Judges:
In my experience, the book of Judges does not get a lot of attention so I’ll devote several posts to Judges.
6 Israel Fights in Caanan
Following the death of Joshua, God sent the Israelites to drive the Canaanites out of the land God had promised the Israelites. They were supposed to drive the people living there out of the land or kill them. Sounds simple if you know God is going to fight with you right? Yeah, well, some of the Israelites are like some of us, they didn’t follow God’s instructions. Some of the armies did kind of a half job. There of course are consequences for not doing as God instructs, just like there are now. When God calls us to do something (or not do something), there are consequences for not following directions.
So what happened because they disobeyed God? Judges 2:10-15 says “After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. They forsook the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They aroused the Lord’s angerbecause they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. In his anger against Israel the Lord gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them. He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist.Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the was against them to defeat them, just as he had sworn to them. They were in great distress.” Now God is no longer fighting with the Israelites, he’s fighting against them. That didn’t go so well; that however, was a short term issue. The longer term problem was these others that worshiped other gods corrupted the Israelites and they also started worshiping Baal and Ashtoreths. God did not drive them out, rather He left them to test the faithfulness of Israel.
So, without a true leader, God raised up several judges to lead Israel during this time. We will look at them starting in the next post.