Trevor Laurence
The following is the audio and edited transcript of a message on Deuteronomy 12–13 from Trevor Laurence, delivered at Trinity Church (PCA) on October 13, 2024.
There are a lot of tough texts in the Bible, but those concerning the conquest of Canaan are widely considered some of the toughest.
We’re working our way through Deuteronomy in this season, and Israel’s impending entry into and possession of Canaan is the context for the whole book of Deuteronomy. It’s hanging in the background on every page, so we need to go ahead and address it head-on.
The conquest raises questions for just about everyone. For skeptics, it’s Exhibit A for why the God of the Bible is an ethnocentric, genocidal, colonial monster. For seekers, it can be a significant intellectual and ethical hurdle to embracing the God of the Bible as beautiful, just, good, and desirable. And for Christians, the portrait of God in the conquest may appear to be at odds with the God we’ve met in Jesus, and that can stir all sorts of questions about God’s character and his word.
On the face of it, the conquest seems like bad news, prompting many of us to ask, “How can I worship a God who commands and participates in conquest?” But the Bible tells this story without embarrassment. It doesn’t whisper the conquest. It shouts it. The Psalms sing about and celebrate it. The Old Testament treats it as a reason for worship. And the New Testament uses it as a pattern to tell us the story of Jesus and to point us to the future God promises for the whole creation. Why? Because the conquest isn’t bad news—it’s good news. The conquest is good news that God is the true king committed to establishing his kingdom and not letting sin, violence, and injustice engulf his world forever.
Now, in the time that we have, I can’t give a comprehensive survey of the conquest, and I can’t address every possible question or objection. But, taking our cues from Deuteronomy 12–13, I want to explore how the conquest fits into the story God is writing for his world, and I want to consider how that grand story might reframe how we understand what God is doing in the conquest and, ultimately, in all of history. The conquest is a war that takes place on 3 fronts, so we’re going to see the conquest of Canaan, the conquest of Israel, and the conquest of the world.
The Conquest of Canaan
In order to understand the conquest of Canaan, we have to start at the creation of the world. The story of the Bible is the story of a God who desires to live in his creation with his people in a community of love, justice, and joy—in short, a community of holiness, a community of beautiful purity where people and relationships and creation itself flourish in his presence.
The Garden of Eden is the first sanctuary where God dwells among his creatures. God plants Adam and Eve in the fruitful garden so that they can feast with God and live with God and rejoice in the presence of the Lord. And he commissions them as a royal priesthood to guard God’s dwelling from corruption, conquer any unholy predator who tries to enter, and subdue the whole world as the expanding temple of God’s glory.
Eden is the first sanctuary, but God wants the entire creation to be cultivated—prepared as his house, filled up with the holy joy of the creatures who bear his image and reflect his glory. When the serpent comes in spitting lies like venom, Adam should have subdued him like a faithful king and driven him out like a faithful priest. But instead of guarding the sanctuary, he and his wife listen to the liar, rebel against the Lord, and allow sin to pollute the garden and corrupt the joy of life with God. They fail to drive out the serpent, so God drives them out—but he does it with the promise that he’s going to send a true royal priest to crush the serpent, restore God’s dwelling place, and fulfill God’s purpose to live in the abundant fullness of holy love with his people.
As the Bible moves forward, God rescues Israel out of slavery in Egypt through the exodus. He calls them to be his royal priesthood, his new Adam. And he vows to plant them in the land of Canaan, a land of fruitfulness and flourishing where God will dwell in a holy society of love with his people. In the story of the Bible, Canaan is a new Eden—a garden sanctuary—where God will live with his royal priesthood as they heed his word, worship his name, and experience the blessing of life the way it was meant to be.
But there’s a task ahead: there are serpents in the garden—idolatrous nations corrupting the land that God has claimed as his sanctuary—and Israel, the new Adam, has to perform Adam’s task. God calls them as his royal priesthood to subdue the land and drive out the serpents. The conquest of Canaan is the preparation of a new Eden, and God commands Israel to drive out the nations so that their worship and way of life won’t infect the community of love, justice, and joy that he intends to nurture in his presence.
If you read through the conquest commands in Exodus and Deuteronomy, the consistent focus is on the elimination of idolatry—of false gods and false worship and the distortion and injustice they inevitably bring. God is going to drive out—expel—the wicked nations through Israel, and he commands his people over and over: don’t bow down to their gods; don’t serve their gods; don’t intermarry with them and adopt their ways and raise the next generation as idol worshipers.
