God says the fact that the Canaanites were killed is meant to warn you that God is a judge, that He does take sin seriously, and that you, too, will be punished for your sin unless you come to Jesus Christ. At the same time, the fact that God delays His judgment is meant as an encouragement to you. It’s meant to clearly say that God is nevertheless a God of mercy. Peter says, “God is patient, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to eternal life.”

Well it’s true, of course that the final judgment has not yet come; God has delayed his final reckoning. But if you look to past history, if you look to these great marks of judgments, these things stand there in history and in the pages of the Word of God as warnings. Certainly, this is true of the Jewish invasion of Canaan. It’s God’s way of saying that there is judgment even among the nations. Righteousness exalts a nation, but a nation that goes the way of sin and perversions is inevitably brought down. These things also stand as a warning of a judgment to come finally at the end of time. We mustn’t think that God will be any different with us than he was for those ancient cultures.

All of the wicked practices that Israel was warned against were present in a most perverted and dangerous way in the Canaanite culture. It is, incidentally, something similar to what existed in the time of Noah, and in my view, is one of the reasons for God’s judgment upon that culture as well as upon the Canaanites. God is in the battle against the demonic forces of evil, and where there’s a great outcropping of those in society, God’s judgments are particularly swift. All of that was true of the Canaanites.

Spiritism and the occult might seem rather remote to us, but they are not treated lightly by people who have lived in areas of the world where this is seriously practiced. It does take place in portions of America, and it’s going to become increasingly a problem for us in years ahead. But for those who have seen in it some way, it is very serious because the demonic is a terrible thing.

I suppose it’s not really possible to preach through the book of Joshua without dealing at some point with what some people have felt to be a great moral problem. The moral problem lies in the fact that at the direction of God, the Jewish people were commanded by Joshua to exterminate large blocks of the country God had given them to possess. People would call it genocide. It’s a bad thing and people have asked with some perception how it can be possible that in a book that pretends to present to us the character of a good and loving God we could have stories which show God directing His people to do such a thing. This is one of a class of problems that we find in the Bible, and it is the task of apologetics, that is, the defense of the faith, to answer these.