You haven’t spent much time in the Old Testament, have you? Otherwise you would not be able to make a statement like “The O.T. says nothing against polygamy.” May I direct your attention to Deuteronomy 17:17? Kings were not permitted to be polygamous, but they were anyway. And look what the results were! One of David’s sons tried to kill him and another raped his own sister. The argument from silence, by the way, is a logical fallacy. Not everything that is recorded in the Bible is approved by the Bible.

You apparently subscribe to heresy #3 above, so sorry, but you have not met the challenge.

Mark 10
2 Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
3 “What did Moses command you?” he replied.
4 They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”
5 “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied.

Jesus then goes on to say that divorce is unacceptable except for adultery.
Did you get that? “YOUR HEARTS WERE HARD”. God allowed divorce to be written in the law yet Jesus states “But it was not this way from the beginning” (mat 19:8).
Another example is polygamy. Most of the O.T. dudes had multiple wives, David had at least 18, Salomon 700! And since the O.T. says nothing against polygamy, you must be a polygamist right?
Another example : John 8:2-11 or “the abolition of the death penalty” although something tells me you would disagree.
Some of the O.T.wars fall under the same category; ie: God, by choosing to work with and through an imperfect people allowed certain practices that Jesus would later address. Why? Because their “HEARTS WERE HARD”. The wars that don’t fit this category (those that God actually commanded) are His own holy wars. I have no problem with these since God as creator can judge anyone anytime, who am i to stand in His way. (By the way the Israelites were usually punished by God if they ever took back spoils from the war, in other words these were not conventional wars of conquest but God using the Israelites to judge other nations).You cannot justify modern warfare by this standard. Anyways I could go on but there is plenty already written on the subject. You should take the time to read some. A great start is the book by Jean Lasserre “War and the Gospel”
Remember:
“Do not take revenge, dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath. For it is written, “Vengeance belongs to me. I will pay them back, declares the Lord.” (written by Paul to the persecuted church in Rome under the rule of Nero “i like to feed christians to the lions” Claudius Caesar.)
PEACE OUT!!

Misguided church tradition has embraced pacifism as a core value, and although this can be an admirable quality at times, it is not a Biblical mandate for nations.

Perhaps I’m too dense, but you’re also going to have to explain how God commanding the Israelites to go to war is a “pattern or picture of the relationship between man and Christ.”

God did use the Israelites to bring in the Messianic age. It says so in scripture: speaking of the Law (of which you quote), “who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses was admonished of God when he was about to make the tabernacle: for, See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the mount.” (Hebrews 8:5). The OT Israel provided for us a pattern or picture of the relationship between man and Christ, NOT man and man.

Pacifism, in and of itself can become its own God, but pacifism as an expression of love is exactly what Christ commanded of us all.

Our warfare is spiritual, not physical.

The CommonMan Commentaries