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Judges 2:16-19
After the death of Joshua, the people of Israel start the process of making the Promised Land their permanent home. It wasn’t without it’s difficulties. The Canaanites still occupied some of the land. And it seems as if the Israelites became more concerned with how to survive with the Canaanites there rather than trust God to completely give them the land.
God had warned the Israelites that the Canaanites and their gods would be a threat to them in the land. There is a cycle of retribution that Israel experiences over the next 200 years.
Judges 2:16-19 (NIV) Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hands of these raiders. Yet they would not listen to their judges but prostituted themselves to other gods and worshiped them. They quickly turned from the ways of their ancestors, who had been obedient to the Lord’s commands. Whenever the Lord raised up a judge for them, he was with the judge and saved them out of the hands of their enemies as long as the judge lived; for the Lord relented because of their groaning under those who oppressed and afflicted them. But when the judge died, the people returned to ways even more corrupt than those of their ancestors, following other gods and serving and worshiping them. They refused to give up their evil practices and stubborn ways.
Have you ever heard the old saying, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it? I’m not certain that history itself repeats. But when we don’t learn from our mistakes, we can repeat those mistakes.
Christians believe that history is not cyclical, rather that it is linear. There is a beginning to time and an end to time. When the Bible talks about Jesus’ birth, crucifixion (His death and resurrection), and His return, it’s phrase is all about how when all of time lines up or everything comes together to a certain point. And human history is moving in a specific direction, to a certain destination.
As individuals and even as a society, we can get caught up in a cycle that doesn’t seem to end. A cycle in which we repeat the mistakes of our parents—and their parents—over and over again. As we work through the book of Judges you may discover that the mistakes we read about there resemble our mistakes.
As you read through this book, you encounter things such as indiscriminate violence, political disorder, objectification of humans as a means to an end. You will see the absence of both public and personal faith and the notion that Truth doesn’t exist. Most of what we are going to see could be summed up in a repeated theme.
Judges 17:6 (NIV) In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.
It’s much of what I believe we see in our own society today.