Problem Passage | Does the Bible Advocate Infanticide? | Psalm 137:9

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We don't have the same authority over others that he has over all of us.

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People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio.

The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject

Christ, therefore, forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of Almighty

God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath

come, they will be consumed and they will perish.

God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended, and became a

man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to

the right hand of the Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us.

Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods

of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

We're your host, Harrison Kerrig and Pastor Tim Mullett, and today we'll answer the age -old question, does the Bible

advocate infanticide?

Now, this question is coming from the verse, Psalm 137, verse

nine, and this is what it says.

How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock.

So, Tim, a lot of people, they see this verse and it really causes a lot of problems

for them in their heads.

So, what is this verse talking about?

Is this verse saying that it is okay to kill babies?

Is that what's happening here?

All right, so when you read a verse like this, you do have to read the context a little bit, but then I don't even know the context will

really make it any better for people, like for most people.

All right.

So, but you do have to read the context here.

So, I'm not saying, hey, read the context and all of it, like, well, it'll magically solve all your problems, but then

think about what's happening here.

So, let's see, Psalm 137, I'm gonna read verse seven.

So, verse seven, remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they said,

lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations.

O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall be he who repays you for what you've done to us.

Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.

Well, that context just cleared it right up.

Yeah, man.

Yeah, it definitely, a lot better.

I now see how it means the opposite.

All right, so what you have is you have the Israelites going into the promised land to basically conquer the

promised land.

And one of the things that happens during that conquest is God, at various points, he

basically says to kill every single one of them, right?

So, go into the promised land.

Their iniquity, so, as they're going in, like, they're wandering in the wilderness, God says, like, the

iniquity of the Amorites has not become full yet, right?

So, I mean, there's things like that, but then once they actually go into the promised land, they are instructed to

kill them all, the women, the children, every single one of them.

Then, like, at different events, they don't kill the women, right?

They save the women and don't kill all the women, and they're rebuked by Moses for doing this.

So, what God had commanded at that point was specifically for the Israelites to go into the promised land

and wipe them all out, essentially.

And so then what's happening here, like, in this passage is you have two different things, two different situations that are

kind of being compared in certain ways.

So, in verse seven, it says, remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they said, lay it bare, lay

it bare down to its foundations.

And then, O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you've done to us.

And so, you know, like, what this is referring to is the Israelites being exiled, essentially.

And then it's talking back to, like, Edomites, the language of the Edomites there.

So, what's happening is, like, they're saying, hey, blessed will be the one who repays the Babylonians who took them into captivity

for what they've done to them.

And the way that they're gonna be repaid, like, the way that they would be blessed, in other words, is

if a nation comes in and wipes them out like they did to Jerusalem.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah.

All right, so, like, what's happening here is, like, you have to have some sort of theology

of God's justice that undergirds this.

And so, when you have people who read the Bible, they read the Bible as if it's just, like, a purely human book that's written by the victors,

so to speak.

So, then this is, like, what the Bible becomes in the minds of, like, the secular person who's reading it is it basically

just becomes, like, an exaggerated tale of the Jews and their conquest

and their moral rationalization and justification for it.

So, that's kind of what it becomes, right?

But then there's a lot of things that are just, like, utterly foreign to our way of thinking

that are characteristic of the Bible as it relates to passages along these lines.

So, what you have is, like, you have, like, in the minds of, like, a secular person, you read these passages

like this.

God tells the Israelites, go into promised land and wipe them all out, right?

So, God tells them to go wipe them all out.

Don't spare any of them.

Don't spare the women.

Don't spare the children.

Don't spare any of them, right?

Just utterly conquer them, destroy them, wipe them off the face of the earth.

What they're looking at, like, they're not saying, hey, there's a God who created the heavens, the earth, who is holy

and who is authorizing this specific action,.

Right?

Yeah.

So, that God doesn't exist in their mind.

So, God doesn't exist.

And so, then what it becomes is just kind of a human -to -human struggle.

