Last week we discussed the Hamas spirit in the Bible and this week we go even deeper into prophetic revelation. Today we will connect some prophetic passages in Deuteronomy, to their fulfillment in Judges, and to the current war in Israel. This war was foreshadowed over 3,000 years ago, as we are seeing ancient prophecy fulfilled and repeated on the nightly news.
Upon occupying the Promised Land, God commands His people in Israel to kill as many enemies as possible and completely drive out those who seek to remain in the land, saying in Deuteronomy 7:1-5:
“When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites,
the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them. You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and chop down their Asherim and burn their carved images with fire.”
In current political vernacular, God commanded a one-state solution: Israel inhabited and governed by Abraham’s descendants through Isaac (the Jewish people), not Ishmael (the Palestinian people). In rebellion that infuriated God, His people in the ancient days of Judges chose what today would be called a two-state solution: a coexisting of both groups in the Promised Land, which ignores the underlying spiritual war that inevitably leads to physical war.
Judges 1:3–36 reports that God’s people did not drive out all of the inhabitants of the land. Instead, they enslaved, intermarried with, and even syncretized (i.e., sought to unite or harmonize) their religious worship with their enemies.
In Judges 2:1-3, Jesus Christ appears from Heaven as the Angel of the Lord to rebuke the people for not driving every one of their enemies into the grave or out of the land, saying:
“I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers. I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.’ But you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you have done? So now I say, I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.”
Just like the Israelites did not drive out the things/people that were opposed to God, is there anything in your own life that you need to “drive out” and replace with the things of God?
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