Of course I have seen that Love protects and preserves.
However that was not what God was doing when he ordered Israel to kill everything in Canaan. God knew those people had been there for centuries and allowed them to stay. To compare them to breaking and entering his house is just plain wrong.
Nevertheless I for one am prepared to give Jesus of Nazareth (an innocent man who gave his perfect life so that everyone of us who were (and are) his enemies may be saved from death) the benefit of the doubt when he claims to be the Son of the God of Abraham.
Given that this demonstrably supremely Loving man would have fully apprehended the history given in scripture and then identified with it might indicate that a couple of millennia, a culture and a translation of the story away, I might perhaps misapprehend and misunderstand the story a bit.
In respect of the above, I think the truth is that he had been warning the Canaanites to repent of their evil for centuries, a number of centuries during which He had kept the children of the promise in a holding pattern in Egypt, while He waited to see the response. It is well known the depths of depravity and evil that the people living in Canaan had sunk to, and it is quite possible that we do not really know what other mankind destroying antics were taking place in the area, suffice to say that the Nephilim were present in the land at the time.
Nevertheless if in His estimation they had gone well beyond the point of no return at considerable danger to the whole of mankind, then that is a decision that I trust my Creator and Redeemer to make.
A God whose ways are higher than those of men would know a way to remove them peacefully and do so without demonstrating to his children that he will do the very things that he told them not to do,
like "thou shalt not kill"...
Perhaps in the case of free agents willfully under the influence of the evil one there is no peaceful way. Perhaps when Adam handed over the authority of the world to another the only way for the Creator to act (without a total destruction of creation) is through the free will act of his agents on earth.
Certainly when the time was right God did in fact sort the problem out in not just a peaceful way but in a way that cost Him His own life.
I do agree with you that love protects and preserves, yet the canaanites are still just as dead and their women murdered and raped. Looks like that God of love is late showing up.
I'm not really sure that the charge of rape stands scrutiny. Given the culture of the time it would have been a mercy for a person to have been offered safe haven among the families of the invading force rather than the alternative.
But again the idea of the lateness of God presumes that we really know what is going on. I can think of a number of ways in which it could be said that the timing is actually quite good. But then I am only a man.