If God Is Good, Why Does He Command Violence in the Old Testament?

I want to deal today with one of the hardest questions that gets thrown at the Christian faith — not just by atheists and sceptics, but by genuine believers who are reading their Bibles honestly and running into passages that trouble them deeply.

The question is this: If God is good, why does He command violence in the Old Testament?

Why does He tell Israel to wipe out the Canaanites — men, women, and children? Why does He drown the entire world in a flood? Why does He command the execution of people for sins that in our culture we would consider personal choices? Why does the God of the New Testament — who tells us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek — appear to be a completely different character from the God of the Old Testament who commands armies to slaughter entire peoples?

I am not going to sidestep this question. I am not going to pretend these passages are not in the Bible, or that they are easy, or that anyone who is troubled by them is lacking in faith. These are real passages. They describe real events. They are in the same Bible that contains John 3:16 and the Sermon on the Mount. And they need a real answer.

But I also want to say this upfront: I believe there is a real answer. I believe the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same God. I believe that God is good — not in a vague, cultural sense, but in the deepest, most absolute, most demanding sense of that word. And I believe that when you understand the full picture of what Scripture is saying, the violence of the Old Testament does not contradict the goodness of God. It reveals it — in ways that are uncomfortable, but true.

So let us open the Word together and work through this honestly.

The Question Must Be Asked Honestly

Before I give any answers, I want to sit in the question for a moment. Because I think one of the mistakes Christians make when confronted with this issue is to rush to a defence before they have actually heard what is being said.

The passages that trouble people are genuinely troubling. Let me put some of them in front of you so we are not dealing with a strawman.

In Deuteronomy 7, God commands Israel concerning the Canaanite nations:

"You shall devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them." (Deuteronomy 7:2, ESV)

In 1 Samuel 15, God commands King Saul through the prophet Samuel:

"Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey." (1 Samuel 15:3, ESV)

In Numbers 31, after Israel's victory over the Midianites, Moses is angry that they spared the women and children and commands their execution. In Joshua 6, after the fall of Jericho, Israel is commanded to destroy everything living in the city. In Genesis 6 through 8, God sends a flood that kills every living creature on earth except those in the ark.

These are not obscure verses buried in footnotes. They are major narrative events in the Old Testament. And the question being asked is a fair one: how do these passages coexist with a God who is described as love, as good, as slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love?

If you have never wrestled with that question, you have not been reading your Bible carefully enough. And if you have wrestled with it, I want you to know that wrestling with hard passages is not faithlessness. It is the beginning of deeper understanding.

Mistake Number One: Reading the Old Testament Like a Flat Book

The first and most important thing I want to establish is this: you cannot understand God's commands of violence in the Old Testament if you read the Bible as a flat book — as if every passage carries the same weight, the same context, and the same application.

The Bible is not a flat book. It is a progressive revelation. It is a story that moves — from creation to fall, from fall to redemption, from the first covenant to the new covenant, from the shadow to the substance. God does not reveal everything at once. He reveals Himself progressively, through history, through nations, through types and shadows that point forward to a fuller revelation.

The writer of Hebrews says this plainly:

"Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son." (Hebrews 1:1–2, ESV)

Many times. Many ways. Progressive revelation. The God who spoke through the prophets and the God who speaks through His Son are the same God — but the fullness of the revelation had not yet arrived. What God was doing through Israel in the Old Testament was part of a larger story that required time and history to unfold.

This does not mean anything goes in the Old Testament. It does not mean we ignore it or dismiss it as irrelevant. It means we read it as what it is — the earlier chapters of a book whose final chapter changes how we understand everything that came before.

When you read the violence in the Old Testament without this framework, you end up with a picture of God that is genuinely incoherent. When you read it within this framework, the picture — while still difficult and demanding — begins to make sense.

Who Were the Canaanites? What the Text Actually Says

The most commonly challenged command in the Old Testament is the command to destroy the Canaanite nations. Most critics of this passage present it as random, unprovoked divine ethnic cleansing. But the text tells a very different story — and we have to actually read the text.

God tells Israel clearly why the Canaanites are being destroyed. He says this in Deuteronomy 9:

"Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations the LORD your God is driving them out from before you." (Deuteronomy 9:5, ESV)

Because of the wickedness of these nations. This is not random. This is judicial. The Canaanites are not being destroyed because of their ethnicity. They are being destroyed because of what they have been doing — and the Bible is explicit about what that was.

