Judges 1:28 And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I do what I call “frontloading my problems.” That is to say, there are some problems we are going to have one way or the other. We know we are going to have to face them, so sometimes I go ahead and get them over with. I take care of them and address them first, then I know I will be free to not worry about them later.
Let me give you a simple, silly example. At the Ranch when I pull my truck into my driveway, I back it in. The reason I do that is because I know I am going to either have to back into my driveway or back out of my driveway. When I back into my driveway, I know how much time I am going to have. I’m not in a hurry. There is no telling when I may need my truck next. It may be that I’ll be in a hurry, be worried, or be preoccupied. So, I would rather back my truck in while I have the time and the mind than to back it out when I don’t have a choice about the circumstances in which I find myself. There are a lot of things like that, things you are going to have to do so you might as well do them, get them done, and not have them hanging over your head in the future.
In Judges 1, you have the children of Israel going into Canaan. God had promised them the land for centuries. God had provided them the land, and God went before them. In fact, a couple of times in Judges 1 the Bible tells us that God was with them and went before them. For instance, verse 22 says, “The LORD was with them.” Judges 1:28 summarizes the entire chapter when it says, “And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out.” Then, it goes tribe by tribe and describes what portion the tribes did not possess.
Now, that may have been a small thing at the time, but it came to characterize the entire history of the nation. Israel was conquered numbers of times. They had numbers of battles and problems they would not have if they had simply obeyed God and wholly followed the LORD God of Israel as Caleb did. The Bible tells us that even as an old man Caleb drove out the Canaanites.
The issues that you ignore will grow to vex your children. There are things that none of us finds pleasant. There are questions that none of us wants to grapple with, but there are things that must be confronted and decided. The sooner we decide those, the sooner we know what God has said and the sooner we have the courage to go ahead. The sooner we address those things in the grace and wisdom of God, the happier and fuller life will be because the issues we ignore will grow to vex our children.