The Israel that went into the promised land was practically a new Israel. None of the adults who had come up out of the land of Egypt during the exodus other than Joshua and Caleb, entered the land. Rather, the nation consisted of children and grandchildren had experienced the exodus.
The people were no longer led by Moses; they were led by Joshua. And rather than Aaron as their high priest they had his son Eleazar.
However, the most important characteristic of the generation entering the land that distinguished them from their fathers was that they actually loved, believed, and served the Lord (Judg. 2:7). Unlike their fathers and grandfathers who had seen the mighty power of God in deliver them from Egypt and yet still refused to remember him, this new generation saw the mighty works of God in the conquering of the land and made sure they didn’t forget.
This generation served Yahweh their entire lives. But then we read that their children grew up, did not believe the Lord, and thus did evil in his sight. Somehow, rather than taking after their godly parents, they instead took after their ungodly grandparents who died when they were young, if they met them at all. Why? What’s going on?
The Scriptures don’t tell us explicitly. How could the generation coming out of Egypt be so hard of heart? How could the generation under Joshua turn out to be probably the most godly generation, including all the generations after them, in the history of Israel? And then how could their children flip back and turn out to be one of the most ungodly generations?
Trying to think about their respective upbringings boggles the mind. The generation coming out of Egypt no doubt heard about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and God’s covenant with them. They heard about how they spent four hundred years in slavery, but how God visited them in their plight and delivered them (Gen. 15:13-14). They also heard about the promised land. Why, then, after God proved his faithfulness by delivering them exactly the way he said he would, were they so distrusting of God?
What about about their children and how they must have been raised? Their parents were given the law and the sacrifices, but judging by their hearts and their actions, it doesn’t seem like they would have been very faithful in obeying and teaching the law. So, it’s not likely that they had godly teachers and examples at home. Yet they turned out to be tender hearted to God and his Word.
And we would expect, since this tender-hearted generation served the Lord all their days, that they would do their best to raise their children up in the way of the Lord by teaching them the law, making the sacrifices, and observing the different holidays that served to remind them and their children of all the things that God had done for them. Yet the generation that followed rebelled against the Lord. Again, it’s mind-boggling.
But we shouldn’t go too far with this speculating about the human reasons why two generations turned out to be duds while the middle generation was faithful. We can’t conclude anything definitive about the various generation’s upbringing or the effects of their environment on their belief, because we’re not told.
However, we do know two things for certain about them: The reason why the middle generation was faithful was wholly due to God’s grace and the hard-heartedness of the other two generations is reflective of every heart without God’s grace. There was nothing inherently special about the generation under Joshua, nor was there anything particularly more wicked about the other two generations, as far as their human natures go.
Rather, their stark differences show us is our desperate need for God’s grace and that every individual must exercise saving faith for themselves. Without God’s grace we are the Exodus generation: Unbelieving, dead in sin, without any hope, and bound to fall without reaching the promised rest of God. It’s only by God’s grace through Christ that we could ever hope to be faithful and to make it to that promised rest.
We’re not saved by our parent’s faith, nor can we save our children by our faith. We therefore cannot take our faith for granted, thinking that our children will believe just because we believe.
In the same way, we can’t look to our parent’s unbelief and how they raised us and use that as a crutch or excuse for our own sin. We are responsible for our sin alone, and our own response to the gospel. The same was true for our parents and the same is true for our children. They must repent and believe for themselves. May the generations of Israel’s early history humble us and cause us to lean ever more on Christ’s merciful arms and to impress on our children their need to rest on that same mercy for themselves.
