How Do We Handle Harsh Passages in Scripture?

Question 1115.

The harsh passages of Scripture are the ones people bring to me most often when they want to know whether the Bible can really be trusted. Someone reads of the flood, or the conquest of Canaan, or a psalm calling down disaster on an enemy, and the question follows almost immediately: how can a good God stand behind a book that contains harsh passages like these?

I take that question seriously, and I want to answer it honestly rather than smoothing it over. I am not going to pretend these harsh passages are comfortable, because they are not meant to be. But reading them carefully, in their own setting and within the whole sweep of Scripture, gives a very different picture from the one a single verse pulled out of context can suggest.

I have sat with church members who nearly gave up on their faith over one of these harsh passages, read in isolation on a bad night with no context and no guide. I do not want to wave that concern away with a tidy formula. I want to work through it properly, because I think the concern deserves a proper answer rather than a dismissive one.

What we mean by harsh passages

When people speak of harsh passages they usually mean one of a few distinct things, and it helps to separate them rather than lump them together under one heading. There are the judgement narratives, the flood in Genesis 6 to 8 and the conquest of Canaan in Joshua. There are the imprecatory psalms, prayers such as Psalm 137 that ask God to repay an enemy in kind. There are laws in the Torah that strike a modern reader as severe, capital sanctions for offences that seem, to us, disproportionate. And there are the wars commanded against particular nations, which I deal with more fully in a companion article on God’s commands against the Canaanite nations.

Each category of harsh passage raises a slightly different question, and each deserves its own careful answer rather than a single blanket explanation covering them all. What they share is that they sit uncomfortably against a modern Western assumption that a good deity would simply never judge, never command warfare, and never permit language of vengeance in prayer. That assumption is worth examining before we examine the harsh passages themselves.

God’s character is not up for negotiation

Scripture does not present God’s holiness and God’s love as competing attributes that have to be balanced against one another whenever a harsh passage appears. It presents them as a single, unified character revealed progressively across the whole canon. The God who judges the earth in Genesis 6 is the same God who tells Peter that he is ‘not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance’ (2 Peter 3:9). Both statements are true of the same God at the same moment, because judgement in Scripture is never arbitrary cruelty. It is always the response of a holy God to persistent, unrepented sin, delayed as long as patience will allow.

It is worth remembering that the flood narrative itself records a hundred and twenty years of warning before judgement fell (Genesis 6:3), and the conquest of Canaan was delayed for four centuries specifically because, as God tells Abraham, ‘the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete’ (Genesis 15:16). Judgement in these harsh passages is not impulsive. It is the last resort of a God who has already been extraordinarily patient with people who have every opportunity to turn.

Even within the flood narrative itself, Peter later calls Noah ‘a herald of righteousness’ (2 Peter 2:5), which the rabbinic tradition and much of the church has long read as implying decades of public warning and preaching that went almost entirely unheeded. Judgement, in other words, was not the first word. It was the last, after every other word had been ignored.

Reading these harsh passages in their own historical setting

A literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic requires that I read ancient Near Eastern texts the way their first audience would have understood them, not the way a twenty-first-century reader instinctively does. Conquest accounts in the ancient Near East used a stock rhetoric of total victory, phrases such as ‘left none remaining’ or ‘utterly destroyed,’ as conventional battle language rather than a literal body count. We know this because the book of Joshua, having reported the supposed total destruction of a city, goes on to describe the same peoples still living in the land in Judges. The language is the language of decisive victory, not a modern casualty report, and recognising that changes how harsh many of these harsh passages actually are.

This pattern is not unique to Israel. Egyptian pharaohs and Assyrian kings used identical hyperbolic formulae in their own royal annals, boasting of enemies ‘annihilated’ or lands ‘made as though they had never existed’ in campaigns we know, from other sources, did not end in literal extermination. Reading Joshua against that wider ancient Near Eastern literary background does not make the events described any less real, but it does mean the harsh passages describing them are using a recognised genre of victory rhetoric rather than reporting genocide in the modern sense of the word.

This does not remove the reality of judgement from these accounts, and I am not trying to explain the harsh passages away. It does mean that reading them with ancient categories rather than modern ones changes what the text is actually claiming, and that matters a great deal for how we assess it.

Divine judgement is not the same as cruelty

Canaanite religion, as far as we can reconstruct it from archaeology and from the Old Testament’s own descriptions, involved child sacrifice to Molech, ritual prostitution, and a level of societal violence that the text repeatedly calls an abomination. The judgement that fell on these nations was moral judgement on entrenched, generational wickedness, not an arbitrary land grab dressed up in religious language. Israel herself is warned in the same breath that the land will vomit her out too if she adopts the same practices (Leviticus 18:24-28). This was never a matter of ethnicity. It was a matter of persistent moral corruption meeting a holy God whose patience had run its course, and reading it any other way misunderstands what the text says.

I think it is also worth saying plainly that these were unique, non-repeatable acts of divine judgement carried out through Israel at a specific point in redemptive history, not a template for how believers are to treat their enemies today. The New Testament could not be clearer that our present warfare is ‘not against flesh and blood’ (Ephesians 6:12), and Jesus tells us to love our enemies rather than conquer them (Matthew 5:44).

What harsh passages do not mean

It matters to say plainly what these harsh passages are not claiming, because a great deal of modern objection rests on a misreading. They are not a licence for ethnic cleansing, and the text itself proves it. Rahab, a Canaanite, is spared and grafted into Israel because of her faith (Joshua 2, 6:25), and later becomes an ancestor of the Messiah (Matthew 1:5). The Gibeonites secure a covenant of peace through deception rather than destruction (Joshua 9), and Israel honours it. Judgement in these harsh passages falls on entrenched wickedness, not on a bloodline, and anyone within the judged nations who turned, like Rahab, was received rather than destroyed.

