Is It Wrong for God to Kill People?
When God exercises His sovereign right
This question comes up in nearly every serious conversation with a skeptic. It usually arrives with a tone of moral certainty, as though the answer is so obvious that anyone who hesitates has already lost. “Your God commanded genocide. Your God drowned the world. Your God killed children.”
Let’s take it seriously.
The first thing to notice is what the question assumes. It assumes God stands in the same moral relationship to human life that other humans do. But on Christian theism (the claim that a personal, all-knowing, all-powerful God exists and created everything), that assumption is false, and recognizing why it’s false is the whole ballgame.
When we say it’s wrong for humans to kill other humans, we’re saying something about creatures taking what doesn’t belong to them. I didn’t make your life. I don’t sustain your life. I don’t have the knowledge to judge whether ending your life serves any good purpose. So I have no right to end it. The moral prohibition on killing is a creaturely constraint, and the reasons behind it are creaturely reasons: we lack the authority, the knowledge, and the justice to make life-and-death determinations rightly.
God lacks none of these.
He is the author of life (Genesis 1-2). He sustains every living thing moment by moment (Colossians 1:17, Acts 17:28). He possesses exhaustive knowledge of every heart, every consequence, every eternal trajectory. And His justice is perfect, without the distortions of ignorance, self-interest, or cruelty that corrupt every human judgment.
“The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). That’s not fatalism. It’s a recognition of the fundamental gap between Creator and creature, between the one who is self-existent and everything that depends on Him for its existence. The one who grants existence has authority over its parameters. The one who sees beyond the grave doesn’t measure outcomes the way we do.
But the skeptic presses harder. “Fine, maybe God can take life directly. But what about the conquest narratives? What about the herem?” The herem (sometimes translated “the ban” or “the devotion to destruction”) was God’s command to Israel to completely destroy certain Canaanite populations. “God commanded Israelite soldiers to kill entire peoples, including women and children. That’s genocide.”
This is the hardest version of the question, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The passages in view are primarily 1 Samuel 15 and portions of Deuteronomy and Joshua, where God commands the total destruction of Canaanite populations. Anyone who reads these texts without discomfort probably hasn’t read them carefully enough.
But notice: the principle from above doesn’t change when the mechanism changes. A judge who sentences a criminal and an officer who carries out the sentence operate under the same judicial authority. If God has the right to end life, He has the right to delegate that act. The moral logic is the same whether He acts through a flood, through fire from heaven, or through an army.
Several honest distinctions need to be made.
First, these commands are specific, limited, and situated within a particular moment in the unfolding history of God’s plan to redeem humanity. They are not standing orders. They are not generalizable ethical principles. They are singular divine judgments against particular peoples at particular times for particular reasons. Deuteronomy 9:4-5 makes explicit that Israel is displacing the Canaanites not because of Israel’s righteousness, but because of the wickedness of those nations. And critically, Israel itself receives the identical treatment when it falls into the same sins. Exile to Babylon is God applying the same standard to His own covenant people. The standard is consistent even when the application is terrifying.
Second, this was judgment on cultures practicing child sacrifice, ritual prostitution, and systemic violence. We have archaeological evidence for this from ancient Canaanite religious texts discovered at Ugarit (modern Syria) and from cultic remains at excavated sites. God’s stated reason is moral corruption, not ethnic identity. The herem is judgment rendered by God as the ruling authority over Israel, not racial cleansing. The word “genocide” smuggles in ethnic targeting that the text explicitly excludes.
Third, and most importantly, the principle of progressive revelation matters here. God does not dump the full weight of His purposes on humanity all at once. He reveals His character and His will incrementally, meeting people where they are and moving them toward the ideal. The conquest narratives belong to a specific phase of redemptive history where God is establishing a nation ruled directly by His law, the nation through which the Messiah will come. That phase does not recur. Christ inaugurates an entirely different mode of engagement: “Love your enemies.” “Put away your sword.” “My kingdom is not of this world.” This is not God changing His mind. It is different phases of a single redemptive plan. And when you look at the trajectory, it terminates in a God who absorbs violence rather than commanding it, who dies for His enemies rather than destroying them.
Now the hardest part. What about the children?
I won’t minimize this. The thought of soldiers killing infants on command is viscerally horrifying, and we should feel the weight of it. But several things bear on the question that the skeptic’s framing obscures.
