The Handbook / HRD
Facing the difficult texts honestly.
These texts are genuinely hard, and Christians should not soften them. But several facts matter: the command was a unique judgment limited to one time and place, given after centuries of patience toward cultures that practiced child sacrifice; its main aim was to remove the Canaanite religious system, and it was not driven by ethnic hatred; and the same books show that 'leave none alive' was stock war rhetoric, since many Canaanites remained. It was never a standing command, and Jesus points to a different way.
Much of what the Old Testament calls 'slavery' was debt service, not the race-based, lifelong chattel slavery of the Americas, which the Bible condemns at its root by forbidding kidnapping and slave-trading. Some laws, especially those about foreign slaves, remain hard. They regulated a fallen institution in a fallen world rather than endorsing it as ideal. Meanwhile Scripture planted principles (every person made in God's image, master and slave equal in Christ) that Christians eventually used to dismantle slavery.
Christians don't pick laws at random. The Old Testament law was the covenant God made with Israel as a nation, and the New Testament teaches that Jesus fulfilled it. Laws that marked Israel as distinct, like food and purity rules, sacrifices and many civil penalties, pointed forward to Christ and are not binding on the church. The moral will of God behind the law (love God, love neighbor) continues, and the New Testament restates much of it. The question isn't 'Is it in Leviticus?' but 'How does it apply after Christ?'
The contrast is a caricature of both Testaments. The Old Testament's most repeated description of God is 'merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love' (Exodus 34:6). Jesus, for his part, speaks about judgment and hell more than anyone else in the New Testament. Both Testaments show one God who is both holy and loving. Jesus claimed to be the full revelation of the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, whose Scriptures he quoted and loved.
Genesis 22 says from the first verse that this was a test, and God stopped it. He never intended Isaac to die. The story shows that God does not want child sacrifice: elsewhere he condemns it as something that never entered his mind. Abraham trusted that God would keep his promise through Isaac, even if it meant raising him from the dead. Above all, the story points forward: God provided a substitute, and centuries later he did not spare his own Son.
