Luke, a really smart 6th grader at Church, asked me after watching the Bible Series on TV…. “Wasn’t God’s instruction to kill the Canaanites a sin?”

Wow!  Great question Luke.
We must ponder this Biblical Revelation in the Text… if we take the Text as seriously as we claim we do.

Many in denying our God,…. have charged Christians and Jews with Genocide…

If you look it up on Wikipedia… you get a bit of this:

John Hemer asserts that the two primary approaches that Christian teaching uses to deal with “the problem of violence in the Old Testament” are:

1. Concentrate more on the many passages where God is depicted as loving – much of Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, Deuteronomy.
2. Explain how the idea of God as a violent punishing war-monger is all part of the historical and cultural conditioning of the author and that we can ignore it in good faith, especially in the light of the New Testament.

Hemer, John (April 2003). “Violence & The Bible”. Retrieved 2010-11-21.

We have to have a deeper look…. stay tuned for a more in depth study…