You can hear it in Deuteronomy 12: “You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess served their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. You shall tear down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and burn their Asherim with fire. You shall chop down the cared images of their gods and destroy their name out of that place” (vv. 2–3). Why? Because God doesn’t want his people following after the bloodthirsty gods of the ancient world and turning his new Eden into hell on earth.
Sometimes, we tend to assume that the Canaanites were like secular suburban Americans: middle class values, largely minding their own business, until God commands Israel to march into their relatively peaceful territory. But we only entertain that image because we can’t imagine the everyday horrors of the ancient world. We only think that way because all of western civilization has already been transformed by Israel’s law and Jesus’ teaching, so we have a hard time imagining a culture where our basic values aren’t taken for granted.
But when the Bible describes Canaanite culture, it’s the stuff of nightmares. God condemns the Canaanites for sexual anarchy, incest, bestiality. Their gods required worship through ritual prostitution. They practiced necromancy and sorcery with demonic spiritual powers. And Deuteronomy 12:31 sums it up: “Every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.” The portrait that emerges is of a society defined by sexual predation, rampant injustice, and unspeakable violence against the most vulnerable—all of which was sanctioned by the gods they worshiped.
When God calls Israel to drive out the Canaanites from his land, he makes two things abundantly clear. First, this is a just judgment against their profound wickedness. And second, this removal of their idols is necessary so that his Edenic home with his people doesn’t devolve into a cesspool of bloodshed, oppression, sexual chaos, and child sacrifice.
As we’ve seen throughout Deuteronomy, God wants a home where his creatures experience true flourishing for their good—so the idolatry that leads to personal and social disintegration and misery has to be eradicated. And the goal is festal joy in the presence of the Lord. God tells them to destroy the name of the false gods out of the land because he’s going to put his name there. He’s going to build his house. He’s going to make the land his home. And he wants his people to dine at his table: “There you shall eat before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your households, in all that you undertake, in which the Lord your God has blessed you” (Deut 12:7).
In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate and rejoiced in the presence of God. And in the land of Canaan, God calls Israel to drive out every serpent and every idol so that they can feast in joy before his face once again.
And God is not stingy with his invitation. Anyone can get in on the festal joy he offers in his new Eden. All along the way, the nations are invited to join in on the new thing God is doing with his people. So when God frees his people from Egypt in the exodus, the Bible says a “mixed multitude” (Exod 12:38)—Israelites and Egyptians—crossed through the sea. Egyptians who saw God’s power over the idols and his justice against sin forsook their gods to follow the King.
Caleb, one of the leaders sent to spy out the land, is of non-Israelite ancestry, and the Bible traces his lineage to one of the Canaanite nations that God is driving out (Num 32:12; Josh 14:6; cf. Gen 15:19). Caleb has Canaanite blood running through his veins, but his family left their gods, came in faith under Yahweh’s reign, and received the land rather than being driven from it.
Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute in Jericho, who declared to two Israelite spies, “I know that the Lord has given you the land, and that the fear of you has fallen upon us. . . . For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt. . . . And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no spirit left in any man because of you, for the LORD your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath” (Josh 2:8–11).
According to Rahab, the whole land of Canaan had heard what God did for Israel forty years earlier. They had received the advance warning, which was also an invitation to life, and Rahab led her household into the kingdom, where she became the great-great-grandmother of King David and a branch in the family tree of Jesus himself. And let me submit that, for the Rahabs of Canaan—for the lowest of the low scraping to survive in an oppressive society—the news that Yahweh was coming was good news.
When the downtrodden heard that a God is on his way who rescued slaves from the empire, who exalts the lowly, who fights on behalf of a people that’s weaker than all their enemies, who repudiates child sacrifice, who outlaws oppression, who gives a law demanding that his worshipers follow him in love and justice even for the marginalized, who’s coming to drive out this crushing wickedness and live among his people in a new kind of kingdom, and on top of it all, there’s room for me—for the Rahabs, that news was an announcement that liberation and life are on their way.
