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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Love and Destruction

Coming up next, please stay tuned for It Is Written, presented by Pastor John Bradshaw.

It's 1 of the most celebrated of all things.

Love has been called a many-splendored thing.

In classical music there's Liebestraum, Dream of Love, by Liszt.

Salut d'amour, love's greeting, was given by the English composer Elgar as an engagement gift.

Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing, all love stories.

Poetry and love go hand in hand, always have.

"'Oh, my love is like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June, ' wrote Robert Burns in the 1700s.

The Western world has even set aside a day on which to remember love, Valentine's Day.

And when you come to the Bible, there it is.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Twice in the same chapter, 1 John 4, we are told that God is love.

Paul wrote, "...I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Beautiful!

And the Bible depicts love in some beautiful ways.

In Genesis, Jacob served 7 years for Rachel, and they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly condemned.

And Jesus said, the Father himself loves you.

God says through the prophet Samuel, Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not.

But slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." That's 1 Samuel 15 and verse 3.

God commanded King Saul, the leader of his people Israel, to utterly destroy all that they have.

Men, women, young children, even nursing babies, even the animals.

How do we reconcile this with the idea that God is love.

Atheists love passages of the Bible like this.

They'll tell you that the God of the Bible is murderous, a tyrant, a megalomaniac, a bully, except of course, God is love, as we've read from Holy Scripture.

And notice it's not that God loves but that God is love.

It's not just who he is but love is what he is.

Can God be love and order the total annihilation of an entire people group?

But even after I do that, there still be questions hanging in the air.

Because someone has to ask, but what about the flood?

What happened to Amalek is a drop in the bucket compared to what happened in Noah's day when God destroyed an entire planet with the exception of just 8 people.

There may have been millions of people in the world at that time.

And yet God killed them all and saved only 8.

That's all God saved out of the entire population of the world at that time.

They're not the questions of only skeptics and cynics and critics.

They're the questions of thinking people, of searching people.

I mean you have to ask those questions, don't you?

Let's consider the Amalekites, the descendants of Esau, the union of Esau's son Eliphaz and a concubine named Timnah produced, among others, a child called Amalek.

Immediately after the Exodus, his descendants attacked Israel.

This was the time when Aaron and Hur held up Moses' arms during that famous battle.

As long as Moses' arms were outstretched toward the heavens, the battle was in Israel's favor.

But when Moses' arms were down, the battle turned against Israel and Amalek prevailed, the Bible says.

Ultimately, the armies of Israel, led by Joshua, defeated Amalek.

But notice that God said, "'Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua.

For I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.'" Exodus 17, 14.

After that, Amalek was a thorn in the side of Israel.

The Amalekites were in the Promised Land when Israel got there.

It was 1 of the people groups that Israel should have eradicated.

And it was the Amalekites who attacked Israel and caused a great amount of loss and damage when Israel thought presumptuously to take the Promised Land without the blessing of God.

There was a reason God wanted the Amalekites destroyed.

God's people had been enslaved for hundreds of years.

He delivered them so they could go on to the promised land, where they could thrive, and where Israel would function as an incubator, out of which would spring the Messiah.

Israel's survival depended on their safety and security.

And as long as the Amalekites were around, Israel was in jeopardy.

They were not safe and they were not secure.

You couldn't make the case that the Amalekites were upstanding citizens, or that they'd made any kind of positive contribution to the world.

You have to understand that after a couple of thousand years of sin, some people were profoundly wicked.

Well, couldn't God have brought them over, led them to repentance, convinced them that He had their best interests at heart?

They knew about Israel's deliverance from Egypt and the miracle that that was.

They had evidence that God was with Israel.

They knew about this God, yet they chose to remain defiant.

I think the problem some people have with this is that they think the Amalekites were something like their own rowdy neighbors.

That they had a penchant for playing loud music late at night, they left old cars in their front yard, drank too much, got in occasional trouble with the law, lovable rogues who could never straighten up.

No, the Amalekites were profoundly wicked.

They'd have lived miserable lives, and they would have made other people miserable.

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Love and Destruction

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