THE COMPLETE WORKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
(Continued)
...that God wiped out most of his creation and all people except for Noah’s family. From Noah’s descendants came Abraham. God covenanted to make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation, through which all nations would be blessed. Several generations later, Abraham’s descendants entered Egypt, where they did become great in number but also became slaves to the Egyptians. After a few centuries, God miraculously delivered them—now known as the Israelites—from Egypt and led them, through Moses, into the wilderness, where they spent 40 years learning who God was and how to be in relationship with him. After 40 years, God gave them a vast territory, where they settled and became so comfortable that they began to ignore God. This began the cycle of the judges, wherein they vacillated between crying out to God during times of trouble and forgetting about God during times of peace and prosperity. Finally, they called for a king. They had only three kings before the kingdom fell apart. The remaining kings brought little more than bloodshed, hardship, and idolatry. Meanwhile, prophets reminded the people how far they had wandered from God, but the people continued on their path until the nation dissolved into exile. A remnant returned, but its efforts to rebuild the nation and the temple were so paltry that some of them wept to think how far they had fallen.