15 July 2006: The Subject Of Joshua (Heavy!!)

Some Ground That Christians Should
Have Been Defending Long Before Now

God, I pray that there will still be _time_ for such
a message as this to be seen and considered, before
the malice of tyrants in Iran, Syria and elsewhere
brings on such widespread violence as will drown out
all calm discussion. Amen.

Very early in my Christian life, I went sometimes
to a highly liberal mainline-denominational church,
because for awhile I was dating the daughter of its
music minister. At a Bible study there, the teacher
began saying that the Jehovah's Witnesses were not
a genuine Christian denomination. For a moment, I
dared to hope that he was going to defend Biblical
orthodoxy. Silly rabbit. I found out my mistake
when I heard what he gave as the _grounds_ for
disapproving of the J.W.'s. It had nothing to do
with their denial of the Deity of Jesus, nor with
their claim that only they have the real gospel,
and least of all with their refusal to show loyalty
to America. What gave this Congregationalist teacher
a red flag was the belief of J.W.'s that Jehovah
had really ordered the Israelites to kill the
people in Jericho and other Canaanite cities.
This, he said, could not be the God worshipped
by Christians!

Some of you will remember an article I wrote
about people drawing spiritual dividing lines
in the wrong place. This teacher had drawn a
line which placed every believer in full inspiration
of Scripture on the same side as a fraudulent cult.

It was this incident which prompted me to compose
one of my earlier songs. I called it "JOSHUAPHOBIA."
I'm not sure it ever got performed for an audience;
it was definitely strong meat, not fill-my-cup-and-
make-me-whole sweetness. I don't think a complete
copy survives now; but I can remember the melody
and some of the words. I don't have the means of
sending music online, but the lyrics of "JOSHUAPHOBIA"
began thus:

Twentieth-century liberal man, how you condescend
To a proven friend of God Almighty!
Joshua seems to embarrass you much; "Primitive," you say;
You regard his way as quite untidy.

Even as an infant Christian in the early 1970's, I
was able to recognize an irony to which the liberal
teacher probably was oblivious. His church was one
which never missed a chance to insist that this or
that passage in the Old Testament was only symbolic,
not literal fact. If he had simply assumed the account
of killing the Canaanites to be _another_ symbolic
whatsit that never actually happened, there would
be nothing to be angry about, because the mass
executions never actually happened. On the other
hand, if I had brought this up to him, he might
have said, "Well, of course that didn't happen,
since it's all symbolic. What I dislike about
the Jehovah's Witnesses is that they _imagine_
God would order people to kill others."

I can see his reasoning. A God Who saw no need
to bother giving a reliable factual record of
His dealings with creation probably also would
not bother insisting on any societal moral
standards for whose repeated violation a wicked
society might have to be destroyed as a corporate
entity. Still, my song was trying to encompass
the whole issue of God's authority in such a
way as to answer this very attitude. The next
part of the words I remember says:

What do you think that it means to be God? Has He not the right,
As well as the might, to punish evil?
Look in Leviticus, chapter eighteen; you'll see God was just
To feel great disgust with Canaan's people.

Of course, you might be out of luck if you look
for that chapter in a Gideon Bible. Homosexual
actor Ian McKellen is said to be in the habit
of ripping out the pages of Leviticus he doesn't
like when he stays at hotels with Gideon Bibles.
That provides another irony. Christians will
sometimes hold book-burnings, in which the only
books being burned are ones voluntarily handed
over for burning by their owners; this was done
once in Ephesus, as I recall. But Christian-
bashers choose to believe that this is the exact
same thing as Nazi book-burnings, although the
Nazis were burning books taken by force from
their owners. McKellen sounds as if he would
join in such an accusation against Christians;
and yet he is willing to deface a Bible which
does NOT belong to him. The hard left never
tires of practicing double standards...which
is why it is conservative student newspapers,
and ONLY conservative ones, which routinely
get stolen and destroyed on many big university
campuses in America.

Unfortunately, Christians do get tired--tired
of having to defend doctrines which are distasteful
to many hearers. We'd rather just preach our five-
hundredth sermon on unconditional love--that can't
alienate anyone! So, over the decades since I wrote
"JOSHUAPHOBIA," there seem to have been fewer and
fewer pastors bothering to explain why God could
have had reasons to order those pagan cities wiped
out. And the less the effort is made, the less
the effort _can_ be made; that is, it becomes
harder and harder to get people to listen to the
harsher part of the truth. Yet there are modifying
elements in the story told by the Book of Joshua.
For those who do not demand that God practice
infant damnation, there is a crucial piece of
solace with regard to the small Canaanite children
who were killed. As I wrote--

Don't you believe there's a Heaven?
Well, that's where God brought those babies!
So, will you stop treating Yahweh
As if He'd gone mad with rabies?

Moreover, that same Book of Leviticus makes
references to non-Israelites being allowed to
join in serving the true God and in enjoying
His favor. So there was a way out, and some
Canaanites availed themselves of it. Note that
when later portions of the Old Testament speak
of the trouble caused by the remaining Canaanites,
they mean the Canaanites who had _not_ genuinely
accepted the Lordship of the true God.

