New government consultation on three parent embryos asks the wrong questions

The Department of Health today has published for consultation draft regulations to allow mitochondrial donation to prevent the transmission of serious mitochondrial disease from mother to child.

The consultation will close on 21 May.

This new government consultation is not asking whether but how these controversial techniques for mitochondrial disease should be implemented. In so doing it sweeps aside genuine ethical and safety concerns in the headlong rush to push the scientific boundaries. 

Rather like the motorist who asked an Irishman for directions and received the answer, ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ the government in this new consultation is actually asking the wrong questions.

Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, California has previously argued in an piece titled ‘A slippery slope to germline modification’ that were the United Kingdom to grant a regulatory go-ahead, it would unilaterally cross ‘a legal and ethical line’ observed by the entire international community that ‘genetic-engineering tools’ should not be used ‘to modify gametes or early embryos and so manipulate the characteristics of future children’. This is now happening.

She is not alone in her concerns. Just this week advisors to the US Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have expressed concern that the three-parent embryo procedure could lead to human gene manipulation and have questioned its ethics and whether the research into it is as far advanced as some of its advocates claim.

In short, should we be giving treatments to human beings that have not yet been tested fully in animals?

It is deeply regrettable that the government intends to press on recklessly with this controversial technology in real patients in the face of genuine concerns about safety, effectiveness and ethics which have so far prevented its implementation anywhere else in the world.

In many countries around and the world, and by commentators from both secular and faith based scientific backgrounds, Britain is viewed as a rogue state in this area of research.

The Government gave an assurance in 2009 that regulations to allow treatment would not be made until any proposed techniques were considered to be effective and safe for use in treatment.

It has still to deliver on this undertaking. 

Further background

Christian Medical Fellowship has recently published a paper on ‘three parent embryos for mitochondrial disease’ which was strongly critical of this new technology on both theological and scientific grounds.

This followed submissions that we made on the issue to both the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) and the Nuffield Council. We have more recently made similar points to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

We have also argued previously that the techniques involved are unsafe, unethical and unnecessary (see here, here, here and here).

The greatest gift of a Christian leader to his people is his own personal holiness – a reflection on John Owen

If you have not yet discovered John Piper’s biographies then I heartily recommend them. They can all be downloaded free of charge from the Desiring God website and are great for car or train journeys, walks and runs. 

I’ve just listened again today, during a long run, to John Piper’s biography on John Owen, ‘The Chief Design of My Life: Mortification and Universal Holiness’.

John Owen (1616 – 1683) was an English Nonconformist church leader, theologian, and academic administrator at the University of Oxford. 

He was also briefly a member of parliament for the University, sitting in the First Protectorate Parliament of 1654 to 1655 under Oliver Cromwell.

He also chaired the committee which in 1658 drew up the Savoy Declaration, the statement of faith that became the foundation document for the Congregational Churches. So Owen takes me right back to my childhood roots.

His influence on subsequent church leaders has been immense and yet most people today—even pastors and theologians—don't know much about him. 

Owen was born in England in 1616, the same year that William Shakespeare died and four years before the Pilgrims set sail for New England. This is virtually in the middle of the great Puritan century (roughly 1560 to 1660).

Puritanism was at heart a spiritual movement, passionately concerned with God and godliness. It began in England with William Tyndale the Bible translator, Luther's contemporary, and was essentially a movement for church reform, pastoral renewal and evangelism, and spiritual revival.

Owen was born in the middle of this movement and became its greatest pastor-theologian as the movement ended almost simultaneously with his death in 1683. He was also responsible for the publication of John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, the best-selling book in history outside the Bible.

Piper’s whole study is worthy of careful study (or listening) but I was particularly struck today by his comments on Owen’s guiding passion, his quest for personal holiness. The following notes are abridged from Piper.

The words of Owen which come closest to giving us the heart and aim of his life are found in the preface to the little book: Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers which was based on sermons that he preached to the students and academic community at Oxford:

‘I hope I may own in sincerity that my heart's desire unto God, and the chief design of my life ... are, that mortification and universal holiness may be promoted in my own and in the hearts and ways of others, to the glory of God, that so the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ may be adorned in all things.’