Contrary to popular belief, the conquest was never about ethnicity. It was always about worship. Anyone willing to turn from their idols and the degrading violence and injustice that idolatry animates could find their place in Yahweh’s festal joy. But for those who refused the invitation to repent, who rejected the warning to flee, and who resisted God’s kingdom of justice in devotion to their parasitic gods, the Lord said, “They have to go.”
But the destructive idolatry God was driving out did not just exist in Canaan.
The Conquest of Israel
We sometimes have this notion that God is really harsh with outsiders and really indulgent with Israel—that God is guilty of some sort of ethnocentric favoritism, that he reacts severely against the sins of the nations but sweeps Israel’s sin under the cosmic rug. The reality couldn’t be farther from the truth. Let’s just consider the first few books of the Bible.
At Mount Sinai after the exodus, while Moses was on top of the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments from the Lord, Israel built a golden calf—a carved image, an idol—and bowed down to it in worship. And there, God sent a plague among the people, and at his command, the Levites put three thousand men to death for their idolatry.
In the law that God delivered on top of that mountain, he mandated that all sorts of infectious and destructive forms of sin be met with capital punishment.
In the tabernacle—the tent where he made his dwelling—two men named Nadab and Abihu brought strange fire before the Lord, an offering that he did not ask for. So fire came out from the presence of God and consumed them on the spot.
In the wilderness, when Israel murmured against God and his miraculous manna—the bread from heaven—and talked about how great the food was in Egypt, as if Pharaoh was a better king than the Lord himself, God gave them quail to eat. And then he struck down the grumblers “while the meat was yet between their teeth” (Num 11:33).
When a power struggle broke out in the camp and a man named Korah challenged Moses and Aaron’s leadership, God opened up the earth, and the ground swallowed them, and they “went down alive into Sheol” (Num 16:33).
On the way to promised land, when the people of Israel committed sexual immorality with the Moabites and bound themselves in worship to Baal their god, the Lord sent a plague through the camp that consumed twenty-four thousand.
When Israel refused to enter the land of Canaan because they were scared of how big and strong its inhabitants were, God declared that the entire wilderness generation—every adult twenty years old and up—would perish in the wilderness, and only the next generation would enter into the land where God would set his glory and begin his new Eden.
If you simply read through the first five or six books of Bible, you’ll see that the charge that God takes it easy on Israel in comparison to everyone else is totally backwards. The Israelites would beg to differ. You’ll recognize that God is actually far less patient with corruption within his covenant people than he is with the corruption outside among the nations.
God promised the land to Abraham and told him that his family would have to wait more than four hundred years to go in. Why? Because the sin of Canaan hadn’t yet risen to the level where expulsion was just. But when idolatry creeps into Israel—into God’s holy people—sometimes in the blink of an eye, God jumps into action to remove the contagion from his garden people.
We heard it earlier this morning in Joshua 5. Do you remember? When Israel gets to the edge of the promised land, they meet the angelic commander of the army of the Lord. Joshua asks him, “Whose side are you on? Are you for us or our enemies?” And God’s answer is “no.” God isn’t taking sides in a human conflict. He’s calling Israel to live on his side as a community of justice, love, worship, and joy. And if they oppose him in injustice, oppression, idolatry, and the human devastation those things always bring, God tells them—over and over, in Exodus and Deuteronomy and beyond—that he’s going to turn his sword against them. Why? Because God’s intention is not simply to build Israel. His intention is to build a community of fullness—of faithful flourishing in his presence—and he’s welcomed Israel to live as a light to the nations and display to the world the beauty of human life and society as it was meant to be under the reign of God and in worship. And if they reject that calling, if they turn to the gods of the nations, he will not let them bear his name in vain and lie to the world with their corrupted lives.
God is not just concerned with the idolatry in the land. He’s concerned with the idolatry in his people, too. And that shows up in Deuteronomy 13.
This chapter tells Israel how they’re to respond to idolatry when it crops up in their midst, and it uses all sorts of familiar language: your eye shall not pity, you shall put them to the sword, you shall herem them—completely remove them. Where have we heard that before? That’s all the grammar of the conquest. It’s what Israel is to do to the idolatrous nations in the land. Now why is that language being recycled here? There’s only one reason: it’s because when an Israelite worships and lives like a Canaanite, he is to be judged like a Canaanite. Canaanites can become Israelites by faith, and Israelites can become Canaanites by idolatry. And the conquest that takes place in the land takes place within the community as well.
