Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, church.
[00:00:04] Hey.
[00:00:05] If I have not met you before, my name is Tom Nelson.
[00:00:10] Our family has been at this church for almost five years. It'll be five years on Easter.
[00:00:17] I've had a chance to be up here before. I really enjoy being up here. I'm excited to bring the word to you today.
[00:00:24] Big thanks to Duba, the pastors and the elders for your confidence in me.
[00:00:30] It's a joy. It's a gift.
[00:00:33] Okay, you guys, we've been in this series exploring the Old Testament and discovering the Savior. I really like that we're doing this because I think for a lot of us, and this was certainly true of me as a younger believer, the Old Testament was weird.
[00:00:51] It felt so foreign to my lived, present experience.
[00:00:54] And I think that maybe is true for a lot of us. Maybe we know a lot about little sections, but when we string it all together, it kind of just feels like there's lots of kind of gray areas in between some of those stories. Maybe we grew up in Sunday school with flannel graph and understanding really well.
[00:01:10] I work with college students. I'm with a Christian organization called the Navigators, and I serve at UC Davis.
[00:01:17] About 10 years ago, I was leading a retreat with our students in Lake Tahoe and I led a workshop titled the One Gospel in the Old and New Testaments. And I had about 30 or 40 students in my workshop. And when they arrived, I gave them an index card with the name of an Old Testament character.
[00:01:35] Okay? And there were again, 30 or 40 of these. And I said, hey, here's what I want you guys to do.
[00:01:41] I want you guys to line up with your character in order of where you show up in the Old Testament, okay?
[00:01:50] And so, you know, the one guy with Adam was like, I think I know where I go, you know?
[00:01:55] And of course, it wasn't too hard where, you know, there's Abraham and Moses, David, the biggies.
[00:02:01] But then you started to get maybe like those second tier, the lesser known characters still names that we know, you know? And so the guy with Micah is kind of like, oh, Sheesh, or Hezekiah or Nebuchadnezzar or Daniel or Jephthah.
[00:02:17] And I did this to start showing we have a very sort of episodic understanding of the Old Testament. I think even for a lot of us, if someone asked us, hey, can you just walk us through the narrative From Genesis 39 Books to Malachi, I think a lot of us would probably struggle with that.
[00:02:36] So I like that we're doing this in our church.
[00:02:42] Today, we're not doing anything fancy. We're just going to move through the text, make some observations, and by God's grace, something that he will provide for us will help give shape to our hearts, our lives, this community.
[00:02:55] And so, before we go any further, we're going to pray.
[00:02:59] Father, thank you.
[00:03:02] Thanks for Jesus.
[00:03:05] Apart from him, we have nothing to boast about.
[00:03:11] So as I speak and as you teach, I pray that your word would encourage us, sharpen us, maybe even pierce us, that we might be more fully available and open to all that you have for us.
[00:03:30] And at the end of all of this, you would receive the glory. Christ would be magnified.
[00:03:35] And we do pray this in his name.
[00:03:39] Amen.
[00:03:40] Okay, Something that's helpful to keep in mind, again, as we are all learning to be students of the Scriptures, is that when we're reading the Old Testament, we're really reading two stories, okay?
[00:03:53] One of the stories is the story of the visible realm.
[00:03:58] And in that story, we have dates and locations and peoples and activity. It's all the things that happen above the waterline, okay? The thing that we have easy access to, and a lot of times what we read in the Old Testament kind of shocks us, causes us to pause or scratch our head.
[00:04:17] It's not clean.
[00:04:20] It's not pretty.
[00:04:25] In fact, you don't even need to get through Genesis.
[00:04:29] And you've already encountered stories of betrayal, deceit, forced servitude. And it gets worse and worse.
[00:04:38] Fratricide, patricide, genocide, rape, incest. And you're thinking, what is going on, God? Have you totally lost control?
[00:04:49] But again, that's the story of the surface.
[00:04:53] The other story is the story of God's faithfulness, that subterranean groundswell of God causing all things to work together for his glory.
[00:05:05] That below all that, we see and are shocked and appalled at God consistently, not because of our activity, but almost in spite of it, continues to work to bring about the fulfillment of the promise given to Abraham in the beginning of Genesis 12 that he is going through the seed of Abraham to bless all nations.
[00:05:27] And we see along the way certain signposts that remind us that that story is still taking place. Despite all that happens sort of above the waterline.
[00:05:37] We see it at the end of Genesis with Joseph saying, hey, the things that you sought to do to me for evil, God intended for good.
[00:05:43] We see signposts along the way where God says he is still committed to his promises again, despite all the activity on the surface.
[00:05:51] And we really do see those two storylines converge at the cross.
[00:05:57] Someone could look at the cross where Jesus was crucified, and all they could see is death, desolation, annihilation.
[00:06:07] There is nothing redemptive.
[00:06:10] But if we have been trained to understand the other story, we can look at the cross, acknowledge how terrible it is.
[00:06:21] But what we can see is life and hope and shalom and the healing of the nations. A sacrifice sufficient for the salvation of all who might believe in him.
