Judges

portrays Israel as really stupid.  They turn away, the Lord delivers with a judge, the judge redeems and rules justly for X-number of years, Israel turns away again, etc...  After a time of this it presents the picture of "there being no judge in the land and everyone did what was right in their own eyes."  Like a Levite priest throwing a concubine to a mob to be ravished, then cutting her into 12 pieces to send to the twelve tribes.  Whoa.  

Israel was commanded under Joshua to fully take the land and totally and utterly remove the foreigners, or else their pagan ideology would spread into Israel and it would be a snare to them.  Upon entering the promised land Israel saw it, claimed it, and cut there losses.  They hadn't totally removed the Philistines and Canaanites, but who cares?  They had more land then they've ever possessed before.  Manasseh, Gad and Reuben didn't even make it West of the Jordan before they claimed their inheritance.  

Hebrews 11 says:

And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. ¹⁴People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. ¹⁵If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

C.S. Lewis says our problem isn't that the world and its pleasures are so wonderfully enticing that we are distracted from what God offers, but rather that we are far too easily pleased.  The world is not so good that it competes for the goodness of what God offers, but rather we are so fallen that we can't even imagine the greatness of God and thus settle for what the world offers, thinking it is true joy. 

So it is with Israel, and often times me.  Reading through Joshua I was getting the picture that the Promised Land was like a modern day equivalent of Heaven.  But I don't share that thought anymore. The Promised Land is good, but still not home.  Israel saw the beginnings of their inheritance and settled with just that.  They received the land, but not fully.  They did not rout the pagan nations left, and a century later in Judges Israel sees fully the consequences of that.  The Philistines enslave them.  They take other nations as wives and begin worshiping their deities.  The Law in the Torah is almost completely forgotten, Levi priests serve households rather than Israel and carved images instead of the Lord.

Regardless of how good this world ever is to me, I never want to lose sight that my true home is not here.