In some Bible passages, as atheists and others who want to avoid the claims of God are quick to point out, God sounds like a Dalek.
Deut 7:2 is a typical case.
When the LORD your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy. (NLT)
Here God demands that Israel exterminate all the Canaanites. What’s going on? Is the God of the Bible (or at least the Old Testament a genocidal maniac?
This is part one of a series, so it will only deal with part of the answer. You will have to watch out for the other parts for a fuller treatment. The really difficult takes more than five minutes 😉
This is something I have always wondered about. It seems like the God of Old Tes and God of New are two different gods. Waiting to listen to part two. Seems a bit simplistic in part one.
Hopefully simple not simplistic 😉 This is ceertainly not a complete answer, and there is no complete answer to such questions! For me it is the claim that the God revealed in and by Jesus is the same as the God revealed in the Old Testament that is one of the strongest reasons I cannot be a fundamentalist in my approach to Scripture.
[…] God the Dalek – Tim looks at God’s genocidal tendencies in the Hebrew Bible, specifically a passage in Deuteronomy 7. Spoilers: He finds that when God is using particularly inflammatory language, he’s just exaggerating for effect. (And shows clues in the text to point at this determination.) […]