Curses and Holy Wars—and Hell
Arise, LORD, in your anger; rise up against the rage of my enemies (Ps. 7:6). May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership. May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes. . . . May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children (Ps. 109:8–12). Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy are those who repay you for what you have done to us. Happy are those who seize your infants and dash them against the rocks (Ps. 137:8–9).
When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God (Deut. 20:10–18).
As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 13:40–42).
A few years ago, my wife and I brought a middle-aged lady connected with our family to church with us. She fancied herself religious, indeed a Christian, although she rarely attended church, except for Christmas and Easter. It so happened that the pastor of our church was beginning a series of sermons on the prophecy of Hosea. In the course of his address, he read lengthy excerpts from Hosea, full of rather explicit language about adultery, whoredom, nakedness, shame, and the like. This lady was rather subdued when she left the service with us. The silence continued in the car on the way home. Finally, she asked, “How different is the Bible you use in your church from the one we use in our church?”
We finally figured out what she was driving at. She simply did not believe that all the things she had heard that morning from Hosea could actually be found in “her” Bible. It took no little effort to persuade her otherwise.
I wonder what her response would have been had the reading been the passages with which this chapter begins.
The truth of the matter is that most Christians (let alone non-Christians) are uncomfortable with such passages. We hear the curses, and we wonder what possible place they can have in a book that tells us to turn the other cheek, to remember that vengeance belongs exclusively to the Lord, to love our enemies and to pray for those who use us shamefully. We read the passages that not only describe but mandate genocide, and remember that when genocide takes place today there is either an international furor or perhaps a war crimes tribunal. We read of hell, and we are attracted to interpretations that relativize the threat (Will hell be real, but finally empty? Will it destroy its residents, so that their torment will not last forever?).
Some of us avoid the difficulties by passing over such passages in our Bible reading as quickly as we can. Some of us would rather “spiritualize” all references to cursing and war, and perhaps unwittingly switch to another set of categories occupied with justice and the triumph of God. Even where such a switch is legitimate at the level of applying Scripture, we must first come to grips with the fact that real people die in Old Testament genocide. Still others of us first think seriously about such matters when our friends and loved ones are affected. What exactly was I to say to the young woman who came and asked for help and comfort after her father had recently died and, as far as she could tell, went to hell? Her own father!
I do not claim to have all the answers in such matters. But there is little doubt that some people, more sensitive, perhaps, than others, find these teachings and passages in the Bible sometimes cause them enormous distress. As part of the “framework” for looking at these things I find it helpful to weigh these realities of Scripture against six factors that the Bible itself calls us to take into account.
The Perception of the Problem
When Peter Craigie wrote the little book I alluded to in chapter 4, The Problem of War in the Old Testament,[1] he was careful to point out that the “problem” to which his title refers is our problem when we read the Old Testament. That is another way of conceding, of course, that by itself his title is potentially misleading: it might suggest that the Old Testament writers themselves find a “problem” in war. As we have seen, the fact is they do not. Indeed, one biblical writer can say, “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle” (Ps. 144:1).
If Saul refuses to obey the Lord by utterly destroying the Amalekites, it is not because he claims some sort of superior moral compunction, but because he arbitrarily opts to preserve the life of King Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle (1 Sam. 15). His excuse—that cattle, at least, were kept aside to be offered to the Lord in sacrifice—brings this withering denunciation: “Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the LORD? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams. For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has rejected you as king” (1 Sam. 15:22–23). In other words, it is not the command to commit genocide that shocks Samuel; it is the rebellion that refuses to commit it.
Something similar could be said about the cries for vengeance and the biblical teaching on hell. As horrific as the descriptions of hell are, the stunning truth of the matter is that most of them come from the lips of Jesus. He has far more to say about hell than anyone else in the Bible.
Surely that must give us pause. We must dare to ask ourselves if our own moral sensibilities have somehow been misdirected, misfocused. Is it possible that our severest problems about these forms of suffering owe more to the pluralism of our age than to any ostensible superiority in moral judgment on our part? Is it possible that part, at least, of our horror at hell owes something to our inability (or refusal?) to look at sin from God’s perspective?
