2 Chronicles 20:1-30
Deuteronomy 28:1-14
2 Chronicles 18:1-22
Psalm 136
Dr. Michael Heiser (The Unseen Realm)
“The wars of conquest under Moses and Joshua were supposed to cleanse the land of a competing divine bloodline and install Yahweh’s own children, his inheritance, into the place he had allotted to them. Yahweh’s rule on earth was to be reconstituted in Canaan.
Yahweh had chosen to accomplish his ends through imagers loyal to him against imagers who weren’t. This commitment to humanity, his original imagers on earth, is one often-missed reason why, when humanity (Israel) failed to restore God’s rule, God took matters into his own hands BY BECOMING HUMAN IN JESUS CHRIST. Canaan would become Yahweh’s beachhead of cosmic geography from which Israel could fulfill its mission. Israel would be a kingdom of priests, a conduit through which the disinherited nations of the earth would see Israel’s prosperity. The surrounding peoples would hear of Israel’s God, see his unmatched power, and seek his covenantal love. The nations would be reclaimed, not by force, but be free imagers choosing to turn toward the true God – the creator and Lord of all. At least that was the plan.
We know that Israel ultimately failed. The seeds of that failure were sown in the events of the conquest. For whatever reason – lack of faith or lack of effort, or both – Israel failed to drive out their enemies. They allowed vestiges of the targeted bloodlines to remain in the land in the Philistine cities. They chose to coexist. The visible Yahweh, the Angel, asks the rhetorical question, ‘Why would you do such a thing?’ and then announces the consequence: ‘Now I say, I will not drive them out from before you’ (Judges 2:2-3). The name of the place where he uttered these words was thereafter appropriately remembered as Bochim, a Hebrew word that means ‘weeping’. Not surprisingly, the rest of Israel’s history is a sordid roller-coaster ride. Loyalty to Yahweh – refusing to worship any other god – was of course at the heart of salvation in the Old Testament. Possession of the land is linked to this loyalty as far back as the Abrahamic Covenant.
It would be due to failure in this loyalty that Israel was sent into exile – expelled from the land of promise.
Israel’s monarchy would suffer through Saul and eventually flourish under David and his son Solomon. But the monarchy thereafter crumbled, dragging God’s intended kingdom into centuries of apostasy and civil war before ending in divine judgment.”