SteelHead wrote:This wasn't an a bomb it was house to house melee combat. The children could have been spared and raised by the Israelites.
What kind of god orders the slaughter of innocents?
The kind of God who knows that the spirits of not only the innocents, but also the guilty will be obtaining another physical body in another incarnation.
Let's see how this looks from the simplistic LDS perspective that infants and young children go directly to the Celestial Kingdom. We have also been told that parents whose children's spirits have gone to the Celestial Kingdom, will have the opportunity to raise them during the Millenium. I do not think that a "glorified" body needs to be "raised" to adulthood. Since the flesh bodies of those spirits who occupied the infant and young children's bodies have returned to dust, I think those spirits are put into new flesh bodies which have not yet been glorified.
Inasmuch as we are eternal, and taking into consideration that Father wants ALL of us to return to Him, I believe that eventually ALL of us WILL return to Him. Through the process of reincarnation (or, as Joseph Smith called it, multiple probations), we can all progress to eventual Exaltation.
Therefore, where Atheists or Agnostics read the Old Testament and come to the conclusion that God is some kind of monster, or that He is schizophrenic, reincarnation manifests God's wisdom, goodness, mercy, justice, love, as well as His unchanging desire that all of His children will be able to return to Him.
When we see the story of Amalek, we find out that Saul did not obey God's commandment to kill everyone. We can see in the Book of Esther that a direct descendant of Agag (who was an Amalekite), by the name of Haman the Agagite had organized a massacre of all Jewish peoples who lived in all of the lands which were under the rule of the Persian King Ahasuerus. However, Haman's plan was foiled by Esther who had recently become the King's wife. The reason I share this additional information is because God knew that through the Amalekites, His chosen people, the Jews, would suffer, and by the time of Haman, there would be an attempt at genocide made against them. Since the Amalekites were already a tainted lineage while Saul was alive, God wanted to wipe out that line.
Whenever God commanded that a people be destroyed, it is only the physical bodies which were destroyed; not the spirits which inhabited those bodies.
Blessings,
jo
