God's Commanded Extermination of the Canaanites Justified
All of the evil coming upon us is from God, just as was the case with the Canaanites and the Israelites.
The Righteousness and Equity of It
Infidels like to bring reproach upon Christians and try to discredit the Bible by scurrilously claiming that the Scriptures depict God as unjustly killing an entire race of people (the Canaanites) to make room for his chosen people (the Israelites) in his holy land. This, they say, exemplifies genocide committed on the basis of favoritism, that it displays an unrighteous double-standard, and that it therefore reveals the Bible to be the mere production of men and not that of a holy God.
This is all false and needs to be refuted, not only because it is a slander against God on the part of unbelievers, but more importantly because many Christians do not fully understand how the righteousness of God is manifested in the annihilation of the Canaanites. It is feared that doubts have crept into the minds of more than a few believers because of such claims and their inability to refute them, and it is the hope of the writer that this article will help to dispel those doubts and equip Christians to better stand against the lies. In addition, there are useful lessons to be learned in the case of God’s judgment against the Canaanites which can be applied to modern societies and the churches of the present day. This will be done in the second and third sections of the article, but first we will begin by examining three facts of the case that despisers of the Bible overlook.
1. The Canaanites Deserved Their Punishment
The Canaanites were very wicked people and the moral law by which they were judged was not unknown to them. Both of these truths are made clear by the passage quoted below where God declares that he has judged the Canaanites by the very same law that has just been recited to the Israelites:
Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;) That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people. Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 18:24-30)
The Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Commentary (1871) on Leviticus 18:30 summarizes the matter well:
In giving the Israelites these particular institutions, God was only re-delivering the law imprinted on the natural heart of man; for there is every reason to believe that the incestuous alliances and unnatural crimes prohibited in this chapter were forbidden to all men by a law expressed or understood from the beginning of the world, or at least from the era of the flood, since God threatens to condemn and punish, in a manner so sternly severe, these atrocities in the practice of the Canaanites and their neighbors, who were not subject to the laws of the Hebrew nation.
Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575) remarks:
Let no man think, that before Moses' time there was no law, and that the law was by Moses first of all published. For the self-same especial points of the moral law, which Moses setteth down in the Decalogue, were known and observed by the patriarchs long before Moses.
A later Bullinger, Anglican minister Ethelbert William Bullinger (1837-1913), made a list of thirty-four laws seen in force in Genesis, given by Jehovah, and subsequently confirmed in the Mosaic code.
2. God Was Longsuffering Toward the Canaanites
Another overlooked fact is that God did not immediately execute judgment upon the sinful Canaanites. In fact, he was very longsuffering toward them. The punishment inflicted on Sodom and Gomorrah (Canaanite cities) in Abraham’s time should have been a warning to them, but Leviticus 18:24-30 (quoted above) and the preceding verses make it obvious that they were continuing to do evil in Moses’ time, practicing even the very same sin of the Sodomites.
Patrick Fairbairn, in an article about the Canaanites from his Imperial Bible Dictionary (1866), writes:
Nor should it be forgotten in regard to the Canaanites, how much to them of mercy was mingled with the judgment; that to give space for repentance, the stroke of vengeance was for centuries delayed; that various means of reformation were employed, especially in the exhibition of judgment upon the cities of the plain, and the living testimony of such eminent witnesses for the truth as Melchisedec, Abraham, and his immediate descendants; that plain intimations also were given, from time to time, of the coming doom—all tending, when duly considered, to show how loathe God was to execute the work of doom, and rendering more manifest the incurable corruption and heedless profligacy of those on whom it was to alight.”
3. The Israelites Were Given Similar Punishments for Similar Crimes
Finally, there is the fact that the children of Israel, in Leviticus 18:28, were cautioned by God to keep his law, lest like the Canaanites, they also be removed from the land for defiling it with their sins.
That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.
This warning was repeated at other times in Israel’s history:
But if ye shall at all turn from following me, ye or your children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods, and worship them: then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them.
—1 Kings 9:6-7
And I will cast thee out, and thy mother that bare thee, into another country, where ye were not born; and there shall ye die. But to the land whereunto they desire to return, thither shall they not return.
—Jeremiah 22:26-27
These warnings were unheeded and so centuries after the Canaanite nations were overthrown, the Israelites, because of their evil, were visited with famine, pestilence, and the sword of foreign invaders until they were reduced to a small number and removed from their land, just as were the Canaanites.
So we see that the charges of the infidels have no basis. The Canaanites were a degenerated race of people practicing the most vicious evils, and they had a sufficient knowledge of the law of God that they should have known what God required of them. We also know that The Lord gave them warnings and plenty of space for repentance before he executed vengeance upon them, and it is evident that the same laws and similar judgments were pressed upon the Israelites at a later date. The Lord indeed has favorites but he has never judged the Canaanites, or anyone else, by any other standard than that given to the Israelites through Moses. This is the same law to which every man will be called to account on the last day, and the same law for which Jesus Christ was judged and punished on behalf of all those who submit to him in faith.
