The Circle That Kept Spinning

When Joshua sent the people home from the stone under the oak, every family walked off to its own piece of the promised land. All through Joshua's life, they served the LORD.

Joshua lived to be a hundred and ten. Then he died, and they buried him on his own land in the hill country of Ephraim. One by one, the grown-ups who had marched with him died too.

While they lived, those old ones had stories to tell.

"I saw the Jordan River stop," a grandfather might say, with a grandchild on each knee. "It piled up like a wall, and we walked across on dry ground!"

"Tell about Jericho!"

"We shouted, and the walls fell flat!"

But when that whole generation had died, the stories stopped, and a new generation grew up that did not know the LORD or anything he had done for Israel. Their neighbours had other gods, like Baal, who was supposed to send the rain.

"Everybody prays to Baal," the young people said. "Why shouldn't we?"

So they did. (Baal had a painted face, a metal crown, and ears that heard nothing. He had to be carried from place to place, which is a strange thing to ask of a god.)

The LORD had brought them out of Egypt, and they left him for a statue. God and Israel had made a covenant, a promise to belong only to each other. The Bible uses a strong word for breaking it: they were unfaithful, like a husband or wife who breaks a wedding promise.

God's anger burned. He let raiders sweep in and carry off their harvests, and whenever Israel marched out to fight, they lost.

"They took all the grain!"

"Help us! Somebody help us!"

The LORD heard their groaning, and his heart hurt for them. So he raised up a judge. (A judge in those days did not sit behind a desk. A judge was a rescuer God chose to chase off the enemy and lead the people back to him.) God was with that judge, and he saved Israel all the days of the judge's life.

But a judge's days always ran out. When the judge died, the people went straight back to their statues, each time worse than their parents. Then the raiders came back, and the groaning, and another judge, and another funeral. Round and round it went, like a playground roundabout that spins faster with every push until no one can climb off.

At last God said, "This nation has broken the covenant I made with their fathers and has not listened to my voice. So I will no longer drive out the nations Joshua left when he died. I will use them to test Israel, to see whether they will keep to my way as their fathers did."

Each judge saved God's people for a while, then died, and the circle started again.

After the judges came kings, and still the people wandered off.

So God's people waited for another rescuer, one whose days would never run out. When he came, he would die, as every judge had died, and his friends would bury him in a tomb cut in the rock. But on the third day he would get up again, alive, and never die again.

His name is Jesus. He saves his people all the days of his life, and the days of his life never end.