Before answering this question, do you think if God is real, then he is unjust or immoral because of the bad things that happen in this world? Like war, rape and killing of innocent people?
God commanded the Israelites to wipe out the Caananites. Did God just decide, hey lets wipe out this group of people for no reason? Or did God judge the Caananites and gave reasons for wiping them out?
The Caananites had been committing atrocities for hundreds of years. An example of just one of the things that they did was they had a large metal bull god called Molech. It had 2 hands that were together, palms facing upward and likely cupped. At the base of this idol was a furnace.
They would heat up the furnace so that the metal was roasting hot. They would then sacrifice babies on the molten hot hands of the idol. They didn’t kill the babies. They put the babies on there, alive. Think about how long and how torturous that would have been for those babies that were seared to death by the hot metal.
A greek writer called Plutarch wrote about this practice. He said that the drummers would beat their drums louder when babies were put on the hands so that the parents of the baby didn’t hear the screams of their children. Think for a second of seeing and hearing your own baby, or anyone elses go through such a thing. This was evil.
At this point, atheists would usually state “Why does God allow such evil in the world?”. Yet here we have a scenario where God actually does something about it, and now people are complaining about it and saying God is immoral because he wiped these people out.
Why complain that God doesn’t stop evil, but then complain when He does?
The truth is that it doesn’t matter what God does. If we point out the above, then people will conclude that it was right for God to act. But then they go and look for other reasons to shake their fist at God.
They may say “Why did God have to wipe them all out? Why couldn’t he have just wiped out those that were doing the sacrificing?”.
“Aha”, they say! They feel good about themselves again. God is a monster. He wiped out innocent people.
Well the Bible says in Duetoronomy 7 that the Israelites are to wipe everybody out, but it then says in the next passage that the Israelites are not to intermarry with them. But how can they intermarry with them if they wiped them out?
Do you see the problem? It was hyperbole. So if we conclude that they all weren’t wiped out, another accusation comes. Usually something like:
“Okay, but why did God wait 400 years to act? Why couldn’t he have waited just 200 years before he acted?”
If a valid answer was then given to that question, then they would find some other reason to shake their fist at God. It doesn’t matter how many good and valid answers there are, such people will never be satisfied. They will faultfind where there is no fault. They will pick and hunt down reasons to say “This is how I would have done it”, thinking they know the full facts and every possible outcome and scenario.
God gives us reasons for many of the things that He does, but He doesn’t give us all the reasons. If He did, we wouldn’t have time to read them all, nor fully understand them all.
Thinking you know better than God is a dangerous place to be. It is all comes down to pride. We want to be our own Gods, and to think we have all the answers. The God of the Bible to such people is an offense. No amount of words or reason can persuade such people, because it is a heart issue, not a head issue.
Is it a head or a heart issue for you? Ask yourself this question: If you don’t believe in Christianity, but then you were provided with infallible evidence that it was true, would you then become a Christian?
If the answer is “no”, then it is either a heart issue, or you are seriously misinformed about what Christianity is, and God has done for you by sending His only Son to die on the cross for YOU.