This post is part of my ongoing series of writing down my thoughts on the Bible passages I read each day. Some days I hope to have great insight that the Lord gives me, and many days, I will likely struggle through the text and not know what to write down based on what I read. My hope and prayer is that as I make this a habit, just as I did daily writing for so long, that I will improve on my ability to read and understand the passages I’m reading. Please keep in mind that many of these posts may be published late at night or with little time studying and simply be my first thoughts after reading. This is in no way a commentary that one should use to discern the Bible, but my own personal thoughts.

One of the things that amazes me about the people of Israel is how quickly they seem to forget. Maybe we don’t get a good perspective of time just reading these stories at the 30,000 viewpoint, but it seems like it’s only days sometimes between when God does something completely incredible and when they go off and worship other gods.

You’d think people so close to seeing God move couldn’t possibly do this, yet here we have story after story. Right after God (through Moses) parted the Red Sea and saved Israel from Egypt, they don’t have water for three days and the people lose faith in God. ALREADY! They have just been saved from Pharoh and now they are complaining against God. To be fair, if you didn’t have water for three days, do you think you would have much grace with anyone about your situation? We don’t eat for a couple of hours sometimes and we’re angry at everyone around us.

It seems Joshua and Moses were both aware of this and set up very strict standards when they left the people of Israel. Not because they wanted to restrict them, but because they wanted them to be in the freedom of what God had given them. They reinforce, that if you do what God desires, then you will be blessed, if you go against it, you will be cursed.

It’s almost as if they know as soon as they go away, the people are going to turn to other God’s. And sure enough, no sooner does Joshua pass away that the people start going into places and letting the people live among them instead of driving them out of the land, and then pretty soon, this destroys them.

It’s not rocket science. You disobey God, you are punished. Your own foolishness punishes you.

My biggest takeaway is to teach very clearly as much as you can about reproducing other disciples. If you can’t do that in a good way, you’re going to end up with maybe a generation of people following, and the immediate generation after falling to the other side of the pendulum trying to go after all the opposite things.

Teach the next generation not only the commands to follow, but the command to teach.