The Canaanite religious practices included child sacrifice — burning their children alive in fire as offerings to their gods, particularly Molech. Leviticus 18 gives us a catalogue of the practices that had so defiled the land of Canaan that God says the land itself was vomiting them out:

"Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants." (Leviticus 18:24–25, ESV)

The land vomited them out. That is not the language of arbitrary violence. That is the language of a land so saturated with moral and spiritual pollution — child sacrifice, sexual perversion, systematic cruelty — that its inhabitants had brought judgment on themselves.

And here is the detail that most critics of this passage either do not know or choose not to mention: God waited four hundred years before executing this judgment.

In Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abraham and tells him that his descendants will live in Egypt for four hundred years before returning to the promised land. He tells Abraham explicitly why:

"And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." (Genesis 15:16, ESV)

The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. God is not going to judge them yet because their sin has not yet reached the point that demands judgment. He is going to wait. Four hundred years. He gave them four hundred years.

The God who commanded the destruction of Canaan is a God who waited four centuries before executing judgment on a people whose sins included burning their children alive. That is not a God who is trigger-happy with violence. That is a God of extraordinary patience who eventually, inevitably, executes the justice that His own holiness demands.

God's Violence Is Always Judicial, Never Arbitrary

This is the most important theological point in this entire blog, and I want you to sit with it carefully.

Every instance of God commanding or executing violence in the Old Testament is judicial in nature. It is the execution of a sentence by the rightful Judge of all the earth. It is not random. It is not impulsive. It is not the behaviour of a tribal deity throwing a tantrum. It is the behaviour of a holy God who takes sin seriously.

Abraham understood this. When God told him He was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham interceded and asked: will you destroy the righteous with the wicked? And then he said something that reveals exactly how the biblical worldview understands this question:

"Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Genesis 18:25, ESV)

Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just? Abraham is not defending God nervously. He is stating a principle that he fully believes: God is the Judge of all the earth, and whatever He does is just — by definition, because justice flows from His character.

The problem most modern people have with God's violence in the Old Testament is not really a biblical problem. It is a worldview problem. We live in a culture that has separated the concept of love from the concept of justice. We have been trained to think that a loving God would not judge — that love and judgment are opposites.

But they are not opposites. They are both expressions of the same holy character. A judge who refuses to punish evil is not loving — he is corrupt. A God who watches children burned alive in sacrificial fires, watches generations of cruelty and perversion and oppression, and does nothing about it is not good — He is indifferent.

The God of the Old Testament is not too violent. He is a God who takes evil seriously enough to act against it. And in a world full of the kind of evil the Canaanites were practicing, that action looks like the texts we are reading.

What About the Children?

This is the question that most troubles people, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. When God commands the destruction of Canaan and includes children and infants in the command, that is the hardest part of these passages.

I want to say three things about this.

First, we need to understand the nature of these commands in their military and cultural context. The ancient Near Eastern formula for total military destruction — what the Hebrew calls herem, often translated "devoted to destruction" — was a specific legal and religious category. Some scholars have noted that the language of total destruction in ancient Near Eastern military contexts was often hyperbolic — conventional battle language that overstated the completeness of victory, similar to how modern news might describe a "total victory" that was not literally the annihilation of every single individual. The book of Judges, which immediately follows Joshua, describes many of the same Canaanite people groups still living in the land, making covenants and intermarrying with Israel. This suggests the command was not a biological extermination of an entire people group but a specific military and judicial mandate in a specific historical moment.

Second, the same God who commanded this is a God who expresses anguish over the death of the wicked. Ezekiel makes this explicit:

"As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?" (Ezekiel 33:11, ESV)

God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He pleads with people to turn. He waited four hundred years before acting against Canaan. He sent prophet after prophet to Israel before finally executing judgment on them. The heart of God toward the wicked is not eagerness for their destruction but longing for their repentance.

Third, and most importantly, we have to hold this in tension with what we know about the character of God from the whole of Scripture. We know that God is the one who said before Jericho was destroyed that Rahab the prostitute — a Canaanite woman — and her entire household would be spared because she had shown faith (Joshua 2). We know that Ruth, a Moabite woman from a people Israel had been commanded to have nothing to do with, became an ancestor of the Messiah because she turned to the God of Israel. We know that God's stated heart was never the elimination of ethnic groups but the elimination of the sin that was destroying them and spreading like cancer to everyone around them.

