The questions are legitimate. The same questions existed shortly after Jesus’ day, as His apostles were carrying the message of His all-conquering victory into the world. In the second letter of Peter, we read questioning words like “Where is His promised return? For ever since our ancestors died, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:4). In the face of the message that Jesus had conquered death, hearers in that day were no less able than “astute observers” in our day (who always think that they are the first to notice that there is evil all around us), to look around and see violence, death, and inexplicable destruction, and say “Nothing much has changed. Things pretty much look the same way that they have always looked.” It’s a legitimate observation, so how are we to answer it?
Naturally, this is a difficult issue that has plagued all those that have ever posited a God of love and a victorious Messiah. Israel would have been tempted to pose the same type of question to God. They could look upwards and say, “Lord, You promised this land to our ancestors and to us. You brought us out of Egypt. You directed us to cross the Jordan and to re-claim that which you said is ours. Why don’t these people know this? You brought plagues on Egypt, parted the Red Sea, destroyed the Egyptian army, and gave us food and water in the wilderness, so why not just drive these people from the land? Would that not be easier? Would that not be a greater demonstration of your power than us having to carry out these campaigns?” We could even imagine them employing some reverse psychology on God and saying, “Seriously, God, if you just drive them out, then you will get all the glory. If we have to do battle against these people and these rulers, then we might get some of the glory too. We don’t want that. You don’t really want that, do you?”
What might be God’s response to such thinking? Returning to the eleventh chapter of Joshua, we pick up where we left off and read, “for the Lord determined to make them obstinate so they would attack Israel. He wanted Israel to annihilate them without mercy, as He had instructed Moses” (11:20). Though the land had been given to Israel, and though the people of the land had been handed over to Israel, God wanted His people to annihilate them. God wanted His people to have a hand in the battle. Indeed, God wanted to work through His people, to empower His people, to deal with and overcome that which despoiled, defaced, and decimated their land of promise---that first part of the creation that God was redeeming through the care and stewardship of His covenant people. In the end, Israel should have been compelled to point to their God, and the power of their promise-making God, as the means by which they emerged victorious. In the end, because Jesus is reigning, and because He has a people in covenant with Him and confessing Him as Lord, in spite of the evil that we see, each and every time we are successfully able to gain a victory over the powers that compel us to join in the evil---each time we engage in an act of sacrifice and love that benefits only the recipient---we are able to overcome the self-idolatry that was the primary reason for mankind’s initial rebellion against its God-given responsibility.
It is in this way that we attempt to annihilate the obstinate enemy. We do so, thankfully, in an exercise of mercy, knowing that before Jesus accepted us into His kingdom by an act of mercy, we stood in the same position as these kings and enemies of Israel, in need of that mercy, deserving of none. In such engagements, as we overcome, we begin to bear the divine image, and in doing so, we embody and manifest Jesus’ ultimate victory over evil, and point to the fact that He does reign, and that through the Spirit and the Gospel, the power of transformation and renewal and restoration and reconciliation is at work in this world; and that it has been at work ever since that tomb was split open and Resurrection power flooded into this world. God enables His people to harness that flood of power, and to carry it into the world through the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus. We do not deny that evil is pervasive, just as Israel could not deny that they had to go to battle to gain victories over that which God pointed to as the embodiment of evil in the land of His promise.
We also read that “Joshua conquered the whole land, just as the Lord had promised” (11:23a). So too did Jesus, also according to God’s promise. The words that follow at this point in Joshua point to the final outcome of Jesus’ conquering, in that the tribes of Israel were assigned the portions of the land for which they were responsible, which they were to rule and steward along with Joshua, and that “the land was free of war” (11:23c). Israel had to react and respond to evil, in full knowledge of God’s promise of a victory already won. Because our God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and because He does not change, in this day, we must do the same as Israel, reacting and responding to evil in full knowledge of God’s promise of a victory already won. In both instances, the fact that there was a foregone conclusion in place did not remove the responsibility to work according to God’s plan to be His lights and to reflect His glory, and to do so according to His intentions, plans, and purposes. That is the life of faith.
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