Supernatural Session 15

Holy War

The Bible is a controversial book. People who don’t see it as the Word of God often object to what it says. But some parts of the Bible make even Christians uncomfortable. Israel’s war to conquer the Promised Land is a case in point.

Why? Mostly because of the killing. It seems indiscriminate and far too thorough. Why was it necessary to kill entire populations in some cities—men, women, children, and even livestock? Why not let the inhabitants surrender? Wouldn’t it be better to exile them than to slaughter them?

There’s an answer to those objections—but I’ve discovered that the answer seems to make Christians as uncomfortable as the problem. You can only understand the rationale and motive of the conquest accounts when you see them through the supernatural worldview of an Israelite.

Israel’s Supernatural Logic

The battles for the Promised Land were framed by two factors, both deeply rooted in Israel’s understanding of their world as not only the abode of humankind but also the prize in an unseen spiritual war. We’ve talked about both of them already, but let’s review.

One factor is the fallout from the events at the Tower of Babel, when God decided, after the nations rebelled against him, that he no longer wanted a direct relationship with the people of those nations. Instead, he assigned members of his divine council, the sons of God, to govern them (; ). Afterward, he called Abraham and enabled him and his wife Sarah to have a child (Isaac), from whom the people of Israel would come.

We learned in that these lesser gods became corrupt. They allowed injustice. People came to worship them instead of the Most High God. Thus, they became enemies of God and his people, Israel. Since some of those nations were within the land of Canaan, which God purposed to give to his nation Israel after the exodus, Moses and the Israelites believed the people who occupied those lands were their mortal enemies and their gods would do all they could to destroy Israel.

The second factor was even more frightening for the Israelites. It’s best explained by what happened when the Israelites arrived at the border of Canaan, the Promised Land.

Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan to report on the land and its inhabitants. The spies came back with evidence that the land itself was wonderful—it flows “with milk and honey”—just as God had told them (). But then they dropped a bombshell: “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them” ().

We’ve talked about the Nephilim before. They were the sinister spawn of the sons of God and the daughters of humankind back in . The Anakim giants the Israelite spies saw in Canaan were their descendants, and there were more of them scattered throughout the land of Canaan, among the nations and cities the Israelites would have to defeat to take the land (). The task of conquering the land and its gods had seemed difficult before; now it looked downright impossible. Now to take the land they would have to face warriors of abnormal physical size.

Only two of the spies—Joshua and Caleb—believed God would help the Israelites defeat the Anakim. The rest persuaded the people they would lose. Instead of trusting that God—the same God who had devastated Pharaoh and his army so thoroughly—would intercede to give them the victory, they whined, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are” ().

God replied, “How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?” (). In fact, God was so angry that he threatened to disinherit Israel—the very thing he had done to the nations back at the Tower of Babel—and start over yet again, this time with Moses: “I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they” ().

Moses begged God to relent (). God did, but he couldn’t overlook the unbelief of the people. A lesson had to be learned. It would be harsh. He told Moses:

I have pardoned, according to your word. But truly, as I live, and as all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord, none of the men who have seen my glory and my signs that I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and yet have put me to the test these ten times and have not obeyed my voice, shall see the land that I swore to give to their fathers. And none of those who despised me shall see it.…

Your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and of all your number, listed in the census from twenty years old and upward, who have grumbled against me, not one shall come into the land where I swore that I would make you dwell, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun. But your little ones, who you said would become a prey, I will bring in, and they shall know the land that you have rejected. ()

“Ten times” was a figure of speech in biblical days for “time and time again” (; ). To this point, God had been tolerant of the people’s complaints. Instead of being thrilled to no longer be bondservants in Egypt, they’d griped about the food they had to eat (; ) and about God’s chosen leader, Moses (). But his patience had run out; this time, their unbelief would have a terrible cost. Israel would wander in the desert for forty years until all the adults who had not believed had died off.

A Second Chance

Israel would get a second chance at taking the Promised Land. chronicles how, during their forty years of wandering, the Israelites wound up in the territory on the other side of the Jordan River (called the “Transjordan”), to the east of the Promised Land. The Transjordanian lands were Edom, Moab, and Ammon, territories God had given to the descendants of Lot, Abraham’s nephew, and Esau, Jacob’s brother. The people who lived there were relatives of the Israelites … most of them, anyway. But there were others.

God had directed Moses to make this trip for a specific purpose. It wasn’t about visiting distant relatives. The Israelites eventually made their way into a region known as Bashan. The place had a terrifying reputation. In ancient literature outside the Bible, Bashan was known as “the place of the serpent.” Two of its major cities, Ashtaroth and Edrei, both mentioned in connection with this journey (; ), were considered gateways to the underworld realm of the dead. In the context of Israel’s supernatural worldview, God had led the Israelites to the gates of hell.

And that wasn’t all.

