Laws Governing Warfare

Deuteronomy 20 and the Purpose of Warfare Laws

If you'll turn with me, please, in your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 20. Deuteronomy chapter 20 will be our scripture lesson for the evening. Deuteronomy chapter 20. Let's ask the Lord to bless our time together.

Our Heavenly Father, once again, as we open your law in this evening, as we struggle with a difficult text, we would ask that you would assist us, that you would give us hearts of understanding, that you would give us ears that would hear.

May we handle your Word aright, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. We come to one of those texts this evening that, once again, presents challenges to us. One particular, as we will see as we read through the chapter, that you may encounter, may have already encountered in times past, as an objection to the faith.

But we continue and press forward with this second giving of the law, Deuteronomy chapter 20, when you go out to battle against your enemies and see horses and chariots and people more numerous than you.

Do not be afraid of them, for the Lord your God, who brought you up from the land of Egypt, is with you. When you are approaching the battle, the priest shall come near and speak to the people. He shall say to them, Hear, O Israel, you are approaching the battle against your enemies today.

Do not be fainthearted, do not be afraid or panic or tremble before them, for Yahweh your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to save you. The officers also shall speak to the people, saying, Who is the man that has built a new house and has not dedicated it?

Let him depart and return to his house, otherwise he might die in the battle, and another man would dedicate it. Who is the man that has planted a vineyard and has not begun to use its fruit? Let him depart and return to his house, otherwise he might die in the battle, and another man would begin to use its fruit.

And who is the man who has engaged a woman and has not married her? Let him depart and return to his house, otherwise he might die in the battle, and another man would marry her. And the officers shall speak further to the people and say, Who is the man that is afraid and fainthearted?

Let him depart and return to his house, so that he might not make his brother's hearts melt like his heart. When the officers have finished speaking to the people, they shall appoint commanders of armies at the head of the people.

When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you.

However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. Then when Yahweh, your God, gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword.

Only the women, the children, the animals, and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself, and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which Yahweh, your God, has given you.

Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not the cities of these nations nearby. Only in the cities of these peoples that Yahweh, your God, is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave anything that breathes.

But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite, as Yahweh, your God, has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all the detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against Yahweh, your God.

When you besiege a city a long time to make war against it in order to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them, for you may eat from them, and you shall not cut them down.

For is the tree of the field a man that it should be besieged by you? Only the trees which you know are not fruit trees you shall destroy and cut down, that you may construct siege works against the city that is making war with you until it falls.

Amen.

Warfare, Fear, and the Welfare of the People of God

So here is the 20th chapter of Deuteronomy. And we have at the beginning instructions for battle. And we might wonder, well, as interesting as this is, what kind of application can we make today? Once again, there is a concern for justice and a concern for the welfare of the people of God.

First of all, in this matter of warfare, in this matter of going out against a people, and we certainly see that this happens a great deal when we read the historical books. We read about what took place in those days.

We can be thankful. I think that we do not have as much warfare in our land anyways. Certainly, as we look at the world, there is a great deal. But in those days, again, we are talking about the people of God here.

And when they go into battle, the exhortation to them is that they are not to fear their enemies. Do not be afraid or panic or tremble before them. Why? For Yahweh your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to save you.

And so, again, the context that is envisioned here was not, after David and maybe Solomon, was not a common experience of the people of Israel. Once the people of Israel began to decline in their worship, began to decline in their leadership, this kind of a situation was not very common.

And hence, the instructions here are almost idealistic in the sense that when you have the officers saying to the people, Who has built a new house? And you have not dedicated it yet. You, you go on home.

Can you see some of the evil kings of Israel who want to have as many men as possible on the field because they really do not trust God. They are not doing this because they are serving God. They are actually idolaters in their heart.

They are not going to ask these questions. They don't care if someone has dedicated their home. They don't care if someone has planted a vineyard. They don't care if someone is engaged to a woman who has not married her yet.

Let those people depart. They don't care. And certainly, we can understand when you get to the last, who is the man that is afraid and fainthearted? Let him depart and return to his house so that he might not make his brother's heart melt like his heart.