What We Can Learn From These Examples
There is a very important lesson that can be gleaned from the examples of first the Canaanites and then later the Israelites being severely punished by God through the diminishing of their people and their dispossession of their land. The lesson is that nations should expect the same regardless of where they are in the progression of history. God’s law is perpetual and universal, and the violation of it will be met with the same treatment already meted out to both the Canaanites and the Israelites.
But we must first understand that it is God who assigns the families of man to their lands—the ethnic divisions in humanity and the distributions of land are not arbitrary.
We might survey the seemingly chaotic record of history in the movement and mixing of peoples, the redrawing of borders, the rise, fall, and disappearance of nations and empire—as well as the causes for these changes (wars, floods, famines, plagues, forced migrations, etc.) and mistakenly conclude that it is all a matter of happenstance, but the Bible tells us differently. The Christian should understand that the entirety of history, including the calamitous events that shape it, is ordained by God and guided by his hand. Men are born into their respective families, tribes, and nations, and placed in their particular lands by the ordination of God.
This is the teaching of Acts 17:26 where it is said that God “hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation...” As the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary on this verse states:
The apostle here opposes both Stoical fate and Epicurean chance, ascribing the periods and localities in which men and nations flourish to the sovereign will and prearrangements of a living God.
Presbyterian Minister J. A. Alexander (1809-1860) states in his commentary on Acts:
In this verse Paul claims for the Most High the right to govern, and indeed the actual control of the vicissitudes of nations, whether temporal or local, as part of his great providential plan or purpose.
Without a doubt, the history of man has been tumultuous, and observation of this fact might cause some to ask: If God is guiding man’s history, then why does it appear so turbulent? Why all the instability in the nations? The simple answer is that the heart of man is unstable. It is the sins of mankind that have shaped his history and all of the upheaval in the nations has been God’s judgment for it, having served to either punish the wicked, correct the righteous, or both. But we ought not to interpret this as meaning that man has somehow sinned himself into a position of autonomy where his will has overridden the decree of God. This can never be. Rather, God guides the will of man to fulfill his own plan. “A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). That is, men consider and propose to themselves what they will do but the Lord overrules and directs all their designs and actions as he pleases. “Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass, when the Lord commandeth it not?” (Lamentations 3:37).
We must also understand that God does not arbitrarily bring destruction upon nations. A principle of judgment set forth in the Bible is that the Lord does not displace nations from their rightfully possessed land until they cast out themselves by their own wickedness. This is why both the Canaanites and Israelites were dispossessed as previously shown. John Calvin, in his commentary on Genesis 15:16, explains further:
“...for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.” Since he had given that land to the Amorites [i.e., Canaanites] to be inhabited by them in perpetuity, he intimates, that he will not, without just cause, transfer the possession of it to others; as if he would say, 'I grant the dominion of this land to thy seed without injury to any one. The land, at present, is occupied by its lawful possessors, to whom I delivered it. Until, therefore, they shall have deserved, by their sins, to be rightfully expelled, the dominion of it will not come to thy posterity.' Thus God teaches him that the land must be evacuated, in order that it may lie open to new inhabitants. And this passage is remarkable, as showing, that the abodes of men are so distributed in the world, that the Lord will preserve quiet people, each in their several stations, till they cast themselves out by their own wickedness. For by polluting the place of their habitation, they in a certain sense tear away the boundaries fixed by the hand of God, which would otherwise have remained immovable.
How It Applies to Us
So how does all of this apply to the nations in our time? Those who have eyes to see it, can easily discern that the same judgment has come upon the formerly Christian nations for their apostasy. All around us we see the children of Japheth—that is, those of White European stock—being greatly reduced in number, while foreigners flood their lands. Not only so, but non-Whites are even usurping positions of power over them. The latter is an example of the punishment described in Deuteronomy 28:42 “The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.” As the Keil & Delitzsch Commentary (1866) says on this verse:
Israel would be utterly impoverished, and would sink lower and lower, whilst the stranger in the midst of it would, on the contrary, get above it very high . . . because he would be exempted with all his possessions from the curse of God, just as the Israelites had been exempted from the plagues which came upon the Egyptians.
