If Satan came to kill, steal, and destroy, then isn’t God in the Old Testament fulfilling these in the eyes of every nation who was killed, stolen, and destroyed?

Here’s the short answer. Satan steals what isn’t his. God owns every life and every nation, so when He judges, He’s the rightful Judge acting, not a thief. And when He judged the nations of Canaan, He waited over four hundred years first and spared anyone who turned to Him. Now the long answer.

First, read the whole verse

“The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).

In John 10, Jesus is talking to the Pharisees who had just thrown a healed blind man out of the synagogue. The “thief” in that chapter is the false shepherd: “He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber” (John 10:1). Those leaders were doing their father’s work, and Jesus had already told them who that was: “Ye are of your father the devil... He was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). So yes, the line runs back to Satan. And the point of the verse is the second half. The thief takes life. Jesus gives it.

A thief takes what isn’t his. God owns all of it.

The question treats every death in the Bible like the same act. Scripture doesn’t. “The earth is the LORD’S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1). “Behold, all souls are mine” (Ezekiel 18:4). “I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal” (Deuteronomy 32:39).

Think of it this way. A surgeon and a man with a knife both cut. A judge and a kidnapper both lock someone in a room. From the outside it looks the same. The right to do it and the reason are what make one a crime and the other justice. When Satan kills, he’s a murderer taking what belongs to God. When God judges, He’s the owner of every life doing what’s right: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).

Even “thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13) is about murder. The same Law gave the death penalty for murder. The command stops creatures from murdering. It doesn’t stop the Creator from judging.

And nobody got rich off Jericho. Everything in it was “consecrated unto the LORD” (Joshua 6:19). The only thief in the whole story was an Israelite, Achan, and God judged him for it: “they have even taken of the accursed thing, and have also stolen” (Joshua 7:11). So the “steal” part of the question points the wrong way.

God waited four hundred years

God didn’t judge the Canaanites on a whim. He told Abraham his family wouldn’t get the land for generations, “for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16). Four hundred years of patience.

And Scripture says exactly what they were doing. “Every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31). “They sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, And shed innocent blood” (Psalm 106:37-38).

Read that again. In Canaan, the ones killing children were the devil’s worshipers, burning their own kids to demons. That’s the kill, steal and destroy in this story. God’s judgment is what ended it.

Most of the time the word God uses is “drive out”: “I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite” (Exodus 23:28). People could leave. And the Bible doesn’t hide the hard part either. God commanded the judgment, and Scripture owns that. It doesn’t put it on Israel or on Satan.

Same rule for Israel. No favorites.

God warned Israel the land would “spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you” (Leviticus 18:28). And when Israel did the same things, burning their own sons and daughters, “the LORD was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of his sight” (2 Kings 17:17-18). When Joshua asked the angel with the drawn sword, “Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?”, the answer was “Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come” (Joshua 5:13-14). God isn’t a team mascot. He judges evil wherever it is, starting with His own people.

Anyone who turned to Him was spared

Everyone in Jericho heard what God had done. One woman believed. Rahab said, “the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath” (Joshua 2:11), and “Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive, and her father’s household” (Joshua 6:25). “By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not” (Hebrews 11:31). She ended up in the family line of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). The city of Gibeon came and asked for peace, and they were spared too.

Nineveh was an enemy empire, and when they repented, “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not” (Jonah 3:10). That’s God’s rule for every nation: “If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them” (Jeremiah 18:8).

And He takes no joy in judgment: “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11).

When they left no man, woman, or child

This is the hardest part of the whole question, so here it is straight. Some of the time God’s command was total. For the cities inside the land: “thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth” (Deuteronomy 20:16). At Jericho, “they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old” (Joshua 6:21). In the south, Joshua “left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded” (Joshua 10:40). Against Amalek: “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling” (1 Samuel 15:3). The Bible doesn’t hide it, and neither should we.

Did God tell them to murder?

