Year 7, Day 262: Judges 1

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Judges is one of my favorite books of the Bible.  I tend to gravitate towards the books of the Bible that have a fair portrayal of humanity.  In Judges we will see the good and the bad.  We see success and failure and often in the same passages.  I love books like Judges because of its honest portrayal of life in general.

In this first chapter, we start out strong.  At the beginning of the chapter, we hear about hos Judah and Simeon rise up and take on the Canaanites after Joshua dies.  The land must be under conquest.  These two tribes try and take the leadership role in pursuit of conquest.  They are largely successful.

However, they are not fully successful.  We hear in a few places that the Canaanites stick around.  The Judahites aren’t actually able to accomplish the goals.  We can’t fault them for their effort.  Even still they are not successful.

Then we hear about the experience of the other tribes.  They aren’t successful, either.  Granted, all of the tribes experience some measure of success.  They don’t experience total success, though.  There are cracks in what they are able to accomplish – and in some cases absolute holes!

This feels like life to me.  In some cases we try and find success.  In other cases we try and find marginal success.  In other cases we try and fail.  We seldom ever go in and do something so absolutely perfectly that it cannot be improved upon.

Note that God doesn’t abandon the Hebrew people because of their inability.  Their inability will even come back to affect them, but God doesn’t hold that against them.  God stays by their side.  He continues to call them His people.  The same is true for us.  God will not abandon us.  We need to try as hard as we can and for His sake.  But God will no more abandon us as His people as He abandons the Hebrew people in their moments of failure.  God will stick by His people regardless.

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