Expert: Tyler Eldred (formally known as DarkBlue) - 10/29/2008

Question
What does the Bible say about attacking other nations?
Would the answer be different for the OT and the NT ?

Answer
Dear Michael,
Your question is a complex one, and an interesting one, and I would say that it is an important one. I am glad for my own sake as well as yours that I was able to take a closer look at this question, and so I thank you for that opportunity. The problem is pretty straightforward: Old Testament scripture tells of great battles started and won directly through God's will, but in the Gospels, Jesus never harmed anyone, and He allowed Himself to suffer and die rather than vanquish His enemies. So how can this be? There is an answer, but not a simple one.

First off, although certainly it is true that because of Jesus' salvation, the New Testament has taught us how to understand the Law of the Old Testament in a new way, we must also recognize that the God of David, great military leader and slayer of Goliath is the same God as Jesus, who is called the Lamb of God, and that that God never makes mistakes. If this is true, then it is obvious that there exists instances where war is necessary and where war is unacceptable. I think that that is important to get across first. Now what follows is my best attempt to sort out when and where a nation should war with another nation, and how the new law brought forth by the salvation of Jesus changes how we think about it. Because the chief evil of war is the deaths of many, some of my examples will be talking about deaths in, general, and not really formal wars. What I say about deaths I think, though, is appropriate to generalize to war where applicable.

I can think of four different reasons we could see a war or death brought on through God. The first is liberation. Exodus is a good example of this. During the first Passover feast, the angel and comes and kills the first born sons of each Egyptian that the Pharaoh would free the Israelites. In this example, we would note that Moses gives him many warnings and many littler curses first, it only after these that God causes this to happen. We should also note the significance that this Passover feast has in making way for Jesus: in the Passover over feast, the Jews are saved from death by the mark of the blood of the lamb, and we are saved from death by the blood of Jesus when He dies for us at that same time of year. Finally, we should point out that God would not have set this plague of Egypt if Pharaoh had let the Israelites go, and so that was what God was bringing about through that plague. Because in the New Testament it says, though, "Slaves, obey your masters," I think that God chose to bring about this liberation because we wanted to make the Israelites His chosen people in order to establish that law, not only because they were oppressed.

The second reason is to defense or protect someone. In Psalm 7, it says, for instance "Lord my God in you I take refuge; rescue me; save me from all who pursue me, Lest they maul me like lions tear me to pieces with none to save," "Bring the malice of the wicked to an end; uphold the innocent," and "A shield before me is God who saves the honest heart...God sharpens his sword, strings and readies the bow." (Another good example is 2 Kings 1)If we cite this as reason for war though, we should point out that war isn't always a solution to this problem. The Psalmist asks for rescue, not for vengeance. If there is any other way to protect someone, it seems obvious to me that that course of action should be taken instead.

The third reason is for the preservation of the truth about God. In 1 Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath, David accepts Goliath's challenge because he mocks and insults the army of Israel, God's chosen army, and before he fights him, he says "You come against me with the sword and spear and scimitar, but I come against you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel that you have insulted. Today the LORD shall deliver you into my hand...thus the whole land shall learn that Israel has a God." (Another good example is in 1 Kings 18.) If God actually does sometimes strike people with lightning for their blasphemy, I imagine that those would be the same type as this. It is obvious though, that not everyone who profanes the name of God receives death. Jesus did not smite the Roman soldiers that mocked Him, because it was the greater truth of God's mercy that He revealed in not doing so, and because they too were to loved and to be shown love through the beautiful Passion of our Lord. Neither would God necessarily be wrathful in these instances, He would simply be communicating a point, in order that more people could be saved.

The fourth reason I think is punishment. The classic example of this is Sodom and Gomorrah. Some would argue that this instance is part of the third reason, and that the only reason why He destroyed the people of Sodom and Gomorrah was to uphold the truth about what is moral, but if it is not here that death results as a punishment, then certainly it will be this way at the end of the world, that everyone will be judged according to what they did in their lifetime, and some will fail to accept salvation and receive death. But this point is not a very important one for your question, because I don't think it is our place to enact this sort of punishment on others. After all, as our Lord said "Let he without sin cast the first stone."

My purpose for mentioning those four reasons was to help shed some light on this apparent difference between how we think about the Old Testament God and the New Testament God, though they are the same. I did by trying to explain some instances of killing in the Old Testament, in order that they might not seem so arbitrary and random. Now that we have those reasons as some tools to help understand. I want to look deeper than these reasons, and talk about some very important consideration to take into account. These considerations, I think, have always been true, but they were not emphasized in the Old Testament, and they were not revealed to us until the New Testament.

First I want to look at two quotes. The first is from Matthew 10: 34-36, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man 'against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's enemies will be those of his household.'" The peace I believe He talking about here doesn't have anything to do with the peace of healing, fulfillment, and completeness that He preaches often, but this sort of peace He is referring to is of stagnation and complacency. When He says He comes to bring the sword, I think He is saying that He is calling us accept and spread a hard truth, a truth that means for a complete change of our desires and intentions and a truth that doesn't compromise itself or apologize itself for being true. When I say that it is a hard truth, I should say that I don't mean that it is ungracious or unmerciful, rather, it is a truth that is infinitely merciful, but one that we resist because of the hardness of our hearts. So I bring this quote up because I think that sword He is referring to is not necessarily a physical weapon but an illustration of how serious our faith should be. To that now, I would add, that in order to uphold that which is good, that faith can sometimes call for war.

