The Feed Mill

Today’s Bible Reading: Judges 1-3

Daily Devotional: Judges 1:1-26

The children of Israel begin to grow in an experiential of the Lord, within the promised land, of Him being with each of the tribes personally. The congregation and tribes have grown and matured in trusting the Lord the 40 years in the wilderness and the first few battles leading up to and in the promised land; they are now mature enough to carry their own burdens personally, but the command both from Moses and Joshua to obey the Lord’s commands and to Love Him and no other is the key distinction between them and those in the land and should not be forgotten.

They have learned that the Lord’s desires for the lives is not only corporately, but it’s also individual. Their lands were awesome and different from one another and so the Lord won these battles in their midst by different means. The children of Israel could never say because of their strength, or there was never an enemy bigger than they could handle, because on every occasion there was an enemy who was bigger than they could handle and subdue both individually and corporately apart from the Lord, they were never bigger than He could handle. Each would now have to learn to trust God individually, His strength and staying close and walking out His commands that He had given to Moses. And so as long as they did, they would continue to hear from the Lord and experience victory over their enemies in their lives. When they don’t He will give them over to what is right in their own eyes so that they will learn His ways are better and to stay close to Him and trust in Him for the victory over their choices which suppress them.

For us even today these are all strong pictures and examples for us of how we overcome and move through our lives, and sadly when we choose that our ways or our understanding is best it’s not the Lord coming down and punishing us that we feel, but it’s the full weight of the consequences of our choices. If we tell the Lord we want certain things apart from Him, He’ll eventually give us a taste of that and the consequence of that thing in our life; it’s not Him hating us but it’s His love for us that He allows us to taste the bitterness of our choices so that we can compare His love to what we desire in our own hearts. Sadly enough the book of Judges is full of exactly this, the children of Israel constantly choosing their own hearts instead of God’s and so the troubles they face come from their own desires and the consequences not God’s Love. Our hearts are deceitful, they tell us that certain things will give us peace and pleasure but that is drastically opposite from reality, it’s only the Lord and His ways which give us true peace and pleasure in life.