Musings on divine genocide

But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you, (Deut 20:17) 

I have never heard a comforting exegesis of the genocide commands found in the Old Testament as part of the conquest of the Holy Land.

Virtually every explanation centers on how sinful the ites were—but that is simply a variant of the “thank you God that I am not such a sinner as he” false assurance trap. If being sinful and in rebellion against God was a reason for divine ethnic cleansing ¹ then the Jews (and every other ethnicity, ites or not) should have been command to kill one another, with the victors then required to commit mass suicide.

From a theological standpoint I can accept that everything God commands is good. From a human standpoint I recoil at what was commanded and what transpired, and see no good in it, even as I admit that it (the good) must be there, hiding from my sight.

Recently I heard this argument. I’m paraphrasing:

So you find it offensive that God ordained the deaths of these peoples at the hands of the Jews? Is God not sovereign? Would not God have ordained their deaths anyway? Would you find it less offensive if God ordained their deaths scattered over the following 50 years by various means—illness, accident, etc., but nevertheless a death that is just as dead and just as ordained? 

That’s not a helpful perspective (although at least it was novel to me.) Yes I find it more offensive to order one group to annihilate another with the sword even though all deaths, even the deaths by natural causes, are ordained. Not to mention (and the person making this argument did not mention it) that the manner in which God ordained the deaths of these people groups mean the extinction of their bloodlines, as it were. So the argument just doesn’t work. Meh. Thanks for trying.

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¹ Actually it is, except for God’s mercy. Wherein possibly lies the truth of the matter, regardless of how unsatisfying. And it will likely never be satisfying until we come face to face with the awful reality of God’s holiness. Then it will be like: Oh, yeah...