How can you call a God who ordered a massacre love?

🔥The question: “There are wars and orders to kill in it, so how is that the word of a God of love?”

🛡️The Church's answer: Some passages do not stop at recording a war; they speak as though God commanded total destruction. Pretending not to see those sentences, or easily rewriting them as “it wasn't really violence at all,” is not an honest answer. Ancient war records used exaggerated conventional formulas to claim total victory, and the texts also carry the historical limits of an Israel that lived in a violent age as it understood and expressed the will of God. Catholics do not hold that every moral insight of the human authors was complete from the start; we read revelation as reaching its summit in Jesus Christ, who loved his enemies and took death upon himself. That does not mean we can reconstruct everything that historically happened in each event, or how people understood a command of God. While admitting what we do not know, we have to say plainly that killing innocent people never becomes good, and that these texts cannot be used as an order to commit violence today.

🧐If they press further: “Can those passages justify violence today?” — No. Taking a verse of Scripture out and applying it as a command for genocide, racism, hatred, or personal violence contradicts the Gospel and the unity of the whole of Scripture.

✨In one sentence: “Don't hide the violent texts — study the history and the genre, but read them in the light of Jesus Christ, who loved even his enemies. They can't justify violence today.”