No. He told them to carry out His judgment, and that’s a different thing. Murder is a person taking a life that belongs to God. God gave every one of those lives. “The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away” (Job 1:21). Every person who has ever died, of anything, died under God’s hand. At the flood He did it with no army at all, and “every living substance was destroyed” (Genesis 7:23). Jesus Himself pointed back to the flood and to Sodom as real judgments from God: the flood “destroyed them all,” and the fire on Sodom “destroyed them all” (Luke 17:27, 29). In Canaan the only difference is He used Israel’s sword.

So here’s the difference between God ordering it and people doing it on their own. A man who kills on his own is taking a life he doesn’t own, and nobody made him the judge. God owns every life, and He’s the Judge of the whole earth. Israel had no right to do this by themselves either. They only had it because God handed down the sentence.

Only these nations, only that time

The command named its targets: “the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites” (Deuteronomy 20:17). Every other city got an offer of peace first: “proclaim peace unto it” (Deuteronomy 20:10). That rule covered “all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations” (Deuteronomy 20:15). God gave the reason those seven nations were different: “That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods” (Deuteronomy 20:18).

Even inside the land, a city could still make peace, and Gibeon did. Everyone else came out to fight: “There was not a city that made peace with the children of Israel, save the Hivites the inhabitants of Gibeon: all other they took in battle” (Joshua 11:19).

What about the children?

Look at where those children went. Scripture talks about little ones as children “which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil” (Deuteronomy 1:39). When David’s baby died, he said, “I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me” (2 Samuel 12:23). Jesus said, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14). Same as the toddler in Why would God let a toddler die of cancer?: a child who leaves this world goes straight to God. Those kids were taken out of a culture that burned its own sons and daughters to its gods, something God says “I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart” (Jeremiah 7:31). And they went home to Him.

Somebody will say God broke His own Law here, because it says, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers” (Deuteronomy 24:16). That verse is a rule for human courts. No judge in Israel could execute a child for what his father did. And God holds every soul to the same rule: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). Those children weren’t charged with their parents’ sins and sent to hell for them. They died when their nation fell, the way children die in every flood and famine, and they went to God.

Amalek

Amalek is the hardest one to read. Scripture gives the reason. When Israel came out of Egypt, Amalek “smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God” (Deuteronomy 25:17-18). They went after the weak at the back of the line. God said back then that Amalek would be wiped out (Exodus 17:14), and He waited generations. They were still at it when Saul got there. Samuel told their king, “As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women” (1 Samuel 15:33).

“Every army says God told them to. How do you know this was God?”

Fair question. People have killed in God’s name for thousands of years. Here’s what’s different about this one.

Everyone could see God was in it. The Jordan River “stood and rose up upon an heap” so Israel could walk across (Joshua 3:16). Jericho’s wall “fell down flat” at a shout (Joshua 6:20). The Canaanites knew which God was fighting. Rahab said, “we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red sea for you” (Joshua 2:10). The Gibeonites said it “was certainly told thy servants, how that the LORD thy God commanded his servant Moses to give you all the land” (Joshua 9:24). Nobody on the other side thought Israel made it up.

When Israel went without God, they lost. After God said no, the people went up anyway. Moses warned them, “Go not up, for the LORD is not among you” (Numbers 14:42), and “the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in that hill, and smote them” (Numbers 14:45). At Ai, with stolen goods hidden in the camp, “the men of Ai smote of them about thirty and six men” (Joshua 7:5). An army using God as an excuse wins or loses on its own strength. Israel only won when God was with them.

God told Israel they weren’t better. “The LORD thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stiffnecked people” (Deuteronomy 9:6). People who make up a holy war say God picked them because they’re the good guys. Israel’s own Scriptures say the opposite.

The same rule came back on Israel. God warned them the land would “spue not you out also” (Leviticus 18:28), and it did. He sent Assyria and called it “the rod of mine anger” (Isaiah 10:5). Nobody invents a god whose rule ends with their own nation getting thrown out.