God had brought the Israelites there to encounter two kings, Sihon and Og. Those two kings were Amorites (; ) and rulers of what the Bible calls the Rephaim. As ominously noted, the Anakim were “also counted as Rephaim.” God, through Moses, had led the people to another area occupied by the same sort of giants that had frightened the Israelite spies into unbelief years earlier (), the event that had caused the forty years of wandering.

Why had God brought them there? Because this confrontation was a foretaste of what would have to be done when the forty years had ended. Israel would eventually have to cross the Jordan to occupy the land God had given to them. God was testing his people. Would they believe and fight this time? If so, a victory would give them confidence and faith for what lay ahead.

The Israelites had turned tail years earlier. But this time the story ended differently. As Moses said, “The Lord our God gave [Sihon] over to us, and we defeated him and his sons and all his people.… The Lord our God gave into our hand Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people, and we struck him down until he had no survivor left” (; ). The prophet Amos, recounting the confrontation in his own biblical book many years later, described the outcome this way: “[the Lord] destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars and who was as strong as the oaks” ().

It was a rough way to start their second chance. God demanded that they face their fears—the terrors that had cost them forty years of aimless wandering. They had the God who had parted the Red Sea on their side. It was time they remembered that.

“Devoted to Destruction”

Israel won the day against Sihon and Og. And it is here that we get our first taste of why the conquest of the Promised Land at times involved annihilation. The entire populations of the cities that were home to the giant Rephaim were “devoted to destruction” (). The goal was not revenge. The goal was to ensure the elimination of the Nephilim bloodlines. To the Israelites, the giant clan bloodlines were demonic, having been produced by rebellious, fallen divine beings. They could not coexist with a demonic heritage.

Time passed, and before the Israelites crossed the Jordan into Canaan, Moses died. The leadership passed to Joshua. He led many military campaigns in the Israelites’ conquest of the Promised Land, and those campaigns were guided by the two factors I noted earlier in this chapter: drive out the hostile enemy nations and, in the process, eliminate the giant clan bloodlines.

Viewed in that context, the conquest of the Promised Land was a holy war—a battle against the forces of darkness and enemies under the dominion of hostile gods the Bible says are real spiritual entities.

The logic of the conquest is summarized well in :

And Joshua came at that time and cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua devoted them to destruction with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain. :

Why This Matters

Joshua’s campaigns were mostly successful, but not complete. A few giants escaped—and while that may not have seemed very important, it foreshadowed events to come. Some wound up in Gath. Gath became a Philistine city () and was the hometown of Goliath at the time of King David (). Goliath wasn’t the only giant in Gath, either (). Not all of those who had been “devoted to destruction” during the conquest of the Promised Land were in fact destroyed, and the fact that the conquest didn’t accomplish all of its prime directives had consequences for the Israelites.

The book of Judges tells us the conquest was incomplete in other ways at the time Joshua died. It was never fully realized. The Israelites decided they’d done well enough and disobeyed God’s command to drive out the other nations. But partial obedience is disobedience.

The Israelites would spend centuries paying for their decision to stop short of God’s goals. The book of Judges reiterates an awful cycle: Israel was repeatedly overwhelmed by hostile nations, and believing loyalty to God was nearly extinguished. Things improved by the time of King David and his son, Solomon, but once Solomon was gone, Israel disintegrated into civil war and idolatry.

The glory of the conquest was overshadowed by epic failure. Defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. God’s kingdom rule—his plan for a restored Eden—went down in flames. The supernatural worldview that emerged from Babel, with unbelieving nations under the dominion of evil gods, remained intact. Israel was defeated and scattered, and her Promised Land came under the rule of other gods and their peoples. This same worldview permeates the New Testament too. Paul uses terms like principalities, authorities, thrones, and powers to describe the forces of darkness. Each of those terms was used in antiquity to refer to geographical rule.

The cause of the Israelites’ failure was disobedience and faithlessness on the part of God’s people. Humans are weak. We might wonder why God bothers with us. But if we look back to Eden, we know why. God had committed himself to humanity. We are his imagers, and his earthly family. His original plan for ruling the earth included us. For God to cast aside human participation in his council rule on earth would send the message that he’s unable to make it work or that it was a bad idea to begin with. God is not incapable of achieving his own goals. And as mentioned in an earlier chapter, he doesn’t make mistakes.

It was time for a new approach to the old problem of sin and failure. Humanity could not be trusted with reviving the Edenic kingdom rule. Only God himself could do what needed to be done. Only God could meet the obligations of his own covenants. But humanity would not be set aside. Instead, God would have to become man. God would have to fulfill the Law and the covenants himself and then take upon himself the penalty for all human failure. But pulling off that unthinkable solution meant that it would have to be kept secret from everyone, including the intelligent supernatural beings hostile to his purposes. That wasn’t going to be easy.[1]

[1] Heiser, M. S. (2015). Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches about the Unseen World—And Why It Matters. (D. Lambert, Ed.) (pp. 87–96). Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.