Yesterday I told you about the 4 cycles that we see over and over again in the book of Judges. Let me remind you of what that cylce is, this time in a simpler way:
- Sin
- Punishment
- Repentance
- Deliverance.
Today, we’re going to talk about the first of these cycles.
- Sin
God commanded the nation of Israel to completely drive out and conquer the inhabitants that lived in their land. When Joshua was leading they moved forward in a swift campaign that helped them to conquer the land and allowed the different tribes to get into the part of the country that they were going to live in. When the tribes got to their land they were supposed to finish driving out the inhabitants on their own.
Why was God so specific about driving out the inhabitants of the land?
God knew that the inhabitants of the land were involved in all sorts of pagan worship. They worshipped idols like Baal and Ashteroth. There worship wasn’t singing or listening to preaching like we experience in corporate worship. It included self injury, immorality, and at times even human sacrifice.
The children of Israel disobeyed God when they got to the land. They allowed the inhabitants to stay. This lead them to participating in the practices and worship of the people that God had told them to conquer.
Life Step: Think about it…
Isn’t it the same in our life? So often we end up just flat out disobeying God. Unfortunately, disobedience ends up leading us to many other kinds of sin. It’s so important that we fully obey God. Partial obedience is disobedience.
Do you think that sometimes we don’t take sin seriously? How do we do that?
Do you think that sometimes the people we allow ourselves to be around or to be influenced by lead us to sin?
Study the Scriptures with Ben Jennings 
I think that we sometimes try to justify sin and look at everybody else doing it so we dont take it as seriously as we should. The second question reminds me of an old quote “show me your friends and ill show you your future.” so who we spend time with and who we let influence us definitely has a huge impact on our lives.
“You won’t fly like an eagle if you run with the turkeys.”
🙂
Sometimes I don’t take all sin seriously I sometimes go at sin like it won’t hurt anybody nobody cares but God does and we all forget that at times and friends have a huge part on our sin like what your friends do you will end up doing.
I think the reason we sometimes don’t take sin very seriously is because we think it isn’t that big of a deal, we don’t really think that there’s major consequences for the sin we commit. The children of Israel seriously look like what’s happening in our world today. When God tells us to do something, maybe it’s something we don’t want to do, it’s kinda common to only do part of it like the children of Israel did. God knew that if the Israelites didn’t drive the other people out of the land that they would be influenced away from God, and that’s exactly what happened! Just goes to show that God ALWAYS knows what’s best for us 🙂
I think the majority of the time, we forget how important it is to take sin seriously. It’s easy to have the attitude that God is gracious and that you can just ask for forgiveness, but constantly doing sins, is living in sins. There is a difference between sinning, which is in our nature, and living in sin, which was commanded by God that we shouldn’t do. We definitley take it for granted sometimes, and it’s not a good thing. I would say yes that people can influence us to be in sin, because I’ve got caught up in that before. If people you are constantly around or look up to are sinning or living in sin, it’s easy to get caught up in it yourself. We need to take the example of the Isrealites and how they disobeyed God in sin, and use it as a motivator to change our attitudes and behaviors.