[00:06:37] And there are few books where I think holding these two storylines in tension is more necessary than the Book of Judges. And that's where we are today. We are looking at the Book of Judges.
[00:06:49] You can read these 21 chapters of Judges, and if even a little bit of what's actually unfolding on the pages in front of you can get in, You'll blush, you'll recoil, you'll weep, you'll get to the end of it and you think, what the heck is going on?
[00:07:16] Who am I supposed to be cheering for here?
[00:07:20] You'll need to take a bath. You'll want to hug someone you love. It is not a clean book. It is not a sanitary book, which is why we think that there's two stories in play.
[00:07:31] In fact, you only needed to go six verses into chapter one, and you see a Canaanite king getting his thumbs and his big toes cut off.
[00:07:40] In your bulletin, I have a short little statement here. Judges is a cautionary history depicting cycles of human sin and God's intervening redemption, unveiling the awful and destructive trajectory of mankind's ungoverned desires.
[00:07:59] The book serves as a transitional text unveiling the Israelites. And this is important, our own need for a king. Okay, so we have the Book of Judges.
[00:08:12] And I think when I was a new believer and I heard there was a book called Judges, my mind immediately went to the courtroom, legal proceedings, and I thought, that's weird. Why do they have this? May, maybe for you, the picture of, like, someone wearing a ceremonial white curly wig, a barrister, or a judge in Britain. Don't think that, okay? Get that out of your head.
[00:08:35] When the Bible talks about Judges, they're talking about a man or woman who was uniquely called in the Old Testament and empowered by God's spirit to strengthen and lead the people of Israel, often in battle, as a judgment against other nations, both from without and within the borders of Israel.
[00:09:02] Now, for those of us who have been around, you understand that this past week we picked up the story in Joshua and Duba, talked about how Joshua, after Moses death, he was the one that was raised up to lead the Israelites into Canaan, into the promised land, where they were commissioned and commanded to go and basically take over, to completely wipe out the different nations and peoples there and to occupy this land flowing with milk and honey that God had designated for the different sons of Jacob, the different houses that descended from the sons of Jacob.
[00:09:36] And at the end of the text, Joshua reminds them of who they are as a people and what they are to do to obey the Lord. And this is the response. The very end of Joshua 24, we'll look at 16.
[00:09:47] The people answered and said, far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods.
[00:09:53] They said, we're not going to do it. We are going to serve God.
[00:09:57] Verse 24. The people said to Joshua, we will serve the Lord our God, and we will obey his voice.
[00:10:06] Okay, it seems, it seems like things are trending in a really positive direction for the Israelites. Okay, they're in the land. They've said, we're going to do it.
[00:10:17] We're going to obey God. We're not going to forsake other gods. Things seem to be going really, really well. What could go wrong?
[00:10:26] We'll see.
[00:10:27] Before we answer that question, we're going to talk about the basics. You guys have this in your message notes the author. When we come to the book of Judges, who wrote it? Well, a traditional option is someone say Samuel wrote it.
[00:10:39] Samuel was the last judge we'd read in a couple weeks in 1st Samuel. There's also a lot of internal evidence that the author of this book comes from the period of King David's reign a little bit later in history.
[00:10:54] That's fine. The timeline Judges takes a long time.
[00:10:59] You can read it pretty quickly and there's a lot of action. And so it's an easy read. It's not a beautiful read, but it's a quick read.
[00:11:06] Realistically, Judges probably was 300 to 350 years long.
[00:11:12] It occupies a long, long chunk of time. For our purposes, we'll say 330, 1380 BC right after the death of Joshua to about 1050 BC.
[00:11:25] And if you're reading it, you can miss along the way, there's some little verbal signposts that if you gloss over it and you're just getting to the action, you'll miss statements where something might say so and so died and then the land had rest for 40 years. And then they launch into the Next Vivid story.
[00:11:44] 40 years in one verse.
[00:11:47] It goes fast location all over Israel.
[00:11:52] And there's a reason, I think, for this on the screen, you'll see a map of inhabited Israel with the different tribes.
[00:12:01] Now, the activity of judges is not consigned to any one area or any one locale, okay? It talks about the threats in the north from the Sidonians. It talks about threats from Moab in the east. It talks about threats from Ammon in the northeast, from Midian in the far south, from the Philistines in the southwest.
[00:12:21] In fact, of the 12 listed judges in the book, eight come from different tribes descended from the sons of Jacob.
[00:12:28] And again, I think the authors are doing this to show that the awful events that unfold in this book are universal.
[00:12:37] They didn't disproportionately affect one tribe. It wasn't that there was one tribe that was worse than the other. It was all over the place. And I think this is very intentional.
[00:12:51] At this point in history, even though we say the word Israelites, this is important to note.
[00:12:56] They were not, on the whole, very united, okay? And this probably started back all the way in Exodus. You guys might remember this. I think Duba had a graphic on the screen. But one of the prescriptions of the law that God handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai is after they build this tabernacle, this mobile tent that would be with them for 40 years. When they sat down and plopped down, set up camp, the different tribes, the different houses from the sons of Jacob would actually have prescribed places where they were to, as a house, camp around the tent. The north, the south, east of west, okay?
