Today’s reading: Judges 1; Acts 13
Judges 1 is really important context to keep in mind as we start making our way into this book.
If you’re not familiar with the book of Judges, quick spoiler, but the whole book is basically Israel turning away from God, getting taken over by other nations, eventually realizing what they’ve done and calling out to God, and God raising up a judge to rescue them over and over again.
This opening chapter lists all the peoples that Israel failed to drive out of the land like they were supposed to, and there is a reason the author opens the book this way. What was the reasoning that they weren’t supposed to leave any of the people of the land behind? Those other people would teach Israel to follow their gods and lead the people astray from faithfulness to Yahweh. So, after reading this long list of all the people left in the land, the rest of the book of Judges should really come as no surprise.
There are a couple things in this list that I find particularly interesting today though. One of them is the number of Canaanites that Manasseh and Ephraim left in their territory. This strikes me as interesting because they are the ones who went to Joshua asking for more land and were told they had enough land, they just needed to clear some of the forest and drive out the Canaanites like they were supposed to. Evidently, even though they were complaining about not having enough land, that still wasn’t enough motivation for them to be faithful to the task God had set before them and numerous cities were left in their territory occupied by the Canaanites.
The other thing I think is interesting is that we are given the justification for why Judah was unable to drive out the people of the plain in that they had chariots of iron. This is interesting to me on two levels. The first, and most obvious, is that Yahweh is not weaker than iron chariots. God has already shown Himself more than capable of defeating an army entirely on His own (e.g. Egypt), so iron chariots are in no way able to stop Him from fulfilling His promise of delivering the land to His people. That tells me that, more than likely, it’s not that they went against these people in faithfulness and trust in Yahweh for deliverance, but were unwilling to go because of the chariots, assuming they wouldn’t be able to win that confrontation. The other side of this though is that we aren’t given justification for any of the other peoples that were left in the land. What that tells me is that while Judah at least had an excuse, there was really no excuse at all for the rest of these people, and they could and should have been driven out of the land like Yahweh said, but Israel simply didn’t listen. Whether it was because they had enough land without driving them out and they got complacent, or whether it was because they were fearful and decided to content themselves with what they already had, either way, it is unexcused faithlessness. At the end of the day though, whether they had an excuse or not doesn’t really matter because God had already shown Himself more than capable of keeping His promise and delivering the land into Israel’s hands, if only they had trust Him and listened…
But, to wrap up this post this morning, I just want us to keep this chapter in mind as we move on through the rest of this book. This kind of context is easy to forget when we are just reading one chapter a day, but it’s important because it informs everything that comes after it. All of Israel’s unfaithfulness and the trouble it invites comes back to this one decision to not go all the way in faithfulness to Yahweh and to leave some of what He called for undone. If they had been fully faithful here, things would very likely have gone dramatically differently for Israel going forward, but they weren’t, and the rest of the book of Judges is Israel reaping the rewards of the choices they made to stop short of the better things God was calling them to.
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