The Great Forgetting: When a Generation Drops the Baton Text: Judges 2:6-10
Introduction: The Covenant is a River
We live in an age that thinks history began yesterday morning. We are afflicted with a kind of chronological snobbery that dismisses the past as irrelevant and quaint, and as a result, we are constantly surprised by the consequences of our own foolishness. We think we can invent ourselves from scratch every generation, as though we were the first people to ever feel, or think, or sin, or die. But the Bible teaches us that history is not a series of disconnected snapshots. History is a river. It is a covenantal reality that flows from one generation to the next. What one generation does in the river upstream has profound and unavoidable consequences for those downstream.
The book of Judges is a stark and bloody illustration of this principle. It is a book of cycles, a book of ups and downs, a book of astonishing heroism and appalling apostasy. And right here, in this brief and tragic little paragraph, we find the headwaters of all that subsequent chaos. This passage serves as the hinge between the glorious victories under Joshua and the repeating spiral of sin, oppression, crying out, and deliverance that defines the rest of the book. This is the moment the baton was dropped. This is the moment a generation forgot.
We must not read this as some dusty record of ancient failures. This is a perpetual warning to the people of God in every age. Faithfulness is never more than one generation away from extinction. The covenant promises of God are sure, but they are not automatic. They flow through the channels of faithful instruction, diligent remembrance, and courageous obedience. When those channels become clogged with apathy, compromise, and forgetfulness, the river of blessing dries up, and the people are left in a parched and hostile land, wondering why God has abandoned them, when in fact, they are the ones who have forgotten Him.
This passage is a post-mortem on a successful generation and a diagnosis of the fatal disease that infected the next. It shows us how quickly a nation can go from serving Yahweh to not even knowing His name. And it forces us to ask the hard question: Are we telling our children what God has done? Or are we raising a generation that will not know Yahweh?
The Text
Then Joshua sent the people away, and the sons of Israel went each to his inheritance to possess the land.
And the people served Yahweh all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who survived Joshua, who saw all the great work of Yahweh which He had done for Israel.
Then Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Yahweh, died at the age of 110.
And they buried him in the territory of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.
And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation after them who did not know Yahweh or even the work which He had done for Israel.
(Judges 2:6-10 LSB)
Possession and Service (v. 6-7)
The passage begins by summarizing the end of the Joshua era. It is a time of obedient action and faithful service.
"Then Joshua sent the people away, and the sons of Israel went each to his inheritance to possess the land. And the people served Yahweh all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who survived Joshua, who saw all the great work of Yahweh which He had done for Israel." (Judges 2:6-7)
Notice the two key verbs here: possess and served. First, they went to possess the land. This was an act of faith. God had given them the land, but they still had to go in and take it. They had to fight. They had to drive out the remaining Canaanites. Faith is not passive; it is an active, obedient trust that puts feet to God's promises. They were not sitting around waiting for the title deed to fall from heaven; they were acting on the title deed God had already given them.
Second, and as a result of this active faith, "the people served Yahweh." This was a golden age. The faithfulness of the people was directly tied to the memory of their leaders. They served God as long as Joshua was alive, and as long as the elders who had been with Joshua were alive. Why? Because these men were living memorials. They were walking, talking history books. They "saw all the great work of Yahweh." They had seen the walls of Jericho fall. They had seen the sun stand still. They had seen God fight for Israel.
Their faith was not based on abstract principles or second-hand stories. It was experiential. It was visceral. When one of these old men stood up to speak, his words carried the weight of a man who had seen God part the Jordan with his own eyes. This is the power of testimony. Personal, eyewitness testimony is a powerful anchor for faith. The problem, as we are about to see, is what happens when that living testimony is no longer present.
The Passing of the Guard (v. 8-10a)
Verses 8 and 9 record the end of an era with the death of the great leader, Joshua.
