God's Judgment Upon Nations

Genesis 15 and 1 Samuel 15: The Biblical Background to Divine Judgment

Carry with me please in your scriptures to the book of Genesis chapter 15. Genesis chapter 15. We'll actually be looking at two texts if you want to turn to both of them and have them ready. The other is in 1 Samuel chapter 15.

Genesis 15 and 1 Samuel chapter 15. Once again let us ask the Lord to bless us. In need of Heavenly Father we ask that now you would protect us from distraction. Help us to look to your word, to understand your word.

May your people be blessed this day by the presence of your spirit. We pray in Christ's name. Amen. Genesis chapter 15 beginning at verse 13. Genesis chapter 15 beginning at verse 13. Then the Lord said to Abram, Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in the land that is not theirs, and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years.

But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace. You shall be buried in a good old age.

And the text I want us to focus on. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. For the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. Now turn with me to 1 Samuel chapter 15.

Verse 3. Samuel said to Saul, The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel. Now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, I have known what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came out of Egypt.

Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. Here we have two texts. Two of many texts that could be cited that refer us to a very difficult problem in the Bible.

The Emotional Objection to God's Judgment

At least that's what people would like to tell us. Very often you will hear people today speaking of the cruelty of the God of the Bible. They use this as an objection. An objection to Christian faith, an objection to the Bible being the word of God.

They present this as an objection to even allowing the Christian faith to speak within any culture whatsoever because their assertion is that the scriptures are not a proper moral guide because the God of the Bible is a reprehensible creature.

He is in fact guilty of genocide. Genocide, primary argument against the God of the Bible. Now, these two texts speak of difficult situations historically. Saul is instructed to strike down a certain people and he is not simply to defeat them militarily.

He is to wipe them out. Man and woman, child and infant, even the living animals are to be destroyed. There is to be total destruction of a culture. People would refer to that as genocide. When the people of Israel came into the land that they were to possess, they had to dispossess the people that were already there.

They were, in the eyes of those who were already there, invaders. We have that strange statement in Genesis 15. Long before the people of Israel came out of Egypt, spoken as a part of the very promise to Abram of the coming blessing.

This is where Abram exercises faith. It's recognized as righteousness. Genesis 15. And part of that revelation given to Abram has this strange discussion. The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.

Here we have a statement that God knows that the people of this land are filled with iniquity. And I see no evidence to believe that during the period of time when his descendants go down into Egypt, they become a large and mighty nation.

Generation after generation passes. And the iniquity of the Amorites continues to grow. I see no reason to believe that God sent prophets here. I see no reason to believe that anything takes place where God is pleading with the Amorites.

Their iniquity continues to grow. And so when the people of Israel come into the land, it is these very people who feel the brunt of God's wrath and judgment upon them in the people of Israel. Now, we cannot downplay the emotional impact of such argumentation upon our fellow creatures.

I recently saw something on the Internet. Some Orthodox Jews standing outside the wailing wall in Jerusalem slaughtered a sheep. And they captured the blood. You remember just last week when the pastor was talking about the Passover and the blood upon the doorpost and the lintel.

That's what they were doing. They slit the throat of the sheep and they captured the blood and the sheep dies. And I could not help but thinking as I watched that video how many people who gather in evangelical churches would recoil in horror at a single sacrifice, let alone what was done during Yom Kippur, let alone what is narrated in the text of the Old Testament.

We need to realize that there is a tremendous emotional weight when people start objecting. How can a God of love command the destruction, and normally this word comes along, of innocents, men, women, and children?

How can you kill little children? How can you make people do this? And there is a tremendous emotional weight to that objection. Our day is one of great concern about offense. You can't offend anybody.

You can't do anything that will offend anybody. And if people believe that a God that you present is too offensive for their tastes, then they simply will not worship Him or acknowledge Him. I will never worship a God like that.

You need to give me a God I like, that is edited to my desires, and then I will honor Him by giving Him my allegiance, at least for now at least, until He does something that's offensive to me, the creature.

Admittedly, this is an objection rooted in a modern antiseptic age, where we are most often insulated from death and disease. It likewise pertains deeply in naturalistic materialism, where the wrath of God in natural disasters has been removed from the table of discussion.

You can't even talk about the wrath of God coming in the form of anything in nature, because, well, nature is its own self. We wise modern men have begun to learn how nature functions. Since we've figured out some of the mechanics, well then, we don't need God anymore.

