Now the judgement comes. The people had not followed the Lord's plans properly, in particular they had not broken down the altars to false gods in the land. Every nation is full of false idols, every culture, including our own, is full of false idols. They may not be called "gods", but anything that claims our trust is an idol, anything that claims our allegiance that rightly belongs to God is an idol, and we must get rid of all idols in our lives. The angel of the Lord announced this to all the people, and the people wept, and offered sacrifices.
From verse 6 onwards we resume the narrative the end of Joshua. The first chapter was explaining the reasons for the judgement at the start of chapter 2. Things really started to go wrong when the generation rose up that had not witnessed the things that Joshua's generation, and the immediately succeeding one, had seen. We need to note that the root of the fault lay with the generation immediately after Joshua. The key lesson to learn from this is that we must see through to fulfilment all that God calls us to do, we must not be satisfied with any half measures. That is the way to prepare the ground for the next generation.
However, this had not happened, and the generation turned to idols, so the Lord gave them over to their enemies, and defeat came upon them.
Verse 16-19 describe the pattern which followed, with judges being raised up to save the nation, but the people refusing to learn from them. So defeat quickly caught up with them again. So the blessing of the Lord was removed from the people. Note, however, that He did not stop loving them. Instead the other nations were used to test the nation. Our actions do not affect how much God loves us, but they do affect the way in which that love can be shown to us.
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