You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” – Genesis 50:20.

For a long while, when somebody who has fallen away from Christianity makes the argument that God is a violent god, and listed all the things in the Bible that revealed God’s violence, I found nothing to say.
I believe God is Love. I believe that when sin entered the human race that sin caused the violence and the sin of violence occurs through the Literalists throughout all of history. I came to this conclusion by the study of words, our imperfect interpretation of them and mankind’s willingness to take the easy way in matters of the right thing to do vs the wrong. Human nature.Take Moses for example. 

Here is The Promised Land” and “Why was Moses not allowed in?”

These two things together have bothered me and probably because I wasn’t viewing reality correctly. The only thing that makes sense to me is that Moses took an easy way rather than the right way to get the Chosen People into the Promised Land. It still got the People the land and the cities, but in a human way: war. Donald Redford (Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times) extrapolates from Numbers 1:46 to give the number of Israelites who were said to have fled Egypt as 2.5 million and 600,000 of those were men.

Imagine two and a half million people moving into and through your city and absorbing into the framework of it. Imagine what two and a half million people and their goods and livestock disappearing from the Egyptian cities and countryside did to Egyptian economy, and work system. We know what a massive strike in the transportation system of the USA would do. But think too, how would two and half million people travel in one movement? I’ve seen what the trampling a crowd of approximately 3 thousand does to the lawns in my small home town when a carnival is set up in the town park. Two and a half million people and their flocks would leave an awfully deep path if they followed single file. Very destructive.

But if they spread out over an area of some miles either way and slowly over 40 years absorbed the indigent people of the countrysides? Can a culture be made over by saturation by another culture? Yes, to the good, or to the detriment, of it.
God allows mankind its folly. Free will, we got it. We can use it to do evil, and choose an easy and wrong way over the harder and right way. As in, you have a car for sale and I want it. Instead of paying a fair price for it, I pop you in the head and take it. I get the car either way of which was done with my use of my own free will, but a wrong was committed to get it. And the consequences are different in each way too.
Does God commit a sin when I commit a sin? No, my free will choice makes it my responsibility. God does not will me to sin, quite the oppostie. Does God commit a sin when a whole nation commits a sin? No. Free will.

Did Moses, like a doting father would, while wishing to see “his” People, “his” children, settled in the Promised Land before his own death, condone plans to go to war against the cities of the Canaanites? Forty years is a long time to rule such a vast people, it seems natural for him to consider them “his” People instead of fully God’s. His striking a stone for water instead of speaking to the stone as commanded by God is, to me, symbolic of a loss of faith in the face of dire circumstances and that loss of faith would translate into following his own judgment instead of the right thing to do. The right thing to do is to follow God’s commandments.

His action had consequences. And not just for him but for the Chosen People. Yet God would accomplish His Own Will despite what Moses and God’s Chosen People had done.
Contemplating all sorrows in my life and others lives, sorrows most of which are caused by free will choices, has allowed me to see how God thwarts evil. I see now how I am able to participate in Jesus’s pain and suffering by first acknowledging that He took on mine. I see how by “taking up my cross” which is my portion of that Cross Jesus carried on Calvary, I participate in His suffering.

Willing to suffer my own sorrows for His sake, while knowing that He is helping me, has made me be much less afraid in the world. Yes, I fear. I am afraid of the world influences upon me. But not so much as for it to become debilitating. I understand “Do not be afraid” now more than ever. In some tiny way, in the back of my thoughts I’ve become aware that there will come a point when I might have to suffer more, and like a child, the thought of it makes me cry. But. More and more I am seeing less and less cause of my choices, and more of worldly circumstances. Outside causes. How? By conforming my mind to God’s Will. “Thy Will be done” is a constant prayer in any difficulty. “In this and in all things, oh my Jesus, help me participate in God’s Will for this (……)”
It is a firm and accomplished knowing that He, with my co-operative willingness will take the bad and thwart its outcome. I have only to witness to His power over evil. I could co-operate with evil by sinking into despair, or I could trust God to turn it all around. I’ve learned to trust, and sit back and watch the show, so to speak. My human imperfection is still God’s tool whether I co-operate with Him or not. The difference is that one way gets to to Heaven and the other doesn’t. .
God gives life, and He saves lives unto eternity. He only asks our co-operation with His Will. He doesn’t send us to hell, we do by rejecting His Will, and following each our own. May “Thy Will be done” be our hearts’ beats until they go to rest in His Arms by His Sacred Heart in Heaven.