Even in his political messages—the sermons to Parliament—the theme was repeatedly holiness. He based this on the Old Testament patter— that ‘the people of Israel were at the height of their fortunes when their leaders were godly’. So the key issue for him was that the legislature be made up of holy people.

This humility opened Owen's soul to the greatest visions of Christ in the Scriptures. And he believed with all his heart the truth of 2 Corinthians 3:18 that by contemplating the glory of Christ ‘we may be gradually transformed into the same glory’. And that is nothing other than holiness.

Owen grew in knowledge of God by obeying what he knew already. In other words Owen recognized that holiness was not merely the goal of all true learning; it is also the means of more true learning. 

This elevated holiness even higher in his life: it was the aim of his life and, in large measure, the means of getting there.

Thus Owen kept the streams of the fountain of truth open by making personal obedience the effect of all that he learned, and the means of more. Owen passionately pursued a personal communion with God.

J I Packer says that the Puritans differ from evangelicals today because with them:

‘ ... communion with God was a great thing, to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small  thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely of their daily experience of God.’ 

From Owen’s writings, and from the testimony of others, it seems fair to say that the aim of personal holiness in all of life, and the mortifying of all known sin really was the labour not only of his teaching but of his own personal life.

This was the conviction that controlled him:

‘A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul. And he that doth not feed on and thrive in the digestion of the food which he provides for others will scarce make it savoury unto them; yea, he knows not but the food he hath provided may be poison, unless he have really tasted of it himself. If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us .’

66 babies born alive after abortion in one year in Britain raise questions for parliamentarians

The problem of how to deal with babies born alive after abortion has been highlighted by a question asked at the Council of Europe.

The Committee of Ministers has been asked to act ‘in order to guarantee that foetuses who survive abortions are not deprived of the medical treatment that they are entitled to - as human persons born alive - according to the European Convention on Human Rights’.

The question is highly relevant in view of a story in the Daily Mail which claimed that 66 babies survived NHS termination attempts in one year alone.

The figure came from the CEMACH 2007 Perinatal Mortality report which covers the year 2005. It carries the said figures on page 28. I quote:

‘Sixty-six of the 2,235 neonatal deaths notified in England and Wales followed legal termination (predominantly on account of congenital anomalies) of the pregnancy ie. born showing signs of life and dying during the neonatal period. Sixteen were born at 22 weeks’ gestation or later and death occurred between 1 and 270 minutes after birth (median: 66 minutes). The remaining 50 fetuses were born before 22 weeks’ gestation and death occurred between 0 and 615 minutes after birth (median: 55 minutes).’

I have checked the CEMACH reports for 2009 and 2011 (covering 2007 and 2009 respectively) and found no similar reference, but in the latter a diagram on page 51 (figure 6.2) does say that figures of early neonatal deaths following termination of pregnancy have been (deliberately) excluded.  The strong implication is that they are still happening, but just not being reported.

An article in Prolife Ireland this week reports that the problem also exists in other countries, including Sweden and Italy, where in 2010 a 22 week ‘foetus’ was found alive 20 hours after being aborted. The baby was then placed in intensive care, where he died the next day. It further reports:

‘Another child in Florence survived three full days after having been aborted. Such events are happening everywhere that late term abortions are allowed, but are rarely reported and made public…. To prevent these situations, Norway decided at the beginning of January to prohibit abortion completely after 22 weeks, the threshold of viability outside the uterus as determined by the World Health Organisation.’

The Committee of Ministers will provide a written response to this question in the coming weeks.

But given that abortion is legal up until 24 weeks in Britain, it seems inconceivable that babies are not still being born alive after abortion here. But clearly whoever knows the facts is keeping quiet.

Perhaps someone should ask some questions in the Westminster parliament too.

Steve Chalke says he wants to draw people to Jesus but his teaching on the Bible risks leading them away

Christianity magazine and Premier Radio have controversially this week given Steve Chalke (pictured) a platform to propagate his views on the Bible.

But the deafening silence from evangelicals (and effusive welcome from others) that has greeted his call (see also here) for a ‘global conversation’ on how we interpret God’s Word is further evidence that many no longer see him as a credible Christian voice 

As Steve Holmes ably argues, we have been having a global debate about the interpretation of the Bible for almost 2,000 years, and there is nothing earth-shattering or even new in what Chalke says.

