Civilians and Innocents

Today's Scripture

Genesis 18:25 — "Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?"

Proverbs 6:16-17 — "There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood."

Jonah 4:11 — "And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?"

The Big Idea

Even if a war can be just, not everything done in a war is just. The Bible insists that God watches how wars are fought, and that the people who never picked up a weapon — the children, the elderly, the families in the cellars — are precious to him. A war can begin with a just cause and still be fought wickedly. Today is about the line that no side, including ours, is allowed to cross.

Reflection

Rules, even in war

It might surprise you that the Old Testament has laws of war at all. Deuteronomy 20:10 — "When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it." Before a single arrow flies, Israel must offer peace. A few verses later, God protects the trees: "you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them... Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you?" (Deuteronomy 20:19). If God sets limits to protect fruit trees from an army, what do you think he feels about children?

Even nations that never heard these laws are held to a standard. In Amos 1:13, God announces judgment on Ammon — a pagan kingdom with no Bible — "because they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead, that they might enlarge their border." Notice what that means. God holds every nation accountable for atrocities, written law or not. There is a war-law carved into the human conscience, and God enforces it.

The church's old name for this is jus in bello — Latin for "justice in war." It asks not whether a war should be fought, but how. Two rules carry the weight. Discrimination means you may aim only at combatants — the people actually fighting — never at civilians. Proportionality means the harm you cause must not be wildly out of scale with the good you are aiming at. Lose those two rules, and "just war" becomes a costume that any cruelty can wear.

The Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who watched Europe's princes bless their endless wars, loved to repeat an old Greek proverb:

"War is sweet to those who have not tried it." — Erasmus, Adagia

War is easiest to cheer from a safe distance. Today's reading drags us closer.

The people God watches

Start at the beginning. Genesis 1:27 — "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." Every human being carries God's image, like a king's face stamped on a coin. A border does not remove it. A passport does not remove it. A war does not remove it. The child in the cellar on the enemy side of the line is God's image-bearer, full stop.

That is why Proverbs 6:16-17 uses such strong language: among the things the Lord hates — an abomination to him — are "hands that shed innocent blood." Scripture never treats civilian death as a rounding error. The prophet Jeremiah, watching his own besieged city starve, wrote one of the most painful verses in the Bible: "My eyes are spent with weeping... because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city" (Lamentations 2:11). The Bible makes us look at the small victims of war. It will not let us look away.

Jesus stands in the same line. Matthew 18:10 — "See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven." The smallest people have the highest connections.

Here is where this lands in an ordinary week. You are standing in a checkout line when your phone buzzes: footage of an apartment block, somewhere far away, folded into rubble. There is a stuffed animal in the wreckage. You have about two seconds before the scroll carries you to something funnier. The whole battle over civilians in war happens in those two seconds — whether that child registers as an image-bearer God knows by name, or as background noise from someone else's conflict.

And then there is the strangest verse of all. At the end of Jonah, God explains why he spared Nineveh — the capital of Assyria, the cruelest empire of its day, Israel's terror. Jonah 4:11 — "And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left?" God counts the civilians of his people's worst enemy. He knows their number. He pities them. Jonah wanted the city burned; God saw 120,000 people who could not tell left from right.

Bonhoeffer, writing from inside the Nazi catastrophe, said the resistance years had taught him to read history the way Jonah's God reads cities:

"We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled — in short, from the perspective of those who suffer." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

That is the Christian's assigned seat in wartime. Not in the general's tent. Below — with the people under the bombs.

When the church said no — and when it didn't

The just-war tradition, at its best, has guarded this line fiercely. Augustine, its founding voice, kept returning to the soldier's heart. Writing to a Christian general named Boniface, he insisted:

"Let necessity, therefore, and not your will, slay the enemy who fights against you." — Augustine, Letter 189 to Boniface

And in the same letter:

"Therefore, even in waging war, cherish the spirit of a peacemaker, that, by conquering those whom you attack, you may lead them back to the advantages of peace." — Augustine, Letter 189 to Boniface

Necessity may fight; hatred may not. C.S. Lewis, who fought in the trenches of World War I and defended the possibility of just war, drew the same line in plain English:

"We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Even Martin Luther, no pacifist, refused to romanticize what war is:

"War is one of the greatest plagues that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it." — Martin Luther, Table Talk

But the church has not always held the line. In World War II, the Allies adopted "morale bombing" — destroying an enemy's will to fight by burning its cities. Dresden was firebombed. Tokyo burned in a single night, with around one hundred thousand dead, most of them civilians. Then Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever you think those bombings accomplished, be clear about what they were: civilians were not the accident. They were the target.

In 1956, Oxford University proposed an honorary degree for Harry Truman, the president who ordered the atomic bombings. A Christian philosopher named Elizabeth Anscombe stood up — almost alone — and publicly objected. Her argument was not complicated. It was the old line, restated:

"For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder." — Elizabeth Anscombe, Mr Truman's Degree

She lost the vote. She was right anyway, on the tradition's own logic. And here is the uncomfortable part: this rule does not check your passport. It condemns the missile that levels an apartment block in Ukraine, the strike that kills a family in Gaza, the drone that hits a wedding, the bomb in a marketplace — whoever fired it, whatever the cause. A Christian is never allowed to say, "It was terrible, but it was our side." If your tradition permits war, it obligates you to oppose unjust war-fighting — especially your own nation's.

The Judge of all the earth — and the blood that speaks

Long before Augustine, Abraham stood on a ridge above Sodom and argued with God about exactly this. Would God destroy the innocent along with the guilty? Genesis 18:25 — "Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked... Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" Here is the astonishing thing: God does not rebuke the question. He accepts its premise. The Judge of all the earth does not treat the innocent as ammunition. Neither may we.

But Scripture pushes one step deeper, into the gospel itself. The Bible's first war casualty was a civilian — Abel, murdered by his brother — and God said his blood cried out from the ground for justice. Every innocent death since has joined that cry. God hears all of it. He forgets none of it.

And God's answer was not to shrug, and not simply to retaliate. His answer was to come down and stand in the place where the innocent die. At the cross, the only truly innocent man in history was executed by a military superpower — and instead of crying out for vengeance, his blood speaks mercy. Hebrews 12:24 says we have come "to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel." Abel's blood says: justice for me. Jesus's blood says: mercy for them.

This is why Christians care about civilians in war. Not because we are squeamish, and not because we are naive about evil. Because our whole faith rests on innocent blood — shed once, for the guilty, so that the killing could one day end. People saved by the dying of the Innocent One can never be casual about the deaths of innocents. We follow a Lamb. We do not get to think like wolves.

Going Deeper

Pick one war in the news this week. Find the name or photo of one civilian affected by it — a child, a grandmother, a displaced family — from whichever side you instinctively care about least. Pray for that person by name or by face: safety, food, comfort, and that they would come to know the God who counts them. Then ask yourself one honest question: is this war being fought in a way I could defend to the Judge of all the earth? If you are not sure, say so — to God, and to one other person.