There’s a phrase in chapter 13 that will be repeated several times in Deuteronomy: “You shall purge the evil from your midst.” The idea there is clear enough. They’re to remove the potentially metastasizing corruption from God’s new Eden before it spreads and takes root in the garden. But the word “purge” literally means “burn” or “consume.” It’s the same word that’s used of the burning bush that burns but is not consumed. Israel is God’s Edenic garden, and the fire of his presence burns among them in grace without burning them up. But when deadly idolatry creeps into the garden, the royal priesthood is called to protect the sanctuary and represent the God who is himself a consuming fire by purging away the corruption that will inevitably threaten the fidelity and joy of his people.
Amid all the instructions to drive out the idolatry from their midst, God repeats in this chapter several times that he’s the one who brought Israel out of the house of slavery. Why does he emphasize that? Why does he focus on his liberating work in a chapter about idolatry? Because idolatry is entry back into the slavery. Worshiping anything other than the one true God—finding life, satisfaction, fullness, worth, meaning, and joy in anything other than him—always makes you a slave of the thing you’re serving. And God commands Israel to deal decisively with that because he does not want his liberated people to willingly walk back into the chains of slavery.
Deuteronomy 13 focuses on three possible sources of idolatry in Israel. The chapter homes in on the call to follow another god that comes from an influential leader, a prophet or a dreamer of dreams; a loved one, a family member or dear friend; or an entire community of people. And I think it speaks to each of those situations because God deeply understands the process through which our hearts are often drawn away from him. Oftentimes, people who think that they’re committed to following the Lord and his word are drawn away to false doctrine, false worship, and false—self-destructive—living in part because of relational ties and the power of those relationships. They do it in part because they feel the pull of a charismatic leader, a cherished relationship, or an influential peer group that they desperately want to be part of. I don’t have time to press into all the dynamics involved here, but it’s worth reflecting on how many stories of Christians who begin to embrace idolatry—and in our time, especially sexual idolatry—because they gave themselves to a preacher who shifted, or they had a family member who embraced a new identity, or they found a church who told them it was OK to worship the gods of the nations and still call yourself one of Jesus’ people.
The same human and social dynamics that are often at work in our time were at work in Israel, too. And that’s why the Lord warned them and us about the seduction of idolatry.
The Conquest of the World
In the unfolding story of the Old Testament, Israel does not completely drive out the idolatrous nations from the land, and they don’t drive out the idolatry from within their own borders, either. The result is that rather than shining in joy like God’s new Eden, they mimic the idol-driven violence of the nations. The descriptions of the life that ensues over the centuries as Israel descends into a Canaanite kind of worship and identity are bone-chilling. All of the things that God condemns the nations for in the land, Israel ends up embracing, and the result is massive bloodshed and devastation among the people of God. And God does what he promised: he takes it into his own hands to drive a wicked Adam out of his garden.
But amid the spectacular failure of Israel, the Lord remains committed to his purpose to restore humanity to this presence and craft a community of holiness and wholeness. And he does it in Jesus.
Often in discussions of the conquest, there’s an assumption that the Jesus of the New Testament is nothing like the conquest God of the Old Testament. But to the contrary, Jesus fulfills the pattern of the conquest, and he expands it to encompass the entire cosmos. How so?
Joshua was the leader who piloted Israel across the Jordan into the land, and Jesus—whose name is simply the Greek form of Joshua—Jesus arrives as a new Joshua who crosses the Jordan in his baptism to begin a new conquest in the land. He journeys throughout the land driving out demonic powers and disease and proclaiming to every town, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” With a warning and an invitation, he tells them, “In me, God is on the way,” and he invites them to enter in to God’s in-breaking, life-renewing reign by repentance and faith.
And then he does something utterly surprising. We might think that God’s new Joshua, his faithful Adam, his royal priest is going to come and effect the conquest in military power. He’s going to drive out every sin, every corruption, from the land. But that’s not what he does. The one who alone was worthy to drive out every corrupted sinner lets himself be driven out instead.