This does not answer every question. I will be honest — I do not have a complete, fully satisfying answer to the death of children in the Canaanite conquest that resolves every tension. I do not think anyone does. But I know that the God who commanded it is the same God who declared He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, the same God who waited four centuries before acting, the same God who spared everyone who came to Him in faith. That does not make the passage easy. But it does mean that reducing it to "God is a monster" ignores everything the text is actually telling us about who God is and what He was doing.

The Flood: The Hardest Case

The flood is perhaps the most total act of divine violence in the entire Bible — the death of every living creature on earth except those in the ark. And again, the question is the same: how does a good God do this?

Let me show you what the text says about the condition of humanity before the flood:

"The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." (Genesis 6:5, ESV)

Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. That is total moral corruption. Not imperfect people trying to do their best. People whose entire inner life — every imagination, every plan, every desire — had become entirely and continuously evil.

And then God says something that is one of the most humanising things He says anywhere in Scripture:

"And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart." (Genesis 6:6, ESV)

It grieved Him to His heart. The God who sends the flood is a God in grief. He is not celebrating the destruction of humanity. He is grieved to His core by what humanity has become. This is not the picture of a bloodthirsty deity. This is the picture of a God who created human beings in love, watched them destroy themselves and each other, and made the judicial decision that the infection had become terminal.

And even then — He preserved a remnant. He did not simply wipe the earth clean and start again from scratch. He found one righteous man and his family, and He saved them. He built a rescue before He executed the judgment. The ark is grace inside the judgment.

After the flood, God makes a covenant and a promise:

"I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done." (Genesis 8:21, ESV)

He promises never to do it again. Not because sin stopped being serious, but because another way of dealing with it was coming — a way that would not require universal destruction but universal redemption. The cross is the answer to the flood. God found a way to deal with the totality of human sin that did not require the death of all sinners, but the death of One who bore the sins of all.

The Old Testament and the New Testament Are the Same God

I have to address directly the claim — sometimes made even by people who call themselves Christians — that the God of the Old Testament is a different God from the God of the New Testament. That the Old Testament God is wrathful and violent and the New Testament God is loving and gentle.

This is not a new idea. It was promoted by a man named Marcion in the second century, and it was declared a heresy by the early church. And it is still wrong.

Jesus Himself does not distance Himself from the God of the Old Testament. He quotes from it constantly. He says He did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them (Matthew 5:17). He endorses the judgments of the Old Testament, including the flood (Matthew 24:37–39) and the destruction of Sodom (Luke 17:28–30). He speaks more about hell and eternal judgment than any other figure in the New Testament.

The God who commands violence in the Old Testament and the Jesus who says "love your enemies" in the New Testament are the same Person — the second member of the Trinity, who was present at creation, who appeared to Abraham, who spoke from the burning bush, who walked in the fire with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Paul says this directly:

"For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ." (1 Corinthians 10:1–4, ESV)

The Rock was Christ. The God who led Israel through the wilderness was Christ. The God who judged the nations was Christ. There is no Marcionite division in Scripture between a violent Old Testament God and a loving New Testament God. There is one God whose love and whose justice are both fully and finally expressed in the cross of Jesus Christ.

The Cross Changes Everything — Including How We Read This

Here is the point I want to make that I think is the most important theological key for reading Old Testament violence correctly.

The cross is not a contradiction of God's judgment. It is the fullest expression of it.

On the cross, God did not suddenly become soft on sin. He poured out the totality of His wrath against sin — every ounce of the judgment that every human being who has ever lived deserves — onto His own Son. The violence of the cross is the most concentrated act of divine judgment in all of history. And it was not inflicted on the guilty. It was inflicted on the innocent One, who took the place of the guilty.

"For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:21, ESV)

The God who commanded the destruction of Canaan because of their sin is the same God who did not spare His own Son because of our sin. The holiness that demanded judgment in the Old Testament is the same holiness that demanded the cross in the New Testament. It is not that God became more tolerant of sin in the New Testament. It is that He dealt with sin in a different way — not by destroying the sinners, but by becoming one and bearing the destruction Himself.

This means the cross is the answer to every difficult passage in the Old Testament about God's violence. Every drop of blood spilled in the Canaanite conquest, every life taken by flood or fire or plague — all of it was a foreshadowing, an echo, a partial picture of what would happen on a hill outside Jerusalem where God judged sin once and for all in the body of His own Son.

The violence of the Old Testament is not evidence that God is cruel. It is evidence that God is holy — that He takes sin with complete seriousness. And the cross is the same evidence, taken to its ultimate expression.

