Expert: Griff Ruby - 8/25/2008

Question
An Atheist asked me if your God Jesus is love and love us then why He command Saul to killed every one including women and infant of Amalek ?

1 Samuel Chapter 15
15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.

15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.


Answer
Understand that we are dealing here in this case with a nation that God knew to be evil to the last man woman and child (and God would know that sort of thing, don't you think?)
I realize the hardest part would be the small children of that nation who obviously have had no real role in that wickedness, but even here there are two earthly considerations and one spiritual.
One is the question of who would have been there to take care of the now parentless children?  Instead of dying quickly and (relatively) painlessly they would have slowly starved to death for lack on anyone to take care of them.
Two is the question of what happens if one survives and grows up?  For example in Exodus, if Pharaoh's daughter had not caused one of the Hebrew boys to be spared (Moses), who would there have been to deprive Egypt of all its slaves, saying "Let My People Go"?  No, even one surviving child from an annihilated nation could (and reasonably would) vow revenge and wreak havoc.
The spiritual aspect is that there is no reason to believe that the children would be damned, indeed such children so slaughtered might well be the only persons from such a wretched nation to make it to Heaven, who knows?  Their parents certainly weren't qualified.
Finally, just to put things into proportion, while we may blanch at the thought of all those innocent children being mercilessly put to death and yet nearly all of those who make this complaint are one and the same with those who are ever voting in favor of aborting similarly innocent children, and oftentimes also of killing off such "useless" people as the elderly, the infirm, the handicapped, and so forth, all in the name of efficiency, gain, or convenience.
As for the animals, we are dealing with a nation that was truly depraved, and who knows what  unnatural things they were doing with their animals, and what diseases their animals might thereby carry?  Think of all the (how many? - thousands, millions?) cows we destroyed on the fear that some few of them might have Mad Cow disease.