Deuteronomy 20:10-18- 10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. 11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. 12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. 13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. 14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. 15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. 18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.
When God had Israel go into the land and kill everyone, it was because those people had completely turned evil. They had ripened up to the stench where God said no more. God commanded the Israelites to kill everyone. Why? Because he didn’t want one infected bad apple to infect a new people who were to follow His principals.
Notice God didn’t send them in until the appointed time. They had to become really evil before they went in. This is what He said to Abraham.
Genesis 15:16 –16 In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure.”
To the surrounding areas, God wanted submission. He gave an alternative to the people around the area. Serve Israel or the men (only) would be killed. Notice there wasn’t the purging God demanded from those in the land He was giving to Israel. They then took the woman and children to raise under God.
How much longer, before America reaches its full measure? It’s on a fast track of bringing back all the things that God detests. God takes evil seriously.
God may be slow to anger and abounding in love, but He hates evil. Let’s do our best to stay away from what God thinks is evil. Let’s try to purge it from our lives.