Proclaimer Blog
What do we do with holy war?
One of the hardest things for OT preachers is to work through what is going on when it comes to holy war – what does it really mean to totally devote things to destruction? It’s a tricky question, and a key objection to the battle scenes we find in Numbers, Judges, Joshua and on into the monarchy.
We had an excellent hour with Richard Pratt on just this topic. We’ll post the video soon, but here are some headlines. First, the word used to denote this holy destruction is a law word (Lev 27.28) where it is actually an act of piety. Various things given to God could be redeemed, but not those things that were ‘haram’ – they belonged totally to God and could not be bought back.
The culture of the time, of course, was to take things for yourselves, and this was as true in war as the rest of life. The culture was for the victors to take the plunder, including human plunder. To the victor the spoils. Thus, in the context of war, to devote something to destruction was actually an act of self-denial: it was to give to God wholly something that was normally reserved for yourself: it is, in that sense, an act of piety. This is why Achan’s sin (Joshua 7) is so terrible.
Second, we need to set the battles in the context of the larger battle that exists between God and Satan – a battle which begins in Genesis 3 and finally comes to an end in Revelation 21. This is the Lord’s battle – a vivid reminder of which is found in the Commander of the Lord’s Army (Joshua 5-6) who is neither for Joshua nor his enemies, but for the Lord. In other words, the battles are not ethno-centric (committed to the propagation of one particular race) but deistic – God-centric, in other words.
Third, it is easy for us to think that just because we breathe air, we deserve to die (Pratt’s caricature, not mine!). Whilst true at one level, it is also true that there are particular kinds of wickedness that come up before God which deserve immediate judgement. To put it another way, not every city in the Bible is destroyed. Many are not. But there are some whose sins are so significant that they deserve judgement – Sodom and Gomorrah are a case in point.
Even the word gospel with its OT overtones (Isaiah 52.7) is a warfare term. We tend to reduce gospel to ‘believe and be saved’ but in fact it is an announcement of a battle victory.
All of this of course is a million miles away from a standard 21st Century perspectives where holy war is thought to be and reduced down to some kind of ethnic cleansing. That puts us on the back foot. But here is holy Scripture, and thinking more carefully about these issues allows us to think positively, as indeed we ought.