Nor do these harsh passages establish a repeatable pattern for how any nation or any believer should treat an enemy. They describe a unique, bounded episode within God’s larger redemptive plan for Israel and the land, closed off by its own historical and covenantal particulars. Nothing in the text invites a modern reader to imitate it, and the New Testament nowhere treats it as a model for Christian conduct.

The wider canon confirms this reading. God sends Jonah to preach to Nineveh, capital of a brutal Assyrian empire, precisely so that the city might repent and be spared, and when it does, God relents (Jonah 3:10), much to Jonah’s own displeasure. Ruth, a Moabite from a nation under God’s judgement elsewhere in the Old Testament, becomes another ancestor of the Messiah. The consistent pattern across these harsh passages and their surrounding narratives is that judgement falls on unrepented wickedness and mercy is extended the moment anyone, of any nation, turns toward God.

The imprecatory psalms as honest prayer, not personal revenge

Psalms such as 137 and 69, which ask God to bring severe judgement on an enemy, are among the harsh passages that startle modern ears most, and I address them at greater length in a companion piece on the imprecatory psalms. What I want to say briefly here is that these prayers are not the psalmist taking justice into his own hands. They are the opposite, a deliberate handing over of vengeance to God rather than acting on it personally, which is exactly what Paul later commands in Romans 12:19, ‘Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.’

There is something honest, even healthy, about bringing raw anger at injustice to God in prayer rather than suppressing it or acting on it ourselves. The psalmists model that honesty for us, and it is a very different thing from the personal vendetta the phrase harsh passages often suggests on a first reading.

Progressive revelation and the picture completed in Jesus

Scripture unfolds progressively. God deals with humanity differently at different points in redemptive history, under different arrangements, without His character ever changing. That is the basic insight behind a dispensational reading of the Bible, and it matters here because so many harsh passages belong to a particular stage of that unfolding story, the period in which God was establishing and protecting a covenant nation through whom the Messiah would come.

Jesus does not repudiate the Old Testament’s portrait of God. He affirms it, quotes it as authoritative, and describes Himself as its fulfilment (Matthew 5:17). At the same time He is the clearest revelation of God’s character we have, ‘the exact imprint of his nature’ (Hebrews 1:3), and in Him we see a God who judges sin at the cross rather than sparing us the reckoning we deserve, doing so out of love rather than in spite of it.

Common objections to harsh passages, answered honestly

The most common objection I hear is some version of, ‘the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New.’ I do not think that survives careful reading. The New Testament’s God judges too, decisively and eternally, and the Old Testament’s God is described in the very same breath as slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (Exodus 34:6). The two testaments describe one God, not two, and both contain harsh passages alongside extraordinary tenderness.

A second objection asks why these passages are in the Bible at all if they cause so much difficulty. I would answer that removing them would not make Scripture more honest, only less. A Bible edited down to the material we find comfortable would no longer be a reliable record of who God is and how He has dealt with a real, fallen world. I would rather keep the whole picture, harsh passages included, than trade it for a curated one that flatters modern sensibilities.

A third objection asks whether, if God commanded judgement once, He might command something similar again. The consistent answer of Scripture is no. These were bounded acts tied to a specific redemptive-historical purpose, the establishment of Israel in the land in preparation for the Messiah’s coming, and that purpose has been accomplished. Nothing in the New Testament grants believers, or any nation, authority to act as agents of that kind of judgement now.

Living faithfully with the whole Bible

I do not think every tension in these harsh passages resolves neatly, and I would be dishonest to claim otherwise. What I can say is that the difficulties do not undermine the larger, overwhelmingly consistent portrait of a God who is holy, patient, just, and, in the end, willing to bear judgement Himself at the cross rather than simply hand it down to us. That is not the profile of a capricious deity. It is the profile of a God whose harshest actions are always in service of a larger faithfulness that stretches from Genesis to Revelation.

I would encourage anyone wrestling with harsh passages not to flinch away from them, but not to read them in isolation either. Read Genesis 15 alongside Joshua. Read the imprecatory psalms alongside Romans 12. Read the conquest narratives alongside the sermon on the mount. The whole counsel of God gives a far more coherent picture than any single harsh passage read on its own ever could.

I have found, over years of pastoral ministry, that the people most troubled by harsh passages are often the same people most serious about wanting a God who is genuinely good. That instinct is right, and it should not be talked out of them. It should be pointed toward the fuller revelation of that goodness in Christ, where judgement and mercy meet without either being diminished.

So, now what?

If you have been troubled by one of these harsh passages, I would say two things. First, you are allowed to sit with the discomfort rather than rushing past it. These texts are meant to be taken seriously, and glib answers do them no favours. Second, keep reading. The God who judges Canaan and inspires the imprecatory psalms is the same God who sends His Son to bear judgement for us, and that larger story is where harsh passages finally make sense.

If you would like to go further, my companion articles on the imprecatory psalms and on the Canaanite conquest specifically go into more depth on those two categories of harsh passage, and I would commend wider reading in Old Testament ethics for anyone who wants to sit with these questions properly rather than accept a quick summary.

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:16-17 (ESV)

For Further Study

Readers wanting to work through these questions more fully will find help in Millard Erickson’s treatment of the doctrine of Scripture and the character of God, in Charles Ryrie’s discussion of progressive revelation across the dispensations, and in J. Dwight Pentecost’s and John Walvoord’s writing on how God’s unfolding programme with Israel accounts for actions belonging to a specific, non-repeated period of redemptive history. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s systematic theology remains valuable for tracing how God’s unchanging character is expressed differently under different covenantal arrangements, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s writing on Israelology gives useful background on the land promises behind the conquest narratives and the reasons Scripture gives for the timing of judgement upon them.