It's important to realize that God's order for
extermination was not an open-ended policy. He
ordered the destruction of one civilization
which had become extraordinarily evil, and whose
continued presence would make it frightfully
difficult for the Israelites to perform their
function as the training camp and laboratory
of human-divine relations. God _never_ told His
people to expand the extermination beyond the
Promised Land. Thus, what He commanded was not
at all the same thing as when radical Islam
labels the WHOLE non-Muslim world as Dar al-Harb,
"The House Of War," meaning that all non-Muslims
_everywhere_ are fair game to be killed or
enslaved. In this perilous time, when Christian-
bashers love to draw a false dividing line
placing Christians on the same side as Al-Qaeda,
the true distinction must be made.

Of course, that Congregationalist teacher would
be quick to say, "But it's all so simple! We can
make the distinction by proclaiming that our God
of love would never want anyone to be killed for
any reason whatsoever, not even in one place at
one time." This, however, can only be done by
denying that the Old Testament is a reliable
history; and if we make this concession, what
is to prevent the New Testament from being
likewise dismissed?

I suppose we can say we are distinguishable from
the Islamists if we accept having a God Who never
said anything and won't do anything. But when
the Christian faith is NOT distinguishable from
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood...when we have nothing
more to say than "Be nice"...we will have no means
of inspiring discipline, fortitude or self-sacrifice.
Pacifistic Christian love is designed to win over
individuals, and it _is_ winning over millions of
individuals, including Muslims; but when whole
Muslim nations are applying their full power to
an effort to annihilate Israel and points west,
the sterner virtues will have to be remembered,
or there won't BE enough sweet peacemakers left
alive TO have any substantial impact with
Christian love.

So we need an authoritative standard, a God Who
_does_ call some things right and others wrong,
and Who _does_ let us know what He wants. If
you don't think that the Bible truthfully conveys
this, you are free to make up your own religion,
as Charles Taze Russell did in founding the J.W.'s
and as Dan Brown is doing with "The DaVinci Code."
But those of us who believe in the Jesus for Whose
honor the Apostles accepted martyrdom (and their
martyrdom was not about murdering the innocent
as terrorist "martyrs" do) need to be teaching
God's Word. God's _WHOLE_ Word, not only the
happy and convenient parts.

You know what? I don't believe that Joshua found
it fun to kill people. He was given a thing to
do which has not been demanded of us, and I am
thankful it has not been. But at a certain time
and place--if the Bible is not a fairytale--it
_was_ nonetheless commanded. If God is the giver
of life, He has the right to say when each human
life should end. If we say that He is only allowed
to give commands which are not upsetting to think
about, we are actually saying that He is not
allowed to give commands. This, in turn, will
mean that no man is allowed to say that his
actions were ordered by God, which leaves Joshua
to be despised by well-dressed scholars who never
had a life-and-death issue to cope with.

"JOSHUAPHOBIA" ended with these words, in which
"him" refers to Joshua:

I won't apologize for him,
Since none of your scorn is due him.
If you reach Heaven at all, friend,
YOU will apologize TO him!

Because the nature and implications of God's
authority have _not_ been adequately taught, a
false dividing line has been drawn which may be
impossible to erase; it may still be there,
confusing people, until Jesus Himself returns
to destroy the Antichrist regime. This line,
existing in the minds of secular humanists
everywhere, places _everyone_ who says there
is a dependable source of divine revelation in
the same zone as Osama bin-Ladin. If it is not
already too late, we have to try to reposition
that line. The true choice is not between the
always-wrong idea of divine authority and the
wonderful freedom of having no rules or standards;
it's between having the RIGHT standards and
having FALSE ones.

Muslim terrorists and Muslim dictators are going
to do enormous harm in this world; it has already
begun. But they will not be the last word in evil.
Right now, Muslim terrorists are drawing a line
which groups Christians, Jews and atheists all
together on the infidel side; but the cold-blooded
reptiles of materialistic totalitarianism (borrowing
New Age mysticism for a little religious camouflage
as it suits them) will have their day to draw their
own line. That line will put Christians, Jews,
civilized Muslims, and anyone else who believes
in a transcendent moral authority, together in
a classification as backward primitives who are
blocking the glorious progress of evolution.
Psychotic criminals who delude themselves about
hearing from God will be viewed as typical
specimens of the disease called faith.

What are we to do? Certainly, we are NOT to give
up witnessing to people about God's love. But if
we make this love into empty calories, with no
principles or expectations, we are abdicating
our obligation to give the _whole_ counsel of
God. That's what has been increasingly occurring
for years now, and it has resulted in Christendom
being put on the defensive--"defensive scarce,"
to use John Milton's phrase. Joshua was able to
go on the attack; but for Christians today, the
most we can do in many theaters of action is to
slow down the loss of territory.

This trend will not be cured by saying that our
God never had any right to possess that territory
in the first place. If we let ourselves agree
with the secular world that God's Word is _not_
authoritative and reliable, and that the moral
truths contained there are only opinions, we are
doing the opposite from John Paul Jones: we ARE
surrendering without ever having begun to fight.

There's always another complication. I'm afraid
that some supposed Christians will say, "That's
right, we need to stand firm on the Bible's clear
commands that the United States must unilaterally
disarm, that private ownership of property must
be abolished, that the status of marriage must be
given to homosexual and incestuous couples or
threesomes, that the federal government must be
able to overrule parents in all questions of
child-raising, and that abortion and euthanasia
are to be made into sacraments." But I've
touched on that angle in past writings, and
may do so again another time. I pray there
still IS time.

Yours for Jesus and America,
Joseph Richard Ravitts