JUDGES - Christian Identity Forum

Ehud: Sodom and Amalek Resurgent 59
judgment over what had gone before.
H. C. Hoeksema comments: “But if these eighteen years
reveal that the chastisements of the Lord increase in severity as
the sin is repeated, they also show that there was need of a very
severe oppression. Was it not true that as soon as the people
would cry to the God of their fathers in true repentance, He
would deliver them? The situation was thus, then, that it required
eighteen years of oppression for the children of Israel to
learn their lesson. For a long time apparently they simply submitted
to the inevitable. They did not turn to Jehovah in repentance;
they did not turn from the service of the gods of the nations.
They continued to make friends with the nations in whose
midst they dwelled. They persisted in giving their daughters in
marriage to the nations of the kingdom of darkness. Hence, it
required some time to make Israel listen. Meanwhile the oppression
became heavier, no doubt, as the years went by. It must
have been when finally the burden became unbearable that they
cried to the God of the covenant for help and salvation. It was
then, and not before, that Jehovah sent deliverance. Before
this, salvation could not be sent, for the simple reason that the
lesson had to be learned by the people. How could Jehovah deliver
them as long as they served Baalim and Ashteroth and forgot
the Lord their God? Would they not acknowledge these idol
gods for the deliverance which Jehovah had wrought, and
would they not continue to amalgamate with the nations round
about them? But this might not be. The people had to learn war.
They had to be taught to change their attitude over against the
nations with whom they made friends. They had to be taught to
fight against the kingdom of darkness. The purpose of the oppression,
therefore, was not reached before Israel understood
that the alliance with the kingdom of darkness was only to their
hurt, before they learned to hate the power of heathendom as it
oppressed them, before they became able to distinguish between
the gods of the nations and the God of Israel, before they turned
from the gods that afford no help and in faith and repentance
turned to their God, in order that He might save them.”]
It had been the faith of Abraham that had saved Lot from
1. H. C. Hoeksema, Era of the Judges (Grandville, Michigan: Theological
School of the Protestant Reformed Churches, 1981), pp. 67f.