And then the Jews in that kind of encounter, they're just these genocidal maniacs who are claiming

ownership of the promised land of their own initiative, right?

So, they're just kind of coming in like all of history has done, right?

So, if you think about the story of history, the story of history is a story of war and conquest and everything else, right?

Doing whatever was right in their own eyes, right?

That's how people view it, right?

Right.

So, now you have people in the 21st century who are viewing the act

of the pilgrims coming over from America.

They're viewing it through this lens of conquest and genocide and everything else.

And so, what you have is you have a lot of guilt, like a lot of guilt that the West has for

its sins or whatever that causes it to think about its own history in such a way

that's completely disconnected from every other people group throughout the history of the world, if

that makes sense, right?

So, if you think about what history actually is, it's like, hey, one civilization with a technological advantage

going to war against another civilization, and then the victor wins, and then they, so to speak, they're

gonna write the stories and then provide them moral justification for that.

And then like in the pagan world, then typically what you're gonna do is appeal to the God -wills -it as a way of sanctifying

anything and everything that happened during that time, right?

So, just some features of what I'm talking about, like conquest has always been a history, like the

story of the world is the story of one group of people getting some sort of technological advantage and

conquering another.

That's just the way it works.

And you draw that line back to creation, and that's what you find.

You're gonna find a story of that after a story of that.

But then the issue is like in this story of conquest, what you have is you actually have like a real story,

okay?

Like you have a real story of God making a promise to Abraham and to his offspring

and saying, hey, I'm gonna give you this land, right?

I'm gonna give you this land.

I'm gonna make you as numerous as the stars of heaven.

That's what I'm gonna do.

And I'm gonna use you as an instrument of judgment against these people that you're going in to displace, right?

So, you're gonna displace people that are mightier than you so that I will get the glory for it.

So, this isn't a story of like human glory.

This is a story of God giving the glory for giving them like this land that they

didn't work for, these houses that they didn't build.

And they're doing it because they're a means of God's judgment against people.

So, part of what's happening, like when you're reading the Bible, is you're trying to say, hey, if you're reading it through

the lens of everyone is good, right?

So, like everyone's good.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Then you've kind of missed the whole story of the Bible.

The issue is like these nations were committing abominable practices like Sodom

and Gomorrah.

Like that's what these nations were doing.

And as you read through the old covenant, what you see is God is warning the Israelites, if you do the abominable

practices that these nations, you're dispossessing, are gonna do.

Like you're gonna go into the promised land, you're gonna do these same things, and then I'm gonna drive you out.

And the instrument that I'm gonna use to drive you out happens to be the Babylonians in this kind of encounter, right?

So, the Babylonians came and did to Israel what Israel went in and did to the people of the land during that

time, right?

Now, the issue is though, like and what people can't understand is like, well,

why would you do this, right?

Why would you wipe out everyone, right?

So, wipe out the bad people, right?

Yeah.

Like the idea is like just -.

Wipe out the Hitlers.

So, like the issue is it's like, so, in the minds of many people, it's like, hey, you have like the Geneva Convention and all this,

like you don't wipe out non -combatants like that.

So, you don't do that kind of thing.

But then part of the problem is, and there's like just basic observations that people are just completely and totally unwilling to make at

this point that I'm only gonna vaguely hint at because I'm not an idiot.

But like, you can look at the, look at what's happening in the Middle East right now.

And what you're gonna see is that like when a certain, like when people set

themselves to do evil, like it's not just as simple as like, like trying

to civilize them or something like that.

Like, hey, just install a new form of government and all your problems will go away, right?

Just give them democracy, right?

Like, so just go in and conquer them and give them democracy and help them.

Well, what, how did that work out, right?

So, how did that actually work out?

Like, so it seems like we've tried this experiment over there, right?

You try this experiment over there and what ends up happening is like you, like you

can't figure out what the difference between the terrorist are and the non -terrorist, right?

So like, so like the issue is like, we don't have this category for God looking at a people

and declaring that they're utterly wicked, right?

Like to the core.

