Visions From Our Story: The Promise in Limbo

If you have ever seen a yo-yo then you will have a great visual image of the next chapter in the story of the Promise. God would draw the people close. The people would run away. God would pull them back in. Again and again in the Book of Judges this fleeing and drawing played itself out.

The first running away begins almost immediately after the death of Joshua. The New International Version puts it this way in Judges 2:10-15. "After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel.
Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. They forsook the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They provoked the LORD to anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths."

As we learned last week, the conquest of the Land of Promise had not been as complete as the book of Joshua would lead us to believe. Entire swaths of land and numerous cities remained firmly in the hands of those who had been in the land before the Israelites arrived in mass. The Baals and Ashtoreths were the primary god and goddess of the Semitic peoples in Canaan. Baal and Ashtoreth were fertility gods. The belief was that in order to insure good harvests people needed to engage in sexually oriented rituals (with both male and female cult prostitutes), offer human sacrifices and participate in ecstatic and violent rituals.

The people of Israel were tempted to abandon the worship of YHWH (the Hebrew consonants used to write the name of God who had given them the Promise and had liberated them) in order to become like their neighbors and worship Baal and Ashtoreth. The result of this transfer of allegiance inevitably led to Israel's political and economic oppression. Out of their despair the Israelites would cry out to YHWH for relief. YHWH, the always promise keeping God, would then send them judges to liberate them. The judges were charismatic leaders who could rally the Israelites to fight for and win their freedom. There were twelve judges in all (including Gideon, Samson and Deborah) which meant that the yo-yo of faith to apostasy and back was a regular event for almost 200 years.

While you and I do not live in a world in which there are statues of Baal and Ashtoreth around every corner, we live in a world in which there are competing claims for our time, talent and treasure. There are competing world views which call for us and our children to abandon our lives as people of the Promise. The Israelites abandoned God because they forgot the story of what God had done for them and adopted the story of the Baals and Ashtoreths. They forgot the story of the Promise. Our task is to insure that we and our children do not forget our story. We need to be sure we remember that there is a living God who loves us passionately and calls us to be coworkers with Christ in the release, renewal and restoration of the world.

Part of our vision then needs to be the constant telling and retelling of our story so that it is not forgotten and thus becomes the foundation of our and our children's worldviews…thus one of my reasons for my retelling the story.