Judges 2

God has always been faithful to His Word. The Lord of Love will never ultimately reject His people. He warns them when they go astray and He corrects them and calls them back home when they forget Him or His Word. This is what love demands.

The Lord gives His children the gift of repentance. It is a good thing when God gives us tears for our sin, but nothing dries faster than a tear. Repentance is more than crying. We need to change by the grace that the Lord supplies, turning to Him, and following His Son in the newness of life that He grants to us every day.

This process of repentance and spiritual growth is not only for the individual. We have a life together as a people. Israel needed to repent. The church needs to grow spiritually.

Just as people can vary in their faith and obedience, generations of the Lord's beloved flock can be very different. The conquest generation, the group associated with Joshua and the elders around him, were faithful to the Lord, despite their failings honestly recorded in the book that bears Joshua's name. The generation that followed them did not know the Lord or the work that He had done for Israel.

People can believe in Yahweh, and even acknowledge Him as a good God, and yet treat Him as very peripheral to the matters of their lives that they consider most important. The God of Israel is not weighty or beautiful to them. He does not captivate their souls. They do not seek Him for daily renewal or consider all of His mighty works. They take the Lord for granted. Before long it can be said of them that they do not know the Lord. This serious decline is heartbreaking to read about or to observe in the generations of the history of the church.

The book of Judges is a book of generations. Through the God-given leaders that the Lord bestows from heaven upon His people Israel we see not only the individual saviors who deliver Israel from her enemies, but also the gathering of worshipers that call out to the Lord for help, receive the gift of a godly and powerful leader, and then forget about the Lord again after that good judge dies.

We are weak. We would like to see a very different pattern in the church than the one described in this book. The centuries of life for us as a covenant people speak for themselves. While the Lord is working the most astounding worldwide conquest of love, places where the church was once strong cannot presume that the next generation will automatically know the Lord. We need to appeal for the Lord's grace every day, and remember the incomparable faithfulness of the God of Love. “Behold His hands and side. Rich wounds yet visible above, in beauty glorified.”

He is not shifting and changing in His affection or in His determination to accomplish His great eternal purpose. May the Lord keep us and our children and grandchildren from the worship of false gods. May we look to heaven always for the coming of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. But may we also know Him right now, as our present Helper who delivers us and our children from evil, and who grants to us godly sorrow that brings true repentance.