[00:13:31] Three tribes in each area. So there already was a little bit of division. Now you take that, and now they have a whole area apportioned to them.
[00:13:40] And so while any one of these people would say, like, yeah, I'm an Israelite, which is to say, I'm descended from Abraham by way of Jacob, more practically, more functionally, they didn't identify as Israelites as much as they would identify as a Gadite or a Reubenite or I'm from Judah, or I'm from Manasseh, or I'm from Ephraim, okay?
[00:14:03] And so the picture that we have at this point in history is they are not united.
[00:14:08] At best, they're just kind of a loose confederacy of states.
[00:14:14] And this plays into the story.
[00:14:17] Now, major themes for this sermon, we're really taking kind of a 30,000 foot view, because to understand the Book of Judges, it's almost easier to look at it as a whole. We will get into the text, but there are some themes within the text that are going to really Help us understand what this book is about. So we're zoomed in, zoomed out. We will zoom in a little bit. But the major themes, the first one again in your message notes, cultural assimilation.
[00:14:43] This was the number one problem.
[00:14:46] Judges.
[00:14:48] And by that I mean the Israelites adoption and integration of practices of the nations surrounding them and that still occupied their borders.
[00:15:00] Remember what Joshua told the Israelites before he died and before the Book of Judges. He says, if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, intermarry with them so that you associate with them. And they with you know with certainty that the Lord your God will not continue to drive these nations out before you.
[00:15:26] But they will be a snare and a trap to you and a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes until you perish from off this good land which the Lord your God has given you. Okay? That's the warning. This is what's going to happen for certainty if you don't drive them out. Did they drive them out?
[00:15:44] Not completely.
[00:15:46] No way.
[00:15:47] In fact, you can read the latter half of Judges, chapter one, and there's just a list of the tribes and basically saying, yeah, Ephraim, did they drive them out? They didn't. Naphtali? Nope. Dan. No.
[00:15:58] Nations still existed within their borders.
[00:16:01] And what naturally followed was, was a major cultural assimilation, integration, adoption of the practices of the Canaanites that were still there, both intermarrying with the peoples as well as bringing in a lot of their religious practices. And so the second major theme followed from that, which is we see in the text a growing demand for a king.
[00:16:30] In the Old Testament, God said, I am your king. I will be your leader.
[00:16:35] But the Israelites started to look around and say, well, hey, they have a king. They have a leader that's going to lead them out to battle. There's a Judge that's going to pass judgments on them.
[00:16:44] And we see this actually in the very opening lines of the Book of Judges. There's actually very strong structural similarities which I think are intentional between the opening lines of Joshua and the opening line of Judges. Look what it says in the very beginning of Joshua.
[00:16:59] Now, it came about after the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, that the Lord spoke to Joshua, the son of Nun. Nun. I don't know. Moses. Servant saying, moses, my servant is dead. Now, therefore arise. Cross this Jordan and all this people to the land which I'm going to give them to the sons of Israel. Fast forward. Look at the opening lines of Judges. Now, it came about after the death of Joshua that the sons of Israel inquired. They asked of the Lord, saying, who's going to go up against the Canaanites to fight against them?
[00:17:35] The Lord said, judah shall go up. Behold, I have given the land into his hand.
[00:17:40] The opening lines of the Book of Judges are intentionally crafted to frame the text in light of the question, who will lead us?
[00:17:49] Who will be the person that takes us into battle, the person that we can point to to be our leader?
[00:17:57] Now you might say, well, look, it says Judah. Judah. The person died about 450 years earlier.
[00:18:03] They're talking about the house of Judah. Again, this is one of those internal evidences to suggest that this was written in the time of David, who was from Judah, to show that the kingship is supposed to come through Judah. Okay, again, the growing demand for a king is. Is one of the direct fruits of this cultural assimilation. The first theme, they looked around and we're going to peek ahead. I don't know in this series if I'm allowed to do this, but I'm going to dip my toe into First Samuel, because I think it helps show kind of the inevitable result of their thinking in first Samuel 8, 4, 5, and then 19 and 20. This is when they demand a king like the nations around them.
[00:18:48] Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and they said to him, behold, you have grown old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations.
[00:19:05] Fast forward, verse 19.
[00:19:07] Nevertheless, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel, and they said, no, but there shall be a king over us, that we may also be like all the nations, that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.
[00:19:23] Okay, major themes of the Book of Judges, cultural assimilation, which leads to number two, a growing discontentment and a demand for a human singular king.
[00:19:35] As we've been going through this series, we've had the basics.
[00:19:39] We've also had the structure. And again, this is really important to understand the narrative of Judges is to understand the structure. I think it's helpful to think about the Book of Judges like a song. It's a really bad song, but there are some themes that I think fall really well. Using a song as an analogy, we'll look at the intro, the rhythm, the chorus, and then the verses. Okay, so we'll start with the intro. The intro is simple. It's the death of Joshua.
[00:20:06] The entire book is framed and launched into by the Death of this leader, creating a leadership vacuum which again, the book is trying to answer.