And so, you know, God tells the Israelites, if you don't wipe them out, they're gonna constantly be a thorn in your side,

like for the rest of your time while you're in the land.

And the issue is they didn't completely wipe them out.

And you can look at what happened and they were constantly a thorn in their side for their

entirety of their history, right?

So they didn't wipe out the Philistines.

And what happens, you end up getting like constant wars with the Philistines throughout the entire history, you

know, of them occupying the land, you know, facing Goliath and all this kind of stuff.

And so like, that's what happens when they didn't listen to what God says, but then this is all predicated on the reality that people are

fundamentally evil and that not only are they evil, but then they pass that same kind of hatred

down, you know, from generation to generation, if that makes sense, right?

Yeah.

So like the issue is like when you're looking at what's happening, if Israel would have listened to God and wiped them out like you

told them to, they would have had a completely different experience of living in the promised land

than what they actually did because they were dealing with people who were kind of like these terrorist kind of people.

Do you see what I'm saying?

Like the only way I can like give you a modern equivalent of like trying to help you understand what's happening.

So like the issue is like, it's not like the assumption that we take

when we're going into these encounters is we assume that all culture, we have this

multicultural kind of assumption.

So you assume that all cultures are equal, right?

And they're all basically good and they're all basically noble.

And then it just reduces to when you're comparing two cultures, what you have is you have like one culture that just has

strengths in one area and then one culture that has strengths in other areas.

And then the idea is you gotta mix them all together.

And then what will happen when you mix them all together is all the strengths will rise to the surface and all the weaknesses

will be put away.

But then that isn't actually what happens, right?

So when God sends Israel into the promised land, like what you have is you have them conquering a people who are fundamentally wicked

and fundamentally evil and so evil to the point where God's saying, hey, it's time to utterly judge you and

utterly wipe you out.

And erase your seed from this earth because it's so thoroughly corrupt at this point, right?

But then the issue is only God has the right to make that kind of determination.

But then if God makes that determination, he makes it.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Right, yeah.

So he's authorizing the Israelites to go into the promised land and to wipe these people out.

And the issue is you can look at it and you can say, hey, well, that's genocide and he's a moral monster and whatever else.

No, but the issue is God's gonna send people who don't repent to hell forever

and ever.

So what this is actually about is you don't actually think God's just and you don't like his justice and you don't like his standard.

And you have a standard that's elevated above his.

And so -.

And that's not even the first time that something like this would have happened.

I mean, do you think just grown adult males died in the

worldwide flood?

I mean, who are the ones that God killed as the final plague versus

towards the Egyptians when Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites go?

Sure, firstborn.

I mean, he killed the firstborn, right?

So yeah, but you keep going.

Well, I mean, that's the pattern in every single instance.

So he kills the firstborn, right?

Right.

The inheritance of Egypt in that point.

He did the same thing in the flood.

He did the same thing in Sodom and Gomorrah.

Yeah, all is judgment.

So then the issue is what you actually have is you have a situation where it tests your basic fundamental

theology.

Do you believe that human beings come into the world as sinners, right?

Do you believe that they're hopeless apart from God's grace?

Like apart from God's grace, they're not going to turn to them.

They're not gonna turn to God, right?

And so then does the creator have a right then to pass judgment upon those who

will not come to him?

Right?

Who violated his standards.

And it's not just a matter of they won't come to him as if they can make up for it.

They come into the world inheriting the guilt of Adam.

They come inheriting his sin.

They come guilty.

Like it's death row inmates deserving of nothing from God.

The Lord gives, the Lord takes away.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

And so what we have is we have like a sentimental understanding of infants at this point to where we don't think that

infants are deserving of death and hell and everything else.

And so all those things are being put to test in these kinds of passages.

So when God says, hey, I'm gonna wipe these people off the face of the map because they're thoroughly wicked and they're thoroughly evil.

He has every right to make that kind of determination at that point.

And we have no right to say anything to him other than just to shut our mouth, right?

So like we don't have any answer back to him at that point.

So that's, I mean, basically that's the fundamental situation that you're talking about.