What is the cross? The cross is the conquest of the Son of God. At the cross, the holy one is driven out so that the unholy can be welcomed in. The King is uprooted so that idol-captive enemies like you and me can be graciously planted in the soul-satisfying, joy-fulfilling presence of God. Jesus received the conquest judgment in his own body and soul, and in so doing, he disempowered sin, death, and Satan in resurrection life. The faithful Adam, the Son of God, stomped on the head of the devastating serpent, and he conquered the deepest foes that corrupt God’s world and prey upon his creatures. Jesus fulfilled the conquest by bearing the conquest at the cross and driving away the power of the enemies of God. And one day he’ll return to drive out every corruption from a cosmos that will become God’s unstained sanctuary of glory, justice, and love.
That is the future hope of the people of God—Christ’s conquest of the cosmos in justice, in glory, in love. And in the meantime he continues the work of the conquest to this day. How? He does it in three ways.
First, Jesus sends his church on a gospel conquest to the nations. After the exodus, God put his tabernacle in the midst of Israel and sent them out among the nations of Canaan to prepare his dwelling place in the land. And after his resurrection, Jesus made the church his tabernacle—he put the Spirit of glory within his people—and he now sends us among all the nations of the world to prepare them to be God’s dwelling place. The gospel makes sinners into the temple of God—the house where his Spirit resides—and we fill the earth with the glory of the Lord, we extend God’s temple throughout the world, by bearing witness to the king who let himself be conquered in judgment so that he could conquer us in grace.
The New Testament regularly describes the life of the church with military imagery. Why? Because the Christian life of peace and proclamation is a participation in Jesus’ merciful conquest of the world. As Paul says, we don’t destroy the physical high places of idolatry, but every high and presumptuous and idolatrous thought that’s raised against God as we invite all peoples to be conquered by the King who longs to exalt them and fill them up with himself. We fight not with swords but with prayer and the good news of the cross, as Paul says, “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Cor 10:4). Israel battled against the military strongholds of Canaan, and the church battles with the gospel against the military strongholds of the devil in the hearts and minds of the sinners that we long to see step into life that Jesus puts on offer.
Second, Jesus calls the church still to purge evil from our midst. Just like the conquest had to take place inside Israel, not just outside of them, the church has to drive out unrepentant sin and idolatry from the community where God has set his name. Church discipline—removing the rebellious who cling to their enslaving idols from the membership of the church—is the internal conquest of God’s people. That’s why Paul quotes Deuteronomy 13 when he teaches about church discipline in 1 Corinthians 5: “Purge the evil person from among you” (v. 13). What does he mean? Drive them out in the hope that they will wake up to their folly and return in the joy of repentance. And that’s why Paul says in Galatians 1 that, if any preacher comes announcing a different gospel, let him be anathema—counted as accursed, completely removed from among you. What is that? It’s the Greek word for herem, the same word used in Deuteronomy 13.
Church discipline is an internal conquest that protects the holiness of the sanctuary, interrupts the spread of idolatry’s infection, guards the joy and peace of the community—which can only really be found in Jesus—and preserves the witness of the church as a truth-bearing light to the nations who points the way to life.
Finally, Jesus continues his conquest by calling us to continually drive out the unholiness from our own hearts. Christian, you are the sanctuary of the Spirit of God. You are a living garden of Eden. You are a walking land of Canaan. And your everyday repentance is the practice of driving out the sin and idolatry that corrupts the temple that is your body.
The nineteenth-century theologian Thomas Chalmers talked about the transformation the gospel can bring as “the expulsive power of a new affection”—the expulsive power. Jesus offers a satisfaction, fullness, and delight in himself that is powerful enough to expel, to drive out, every competing idol in our hearts. And our everyday return to the gospel, our everyday fight for holiness, is an everyday act of conquest and a pursuit of highest joy in Jesus.
Deuteronomy tells us that the goal of the conquest—and everything God is doing in the world—is festal joy in the presence of the Lord: “You shall eat before the Lord your God, and you shall rejoice” (12:7). Jesus accepted the conquest of the cross so that ultimately he could set a banquet before you, so that you could feast on him and with him. So now as we go to the table, the call is the call of Deuteronomy 12. Eat and rejoice before the Lord your God. Let his beauty drive out the competing gods of your heart and do its conquest work in you. And be strengthened to participate in Jesus’ gospel conquest, for the sake of your joy and the joy of the entire world.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute and the author of Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer (Baylor University Press, 2022) and Arise, O Lord: A Christian Guide to Cursing with God (Theopolis Books, 2025).
Image: Benjamin West, Joshua Passing the River Jordan with the Ark of the Covenant