[00:20:16] Judges 2, 8, 10. Then Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110, and they buried him in the territory of his inheritance in Timnath. Heres in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash, all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. Here we go. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which we had done for Israel.
[00:20:47] Okay, this is the intro of the song.
[00:20:49] This is going to set up the rest of the song, and it's going to animate and give explanation to all that follows. Another generation arose that did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. So already in the intro of the song, we're off to a pretty crummy start, right?
[00:21:07] Just wait.
[00:21:09] The rhythm. Just like any song, there is rhythm, there's a cadence, there's meter that we find in the Book of Judges.
[00:21:18] And we see it in the very next verse after what we just read that there was a generation that arose. Look what it says immediately after.
[00:21:25] And here's the thing.
[00:21:27] This is kind of like the Cliff Notes, the tldr. Like, if you don't want to read the whole thing, if you read judges 2, 11, 19, you'll get a pretty good sense of what the book is about.
[00:21:38] You should read the whole thing. But let me read what it says then. The sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the lord.
[00:21:50] The rhythm, if you want to fill in the blank, it says, israel did evil again and again and again. We'll see this back in our text. They did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they served the Baals, and they forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt and followed other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed themselves down to them. Thus they provoked the Lord to anger. So they forsook the Lord and served the BAAL and the Ashtaroth. The anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he gave them into the hands of plunderers and plundered them. And he sold them into the hands of their enemies around them, so that they could no longer stand before their enemies.
[00:22:31] Wherever they went, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil as the Lord had spoken, and as the Lord had sworn to them, so that they were severely distressed.
[00:22:42] Then the Lord raised up judges who delivered them from the hands of those who plundered them. Yet they did not listen to their judges. For they played the harlot after other gods and bowed themselves down to them. And they turned aside quickly from the way in which their fathers had walked in, obeying the commandments of the Lord. They did not do as their fathers.
[00:23:01] When the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and delivered them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the Judge. For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed and afflicted them. But it came about when the judge died that they would turn back and act more, more corruptly than their fathers, and following other gods to serve them and bow down to them. They did not abandon their practices or their stubborn ways.
[00:23:30] They sinned. They went after the gods of the other nations. They acted corruptly. Then they whined about it. God raised up a judge and delivered them. The judge dies. And they keep doing it again and again and again. Again the rhythm. Israel did evil again. And then I just put on the screen some of the instances where you see this happen over and over and over. We see the same thing in Judges 3:7, Judges 3:12, Judges 4:1, Judges 6, Judges 10, Judges 13.
[00:24:02] It's all over the place, you understand? This is the rhythm over and over and over again. They acted corruptly. They were judged. They complained. A judge was empowered by God to come in and act with might, deliver the people. The judge dies. The land has rest for an undisclosed number of years, and rinse and repeat.
[00:24:27] So we've talked about the intro, we've talked about the rhythm.
[00:24:31] If you want to know what a song is actually about, you listen to the chorus.
[00:24:37] It's the often repeated phrase or phrases that bring together and emphasize the truth or message that the lyrics are all pointing towards.
[00:24:46] If you want to know what a book is about, this is what the book is about. The chorus there was no king in Israel.
[00:24:56] Remember, her opening lines have framed the text to ask, who's going to take over? Who's going to lead them?
[00:25:02] It never gets resolved. There was no king in Israel.
[00:25:09] Judges 17:6.
[00:25:11] In those days there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. Judges 18:1. In those days there was no king in Israel.
[00:25:21] Judges 19:1. Now, it came about in those days when there was no king in Israel. And as we often do, and as we did oftentimes when we sing our songs in here on Sunday morning, we kind of repeat the chorus at the very end, right? It's Got a nice clean way. The chords resolve nicely. We all feel good.
[00:25:36] Well, same thing. The chorus repeats at the very end the final verse of the entire book. We see the chorus one more time. Judges 21:25. In those days, there was no king in the land.
[00:25:50] Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
[00:25:55] And you might know in 1706 and in 2125, there's a companion thought that gets attached to the declaration that there was no king in the land.
[00:26:06] Everyone did what was right in their own eyes, almost to say, hey, because there's no king, because there's no one to orient us, there's no person to follow.
[00:26:17] Look, everyone's just doing whatever they want.
[00:26:20] Which is actually a verse pulled from Moses. It's in Deuteronomy 12. I have it on the screen. But Deuteronomy 12:8 again, is a warning that Moses, prior to Joshua, is giving the people of Israel to say, hey, when you come into the land, you should be these sorts of people. You shouldn't follow these practices.
[00:26:36] You shouldn't go after other gods.
[00:26:40] And then he says, you know what?
[00:26:42] See all that's happening here today, that's not going to happen when we get in the land, right? Right now, every man's just doing whatever they want. That's not going to be who we are. And that's the phrase that the author pulls and attributes to the Book of Judges.
[00:26:58] Okay, are you getting it? Like, things aren't looking that good. We have a really crummy intro.
[00:27:04] We have these repetitious. This rhythm of this song that keeps repeating that doesn't really feel all that great. We're not getting any traction. We're not moving anywhere. And then we have this chorus which just reinforces the fact that they're dissatisfied, they're discontent, and the people are just kind of sinning however they want.