Few would dispute the fact that Chalke has done, and continues to do, a great deal of good. But many will see his latest article on the Bible as just a further dangerous step down the slippery slope to embracing a new liberalism, following logically from his earlier rejection of penal substitution and his embracing of gay partnerships.

Chalke does nonetheless give voice to the inner doubts with which some Christians struggle and for that reason it is important that we deal in our pulpits and Bible studies with the issues that he raises.

In other words, the able defences of biblical authority with which most evangelical preachers and apologists are already well familiar, need to be made more accessible to ordinary Christians in the pew.

This is because Chalke, though critical of what he sees as Richard Dawkins’ ‘rather superficial and juvenile conclusions’, now risks unwittingly giving credence to the new atheism he rejects, by recycling some of the tired arguments of Dawkins and others as grounds for his own loss of confidence in biblical authority.

His popularity, combined with his undoubted ability to connect with people, in this age of celebrity, I believe poses a real danger. This is made worse by the fact that Chalke continues to insist that he is still an evangelical and that many evangelicals seem reluctant to distance themselves from his teaching.

Now that many young Christians on the front line are encountering the new atheism it is important to ensure that they are adequately equipped to deal not just with Dawkins and his ilk from outside the camp, but also with the arguments of Chalke from within it.

So what are the issues that have led Chalke to abandon an evangelical position?

Interestingly he touches only very briefly on these in the version of his article that appears in Christianity magazine. One has to read his longer article on the Oasis website to see which biblical teaching he no longer feels comfortable with. Here, I believe, we find his real reasons for no longer professing in full the Christian faith taught by Jesus and the Apostles.

Chalke sums up his objections up by referring to the ‘brutality, violence, genocide and punitive legislation contained in the Old Testament’ and the ‘oppressive and discriminatory teaching’ in the New Testament.

The following list of the biblical teaching which Chalke rejects should not surprise. I have made a short comment about each item in italics but reams have already been written more ably by others about each.

1. Sex between two people of the same sex is morally wrong

Chalke wants to endorse ‘faithful’ same-sex partnerships and so rejects the clear biblical teaching that sex is made only for a life-long, monogamous, heterosexual relationship called marriage.

2. The slaughter of the Canaanites in the Old Testament

Chalke seems not to understand the lessons this incident is meant to teach us about the seriousness of sin and the justice, mercy and grace of God.

3. The provision for slavery in the Old Testament

Chalke again seems not to be uncomfortable with the Old Testament’s acceptance of bonded servants (a better option for indebted people than imprisonment or unemployment) and prisoners of war and seems not to be aware that kidnapping a person (real slavery) was actually a capital offence, regarded as seriously in the Old Testament as murder and/or adultery (Deuteronomy 24:7)

4. God created the universe in six consecutive 24 hour periods (Genesis 1)

Many evangelicals dispute that the biblical texts can only be read in this unambiguous way. But Chalke seems either unaware, or unwilling to acknowledge the existence, of the different positions defended by serious evangelicals on the creation narrative from both scripture and history. John Lennox’s ‘Seven days that divide the world’ is a good overview of the various arguments.

5. Disabled people were not able to become priests in Israel (Leviticus 21:16-23)

Chalke accuses the Bible of discriminating against disabled people but the Bible is very clear elsewhere that all human beings are equally made in the image of God and equally precious to him. It actually teaches that disabled people deserve special respect and protection (Leviticus 19:14; 2 Samuel 9). The Levitical passage above is to be seen in its context as pointing to the perfection of Christ as our great high priest, in the same way that animals sacrificed in the temple pointed to him by being ‘without blemish’. It is not endorsing discrimination.

6. The man stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36)

Like many Old Testament stories this incident teaches us about the serious of sin and the importance of taking God’s commands seriously. Old Testament stories are there to teach us about God’s holiness. They are warnings to us, not endorsements to apply their punishments today (1 Corinthians 10:1-13).

7. The varying accounts of who inspired David’s census – God or Satan (2 Samuel 24:1 & 1 Chronicles 21:1)

Chalke asks ‘Can both accounts be right?’ but most commentators see no difficulty here. Satan was acting under God’s sovereignty and with his permission, in the same way that he was allowed to test Job or sift Peter. Chalke is either unaware of this or has deliberately chosen not to say it. He should perhaps read Jay Smith’s ‘101 cleared up contradictions in the Bible’ where this and 100 other commonly cited alleged contradictions are explained.

