Get Rid of Them

 DEVOTION

JOSHUA

GET RID OF THEM

Judges 2:1-9

2:1 The angel of the LORD went up from Gilgal to Bokim and said, "I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land that I swore to give to your forefathers. I said, 'I will never break my covenant with you, 2 and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land, but you shall break down their altars.' Yet you have disobeyed me. Why have you done this? 3 Now therefore I tell you that I will not drive them out before you; they will be [thorns] in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you." 4 When the angel of the LORD had spoken these things to all the Israelites, the people wept aloud, 5 and they called that place Bokim. There they offered sacrifices to the LORD. 6 After Joshua had dismissed the Israelites, they went to take possession of the land, each to his own inheritance. 7 The people served the LORD throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the LORD had done for Israel.  Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died at the age of a hundred and ten. 9 And they buried him in the land of his inheritance, at Timnath Heres in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.

NIV

We don’t know who this angel of the LORD is, but we know from the Hebrew word that an angel is a messenger of the LORD who speaks as directed as the LORD. This is unlike when the prophets said, “Thus says the Lord”. This is as if the LORD, himself was speaking, as we notice the first-person words, “I brought you up out of Egypt”, and “I will never break my covenant with you”. The problem we spoke about before that was to happen is at hand. Because the Israelites did not drive all the people from the land God promised Abraham all his descendants would own, they now had foreign gods among them, yet more importantly they disobeyed the LORD. These foreign people and their gods became a thorn or a snare to them. The LORD has given them the opportunity to repent of their disobedience and serve him instead of those other gods. However, we know they had already begun to mingle with those foreign people and their gods because the angel of the LORD asked them, “Why have you done this?” It appears they did repent to an extent, as they wept loudly and offered sacrifices to the LORD. We are told they served the LORD throughout the lifetime of Joshua and the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the LORD had done for Israel. This would also imply most of the current people had not seen all the great things and that might be the reason they had begun to accept the foreign gods in the land of their inheritance. Here is where the rubber meets the road for us today. We cannot allow any of the foreign gods of this world to invade our thinking and thus the way we live. We cannot mingle with its ways, or allow the world’s altars to stay standing in our lives. We certainly would not ever think to bring an altar to a foreign god into our church sanctuary. Why then would we ever allow one into our personal lives? Yet is there anything that has become a master in our lives? This could be accepting the systems of the world, taking on the ideas they hold to, or for that matter, when it comes to our spiritual life, have we adopted the law as a way of life, rather than living by faith. If we have rejected the financial master of this world, worshipping the Lord only, but want to live by some laws we have devised or believe indicate we are Christians, are not those laws a form of a foreign altar? It is just a thought, but if Jesus gave us a new covenant based on two commands, loving the Lord with our whole being, and loving ourselves as ourselves, then that is the only altar we offer ourselves as living sacrifices on which would be acceptable and pleasing to God. Let us rid ourselves of anything that interferes with obeying our calling.