The Lord Tests Israel

BY Sharon Hodde Miller

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann once wrote, “Prosperity breeds amnesia.” 

I find this to be a good description of what was happening to the Israelites in Judges. Every time the Israelites prospered, they didn’t simply forget God; they forgot what it meant to be God’s chosen people in the world. They forgot their own sin. They forgot the world’s brokenness. And they forgot how desperately they needed God. So they lived as if they didn’t. 

Their forgetfulness led to sin, and their sin led to death and destruction. It’s a pattern we’ll see repeated throughout the book. 

We should never be too quick to explain the stories of violence and suffering in Judges. Neat and tidy answers almost always do a disservice to these difficult passages. But I think it’s safe to say that the cycle of foreign invasions had an eye-opening effect on the Israelites because God tested “all those in Israel who had experienced none of the wars in Canaan” (Judges 3:1). I wonder if this was another way of saying, “The Israelites forgot who they were. They had forgotten their weakness. They had forgotten their vulnerability. They had forgotten that they needed God.”

Don’t we sometimes do the same? 

It was true then, and it is still true today: prosperity breeds amnesia. In times of comfort, we do not simply forget God, but we also forget the seriousness of sin, the reality of suffering, and our desperate need for salvation.

The book of Judges challenges us to remember. It is painful and difficult—and certainly not tidy—but in it we can almost hear the Spirit whisper, “This is why you need a Savior. This is why I came.”