We certainly know one thing. We know that in battle, and certainly battle in this sense, up until, there were periods of time when the Romans developed certain weapons that sort of had a range to them.

But battle up until the modern period was a very personal thing. Until you had long-range cannon and artillery and machine guns and things like that, battle was pretty much one person against another person.

And it was up close and personal. And so, in that situation, when one person falters, maybe you might get, if you get two or three together, and they falter and they begin to run, there is a mentality amongst mankind.

Once certain people are running, I think it might be time we run too. And so you can certainly understand, you know, if you think you're fainthearted, if you think you're going to turn and run, why don't you leave now?

Let's leave the people here that actually want to be here and that are actually pursuing this for their proper purposes. Again, how often did that end up happening? Certainly during the days of Joshua, I would imagine it would.

Maybe a couple of the righteous kings of Israel, David or someone, would have engaged in properly doing this kind of instruction. But I doubt it happened very often. And these kinds of promises really only have a meaning when you really actually believe that what you're doing, you're doing because God is with you and you are the people of God and you've given evidence of being the people of God.

Once people knew that, yeah, you know, we call Yahweh our God, but there sure are a lot of high places up on the mountains these days. Yeah, I see people going to the tabernacle to worship or later on going to pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but those same people that do that, I see them sneaking off to the ashram, to the bales, to the high places.

Don't you think that would fundamentally change the conviction that you would have in going into battle that these people around me are all servants of Yahweh? We know that what we're doing here is just and right.

Probably change the coherence of those military efforts. But what we have in the law, though, is clearly if the people of God are seeking to do what is right and God has brought them into a situation where they must defend their land in this instance or in other instances, maybe they're driving people out who have invaded in or whatever the situation is, these were wise things to do.

They were things that showed that God cared about His people and cared about what was going to happen afterwards. But then we have verses 10 following. And this is going to be a section where people are going to raise these issues and they are going to use this as an argument against the Bible and against the God of the Bible.

The Objection of Genocide and the Judgment on the Canaanites

And there are two contexts that are raised here. The one is a context of coming against a city that is far away, that is outside of the land of Israel. In other words, not during the time when the people of Israel are purging the land of the Canaanites, Perizzites, Perivites, so on, so on, so on, all the people that are listed later on.

When they're not driving the people out of the land that has been given to them as an inheritance. And again, remember, when we looked at Leviticus, why were these people being driven out? Very often, very, very often, when this issue is raised in a conversation with people, and people will say, well, I have an honest intellectual objection to believing the Bible because it sanctions genocide.

It sanctions genocide in Deuteronomy chapter 20. By name, various peoples are to be wiped out completely, man, woman, and child. Always remember that the Scriptures had given us a context in the first giving of the law.

In fact, all the way back in Genesis chapter 15, you'd had that cryptic statement that had been made that the trespasses, the sins of the people of the land were not yet full. They had been given literally centuries in which they had continued in their child sacrifice and in all of the worst forms of human behavior and self-destructiveness that is a part of the degradation that was theirs.

Now, when you live in a day like today where there is no moral, objective moral standards any longer, that idea, you know, in and of itself has to be defended. But the reality is that the Scriptures tell us that these nations had engaged in this kind of behavior and, in fact, that the land was spewing them out.

It just so happens that the people of Israel were the mechanism that God was using to do that rather than locusts or plagues or earthquake or fire from heaven or whatever else it might be. And so there are two different contexts.

One, when you're outside of the land and you take a city. Now, if they choose not to fight, then they become your servants. Now, you probably wouldn't just drag everybody off and drag them back to Israel and use them as slaves or something.

They would be placed under some kind of a subservient treaty where they would have to send, in essence, a tax money, a fealty tax, to the people of Israel. That's the first one. If they make peace with you, then they will serve you.

But if they make war with you, then the men are to be destroyed because they are the army. It wasn't a day like today where you had the standing army and then you had the artisans and stuff. Everyone took up arms.

