Monday, August 7, 2017
Judges 2:11a, 16 Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord ... Nevertheless, the Lord raised up judges who delivered them out of the hand of those who plundered them ...
GOD IS FAITHFUL TO HIS PROMISES
The Bible tells us that, "... the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments ..." (Deuteronomy 7:9). Scripture tells us that, "If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself" (2 Timothy 2:13). God keeps His promises because God is faithful.
In Joshua we find the people of Israel, obedient under the rule of Joshua, taking possession of the land of Canaan through trust in the power of God, and promising to serve the Lord always. In Judges, however, we find a disobedient and idolatrous people rebelling against the LORD again and again (2:7-10, 19). Thus what should have been Israel's Golden Age under God's gracious rulership, instead became a continuing, three-and-a-half century cycle of sin, chastisement (2:20-21), repentance, and deliverance (2:10-23).
Why did God deliver His people from the Canaanites? The bottom line is that He delivered their nation, delivered their bodies, because He is faithful to His promises. Ultimately, the Lord delivered their bodies so that He could deliver their souls, and the soul of every sinner, by preserving the Promise of the Savior who would be born a thousand years later in Bethlehem.
The Lord had promised that the everlasting Savior from sin would be born of the Seed of Abraham, from the Tribe of Judah, in the town of Bethlehem, born of a virgin, so that He could grow up sinless and offer Himself the Sacrifice for sin. And that having died to pay for sin, He would rise from the dead bodily so that His payment for sin and His deliverance from death and the power of the devil would be eternal.
How could all that have happened had the Israelites been snuffed out there in the Promised Land a thousand years before the Savior could be born? We're told that, "But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons" (Galatians 4:4-5). The time was still being fulfilled for God to send forth His Son.
And when Jesus came and fulfilled God's Promise to His people, indeed to all people, Christ died and rose again. His deliverance did not pass away when He died. Rather it was confirmed for eternity with His resurrection from the dead. We do not have peace only for forty years or only a hundred years, or even only for a thousand years. Through Christ Jesus, the Deliverer, we have everlasting peace with God, protection from our true enemies, sin, death, and the devil, for eternity!
