7.21.10

The following question was found online. It is from the viewpoint of someone who does not believe in God, and is looking for questions that cannot be answered in order to justify his/her belief that there is no God. You can hear the lack of trust in God in the question. The viewpoint of my answer is from total trust in God. Each answer is a quick overview – not a detailed explanation! God is a God of truth, and the Bible is full of answers…

If God is love, then how could he possibly be responsible for killing women and children in the Old Testament through the flood and conquest of the Promised Land?

In the June 3rd blog, we already established that God is certainly love. The Bible makes this point very clear in 1 John 4:16, which says “God is love.” Also established on the June 3rd blog is the fact that love demands an element of choice, and it can’t go unnoticed that the people destroyed in the Old Testament were practicing every abomination in God’s sight known to man.

But this is really beside the point. Can a God of love really destroy these people?

The Bible is a record of God’s revelation to mankind. In the Bible, we have a story of a people created to have a relationship with God: God love us. This relationship is estranged because of man’s choice to rebel against God, but God still loves us. And the rest of the Bible is the story of God’s redemption of mankind.

If God has a plan to redeem mankind, then Satan has a plan to thwart God’s plan. When you read through the Bible, it is easy to see the reaction of Satan to frustrate the plan of God. One can also easily tell that Satan is not on the same level as God. He doesn’t know the future aside from what God has revealed through prophecy. (Many people think of Satan as the enemy of God who is his equal, but this is not the case. God is all-powerful; Satan clearly does not have the same attributes as God.) Since Satan only knows what has been revealed by God, then his attacks of God’s plan are always based on the information he has received.

Follow in the Bible with me. Adam and Eve have sinned and fallen out of fellowship with the Lord. God is placing a curse on the earth, upon man and woman, and upon the serpent because of the fall. In Genesis 3:15, God speaks to the serpent and says: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” There is a major problem with this verse. A woman doesn’t have the seed – she has the egg and a man has the seed. Did this verse make a mistake? No! It is the first prophecy of the Messiah: one will come from the seed of a woman and crush Satan – this is directly fulfilled in Jesus Christ!

After Genesis 3:15, Satan knows that God’s plan to redeem mankind is going to come from mankind. So what does he do? He contaminates the blood line. Genesis 6:1-2 says “When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of god saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.” Who were the sons of God? Based on the Hebrew word, they were fallen angels (Job 1:6; Jude 6; Revelation 12:4). Another way to understand there is something different about these sons of god is their offspring. Genesis 6:4 says their offspring were Nephilim (fallen ones): “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days – and also afterward – when the sons of God went to the daughters of man and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.” Based on other scripture, we know these Nephilim were giants (Deuteronomy 3:11; Numbers 13:33; 1 Samuel 17; 2 Samuel 21:15-22).

The men before Noah were evil, but there was something distinctly different about them: they were not the pure human race which God created! How could the Messiah come from the seed of a woman when that seed is evil? So God destroys the earth in a flood in Genesis 6, and even though He is completely justified in this action, the Bible still says the Lord’s heart was filled with pain (Genesis 6:6). This is the testimony of a God of love!

Soon after the flood, a man by the name of Abram (later known as Abraham) is born. God promises Abram that all peoples on earth will be blessed through him (Genesis 12:2-4) What does this information mean? God is going to send the Messiah through the line of Abraham. Then God leads Abraham to the land of Canaan to give it to him. There is now some very specific prophecy for Satan to concentrate on and plan his attack. Through God’s hand, Abraham’s descendants end up in Egypt, but longing for their destiny to be fulfilled and God to lead them to their promised land. Through Moses, God’s power is displayed in Egypt and the people led to the promised land, but what do they find when they get there? Nephilim! “We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” – Number 13:33. So for 400 years, while Abraham’s descendant’s had been in Egypt, Satan was building up his plan to stop God’s plan.

Joshua ends up leading the conquest of the promised land, and through miracle after miracle, God fights for His people and the battles are won. There are only a few people groups that the Israelite tribes do not completely destroy in obedience to the Lord. We see these groups fighting against the Israelites throughout the rest of the Old Testament (1 Samuel 17; 2 Samuel 21:15-22).

Is God still love? Yes. He loves us so much he was willing to endure the pain of great loss – even the loss of His Son – to redeem us and make a relationship with Him possible. Praise the Lord!