MAX ON LIFE

59. Does God allow war? If so, how do we reconcile his commands to love our enemies?

"Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members?" (James 4:1). War is the result of sin. To ask God to prohibit war, then, is to ask him to prohibit the consequence of human behavior. Something he has never been wont to do. As long as there is sin, there will be war.
In fact, God has used war to eradicate sin. When calling the Israelites into battle, Moses instructed them:

"After the Lord your God has done this for you, don't say in your hearts, 'The Lord has given us this land because we are such good people!' No, it is because of the wickedness of the other nations that he is pushing them out of your way." (Deut 9:4)

Can people grow so wicked, so pagan, so vile that God justifiably destroys them? Can leaders be so evil and cruel that God, knowing the hardness of their hearts, righteously removes them from the earth? Apparently so. He did so with Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen 19:24-25). He did so with the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Hivites, and Jebusites (Ex 23:23).

"In those towns that the Lord your God is giving you as a special possession, destroy every living thing.... This will prevent the people of the land from teaching you to imitate their detestable customs in the worship of their gods, which would cause you to sin deeply against the Lord you God." (Deut 20:16, 18)

God has used warfare as a form of judgment against the enemies of God. In fact, he uses warfare as judgment against his own people when they become enemies of God.
God's priority is the salvation of souls. When a people group blockades his plan, does he not have the right to remove them? He is the God who knows "the end from the beginning" (Isa 46:10). He knows the hearts of everyone and protects his people by punishing the evil of their wicked neighbors. Is it not God's right to punish evil? Is it not appropriate for the One who tells us to hate that which is evil to punish that which is evil? Of course it is.
I like the words of C. S. Lewis here:

"Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought no to subject myself to punishment - even to death. If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace. It is no good quoting "Thou shalt not kill". There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew. All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St. John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: not did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major - what they called a centurion. The idea of the knight - the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause - is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dredful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken."

By: Max Lucado