And the anger of Jehovah was hot against Israel; and he said, Because this nation hath transgressed my covenant which I commanded their fathers, and hath not hearkened unto my voice,
God's anger burns against His own people after years of rescue and relapse. The reason He gives is a covenant broken and a voice ignored. Two hard questions follow. How can God be angry with the people He saved? And what happens to the enemies He promised to drive out?
The sin God names is not vague. He points to a covenant already given and a voice already heard. One writer shows where Israel's later oppressors came from. They were not strangers God had planted in the land. They were enemies Israel itself had failed to drive out.
Notice who the enemies were that oppressed Israel from time to time. They were the ones Israel had left alive in the land. Israel left them there because of their own disobedience to God and their lack of confidence in Him. As long as they went on depending on God, no enemy could stand before them. He gave them one victory after another. These enemies stayed in the land entirely because of Israel's unfaithfulness.
The anger in this verse does not fall on a first offence. It follows a pattern. God raises up a rescuer. The rescuer dies. The people sink again — often lower than before.
After every time of deliverance, when the judge died, Israel went back to their low state or even lower than before, serving and bowing down to idols (v. 19). Can we wonder that God's anger was hot against Israel? Israel broke God's covenant. So He declared He would no longer drive out the nations Joshua left when he died (vv. 20-21). Instead, He would use those nations to test Israel (v. 22). The demon worship of these nations should have filled Israel with disgust at such evil, instead of luring them into the same practices. So it was a test, but one that proved Israel rebellious.
God kept every promise; Israel kept none. You might expect God's anger to fall on the idol-worshipping nations in the land. It falls instead on the people who carried His name.
The LORD failed in nothing; Israel failed in everything. Joshua made a covenant with them at his last meeting, and they ignored it, just as they had ignored the covenant of Moses. God raised up judges to restore them and to save them from the hand of their enemies. But each time a judge died, they turned back without gratitude and behaved worse than their fathers. So His anger was kindled against Israel — not against the Amorite or the Canaanite — and He refused to drive out their enemies, leaving those enemies to test His people.
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What follows in the chapter is not random misfortune. The punishment takes its shape from the sin. One writer says the same rule holds for us.
If the people of Israel abandon the LORD to serve idols, then the LORD gives them up to serve idol-worshippers. It is the same with us. If we sin, that sin measures and defines our discipline. And so grace works repentance in us when we turn and cry to the Lord in our distress.
Another writer puts this moment in God's own voice.
He has to spread out before us the misery of our failures and our turning away from Him. He tells us that He brought us out of Egypt and into the land. He said He would never forget His covenant, and that He would always be faithful to His people. But He says: you have departed from Me. You have served other gods. Why have you done this? Then He tells them He cannot bless them. He cannot be with them in any real sense while they have departed from Him. He tells them He cannot drive out their enemies from their territory.
The refusal in the next verses is not only punishment. One writer points to a purpose behind it that God had in view before the failure ever happened.
This unfaithfulness, foreseen by God, was the reason why God left some of the nations among His people to prove them. The presence of these nations was itself proof that Israel lacked energy and confidence in the power of God. Yet God would still have kept them from the disasters that followed. But in the wisdom of His purposes, God, who knew His people, left these nations among them as a means of testing them. Israel will be fully blessed only under Messiah. By His might He will bring in their blessing, and by His might He will keep it for them.
- Cause — God names the sin before He names the punishment: a covenant broken, a voice ignored.
- Aim — It burns against Israel, not the Canaanites. God held the people who bore His name to account.
- Shape — The discipline fits the sin. God handed those who chose idols over to idol-worshippers, and the sin itself measures the discipline.
- Consequence — Israel's own disobedience left those enemies standing. While Israel depended on God, no enemy could stand before them.
- Purpose — God foresaw the failure and left the nations as a test. Full blessing waits for Messiah, who will bring it in and keep it.
I also will not henceforth dispossess from before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died;
God's anger here is not a passing mood. It is a verdict on a broken covenant. The sentence is quiet: He stops doing for Israel what they refused to do for themselves. The nations Joshua left behind will now stay. Why would God leave His own people surrounded by the enemies that ruined them?
Israel's collapse was not a one-time slip. God's sentence answers a pattern.
After every time of deliverance, when the judge died, Israel went back to their low state or even lower than before, serving and bowing down to idols (v. 19). Can we wonder that God's anger was hot against Israel? Israel transgressed God's covenant. So He declared He would no longer drive out before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died (vv. 20-21). Instead, He would use those nations to test Israel (v. 22).
God's answer matches a choice Israel had already made.
They would not drive out the nations, and so He would not; and the consequences of this, predicted again and again, would come upon them.
The nations left behind are not harmless neighbours.
The children of Israel were unfaithful: they did not go forward to overcome their enemies. So God declared He would no longer cast those enemies out of the land. He would leave them as thorns in their side, a lasting witness to Israel's unfaithfulness and disobedience. At the same time they would be a constant menace to their testimony and to their national existence.
The same unconquered peoples carry a second meaning. They are still there, so the work is still open.
So God left these nations among them to try them. They lived side by side with Israel day after day. They were a constant test of the loyalty and obedience of the generations that followed, to prove whether Israel would now go on to carry out the will of God and cast out the enemy that was there. In other words, the presence of these men, as long as they remained, was always a witness of past failure and an invitation to present recovery.
This is where the chapter turns. God takes the trouble Israel brought on themselves and puts it to work.
The very trial that comes in through sin, He makes a means of practising faith, for those who have faith. They had not learned from their fathers' history the need of obedience and reliance on the living God. So they were to learn these by meeting the same enemies their fathers met. Their discipline was to be a school of faith.
Nothing here caught God off guard. His purpose in leaving these nations reaches past the judgment to Israel's future.
God foresaw this unfaithfulness, and that is why He left some of the nations among His people to prove them. Their presence was in itself proof that Israel lacked energy and confidence in the power of God. Yet God would still have kept them from the disasters that followed. But in the wisdom of His counsels, God, who knew His people, left these nations among them as a means of proving them. Israel will be fully blessed only under Messiah, who by His might will bring in their blessing, and by His might will keep it for them.
This history is not only Israel's.
This is what makes the book of Judges so extremely important for us. We have here, as in a mirror, our own faces spiritually: a photograph taken in divine light that will not flatter.
This verse can sound like a closed door. It is not one.
If His people by their own unbelief and disobedience have compromised Him and compromised themselves, God does not give them up. He is a God of endless patience and long-suffering. He leaves them to the result of their own disobedience — that is the first thing. Out of those very results He brings fresh tests of their future obedience.
- Cause — Israel would not drive the nations out, so God would not. The sentence confirms the choice they had already made.
- Consequence — The nations left behind become thorns. They threaten Israel and stand as a witness to the work Israel never finished.
- Purpose — God does not walk away. He turns the enemy left in the land into a test, and the discipline becomes a school of faith.
- Mirror — The book shows readers their own faces in a light that will not flatter.
- Recovery — The enemy still in the land is a witness of past failure and an invitation to present recovery. God does not give His people up.