Today’s passage is Judges 3:1-11.
The new generation of Israelites had no battle experience, so God left the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Sidonians to see if they’d obey the Lord’s commands. They intermarried. The Israelites did evil in God’s sight and he let them be sold into Cushan-Risthathaim’s hands for eight years. When they cried out, God sent Othniel, Caleb’s younger brother, to be their judge. He defeated the king, bringing peace for 40 years until he died.
Why does the new generation need battles? Why do they intermarry with foreigners?
One of the big lessons I learned from my years of suffering after my world collapsed was that, even though almost everything was taken away, I didn’t die.
I thought I would because my pride was struck down.
I wanted to die because I didn’t think I had anything to live for.
I was reduced to a bundle of misery and self-pity.
But I didn’t die.
Years later I understood that I was not a victim of others but of my own attitude, actions and sins.
But I had not died.
That turned out to be important.
Because I didn’t die, I had a foundation of suffering to stand on and live through new circumstances which I could not have lived through before.
Not only could I live in smelly, bug-infested apartments in Ansan, I could also praise God, go to worship and mokjang, do QT and be happy.
My circumstances did not affect my faith in God nor my growing dependence on him nor my trust in him.
As I meditated daily on my sins through QT, I came to see that my time of suffering was nothing at all.
For my sins I should’ve received far worse suffering and then died.
But God’s grace rescued me just like Othniel rescued the Israelites.
Losing my father, my friend, and my alcoholic wife to death, rejected by my lover, and losing my job, career, money, car, and dog was just a simple pruning by my merciful God.
It was a wake-up call that took me years to hear.
I thought it was punishment. But it was training.
Without that training I could not enjoy the forty years of peace that seems to have come upon me.
I needed that battle of suffering to see myself and hear God.
I didn’t die and neither did the Israelites. God’s grace.
What matters is hearing God and repenting.
Suffering was the route that got me there.
Application: Today is the first day my wife and I are battling with her brother to teach him QT. He and I sit together. I do my QT as a model for him. My wife talks him through his QT.
Lord, let me have sympathy for those in battle. Inspire me to pray more deeply for my brother in law to learn how to interpret his life through QT.