The second quote is from Matthew 26: 52, "Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword." According to the wisdom of the great theologian St Thomas Aquinas those who "take the sword" doesn't refer to all those who use a weapon, but those who take it up an unjust sort of way. We can think of "taking up the sword" as a certain violent disposition or wrathful intention, a sort frame of mind, if you want to think of it that way. Furthermore he says that although such people are not always physically slain, "they always perish with their own sword, because, unless they repent, they are punished eternally for their sinful use of the sword." This point here is important: our greatest danger concerning attacking another nation is whether in our reason for attacking, the way we attack or what is the result of our attacking we have allowed ourselves to do something contrary to the Gospel to which God has called us. As it says in Ephesians 4 "Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun set on your anger."

With these two quotes, we don't necessarily have specifics about appropriate instances of attacking or not attacking, but we have some guidelines for how we should direct our conscious when we consider these cases. The first quote says that we must stand up for what is right, the second quote says we should never stand up for something in the wrong way. These two concepts help us to form a balance, and it gives a proper voice to each of our concerns when considering the morality of a certain situation of war.

Though we have this conscience as our help, we must realize that our conscience is disordered and incomplete if we do not heed the wisdom of God, and indeed we need God before we can make any good decision on such things. We should not then, readily and immediately assume we know the answer to these questions. To do that, I think, would be violate one of the two quotes above. These matters thus require much humility and prayer.

I will now mention five factors that I think are unique to the New Testament and that are very important when considering issues of war. The first is mercy. Starting in Matthew 18: 21, Peter asks Jesus "Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?" to which Jesus answers, "not seven times but seventy-seven times." He proceeds to tell him the story of the unforgiving servant. The message of the parable is like this: Given how merciful God has been to you, though you offended Him and denied Him so many times, how can you be unforgiving with smaller offenses between you and someone else? We have then, an opportunity to try to pay back our Master by passing on His mercy, or else we disrespect that mercy by affording it to none. Thus is says "For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you" (Matthew 6: 2). In this way the "turn the other cheek" policy applies, and war should have nothing to do with personal or national retribution.

Along these same lines, we could cite lots of nations that don't deserve to exist, or war that would be just in doing, but we should also recognize that neither does anyone deserve to exist either. For are as guilty as prostitutes and murderers: "You have heard that it was said to your ancestor, 'You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.' But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment," "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Is it not the same God who forgives us both? Perhaps we could attack in order to prevent an evil greater than our attack, but it is not fitting for us to make distinctions between us and another, to say "he deserves to die, while I do not." Further, we should recognize our universal plight, and hope in the working of the salvation that is bigger than any war.

We should remember this about any trials that we face: "The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?" (Psalm 27). To be more specific "What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? ... I am convinced that [not even death] … will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ." (Romans 8:35) I mention these verses, because I think we often use desperate circumstance as excuse to do evil. 'I had to steal,' says the thief 'because I didn't have very much money.' This point is not meant to undermine the seriousness with which we should work to defend life and the dignity of all persons but to say that our decisions should be made without any angst because the Lord has taken care of all things, for if we have the Lord himself, nothing else is necessary.

It is true that obedience as a virtue has taken a much more dominant role in Christianity than in Judaism. The first 7 verses of Romans 13 make it obvious that we should not, for example, start a civil war against an unjust leader, because, as Paul explains, every authority has been place there for a reason by God. Instead, in such matters, we should, like Jesus before Pontius Pilate, allow ourselves to be subjected to authority. I would say that liberation, in these instances, should come from God's initiative, and that obedience is something to be respected and factored into our considerations about war.

Finally, I think that a crucial point about war is that we should not be selfish about it. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" are the word of our Lord during the last supper (John 15:13). Giving of our life, then, is of ultimate importance in what we do. Many saints have died rather than defend themselves against their attackers; they did not consider their life to be so important that they should harm another so they laid down their lives in order to love how Jesus loved and commanded us to love. But if we go to war, to defend life, not to take it, then those soldiers lay down their lives not for their own sake, but for those that they are protecting. If we fight only for ourselves though, we fight selfishly.

Now that we talked about all sorts of reasons to go or not to go to war, I want to mention that it is obviously important how it is that we attack another nation. There are some moral ways, and some immoral ways. Some basic rules could include the following: Whenever we attack someone, we always do it with respect. Our target should always be the guilty and never the innocent. Any more humane ways to accomplish a mission are obviously preferred. Taking lives should be avoided any time it is possible (for instance, taking prisoners). You should never enter a war if it creates more damage that it stove to prevent. Those are just some examples. The same sort of prudence should be taken with how a war is done as with what we have talked about, in conjunction with the rest of our Christian understanding.

As a summary, I will say that we discovered there are reasons that war can be ethical, but there are many limiting circumstances. Basically war should be the last option, for the prevention of evil rather for retribution, for non-selfish reasons and done in a noble way. We also said our judgments about war should come from uncompromised conviction balanced with pious caution, and with the fullest possible submission to the Will and Wisdom of God. I think that perhaps Romans 12:17-21 says it best, "Do not repay anyone evil for evil; be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all. If possible, on your part, live at peace with all. Beloved, do not look for revenge but leave room for the wrath; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." Rather, "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head." Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good." On this we can comment on how imperative it is that we try and prevent war at all costs, but it seems to imply that it is possible for war to occur. Also, it suggests compassion as an alternate solution to the problems of our enemies. I know that that was kind of a complicated answer, and perhaps not too organized, but I hope that helped you understand what the Bible has to say about attacking other nations better, and I thank you once again for your question. May God be with you to guide you, and to protect you from all evil.