I want to tell you about a puppet.

Growing up in church, before we had screens everywhere, we had two main tools for teaching kids the Bible: flannelgraph and puppets. I actually got to be the puppeteer for a puppet that looked exactly like our senior pastor, which felt like a significant promotion in the children’s ministry pecking order. I used that puppet to act out the parting of the Red Sea. Do you know what we left out? The part where Pharaoh’s entire army drowns. We had Moses, we had the walls of water, we had dramatic voices — we did not have bodies. Same with flannelgraph David and Goliath. We got the slingshot. We did not get the part where David cuts off the giant’s head.

I don’t blame anyone for that. You don’t traumatize six-year-olds with decapitation via felt cutouts. But here’s the thing that’s been sitting with me: we spend our whole childhood getting a sanitized Bible, and then somewhere around adulthood we’re expected to just… read the real one, unedited, and be fine with it. Nobody hands you a transition guide. So when you’re flipping through Deuteronomy or Joshua one day and you run into God apparently commanding wall-to-wall destruction of entire people groups, your brain does what mine did the first time: it glitches. Hard.

We just started a new series called “Tough Questions” — not because we’re clever with names, I promise, but because for six weeks we’re going after the stuff that actually messes with people’s faith. Not “can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it.” Real questions. And the one we started with is about as heavy as it gets: did God command genocide in the Old Testament?

I’ll be honest, I did not pick that one to be gentle on you.

Here’s the text that starts the trouble. Deuteronomy 20 has God instructing Israel, as they take the land of Canaan, “do not leave alive anything that breathes.” Then Joshua 10 says Joshua did exactly that — left no survivors. Read that cold, and it sounds like exactly what it sounds like. You will not find that verse on a church billboard. “Come to Ginghamsburg! We worship the God who kills everyone!” Might bring in a certain crowd, but it’s not the crowd we’re going for.

Richard Dawkins — not exactly a friend to the faith — once described the God of the Old Testament as, and I’m going to paraphrase generously here, basically the villain of all literature. And if all you’ve got is that one verse, I get why he’d say it. I get why any of us, staring at that verse alone, would want to either look away or quietly decide the Old Testament God and the Jesus we sing about on Sunday must be two different guys. People have actually believed that officially — there was a guy named Marcion back in the second century who taught it, and the church excommunicated him for it. Because God doesn’t change. Which means we don’t get the easy out of just picking the version of God we like better.

So what do we do?

I think about Harry Potter. Stick with me. If you read exactly one page of the first book, you could walk away convinced the entire series is about an obnoxious kid named Dudley Dursley and his troubles with a pig tail. Technically, that page exists. It’s just not remotely what the story is about. The Bible has over 31,000 verses. We don’t get to build our whole understanding of God’s character on two of them without doing some digging first.

So we dug. Who were these people actually? Turns out “Canaanites” wasn’t one unified nation — it was a scattered patchwork of city-states, basically enforcers for a brutal Egyptian war machine, more Wild West than peaceful village. Why would God move against them? Because their central religious practice, worship of the god Baal, involved cult prostitution and child sacrifice. I love Ohio sweet corn as much as anybody — I’ll drive out of my way for a roadside stand, butter and salt, the whole thing — but I would never sacrifice one of my kids for a good crop. Not for two dozen ears. Not for a hundred. That’s the level of horror we’re talking about.

And “destroy everyone”? I actually have a category for that language. Years ago I was coaching my son Colin’s soccer team, a team we were embarrassingly outmatching but somehow not beating because we weren’t playing hard. Halftime pep talk, I got fired up, and I told them, “Now go out there and destroy them!” Then I noticed the parents standing right there and quickly tacked on, “…with the love of Jesus.” That’s hyperbole. It was common language in ancient war accounts too — Egypt’s own records claim Pharaoh “entirely annihilated” Israel in 1207 BC. Raise your hand if you’ve noticed Israel still exists. Right. It was military boasting, not a body count.

Here’s what I actually walked away with, and what I hope you do too: sin is serious. God didn’t wink at what was happening in Canaan, and He doesn’t wink at what’s happening in us either. But — and this is the part I need just as much as you do — the grace of God is bigger still. God gave an entire nation four hundred years before judgment came. Four hundred years of patience. If that’s who He is, then whatever you’re carrying, whatever verse or failure has convinced you that you’re too far gone or too messed up — you’re not. He proved exactly how far His patience goes when He hung on a cross and asked the Father to forgive the people putting Him there.

Sin is serious. So is grace. Hold both. That’s the whole sermon, really.