Why is it that we are comfortable with evangelical clichés about God “loving the sinner but hating the sin,” when within the first fifty psalms alone there are fourteen passages where God is explicitly said to hate the sinner, or to be angry with the sinner, or the like?[2]
I am not for a moment suggesting there is no truth at all in the cliché; the question will be explored a little in chapter 10. Still less am I suggesting that we would be justified in going out today and committing genocide. The horrible slogan of some militarists, “The fight against communism is the fight for God” (which I heard one preacher actually say), is too blind for words. Mercifully, this sort of demagoguery is now largely passé, owing primarily to the demise of the Soviet empire. (Can one imagine the apostle Paul thundering, “The fight against the Roman Empire is the fight for God”?) This is not to assert the moral equivalency of both sides in every armed conflict—whether World War II or the current war on terror. It is merely to observe two things: (1) One of the fundamental differences brought about by the new covenant is the fact that the locus of the people of God under this covenant no longer constitutes a nation, but an international community not to be identified with any nation. This means that the loyalty of Christians to their state must always be conditional. (2) Even if the state has the right—indeed, the obligation—to use the sword in defense of justice, we had better recognize the propensity of all states, and of all individuals in it, to demonstrate that power in this fallen world is corrupting, with violence too easily becoming the first resort rather than the last resort.
Even so, after all caveats have been entered, the distance between our perception of where the problem lies and the perceptions of the biblical writers is one of the most sobering considerations for those who take the Bible seriously. It is one more indication that we have given ourselves to thinking great thoughts about human beings and small thoughts about God.
How does rebellion appear to One so incomparably transcendent that even the superpowers appear to his eyes like the fine dust in a balance? How does rebellion appear to One who measures our sin by the death of his Son?
Not every expression of moral outrage is to be taken as concrete description, or even as considered desire.
Take, for instance, this malediction from Jeremiah, once again lamenting his unhappy lot: “Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, ‘A child is born to you—a son!’ May that man be like the towns the LORD overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. For he did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?” (Jer. 20:14–18).
The general thrust of these verses is clear: Jeremiah is so miserable that he wishes he were dead—or, better yet, that he had never been born. But does that mean he is placing a well-considered curse on the head of the poor chap unlucky enough to have brought the news of Jeremiah’s birth to Jeremiah’s father? Does Jeremiah really want his mother to be forever pregnant? Only the crassest literalist could read the text in this way.
To cut the passage from the text on the ground that it is irresponsible would be a great loss, for the vividness of the outrage would be diluted were it replaced by a bland abstraction such as “Jeremiah is deeply disturbed,” or by mere literalism such as “Jeremiah wishes he had never been born.” Jeremiah makes us feel the heat of his indignation; cautious literalism could not achieve so much.
It follows that we must ask whether some of the malediction language in the psalms is in the same way not the language of considered address but the rhetoric of outrage. Its purpose is not to inform but to ignite; it has little in common with cool discourse, a great deal in common with a sudden scream. It does not establish military policy; it vents confusion and terror when “haunts of violence fill the dark places of the land” (Ps. 74:20).
Related to this is how these cries of outrage fit into the larger context of the man and his message. Jeremiah was sometimes gently rebuked by the Lord for his understandable but bitter self-pity; David was not permitted to build the temple because, unlike his son Solomon, he was a warrior who had shed blood (1 Chron. 28:3). The anticipation of the consummation of history, when people “will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” when “nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore” (Isa. 2:4), provides ample evidence that war is not treated as a neutral thing, still less an intrinsically good thing. Rather, war, cries of vengeance, and mass deaths are themselves to be set against the backdrop of a fallen world where evil must be restrained, where evil inflicted evokes cries of outraged despair and candid calls for exacting justice.
The Influence of the Old Covenant
Under the old covenant, the covenant that God made with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai through his servant Moses, the locus of the people of God was a nation. Other nations enjoyed God’s forbearance and blessings, sometimes even his forgiveness (e.g., Nineveh in the time of Jonah); but Israel was the covenant people of God. And Israel was a nation—in time, two nations.
Further, although God was Israel’s King, he operated through mediators: his vassal king in the Davidic line, his priests from the tribe of Levi, and prophets raised up for the occasion. They represented the people to God; they represented God to the people. When they sinned, they brought down the people with them; when they were courageous and righteous, in some measure they reformed the people for whom they were responsible.
Because the people of God constituted a nation, it was impossible to dissociate God’s blessing on the people from the welfare of the nation, or God’s judgment of the people from the decline of the nation, or the spiritual and moral purity of the people from the religious integrity of the nation, or the compassion of the people from the charity of the nation.