8. The role of women in the church (1 Timothy 2:11-15)

Chalke again seems unwilling to grapple with texts like this in the context of the rest of the testimony of Scripture about the role of women. There is a huge evangelical literature on this text and others. Is he genuinely unable to see his way here, or is he just being lazy? 

Chalke’s underlying motivation seems to be to remove, or to reinterpret, biblical teachings that he thinks will put people off embracing Christianity. He wants to make the Christian faith more ‘attractive’, ‘relevant’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘welcoming’.

The problem with this is that in so doing he is both undermining people’s confidence in the authority of Scripture, which Jesus himself upheld, and also modifying the Gospel.

Chalke has fashioned for himself an alternative Gospel which cherry picks from Scripture the beliefs he wants and discards those which he finds inconvenient.

He claims that this is in order to draw people to Christ – the real Word of God – but I can’t help wondering if he is simply responding to the temptation of choosing a message which will help him avoid being attacked. 

In embracing popular contemporary causes like gay marriage and avoiding speaking out on areas where Scripture is under attack Chalke risks emasculating the Gospel.

On the one hand he is endorsing a practice (same sex erotic behaviour) which the Bible clearly teaches will result in exclusion from the Kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

On the other, he is wanting to excise passages from the Scriptures which teach of God’s holiness, justice and judgement. But understanding these matters is an essential prerequisite to understanding grace and mercy and indeed the true message of the cross.

Jesus Christ put his stamp of authority on the Old Testament and commissioned the writing of the New Testament through the apostles by the Holy Spirit.

In saying that the Bible is not the Word of God Chalke is denying something that Jesus himself taught. He can't have it both ways. He can't claim to follow Christ and yet reject Christ's teaching.

Chalke is walking a dangerous road. In his passion to draw people in to Christ, he risks leading them away. 

For a brief review of Jesus’ view of the Bible see here.

Other coverage and commentary

Huffington Post 
Christianity Today

Brian McLaren    

Steve Holmes 

Dan Strange 

Ian Paul 

RCGP maintains its strong opposition to any change in the law to allow ‘assisted dying’

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has today soundly rejected any change to its long opposition to the legalisation of assisted suicide or euthanasia (see RCGP full report and analysis of responses and Pulse report).

The change had been proposed by former chairman Clare Gerada and led to an extensive consultation last autumn but members have overwhelmingly rejected the move.

Overall 77% of individual responses opposed any change.

In a letter to members today, current chair Maureen Baker, wrote:

‘We have just finished debating the results of the College-wide consultation on whether, as a College, we should change our collective stance on assisted dying. I can confirm that Council has resolved to maintain the College’s position of opposition to a change in the law on assisted dying.

Council decided last February that consultation with our membership was necessary as, since 2005 when the position was last debated, we have welcomed many new members to the College and views could have changed. 

Any change in the law to permit assisted dying would have a huge impact on our profession and this was one of the most comprehensive consultations of membership that we have ever undertaken, with over 1,700 responses.

Thank you to everyone who exercised their right to voice an opinion on this – it is imperative that our membership has the opportunity to inform Council debates on key policy issues.’

This is a highly welcome move and will send a strong signal to legislators in a year when new bills seeking to legalise assisted suicide are being debated in both Westminster and Scotland.

The recent legalisation of euthanasia for children in Belgium and the huge increase in the number of cases of euthanasia for people with mental illness in the Netherlands have sent shockwaves throughout the world and have underlined how difficult it is to stop incremental extension once any weakening of the law is allowed.

Any change in the law to allow assisted suicide or euthanasia would place pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives for fear of being a financial, emotional or care burden upon others. This would especially affect people who are disabled, elderly, sick or depressed.

Persistent requests for euthanasia are extremely rare if people are properly cared for so our priority must be to ensure that good care addressing people's physical, psychological, social and spiritual needs is accessible to all.

The present law making assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal is clear and right and does not need changing. The penalties it holds in reserve act as a strong deterrent to exploitation and abuse whilst giving discretion to prosecutors and judges in hard cases.