It's just sort of the way it happens. We don't have God, but hey, that's another issue. But with all of that said, we still must deal with a stark reality that the Bible contains historical narratives that are deeply offensive to the human mind.

Ignoring them is not an option. Hoping folks will not read deeply enough to find them is likely likewise not an option, though it seems to work for a lot of folks, sadly. Saying that's just the Old Testament may work for certain dispensationalists, but it won't work for those who believe all Scripture is inspired from.

The reason that these stories are useful to the enemies of the faith is easily understood. These incidents exist in a biblical context that is unknown not only to the vast majority of unbelievers today, but sadly to a vast majority of believers as well.

The only meaningful way to answer their use as an objection is to engage in some amount of biblical education. Few are prepared to give such instruction, and fewer have the patience and attention span to accept it anyway.

Let's lay the needed foundation for understanding sweeping acts of judgment as they are recorded for us in the Bible. For possibly you may be thinking this morning, I know individuals in my family. I know individuals in my place of work.

I know individuals all around me who have this very objection. I've always found it somewhat difficult to deal with. It's uncomfortable. But we need to think through these things. We need to understand why God commanded some of the things that God commanded.

If we don't think through it now, the time to be thinking through it is not when an unbeliever has raised this as an objection. And certainly, as I've said many times, young people, if you're in high school, you've probably already encountered people who have raised these kinds of objections.

If you have not, if you're planning on going into the educational system out there in the world, the university system, I can assure you that this is basic Christian belief 101. This is basic attack upon Christian belief 101 for many a professor and many a person in the university system.

Let's lay a foundation. If we do not understand God's judgment, if we do not understand God's justice in commanding these things ourselves, we will never be able to communicate this to someone else. You cannot communicate to someone else with clarity when your own thought is muddled and unclear.

We must, as uncomfortable as it may be, think through difficult issues. The first and most important foundation for understanding these texts is that God is the creator of all things. And is that not the very departure point today in dealing with our fellow creatures in our society?

They have no creator. The creator is an impersonal, material universe that has no purpose and no end. When I mean end there, I mean goal toward which it is moving. It may have an end someday in heat death, where everything simply becomes one temperature and there is no life any longer, but there is no purpose for what this impersonal creation does.

It doesn't call it creation. We sort of have a hard time not doing that. Our fellow citizens do not have a personal creator. They do not have a creator who is the lawgiver for all of creation, mankind included.

If you make it, if you create it, then you get to determine its value, you get to determine its purpose, you get to determine its behavior. That is the right of the creator over the creation. The Christian worldview says we have a creator.

We have one who can explain why the universe exists in the way that it does. We don't have to just throw up our hands and say, oh, look at this incredible informational, purposeful complexity of life.

Amazing how it got here. We haven't a clue how it happened, but boy, we're often glad it's here. No, the Christian says that that informational complexity reflects its creator, has its origin in its creator, and therefore God as the creator has the right to determine what is right and what is wrong and to bring his wrath against those who break his law.

General Revelation, Romans 1, and the Reality of Sin

Secondly, God's law has not only been revealed in special revelation in Scripture, but it has been revealed in general revelation in the creation around us. Why do I make reference to this? Well, some might say those Amorites whose iniquity had not yet been filled up, they didn't have the clarity of revelation that you have in the Bible.

They can be excused, can they not, for what they did? They didn't have prophets coming to them, and yet, what is the biblical response to that objection? There is a direct biblical response. We all know what it is.

The apostle Paul dealt with it in Romans chapter 1. He talked about the wrath of God coming against all the ungodliness of men, not just the ungodliness of men who have the printed Scriptures in their possession, but all the ungodliness of men who suppress the truth and righteousness.

Why? For what can be known about God is plain to them. It has been manifest to them because God has shown it to them. He's revealed it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made, so they are without excuse, unapologia, without a defense.

For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him for what they did. They became futile in their thinking. Their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they become fools and exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal men and birds and animals and creeping things.

God has revealed Himself in the creation. And it does not matter where a man looks. He can look out into the vast reaches of space. He can look into the creation outside of himself, into the laws of science.

He can examine the world. He can examine life around him, or he can look inwardly into his own conscience, into his own constitution, and he will find the fingerprints of God all around him. He does not have to use the special dust that the CSIs use to find the fingerprints.