I mean, we talk about cities here and we're thinking of Phoenix. Okay, no. Cities rarely, well certainly some cities did have many inhabitants. But most of the time, most cities in that region of the world at that time were what we would call villages.

They might have some high walls. Certainly we're reading about Jericho right now. That's an exception. But in general, these were not huge, huge places. It might be a little bit more like New River.

Sieging New River.

That means they would not have a standing army. Or if they did, they had certain people who were soldiers. But when it came time for battle, everybody had to become involved. And so the men were the fighting force.

And so they were to be destroyed. But the big issue is, yeah, but you kept the women and the children for yourself. And there's always this look of, see, you're God's evil and this was just Bronze Age morality and la la la la la la.

Well, how do you respond to something like that? Well again, context is always the most important thing. And very rarely people take the time to think, all right, well, what should they have done? I mean, okay, we're living in a different land in a different time.

That's a given. However, if the men are gone and you just march off,.

What happens to the women and the children?

You just going to leave them there? You see, by making the people of Israel, by making them booty, they were being made responsible for the care of these people. They weren't to put them to death. So now what do they have to do?

They had to provide for them. They had to provide for them.

And so if they had just been left to themselves, obviously the people around them were not going to just come rushing to their aid, like, oh, well, we feel so sorry for you. The UN has called us to come help you.

There was no UN. There were no pastel blue helmets to come and provide for food and so on and so forth. So the giving of these people to the Israelites as booty saved their lives and required then the Israelites to care for these individuals.

I've never once in any presentation by an atheist or something, as you know, 99 of the time the atheist just quotes a line or two, makes application, runs on. They haven't even taken a second to give any serious thought to what this might mean.

But just as this morning we saw the lex talionis is actually a means of restricting retribution in the same way this is a means of actually providing for sustenance. Once you took the men away, you had destroyed the defense.

You had destroyed the means of production and hunting and so on and so forth. These weren't Amazon women that were going to go out and take care of all these things yourself. Now the people of Israel had to take care of these individuals in that way.

And so the exception to this, then in verse 17, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as Yahweh your God has commanded you.

Why? Why? Well, once again, when the atheist raises these issues, they don't care and have no place in their worldview to care about verse 18. So they may not teach you to do according to all the detestable things which they have done for their gods so that you would sin against Yahweh your God.

That's not going to convince an atheist. They don't care. It is irrelevant. Why? Because there really isn't anything that is detestable to God. There is nothing detestable at all. It didn't matter that these people, for generations, had been causing their children to pass through the fire.

Can you imagine what kind of cultures resulted when generation after generation after generation had been engaged in that kind of quote-unquote religious worship? The degradation, the generational degradation that had taken place.

It's not like, well, you shall instruct them in the ways of Yahweh and send missionaries to them or something along those lines. That doesn't happen. They are to be destroyed so that they may not teach you to do according to all the detestable things.

Now, it's interesting, a lot of Christians struggle with this as well. They look at the text like this and they go, that's not the loving God of the New Testament. Well, I'm not sure which parts of the New Testament you've been skipping over.

When Jesus gives the parable of the people that rejected his rulership over them, and the king says, bring these before me that would not have me rule over them and kill them in my presence, I guess you just skipped over that part or spiritualized it or did something I don't know.

And maybe you skipped over all the repeated references to the Chesed, the loving kindness of Yahweh in the Old Testament. But still, people look at this and they go, I just can't accept this. And really what it requires, the only heart that is going to see this, take it in its proper context and recognize this, is the heart that also has looked at Isaiah 6 and has, with Isaiah 6, seen Yahweh sitting upon his throne and has recognized with Isaiah, I am a man of unclean lips and I live amongst a people of unclean lips.

As long as you do not have any concept of the holiness of God, you will not be able to understand God's right to bring judgment upon people. Now, it's interesting, a lot of Christians, if you ask them theoretically, if you ask them theoretically, would God have the right to, well, did God have the right to destroy the world by flood?

Well, it does say that the thoughts and intents of man's heart were evil continually before the Lord. Will God have the right to judge in the final day?

