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In a sermon that I recently preached on Joshua 6, I had to address a difficult concept found in the Old Testament: God’s command for Israel to “devote” the peoples living in the Promised Land to destruction. In the sermon, I mentioned 3 observations that have helped me think Biblically about this practice. That doesn’t mean I’ve got it all figured out (it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around, to some extent). I’m still wrestling with these issues. Anyway, I actually had 2 more observations I wanted to share in the sermon but did not because of time constraints. Here’s (more or less) what I said in the sermon on Joshua 6 about the practice of “devoting to destruction”, along with an expanded list of observations that have helped me as I’ve wrestled with this issue:

Joshua 6:21 says that the Israelites killed with the sword “both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys”. Personally, my first reaction to the apparent wholesale slaughter of men and women, boys and girls, and even the animals in Jericho…is horror! I’m tempted to think that this makes God into some kind of moral monster.

That might be our first reaction, but that’s not where we should stop thinking about this issue. As I’ve worked through this myself, it’s still a difficult topic…but I want to briefly share 5 observations that helped me come to terms with Israel’s practice of “devoting to destruction”.

1. The first observation is that God commanded this practice only in the Old Testament as a limited application of His Divine judgment of sin. In Deuteronomy 20:16-18, God gave Israel these instructions before they entered the Promised Land:

¹⁶ But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, ¹⁷ but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded, ¹⁸ that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the LORD your God.

The peoples of this Land practiced all sorts of wickedness, idolatry (even child sacrifice), extreme violence, and sexual immorality (see Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20). These were not just “innocent” people…the entire culture of Canaan was an offense to God’s holiness!

And so what we see in Deuteronomy 20 is that God commanded this practice of “devoting to destruction”, and it is God, not Israel, that is bringing the judgment. Remember the end of Joshua 5? The Lord Himself was holding the sword of His justice. So, this isn’t Israel deciding to undertake a program of “ethnic cleansing” and land acquisition. God is giving them the land as an inheritance on the condition that they faithfully execute His Divine verdicts. And practice is only commanded to the Old Testament nation of Israel, where God ruled over His people in a political nation-state. This is not to be applied by any modern people under the New Covenant in Christ! Warfare in the Old Testament was both physical and spiritual. Israel was fighting foreign armies as well as demonstrating the Lord’s supremacy over foreign idols. So it is right to speak of Jericho and other instances of “devoting to destruction” as both physical and spiritual victories for God’s people.

This just isn’t the case today, since God’s people are no longer formed as a theocratic, political nation-state…now we are a spiritual people formed by the gospel from every tribe, tongue, and nation to spread the love and glory of God to the ends of the earth!

But even back in the Old Testament, the Lord also limited the scope of this practice in Israel in Deuteronomy 20:10-15, saying that “devoting to destruction” was only supposed to be applied to those wicked peoples living within the area of the Promised Land. Outside the borders of Canaan, if Israel was drawn into any conflict God commanded them to try to negotiate peace. But if they had to go to war, God placed protections on their enemies’ women, children, and livestock. God’s full judgment was not yet falling on the people outside of those borders.

“Devoting to destruction”, then, was a limited application of God’s holy judgment on the utter sinfulness of the Canaanite peoples…and a protection for Israel from their pagan influence.

2. Now to the second observation: God’s justice in the form of the peoples of  Canaan being “devoted to destruction” foreshadows the final judgment that we all must reckon with (See Revelation 20:11-15 or many other sections of the Bible that speak of this judgment).

We should not miss the point that any judgment of sin mentioned in the Bible is a forerunner of God’s final judgment on the Last Day. If we have a problem accepting God’s sovereign judgments in the Old Testament as moral and just, then we may actually have a problem with God’s sovereign judgment of sin in general. And if that’s the case, we’re forgetting that the Lord has the right to judge how He pleases and dispense mercy how He pleases, because He’s our Creator and we have all sinned against Him. We need to humble ourselves before God’s word, and trust that its portrayal of Him as completely good and perfectly loving is not at odds with its portrayal of Him as the all-powerful and sovereign judge. In fact, His holiness and goodness demand that justice ultimately prevail. Think of all the victims of horrible sins that never get justice in this life…it would actually be unjust if sin were never judged!

3. The third observation about “devoting to destruction”: God was actually very patient with the wicked Canaanites!

Let’s rewind a bit from Joshua chapter 6. The people of Israel entering in to take possession of the Promised Land is the fulfillment of one of God’s promises to their forefather, Abram, over 400 years before. Listen to Genesis 15:13-16…

¹³ Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. ¹⁴ But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. ¹⁵ As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. ¹⁶ And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

So, God patiently withheld judgment of the people in Canaan for over 400 years, while His own Hebrew people were oppressed in slavery in Egypt! This gave the Canaanites plenty of opportunities to repent from their idolatry and wickedness before the sword fell. So, let’s not pretend that God was rushing to judgment when He finally called these people to account for their sin!

But what is perhaps more striking than the Lord’s patience, is that God displayed His mercy even in the midst of His judgment of Jericho in Joshua 6. While every living thing in Jericho was supposed to be “devoted to destruction”, we see in verses 17 and 22-24 that God displayed His mercy by sparing one of the city’s prostitutes, named Rahab, because of the faith she showed by her actions of hiding the Israelite scouts in Joshua 2. And not only that, all of her relatives received mercy and were spared on her account as well! I truly believe that if any of the Canaanites would have put their faith in God, they would have been mercifully spared from destruction even in the midst of the wider judgment on the land. We serve a patient and merciful God!

4. The fourth observation about this practice is that God’s people were not immune from the threat of His judgment if they disobeyed. In Joshua 6:18, as the people are preparing to enter the city of Jericho, Joshua warns them: “But you, keep yourselves from the things devoted to destruction, lest when you have devoted them you take any of the devoted things and make the camp of Israel a thing for destruction and bring trouble upon it.” If any of the Israelites strayed from God’s instructions, they were potentially making Israel’s camp a thing to be devoted to destruction. In fact, that’s exactly what we see in Joshua 7 once Achan’s sin is made apparent. The gruesome death he and his family died spared the rest of the camp from being destroyed.

5. Finally, the fifth observation is that God’s goal in all of this was for His holy name to be glorified among all the nations. Israel’s task of “devoting to destruction” was given, at least in part, to fulfill its role of being a light to the nations. The judgment of the Canaanites’ sin showed God’s holiness…but so did God’s judgment of his own people when they themselves turned toward the very idolatry they were supposed to destroy. Earlier, it was shown that the practice of “devoting to destruction” was a protection for Israel from pagan influences (Deuteronomy 20:18). Unfortunately, God’s people did not fully obey the Lord. They didn’t occupy the Promised Land to the extent they were supposed to. They didn’t destroy all of the sinful peoples in the Land like they were commanded. They failed to be a light to the nations. And, eventually, those pagan influences caught up to them. Hundreds of years after Jericho, God brought the Assyrians and then the Babylonians to bring judgment and destruction on His own people to preserve His holy name.

And yet, the Lord didn’t destroy Israel entirely. He once again showed patience and mercy. Isaiah 48:9-11 says:

It was always about God’s holy name and God’s glory among the nations. And so He kept for Himself a remnant…a line from which Jesus would come as the true Light of the nations (Isaiah 49:6; Luke 2:29-32), so that salvation might reach to the end of the earth!

Clearly, much more could be said about the practice of “devoting to destruction”. It’s still a difficult topic. But it’s in God’s word to instruct us. God’s holy judgments are right and they bring Him glory…just like His patience and mercy toward His people in Christ!