"Then Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Yahweh, died at the age of 110. And they buried him in the territory of his inheritance... And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers..." (Judges 2:8-10a LSB)
Joshua is given the highest possible honorific: "the servant of Yahweh." He finished his course. He was faithful to the end. He dies at 110, the same age as Joseph, another great leader who brought Israel through a tumultuous time. His burial is noted, a sign of respect and the final closing of a chapter. Then, the text broadens: "And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers." This refers to that entire generation of elders and warriors who had seen God's mighty works.
The phrase "gathered to their fathers" is a peaceful, covenantal term for death. It implies continuity. They were joining their believing ancestors. But the peace of this phrase is shattered by what comes next. A great transition is taking place. The living repositories of God's mighty acts are being removed from the scene. The anchor is being pulled up. The question that hangs in the air is whether the next generation has been tied to the anchor of God's Word, or just to the personalities of the old men.
This is a sober warning for the church. We can have dynamic, godly, faithful leaders. We can have a generation that sees God do great things. But if that faithfulness is dependent on the charisma or the presence of those leaders, and not on a deep, personal, and taught knowledge of God and His Word, then the church is one funeral away from apostasy.
The Amnesiac Generation (v. 10b)
This is the verse that provides the key to the entire book of Judges. It is one of the most tragic statements in all of Scripture.
"...and there arose another generation after them who did not know Yahweh or even the work which He had done for Israel." (Judges 2:10b LSB)
Let the weight of this sink in. How is this possible? How can the children of the men who conquered Canaan not know the God who gave it to them? The text gives us two reasons, which are really two sides of the same coin. They did not know Yahweh, and they did not know His work. This was not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of instruction. This was a failure of catechism. This was a catastrophic failure of fathers to obey the central command of the covenant.
In Deuteronomy 6, Moses had laid out the blueprint for generational faithfulness. "And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise" (Deut. 6:6-7). The stories of God's mighty acts, the crossing of the Red Sea, the provision of manna, the conquest of the land, were to be the constant curriculum in every Israelite home. The fathers were commanded to be the history teachers, the theologians, the pastors of their own families.
But somewhere between possessing the land and settling down in it, they stopped talking. They got comfortable. They assumed that the faith would just transmit by osmosis. They enjoyed the peace and prosperity that God had given them, and they forgot to tell their children how they got it. They gave their children the inheritance of the land, but they failed to give them the inheritance of the story. And a people who forget their story will inevitably forget their God.
To "know" Yahweh in the Bible is not simply to have intellectual data about Him. It is to have a personal, covenantal relationship with Him. This new generation was functionally atheist. They may have gone through some of the religious motions, but they had no relationship with the living God. And because they did not know Him, they did not know His works. His mighty acts were just old stories, if they were told at all. They had no power, no relevance. The result was a vacuum, and as we see in the very next verses, that vacuum was quickly filled with the idols of the Canaanites they had failed to drive out.
Conclusion: The Duty to Remember and Recount
The lesson for us is painfully clear. We are always, in every age, just one generation away from this same disaster. The health of the church, the health of our families, the health of our nation, depends entirely on our commitment to this task of remembering and recounting.
Fathers, God has given you the primary responsibility for this. It is not the pastor's job first, nor the Sunday School teacher's. It is yours. Do your children know the great work of Yahweh? Not just the stories of Israel, but the ultimate work of God in the person of Jesus Christ? Do they know the story of the cross? Do they know the story of the empty tomb? Do they know that this is not just a story, but it is their story? Do you talk of these things when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way?
We cannot simply live off the spiritual capital of a previous generation. We cannot coast on the fumes of our fathers' faith. Each generation must be conquered for Christ anew. And that conquest happens through the faithful proclamation of the gospel, starting in our own homes. It happens when we take the mighty works of God, memorialize them, sing about them, teach them, and build our lives upon them.
The generation of Joshua saw God's work and they served Him. The next generation did not know His work, and so they served idols, which led to their ruin. The pattern is set. If we do not want our children to fall into the same cycle of sin and misery, then we must be a people of the story. We must know Yahweh, and we must make His mighty works known to the generation to come, so that they too might put their trust in God and not forget His works, but keep His commandments (Psalm 78:7).