The Gadites were given the lesson in how and why nations succeed and flourish. It was given to them by Joshua right after they’d proved themselves faithful to their promise to Moses, to not return to their homes and families east of the Jordan River until the entire country west of the Jordan was safely in Israelite hands.
“So,” Joshua told the Gadites in Joshua 22:4, “now that the Lord your God has given your brothers rest as he promised, return to your homes in the land that Moses gave you on the other side of the Jordan. “But,” verse 5 – and here came the lesson – “be very careful to keep the commandments and the law that Moses the servant of the lord gave you: to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to obey his commands to hold fast to him and to serve him with all your heart and all your soul.”
And at this point in their history the Gadites were determined to do just that, and demonstrated it visibly by building an impressive altar (10) as “A witness between us that the Lord is God,” verse 34.
With an attitude like that their potential was enormous, because the “Lord would give them rest on every side,” Joshua 21:44, he’d also “hand all their enemies over to them and not one of his promises to them would fail” (45). They had God’s total backing.
And God was true to his promise too, because when the Gadites “waged war against the Hagrites, Jetur, Naphish and Nodab” in 1 Chronicle 5:19, “God handed the Hagrites and all their allies over to them, because they (the Gadites) cried out to him during the battle,” and God “answered their prayers, because the Gadites trusted in him” (20).
But something went horribly wrong, verse 26, resulting in “the God of Israel stirring up the spirit of Tiglath-Pileser king of Assyria, who took the Gadites into exile” and they lost everything. The reason being verse 25: “they were unfaithful to the God of their fathers and prostituted themselves to the gods of the people of the land.”
The Gadites failed as a tribe, and so did Israel as a nation, when obeying and trusting God felt so out-of-date and non-progressive compared to the novel and innovative gods and religions that other peoples had. Which rings a rather familiar bell in our western nations today, that were built on a respect for and faith in the biblical God, but are now experiencing what happens “When the ‘isms’ take over”….(next blog)