They glow when he but will look. God has revealed Himself. Now, He has revealed certain aspects of Himself. He has not revealed Himself, the full clarity that He has, in special revelation. The text specifically says He's revealed His divine power, His eternal nature, so that man should give thanks and honor Him as God.

It's that very thing that man refuses to do. And so you see, those Amorites, they were not blind in the sense of lacking the revelation of God. They may have certainly closed their eyes to that. They may have had self-inflicted blindness.

But God's revelation was around them. They continued doing what they were doing against their conscience. Third point, God can righteously bring the penalty for sin to bear upon all at any point in time, individually or in groups.

He can do so through war, famine, plague, earthquake, fire, flood, hail, after reading the news this morning, swine flu. Whatever means the Creator has at His disposal. God can righteously bring the penalty for sin to bear upon all at any point in time.

He can do it individually. He can do it as a group. There is nothing in Scripture that says the penalty of sin is death, but God will always grant you a lengthy period of time to consider your ways. And in many situations, just add more sin upon your already burdensome sin debt.

God can bring His judgment to bear whenever He sees fit. You see, the problem is, since God has long suffered, since God so often delays the coming of His judgment, we assume that's necessary. We assume that must happen.

In fact, in our creaturely and sinful madness, so often we say, well, God has to be prepared. Really? Be very careful when you bring up issues of God's righteousness. You don't want God to be prepared.

If God were fair, He would bring His judgment to bear instantly. That would be fair. And you would have no intercessor. You would have none to interpose. You would have to answer solely for your sin. You do not want God to be fair.

It is amazing what I hear. Unrighteous men and women flapping their gums, accusing God of unfairness. What an amazing thing. God demonstrates His righteousness in bringing His wrath to bear. He can do so in many ways.

The Bible makes it very plain, and it's only the naturalistic materialism that we are soaked in in our society that causes us to be uncomfortable about this. God uses the natural realm to bring about His judgment.

You see, we as people who are so likely to be imbibing naturalistic, humanistic concepts go, oh, no, famine. Famine is just due to, well, it's climatological, it's due to you driving your SUV, it's due to all sorts of things like that.

And since we've started to understand a little bit more about how our universe works, we have a little more technology available to us, then it's really easy for us to say, oh, all that stuff is just completely natural.

Well, isn't it wonderful that you've figured out after all this time some of the mechanics of how God created the world, but that doesn't explain the why. That only explains the how. How and why are two different questions.

Why is it that famine is in one area and not another? Well, you know, you might come up with, you know, the weather does this. We still can't predict the weather very well. You put satellites in the sky and balloons in the air and they still mess it up.

Why is it? The Bible says that God brings His wrath to bear. That death comes about because of sin. It's not just some natural thing. And sometimes God brings judgment upon a people and it is a great judgment.

And many feel at the same time, sometimes He does not. Sometimes it's one at a time, so it's not as easily perceived or seen. The Creator has many things at His disposal to bring about His judgment. Fourth point.

Here's another that the world does not share. There is no innocent person post Adam. There is no innocent person. Oh, we use the term all the time. We use it in the sense of someone who has not broken a particular law.

How dare you do this to an innocent person? But you see, when it comes to cosmic justice, there is no innocent person post Adam. Original sin teaches that all people, young and old, are tainted by sinful rebellion and hence are reprehensible in God's sight.

If we determined the size of Christendom on the basis of how many people actually believe that, how big would it be? So many who call themselves Christians today do not believe what I just said, refuse to believe what I just said, refuse to believe the fifth chapter of Romans and the fact that we are in Adam and by His one transgression, we were constituted sinners.

No! That's got to be unconstitutional. There is a judicial anachronism. Thinking again. Original sin teaches that all people, young or old, are tainted by sinful rebellion and hence are reprehensible in God's sight.

Every day, God does not bring final judgment to bear upon any individual is a day of grace. What was the message that Jonathan Edwards preached that caused people to fall out in the aisles, to cry out for mercy and weep in repentance, but to remind people that they were on a rotten bridge over the very fires of hell and at any moment did He give way.

God by His Spirit caused people to recognize their true state. We live in a day of senseless men so distracted by the things of this world, so distracted by our gadgets and our games and our amusements that the contemplation of eternity, few are those who look past just their own current experience to consider eternity, let alone their relationship with it.

Every day that God does not bring His wrath to bear upon the sinner is a day when undeserved grace and mercy has been extended and how often is God ever thanked. Quick is man with accusation of unfairness.