Israel wrote down its own failures. Achan stealing, losing at Ai, and never finishing the job: they “did not utterly drive them out” (Judges 1:28). People who make up their history make themselves look good. This history doesn’t.

And Jesus vouched for it. He rose from the dead, and He said everything “written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms” was about Him (Luke 24:44). He treated these books as God’s word. If you trust Him, you can trust that God really spoke. That’s the real reason a Christian knows.

“Could God tell someone to do that today?”

No. That command was for named nations at one time in history, and it’s finished. There’s no command like it anywhere in the New Testament. Jesus says, “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). When Peter swung a sword to defend Him, Jesus told him, “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Christians are told, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19). If anybody today says God told them to kill, it goes against what Jesus said, so it didn’t come from God. Nobody gets to use these chapters to excuse killing anyone.

Look at the one time God tested a man with a child. He told Abraham to offer Isaac. Abraham told his son, “God will provide himself a lamb” (Genesis 22:8), and God stopped him before the knife came down: “Lay not thine hand upon the lad” (Genesis 22:12). God never wanted a child on an altar. Child sacrifice is the very thing He judged Canaan for.

More pushback

“That’s genocide.” Genocide is killing people for their race. If this were about blood, Rahab, a Canaanite, wouldn’t be in Jesus’ family line (Matthew 1:5). Any stranger could join Israel and “be as one that is born in the land” (Exodus 12:48). And God judged Israel by the exact same rule.

“God hardened their hearts, so they never had a chance” (Joshua 11:20). They’d heard about the Red Sea for forty years (Joshua 2:10). Rahab heard the same news and turned. Gibeon heard it and made peace. And with Pharaoh, Scripture says “he hardened his heart” himself too (Exodus 8:15).

“A loving God wouldn’t do this.” Love that never stops evil doesn’t love the victims, and in Canaan the victims were children on the fire. When God told Moses who He is, He said He’s “merciful and gracious” and also that He “will by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:6-7). If God loves us, why does He punish unbelievers? goes deeper on that.

“Why didn’t God just do it Himself?” He did, at the flood and at Sodom. In Canaan He used Israel, and later He used Assyria and Babylon on Israel for the same sins. The sword was in different hands. The Judge was the same.

When it still doesn’t sit right, go where Abraham went. He asked God this kind of question over Sodom, and God said He’d spare the whole city for ten good people: “I will not destroy it for ten’s sake” (Genesis 18:32). Abraham’s own question was “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). He does. We can trust Him with the part we can’t see.

Satan destroys people. God destroys what destroys people.

The word “destroy” shows up on both sides, pointed opposite ways. Satan was “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). Jesus came to wipe out his work: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). He died “that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14).

Even when Satan means harm, God turns it: “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Genesis 50:20). What was used for evil, God uses for good.

The cross is where it all lands

At the cross, the killing and destroying came at Jesus, and He walked straight into it on purpose. “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18). “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5).

The same God who judged Canaan took judgment on Himself so that whoever believes is spared, like Rahab was. When His disciples wanted to call down fire on a village, Jesus rebuked them: “For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:56). Every nation is under the same sentence, and every nation gets the same offer: “except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3), and whoever turns lives.

Say it like this

“Satan steals what isn’t his. God owns every life and every nation, so when He judges, He’s the Judge doing right, not a thief. And look at what He judged: people burning their own kids to demons. He waited four hundred years first, and anyone who turned to Him, like Rahab, was spared. Then He went to the cross and took the judgment on Himself. That’s the opposite of kill, steal and destroy. That’s the Shepherd laying His life down for the sheep.”

If they bring up “no man, woman, or child”: “Yeah, God commanded it. The Bible doesn’t hide that. But a man who kills is taking a life he doesn’t own. God gave every one of those lives, and He’s the Judge. It was a few nations, after four hundred years of waiting, and the kids went home to Him. And He doesn’t tell anybody to do that today. Jesus said put the sword away.”

Keep reading: Isn’t the Old Testament God a moral monster? · If God is good, why is there suffering? · Why did God require blood for forgiveness?