So shall I have wherewith to answer him that reproacheth me: for I trust in thy word Psalm 119;142

The Muslim Qur'an gets into the news again, stirring up a hefty brouhaha. Is it a kind and gentle message? asks TIME magazine; or does it impel its believers to terrorism and massacre? The question is painful for Jews and Christians because there are passages in the Holy Bible that commanded God's "chosen nation" to exterminate certain ethnic people: "Go and smite Amalek , . . . and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling" (1 Sam 15:3). Is the Old Testament God (whose name is Jehovah or Yahweh) the same in character as the Islamic Allah who told his believers, "When the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them" (surah 9:5)

The problem is news again because the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill prescribed for their freshmen the reading of a new book about the Qur'an that seeks to show it is not a terrorism handbook (as is commonly thought). It is not our duty necessarily to defend Islam, but we seek to understand the "LORD," the God of the Old Testament.

In perspective, His commands to exterminate the Canaanites were not calls to bloody jihad as Israel's method of evangelism. Those pagans had sunk to a new low of sexual perversity so utterly lethal in character and so ingrained into their genetics that they were a moral poison to the civilized world. The God of Abraham had faithfully warned them, giving them four centuries to think and to repent of this moral evil (cf Gen 15:13). They were so hopelessly perverse that even the very land "vomited" them out. "Therefore," He says, "I do visit the iniquity thereof" (Lev 18:25). If Israel had believed the New Covenant given to Abraham, they wouldn't have needed to use the sword at all, for He chose to send "hornets" to "drive out" the degraded pagans, so His people could inhabit the land at the nations' crossroads as God's chosen missionary nation to evangelize the world (Ex 23:28; Gen 12:3). The God of the Old Testament is as much New Covenant "love" (agape) as He is in the New Testament.

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