[00:27:22] Then you get to the verse or the verses, and I would say the verses of the song are the actual stories that make up the Book of Judges.
[00:27:32] And there's a lot of them, and there's a lot of judges. Some of them I totally forgot even exist. Some of them we know. You have Othniel, you have Ehud, you have Shamgar, Deborah, Gideon, Abimelech, Tola, Jair, Jephthah, Ibzan, Elan, Abdon, and Samson.
[00:27:50] You might be thinking, oh, I've heard of a couple of those.
[00:27:53] Some of them are just mentioned in passing.
[00:27:56] We don't even know what they did.
[00:27:59] But as you move through the text, you start to see that, like, you Kind of like the Judges in the beginning. And you know, you're pretty excited about Othniel. He said some pretty cool stuff. And Ehud and Shamgar, they seem to be like guys who are pretty intent on following. Once you get to chapter four and after Deborah, you just find yourself cheering for the judges a little bit less, you know, and we'll talk about a couple of them, but in a lot of ways they're kind of like these anti heroes.
[00:28:32] You recognize that God has commissioned them, but you don't feel great about throwing in your hat with them completely.
[00:28:39] You like the effect they have, but you're not sure you like them all that much.
[00:28:44] Well, let's just talk about them. Judges, chapter three.
[00:28:47] Ehud.
[00:28:51] I wouldn't name my kid Ehud, but I don't know if there's an Ehud in the room. I'm so sorry.
[00:29:01] For 18 years, Eglon, he was a fat dude.
[00:29:05] The Bible says it, he was super fat. He was the king of Moab and he was oppressing Israel. And so the Lord raised up and empowered Ehud. And in the course of the story, Ehud has come there to deliver, to deliver the Israelites from the oppression of Moab. And so when he's bringing tribute, Ehud comes to Eglon, brings tribute and says, hey, I have a secret message for you. His servants leave. Ehud, who was a left handed dude, had a sword strapped to his right thigh.
[00:29:34] He takes the sword out, puts it right through Eglon.
[00:29:38] He says he doesn't pull the blade out and it says the fat closed in over the blade.
[00:29:43] And I don't know what this means, but it says the dung came out or the refuse came out. Okay, again, this is not a pretty book.
[00:29:55] But God used Ehud to kill fat Eglon and the land experienced rest.
[00:30:04] You go to the next chapter, you have Deborah, the prophetess who judged Israel. A female. Very cool. Well, this time there is a threat from within its borders. Up in Hazor, the king of Canaan, Jabin, is oppressing Israel.
[00:30:20] And so Deborah calls Barak to come and take care of the problem.
[00:30:26] Go fight the King of Canaan. Go fight Jabin.
[00:30:30] Barak says, I don't want to do it unless you come with us, Deborah. And Deborah says, okay, I'll come, but the glory won't be yours. The glory will go to a woman.
[00:30:41] And so they come and they rout the armies of King Jabin. And Jabin's commander, Sisera, he flees.
[00:30:50] He flees and he flees and he finds a tent that is Occupied by a woman named Jael.
[00:30:57] And he says, hey, can I hide in here if someone comes looking for me? Which is say the armies of Deborah and Barak, just tell them you haven't seen anyone and they'll go their way.
[00:31:08] Do you know what Jael does? She says, I'll do it.
[00:31:12] Sisera, Jabin's commander, falls asleep. She takes a tent peg, drives it through his head into the ground.
[00:31:19] Here's the thing, you guys, and this is pretty remarkable for an ancient near east text. Chapter four. The two heroes of that chapter are women.
[00:31:28] Pretty cool.
[00:31:29] Very cool.
[00:31:31] Deborah, she was the one that got the honor for the battle for the defeat of Jabin. And Jael was the one that delivered the decisive blow to effectively end the king of Canaan's reign, who lived in Hazor.
[00:31:45] Okay, pretty neat.
[00:31:47] Here we go.
[00:31:49] Start to turn down.
[00:31:50] We introduce a guy named Gideon.
[00:31:53] Yeah, Gideon. Okay. Chapters six through eight are kind of the Gideon narrative. Now, you might think, Gideon, he's all right. But here's the thing. Gideon. We are introduced to Gideon in chapter six, and he's threshing wheat in a winepress. What do you do in a winepress?
[00:32:09] I'll tell you.
[00:32:11] You don't thresh wheat. He's hiding. The Midianites from the south have invaded and are taking over. The people have moved to the hills, and they're hiding. And the angel comes to Gideon and calls him valiant warrior. And Gideon's like, me, like, dude, I'm threshing wheat in a winepress. I'm not valiant. I'm not a warrior.
[00:32:29] And throughout the course of God commissioning and empowering Gideon, Gideon needs four assurances to actually do what God asked him.
[00:32:39] He needs the angel to consume an offering to say, it's actually God who's asking you to do this.
[00:32:45] Then Gideon says, sorry, but let me ask another thing. If I put this fleece on the ground tomorrow morning, can I wake up and it be wet, but then have the rest of the ground dry?
