God’s Patience Tested
Do you remember as a kid the Sunday School stories you heard about Gideon and Samson? Gideon was the warrior who challenged God by demanding a ‘fleece’ to confirm God’s orders to him. Not once but twice. Samson was the strong man who had a foolish fling with Delilah that cost him his eyesight and then his life.
You may not know the backstory. These two men were part of thirteen ‘judges’ that God put in place to lead the Israelites for approximately 300 to 400 years before the days of kings Saul and David.
There are a lot of nuggets
in these 21 chapters that society today could benefit from learning and practicing. But I want to focus on one particular theme that permeates the whole narrative.
For the most part, while each judge was alive and gave leadership to the people, their society had rest from wars with neighboring tribes. As soon as the judge died, “the sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord.” It happened over and over. It seems Israel had a very short memory and foreign idol-gods reappeared. The phrase “then the sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord” appears shortly after each judge died.
In our last post (Confidence is More Than Hope), we saw that bad choices can have very bad consequences. Several times in the book of Judges, the phrase “the anger of the Lord burned against Israel” as a result of Israel’s choice to fall back into idol worship. Their consequence was that God removed His protection and used other tribes to mete out oppression to the wayward Israelites.
In one case,
after seven years of oppression, Israel whined to God. Gideon was appointed Judge and peace reigned for 40 years. Then Gideon died. Then after around 100 years alternating between oppression and rest, and 40 years of whining on the part of Israel, Samson became the Judge and lasted 20 years. If you know Samson’s background, you might question God’s choice. But the point here is that with all the bad years mixed with some good ones, Israel never seemed to learn that obedience was the key to peaceful living nor did they seem able to pass the lessons to the next generation who grew worse and worse.
The amazing underlying truth throughout this period in Israel’s history, is that The Holy God who abhors evil, The Righteous God who set the standards, didn’t ever totally give up on these rebels. What lessons can we take from this? Is He the same God today that He was over 3,000 years ago? According to Hebrews 13:8, He is…and always will be.
Do you think America
is more or less righteous, more or less evil today than Israel was back then? Only God knows the answer to that. But it doesn’t take much observation today to draw parallels of attitudes, if not actual actions, between us and them. See if this epilog to the book of Judges couldn’t apply to modern America. The last verse in chapter 21 says, “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
Many parts of Scripture paint the incomprehensible patience of a Holy God. We should fall to our knees and thank God that He doesn’t give us what we deserve. By the way, this applies to those of us who call Jesus friend and Savior as well as those who don’t know Him. Listen to Paul’s admonition to the Romans, “Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?” (Rom. 2:4).
Remember how long it took you
to turn from your sinful ways and embrace the truth of the gospel? Where would we all be if, the first and every time we broke God’s law, He gave us our “wages” * instead of another chance? We can’t understand that kind of love. But we benefit from it. Rather than piously pointing out others’ failures, if we cared for their souls, we’d thank God for his patience and step up our prayers for them.
The stark truth is, though we haven’t seen it yet, there is a limit to God’s patience. And I believe it’s on the horizon; a time when it will be too late. Scripture tells us to “seek the Lord while He may be found” (Isa. 55:6). Get out your gospel seeds. It’s time for sowing. Click here for a sample of a simple gospel presentation.
*”The wages of sin is death…” (Rom. 6:23)