Well, yeah, He has to.

Okay, could God bring judgment upon a people in this world? Well, He did in the flood. How about in an earthquake? Well, yeah, okay, I suppose, you know. How about when Samson knocked down the pillars of the pagan temple and killed all the pagans that were inside that were worshiping their god and himself?

Well, sure, they're engaged in idolatry. So God has the right to do that as long as it's some sort of a supernatural event. Fire from heaven, Sodom and Gomorrah. You know, would it look like a nuclear explosion?

In fact, some people theorize that it was. Eh, whatever. Nuclear explosion. Oh, okay, supernatural. Hail stones falling from heaven against Israel's enemies. Oh, that's an interesting way of doing things.

In those instances, as long as it's some kind of supernatural thing, okay. How about using the people of Israel to wipe out those idolatrous nations? No, can't go there. Can't go there. Why not? Well, because someone might use that as a basis for doing that themselves.

So if someone might misuse a divine truth, a divine truth should never be enunciated. There is no divine truth that has ever been enunciated that has not been misused.

None. None. That's not an excuse.

So that really is the issue. That really is the issue. As I've thought about it, what really bothers people is the idea of God using fellow sinful beings as the means of bringing about that execution.

The executing of God's justice against the people. That's what causes people so much trouble. And the idea that Israel was to drive out all those nations so that they would not be there to be a snare.

So that they would not teach them to do according to all the detestable deeds that they had done for their gods. So that there would not be idolatry in the land. There would not be syncretistic worship in the land.

That is not considered by the modern person to be a sufficient basis. Because they do not have any understanding of what holiness is, what the justice of God is, what the wrath of God is. They just want to say that's just a petty deity that gets angry when people do things he doesn't like.

When you're a parent and you do what is right for your child by disciplining them, teaching them to do what is right because you know that they need to do those things that make you a petty tyrant.

No.

God is so far above just the parent-child paradigm that is often used in scripture. But he's so far above that. That we must keep that in mind as well. And so this will be brought up to you. And to the heart that has experienced no meaningful conviction of sin.

And I've encountered some of those people. I mean it seems like they've been given over. Their conscience is seared. It is a frightening thing. It should be frightening to every one of us just simply to go, again, but for the grace of God, there go I.

But to see God having given someone over and you can just tell in your conversation, they have absolutely positively no concern that they will someday stand before a holy God.

None.

That is something when you see it that certainly should cause you to be very, very, very concerned. And then the chapter ends with an interesting section. Interesting section because I would imagine that there are some environmentalist theologians who would make this one of their favorite texts of scripture.

And if you don't realize that there are environmentalist theologians, there are. The people in liberal denominations have to find something to do. And so they focus on sections like this. For is the tree of the field a man that should be besieged by you?

I wish they would listen to that line because the answer is no, it's not. Trees are trees and the non-fruit trees can be cut down to build siege works so that you can take the city that you need to take.

The point here is not to establish some kind of Israelite echo religion or something. The point is that in taking a city, if that is something that is necessary to be done, that you do not destroy the land unnecessarily in the process.

If you need to build siege works and there are trees to be cut down to do that, that's fine. But the idea was just leveling everything around a city so that once the city was taken, there could never be any meaningful use of it any longer because that which supported it, which provided fruit and so on and so forth, had been destroyed.

It was a scorched earth policy, which obviously would take more time in those days, but let's be honest, we today engage in activities that can make anything that the Israelites thought of doing look amateurish.

We certainly have the technology and the firepower to do these kinds of things. And if we were to make any type of application, it would seemingly be that if you want to engage in warfare, you do so in such a fashion that you have a goal and that there are limits upon what you do.

Evil men don't like that. Evil men do not want to have any limits placed upon them in any way, shape, or form. And what is said here, obviously, is that when engaging in warfare, there is to be limitation and those engaging in warfare are to continue the use of their intellectual faculties.

Warfare, Modern War, and Practical Application

Now, I've done a lot of reading in history and a lot of it has been focused in the Second World War. I've done a lot of reading in the American Civil War as well. There's just not nearly as much in World War I.

