Joshua 13:10. "[A]nd all the cities of Sihon king of the Amorites, who reigned in Heshbon, as far as the boundary of the Ammonites." This is part of a description of the lands allotted by Moses to the tribes of Israel at God's command. This allotment seems almost inconsequential in its specifics to modern readers, but it is tremendously important for many reasons, some of which I have written about before in The Importance of Borders,  Wait For It, and The Only Unity God Wants Is Unity In Him.

Note that the land and cities described here are part of the kingdom of the Amorites, but God pays that no heed, He tells Moses how to apportion the land before the Israelites even get there. All of the Promised Land was occupied by other nations when God led the Israelites to it, and usually they had to fight to obtain the land. The Israelites were, in fact, invaders - they conquered the Promised Land and took it by force, often leaving no survivors among the former occupants, also at God's command. (See, for example, Deuteronomy 20:16-17, “But in the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded.” There are reasons for this slaughter, one big one being God's judgment on the wickedness of the inhabitants of the cities being conquered. The people of Canaan, for example, had engaged in all sorts of evil for 400 years before God's judgment finally befell them through the conquering Israelites, see Why did God command the genocide of the Canaanites?)

I want to focus, though, on how to interpret the Israelites taking/being given the Promised Land in the context of recent events. Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. In many quarters of the world, some shockingly close to home, the reaction to that attack has been full-throated support for Hamas. Why is this? It is because Israel is seen as an invader or an occupier of the land it inhabits, the same land that was theirs since the time of Joshua, some of which was returned to them after the holocaust to prevent such horror from ever happening again. The ironic thing today's passage points out is that originally Israel was an occupying force, but one ordered by God to take the land they occupy.

The Promised Land was promised only to one people, the Jews, by the person who has the only valid claim to it, God Himself. And God, through them, cleared all other claimants to the land out before settling them there. This, then, was God's perfect will - for the Jews to occupy the land of Israel. And what God says is, no matter what the desires of the secular world are. But over the course of history, in God's permissive will, the Jews have been occupied in their land, as they were at the time of Christ; they have been divided among themselves, as during the divided Kingdom; and have been conquered, dispersed, and exiled from the land, as at the time of the Babylonian exile. They have suffered massively, often stemming from the fact that they are the Chosen People - they are the people who knew God and had a covenant with Him, so they were held to a higher standard. 

The Jews have been a bellwether for the world's relationship with God throughout history. Given that, and the current state of this world built on lies and the blood of innocents, October 7th came as an appalling shock but not really a surprise. It has been obvious for some time that the evil in our world is at a level exceeding that of nations God has punished in the past. Many, if not most, of us have felt for the last several years that something must happen, eventually, to set things back on the right path. Before October 7, that "something" had started to happen, in small and large ways that many are still trying to ignore. It is no surprise, then, that Israel became involved in this horrendous way. That should have woken people up, but instead seems to have emboldened her enemies, so there is clearly more to come! We are supposed to read the signs of our times, not ignore them, and what happens to Israel is always a sign of the times.