The Conquest Texts We Have to Face

Today's Scripture

Genesis 15:16 — "And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete."

Joshua 6:21 — "Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword."

Deuteronomy 9:4 — "Do not say in your heart... 'It is because of my righteousness that the Lord has brought me in to possess this land,' whereas it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you."

The Big Idea

You cannot talk honestly about race and the Bible while skipping the chapters where Israel is told to destroy the nations of Canaan. Those chapters have been twisted to bless terrible things. Today we face them: the conquest was God's unique, long-delayed judgment on evil — not a racial template — and it warns every nation, including Israel, including ours.

Reflection

The chapters we want to skip

Joshua 6 is in your Bible. The walls of Jericho fall — that part makes the children's songs — and then comes the verse the songs leave out. Joshua 6:21 — "Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword."

A devotional plan about racial wounds cannot tiptoe past this. These texts have been weaponized. Conquistadors waved Joshua over the Americas. Afrikaner preachers cast themselves as Israel and Black Africans as Canaanites to defend apartheid — a legal system of racial separation in South Africa. American settlers borrowed promised-land language to bless the displacement of Native peoples. The critics of Christianity have noticed all of this, and pretending the chapters are not there convinces no one.

A.W. Tozer warns us why we cannot just look away:

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." — A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

If we quietly decide these chapters reveal a tribal God who plays favorites by bloodline, that idea will poison everything else we believe. So we have to actually read them. When we do, three details overturn the racist reading completely.

A judgment, not a race war

First detail: the waiting. Centuries before Joshua, God told Abram his family would not receive the land for four hundred years. Why the delay? Genesis 15:16 — "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." Iniquity is an old word for deep-rooted evil. The Canaanite cultures practiced child sacrifice — their own texts and archaeology confirm it — and God, who saw it all, waited four hundred years before acting. This is not a land grab dressed up in religion. It is a courtroom where the judge delayed sentencing for four centuries.

The Bible's own framing is moral, not ethnic. Leviticus 18:24-25 says the land itself had become unclean, "so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants." Augustine, wrestling with why God permits evil at all, gives us the long view:

"He judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist." — Augustine, Enchiridion

God's patience is not indifference. It is mercy with a clock running. And his anger, when it finally comes, is nothing like ours. J.I. Packer draws the distinction:

"God's wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Second detail: the exceptions. If the conquest were racial, no Canaanite could cross the line. But Rahab — a Canaanite, and a prostitute — hears about Israel's God and believes. Joshua 2:11 — "for the Lord your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath." She hangs a scarlet cord from her window, and when the walls fall, her house stands. She and her whole family are saved. And she does not merely survive; she is welcomed all the way in. Matthew 1:5 puts her in the family tree of Jesus himself: "and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab." Sit with that. A Canaanite woman from Jericho becomes a great-great-grandmother of the Messiah. Meanwhile, in the very next chapter, an Israelite named Achan steals what belongs to God and falls under the same judgment as Jericho. A believing Canaanite is spared; a faithless Israelite is not. The line was never bloodline. It was always faith.

Third detail: Israel is told, explicitly, that none of this is about their superiority. Deuteronomy 7:7-8 — "It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you." Chosen out of love, not out of merit. A master race needs a myth of superiority. Deuteronomy refuses to supply one.

The warning cuts both ways

Now comes the verse that should end every attempt to read Joshua as a charter for any nation's ambitions. Moses looks Israel in the eye on the edge of the land. Deuteronomy 9:4-5 — "Do not say in your heart... 'It is because of my righteousness that the Lord has brought me in to possess this land'... Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land."

You are not the hero of this story, Moses says. You are spared, not superior. And Leviticus 18 attaches a terrifying clause: if Israel commits the same evils, Leviticus 18:28 warns, the land will "vomit you out... as it vomited out the nation that was before you." Centuries later, that is exactly what happened. The exile to Babylon was the conquest's standard applied to the covenant people themselves. God grades every nation — including his own — on the same scale.

This is why every colonizer who quoted Joshua was misreading it. They cast themselves as Israel. But the text forbids even Israel from thinking that way. It is like a man who finds a judge's signed verdict against his neighbor and concludes he is now allowed to carry out sentences on anyone he dislikes. He has not understood the document. He has stolen the judge's robes. Dietrich Bonhoeffer named the blindness at work:

"Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are as entitled to as we are." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

The Boer reading Joshua against his Black neighbor, the settler reading it against the Cherokee — each was using God's judgment of someone else to hide from God's judgment of himself. The conquest texts, read honestly, make that impossible. They say: the Judge is patient, the Judge is fair, and the Judge is looking at you too.

Martin Luther King Jr., preaching after the march from Selma to Montgomery, set that same confidence in God's justice to music:

"How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." — Martin Luther King Jr., "Our God Is Marching On," 1965

King could renounce violence precisely because he believed judgment was real and was God's. People who know the Judge is on the bench do not have to take the gavel into their own hands.

The sword God takes into himself

So what changed between Joshua and us? Everything — because the Messiah came. Watch what Jesus does in the synagogue at Nazareth. He reads Isaiah's prophecy aloud: Luke 4:18-19 — "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me... to proclaim liberty to the captives... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Then he stops. Mid-sentence. The very next line in Isaiah is "and the day of vengeance of our God" — and Jesus rolls up the scroll before reading it, sits down, and says, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21). The year of favor is now. The day of vengeance is not ours to bring.

Standing before Pilate, he made the new rules explicit. John 18:36 — "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting." No sword. No holy war. Paul gives the church its standing orders in Romans 12:19 — "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God." Christians are the people who believe in judgment so firmly that they never need to grab it for themselves.

C.S. Lewis observed that this is not escapism but power:

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The abolitionists and the marchers at Selma did not believe less in God's judgment than the conquistadors did. They believed in it more — enough to leave it in God's hands and fight evil with truth, suffering, and love instead.

And here is the gospel turn, the deepest reason the conquest can never again be a template. At the cross, the judgment the conquest texts reveal did not fall on God's enemies. It fell on God. John Stott put it unforgettably:

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" — John Stott, The Cross of Christ

Jericho's judgment fell on Jesus. The sword was real, and God took it into his own body, so that anyone — Amorite, Israelite, American — could walk out free, like Rahab, with a scarlet cord of mercy in the window. The cross is where the two hardest truths in the Bible meet: God's judgment on evil is utterly serious, and God's mercy toward the guilty is utterly free, because he absorbed the one to offer the other.

So whose side are you on when you read Joshua? Most of us instinctively read as Israelites marching in. The gospel says we are Canaanites taken in — guilty people, spared by faith, grafted into a family we had no claim to. Read it again from there.

Going Deeper

Take the conquest passage that disturbs you most and read it slowly with three questions: What does this show me about how seriously God takes evil? What does it not authorize me, as a follower of the crucified Messiah, to do? And where am I standing in the story — with the army, or with Rahab at the window, saved by sheer mercy? Write one honest sentence in answer to each. Then thank Jesus that the day of vengeance fell on him.