MASS DESTRUCTION:
Is God guilty of genocide?
By Melvin Tinker
Evangelical Press. 113 pages. £6.99
ISBN 978 1 783 971 855
This little book is an excellent examination of the difficult issues surrounding God’s command that the Canaanites should be wiped out and also of the apologetic challenge highlighted by the book’s subtitle.
For such a difficult issue the book is appropriately multifaceted, examining the different angles of the problem until we begin to understand more clearly what the Bible actually says, what we know about the practices in these ancient cultures from other disciplines such as history and archaeology, and why it is that we tend to react to sin so differently to God.
No ducking
Melvin Tinker is not prepared to settle for answers that fail to do justice to the evidence of Scripture, or that merely duck the key issues (for example, he doesn’t simply conclude that the Bible uses hyperbole in commanding the utter destruction of whole Canaanite nations). Rather, he takes the evidence of Scripture at face value; but best of all he then draws these texts into the whole narrative of the Bible, so that we are brought to consider their fulfilment in Christ, who was put under the curse of utter destruction at the cross that we need never face such a fate.
This book does much more than just get God off the hook (though it does show what a lazy argument it is to casually accuse God of genocide); it causes us to wonder afresh at what Christ suffered that sinners such as us may go free.
