What made Asher repent?

Pride had made the Asherites blind to evil. It was the same problem for all the Israelites in Canaan, who recklessly “did evil in the eyes of the Lord,” Judges 4:1, and only after God brought trouble on them did they wake up and resist evil instead (Judges 4 and 5). But not the Asherites, who felt safe and secure in their riches and location (5:17), and therefore in their pride could not see, or even care about, the need to resist evil.

Until, that is, the Israelites recklessly did evil again in Judges 6:1, and this time God handed them over to the Midianites, whose power for the next seven years “was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds” (2). The Midianite invasion eventually “so impoverished the Israelites” – by ruining all their crops and killing all their livestock – that “the Israelites cried out to God for help” (3-6).

The clear lesson being, that when nations built on God’s values recklessly reject those values, the pattern of God’s response is to invade those nations with oppressive powers – in the hope, though, that those nations come to their senses and get back to “listening” to him (10), and he will then “snatch them from the hand of all their oppressors” (9). 

That’s the lesson of Israel, and it got through to the Asherites who repented of their pompous, uncaring attitude, and this time they responded to Gideon’s “call to arms” (35) to save the nation. But God had to make things really bad for the Asherites’ pride to be shattered, which makes one wonder if that’s what God is doing with the nations proudly dismissing him today as well. 

Because according to Paul what happened to Israel is just as relevant for us today (1 Corinthians 10:11), so when nations built on biblical values today are also being heavily oppressed by invaders both ideologically and literally, is God at work again to shatter our elitist attitude to his laws and ethics, to get us back to realizing those old values that built our countries were right after all? 

Paul also said the times of ignorance are over and it’s time for “people everywhere to repent,” Acts 17:30. So it’s repentance that God is after, but with Israel it took violent oppression by others to get them to that point, and violence on their part to rescue them too. But “Why does God initiate and support violence so much?”….(next blog)