That means that the easy distinctions we make between the civil and the religious, between the political and the moral, could not possibly exist. The covenant people of God constituted a nation; the nation was a theocracy. Its fundamental laws were God’s laws, its officers God’s appointees.
Ideally, therefore, political decisions, court decisions, legislative decisions—all should have reflected the mind of God, and this in a political context. When judicial punishment was being meted out, in theory at least (and sometimes in practice) it was punishment from God himself.
But that was also true (again, in theory, and sometimes in practice) of Israel’s wars. Israel’s enemies were God’s enemies. Israel was told when and where she was allowed to fight. And not a little of the destruction that took place as Israel entered the promised land was understood to be a terrible judgment on the wickedness of the people already living there. Had not God said that Israel had to remain in Egypt, and not return to Canaan, until the sin of the Amorites had reached its full measure (Gen. 15:16)? The rank idolatry had been compounded with fertility-cult religion (people sleeping with cult priests and priestesses to encourage the gods to copulate, in the hope of bringing fruitfulness to land and home) and even child sacrifice (as occurred when babies were offered, screaming, to the god Molech, whose stone bowl was heated by fire).
If God felt it was necessary to curb the evil of the world by obliterating most of the human race at the time of the flood (Gen. 6–9), and if by the same powerful word that effected that judgment “the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly” (2 Pet. 3:7), is it so very surprising that God should inflict through his covenant people punishments of a similar sort, but on a much smaller scale?
By the same token, when the best of Israel’s kings saw themselves surrounded by foes, they could not possibly think in merely military and political categories. The king was God’s son; the king was God’s vassal. His cause was just, because it was God’s. It was entirely right that the king should turn to God and plead his cause and cry for justice; and if justice was forthcoming, then under the structures established by the old covenant that justice necessarily had national, political, and sometimes military overtones.
We may ask ourselves if God still works in similar fashion today. The answer is decidedly ambiguous. On the one hand, the answer must be negative: the locus of God’s people under the new covenant is not a nation, and every attempt to establish a unified “Christian nation,” where the respective boundaries of church and state are made to coalesce, has not only been misconceived but has resulted in disastrous failure. On the other hand, God is still the God of all the nations, acknowledged or not. Wars, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, can be looked at, from a Christian perspective, in several ways. But surely one of them is the perspective of judgment. Is it not worth pondering that most devastating, far-flung wars over the past century have been started and led by the most sophisticated, intellectually scintillating, “civilized,” well-bred, technologically proficient nations, whose blindness, greed, ambition, and arrogance had already generated massive defection from the faith more commonly adopted by their fathers?
I do not mean to suggest that there were no discernible “rights” and “wrongs” in the Second World War. There can be little doubt that Germany started it, and for all the wrong reasons. But I remember Habakkuk: sometimes a more wicked nation is used by God to punish another nation, less wicked perhaps, but whose time for judgment, in God’s providence, has arrived. When I read the record of the incredibly stupid decisions taken by the British Parliament and the French Cabinet in the seven-year period leading up to the war (for Hitler could have been stopped at several strategic junctures, as when he took over the Ruhr), I wonder if God was blinding the eyes of some, to bring about the judgments that actually fell.
Of course, Christians must always be leery of claims that providence can be “read” in hindsight like an old-fashioned morality play. Still, most of us have swung too far the other way: we think along such naturalistic lines that we allow little room for God. We have certainly not taken to heart the biblical portrait of a God of justice, who holds all to account, both individuals and nations, and who sovereignly works out his purposes, sometimes behind the scenes in mysterious providences that use the evil machinations of mere mortals to raise up and put down entire nations and peoples.
This suggests that the most important response to the “problem” of holy wars in the Old Testament is not arrogant self-righteousness and shocked, condescending horror, but contrition, brokenness, intercession. Do we hear again the voice of the Master, “But unless you repent, you too will all perish” (Luke 13:5)?
The remaining three topics of this chapter may also help us to find our way.
Jesus’ Teaching on Hell
If there is any subject that few Christians like to think about, this, surely, is it.
Yet it is Jesus, more than any other person in the New Testament, who gives us the most graphic details. He speaks of a fiery furnace, a place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, of people crying out for a drop of water to cool their tongues, a place of darkness, “outside” and away from the bliss enjoyed by God’s people. He does not hesitate to draw the absolute disjunctive: “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life” (Matt. 25:46). He can speak of the resurrection of the just and of the unjust, and of the evil rising to be condemned (John 5:28–29). It is he who insists that the chasm between those who are in torment and those who are by Abraham’s side is fixed and uncrossable.