Slow is man with thankfulness for mercy. Fifth point, entire nations. Entire nations have been obliterated by earthquake and volcanic activity in the past and have barely made it into the historical records of the process.

The Bible is not the only record of God bringing His judgment to bear upon sinners. History tells us entire cities wiped off the face of the map. In a matter of moments, the naturalist and materialist goes, oh, you shouldn't build your city on the side of the volcano.

Well, there's some wisdom there. There's some wisdom. But the Christian, who may fully understand the natural processes whereby a volcano erupts, does not have to create deities in the middle of the earth who are belching forth fire as man's various religions did in the past.

Doesn't have to do any of that. But can still see, in the use of the natural world, the very judgment of its creator. Oh, the humanist goes, oh, volcanoes don't care about mankind. That's right. They're just natural things.

But you see, if you believe that God is about doing something and this is creation, that that's the reason this creation exists, then you see the hand of God accomplishing His purpose. Sixth, God's wrath is seen every day around the world as mankind suffers and dies.

Not due to a cruel and personal universe, but due to the result of his or her own sin. They love their sin. Every person must confess in their more honest moments that they love their sin far more than they love God and His truth.

In honesty, you can look into your own heart. Is not every act of sin a demonstration of your self-love over your love for anything else, including God and His truth? Mankind loves its sin. It adores its sin.

Those Amorites were not a bunch of nice, innocent people sitting around doing their best. They were in love with their sin. Judgment day. God's wrath is seen every day, whether we are willing to see it or not.

We as Christians are called to see it. We do not have the option of walking along with the humanistic world and closing our eyes to what the Creator is doing in His creation. We should not think that way.

And yet, how often do we? That's what the world is trying to do, is to make you think that way. So that it creates a dissonance when you read the Word of God. That's where it comes from. It comes from the world inserting itself into our thinking.

Selective Judgment, Idolatry, and the Amorites

Seventh point. It's a whole lot more than three. I know you're not accustomed to that. It's okay. We'll get through this together. But at other times, for His own purposes, sometimes He doesn't say what those purposes are.

Sometimes we can discern them. But sometimes, for His own purposes, God brings a more widely seen, more concentrated stroke of judgment against sin. Often this judgment is against a particular form of idolatry.

I simply point you to Egypt. I point you to the gods of Egypt. I point you to the plagues and the exodus. A particular form of idolatry. A great military nation. Look at the monuments to idolatry that continue to scar the face of the planet to this day that came from Egypt.

Monuments to man's brilliance. We still sit around going, how did they do that? Given the technology they have, how did they do that? Brilliance of the mind in service of what? Idolatry. Idolatry. Sometimes that large stroke of judgment comes against a particular form of idolatry.

Destruction of the gods of Egypt or destruction of the first one. Sometimes it is a demonstration of God's judgment on sin, such as the Amorites. Those Amorites, those Egyptians, if we will but look at what the Word of God says, become a byword for God's judgment.

God will not be mocked. Look what he did to the Egyptians. They had their gods and it has been rightly pointed out that each one of the plagues demonstrated that certain gods popular amongst the people of Egypt had no power at all.

Yahweh is the creator of all things. God was making his name known. And every time the Passover has been celebrated since then, there has been a remembrance of God's demonstration of the foolishness of idolatry.

God has the right to make his name known and make his righteousness great. It must be remembered that God has a purpose in doing what he does in his creation. I am so glad we don't believe in a God who is just simply sort of stumbling along in response to mankind.

He hasn't done much of a good job but that's the kind of God he is. When God killed the firstborn of Egypt, he was bringing a selective judgment upon an idolatrous nation that engaged in gross immorality as part of its worship.

And he was in bringing just punishment even upon a select group demonstrating his judgment upon the gods of that nation to the revelation of his name and power. His judgment that night has been used by him to benefit his people for thousands of years since that day.

Now you see, use this as a way of detecting improper thinking in your own mind. But that's not fair! That's not fair! Just the firstborn? You see, you need to start thinking of your own firstborn. Or maybe you are the firstborn.

That's not fair! You mean it would have been more fair if God just wiped all the Egyptians out? Were the firstborn guilty sinners before God? Did the firstborn deserve any of the mercy or grace that had been extended to them from the day of their birth?