[00:32:55] Then I'll know it's God, and God does it the next day. Hey, how about this? Let's flip it. I'm going to put a fleece hat on the ground.
[00:33:05] If it's dry but the ground around it's wet, then I'll know for sure.
[00:33:08] And we see this process of God winnowing down this army of over 30,000 men who have come to fight the midianites down to 300.
[00:33:16] And God tells Gideon, hey, if you're still scared, if you need more assurance, take your servant, go down tonight and listen in at the Midian camp.
[00:33:25] And of course he does, because he needs the assurance, because he's scared. And he overhears a Midianite talking about a dream he had about a giant roll of barley going through the camp and destroying the Midianites. And his friend says, surely, that's Gideon. Gideon's going to destroy us.
[00:33:41] Now, does Gideon actually do what God asked him to do?
[00:33:45] Yeah, he does lead the army. They do defeat the Midianites.
[00:33:51] And we might be thinking, yes, Gideon, you did it.
[00:33:54] Yeah, okay. All those assurances, maybe you didn't feel the most faithful, but you did do it. You never said no. You'd never said no.
[00:34:01] And then you get to chapter eight, and it says, the people came to Gideon. You can read this. It's in 8, 22 and 23.
[00:34:08] The people come to Gideon and his sons and they say, hey, we want make you and your sons king to rule over us.
[00:34:16] Do you know what Gideon says?
[00:34:18] No.
[00:34:20] He says, we will not do it because the Lord is your king.
[00:34:24] Again, we're thinking, Gideon, all right, you're doing it. You're doing good. Do you know what he does immediately after that?
[00:34:32] He takes a collection from all of Israel. The plunder. They've received gold. And he fashions it into an idol, and it says, all of Israel prostituted themselves by it at Ophrah.
[00:34:44] You know what Gideon does after that?
[00:34:47] He dies.
[00:34:49] That's the Gideon narrative. And you're thinking, do I cheer for this guy?
[00:34:54] Should I? Is that okay to do? I mean, he did some great things. He never said no to God. But I don't really.
[00:35:01] Then you move on.
[00:35:04] You get the Jephthah. Judges, chapter 11.
[00:35:08] Jephthah is.
[00:35:10] He's described as the son of a prostitute. He's kind of an outcast among his peers.
[00:35:14] But the Ammonites come and they start invading the land. And they say, jephthah, come back. We need you to fight for us.
[00:35:20] And Jephthah, he says, okay, but if I fight, I'm going to receive honor. The one you discard is going to receive honor. Then he makes what the Bible talks about as a tragic vow. He says, lord, if you give us victory against the Ammonites, whatever comes through my front door, across the threshold, the first thing will be a sacrifice to you.
[00:35:37] And who comes out?
[00:35:39] His daughter, singing and dancing.
[00:35:41] Now, Bible scholars are split about what it means that she was offered to the Lord.
[00:35:48] Most likely, even though we can say he killed her, I think more likely that she was dedicated to the Lord, she never had children. It's the reason why she goes for two months to mourn her virginity. Okay, I'll let you figure that out. That's not the point of why I'm up here. Because we keep going and we hit Samson. I think probably the best known of the judges, certainly the one that's given the most text. 13 to 16.
[00:36:13] Samson. Again, polarizing, dude. Okay. He has a really long birth narrative in chapter 13. But it talks about how he grew and God empowered him. And he had a weakness. His weakness was philistine women.
[00:36:28] In fact, you see early on in his story that he just lusts after this one. He tells his parents, I have to have this woman.
[00:36:36] Fast forward. He's going down to see his wife in the area of Philistine. And he tears a lion apart with his bare hands. And then he eats honey out of it. And then he tells the Philistines a riddle about killing the lion and eating the honey about it. And they can't figure it out. They can't figure out the riddle. And so again, his weakness, Philistine women.
[00:36:56] His wife now starts hounding him. They want to know the answer to the riddle. They want to know the answer to the riddle. I'm thinking, is it really that big of a deal?
[00:37:04] Apparently, the riddle was a big deal. And finally, she wears him down. And he tells her the answer. And she tells her compatriots, the Philistines, and they get it right. And then Samson's mad about it, so he goes and kills 30 guys.
[00:37:20] We're not done. Samson's not done.
[00:37:22] There's another woman.
[00:37:24] You guys remember her name, Delilah. Another philistine woman.
[00:37:30] His weakness.
[00:37:32] He goes and Samson was always known for his great strength.
[00:37:39] The secret of his strength was the fact that it was in his hair. I don't know.
[00:37:45] Never experienced that.
[00:37:49] None of us have. Okay, again, they can't figure out how to stop Samson. He's causing all sorts of problems for the Philistines. Eventually, Delilah wears him down, saying, you keep deceiving me, Samson, like you're a bad husband, Samson. And finally he relents. He gives in and says what the secret is. And at night, they come, they cut his hair. His strength is gone. They bring him into the temple of Dagon, one of their deities.
[00:38:15] They gouge out his eyes.
[00:38:17] Why do they do that? I don't know. They make a spectacle of him.