Even if we note that many of these images are drawn from parables, even if we assume that the language is metaphorical, it is metaphorical language that has a referent; and if the metaphors are doing their job, they are evoking images of a horrible existence. And the shocking language Jesus uses is confirmed elsewhere in the New Testament.
There are several perspectives that help us come to terms with these texts.
First, on the whole Jesus himself is not shocked by the existence of hell, but by the hardness of people’s hearts. As I have already suggested, that may tell us that we need to wrestle much more diligently with how God looks at sin, and the degree and degradation and moral offensiveness of the sin that he sees.
Second, there is no hint in the Bible that there is any repentance in hell. Like the rich man in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), there may be a cry for relief, or even a plea that the surviving brothers be warned; but there is no hint of repentance. Indeed, there is one passage that suggests the opposite. In the final chapter of the Bible, the interpreting angel says to John, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near. Let those who do wrong continue to do wrong; let those who are vile continue to be vile; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy” (Rev. 22:10–11). In a sense, this pronouncement brings the judgment forward: those who will be found vile at the end may just as well continue to be vile now, for their time of mercy has passed. But the assumption, I think, is that just as those who are declared holy at the end, doubtless owing to the gospel of Jesus Christ, continue in holiness, indeed in the very consummation of holiness, so also those who are declared vile at the end, doubtless owing to their own rebellion and hardness of heart, continue in all that is vile, indeed in the very consummation of what is vile.
Perhaps, then, we should think of hell as a place where people continue to rebel, continue to insist on their own way, continue societal structures of prejudice and hate, continue to defy the living God. And as they continue to defy God, so he continues to punish them. And the cycle goes on and on and on.
After all, it is arguable that that is rather analogous to what goes on in the Old Testament—and today. “Who handed Jacob over to become loot, and Israel to the plunderers? Was it not the LORD, against whom we have sinned? For they would not follow his ways; they did not obey his law. So he poured out on them his burning anger, the violence of war. It enveloped them in flames, yet they did not understand; it consumed them, but they did not take it to heart” (Isa. 42:24–25).
In recent years, several notable evangelical scholars have publicly espoused the view that hell itself may exist forever, but that it will not be peopled forever. Although punishments may differ, eventually every resident will be destroyed, annihilated. The idea of eternal punishment, they say, is not biblical. And this interpretation, they suggest, eliminates a great moral problem: no one is punished eternally for finite, temporal sins.[3]
These are difficult questions, and no one should speak too assuredly. But if it is wrong to adopt a merely traditional view of hell that is allegedly without adequate biblical warrant and that leads to insuperable moral problems (as annihilationists insist), it is surely no less wrong to abandon a long-standing interpretation of biblical texts on inadequate grounds that may give false assurance and comfort to some who need to be shaken by the sterner view. I doubt if any of us is equipped to assess what is an “appropriate” punishment for defiance of the holy and sovereign God, save God himself. And I am not quite certain what an “eternal” punishment is. In any case, if the reasoning I have sketched out is correct, the dilemma posed by the annihilationists is a false one. Quite apart from the fact that in my view their interpretation of individual texts is mistaken, there is not even any moral impetus for their view if in hell sinners go on sinning and receiving the recompense of their sin, refusing, always refusing, to bend the knee.
Third, we must always remember that the Bible does not present us with a God who chances upon neutral men and women and arbitrarily consigns some to heaven and some to hell. He takes guilty men and women, all of whom deserve his wrath, and in his great mercy and love he saves vast numbers of them. Had he saved only one, it would have been an act of grace; that he saves a vast host affirms still more unmistakably the uncharted reaches of that grace. From a biblical perspective, hell stands as a horrible witness to human defiance in the face of great grace.
Fourth, heaven would surely be hell to those who do not enjoy and desire the blessing of the unshielded presence of God.
Fifth, and perhaps most important of all, the God of the Bible is not unmoved by our suffering. He is slow to anger, abundant in mercy. The Jesus who delivers the terrible “woes” to the religious hypocrites of his day (Matt. 23) ends up weeping over the city of Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate” (Matt. 23:37–38). The stereotype of a “hell-fire preacher” really letting his hearers have it cannot be found in the Bible. Though the Bible speaks plainly, and sometimes in fury, it never does so without tears. And Christians can never forget that they too, like the rest, are by nature objects of wrath. They never warn others about the wrath of God from a position of intrinsic superiority, but from the brokenness of experience and the relief of redemption they want to share.
