Moses left this advice as Israelites moved into the Promised Land, still dealing with the other people among them:" Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” (Deuteronomy 31:6) There were people still in the land, and there were hostile neighbors, like Moab.
Moab was one of the two tribes that are descended from the daughters of Lot after the destruction of Sodom; they lived in the hills north and east of the Dead Sea. They intermarried with Canaanites and other pagan neighbors, and offered human sacrifices to the pagan god Chemosh. In Judges 3 we read that, with the help of neighboring tribes, they conquered and ruled the Israelites for eighteen years. As we see repeatedly in Judges, the Israelites had lost touch with God, but they eventually came around to calling upon God for deliverance. Last week Pastor Chris told the story of God's deliverer, Ehud, who took advantage of being left-handed to bring a knife into the Moabite king's presence and kill him. When he got back to Israel, he blew a trumpet to gather the Israelites, and went to the Jordan River. They blocked all the places that were used to cross the river, and struck down the Moabites, and Moab was subject to them for eighty years--in peace. A century or two later, a famine in Judah led to a family from Bethlehem moving to Moab, and when the father and both son died, the mother Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth came back to Bethlehem, and Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David. David at one point sent his parents to live in Moab for safety when Saul was harassing David. After that, they were fighting off and on with the kingdoms of Judan and Israel, and we last hear of them as helping the Babylonians in their conquest of Jerusalem.
The Old Testament tribes and then kingdoms of Judah and Israel were entangled with each other and their neighbors for over a thousand years, and we read of short periods of relative peace amid battles and invasions, politically and religious. All of their neighbors, even the ones of Abrahamic ancestry like Moab and Ammon, and Edom, descended from Esau, were idol-worshipping pagans and religious rivals as well as military threats. After the split between the two groups of tribes after Solomon, all of the kings of the northern kingdom were following their pagan neighbors until they were conquered by the Assyrians in the 700's BC. Some of the remnants became the Samaritans, who did have a tradition of God but who did not recognize the Jerusalem Temple and do not have most of the Old Testament other than the Torah and Joshua. After Saul, David and Solomon, the most obedient kings of Judah in the south were Hezekiah and Josiah; but there were more bad than good ones. Still, there were enough courageous kings, prophets and people who did follow the instructions God had given Adam, Noah,Abraham and Moses to keep the promise alive. Yes, it was often a bloody story; but God told Moses very early in the game that ‘The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’ (Numbers 14:18) His Chosen People were often not good at recognizing the dangerous influences of their non-godfearing neighbors, and this was a common problem throughout their history.
There have always been those who are not good neighbors. We truly need the words of James in this day: "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, 20 because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. 21 Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. (James 1:19-21)
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