[00:38:20] He's tied up between a couple pillars in the house. There's thousands of people there worshiping this false God and making A mockery of Samson. And so Samson prays one last time for his strength to return. God honors his prayer.
[00:38:36] He leans upon the two central pillars of the house, and it comes crumbling down. And in a giant murder suicide, it says, samson kills more in his death than he ever did in his life.
[00:38:47] Do I want to.
[00:38:49] Who cheers for him?
[00:38:53] He obeyed God, but there's a lot of things about him. I'm like, I don't want that to be true of me. I don't really want it to be true of you. And Samson marks the end of the cycle of Judges, at least recorded in the Book of Judges.
[00:39:06] But the book doesn't end there. Chapter 17 and 18, there's more like kind of petty debates and deception. And then you get to judges, chapter 19.
[00:39:14] I'm not going to talk about judges 19, because for a couple reasons, we have a mixed crowd here. It is the single most horrific chapter in all of the Bible.
[00:39:24] It is disgusting, it is abusive, it is gory.
[00:39:32] And the end result of judges 19 is that all of Israel is in calamity at the awful events that happened in the city of Gibeah.
[00:39:43] In the city, the tribe of Benjamin's allotted territory. It is so awful that all of Israel rises up as one man and a civil war breaks out.
[00:39:53] And the 11 other tribes go to war against Benjamin and effectively destroy the tribe of Benjamin over the course of a couple days, while also incurring many casualties of their own.
[00:40:06] Again, they're a loose confederacy of states.
[00:40:12] Chapters 20 and 21 detail the aftermath of that. And honestly, to really paraphrase what happens, the other 11 tribes say something to the effect of, yeah, that was probably an overreaction.
[00:40:25] I think we overdid it with Benjamin.
[00:40:28] And so now the conversation happens, well, how do we basically repopulate Benjamin? We've killed all these men, we've killed all these women. How do we basically give the remaining men wives so that they can, like, recover?
[00:40:42] That's kind of how the story ends. Remember how the chorus finishes?
[00:40:48] In those days, there was no king in Israel.
[00:40:52] Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
[00:40:55] And you read it and you think, yeah, that's true.
[00:40:59] That's true.
[00:41:02] Now, let's remember, when we're reading Judges, when we're reading the Old Testament, there's two stories in Judges. You can look at the surface and you can just think, God, there is no way. There is no way that you could possibly keep your promise in light of what I'm reading here.
[00:41:18] God doesn't operate the way we operate.
[00:41:21] He is committed to his promises. He is committed to bringing about the Savior, the seed of Abraham, Jesus Christ, in fulfillment of the promise that he gave to Abraham way back in the beginning of Genesis 12. And so we talk about the Savior.
[00:41:35] We see here in this story a continuing pattern of mankind being unable to save themselves, to govern themselves, to become the sorts of people that they say they ought to be.
[00:41:47] And we see the model of God appointing an individual to stand in the gap for wayward, fickle, destructive people.
[00:41:58] And it's interesting because we read in the New Testament now, looking back on the text of Judges, we have the hall of faith, Hebrews chapter 11. Look at some of the names we read in Hebrews 11, 32 and 39.
[00:42:11] And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets.
[00:42:22] And all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised.
[00:42:31] Now, again, you might be listening to some of the stories I just told you. And then you see that they are now being almost upheld in the New Testament as exemplars of faith.
[00:42:43] And I think it's okay for us to say them, really, If you're disappointed in them, in their actions, I think that's okay.
[00:42:58] Here's one thing we need to recognize. The moment we start putting anyone on a podium, whether it's a character from the Bible, a spiritual leader, you need to look at that person. You say, you know what?
[00:43:08] Even the best man is still just a man at best.
[00:43:14] We love doing it. We still want to appoint kings for ourselves, but we should ask, well, why are they even there?
[00:43:21] Why are they listed alongside David?
[00:43:25] Why are they listed there alongside Samuel and the prophets?
[00:43:32] Well, because they believe God.
[00:43:37] And while again, we want to look at the surface story, we want to look at their actions and their activity, we also recognize the mechanism of salvation, from the beginning of Scriptures to the end was not what we do, it's who we believe.
[00:43:54] You go back to the promise given to Abraham that he would have a son In Genesis 15, he believed God. In Genesis 15:6, foundational verse, it says, and God reckoned it to him as righteousness. He believed that God could do it, and God reckoned it to him as righteousness.
[00:44:15] We don't like what they did. We don't like the way they did it. But in the case of Gideon, he's a great example. Gideon never said no to God.
[00:44:23] He said, I'm scared, I need lots of assurances. But he never said no.
[00:44:27] We are not being asked to emulate their actions.
[00:44:32] I mean, like you could kill a hundred people with a jawbone of a donkey like Samson if you tried, you know, we are not asked to emulate their actions.
[00:44:40] We are asked to emulate their faith.
[00:44:48] It's not about the size of their faith. It's not about the activity, good or bad, that caused their faith and their obedience to God caused them to do.
[00:44:59] Here's a great quote from now, the late Tim Keller, which I really like.
[00:45:04] If you're falling off a cliff, strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.
