Justifying Murder?

There is a discussion going on at The Beautiful Heresy about the atrocities in the OT...and whether God ordered genocide....whether "god" ("satan") commanded it (and empowered it)...or whether it was the carnal nature of the Israelites mixed with their desire to possess the land that spurred them on to jihad. I'm definitely (surprise) of the opinion that the first option is not an option. God is not the author of the OT atrocities. I sway back and forth between the other two choices. Anyway...since my time is sometimes so limited, I am going to post excerpts from the thread, edited just a bit, here on my blog.

One of the posters took issue with the idea that it was equivalent to condoning murder if one believes the genocide in the OT was right because "God commanded it." I don't see it that way.

I think you justify murder when you justify the killing that occurs amidst all the rape and pillage and plundering in the OT….killing everything that breathes….oh….and take the gold and silver for “me” because God “ordained” it. I think that was indeed murder. When I watched the movie Apocolypto, it occurred to me that those scenes of horror give a glimpse of what the Israelites did to all the “ites” when they stormed into the cities they had “dedicated” to God. And that carnage is attributed to God. “Surely God is fighting for Israel” they declared….and perhaps he was. He declared in several places he would send the “hornet” before them and drive the nations out little by little. But hey…why dink around….the land was theirs…..it was the PROMISED LAND….and who cares about all the people who lived there beforehand. Perhaps God’s plan was more along the lines of a migration…..little by little would indicate that.

Perhaps the purpose of the God ALLOWED jihad in the OT was to show them what was in their hearts and to show us what is in our hearts. Granted, God has final responsibility because he allowed it to occur. The buck stops with him…..just like the buck stops with him when a premature infant dies or a teenager is killed in a car crash or a young mother dies of cancer. He alone grants life, and he alone has the right to take it. It is when fallen humans enter the picture and they “hear God” tell them to wipe out civilizations or individual human beings (Achan comes to mind here….although his is only one of many) that I think man’s carnal nature or satan or whatever name you want to attribute it to takes over and causes man to take matters into his own hands.

When I lived in Cleveland there was a horrible story about this really religious guy….who took his young son….under two to the foundry where he worked. “God” told him to sacrifice the boy in one of the blast furnaces. He did. That was about fifteen years ago and I don’t remember all the details….but there is a more recent case that describes a mom in Texas who actually killed her daughter by cutting off her arms because she thought God was telling her to (and I guess if you believe in total determinism it WAS God telling her to since he ordains and plans each and every detail of each and every little thing that happens) I originally read about the story in the Religion News Blog. There are several posts about Dena Schlosser, the Texas woman who sacrificed her ten month old daughter to God by cutting off both of her arms a few years ago. r. She also tried to sever her own arm at the shoulder. I think it serves as a chilling example of just how far a religious belief in the killer god of the OT and mental illness can plummet someone into a macabre world of horror. It is not a pretty story. The baby died. Donna Schlosser was deemed insane and is in the same mental institution as Andrea Yates. As a side note, in another article on the site called Women Who Killed Kids Form Friendship it talks about the friendship these two women share.

Some disturbing excerpts from the article:

Dena Schlosser saw a TV news story about a boy being mauled by a lion and thought it was a sign of the apocalypse, a delusion that led her to sever the arms of her baby Margaret, Dr. David Self told the jury on the sixth day of Schlosser’s capital murder trial.

“She felt she was basically commanded, in essence, to cut Maggie’s arms off and her own arms off, and her legs and her head, and in some way to give them to God,” said Self, who evaluated Schlosser in the months after her arrest.

Self said Schlosser remembered being at an electronics store with her husband the day before the killing. The woman recalled John Schlosser mentioning Maggie’s “little arms,” and she thought of him as a Biblical patriarch planning “something big” because he was buying a clock radio, Self testified.

Self also said Schlosser felt compelled to dress Maggie “as finely as possible” because she planned to give her to God or Doyle Davidson, the pastor of Water of Life Church in Plano, which the Schlossers attended several times a week.

“It is layer upon layer of this craziness, this psychosis,” Self said.

“She didn’t understand why she was being locked up in jail for following God’s will,” Self said.

This extreme example is the concern my friend annie voices when she asks, “who is going to make the "correct" determination of who heard the voice of "God" commanding them to kill and who is just a classic paranoid schizophrenic?” If we believe everything that happened in the OT was the will of God…which Dena Schlosser obviously did….and we believe in a God who orders jihad…..and in penal substitutionary atonement….and revels in sacrifice….well….the belief that he wants us to cut off our baby's arms as a sacrifice to him is not unthinkable. And who knows....what "types and shadows" might come out of it to teach future generations of Christians. And let’s not even go into the story of Andrea Yates, the other mother who drowned her six children…..

I believe God's character is perfectly displayed for all to see in the image of the invisible God described in four gospels. If we've seen him, we've seen the Father. I find little resemblance between Jesus and the "god" who commanded the atrocities in the OT. And so I have no problem attributing the atrocities in the OT to Satan or satan or fallen man....but not to the God we clearly see in Jesus.