Deuteronomy 20:10-16 “When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. 11 “If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you. 12 “However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. 13 “When the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. 14 “Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you. 15 “Thus you shall do to all the cities that are very far from you, which are not of the cities of these nations nearby. 16 “Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.

I struggle with these passages. I struggle with a God who encourages and enables the massacre of cities. I struggle with a God who promotes and encourages war and destruction. I struggle with a God that is so dissimilar to the God I know and worship.

I understand the urge to say there must be two gods. I understand the desire to say that there was a vengeful God of the Old Testament and a loving God of the New Testament. I understand; but I think that’s wrong.

Somehow, the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are one, eternal, unchanging God. The same yesterday, today, and forever.

I do not understand it yet. Maybe I never will.