[00:45:12] Salvation is not finally, based on the strength of your faith, but on the object of your faith.
[00:45:17] If I'm falling off a cliff, I'm not bragging about how strong my grip is. Will I grab onto a little brute?
[00:45:26] I rather have a very weak grip on a very strong branch.
[00:45:30] Okay, judges, if we're looking at both stories above the waterline and below, we need to recognize that the object of our faith is what saves us, not the strength of our faith.
[00:45:48] Unlike the judges, there would come one who. Who would be king, wasn't the king they wanted, who would fight battles against flesh and blood like the kings of the nations around them, But Jesus would be the king they needed, who would fight a decisive battle with death itself and would prevail.
[00:46:07] So what does this mean for us?
[00:46:09] Right. Paul writes to Timothy in 2 Timothy chapter 3, that all scripture, including Judges, is inspired by God, is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, which is to say we can look at the book of Judges and the rest of the Old Testament, which is what Paul had in view when he said that to Timothy and say, there is something here that can give shape to our lives, give shape to our community.
[00:46:34] First thing. And they're related to our two major themes of this text.
[00:46:38] First, one. First major theme was cultural assimilation. For us, we look up, we don't look out.
[00:46:44] It is the easiest thing for us to take our cues from the world we live in, from the people around us, to desire the things that they have that we don't. Material lifestyle, relationships.
[00:47:01] That was their major problem is they looked out, they forgot to look up.
[00:47:05] Paul reminds us in Romans 12, do not be conformed to this world. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and. And acceptable and perfect.
[00:47:19] Yes, we are called to be a peculiar people, unique.
[00:47:24] To not play by the same rules as the rest of the world. And I think so often we take all our cues from everywhere else but God.
[00:47:33] We lose our distinctiveness, we lose our witness.
[00:47:36] There's a verse in Acts. It's not going to be on the screen, but in Acts 5, there's a verse that I don't think we talk as. We don't talk about enough.
[00:47:43] In Acts 5 and 12, this is when the Church still was consigned and stayed in Jerusalem, before the martyrdom of Stephen, before the persecution that caused the Church to actually go out and start fulfilling the Great Commission.
[00:47:55] In Acts 5, 12 and 13, Luke tells us that at the hands of the apostles, many signs and wonders were taking place among the people, and they were all with one accord in Solomon's portico.
[00:48:07] Listen to verse 13.
[00:48:08] But none of the rest, I.e. the surrounding people in Jerusalem, none of the rest dared to associate with them.
[00:48:16] However, the people held them in high esteem.
[00:48:19] Isn't that cool? Why don't we talk about that? There was a way that they looked at the church and thought, they're kind of weird. I don't totally understand.
[00:48:26] They're peculiar, they're unique, but we respect them.
[00:48:31] They weren't taking their cues from everything else that was happening in Jerusalem. They knew who they were. They knew whose they were.
[00:48:38] For us, we need to look up, not out.
[00:48:41] Finally, and I'm probably past time, if you get anything, this is where you lean in.
[00:48:51] The king that they longed for, the king that was envisioned, the one they most wanted in the Book of Judges, he's already come.
[00:49:02] And I don't know who you are. I don't know a lot of you.
[00:49:09] I don't know what sort of your sense of orientation towards God is or what are the ways and thoughts that come to mind when you think about Jesus.
[00:49:20] When we look at the characters in the Book of Judges, it would be wrong for us to think that they're somehow distinct from us in their longings, in their desires, and probably the awful ways they go about fulfilling those longings and desires.
[00:49:35] It's easier for us in our modern 21st century to almost cast judgment backwards, as if to say, well, they're just primitive.
[00:49:42] Our hearts haven't changed.
[00:49:43] We're not that unique.
[00:49:46] If we were there, we'd probably find ourselves in a similar script.
[00:49:51] However, the one that the judges envisioned says that they were approved for their faith, even though they did not receive what was promised. That thing that was promised, that was Jesus.
[00:50:03] We have a chance to respond.
[00:50:04] Some of you have. Some of you are walking with Jesus. You would say you are a follower of Jesus. You are taking your cues from Jesus.
[00:50:12] Some of you like being at church, but you are not taking your cues from Jesus.
[00:50:18] Some of you are here just because someone invited you.
[00:50:21] For all of us, he's come. There's no other king that we're waiting for.
[00:50:28] If you want to be made whole, if you want to be free, look to him.
[00:50:34] He's the one who gives definition to all things.
[00:50:37] Apart from him, we're nothing.
[00:50:40] And that's the book of judges. Pretty awful, right? I would encourage you guys to read it for yourselves.
[00:50:47] Maybe tissues in hand, draw the bath beforehand. I don't know. Like, just.
[00:50:53] I'm going to pray. The worship team is going to come up and we'll raise our voices together.
[00:50:58] Father, thanks for your word.
[00:51:01] Thanks for Jesus. I pray that we would recognize him as the king that has indeed come.
[00:51:07] Dalit, the end of our longing.
[00:51:13] The one alone who can make us whole.
[00:51:17] Help us to adore him and worship him now as we sing together.
[00:51:20] Amen.