So why can't God? To demonstrate, Israel is my firstborn. I am God. All these gods you worship in the most powerful nation in the world at that time are nothing before me. Why can he not bring selective judgment to bear to glorify himself?

The reprobate says, well I'm not glorifying him for it! Well that's the whole point. I know 9 is not a normal number to have for God's physical number. Finally, we started with those Amorites, right? And you think about them and they were primitive people.

God knew about their iniquity in the days of Abram. And he makes this odd statement that their iniquity is not yet full. It's not yet completed. The Amorites, we know from history, this is a place where secular history, archaeology can be of assistance to us in some ways.

It can shed some light. It is helpful. We know the Amorites engaged in the grossest forms of depravity in their religious work. They were about as bad as you can get. We have excavated their cities. We have found their idols.

We know that they caused their children to pass through the fire and sacrificed a mullet. We see so much evidence of their continuing troubling presence in their religious beliefs. What trips up the people of Israel, you have the high places, the groves.

These are places of sexual immorality and prostitution, temple prostitution. And maybe it might sort of help us in some ways to sort of go, well, yeah, you know, that explains God's judgment. You see, the reason He said to kill them all, because they were diseased.

They had engaged in such horrible things that there were all sorts of diseases, horrible diseases, and you couldn't even keep them around. They were so debauched, so you had to wipe them all out. And maybe there's, you know, something that might be useful to someone in considering that.

As long as it doesn't become, oh, well, as long as I have a naturalistic reason for what God did, then I'll accept it. As long as it doesn't become that. The Amorites were absolutely stewing in iniquity.

Their entire culture was a boil in the face of a holy God. Yet, you wipe them out through those diseases? Plague? Yeah. Famine? Sure. There's all sorts of ways God could have wiped the Amorites out. But He chose to use His people.

He chose to bring His people into the land and use them to spew these people out of the land. It's faceless. It's troubling. It's troubling to think of godly Joshua leading the people of God into the land with a sword.

And that sword is bloody with the blood of those people that are under the wrath of God. What did that do to them? What was it like to be one of the soldiers of Israel, tasked with this horrific attack?

We dare not miss the impact upon the people of God this judgment had, nor the fact that it would press home upon them the seriousness of their calling as the people of Yahweh and His demand that they be holy even as He is holy.

But also must be remembered that God's holiness demands punishment of those who engage in such acts as child sacrifice and temple prostitution only by rejecting the holiness of God as a basic reality in our world that these acts of judgment ever be criticized.

And yet is that not exactly what mankind learned? Is that not the very purpose of false religion? Is that not the very purpose of humanism, is to remove from the mind of man that knowledge that Paul said is there for everyone that God does exist.

He is holy and I am not. The natural man will flee from that knowledge. But if you're here today and you bow to Jesus Christ, why are you not fleeing? Why do you actually purposely come here today to gather in His presence?

Because God by His Spirit quells that rebellion, takes out that heart of stone and gives a heart of flesh and announces forgiveness for those who repent and believe in Jesus Christ. And that's what we've done.

I don't know about you, but the contemplation of the true wrath of God and the seriousness of sin makes all of these self-biblical Gospels look so impotent. What foolishness to think that we as sinners can say, we must have a perfect Savior and we must have a perfect Gospel, or we are going to die.

If God is not the one who saves, who could ever save themselves? So it's quite probable that someone in this congregation in this next week, if you have any conversations whatsoever with the people around you in this world, you're going to hear this objection.

How can you believe in a God who would do these things? What are you going to say in response? How are you going to reply? Maybe you might say, how can you believe in a God who reveals himself to be holy and yet does not punish sin?

Remember, you're talking to an image-bearer. The person who bears the image of God is already suppressing that knowledge. All you've got to do is pry on the fingers. You're not going to like that, but the Holy Spirit blesses.

It may very well be the very means that He used to drive people to our just and holy God. We cannot help but we consider such a tremendous subject as this, to once again be reminded of your majesty, your holiness, and our sinfulness.

So once again, we are caused to flee to our Savior, to recognize that only being in Him, having His life, we have peace with Him. Father, help us as we have the opportunity to speak your truth to others, to speak with clarity.

May we recognize that when we speak your truth, you are glorified. The reaction and response of that person does not determine whether you are glorified in the proclamation of your truth. So even when we face men who hate you, who despise your law and your ways, may you cause us to know what it means not to fear the face of man.

And we desire to speak your truth, your truth alone. In Christ's name.