One of the most difficult things for believers in Jesus Christ to do is to see life through God's eyes. We believe in Jesus. We say we trust in God. But when life gets tough or things don't go quite the way we expect them to, we can easily begin to doubt God's goodness and even question whether He is really there at all. In reading through the book of Joshua, we are getting a steady dose of violent interactions between the people of Israel and the inhabitants of the land. Destruction and devastation seem to go hand-in-hand with their conquering of the land. In fact, God had given them specific instructions to destroy any and all inhabitants living within the land. And in Joshua 10:16-28, as part of Joshua's clean-up operation after his defeat of the five-nation confederation, he orders the brutal execution of the five kings who joined forces against the Gibeonites. And it would be easy to see all this brutality as unnecessary and even ungodly. Unless we see it through God's eyes.
