21 June 2026 LSUMC 1143

The Bible on War

Deuteronomy 20:10-20

This week – after a three-week break – we return to a sermon series. Let me remind you what we’ve been doing. We’ve been looking at scripture and some of its challenges. We say that this book is authoritative to our faith, but when we actually read it, we find some puzzling, or even disturbing, things that we have trouble reconciling with our consciences, or even with the rest of scripture. For instance, we looked at the fact that the Bible accepts slavery as a normal part of life. Or again, passages in the Bible clearly assume that women are intrinsically less than men – fit primarily for bearing children. As we’ve dealt with these issues I’ve suggested two important principles:

1. The Bible is not the verbatim, dictated, perfect word of truth; it is God’s message to humanity revealed to historical humans who – unlike God himself – are products of their own historical and cultural context. Thus we have divine truth wrapped in swaddling bands of human cultural assumptions. Our task, as faithful readers, is to separate God’s eternal truth from its temporary cultural accretions.
2. And second, the first step in this difficult process of identifying the diamonds amid the gravel is to look at the life, example, and teaching of Jesus Christ. That’s the standard. Anything that conflicts with what Jesus did or said should be held suspect.

So today we take up a different topic. What does the Bible have to say about war? And let’s lay the foundation by looking first at what Jesus says. From Matthew chapter 5: You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also. Or again, You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Neither of these specifically address war between nations, but both address motivations that often lead to war. More specific is the incident recounted in Matthew 26, when Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. One of his followers drew a sword and prepared to fight, but Jesus said, Put your sword away; for all who take up the sword will perish by the sword. Add to this the incident recounted in Luke 9 when a Samaritan town refused to allow Jesus and his disciples to enter. Two of his disciples, James and John, begged him to call fire from heaven and burn those suckers to the ground. Jesus told them, in effect, to grow up, and went on to the next town. At no point in the Gospels does Jesus say anything that can be interpreted as a call to arms or a vote of approval for violence in any form. And we should note that this non-violent attitude was expressed in a time that was far, far more violent than our own. Jesus’ words are remarkable in our own time; they were almost unfathomable in the 1st century Roman Empire. From all this, it would seem that Jesus’ view of war would be what we might today call “pacifism”: war is wrong, we must have nothing to do with it. Many Christians have accepted that view in its entirety. In the Christian world, the Amish, the Mennonites, and the Quakers are the best-known advocates of pacifism, but its influence is wider than that. Jesus’ teaching against retaliation by violence was foundational for the work of both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

I wanted to start there, to lay that foundation at the very beginning, because that’s not all that the Bible says about war. In some of the laws of Deuteronomy, throughout the book of Joshua, and in several passages in the books of Samuel and Kings, we read about God sending the Israelites out to wage war. Actually, war’s too tame a word. What some of those books prescribe is what we would today call genocide. The Israelites sent to conquer the land of Canaan are told to kill “everything that breathes” because they are not just defeating their enemy, but God’s enemies. They are stamping out dangerous idolatry. The Canaanites are not spoken of as people but as a potential source of infection. Indeed, in a couple of stories Israelites are punished for showing mercy. I think we can all agree that that’s different from the teaching of Jesus. It is impossible to picture Jesus calling for violence, endorsing genocide, or treating anyone at all as less than human. So what do we do with this? First, it is helpful again to remember that the genocide stories are from a very different social world. At the time of the conquest of Canaan, all wars were holy wars, because each nation had its own god. It was the children of Israel’s God against the children of Rimmon or Baal or Molech. In a world of holy war, it is not surprising that the writers of Deuteronomy and Joshua described the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan as a divinely mandated extermination of vermin. It fit the culture. But that is not the message of the Bible as a whole. Again, the notion of a divine genocide simply cannot be reconciled with the God who “so loved the world” or the Christ who gave his own life so that others might live. Either holy war is wrong or Jesus was: I choose to reject holy war.