On the Christian understanding of what human beings are, death is not annihilation. If there is an afterlife, and if God’s justice and mercy extend beyond the grave, the moral calculus is not reducible to “biological life was ended, therefore maximum harm was done.” We are not materialists. The worst thing that can happen to a person is not physical death.
And here is where the full revelation of God’s character in Christ becomes the essential interpretive key.
Jesus’s posture toward children is one of the most consistent themes in the Gospels. “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14). He places a child at the center of a theological dispute and says anyone who receives a child in His name receives Him (Matthew 18:5). He warns that causing a little one to stumble warrants a millstone around the neck (Matthew 18:6). He tells the disciples that unless they become like children, they won’t enter the kingdom at all.
This matters for how we read the conquest narratives, and it cuts in a direction the skeptic doesn’t expect.
If the God who commanded the herem is the same God revealed in Christ (which Christianity affirms), then whatever happened to those children must be understood within Christ’s disposition toward children, not against it. The skeptic wants to read the conquest as evidence that God is cruel toward children. But the full picture across the whole of Scripture shows the opposite. Which means the herem was not, from the divine perspective, an act of cruelty toward those children.
Think about what those children faced within Canaanite culture. These were societies that burned their own children alive on altars to Molech. The horror we feel at the conquest should be measured against the horror of what those children would have experienced, and become, within a culture of ritual child sacrifice and systematic depravity. God’s judgment on that culture can simultaneously be an act of justice against the guilty and an act of mercy toward the most vulnerable within it, if death is not the end.
If the children who died in the conquest were received by the God who said “of such is the kingdom of heaven,” then their physical death, while grievous in temporal terms, delivered them from something far worse than death and brought them into the presence of a God whose tenderness toward them is exactly what Jesus displays.
I want to be careful here. The moment this reasoning becomes glib (”God did them a favor!”), it has stopped treating Scripture seriously. The horror is real. The grief is appropriate. But the horror belongs to the temporal frame. The skeptic wants to trap us in that frame exclusively, and we shouldn’t let them.
Which brings us to the question the skeptic never wants to answer.
On what grounds are you horrified?
If naturalism is true (the view that nature is all there is, that there is no God, no soul, no reality beyond the physical), the killing of Canaanite children is morally indistinguishable from a lion killing a gazelle’s offspring. Death is simply the cessation of biological function. It carries no moral weight beyond what humans subjectively assign to it. You need objective moral standards to call God’s actions “wrong,” and naturalism cannot ground those standards.
The objector borrows from Christian moral categories to make the accusation land. The idea that children have sacred worth, that innocent life deserves protection, that killing is objectively wrong: these convictions come from the worldview the skeptic is attacking. On naturalism, children are just smaller collections of atoms. Their death is thermodynamically identical to any other chemical process. There is no “should” or “shouldn’t” about it.
The skeptic has to borrow our theology of children’s worth to make the objection feel weighty, then deny our theology of children’s eternal destiny to keep the objection standing. That’s an inconsistent use of the Christian framework. You can’t take the imago Dei (the belief that every human being bears the image of God) that makes child-killing horrifying while rejecting the resurrection hope that transforms its ultimate meaning.
So where does this leave us?
God has the authority, the justice, the knowledge, and the revealed character to make life-and-death determinations. The prohibition on killing is a creaturely boundary that does not bind the Creator, precisely because the reasons for the prohibition do not apply to Him. The conquest narratives are specific, limited, judicial acts within a particular phase of redemptive history, not standing ethical principles. And the children who died were received by a God whose disposition toward them is revealed in Christ as one of fierce tenderness and protective love.
The harder question, and the more honest one, is usually not “How could God do this?” but “Can I trust a God who exercises this kind of authority?”
And the Christian answer is the resurrection. God demonstrated His character in Christ, and vindicated that demonstration by raising Him from the dead. The one who commanded the herem is the same one who wept at Lazarus’s tomb, who suffered Roman execution, who prayed “Father, forgive them.” Those aren’t contradictions. They’re the full picture of a God whose justice and mercy are both more severe and more tender than we can easily hold in one frame.
“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).
Yes. He shall. And He has shown us what “right” looks like. It looks like a cross.
Please allow me to get deep.The Higher Being designed the Homo Sapiens to have higher Birth Rate than their Death rate. Wars Famines Plagues Diseases Murders and Genocide are all factored in. And with some help from Mother Nature female humans out number the males on this planet .Without this design Earth would over populate and we would fight each other even more than we are now over resources.So unfortunately yes people need to be killed to make room.