Why God Does Not Command Violence the Same Way Today

I want to address the obvious question that follows from everything I have said: if the conquest of Canaan was God's judicial act against a specific people for specific sins at a specific moment in redemptive history, why do we not follow similar commands today? Why do Christians not take up swords against the wicked?

Because the context has changed entirely.

Israel in the Old Testament was functioning as a theocratic nation — a covenant people who were simultaneously a political, military, and religious entity. They were the instrument through which God was executing judgment on specific nations at specific moments in the redemptive storyline. Their military actions were not personal vengeance or religious enthusiasm. They were specific, limited, divinely mandated acts of judgment within a specific framework that no longer exists.

The church is not a theocratic nation. We are not Israel under the Mosaic covenant. We have not been given a land to conquer or a people to destroy. Jesus Himself makes this clear when Pilate asks Him about His kingdom:

"Jesus answered, 'My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.'" (John 18:36, ESV)

My kingdom is not of this world. The warfare of the new covenant is not physical. It is spiritual. Paul says it directly:

"For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds." (2 Corinthians 10:3–4, ESV)

Any person or group today who uses Old Testament military commands to justify violence — whether against unbelievers, against different religions, against anyone — is making a catastrophic hermeneutical error. They are ripping commands out of their specific redemptive-historical context and applying them in a way the Bible never authorises. Those texts were never given to the church. They were given to Israel for a specific purpose at a specific moment that is now fulfilled.

The Christian's response to enemies is what Jesus said it is:

"But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." (Matthew 5:44, ESV)

That is not a contradiction of the Old Testament. It is the fulfillment of it — the arrival of the new covenant age where God's purposes are advanced not through the sword but through the gospel.

The Fear That Drives This Question

I want to say something pastoral before I close, because I think there is often a fear underneath this question that does not get addressed.

Sometimes people ask "why does God command violence in the Old Testament" not primarily as an intellectual question but as an emotional one. They are afraid that if the answer is not perfectly satisfying, their faith will collapse. They are afraid that these passages represent a crack in the foundation.

I want to tell you that I understand that fear. And I want to tell you honestly: I do not have an answer to every single detail in every difficult Old Testament passage that resolves every tension perfectly. I do not think anyone does. There are passages where I have sat with the text for a long time and still felt the weight of what I was reading without being able to fully articulate why everything fits.

But here is what I have found to be true: the weight of the evidence, across the whole of Scripture, points overwhelmingly to a God who is holy and just and good. A God who is slow to anger. A God who pleads with the wicked to turn. A God who grieves over the death of those He judges. A God who preserved a remnant in the flood, who spared Rahab in Jericho, who welcomed Ruth the Moabite, who protected Nineveh when they repented, who sent His own Son to die so that sinners could live.

That God — the God of the whole Bible — is not a God whose goodness is undermined by the difficult passages. He is a God whose goodness is revealed through all of it, including the parts that are hardest to read.

The problem is not that God commanded violence in the Old Testament. The problem is that we have a very small, very comfortable modern definition of "good" — a definition that means "does not ever do anything that makes me uncomfortable." And the God of Scripture refuses to fit inside that definition.

He is not safe. He is good. Those are not the same thing.

One Final Word

The question of God and violence in the Old Testament is ultimately the question of God and sin. And the answer to both is the same.

God hates sin. Completely, utterly, uncompromisingly. He hates what it does to the people He made. He hates what it does to the world He created. He hates how it spreads, how it corrupts, how it burns children in fire and oppresses the poor and fills the earth with cruelty.

And He deals with it.

In the Old Testament, He dealt with it through judgment — specific, judicial, historically bounded acts of wrath against specific peoples whose sin had reached the point of no return. Every one of those acts was a statement: sin is not tolerated. Evil will not stand forever. Justice will be done.

In the New Testament, He dealt with it through the cross — taking every act of judgment, every ounce of wrath, and concentrating it all onto His own Son who stood in the place of sinners.

Both the Old Testament judgment and the New Testament cross are telling you the same thing about the same God. That He is holy. That sin is serious. That justice will be done.

The only difference is who paid the price.

In the conquest of Canaan, the guilty paid.

At the cross of Christ, the innocent paid for the guilty.

And if you are reading this and you have placed your faith in Jesus Christ, then the cross is your answer — not just to the question of Old Testament violence, but to every sin you have ever committed. The judgment that your sin deserves was poured out on Jesus. You will not face it. He faced it for you.

That is the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Holy enough to judge. Loving enough to be judged in your place.

That is the gospel.

Amen.