Judged

Passage: Judges 2

The Book of Judges chronicles the rapid deterioration of God’s people after their arrival in the Promised Land. Through both Moses and Joshua God predicted that the Israelites would turn their backs on him once they were safe and sound in a land that could sustain them. God also promised that if they turned their backs on him, God would turn his back on his people. So doing he would leave them vulnerable to the dangers and evils of a broken world – dangers and evils from which God had insulated them all along.

Judges tells the story of what happens to God’s chosen people when they try to go it alone. It also provides a snapshot of what happens to anyone who pursues a life without God.

When the Israelites stop worshiping God and living by God’s Law, their society deteriorates and they suffer at the hands of more powerful nations. In Deuteronomy 7 God addresses his people thus:

The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you…

Suddenly, as they are plagued by wave after wave of enemy attack, the Israelites understand what God was talking about. They are the smallest, weakest nation in the neighborhood. They were only able to take Canaan by storm because God was fighting with them. Now they are helpless to defend themselves.

Moreover, the tribes of Israel quickly stop functioning as parts of a whole. Instead, they become territorial, acting like individual nations. Not only do they become isolated and that much more vulnerable, they lose the uniform identity and accountability structure that kept them committed to God and his ways. At the beginning of Judges we see small examples of hostility and disunity among the tribes of Israel. By the end of the book, full-scale war has broken out and the tribes are trying to obliterate each other. As we will see, Judges describes the Israelites’ descent from being an ideal, God-guided people to being less unified and less principled than the most depraved people on earth. This is what happens when God’s people turn their backs on God.