Israel had now entered into a period of relative peace and stability.
This enabled Joshua to finish the work of divvying up the land among the remaining 7 tribes who hadn’t yet received their land inheritance.
Once this was taken care of, the stage was set for the Levites to receive their cities to live in.
And once that was set, the 6 sanctuary cities for those who had accidentally killed someone could be established and put into operation.
And once this was done, the 600,000 person army from all the 12 tribes of Israel was no longer needed.
And there you have it, the whole series of logical step-by-step events that had to happen to get Israel from where it was to where it needed to be.
However, it is only in hindsight that things seem logical.
We all know that to get to this point in time, there were failures, cowardice, self-destructive behavior and acts of disobedience among the Israelites.
But here’s the thing.
The Lord knew all that.
The Lord knows in advance that much of what we’ll do in life we’ll be far from His ideal will for us.
Yet He’ll still be able to work through our disobedience to achieve His will.
That’s His genius.
The God we worship is mystifying and perplexing beyond measure, but we humans are anything but.
We’re actually quite predictable and our behaviors and how we react to certain things are quite simple.
The only problem is we have a tendency to deny our shortcomings and our patterns of predictability which is why history just keeps repeating itself.
Yet, as I just said, the Lord is still able to use our shortcomings to achieve His Will.
That is exactly what was happening in the Promised Land thousands of years ago and that’s exactly what is happening right now in our day and age.
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