David makes a dumb move at 70,000 die. Israel of old clears out the Promised Land and many more die. And then—what about slavery?
Probably, the way it works is that once humans, in the persons of Adam and Eve, have sailed past God’s will and entered the doomed experiment of independent self-rule, to be concluded several thousands of years later, God works with the products of that rebellion to achieve his purpose.
This means, if warfare and yielding to the whims of the gods has become a fixture in life, it is used in furtherance of that purpose. People of that time may not like it, but they will take it right in stride as the sort of thing that happens in their times—whereas people 4000 years later won’t be able to get their heads around it at all. We, from the present day, imagine a world court of some sort that will make a stab at punishing war crimes. Not so then. The time-tested way to clear people out, especially those whose “error” has had 400 years to come to fruition, the way Genesis 15:16 says, is through warfare.
It is rather the same thing with slavery. Modern woke people expect Jesus, or any character of godly standing, to suspend all activity upon encountering it so as to deliver lectures as to how unjust it is. Instead, they say: “well, humans chose injustice (albeit unknowingly) from the earliest days of the first couple,” so they work with it, rather than rail against it. “Were you called when a slave? Do not let it concern you; but if you can become free, then seize the opportunity,” Paul writes at 1 Corinthians 7:21.
In short, humans chose injustice. So God incorporates all the products of that choice into his developing purpose. In the case of David and the 70 deceased K, this is likely a realized manifestation of God’s warning not to choose a king. The system of judges was working just fine. Don’t mess it up:
“However, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel and said: “No, but a king is what will come to be over us. And we must become, we also, like all the nations, and our king must judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” (1 Samuel 8:19-20)
Oh yeah! Cool! Do it the way “all the nations” do. Maybe we can even have our own flag!
Sometimes the king loses those battles. When he does, since you’ve put yourself under his authority, you bear a part of the defeat. Even in lands of participatory government, when you succeed in putting your guy into office, then he commits mayhem abroad, don’t you share some bloodguilt for putting him in that position? Can you really claim to be an innocent civilian?
That God uses the products of early human rebellion against him, in this case the nations they congeal themselves into, as instruments in his purpose, is no more evident than it is in the Book of Isaiah. He uses the nation of Assyria, even calling it the rod of his anger, to discipline his own people:
“Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger; the staff in their hands is my fury! Against a godless nation I send him, and against the people of my wrath I command him, to take spoil and seize plunder, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.” (Isaiah 10:5-6) Later, Babylon will be the instrument, as demonstrated most notable in chapters 39 and 47.
They are fickle and imprecise instruments, as would be expected of products of human rebellion—hard to control, even for God, but such are the tools he has to work with. When the hangman gets too ghoulish, even the State may restrain him. So it is that the mayhem-inducing nations go too far, and God must pull them back. “Should the axe exult itself over the One who chops with it?” Jehovah rebukes Assyria. (10:15) It is the same way with Babylon: “I was angry with my people and profaned my heritage; I gave them into your hand, you showed them no mercy…” (47:6) The oppression is limited. Once the discipline of his people is complete, His anger turns away.
Though disguised, the beef of many is not with the 70K, nor clearing the Promised Land, nor the mean Assyrians or Babylonians, nor the myriad other criticisms they bring up, but with God’s overall plan to let thousands of years elapse to demonstrate that human self-rule independent of him doesn’t work. Rather than the present world “passing away,” they appear to want it repaired, and imagine that lectures on the evils of warfare and slavery will do the trick. If there is one thing history has taught us, it is that humans at the highest levels of accountability are perfectly capable of arguing away whatever is recorded in scripture in favor of what they would rather do. The way the Bible has it laid out is that after the experiment of self-rule has ended, Jehovah will forcefully uphold his sovereignty through the rulership of his son, amidst much loss of life from those who yet oppose. And I suspect they won’t like that either.
”They love this current system so they want to just ‘repair’ the aspects they dont want not realizing its broken and the only solution is to destroy it and have something better”
Sometimes I phrase this that these don’t really want an end to injustice as much as to the symptoms of injustice, mostly the ones that affect them personally. Or, to be more charitable, to the ones that they know of personally. A central Bible theme is that human self-rule is itself the source of injustice, and that injustice manifests itself in so many ways at so many levels that nobody can possible tally it all up—so they just focus on fixing ones those they know, often at the expense of ones they do not know. Human self-rule itself has to go if injustice is to be solved.
These are the ones who put unlimited faith in humankind—or maybe it is disdain for God—so that they continue to insist humans are salvageable, that all that lacks is more education, more communication, more ‘coming together.’ At root, it is those who suppose that man is basically good, rather than fatally flawed. Witnesses take the ‘fatally flawed’ viewpoint, and that the only remedy is salvation through Christ.
It really is true that “the word of God is alive and exerts power and is sharper than any two-edged sword and pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and of joints from the marrow, and is able to discern thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)
Meanwhile, the most learned theologians, stymied by tools that prevent looking into the divine, attribute all such scriptures to after-the-fact damage control, as though putting lipstick on a pig. The 70K died, the original inhabitants west of the Jordan wiped out, Israel and Judah itself desecrated at the hands of foreign powers, and narrative must be concocted to cover these unpleasantries from a human point of view.
****** The bookstore
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