Gooding, David: 1 - Heroes and Heroines of Faith

Vim and vitality, and all the strength you will need of muscle, eye, and brain, and spirit to survive the rigors of today's seminars. There's no pretending they will be easy, but we remember the words of our Lord Jesus, work not for the meat that perishes, but work, work hard for the meat that endures unto eternal life. God grant us not only to believe in the inspiration of Holy Writ, but God grant us to work out the implications of believing that the book held in our hands is the word of the living God, such that if today he opened heaven and spoke to us direct, he would speak to us what he has caused to be written aforetime for our learning in his word. Two passages of scripture may help, may serve to introduce our studies together. The first of them in the Epistle to the Hebrews and chapter Hebrews eleven. Hebrews 11 and verse thirty two. And what shall I say more? For the time will fail me. Never truer a word was spoken. If I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, waxed mighty in war, turned to fight armies of aliens. Women received their dead by resurrection, and others were tortured, not accepting their deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. And others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, they were tempted, they were slain with a sword. They went about in sheepskins, in goat skins, being destitute, afflicted, evil intreated, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and the holes of the earth. And these all, having had witness borne to them through their faith, received not the promise, God having provided some better thing concerning us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect. Therefore, let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience, endurance, the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider him that has endured such rebellion of sinners against themselves, that you waxed not weary, fainting in your souls. You have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. And the second passage comes from First Timothy, Paul's word as a senior missionary to his junior colleague. First Timothy and chapter one. reading at verse eighteen. This charge I commit unto thee, my child Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that by them thou mayest war, the good warfare. Today, then, we meet to study together, as rigorously as we may, the book of Judges. It is, in the bulk of it, the record of some of the heroes and heroines of faith. Though they lived some three thousand years ago, these mighty heroes and heroines of the faith still have power, have they not? To stir our hearts to their very foundations. For they were men and women of faith. Not just faith either, but active faith. Men and women who lived very often in very dark days, spiritually and morally, but men and women that were not content just to wring their hands and lament at the failure and decline and declension and divisions of the Lord's people, to talk about their compromises with idolatry and immorality. And men and women that believe that in spite of it all, God was still alive. That it was God who had instituted the great deliverance from Egypt, God who had brought them into their promised inheritance, God who had covenanted with them by his solemn word and oath. Therefore, because that God was still alive, because he was the great initiator, it was worth believing him. They rose up in faith in the living God, actively to do what they could do in the name of God for the revival of his people. They weren't perfect. Some of them show evident flaws in their characters. Some of them show misunderstandings and mistakes in their methods. But they stand in scripture with this attribute. They were men and women of faith. We shall see, for instance, when we come to the last of them, namely Samson, that spirit-led and powerful man that he was. His life was a long succession of mistakes, sometimes sheer follies, but I must be careful how I speak. For when the Holy Spirit comes to write the record of Samson in his holy word, he records his name amidst the great heroes and heroines of faith. I hope when God comes to write up my record, it won't take many lines. When he comes to write up my record, he will be as generous to me as the Holy Spirit has been to Samson. For these were like men, uh, men of like passions as we, but God used them in their day as mighty deliverers. They weren't content, you see, to sit still and enjoy their little bit of the inheritance that was given to them and watch it diminish. There were men and women who believed that the whole inheritance was for all the people of God. They weren't content to sit by and see the people of God robbed of their inheritance, robbed of the enjoyment of their inheritance, content with outward superficialities of spiritual life and not enjoying the underneath realities of it. They rose up in the name of God to lead the people of God, first of all, in repentance. They judged Israel. That is not they were critical people, but they brought God's people back to his word and his covenant and called on them to dare to believe that the covenant and word of God were still as meaningful and real in their day as it had been in the days of their forefathers, getting the people of God to believe it and therefore to repent where their ways did not coincide with God's word. And having led the people into repentance and stimulated their faith in God and his covenant, they then led the people to war. They were great warriors. We read today the record of the restorations and revivals that many of them led. Let us notice at once that, uh, the revivals they led didn't always happen overnight. It wasn't, so to speak, that one Thursday night they saw what a sad state believers were in in their day and decided that if only they prayed all night to God, on Friday morning they would start a revival. Didn't happen that way. The record is honest. Some of the oppressions and the captivities lasted long. Some of them lasted forty years. That did test their faith. In spite of it, they rose up and started by their own personal faith to lay the foundations of the great restorations and revivals that eventually God brought. And they stand today, says the New Testament, among the great cloud of witnesses. Witnesses not in the