Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Patrick Miller. If you follow the news you probably saw the story of

Salmon Rushdie. He's an author. He wrote a book called The Satanic Verses which

critiqued Islam and as a result of publishing that in 1989 the Iranian

Supreme Leader at the time issued what's called a fatwa it's essentially a call

for assassination and he said that he would pay anyone who assassinated Salma and Rushdie $3 million for their work.

As a result, Rushdie spent the rest of his life in hiding.

Until recently, he was speaking at the Chautauqua Institute in Western New York and

someone rushed the stage and they stabbed Salma and Rushie obviously with the intent to kill

him.

He didn't die.

He was life flighted and was in critical condition and is still doing, I don't think very well.

But I bring up the story for a specific reason.

Because if you're a Christian and you talk to those who are skeptical of the faith,

they will often say that this kind of story, it's

found in the Old Testament. jihad, the call to go to war, holy war, it's found in the Old Testament.

They would point to the circumstances that we're about to

look at in the book of numbers when the Israelites were commanded by God to go to war

and to completely destroy their enemies who were living in the land of Canaan. And so it's a really important question because you have to ask,

can a good God command war?

Can a good God command the extermination of an entire people group?

I mean, isn't that genocide? Can a good God command the destruction of non-combatants?

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