What About the Canaanites? Three Dead Ends (Deuteronomy 7, 9; Joshua 11)

In the Pentateuch, God calls Israel to enter the Promised Land, defeat the Canaanites, and occupy the land. This unique, limited, and unrepeatable command is sometimes used to justify violence in the name of God. In this session, we seek to understand what's really going on by describing three deads that simply don't work: (1) It's an Old Testament problem that the New Testament corrects, (2) It was a case of mistaken zeal, and (3) It is simply an allegory of spiritual warfare. After exposing the weakness of these three explanations we begin to look at this event in light of three frameworks: (1) The framework of the Old Testament story, (2) The framework of God's sovereign justice, and (3) The framework of God's plan to bless the nations. In this and the following session, I am relying heavily on Christopher J. H. Wright's book The God I Don't Understand.

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