p. 84 | Untitled article

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · July 23, 1867

Infidel Objections to the Bible Answered. No. 5.

5. God is Cruel, Unmerciful, Destructive and Ferocious. I will not pity nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy. Jer. xiii, 14. And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them. Deut. vii, 16. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling. 1 Sam. xv, 2, 3. Because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even he smote of the people fifty thousand, and three score and ten men. 1 Sam. vi, 19. The Lord thy God is a consuming fire. Deut. iv, 24.

God is Kind, Merciful and Good. The Lord is very pitiful and of tender mercy. Jam. v, 11. For he doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men. Lam. iii, 33. For his mercy endureth forever. 1 Chron. xvi, 34. I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God. Eze. xviii, 32. The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works. Ps. cxlv, 9. Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. 1 Tim. ii, 4. God is love. 1 John iv, 16. Good and upright is the Lord. Ps. xxv, 8.

Infidels seem to delight in representing the God of the Bible as a cruel and implacable being. Their evidence on this point is chiefly composed, as in the quotations above given, of the judgments he inflicted upon the Canaanites, when they were driven out of the land to make way for the children of Israel. Let there be no begging of the question here. We grant that the judgments were severe: the question is, Were they not just? To determine this, we must look at the character of these nations, and the provocations they had given for God's terrible dealings with them. For this end we call the attention of the reader to the following graphic, though in every way just and candid, remarks, from “The Great Controversy,” by H. L. Hastings, pp. 47–51.

There is a certain class of men who, for the sake of covering up their own faults, and excusing their non-compliance with Divine law, or for some similar purpose, take infinite pains to make us believe that the Bible is a fiction, its author a cunning knave, and its God a fiendish monster of cruelty. One of their hackneyed objections to the Bible is this—“Can it be true that a merciful God would destroy the nations of Canaan, as is related in the Old Testament? We don't believe in such a God.” Well, let us reason together. Who makes noxious reptiles and venomous insects? The God of nature, is it not? Very well, if venomous insects should drive the inhabitants of a country out of her borders, who would be to blame? No one, except the God of nature I suppose! Well, the kings of the Amorites were driven out, not with the sword or the bow of Israel, but by the swarms of hornets which infested the land—sent, Moses says, by Jehovah—infidels would say by the laws of nature. Now, what is the difference? These are the recorded facts. If God sent the hornets, then it was certainly right for Israel to possess the land—and if nature sent them, the case is not altered one jot that I can discern. In either case their title is equally good, and the cavil is good—for nothing.

But it is asserted that there were others of the inhabitants of Canaan who afterward were expelled from its borders by force. This is very true, and to be able to judge of the propriety of the act, we must note a few striking traits in their characters. Among these were the following:

In the first place, they were gross and abominable idolaters, who would not worship, obey or serve, the Most High God, having perhaps views and conceptions of his character in accordance with those of their modern sympathizers. Second: they were firm believers in the essential elements of modern “spiritualism,” and practiced necromancy, or pretended to divine and reveal secrets by means of intercourse with the departed; and were thus guilty of the abominable practice of leaving the living God to consult dead men. Third: there were many of them who were fully developed “spiritual mediums,” or in ancient phraseology “consulters of familiar spirits,” “diviners,” and “wizards,” who, like the “medium” at Endor, professed to bring up dead men for the accommodation of backsliders and God-forsaken rebels like king Saul. Fourth: they were, as it became idolatrous heathens and “progressive” spiritual believers to be, freed from the restrictions which God had placed upon the lustful propensities of their nature, and were consequently at full liberty to develop their ideas of “free love” and “passional attraction.” Fifth: their principles of “free love” not only allowed adultery and fornication, but also incest, and all nameless licentious practices of the most revolting character; and quite as free as ever I heard of being advocated in any modern spiritual newspaper, or by any speaker in a spiritual convention. Sixth: they not only begot children in shameless and promiscuous debauchery, but those same children were murderously burned in the fire by their ungodly parents.

