God Sometimes Saves Trees but Kills Babies and Puppies

Babies and Puppies

The Bible always changes the way I view the world. I realize I come to God's Word with so many preconceived notions that he has to constantly shatter. He did that for me today in my reading of Deuteronomy.

Moses gives a set of commands on how to wage war against far away cities. First, offer terms of peace. If they accept, enslave them. If they don't accept, kill every male. But take every woman, female child, and animal to enjoy as a spoil of war. This didn't really shock me. I knew about this.

When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if it responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you. (Deuteronomy 20:1-14)

Those rules only applied to far away cities. For cities that are part of the land that God gave them as an inheritance, God had a different set of rules. There should be no offer for terms of peace. Everything dies: male, female, adult, child, human or animal.

But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded. (Deuteronomy 20:15-17)

Trees

But not everything dies. God specifically makes a provision to save trees that bear fruit.

When you besiege a city for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. You may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you? Only the trees that you know are not trees for food you may destroy and cut down, that you may build siegeworks against the city that makes war with you, until it falls. (Deuteronomy 20:19-20)

God makes a provision for saving trees that bear fruit! But trees that do not bear fruit could be used to build weapons that kill babies and puppies. Every human and every animal had to be put to destruction.

Why?

Why would God spare far away women and female children, and nearby trees, but command the destruction of everything else?

But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded, that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 20:15-18)

The reason God commaned the destruction of men, women, children, and animals was to ensure that the Israelites would not be led astray to sin. Now, I can see how the men and even the women could lead the Israelites astray. But think about it, how could young children or animals lead them astray? How could an ox or a dog or a donkey or a 2 year old teach a grown up to worship a foreign God?

I am not one to contradict God. So there must be a way in which an ox or a dog or a donkey or a 2 year old can lead us astray to worship foreign Gods.

I have an older brother. When I was five years old, I remember seeing my dad discipline him for disobedience. I hid in the kitchen and watched my dad spank my brother in the living room. It put so much fear in me that I was and still am today a very obedient child to my parents. I remember thinking to myself, "Brother, just listen to them and obey them!"

I think God commanded the Israelites to destroy babies and animals so that the Israelites, and us, would understand how holy God is and how much God hates sin. If I were an Israelite at that time, the very thought of knowing that disobedience to God leads to complete destruction would make me pause before I would think about worshiping a different God. Holding my newborn child would be a constant reminder of the punishment of sin.

So, out of love for the Israelites, God needed them to see his hatred for sin. The local people groups served as an example of that. If you sin, you will die like them. How did they die? Horribly. How much did they die? Completely.

Is that not the purpose of knowing the horrors of hell? To remind us of God's holiness and hatred for sin? And to remind us of his grace toward us who are called to believe (Romans 9:22-24)?