Moral Development

I had a conversation with my faculty adviser today and he was bouncing some ideas off me about issues he had been thinking about. One thing he brought up was regarding the story in Joshua about how the Israelites were told to kill all inhabitants: men, women, and children. His argument was that God was doing this to develop Israel's moral character. How you might ask? Well, most nations would take the women and children as slaves. Therefore, war became a financial enterprise. Naturally, you might respond: isn't taking slaves better than killing off an entire people? But his argument was that this actually was a progression forward in their moral development because it allowed them to see war in light of their role as the people of God rather than in terms of financial gain. It allowed Israel to turn away from the common practices of the surrounding nations to invade other lands to turn people into commodities. This was actually a building block towards a more peaceful nation.

My reflection on this is that our moral development does not always follow logical paths. Instead of becoming more moral through church attendance, we seem to gain our desire for perfection from becoming aware of our faults. God might let us become cynical about the church in order to plant a seed inside of us to want to change the church. The truth is that God's morality does not always fit with what our culture thinks is right. It doesn't even fit with what Christian culture thinks is right all the time. But God works within all of us to develop us to what we can handle.