The Man Who Judged God

I was fascinated by a recent podcast conversation (by Stand to Reason) with 'Dan in Colorado' who wanted to know about God's killing babies.

He was referring to the war against the Midianites in Numbers 31:17-18 and the punishment of Ephraim for apostasy in Hosea 13:16.

I appreciate you didn't have the time available for a lengthy discussion with him, but it got me thinking. How would I respond to his questions?

The first observation I would hazard is that Dan takes an a-historical view of the texts coupled with, perhaps, a deterministic view of God's acts being the source of human/historical acts.

Yet, God's action is in history within its context, as is man's, and the texts report on this. They show God in historical interaction; that is his action is in, through and by history: in a manner, God uses the unfolding of the history of human depravity to achieve his good ends despite the depravity of man which produces a history of degeneracy.

In his 'a-historical' view Dan seems also to have missed the entire point of the OT. It is not merely a collection of narratives, but it lays out the flow of history bringing the Messiah and delineates the historical man in desperate need of the Messiah. It is about the formation and choosing of Israel, itself delivered from slavery, as the base for the Messiah who will deliver us all from slavery to sin and death.

God, rather than being stifled by the reversal in death that man brought upon himself, uses the history marked by it to advance his long game to bring eternal life to all who believe.

Dan seems to take a 'sentimental' view of death. Everyone killed in these judgements, wreaked in the normal course of ANE warfare, itself constrained by the circumstances of the times (more on this below) would have died anyway: as do we all. Death is never 'special' in the history of man. It is condition-normal in our corrupted state and from which we are to be rescued...the great love of God is that he uses the progression of the state of horror we are in to retrieve a people through the coming of the Messiah. He is not finally frustrated by it!

The point of history is not the terminal undoing of mankind in dissolution and death, but in salvation and life. Dan seems to have not considered this.

Dan also seems to bring God wholly into the cosmos with a Euthyphroean option: that 'right' is external to and at least logically, prior to God. Whereas the scriptures teach that all value and ethical judgements flow from God's nature: being that he is love, as John tells us. 'Moral' is what marks our choices because we have the frightening choice: to choose or reject repentance! God, oddly, does not have such a choice: he is who he is, and cannot 'un-be' himself.

Nevertheless, 'love' is also a long game in a world that is full of hate and decay (moral, physical and spiritual) resulting with all this being overturned and put right in the New Creation. God has no 'blood on his hands'.

Moreover the evil done by those who visit it on Ephraim will itself be repaid, as is Moab experiencing, being punished for its rejection of  God and its clear and present danger to the mission of Israel for the rescue of the world. God responds to and uses the evil of Moab and Shalmaneser respectively; he does not cause it, yet is working by it his ultimate Good for those who love him despite the blood-thirsty waywardness of mankind. Working in and by (Romans 8:28) the 'warp and  woof' of human history, because the world is given to man (Ps 115:16) wherein man makes significant choices which must play out, yet will not and cannot frustrate God's ends.

Dan also seems to misunderstand death. I can't remember who stated this, but death is a change of location, not annihilation. Any babies killed would, I think we expect from the scriptures, not be excluded from the love of God, but be saved from the course they would have otherwise gone on. Death in these terms is not the offense of murder.

The practicalities of the ancient world also must be taken into account. They would be twofold: who would look after surviving babies, bearing the financial burden in a very small and fragile economy, to succour the children of the enemy? Moreover, any surviving children would soon enough learn their history and plot to retaliate: who is going to preserve a future guerilla force of angry young men who would be expected to seek their destruction? We see the sentiments of young Arabs in Gaza: perhaps this would be the picture of the adolescent Midian children!

'Evil' is not merely a set of actions that can be abstracted to a particular moral category, but is actions that are 'not-God' or in denial of who God is. This seems to not be fully grasped by Dan. Thus it has no utility apart from sounding the loudest possible alarm that all is not right with the world.  That we detect it (as you say, something is not right with the world), says that we have a transcendental connection to a more basic reality-structure than the world exhibits, by virtue of our imageness of God, I daresay.

The evil in which is the history of the establishment, preservation and preparation of Israel for the Messiah's coming is what life post-fall is, entirely. Dan picks and chooses his 'evils' in some sense. To side-step the evil would be to overturn the fallen world, meaninglessly, as the fallen-ness would continue. Thus, this can only truly be done in the New Creation.

2) God and temporality (the following podcast from the one mentioned above)

I liked the segment in the more recent podcast about God and time. I tend to agree with you, but would fine-tune my own statement of position to recognize that God explicitly  engages with his creation temporally. I've no idea how an a-temporal being would 'work', of course given our experience is of a creation both separate from God, per se, but also congruent with who God is.

Nevertheless, God shows that he is temporally 'synched' with his creation in that he created in the specific cadence of the days that give the tempo to our own experience of the creation. God thus couples with us temporally and substantially in his acts of creation (the ground of fellowship: the parties in the same place and time). He thus sets the context for his other acts within the creation, culminating in the Incarnation.