the iniquity of the Americans

The Word for today:
Judges 20

The Judges delivered the Israelites from their enemies and decided disputes, but behind them stood the ultimate Judge:

Let the Lord, the Judge, decide the dispute this day. (Judges 11:27)

Everything -- the good, the bad, the ugly -- must pass before Him in review. He waves it on, lets it continue on for another day, or He does not.

But sometimes it can seem like nobody’s minding the store anymore. That is because the Judge is patient and methodical; his judgment is never in haste or in the heat of the moment:

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
(2 Peter 3:9-10)

Thus it can seem, in the span of a single human lifetime, that the Judge has vacated the bench. Nothing could be further from the truth. Listen as the Judge explains his timetable concerning the Amorites (the people in possession of Canaan at the time) to Abraham:

“Know of a surety that your descendants shall be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years;
And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great possessions.
And you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age.
But in the fourth generation they shall come here again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete." (Genesis 15:13-16)

What God is telling Abraham is that he will judge both the Amorites (possessors of the Promised Land) and Egypt, but not in Abraham’s time. Abraham will “go to his fathers and be buried” before God will move against these lands in judgment.

400 years later, the iniquity of the Amorites was full. Have you ever met an Amorite? Ever met anybody from Sodom? The Roman Empire? The Third Reich? He put His chosen, the children of Israel, out of the land 3 times--enslavement in Egypt, exile to Babylon, then world-wide dispersal after not one stone was left upon another in 70 AD. And He judged His own Son, when He became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Just so, when the iniquity of the Americans is full, no longer will His sword be stayed.

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