The RCGP has wisely resolved to maintain its position of opposition to a change in the law to allow assisted suicide or euthanasia recognising that any change in the law would have a huge impact on the profession.

It is highly significant that this was one of the most comprehensive consultations of the RCGP membership that has ever been undertaken, with over 1,700 responses.

The RCGP decision reflects the fact that the vast majority of UK doctors are opposed to legalising euthanasia along with the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Physicians, the Association for Palliative Medicine, the British Geriatric Society and the World Medical Association.

The WMA last affirmed its strong opposition last year. 

Three out of every ten human deaths in the UK occur as a result of ‘medical intervention’ before birth

In 2012 there were 499,331 deaths registered in England and Wales, 54,937 in Scotland and 14,756 in Northern Ireland – a total of 569,024 human deaths.

In the same year there were 185,122 abortions carried out on women resident in England and Wales, 1,330 on women from other parts of the UK (including 905 from Northern Ireland) and 12,447 in Scotland – a total of 198,899 human deaths.

According to the answer given to a parliamentary question asked by Lord Alton yesterday, there were 166,631 human embryos that were allowed to perish in the UK in 2012 – a total of 166,631 human deaths. These are 'excess' embryos created in a laboratory by IVF technology that are thrown away.

In addition there are about 250,000 miscarriages in the UK every year – a total of 250,000 human deaths.

So that’s a total of 1,184,554 human deaths in the UK in 2012 – 569,024 registered deaths, 250,000 miscarriages, 198,899 aborted babies, and 166,631 embryos allowed to perish.

Of this total number of human deaths over half (52%) were human beings who were never born, and of these 365,530 (31%) were human lives ended by doctors before birth (abortions and embryos allowed to perish).  

Each of this latter group were human beings that no one wanted and that a doctor, or other health professional, acted to destroy.

Abortion and embryo disposal are against the Hippocratic Oath, against the Declaration of Geneva, against the International Code of Medical Ethics and against the Judeo-Christian ethic on which the laws of our country were originally based.

In 1947 the British Medical Association called abortion 'the greatest crime'.

But it is now so commonplace in Britain that we don’t even bother to mention it as a cause of human death despite the fact that every abortion stops a human heart beating.

The fact that the deaths of human beings are excluded from official death statistics is a symptom of how far we have fallen.

There is no one in the UK more innocent, more vulnerable and killed in greater numbers than the pre-born baby.

And there is no more dangerous place for a human being than the womb... or a petri dish. 

The slaughter of the Canaanites – was it justified?

One consequence of preaching through the Bible book by book, as our church does, is that you can’t escape considering the difficult passages.

And so last Sunday we considered Joshua, chapters 8-12. That’s the bit that deals with the slaughter of the Canaanites.

In Joshua 8 Israel attacks the city of Ai and kills ‘12,000 men and women…’, ‘ all the people of Ai’.

In chapter 10 Joshua kills five Amorite kings – from Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon – and hangs their bodies on five trees before throwing them into a cave.

Then he proceeds to destroy the cities of Makkedah, Libnah, Gezer, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron and Debir, on each occasion leaving ‘no survivors’.

The accounts of similar military victories continue throughout chapter 11 and 12, which end with a list of 31 Kings West of the Jordan who (along with the residents of their cities) Joshua put to the sword.

Two summaries of these battles within these chapters leave us in no doubt that it was God himself who ordered this destruction:

‘So Joshua struck at the whole land: the highlands, the arid southern plains, the lowlands, the slopes, and all their kings. He left no survivors. He wiped out everything that breathed as something reserved for God, exactly as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded.’ (Joshua 10:40)

‘So Joshua took the whole land, exactly as the Lord had promised Moses. Joshua gave it as a legacy to Israel according to their tribal shares. Then the land had a rest from war.’ (Joshua 11:23)

So the inescapable conclusion is that the Bible teaches both that these cities were wiped out with no survivors left and that it was God who authorised it.

Many people say that they could never believe in nor worship a god who would authorise these sorts of ‘atrocities’. Richard Dawkins, in his book ‘the God Delusion’ describes the god of the Old Testament as a ‘control freak, ethnic cleanser and malevolent bully’.

But it is not just atheists who reject these passages. Steve Chalke, in an article published in Christianity magazine last week (longer version here), cites these incidents as one of the reasons that he no longer believes that the Bible is the Word of God.

