No King in Israel (3)

A public appearance by the angel of the Lord in front of large numbers of people is quite exceptional. Indeed, for God to mete out justice personally to sinners during their lifetimes is also a comparatively rare event. A formal, exhaustive accounting for all the evil men have done awaits them at the end of their lives, as the book of Hebrews tells us. Under normal circumstances, that is where God judges sin.

All the same, throughout human history, God has necessarily overlooked much evil, or else all our lives would be very short ones. The divine standard is not to be applied to men until after death.

I. Introduction (continued)

b. Israel’s Unfaithfulness

Judges 2:1-5 — Sorrow without Repentance

“Now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said, ‘I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers. I said, “I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.” But you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you have done? So now I say, I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.’ As soon as the angel of the Lord spoke these words to all the people of Israel, the people lifted up their voices and wept. And they called the name of that place Bochim. And they sacrificed there to the Lord.”

The Angel of the Lord Went Up

If we read the first verse of Judges 2 as if an ordinary angel or even an archangel went up to Bochim on God’s behalf, we lose something of the author’s intent. Even if we bring God into it, imagining an ethereal presence peering down from the sky toward Bochim, we are not really getting the intended sense. The “angel of the Lord” went up, the representative of YHWH, the Son of God in human form.

It’s not impossible that the angel of the Lord made the journey from Gilgal to Bochim on foot, though he could as easily have simply appeared at his destination if he wished to do so. God has a history of wanting to see the people on whom he is passing judgment close up, and I suspect he did in this case too. Of course, God is entirely able to view everything he wishes to view from heaven. In the case of the judgment of Sodom, there was no real doubt what he would find. However, in sending his angel to render judgment, God was allowing the evil city due process. He was formally demonstrating his justice and fairness. Thus, when the three “men” left Abraham and Sarah, God said, “I will go down [to Sodom] to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me.” In traveling from Gilgal to Bochim, the angel of the Lord may have been engaged in something similar.

Arriving in Bochim, the angel of the Lord addresses the people of Israel to tell them of his judgment against them for making covenants with the Canaanites and failing to tear down their altars as he had commanded through Moses and Joshua. As in his other appearances, the divinity of the angel of the Lord is confirmed. The first thing he says to his people is, “I brought you up from Egypt,” and he goes on to speak of “my covenant with you.” Men and ordinary angels do not make covenants.

Standards and Judges

When we see the angel of the Lord acting in judgment in the Old Testament, it seems to me it is because things had gotten so bad that something needed to be done in the here-and-now. It was not a matter of God applying his divine standard, which no human being in history apart from Jesus Christ has ever met. In these exceptional cases, God was judging men by a standard even sinful men recognized as reasonable, usually because earthly authorities had shown themselves incapable of enforcing it. (See for example the “outcry” against Sodom and Gomorrah that God could not ignore. Had the elders of Sodom dealt with the exceptional evil in their midst, fire and brimstone would never have been necessary.)

At Bochim, the weeping of the people and the sacrifices they offered after the judgment rendered by the angel of the Lord reflected the recognition that they richly deserved it. They had failed, not just by the exacting and comprehensive eternal standards of a holy God, but even by the more limited standard they had so recently and enthusiastically sworn to uphold.

Breaking the Covenant

Those who love the idea that covenants between man and God broken from the human side are eternally forfeited ought to note the wording here. The angel of the Lord first says, “I will never break my covenant with you”, then tells Israel what he will now do because of their conduct. He never says his promise of full possession of the land is eternally rescinded, but rather that he will not do what he promised as his part of the covenant immediately.

Israel will receive what Israel was promised. Not a foot of the territory God intended for his people will ever be lost. However, the time frame in which God makes good his promises may be extended until he can fulfill his word at the appropriate time and with the appropriate lessons learned.

Judges 2:6-10 — Another Generation

“When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years. And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash. And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.”

Statement and Restatement

These verses simply restate much we already knew. Judges 1:1 tells us that Joshua died. For that matter, much of this material comes directly from the last chapter of Joshua. Verses 8-10 tell us almost exactly what we learned there, including Joshua’s age when he died, his burial place (with a very slight name variant), and the fact that the people followed the Lord for a period of time afterwards, then fell away.

What should be evident here is that the introductory material we are reading here is not strictly in chronological order. Its purpose is not primarily historical; rather, our writer has a spiritual objective in telling his story, so he states and restates whatever may be necessary to make his spiritual point. Thus, commentaries that draw conclusions from the order of events may not be telling us anything very helpful.

Teach Your Children Well

The most important detail here, and possibly the most profound lesson in these verses, is that each generation must have its own relationship with God. Children and grandchildren will not necessarily find these things out for themselves if their parents and grandparents fail to do the job of communicating truth in a deliberate and consistent manner. The failure of an entire generation so soon after the death of Joshua and the elders who outlived him is a sad commentary on the dereliction of the people who conquered Canaan. They took most of the land God gave them, but gave away something more precious than land.

That God is deeply interested in godly children is evident as early as Genesis. Abraham, God says, was chosen “that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice”. Deuteronomy commands the same thing of all Israelite parents three times (chapters 4, 6 and 11), telling them to teach all that God had instructed as a matter of daily obligation. It is “when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise”. The obligation to pass on the knowledge of the Lord and his law was not just to their children but to their grandchildren as well.

This did not happen, and the lesson for Christian parents today is abundantly clear: it’s not enough to take your children to church and make them vaguely familiar with biblical concepts; your relationship with the Lord must be something they can observe you thinking and talking about 24/7, because God’s commands rightly observed impact every area of every life. Anything less than constant devotion to truth will produce inferior results.

Judges 2:11-15 — His Hand Against Them

“And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm, as the Lord had warned, and as the Lord had sworn to them. And they were in terrible distress.”

This cycle of going after other gods, angering the Lord, and his abandoning Israel to oppression, failure and plunder repeats throughout Judges. Here we have it stated in summary form, but we will come back to it repeatedly. Just as God used Israel to punish the Canaanites for hundreds of years of abominable behavior, so he later used the remaining Canaanites to discipline his people when they began to practice the same things. Where a Canaanite might claim he did not know any better, the people of God could make no such excuse.