It's interesting how that, you know, the war to end all wars didn't, and so it sort of faded a bit in history. But World War I was an amazing war in the death that took place. Needless, senseless, the numbers were staggering.

I mean, in most battles in World War II, you did not have the kind of just mass carnage that you had in World War I.

You might go, how can that be?

Well, because people were moving. It was air battles and tank battles and there's only so many people in a tank. But when you have 40 ,000 people rushing across a field into the teeth of machine guns, you can lose 25 ,000 of them in a single day.

The bloodshed was amazing. And the destruction with the poison gases and things like that to the land and to civilians, I'm not saying it got better in World War II in the sense that you think of Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and things like that.

It was obviously a different kind of war. But the point is that there is supposed to be thought. There is supposed to be, even in warfare, there is to be a discernment as to what your goals were, doing only what you needed to do and not going beyond that.

And so when you encounter passages like this, when you encounter texts like this, you have to ask yourself the question, is the person that is using this text even slightly aware of what comes before and after the text they're reading?

I mean, one sort of very practical thing I would do, if I were you, and some of you do engage in conversations with people on the street or wherever it might be, if you're at the university or something like that, is if anyone ever throws this text at you, Deuteronomy 20, and the Amorites and the Perizzites, Perivites, whoever they were, they're gone now.

If they ever throw that at you, here's what I would do. Aside from trying to explain the context and the fact that God had pronounced judgment on his people long ago, I would ask, so do you know what else is in the chapter that you're criticizing?

And 99 .9 out of 100 are not going to have any idea. And if you want to see, especially in a modern American post-modern university student, stutter. What you could do is go, well, if you don't like that part of the chapter, what about the part of the chapter where the Israelites are prohibited from cutting down fruit trees.

When attacking a city?

That will stop them in their tracks, because they have no idea why that would be there. And that gives you the opportunity on a very practical level of saying, you know, you might want to be a little slower to trust internet websites, Facebook postings that give you, quote unquote, ammunition.

Instead, you might want to consider that there's much more to what's found in the Old Testament scriptures. And keep one other thing in mind. Jesus Christ, who predicted his own death, burial, and resurrection, and rose from the dead, Jesus Christ believed that every one of those chapters in those very same books, and we know exactly what they said in his day, they have not been changed, we have copies of the scriptures that predate Jesus now, were the very words of God.

And so you are, in essence, mocking what Jesus said was the very truth from God. Do you really think it's wise to mock one who rose from the dead? Might give you a few more minutes to explain why you follow him.

Just on a real practical level. So we, as in the Sunday school, can see the end. We can see the end of the Synoptic Study. I can see the end of the Holiness Code Study. There are only a certain number of more chapters that we need to work through that will have given us, I think, a solid basis for having a good grasp on the nature of those laws, the nature of the texts that people use to try to undercut the authority of the law, and then having made a lot of application, recognition of the nature of that law, its holiness, its goodness, and hopefully give you a lot more confidence to be able to make reference to these texts as you speak to people and seek to explain to people why God's law is a good thing and why we, as his creatures, need to recognize what he has said to us.

Let's pray together.

Our gracious Heavenly Father, once again, we do thank you for your word. As we look to yet another year of service to you, we know. We know because of what is happening around us. We know because of what we see in the news, in reporting, that we are going to be called upon over and over again to give an answer of the hope that's within us and especially why we believe that you have spoken concerning how man should relate to his fellow man, what marriage is, what the gift of sexuality is.

And as we have these opportunities given to us, as it is demanded of us to give an answer, may we do so with a knowledge of your word and a confidence in the consistency of your truth. May we explain to others and be used by you as instruments in your hand to encourage our fellow believers to bring conviction of sin, to be used as instruments and bring your own people to yourself.

We desire to be used in this way. We desire to see you honored and glorified. We do pray for our land. O Lord, bring revival. Let your gospel go forth. Have mercy, Lord, we pray, even in the midst of judgment.

We pray in Christ's name.