The Problem of War

Many of the hardest questions that come up when you read the OT concern the role of fighting and killing. In the book of Joshua these questions loom especially large. Why so much killing? Why would a God of compassion and mercy command his people to behave like this?

Philip Jenson addresses these questions in a Grove booklet (see www.grovebooks.co.uk) called The Problem of War in the Old Testament. His conclusion is that the OT’s approach to war is complex, ambivalent, conditional and incomplete. War is presented in a number of different ways. Sometimes God does the fighting for Israel and Israel only needs to trust. At other times Israel fights with God’s assurance of success. Fighting is seen as necessary, but later we’ll see that a fighting king (David) is not allowed to build the temple. Success in war is seen as conditional on a number of factors including trust in the Lord and a society and leadership marked by justice. The coming of Christ changes the situation, not least because the people of God are no longer defined by race or land, but by faith in Christ.

Let’s be clear: fighting and death are seen as a terrible evil. But when it comes to the invasion of Canaan they are seen as a necessary evil. What is at stake is whether God’s people will stay true to him, or will be absorbed into the pagan culture of Canaan and lose their identity. Will true faith in the one true God continue, or will it be critically compromised by the worship of pagan gods? That takes us some way towards understanding what is going on here, though there is still an element of what Calvin called God’s ‘incomprehensible counsel’. There is much of God’s will we don’t understand.

But there is one other thing we can say. Ultimately what is at stake is whether the people of God will survive in order to produce Jesus, the Messiah, who will bring about the salvation of the whole world. In the overarching storyline of the Bible that is the crucial question.