Definitely no, but He did”, would be the obvious reply. I see a problem with this type of lesson: God seems to get the desired result by instilling fear in the Israelites. And if fear forms the basis of our relationship with God then we end up in a master-slave relationship. There is little or no love there. Fear is a powerful weapon to control another person and if God was using fear to manipulate the Israelites then they ought to have done everything He said but history shows that was not the case. Perhaps the lesson was not powerful enough to effect a lasting change on the Israelites behaviour. Other Old Testament books tell us how God patiently and persistently called back the Israelites every time they deserted Him.


The response of Torrey is reminiscent of the old theology which looked upon God as an exacting master or policeman. God is a respector of Human Freedom. He would never manipulate anyone to do His will. This is the Good News brought to us by Jesus. If God wanted, He could have destroyed sin once and for all, but by doing so He would also take away the human capacity to choose. We would all be mere puppets doing what God said, with no mind or freedom of our own.

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