The Nature of the Church’s Discipline—and Cries
If we bring together the last two reflections—on the nature of the old covenant, and Jesus’ teaching on hell—we are driven to a fresh point.
It is sometimes thought that although the Old Testament sanctions holy war and displays nasty tendencies to call down curses on God’s enemies, the New Testament is morally and ethically superior, and leaves such traits behind.
It is true that the church, the locus of the new covenant people of God, is not to defend itself as the church, or to propagate the gospel, by resorting to arms. But that does not mean there is no discipline to be dispensed at all. Jesus lays down some simple procedures for disciplining a brother (Matt. 18:15–18); Paul leads the Corinthian church in the steps it needs to take to expel a professing Christian who is sleeping with his stepmother (1 Cor. 5:1ff.).
In fact, Christian discipline in the church can take many forms: gentle rebuke, encouragement, mutual confession, private confrontation, and more. The final sanction is excommunication: the church, with tears and self-examination, expels someone. In the New Testament, this final sanction is applied in only three areas: where there is major doctrinal deviation, where there is major and persistent moral turpitude, and where there is persistent, loveless divisiveness.
“Ah,” someone objects, “that is merely spiritual discipline. In the Old Testament, there was physical discipline.” But the words are no sooner uttered than all the New Testament teaching about hell rushes to mind and gives one pause. If the church judicially declares that someone is outside the pale of the people of God, then although the decision may be executed in the hope that this person will be saved on the day of the Lord (1 Cor. 5:5), the alternative possibility is horrific, and must be squarely faced.
As for the cries for vengeance, the Apocalypse provides stunning counterparts to the psalms. “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” (Rev. 6:10), cry those who had been slain because of the Word of God and the testimony they had maintained. “Give back to her [Babylon the Great] as she has given; pay her back double for what she has done. Pour her a double portion from her own cup. Give her as much torment and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself. In her heart she boasts, ‘I sit enthroned as queen. I am not a widow; I will never mourn.’ Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her” (Rev. 18:6–8). “Woe! Woe to you, great city, where all who had ships on the sea became rich through her wealth! . . . Rejoice over her, you heavens! Rejoice, you people of God! Rejoice, apostles and prophets! For God has judged her with the judgment she imposed on you” (Rev. 18:19–20). And there is much more of the same.
The factors we weighed when we considered similar Old Testament passages apply here as well. But the point to be made is that if we take seriously the eternal perspective that is laid out in the New Testament, then it simply will not do to write off the Old Testament witness as intrinsically harsher and therefore not something we need worry our heads about today. I think it is closer to the truth to say that in the coming of the Lord Jesus and the new covenant he sealed with his own blood, both the justice of God and the mercy of God appear in sharper relief than ever before, leaving us with correspondingly less excuse, and with greater grounds for praise and worship.
Worse Alternatives
I return to the young woman who asked me how she was to think of her father, who, as far as she knew, had gone to hell.
There were, of course, and are, many important things to say. I could say that none of us knows for certain what transpires between any person and God Almighty before that person is ushered into eternity. I could say that the final proof of the love and goodness of God is the cross. I could say that we know far too little of the new heaven and the new earth to have any idea what consciousness we shall there have of those who have chosen to live and die independently of God. I could add that there are times when, in the confusion, it sometimes helps to think of all that we know of the character of God and ask, with Abraham, the rhetorical question, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25).
All this I could say, and more. But it will not do to opt for a sub-biblical system, a selectively biblical system. Shall we opt for absolute universalism? Then what do we do with the countless texts that foreclose on this speculation? Does God treat those who trust his Son and those who disobey the Son the same way, even though his Word insists, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them” (John 3:36)? Shall we assume that truth and revelation are not the discriminating factors, but human sincerity? What purpose, then, the cross? And what value?
However hard some things are to understand, it is never helpful to start picking and choosing biblical truths we find congenial, as if the Bible is an open-shelved supermarket where we are at perfect liberty to choose only the chocolate bars. For the Christian, it is God’s Word, and it is not negotiable. What answers we find may not be exhaustive, but they give us the God who is there, and who gives us some measure of comfort and assurance. The alternative is a god we manufacture, and who provides no comfort at all. Whatever comfort we feel is self-delusion, and it will be stripped away at the end when we give an account to the God who has spoken to us, not only in Scripture, but supremely in his Son Jesus Christ.
Questions for Further Study