There is a method of discipline for children referred to as natural consequences. Very simply, it means that a child chooses the path that they are on and the adult takes very few, if any, steps to intervene to prevent the consequences that the child will experience. An example could be that a child is told that the stove is on and is hot and the child shouldn’t go to touch it. However, the adult sees that the child is going to go and touch the stove and simply allows them to do it. The adult knows that the child will be burned, but that is the natural consequence of their action. The child experiences the consequence and the adult, knowing that the child is willful and must touch the stove, allows them to do so, thus allowing them to be burned and experience the consequence of not heeding the warning that they were given and taking the action that they were told not to do anyway.
That is essentially the scene that we see between God and the Israelites in Judges 10. The Israelites had been serving the Baals and the Ashtoreths, the foreign false, demonic gods of the peoples around them. They had chosen to serve those gods instead of the one, true God who had saved them and who had promised to be with them.
As the people began to come under attack by those same people, whose other gods the Israelites were serving, they suddenly began to call out to the Lord. They suddenly began to realize the consequences of their sin and asked God to save them, but God tells them that they will receive the natural consequences of their actions:
The Ammonites also crossed the Jordan to fight against Judah, Benjamin and Ephraim; Israel was in great distress. Then the Israelites cried out to the LORD, “We have sinned against you, forsaking our God and serving the Baals.”
The LORD replied, “When the Egyptians, the Amorites, the Ammonites, the Philistines, the Sidonians, the Amalekites and the Maonites oppressed you and you cried to me for help, did I not save you from their hands? But you have forsaken me and served other gods, so I will no longer save you. Go and cry out to the gods you have chosen. Let them save you when you are in trouble! ”
Judges 10:9-14
So frequently we look to God to save us from the position that we find ourselves in. We, in fact, have been the ones to put ourselves in that position. We have done it to our ownselves. We have chosen our own way and now we blame God, either because he has decided to allow us to experience the consequences of our sin, or even because of the situation itself. But the truth is that we need to obey God’s commandments in the first place so that we do not land in the situation that we find ourselves in, and in that way, we won’t need to experience the consequences of our own actions. Let us instead love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and obey him, and in this way we will find the path that God had intended for us from the beginning. Doing this, we will experience the natural consequences of our obedience, not our rebellion and disobedience.