How Soon We Forget God
This week, I’ve started studying the book of Judges for my morning devotions, and it is both amazing and sad to see how quickly the children of Israel turned aside from following God once Joshua died.
Once of the scariest verses for me is Judges 2:8-11, which reads:
(8) And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died, being a hundred and ten years old. (9) And they buried him in the border of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the mount of Ephraim, on the north side of the hill Gaash. (10) And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel. (11) And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served Baalim:
In particular, the phrase “and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD” shows a major failing in two regards:
- that of the children themselves
- that of their parents
Oh, they knew about God, but did not have their own, useful, saving relationship with Him.
Granted, it is not always fair to blame all the ills of one generation on the previous one, but I also believe that we too often discount the lessons we teach our children by our own actions.
Not only is the above passage of scripture scary for me because of what it says historically, but because of its current applicability in today’s society. On a whole, our children are exposed to things that our parents never dreamed that we would see, while at the same time, we offer less guidance and far less restriction than our parents did at their most lax level.
In short, for a variety of good sounding reasons (or what we believe to be good sounding reasons), we have lowered the bar for our children, and consequently for our children's children. And we tend to blame it on “society today” not realizing that it is our cumulative and aggregate actions that create the society we speak of.
We fear to discipline our children out of concern that they will be emotionally scarred, and then they grow up lacking all restraint and end up scarring *us* emotionally and even physically! We want them to experience everything they can before they choose which direction they should take, not realizing that some experiences automatically impair good judgment, thereby precluding better decisions going forward.
The reason that the second generation depicted in Judges 2:10 did not know God was that their parents had, by their own poor example, failed to serve God fully. We can see from the end of Judges chapter 1, that the Israelites failed to do the one thing that God had instructed them to do – to drive out the Canaanites from the land.
Judges 1:28 And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out.
This failing of the parents led to God telling them that He would no longer drive the Canaanites out of the land, but they would end up being a snare unto them.
We are making the same mistake in the current era, and the effect is very much the same – our children are leaving the churches in droves, and they are dabbling in destructive pleasures of the world – all because we don’t want to apply discipline, and more importantly, because we are not following God as fully as we know we should.
Let us take this opportunity to learn a lesson for the history of God’s people and not only live as God has instructed us to, but also lead our families as God has instructed. God’s blessings are almost always conditional – dependent on our obedience to His will and adherence with His commandments. We should avoid any feelings of entitlements when it comes to God’s mercies and blessings, and thereby avoid teaching our children the same.