These were some of the precious traits of character belonging to that reprobate and besotted race which God destroyed. A race scarcely possessed of one solitary recorded virtue, and not exempt from one single imaginable vice. A race debauched, polluted, licentious, and idolatrous. A race progressive, but progressive toward perdition. This was the race of whose presence God purged the world, when their iniquities were full. These were the men whom the land vomited forth. And if Israel had imitated their examples, the reddest bolts from Sinai, or the most lurid fires of Sodom, would have been tame compared with the retributive vengeance which would have been visited upon them. But these men—who would have suffered capital punishment in any land where there is to-day the semblance of a decent law—these men, who had forfeited their lives a dozen times—these men who had done ten times more mischief than their necks were ever worth—these men who had seized on one of the fairest spots beneath the sun, and turned it into an ulcerous brothel of whoredom, and a den of crime and blood—these ancient murderers of their own children—these heathenish “spiritualists” and “free lovers of olden times—these are the men for whom the gentlemen infidels, spirit-rappers, and Bible haters of the present day, generally, plead.

Ah! they pity the poor Canaanites. They blame Moses. They find fault with Joshua. They rail at God. They plead for these villains, cut-throats, Sodomites. They palliate the stinking lecherousness of these unholy scoundrels! They, who have learned all they ever knew of God or goodness at their mothers’ knee, or from the Bible, the hymn book, or in the Sabbath School, rail at Jehovah for wiping out such a plague-spot as this from the universe. Why is all this sympathy? Are they partial to such courses? Are they Spiritualists and necromancers? Are they “free lovers” too? Is it a “fellow feeling” that makes them so “wondrous kind?” If so, I excuse their indecent assaults upon God, and truth, and righteousness. But if not, I ask some reason why men speak evil of the things that they know not of.

The following from “Bible Triumphant,” pp. 19, 20, is also to the point as showing a harmony between those scriptures where the skeptic claims a contradiction.

It has ever been the boast of Infidel writers, that the God of the Bible is cruel and unmerciful, and the texts brought forth in the first part of the above proposition, are ever quoted to sustain this idea. If the reader will take the trouble to examine the passages referred to, in their connection, he will see that they all allude to the judgments of God falling upon wicked nations, for their sins against him. In Jer. xiii, 14, God proposes to destroy the nation of Israel from the land, because they had sinned with a high hand, and trampled on his holy law, but before the threatened judgment was executed, he offered them pardon and forgiveness if they would turn unto Him and cease to pervert his ways. Hence this text is purely of a judicial character, and cannot be made to sustain the skeptic’s attack. Deut. vii, 16, alludes to those nations that were vindictive enemies to God’s people, and he commanded Israel to destroy them. This also was a judgment visited upon the sinful, and therefore founded in justice. The same is true of 1 Sam. xv, 2, 3.—Amalek had done much evil to the people of Israel when they were in the wilderness, killing those that lingered behind in their march, that were fatigued and weary, &c. And for these acts of hostility, God had decreed the overthrow of the Amalekites, and the time now came for its execution. But why, it will be asked, did God decree the destruction of women and helpless infants? We answer, it was a judgment upon a nation, and as such it fell upon all. It was so in the days of the flood, and so of Sodom and Gomorrah. Indeed, the infidel who blames the “God of the Bible,” and boasts of his “God of nature,” is in a worse difficulty than this, for his God buries millions by earthquakes and volcanoes, many of whom are innocent women and helpless babes. His acts are not deserved judgments for sin, but they come without warning or mercy, upon the innocent and helpless. But, says the infidel, they transgressed a physical law, and must suffer its penalty. So we say of those nations. They transgressed a moral law, and they suffered its penalty. The infidel sees no cruelty in his “God of nature” visiting families by disease, by famine and pestilence, taking all the little ones from affectionate parents; he sees no injustice in his “God of nature,” in executing the penalty of violated law. Yet if the God of the Bible inflicts a judgment upon a nation of sinners, he is frightened, and exclaims cruelty! unmerciful! ferocious! Reader, be not deceived. It is done to lead you from the God of truth who does all things for the best, for the good of man, and for his own glory.