I read my way through the book of Exodus earlier this year - which tells the story of how God brought one generation of Israelites out of terrible slavery in Egypt. More recently, I've been working through the book of Numbers; it tells of how that generation travelled for forty years in the wilderness and almost all of them died there. (Click here to read this blog post that I wrote last week about why they died in the desert instead of entering the Promised Land.)
The book of Joshua tells us the story of the next generation: how they conquered and settled in the land God had promised them. By the time we get to the book of Judges, we've moved on to read the life stories of a third and fourth and fifth generation.... and I was particularly struck by a one sentence description of the third generation. Judges 2: 10 says that, after Joshua's generation died, a new generation grew up who didn't acknowledge the Lord or remember the mighty things He had done for Israel. How sad! After all that God has done for His people, we now have another generation that is unfaithful and indifferent to Him.
If we were to ask people for a commentary on the previous generation, the contemporaries of Joshua and Caleb, many people might say that they were a generation who succeeded. In contrast to the Exodus generation, who rebelled against God and died in the wilderness, Joshua's generation were the ones who entered, conquered and settled in the promised land. That sounds a lot like success. It had been more than 450 years since a generation of their ancestors had lived in the land of Canaan.
But as the book of Judges begins, we realise that the previous generation had failed at the most basic of levels: they had failed to pass on a personal knowledge of God to the next generation, or to tell their kids about all the amazing things that God had done for them. And so in Judges 2: 10, we have a generation that not only knows nothing about what God has done in the past, they're a generation that doesn't even acknowledge Him in the present. They just do whatever seems right in their own eyes. (Judges 21: 25)
That's a very apt description of the generation we live in today, in the 21st Century. Whether we're talking about attitudes to marriage, abortion, or even gender, we have a generation who decides for themselves what is right or wrong, with no acknowledgement at all of the eternal truths of God's Word.
So, how do we measure success? In God's eyes, it's not about how many amazing exploits we did or about how famous we became. It's about whether we lived our lives in a way that showed others the reality of God and whether, after we've gone, the next generation continues loving, following and serving the Lord.
Success is measured by obedience, and failing to obey God's instructions to "pass on to the next generations" is perhaps one of the most tragic failures of all.