We have to learn to look beyond the people and the means by which social destruction is effected. If we say that anti-Christ Jews and their numerous allies are behind many of the movements that are deliberately being used to destroy Christian civilizations, we are speaking truth. If we say that non-white immigration is being used to displace our people, we are speaking truth. If we say that we are being drawn into foreign wars as a means of killing off our men, we are speaking truth. If we say that domestic enemies are deliberately excluding White men from positions of power and influence in business and replacing them with women and non-Whites, we are speaking truth. If we say that pornography is being used to weaken our men, we are speaking truth. If we say that contraception and abortion are being used to reduce our population, we are speaking truth.
All these things are true and we should be strongly opposing them and the people who are destroying us through them, and recognize the elements of self-destructiveness in them. But we must first recognize that ultimately all of the evil coming upon us is from God, just as was the case with the Canaanites and the Israelites. The people and the means by which they were reduced in number and driven from their land were only secondary agencies by which God’s punishment was being accomplished. Unless we recognize this fact, understand why we are being punished, and repent of our transgressions, there is no hope of preserving our nations and turning back the evils that are destroying us, because it is the hand of the Lord that is against us. Man’s effort without God’s blessing will always come to nothing: “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain” (Psalm 127:1).
In fact, very little of the evil coming upon us is anything new. For example, using mass immigration/multiculturalism as a weapon of national destruction was done in ancient times:
Esarhaddon was the Assyrian king who resettled Samaria with foreigners after this capital city of the northern kingdom of Israel fell to Assyrian forces in 722 B.C. (Ezra 4:2). This was an example of the Assyrian policy of intermingling cultures in the nations which they conquered to make them weak and compliant.
—Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 1986 edition, Esarhaddon, page 350
We see it was the Assyrians who used this method to weaken their conquered foe, but do we see who brought the Assyrians upon the Israelites? It was God: “O Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in their hand is mine indignation. I will send him against an hypocritical nation, and against the people of my wrath...” (Isaiah 10:5-6). So the Lord brought the Assyrian rod of his anger upon the hypocritical Israelites, who professed God with their lips but had removed their hearts far from him (Isaiah 29:13).
There is no need to here enumerate and describe the sins of our nation. Every Christian is too painfully aware of how wicked and degenerated America has become and there can be no doubt that without widespread spiritual renewal resulting in the repentance of a large number of our citizens this country is doomed to destruction. But our concern here in particular is with the professing church. What is its standing before God at the present time?
Is it not obvious that our people are in the same condition today as the Israelites of Isaiah’s time? We still have millions of Americans professing to be followers of Christ but how many of them display any fruit of true conversion? How many are noticeably different from the ungodly in their thoughts, words, and actions? And how many churches are putting up any resistance to the current satanic world system that is doing its best to destroy all God-given distinctions in humanity? We must acknowledge that the numbers are appallingly low. In so doing, we must also acknowledge that what we have left of Christianity in America is mostly a hollow shell of empty words, and recognize that it is not possible that anything other than judgment can be upon us for it.
We tend to think of God’s providence in terms of blessing but not cursing; and in bringing good upon us but not evil. However, the Bible makes it clear that when evil comes it is from the Lord: “Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it” (Jeremiah 6:19). We have no reason to believe that Americans are any less under divine judgment for all their sins than either the Canaanites of the Israelites in the examples given above, or that the American professing church is not similarly being judged for its worldliness and hypocrisy. “Shall I not visit for these things? saith the LORD: and shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?” (Jeremiah 5:9).
Conclusion
Our peace, stability, and safety as a nation does not consist in the possession of military power or in the skillful practice of political maneuvering. If we are faithful to God our enemies will not be able to destroy us, just as Balaam was unable to do anything but bless Israel despite his wicked intent (Numbers 24:10) driven by avarice. And if we are unfaithful to God nothing can preserve us, just as the “certain man” who “drew a bow at a venture” executed God’s foretold judgment against Ahab (1 Kings 22:17-35) despite the fact that he was disguised and so unrecognized by his enemies. Sennacherib’s overwhelmingly powerful Assyrian army was destroyed when Hezekiah appealed to Jehovah for help (2 Kings 19:15-36), but, on the other hand, the “Lord delivered a very great host” of Israelites into the hands of “a small company” of Syrians in the time of Joash “because they had forsaken the Lord God of their fathers” (2 Chronicles 24:24).
To many professed Christians today, a simple faith in God to set everything right seems not only child-like in its simplicity, but childish in its naivete. Yet, this is what the Bible plainly teaches that we must have. This faith does not exclude the wisdom of men ordering things rightly to attain practical goals, but the former is the foundation of the latter. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10). We cannot expect men to possess the understanding that is necessary to preserve our nation if they lack faith in the One who by grace gives the gift of wisdom to men, and instead they rebelliously lean unto their own understanding. And as long as the people are only honoring God with their lips while their hearts are far removed from him, and every man is doing what is right in his own eyes, then we can only expect the same treatment received when the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel and his hand was against them for evil.
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
—2 Chronicles 7:14
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