The land east of Jordan

There were 12 tribes of Israel, each inheriting a territory assigned by Joshua who

followed the commands of God (Encyclopeaedia Britannica, n.d.)

The tribe of Gad was made up of fierce warriors who fought and won many battles to receive God’s fulfilled promise of Canaan. But just shy of completing God’s will for them, they asked Him to change it and allow them to occupy Gad instead (Numbers 32:5). God allowed it. But there came a time when Gad was overthrown by the Assyrians and the people of Gad  – those Israelite warriors’ descendants – were taken as prisoners of war and dispersed all over. The Tribe of Gad was no more (2 Kings 17). The Israelites of Canaan continued. 

I feel like I don’t know God’s will for me. Not anymore.* I thought He willed for me to be Jason’s wife, but that has been taken. My heart continues to want that, though, and I’ve begged for God to swap His will for mine. He did this for the Gadites. And I'd never before seen much of my own self in The Tribe of Gad until I so desperately wanted God to abandon whatever plan He'd made with my life in order to relieve me of the reality that His plan wasn't what I'd thought it would be.

So, Lord, do for me what you did for the Gadites, please, and see that I've shown up for battle time and time again, and now I want this other idea I've come up with rather than Your Promised Land.

But the Gadites did eventually live with devastating consequences – more accurately, their children lived with those consequences. So, there is that. I have no idea how to begin to understand why this is God’s will for me. Or maybe He indulged a past will of mine, and losing Jason was the consequence. There's a really unhelpful, unfounded possibility to nevertheless run with.

I have mistakenly concluded many times over that, if a thing led to suffering or difficulty, then clearly I must have veered off of God's guided path at some point. Why do we believe that following God's will for us will protect us from misery? God's will for His son was to be tortured, shamed, humiliated, mocked, abandoned - crucified - on the cross. Unlike the Gadites, though, Jesus didn't ask His father to change His mind. He did ask Him to consider some other way - "And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me;" (Matthew 26:39).

When I imagine Jesus falling on the ground pleading for some alternative other than the suffering that was to come...I don't even know. It's a feeling I haven't explored in myself. I just imagine how it looked there in the garden. More importantly, how He felt. It's unfathomable. Yet, in that moment, He didn't end His desperation with a period, because there was a continuing and connected sentiment to come, "not as I will, but as you will.”

What is my suffering compared to what Jesus went through? Who am I to say that something must be wrong if I'm experiencing pain?

Pastor Kenny Thacker for SoundWord Ministries.

I said I'd never really seen myself as much of a Gadite...until I did. And it's not just in my fervent begging that God would see how good my ideas are and use some of them. Much like the Gadites, I have made choices to stay where I was comfortable. I knew there was a large part of me that stayed to position myself closer to my own will for myself. Along the way, I disregarded messages that I was doing the wrong thing. I was following my will and not His. The most notable message was that God was protecting me from a heart and mind I didn’t know. That would have been directly referencing the true motives and mindset of a person I was hellbent on aligning myself with and probably shouldn't have been. 

I think God finally indulged my will. And now, I am living with the consequences of that. I ignored every sign I needed to know better than to involve my heart and hope. And now, they are both injured. And that was finally my push to leave Gad and pursue Canaan. It's hard to desire God’s will right now. It just is. I want my life back. I want to not be so unbearably broken.

I want relief from my suffering by having the reasons I suffer removed.

Even when I think about it, I get so angry and hopeless. I’m obliterated. I’m no longer whole. 

God told Joshua to be strong and of good courage (Joshua 1:9). And then He used the people around Joshua to reinforce and remind him of that over and over. I live my life afraid of God and His will. I’m afraid of how He’ll accomplish it. I’m afraid of what suffering – what kind of fresh hell – stands between me and Canaan. Even then, What awaits me on the other side of the rubble and wreckage that used to be its walls? I’m scared of it all. My fear is as much my suffering as my circumstances are. I wonder if Joshua was the same way.

  There's more to the story behind why Gad is a lost tribe, and I can't not elaborate on that a little bit. For clarity, I'm no theologian or Bible scholar. Not by a long shot. These are just some thoughts that I'm sharing that were initiated by a really good church service and led to me doing some superficial studying about the people of Gad.

The Gadites weren't simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Assyrians came along. When the people of Gad approached Moses with their request to stay there, it was because they had amassed large numbers of livestock, and the land there was great for keeping these herds (Numbers 32). Moses was angry with them, and he reminded them that God's anger had been invoked once before when their fathers, upon seeing the land they had been commanded to overtake through battle, had discouraged everyone from complying. They refused to fight, and as a result, the Israelites spent 40 years - YEARS - wandering the desert.

Moses's reasoning - and rightly so - was that others would see the people of Gad staying behind, and they would be disheartened from marching into Canaan for this one final battle where they would, at last, inherit the Promised Land. "Oh, for sure," they argued. "We're not proposing that. We're just saying we can build our cities, build our walls here, leave our wives and little ones to go fight, and then come back here. Ask God can we do that."

And, as we know, God said okay. But they had to honor their word to fight, and they had to continue to honor the customs of Israel. Most people are familiar with the Battle of Jericho. What a miracle, right? God used the faith and obedience of the Israelites to crumble these unbelievably impenetrable walls with just the blowing of horns. And the Gadites did return, they did obey God's Word, and they did continue on worshipping Him.

Unfortunately, their children did not. Those little ones who stayed behind in Gad didn't see that miracle of the crumbling of the walls take place. They never touched their feet into that land of milk and honey God had promised. And soon, they adopted the customs of the people who had been there in Gad first (2 Kings 17).

Those customs involved idolatry and child sacrifices. Where the fathers declined God's will, their children declined God's promises. It was never God's will for them to be conquered by the Assyrians, exiled, and forever lost. But their own will was a tradeoff that involved the consequences that, as far as they knew, was inheriting a really good place to raise cattle.

If you would like to add your thoughts on God allowing the people of Gad to inherit the land east of Jordan, please share them in the comments below!

*Which is a lie, because His will for me is that I would trust Him and receive His provisions, which include peace, joy, contentment, perseverance, and all things good.

All images were created by describing the image I wanted and using AI technology to generate them.