When God commands judgment against the people, like he utterly wipes them off

the face of the map.

And part of, and I could give like reasons, like I'm trying to give some sort of reasons why that makes sense theologically,

reasons why that makes sense practically.

But like the issue is like, you can see what happens when you have a stubborn recalcitrant

people whose hands are against everyone, who like you just have

generation, like the same kind of problem.

You cut off the head of the Hydra or whatever and seven more heads grow up.

But like, that's the way it works.

Like, and there's no way to deal with that kind of enemy that entrenches themselves in a civilian population

and is training everyone else up to do their wicked deeds.

And I mean, like, what are you going to do?

Like, you get what I'm saying?

Like, you know, if you have like a romanticized view of history, a romanticized view of like human nature, then

you realize that people have like faced that kind of problem before and they had a lot harsher solutions to these kinds of things

because they're probably a little bit more realistic about the nature of human beings.

But then what's happened right now is we just, we've utterly bought into this proposition that everyone is fundamentally good, right?

That everyone is fundamentally good and that everyone deserves a chance and all this kind of stuff.

And so in that, you know, there's no sense of like corporate, like one of the things we've lost is any

sense of corporate guilt anymore too.

But like, meaning like it's all about the individual.

So we think about everything in terms of the individual.

Whereas before, like, I mean, you can't even think that way as you read the Bible where Adam sins and the entire human

race is consigned to sin.

That's the language of, you know, federal headship.

That's something that's utterly alien to us to where like most people throughout history, they understood

these concepts a little bit better too.

And they relate to this kind of topic to where like, if the king insults you, his people, right?

You all share in that act and you have some sort of responsibility to depose the guy if you don't wanna

be and remove him, you know, and offer whatever condolences you could,

you know, because you're connected to him and he's your ruler, you're a part of that, you know?

So I think we've lost a lot of these concepts too.

But I mean, I think to the broader point, God is judge and whatever he says is right.

And, you know, his purposes will stand.

And he determined, like, and he looks at Israel and he says, he determined to bless them.

And he says, I'm gonna give you all this stuff.

I want you to know, I'm gonna give you this house that you didn't build for, that you didn't build, right?

This land that you didn't, you don't deserve.

And I'm not doing it because of your righteousness.

He says, I'm not doing this because of your righteousness.

I'm doing this because of the wickedness of the people that are there, right?

So I'm like, this is undeserved favor.

Like, you're gonna be an instrument of judgment against these people, but you're no better than them, right?

Yeah, I mean, they were worshiping golden calves.

You're no better, you're not, you don't occupy the moral high ground here.

Like, the issue is you're gonna be my tool of judgment against people who deserve to be judged.

And I'm gonna give you their land as an unmerited gift, right, that doesn't belong to

you.

But you need to remember that I'm gonna do the same thing to you that you're doing to them when you, I

mean, Deuteronomy predicts this, like you're, you know, who has given you a heart to obey all these words?

Well, I have to this day, I haven't given you a heart.

And so you're gonna go and you're gonna disobey, you're gonna do the same abominable practices they did.

And then I'm gonna use another nation more wicked than you to drive you out of the promised land, right?

I did the same thing that, you know, and so that's kind of the pattern there.

And that's a lot of what's being referenced too and talked about in this kind of passage.

So then you have like, then you have the Israelites looking at the wicked Babylon, what they did to

them and saying, hey, you know, blessed is the one who returns that evil that you did to us upon you, right?

Yeah.

So that's the short version of what's happening.

But none of it makes sense apart from the belief that there's a creator God and we stand as objects of his wrath and we come into the

world as sinners.

You know, you remove that kind of foundation, then this is just, you know, one nation having a feud against another

nation who happened to win and now is wanting petty vengeance against them.

But then like the issue is like for the Israelites, they want God to be faithful to his promises and

he had promised to bless the world through Abraham's offspring, right?

He made servant.

And so what they're calling God to do is be faithful to his promises and, you know,

restore them back to the promised land at that point, for sure.

