I've been seeing a common atheist line around for a while. Namely: "your God is a psychopathic maniac who kills babies and sanctions rape." Right. Let's take this out.
God and "The Good"
When Christians say "God is The Good", here's what we mean. We mean God is the source an origin of all goodness in reality. His being grounds right and wrong. His characteristics determine right and wrong-the characteristics He has had from eternity by necessity. Therefore, love, justice, peace, kindness, etc are all good because they belong to God's being. God is also the Creator of all reality, and God is the source of life.
What I want to emphasize is that God is also just. Here's what I mean. If a Judge sees a rapist, and then lets the rapist go off scott free, in what sense is that Judge just? If God is Just, He cannot let violations of His own nature go unpunished. When people go against His nature, He cannot just dismiss that as though it's a non-trivial action. To do so would be to fail to uphold the worth of goodness...to fail to uphold the worth of God's own nature. Thus, it would be unjust. God would be saying "yeah violations of goodness is a-okay". In spite of the fact that His nature is intrinsically infinitely valuable-since God Himself is the source and origin of all value in the Universe-God would be denying that value in dismissing sin. He'd be colluding with evil.
The Holiness of God
Unless people understand this (and I get it-Dawkins and Harris CANNOT because no one wants to), they will never understand why God's judgments are so severe. If a man were to commit genocide, I would argue that the death penalty is viable. For a murderer who goes on a killing spree and refuses to stop killing, I don't think executing him is an immoral option. This is my point: the severity of the crime determines the severity of the punishment. If God is the source and origin of all goodness and all life, then to sin against Him and to rebel is to commit a crime INFINITELY heinous. It is to reject the sum total of all goodness, and to reject life itself (since in rejecting God, we reject the source of life). Hence, it is to embrace death.
If God is infinitely Holy and infinitely valuable, then the failure to honor Him is infinitely evil. Sin is infinitely evil precisely because in sinning, we reject the One who is the source of all good. That is why the Bible says that the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23). We are so morally perverse that we have no sense of the seriousness of sinning against the infinitely Holy I am. This is why God judged the Canaanites. This wasn't an act of genocide. It wasn't as though God said "well I hate those Canaanites because they're Canaanites so imma take them out". God judged the nation because of the rampant sin. God is diametrically opposed to anything that defaces His value. And He must be if He is to be considered good; for if God is the embodiment of all good, then He cannot let His own value in creation be mocked and trampled upon. He cannot let crime go unpunished-this would be unjust, and God is perfectly just.
This means God is just to strike anyone down the moment they sin. That's how serious and offensive sin is-until people feel the weight of their sin, they won't get it. The punishment for sin is death. Man may mock that all he wishes-his mocking and his whining does not for a SPLIT SECOND constitute a rational argument.
God and Babies
Okay, so that works for why God has the right to judge sinners. What about babies? And if I say God can take the lives of babies, why am I opposed to abortion? I do want to affirm God's right to take the life of a baby. Why does God have said right? If God is the Creator of all life, He has total rights over all life. Why? Because God Himself is the One who assigns the rights and the value to His creation. He is the One who designates it's purpose-all things belong to Him. We are not our own. Yes, man HATES that idea-but we are not the captain of our own soul.
An inventor has all rights over his invention-his creation. Since God alone creates sentient life, God alone has rights over it. Thus, only God has the right to revoke and give life as He pleases. It should be mentioned that I think babies who die enter the presence of God for reasons mentioned here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCUAi8JfWk0
So why am I opposed to man taking lives-be it baby or not? What distinguishes this God from the God of ISIS? To the first question: because God alone has the right to take life and give as He please, man has no such right. Man has no right to violate the creature-Creator distinction.
To the second question, multiple layers of answer. For one, Allah isn't the right God. Sure, ISIS could say the same-but if Christianity is true, then Allah doesn't exist, and ISIS has therefore acted not in the name of God, but in the name of their own passions. Second, God's command to kill the Canaanites was not indefinite as ISIS's command to kill others is. Rather, because of the seriousness of the sin of the Canaanites, God decided to act. He had waited four hundred years, and extended repentance THAT long. He waited for the measure of their sins to fill up such that when they were so thoroughly corrupt, He acted in judgment.
Let me give an example. Suppose you have a maniac people out to kill others and live in depravity (*cough cough ISIS cough cough*). I think it would be just to take out such a people in judgment. The government has been given the power of the sword (not the individual-which is why this squares with "love your enemy"), and thus can and should act in justice. Given that ancient Israel was structured in such a way that God was the immediate king, He WAS the governing authority. Israel was in a unique time and place wherein they served as God's direct arm of judgment. As I've argued, God has the right to execute His wrath on rebel sinners whenever He pleases. That being said, the church is NOT ancient Israel, and lives under the new covenant. Thus, God's purpose for His people under the old covenant has been fulfilled, and God's purposes in the new covenant have come to take place in Christ. Hence why the church cannot act as Israel did. Christians cannot take up the sword, because the kingdom of God is not from the world, and thus is not of the sword. God's purpose for using the sword was fulfilled, and Christians are to lay down their lives to spread the Gospel.
Of course, the atheist will object: well God's being inconsistent with Himself to act differently in these times of history. Of course, this is a lousy objection of the Dawkinsian variety. If a parent institutes a curfew, the curfew isn't meant to be perpetual. Once the purpose for the curfew is fulfilled (to mature an individual into a responsible adult), it is no longer immoral for the kid to go out past curfew. It no longer applies to Him. Similarly, God's purposes under the old covenant were designed to be fulfilled in Christ, and thus does not apply to the church (which I believe is the continuation and the expansion of Israel).
Concluding Thoughts
I know some of what I've said might unsettle people, or might make people emotional or whatever. Emotional outrages over God's right to judge holy, lofty humanity do not constitute rational arguments. This seems to be all the New Atheists have: empty rhetoric that, while puffing up the egos of the hordes of young people who worship the ground Dawkins walks on, has no substance and reveals the foolishness, emotionalism, and anti-intellectualism of anyone who goes that route. Yes, God's judgment over man is tough. And it's tough because we don't like to be told the truth: we are sinners in the hands of a Holy God. Apart from Christ, that's not a nice place to be.
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