Encamped just across the Jordan River from Jericho, the Israelites received their final instructions before moving into the Promised Land. Like a father sending his child off into the world, God wanted to place a little focus on an very important issue, that he thought the Israelites might think wasn't so important.
“When you cross the Jordan River into the land of Canaan, you must drive out all the people living there. You must destroy all their carved and molten images and demolish all their pagan shrines. Take possession of the land and settle in it, because I have given it to you to occupy. [...] But if you fail to drive out the people who live in the land, those who remain will be like splinters in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will harass you in the land where you live. And I will do to you what I had planned to do to them.”Those were pretty explicit instructions, but in their first battle at Jericho, one of the Israelite warriors decided to keep an idol he found... and then the Israelites were tricked into a peace treaty with some of the inhabitants... and God's instructions were not followed, but the consequences he foretold were. What is it about humans that make them feel they can play with fire and not get burned? How many go astray because they kept a "harmless" habit, that later destroyed them? How ironic that the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" placed us in a condition wherein we cannot recognize the difference between good and evil!
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