Sin
Avenged
Whoever
“God” is, his today the blame.
Yet
who but men the Wrath Divine inflame?
Immersed
as we all are in the world around us, it is difficult, especially for young
people, to realize into what an abnormal condition it has brought itself. Never
in all human history has God been so discredited, disbelieved, and in effect
discarded from men’s lives. And since all sin is primarily an offense against
God, then as men lose all sense of God, so they lose all sense of sin.
Therefore men are always right, and “God,” whoever he may be, is always wrong,
so that whenever things go wrong “he” can always be brought back long enough to
take the blame.
This
widely spread attitude makes it virtually impossible to understand the apparent
severity of God in the Old Testament, where for instance he commands the
Israelites to exterminate whole peoples, as in the book of Joshua. But Catholic
Scripture scholars who have not lost their sense of the true and unchanging
God, put things back in perspective. Here for instance is a summary of the
commentary by a modern Benedictine, Dom Jean de Monléon (1890–1981), on the
slaughter of the Canaanites by the Israelites under their leader, Joshua:—
As
far as Joshua himself is concerned, he was acting not out of hatred, racism,
greed, ambition or whatever, but under strict, precise and repeated orders from
God himself. St John Chrysostom says that Joshua might personally have
preferred some less murderous solution, but certainly God had his own reasons.
These we cannot know for sure, but we can make reasonable guesses. To begin
with, all of us human beings, by our original sin (What is that?” cries modern
man), have to pay the debt of death, the time, manner and place of which are
decided by the Master of Life and Death, who is God. For sinners like the
Canaanites, to die sooner rather than later can be a mercy, especially if the
manner of death gives them time to repent and so save their souls for eternity.
Next,
the Canaanites were in deed sinners, immersed in the committing of terrible
crimes, and like mankind before the Flood, like the Sodomites and Gomorrhans,
they had made the cup of God’s wrath overflow: prostitution of all kinds,
bestiality, incest, witchcraft and in particular, the ritual murder of
children, as proved by multiple archaeological excavations in Palestine,
whereby tiny skeletons have been uncovered in surroundings clearly identifying
them as sacrificial victims, etc.
Moreover
if the Canaanites were allowed to survive, they would present a grave danger of
corrupting the Israelites, as subsequent history only too clearly showed.
In
more recent times, some 400 years ago (but still before the advent of
liberalism!), the first missionaries in Canada found themselves bound to
conclude that the only way to deal with a certain tribe was to exterminate
them. A canonized Saint said, “After repeated experience of their treachery,
whether for peace or for the Faith, there is nothing fur ther to be hoped for
from them.” (end of Dom Monléon summary)
This
still shocks modern susceptibilities, but is it not simply tribal as opposed to
individual capital punishment? The principle of capital punishment is that by
such anti-social crimes as, for instance, murder, treason, counterfeiting,
homosexuality, etc., men are capable of behaving in such a way as to render
themselves unfit to live any more in society, and so society’s legitimate
authority has the right to take their lives (one may object that not all the
individuals in a tribe will be equally guilty, but it should go without saying
that Almighty God can and will make all the distinctions necessary).
The
problem all comes down to disbelief in the greatness and goodness of God, but
let us just say that the Old Testament is neither as cruel nor as out of date
as it is often made to appear.
Kyrie
eleison.
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