Crying for Help
September 8th, 2009In today’s lesson scripture is one possible answer to why the conquest of Canaan was to be so unrelenting and total. The people who were not exiled or killed, but who were instead allowed to stay on as conquered people serving the Israelites, continued to worship their gods. Now these people were established and had cultivated the land – something that the people of Israel, who were nomadic shepherds, had to learn. Unfortunately they not only learned techniques of cultivation of crops such as wheat, olives and grapes – they also learned to worship the gods of the conquered people. Much of these worship practrices were in fact tied to times of planting and harvest and were specifically meant to propitiate the gods’ favor on the success of their crops.
And so there were consequences:
4 They would encamp against them and destroy the produce of the land, as far as the neighborhood of Gaza, and leave no sustenance in Israel, and no sheep or ox or donkey.
5 For they and their livestock would come up, and they would even bring their tents, as thick as locusts; neither they nor their camels could be counted; so they wasted the land as they came in.
6 Thus Israel was greatly impoverished because of Midian; and the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help.
7 When the Israelites cried to the Lord on account of the Midianites,
8 the Lord sent a prophet to the Israelites; and he said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from Egypt, and brought you out of the house of slavery;
9 and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians, and from the hand of all who oppressed you, and drove them out before you, and gave you their land;
10 and I said to you, ‘I am the Lord your God; you shall not pay reverence to the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.’ But you have not given heed to my voice.” Judges 6:4-10 (NRSV)
Today’s scripture describes the consequences the people of God were suffering and then tells of God explaining to the people – through an unnamed prophet – why this was so: a process that was to repeated over and over in the course of Israel’s history.
Why is it that we study these lessons – we even learn them first hand (consequences follow behavior) and yet still find it so hard to walk in the way of God?
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