So what would you say, I mean, I'm sure there's people who are going to read a passage like this and then

try and, you know, essentially try and argue that, hey, it actually is

okay to just indiscriminately kill children, right?

Especially, I can imagine a lot of people who are pro -baby murder, who would

look, point to a passage like this and see, you know, say, hey, see, God's all

for killing kids.

So there you go.

And so what would your response be to that kind of person making that kind of claim

using a passage like this?

Yeah, I mean, I've heard atheists basically do that and they basically point to this passage and say, hey, who are you guys to fight against abortion when

you believe in a book that's, you know, has these kinds of passages in that, like the

God you serve is pro -baby murder too.

And so, I mean, but basically, yeah, what they've done at that point is they basically just turned God's

absolute right as the creator to act in judgment upon his

creatures.

So they've turned that into a license.

Like, so, you know, the person who's gonna use the Bible to justify that on their own end, they're turning that into a

license to play God themself.

So the issue is like, we as human beings, we don't have the right to play God.

And we have to remember the same Israel, like the same lesson that Israel was being taught.

And the lesson that Israel was being taught was you're no better than them, right?

Yeah.

So like from a human to human perspective, like we're not any better than them.

God just decided to have mercy on us that's undeserved.

So God showed unmerited favor and unmerited kindness on us, you know, by saving us from our

sins.

But then like, so the issue is like, we don't have the right to play God, but God has the right to be God.

And so then if you're looking at the Bible and you're saying, hey, these are the words of God, God exists, he reveals himself in the

scriptures.

These are his words.

He has the right to make those kinds of judgments.

And you know, he's gonna do it regardless of whether or not we like it, you know, as we've seen.

So like the issue is he wiped Sodom and Gomorrah off the map and you have to figure out why is that

right?

Right?

Like, why is it right for him to do that?

Why was it right for him to flood the entire earth and kill all the innocent women and children and babies?

And why was that right?

Why was it right to send the Israelites into the promised land to displace these nations

with their abominable practices?

And you can read through Leviticus, and I mean, you know, there are people who are engaging in sodomy and bestiality and

incest and, you know, adultery and fornication and all sorts of depravity.

They got what they deserved.

So the issue is when God acts in judgment, people get what they deserved.

And like, they're not getting anything less than what they've deserved.

And like the entire history of the world has been God using one wicked nation to act in judgment

against another wicked nation doing these very things.

So like, that's the story of history.

The story of history is God using pagan nations as means like of judgment

against other pagan nations who refuse to bow their knee to him.

So no one's getting anything that they don't deserve.

But then none of this is licensed to like an individual person to take life into

their own hands in that way, so.

Right, it all comes down to he's a creator.

He has authority over us as his creation.

We don't have the same authority over others that he has over all of us, right?

Right, amen.

Okay, well, I think that's a good place for us to wrap up the conversation then on this passage.

And, you know, obviously there's a lot of people who they read a passage like this and they immediately label

it as a problem passage, right?

A quote -unquote problem passage with the square, the square quotes, the

scare quotes.

And, you know, in reality it's not.

It just takes some actual basic theology of God's

authority, God's dominion over us as his creation.

And really, I mean, at the end of the day, I think for a lot of Christians it will be,

it feels like a hard pill to swallow, right?

Because of the pressure that society might put on you with a passage like this.

But then in reality, all it does is it just highlights the mercy of God in

a pretty incredible way when you think about what's being spoken of here as something that all of us

rightly deserve to happen to us, right?

We all rightly deserve hell.

And then God decided to show mercy on us anyway.

So you can look at this if you want as a sort of problem passage to try and avoid and try and

hide from people that might try to twist it into something that it doesn't mean.

Or you can look at it the right way and allow it to highlight just

how merciful our God is towards us and how much love he has demonstrated, how much patience,

how much grace he has demonstrated towards us, knowing that we are deserving of all

these same things.

So that's how I would encourage people to think about something like this, is

just realize that we are the same exact people who deserve the same exact thing to happen to us, and yet

God showed mercy towards us.

So thank you, Tim, for explaining all that.

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