Historically, not everyone has agreed with me, of course. Christian history abounds with crusaders, conquistadors, slavers, and colonists wiping out native peoples, all claiming biblical support for their genocides. In our own day there are some claiming the name of Christ who speak of new crusades against infidels. This is why it is so important for us to know our Bible ourselves, one reason I’m preaching this sermon series. When people cite scripture to support evil, we need to know how to respond. We have to lock in first on the testimony of the man of sorrows, Jesus the Christ. If Christ ever drops from the center, we lose all perspective.

But we aren’t quite done with war. I’m guessing that everyone here is agreed on rejecting holy war and genocide. But some of you might have some questions about the pacifist view as well. It sounds good, but is it always possible? Let’s think about that. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to turn the other cheek if someone strikes you. What if someone strikes a child in your care? Do you turn that child’s other cheek? That doesn’t feel like a choice we can make for others. What if peaceful intervention doesn’t turn the attacker away? Does our commitment to non-violence require us to stand by and permit violence to others? That feels dubious. It’s worth noting that Jesus’ instructions are generally framed as individual decisions. What if you are the leader of a group and the whole group is attacked? What if you are the president or prime minister or king of a land that is invaded? Is it not your job – your oath of office – to defend the people in your charge? I hope I’m not arguing with Jesus here, and I’m very willing to say that there is probably a peaceful response that will be better and ultimately more effective than violence, but it doesn’t require too much imagination or knowledge of history to suspect that in this fallen world, sometimes war is unavoidable. How do we know that? And what do we do then? At last we turn to scripture, an odd passage from Deuteronomy.

We now read from the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verses 10-20.

10When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. 11If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you in forced labor. 12If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; 13and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. 14You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. 15Thus you shall treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of the nations here. 16But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. 17You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, 18so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.

19 If you besiege a town for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you must not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them. Although you may take food from them, you must not cut them down. Are trees in the field human beings that they should come under siege from you? 20You may destroy only the trees that you know do not produce food; you may cut them down for use in building siege-works against the town that makes war with you, until it falls.

The middle of this reading is one of those passages that calls for holy war – the annihilation of the Canaanites and all the other kinds of -ites. We’ve already dealt with that. But the rest of the reading admits that not all war is holy war. And for “normal” war, there appear to be rules. These rules include: (1) try to make peace first, (2) do not fight non-combatants – don’t kill the women and children – and (3) don’t destroy the land wantonly. Your war is against enemy soldiers, not civilians and not the land. Now this may not seem like a whole lot – well, it isn’t a whole lot; after all, it says those women and children you didn’t kill you get to keep as slaves – but in its historical context, this passage is notable. Nobody in the ancient Near East of that day imagined any limits to war, but here is at least a hint of that. So let me talk about the Christian tradition of “Just War.” You may have heard discussion of this in recent months, as Pope Leo and others have referred to it. I don’t have the time, and you don’t have the patience to go into detail on the different formulations of this idea, but the basics are pretty clear. Just War Theory says that war is wrong, but sometimes may be necessary. If you must fight, fight only in defense, for the purpose of restoring peace. You may not wage a war of aggression, nor for conquest, nor for gain. Fight only after every other possible resolution of the conflict has been tried. And, as in Deuteronomy, make war only against warriors; not civilians. 

So what does the Bible say about war? Basically three things: pacifism, holy war, and limited war, if necessary. As usual, it is left to the individual reader to decide where to land. But we are not left completely without direction. Christ remains our standard, our core. From that perspective I believe that our default setting must be peace. We are to be non-violent in our individual lives, should love our enemies and accept personal attacks without retaliation. In our social and political lives, we are to advocate for peace, to oppose wars of aggression and wars for the sake of oil or any other gain. And if war comes, as it always has and always will on this earth, we are to seek justice in the way it is waged, protection for its victims, and compassion in its resolution. 

War is a fact of life on this earth. There will always be lands so filled with simmering injustice that war cannot help but boil over. There will always be insecure world leaders who believe that waging war will satisfy their raging emptiness. But as for us, as followers of Christ, peace should be our default – in our words, in our votes, and on our Facebook pages – so that our warring world may see that there is another way.