In his book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins, a well known atheist, vindictively describes God as a jealous butcher who kills men, women and children indiscriminately for the pettiest of reasons.
Furthermore he paints God out to be an unjust control freak, a racist and an ethnic cleanser amongst a number of other nasty things. They say these things with one clear question in mind Why would you serve such a terrible God?
I believe that the central issue to this debate is not whether God kills, because we all know he does, but rather whether it is moral or right for God to kill humans. If we can establish that it is moral for God to kill humans, then the manner and timing of such an act should not be a problem.
God is the author of morality
How do we know that murder, rape or child molestation is wrong? We know it because God has written a moral code into our very beings. Without a universal moral code we would have no way to judge what is wrong or right. Everything would then be relative.
God is the author of morality and decides what is wrong or right. It is therefore, as the moral law giver, Gods right to decree that You shall not murder (Exodus 20:13), while reserving the right for himself to kill as a means to dispense justice.
In fact when we read the Old Testament we find that in certain cases, when the situation warrants it, God affords humans the responsibility to dispense justice, such as in the case of state sanctioned capital punishment.
The flood, Sodom and Gomorrah and the Amalekites
This right of God to protect the continuation of society by killing wicked humans and to dispense justice saturates the Old Testament
Noahs flood, for example is a classic case of Gods judgment. In Genesis 6:11-13 we read Now the earth was corrupt in Gods sight and was full of violence. So God said to Noah, I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. God then speaks to Noah and instructs him to build an ark for the coming flood. When we add to this information what we obtain in 2 Peter 2:5 and Hebrews 11:7, where Noah is described as a preacher of righteousness and someone who condemned the world, we get a clear picture that the people surrounding Noah had fair warning of the impending judgment to come (Some have suggested that the ark took anything between 50 to 100 years to complete).1 God did not decide to wipe out the world on a whim. It was a consequence of a society that had become terribly corrupt over a long period of time.
Sodom and Gomorrah is another classic example. These cities were destroyed in Genesis 19:24 by fire from heaven. Men, women and children were consumed by the flames. Once again they were not innocent. The society had become so corrupt that God needed to remove it in the interests of those around it and those to come. In Genesis 18:20 God declares The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. Abraham, who is present at that time, starts to bargain with God to spare the cities. He starts off by asking God if he will spare them if there are 50 righteous people and eventually bargains God down to sparing the cities for the sake of 10 righteous people, but alas, ten righteous people are not to be found.
Some might argue that when God bargained with Abraham in this manner he was taking human suffering lightly. I contend that God already knew the answer and was engaging in this barter with Abraham to show Abraham the exact opposite. In other words, God was showing Abraham that he was prepared to spare the city for 10 righteous people but that Lot and his family were the only righteous ones left.
God then sends his angels into Sodom. When the men in the city find out about the angels they try to take them by force and rape them, but Lot (Abrahams cousin who lived in Sodom) offers his two virgin daughters to them instead. The men refuse the daughters and try to storm the house into which the angels had retreated. The angels strike the men blind, and rescue Lot and his family.
But Sodom and Gomorrah did not become corrupt overnight. In Genesis 13:13 we read, Now the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the LORD. There are many years (some have argued for as much as 25 years), that pass between this first introduction to the cities when Lot moved there, and when Abraham and Melchizedek, a high priest of God, and the King of Sodom, meet.
The example of the Amalekites is especially interesting. In this case God uses humans to dispense justice. The Amalekites were a warlike nation. They were hell-bent on destroying the Israelites and routinely allied themselves with other nations to wipe Israel off the face of the earth (Judges 6:3-5). After Israels exodus from Egypt their first military confrontation was with the Amalekites who had a nasty habit of attacking people who were lagging behind. The Amalekites were wiped out, but only after God had allowed them more than 400 years to change their ways
Time and time again, killing humans is used to protect the ongoing integrity of broader society and as a means of judgment. God never does anything in an arbitrary manner. It is just not in his nature.
Through these, and many, many more examples, we can see a pattern emerge:
1)People do really bad things.
2)Most times, only when things get beyond the point of no return, God acts.
3)God gives the people opportunity to repent. Either through long periods of exposure to the truth or by direct warning (for
example, Jonah to Nineveh, the prophets to Israel, Judah and the other nations.)
4)God delivers judgment if people do not change.
Our physical bodies are destined to die
For most humans their eventual death will not be as a direct result of God killing them. Unlike the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the vast majority of humanity will die due to natural disaster, sickness, war, famine and malnutrition or a whole host of other reasons , or simply, due to old age. Not because God is sitting in a cloud firing off lightning bolts at them.
An earthquake or a tsunami does not necessarily come about because God wants to punish people, but rather because of pressure building in the earths crust or tectonic plates pushing against each other. Natural disasters where people die are a result of the curse of Genesis 3:17, not particularly because of their sins.
Many people die because of the choices that other people make, for example in cases of murder or war. But this is nothing new; God has allowed humans to die as a consequence of the tragic events that took place in the Garden of Eden.
We have to remember that God gave Adam and Eve a choice (Genesis 2:17). They chose to disobey God and through their choice death entered into the world. Each human being is therefore appointed to die. So whether you die as a two month old baby or as a 105 year old senior citizen, you will die and in allowing that to happen, God would have done you no wrong.
The book of Job articulates this very well. He says Naked I came from my mothers womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised (Job 1:21).
God does not owe us anything. Life is a privilege that he has given us and not a right that we can demand from him.
Abraham understood this very well. He had to choose whether to sacrifice his son or not. He knew God had promised him that Isaac would be the seed through whom God would make Abrahams name great. He trusted that God was the author of life and held both life and death in his hands. He was rewarded for that trust. Atheists love to use the example of Abraham and Isaac to try and illustrate how bloodthirsty God is, but neglect to mention two things. Firstly that God had no intention of allowing Isaac to be killed. God stops Abraham and provides another sacrifice. Secondly that Isaac was a willing participant. The sacrifice was a test of Abrahams loyalty, love and trust in God and Isaac prefigured Jesus Christ.
Death is not the final outcome
In all this talk of death, keep in mind that the death of our physical bodies does not necessarily signify the end of our existence. When Jesus was confronted with the issue of death he had a very interesting way of looking at it. In Mark 5:39, Matthew 9:24 and John 11:11, Jesus raised people from the dead and in each instance he referred to them as being asleep prior to their resurrection. To God the death of the physical body is like the person going to sleep. It is not necessarily the end of their existence.
Conclusion
It is not immoral for God to kill us, nor allow us to die. God determines the standards for morality. We are suffering the consequences of a world doomed to die because of sin. We are not doomed to die because we are innocent, but because we are guilty.
God does not owe us anything. He does not do us any wrong by killing us or by allowing us to die. Ultimately the death of the physical body does not necessarily constitute the end for us.
That is the good news that Jesus came to give us, which is that God loved the world so much that through Jesus sacrifice, everyone will have access to eternal life. We recognize that not all humans will choose Jesus as their Saviour; for some hell will become very real. But I would like to believe that the vast majority of mankind will choose eternal life.
All humans experience death as a traumatic and terrible event. For the trusting Christian who believes, there is great comfort that death is not the end, but simply the next stage in of a wonderful life in Christ.
1) http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2010/06/01/long-to-build-the-ark, http://www.gotquestions.org/Noahs-ark-questions.html