Is Is Ishmael the spiritual father of Islam? That's just one of the questions we'll be

answering on today's edition of Core Christianity. Well, hi, this is Bill Meyer, along with

Pastor Adriel Sanchez, and this is the radio program where we answer your questions about

the Bible and the Christian life every day. We would love to hear from you, and our phone number is 8333-3-3-the-core. You can call us for the next 25 minutes or so, 1-833-843-2673. Now, we also have a YouTube channel, and if you want to watch Adriel Live in the studio and see what kind of cool outfit he's wearing, you can do that right now.

In fact, you can also send him a question through our YouTube channel, so check it out, and anytime you can email us at Questions at CoreChristianity.com.

So let's go into an email first up today. Here's one that came in from one of

our listeners named Rebecca. She says, in light of the conflict in the Middle East, someone

recently said to me that an all-loving creator would not be able to support murder or fighting

of any kind. If he did, then he isn't all loving. But doesn't God support some war in the

Bible? Can you explain this to me? I'd like to give a loving and intelligent response to her.

I mean, what we'd want to distinguish between murder, which is condemned in scripture.

You think of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. You think also even of the Noahic

covenant and the call to preserve life, the doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,

sometimes referred to as the Lex Talionis, the idea that if you take someone's life,

your life is going to be required of you. And so it's clear that murder is forbidden, but it's also

clear in scripture. I mean, you're reading about the conquest in the Old Testament or in other

places where God does command war, holy war, even there in the context of the old covenant. Now,

of course, as Christians living under the new covenant, that's not how we operate. We pray for our

enemies. We're not,

we're not conquering them in the, in the way that the Israelites were to the people of Canaan.

But even there in Canaan, you know, the Israelites were used as, as a source of God's judgment on the

wicked people that lived in the land of Canaan. It wasn't that God was just judging them willy-nilly.

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