“ I also will not henceforth drive out from before them any of the nations which Joshua left when he died.”
His patience was now finished. He would deliver them from outside nations, but the nations in the land were now to be their snares, and traps, and thorns and headaches. He would no longer help them to drive them out. Rather He would leave them there to test them out. There had been a limit to what Joshua could do, an understandable limit of time and manpower. But by now the work should have been near completion, were it not for the continued and deliberate disobedience of His people. So they must suffer for their disobedience.