The Judges

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This is Day 19 of my 40 day Lenten Blog.

After Jericho fell, the Israelite armies marched through the Promised Land and took over the lands that were to be given to each of the tribes. And at Joshua's urging the tribes of Israel renewed their covenant with the Lord and swore: "Far be it for us that we would forsake the Lord and serve other Gods." And Joshua warned them that if they served foreign gods that the Lord would punish them.

But after Joshua died, the Israelites did forsake the Lord. They did serve foreign gods. The Lord had told them to drive out all of the other people from the lands, to destroy their altars to pagan gods. But they did not listen. They decided to make treaties with the other nations in the land and to adopt their god's as the Israelites' own. These "god's" were not gods at all, but demons that were worshipped by people for their power.

So the Lord allowed their enemies to defeat them and plunder them. And the mighty army of the Israelites was defeated time and again because God was against them. So God raised up judges to rescue them from their enemies. Judges like Samson, the strongest man in the world. And Gideon who was not so strong but thanks to the Lord was able to defeat the armies of the East who numbered in the hundreds of thousands with just three hundred men.

God was with the judges and the judges could lead the Israelites to victory over their enemies, but whenever a judge died the Israelites returned to worshiping other gods, and doing even worse things than before. And God sent a great famine on the land. And a man from the tribe of Judah named Elimelech took his wife Naomi and his two sons into Moab hoping they would find food. And his sons married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. But Elimelech and his sons died and so Naomi returned to Israel because she had heard that there was food there again.

Naomi told her daughters-in-law to go back to their own people and marry other men and Orpah listened. But Ruth would not leave her mother-in-law and accompanied her to a city in Judah called Bethlehem. And Ruth married Naomi's relative Boaz and they had a son who they named Obed. And Obed had a son named Jesse. And Jesse had a son named David who would one day be king of Israel.

Next: Here I am!

R.C. VanLandingham is a Catholic homeschool dad just trying to make it through this life and into the next! He has written a Christian children's fantasy series about a boy named Peter Puckett!