Despite God's special relationship with Israel, their disobedience has been a recurring theme in their history. God, as the Husband of Israel, declared in the Old Testament that He was putting them away due to their failure to follow His laws and keep His covenant. This rejection is evident in passages such as II Kings 17, Isaiah 50, Jeremiah 3, Ezekiel 16, and Hosea 2, where He states that He would no longer be their Husband. Even with this disobedience, God has continued to use Israel and Judah to advance His plan, maneuvering them into positions to influence history and fulfill His promises. Their role, though marred by failure, remains significant as God works through them to prepare for the ultimate establishment of His Kingdom.

When God called Israel out of Egypt and formed them into a nation, He knew the inclination of their hearts and that their carnality would ultimately destroy them. He anticipated their disobedience, including language in the Old Covenant that expected them to forsake Him for idols and incur the wrath of the Angel of the Lord, whom they were ordered to obey in all things. Indeed, Israel did exactly as He foresaw, forsaking Him, disobeying the Angel of the Lord, and becoming among the most sinful of nations, even worse than Sodom. God's judgment against Israel was severe due to their special, intimate relationship with Him. They knew, or should have known, God and His expectations, having formally agreed by covenant, ratified with blood, to worship and obey Him exclusively. Despite this, they flagrantly sinned and rebelled, deserving severe punishment in His eyes, though His mercy prevented their utter annihilation. Israel's moral decline was profound; they did not know to do right, despite having received the Ten Commandments and witnessing God's voice at Mount Sinai. Through leaders like Moses, Joshua, the judges, Samuel, David, and many prophets, they were taught what was good, yet they suppressed His instruction and became so saturated with sin that they lost the concept of right and wrong, becoming morally warped. The sins of Israel's women were a sign of their societal collapse, as they urged their husbands to oppress the poor and needy to satisfy selfish desires, symbolized by their craving for wine. Despite their wickedness, Israel remained religious, but they loved the spectacle of religion rather than its truth, corrupting the practices God gave through Moses. They established unauthorized worship sites at Bethel and Gilgal, multiplying transgression, and overdid sacrifices and tithes for show, lacking sincerity and lacing their practices with sin. God warned Israel repeatedly through calamities such as famine, drought, blight, locusts, disease, destruction, war, and earthquakes, designed to signal His displeasure and prompt repentance. Yet, they failed to connect these disasters with their rebellion and sins, remaining spiritually obtuse and hardened against Him. They even forgot or misperceived who God was, necessitating a reminder that He is the Almighty Creator, sovereign over all, not a mere idol, and they were about to encounter Him as an enemy due to their actions. Israel's primary sin was idolatry, equated with sinning against God, as they forsook Him who freed and blessed them for impotent gods and dumb idols, particularly those of the Canaanites. They attempted to hide their idolatry and rebellion, secretly doing things against God, thinking He could not see, revealing their gross misconception of Him as no different from their idols or themselves. They limited Him, underestimating His all-powerful, all-knowing nature, and refused to listen to His prophets, stiffening their necks and rejecting His truth. They actively sought alliances with foreign nations for wealth and safety, rejecting God's promises of blessing and protection. This was seen as spiritual adultery, violating the marriage covenant He considered Himself to have with them as their husband. Israel abandoned all of God's commandments, committing complete apostasy, engaging in idolatry, child sacrifice, witchcraft, and soothsaying, selling themselves to do evil and becoming enslaved to ungodliness, deliberately rebelling against Him in all aspects of life. Among their failures, Israel neglected the Sabbath, a sign setting them apart as God's people. By forsaking it, they drifted further from Him each week, losing knowledge of the true God and eventually their own identity, blending into the world as the lost tribes after exile. This abandonment of the Sabbath facilitated their descent into paganism and severed their intimate connection with Him.

By the time the children of Israel reached the banks of the Jordan River, the older generation whom God had freed from slavery in Egypt had died in the wilderness. Their journey through the wilderness reveals that they never overcame their slave mentality, shaped by their bondage in Egypt, which continually influenced their thinking, attitudes, and conduct. Despite witnessing awesome miracles, enduring plagues that showed God's mercy on them and His punishment of the Egyptians, living under the cloud, and having their daily needs supplied directly by God, they viewed the wilderness as a vast cemetery where they wandered for forty years. They fell short of the Promised Land, representing the Kingdom of God, because their carnal minds, hardened by worldly self-concern, dominated their choices, leading to their demise. The apostle Paul notes in Hebrews 3:17 that God was angry with them for forty years, as their corpses fell in the wilderness, scattered and unburied. These were the same people who left Egypt with joy, yearning for a settled life in their own land, yet they sentenced themselves to a homeless existence in a barren land due to their sins, living poor and hungry, discontented, and often at war. Hebrews 3:19 identifies the root of their failure as unbelief, which prevented them from entering the Promised Land. Despite numerous demonstrations of God's presence and power, the Word delivered through Moses and Aaron, and living examples of faith in men like Joshua and Caleb, they persistently sinned and rebelled, almost driving God to exasperation. Their lack of trust was evident when God required a higher level of obedience to follow His cloud across the wilderness and depend on Him for their needs. They did not have it within them to live or walk by faith, and their loyalty dissolved into rebellion. Though they physically followed the cloud toward the Promised Land, their manner of life corresponded to living in darkness, and they never reached Canaan. They conducted their lives as if God did not exist, with little regard for His words or the consequences to themselves or their posterity, moving in the direction their carnal impulses drove them, ultimately losing the vision of entering the promised homeland.