So how do evangelicals, who believe that the Bible is literally ‘God-breathed’, explain these scriptures?

We were reminded last week that the story of the Canaanite conquests gives us one mistake to avoid and three characteristics of God to understand.

We should first avoid thinking that the Canaanites were innocent and neutral.

On 16 October 1946 a man called John Clarence Woods killed ten men and got off scot free. Woods was a United States Army Master Sergeant who, with Joseph Malta, carried out the executions of ten former top leaders of the German Third Reich after they were sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials. These men were directly responsible for the horrors of the Nazi holocaust.

Was Woods a mass murderer? Some might say so, but many would say he was just an instrument of justice doing what justice decreed had to be done. At the time it was argued that these men deserved to die. 

The Bible argues that the Canaanites also deserved to die. Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 18:9-13 outline the ‘detestable ways’ of the Canaanites - sorcery, witchcraft, idolatry, every kind of sexual immorality and child sacrifice on an industrialised scale. In the eyes of God these were sins equivalent in severity to those of the authors of the Nazi holocaust.

This tells us first that God is a god of justice. He does not tolerate evil for ever but stamps it out. On this occasion it involved wiping these nations off the face of the earth. The instrument he used was the nation of Israel. This does not mean that Israel was good and these nations bad. The Bible makes that abundantly clear in passages like Deuteronomy 7:1-11 and 9:1-6.

‘It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God will drive them out before you’ (Deuteronomy 9:5).

Israel was simply the means God used to execute his justice. John Woods was not perfect either. But he was the means of justice when it came to the Nazis. It is not a virtue to tolerate evil. Justice must be done and someone acting under authority has to administer it.

Second it shows us God’s patience. The Canaanites ‘detestable ways’ were not some momentary departure from a life of virtue but an established pattern that had persisted unchanged for centuries without any indication of coming to an end. Thousands of innocent children had been slaughtered and the real cause of this was these nations’ idolatry. God had delayed his judgement for this period giving them every opportunity to change, but they had opted not to. In fact his extreme patience had led him to leave his own people Israel as slaves in Egypt for over 400 years out of mercy to the Canaanites. As he said to Abraham hundreds of years earlier:

”Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own and that they will be enslaved and ill-treated there… In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure”. (Genesis 15:13-16)

Third it displays God’s grace in that he gives us what we do not deserve. Just as God delayed judgement on the Canaanites out of mercy, so also he gave Israel the land of Canaan which they did not deserve. And with Israel he preserved some of the Canaanites, like the prostitute Rahab from Jericho, who ended up being absorbed into the Israelite nation and becoming a human ancestor of Jesus Christ himself (Matthew 1:5). That’s grace!

So the slaughter of the Canaanites was not ethnic cleansing motivated by racial discrimination. It was rather the careful, fair, settled action of a God of justice, patience and grace.  

But we also need to be clear that the slaughter of the Canaanites was a one-off event never to be repeated. The usual pattern Israel was to follow in war (Deuteronomy 20:1-20) was to make their enemies an offer of peace (20:10). War ensued only if this was rejected. The slaughter of the Canaanites is not justification for some kind of Jewish, let alone Christian, jihad.

If war is ever judged necessary it must be waged justly. And Christians as individuals are called to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them and to carry the Gospel of peace. This passage is absolutely no precedent for genocide nor a justification for people claiming a divine right to similar actions today. Jesus told his disciples to put away their swords.

Finally, if we look at this story in the wider context of salvation history (the big story of the Bible) it begins to make sense.

In reality none of us is innocent. All human beings are sinners who fall short of God’s standards and deserve his judgement (Romans 3:23). Justice must be done, but God’s mercy (delaying judgement) and grace (giving us what we do not deserve) lead him to look for a better way that both deals with sin and also preserves us.

If you can see any justification at all in the slaughter of the Canaanites then you are starting to understand something of the seriousness of sin and the justice, mercy and grace of God - key starting points for considering what is the real heart of the Christian faith.

But that is to bring us back to the deeper question of why Jesus Christ had to die on a Roman cross, a question that I deal with elsewhere on this blog. 

See also, 'Ten things we can learn from the slaughter of the Amorites in the Old Testament'.