sense that they can see us, they may or may not. I shouldn't think they get much joy at seeing me anyway. Eh, not in the sense that we can see them either with our physical eyes. But there they are, my brother, my sister. Can you see them by your eye of faith? There he is. There's old Gideon out there. He's looking down on us this morning, isn't he? Uh, oh, oh, oh, that's Deborah and Jael over there. They're rising up from their heavenly seats. Today they will call on us, Othniel and Ehud and Gideon and Jephthah and Samson. They'll call on us. They want to be knowing in their kind of intrusive way, and what are you doing? Calling on us as the great witnesses of faith, ourselves to run with persistent endurance the race that is set before us. To struggle, to fight against sin. Or it is true of any one of us standing here, we're not martyrs in the traditional sense yet, are we? And as yet, we haven't been thrown to the lions. As yet, we have not resisted unto blood, striving against sin. This, therefore, will be the great exhortation to which these ancient heroes and heroings will witness to us today, that we are to learn to fight. Let it be said at once, that whereas they fought with physical armor, because they lived in a past and distant dispensation, we are not permitted nowadays, either to propagate or defend the faith by force of physical arms. Let's, uh, call to mind the kind of armor that we as believers are expected to wield. The famous passage in Ephesians, we're to go to our fighting, the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, shoes with the preparation of the gospel of peace, shield of faith, helmet the hope and certainty of salvation, and sword, not a physical sword, but the word of God, and these to be used with all prayer and supplication. For as this same passage in Ephesians six reminds us, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, the world rulers of this darkness. And no one will engage in the pro- pre- propagation of the gospel or the pastoring of God's people. No one will engage in it very long before they discover that behind the scenes there are antagonistic spiritual forces. Our Lord was insistent upon it, and so should we be, and in this province very especially. When he was called to witness the good confession before Pontius Pilate, this is what he said: My kingdom is not of this world, as to its source and its power. If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, they would have fought in the garden, they would still be willing to fight now, that I should not be delivered to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from hence. The reason why we as believers in this age are forbidden the use of the physical sword, and semtex as well, in order to promote the Christian faith or defend it, lies in the very nature of the kingdom of Christ. It is not of this world, never was, never will be. What has he come to? How does he gird himself to the fight? He comes, he says, and for this cause I was born, for this cause I've come into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is on the side of the truth, who is of the truth, listens to and obeys my voice. If it is the truth that we witness to, you cannot convince a man or a woman either of the truth by putting a sword to their throat and demanding they agree with you, or you'll cut their head off. Alas, the church forgot this, didn't it, for many centuries at a stretch, and particularly after Constantine joined the state with the church and the church with the state. And what scandals arose from it. As missionaries to Russia, for instance, got hold of the king of the time, who lined up all his subjects and compelled them to be baptized as Christians, because if they didn't, they were executed on the spot. That made a lot of converts of a kind. What a scandal it was. What a scandal it was, not only in pre-Reformation days, but post-Reformation days, my brothers, my sisters. When the reformers still held to the old idea that church and state are but two sides of one coin, and the way for the church to deal with those they considered to be heretics was to hand them over to the civil magistrate, to get the magistrate to execute them, burn them alive, or other such treatment. Using the physical, political, secular state to try and guard the truth of the gospel. What scandals it led to. Our dear friend Luther, to whom we owe so much, viciously persecuted the Mennonites. Owingly said, if you want to get baptized as believers, well, you like water, have water, and trussed them up like chickens and threw them in the rivers. Led to the scandals of so-called Protestants fighting Catholics with their armies, and vice versa. Our so-called Christian armies going and slaughtering Muslims. Oh, what tears, what scandals, what defamation of the fair name of the Lord Jesus. We must get it clear in our minds, mustn't we? What our marching orders are in this day and generation, because of the very nature of the kingdom of Christ, we are strictly forbidden the use of the sword of any kind, physical I mean, either to defend or to propagate the faith. The weapons of our warfare, says Paul, are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful to the destruction of fortresses. But that said, as we heard Paul say to Timothy, we must fight. I've delivered you these commandments, says Paul, reminding you of the prophecies that went upon you earlier, that by these you might war the good warfare. Fight, says Paul. Fight the good fight of faith. The faith, that is. You will need to fight for your basic Christian doctrines. Wherever and ever and ever there is the resistant power from the other side to corrupt, to encroach upon, to pervert, to twist the truth of the gospel. Fight the good fight of the faith. It will be good for us if when we come to our end, as Paul was coming to his, to be able to say, I have fought the good fight. So that if we are going to learn to war and to fight as believers in our day and generation, then we shall find great profit in watching the stories of the ancient warfares, given that they were at the physical level, yet they were fighting ultimately against sin of various kinds. We may, mutatis mutandis, as they say, we may take their examples, first of all, on diagnosing the causes of the people's, uh, decline. Secondly, by reconnoitering the enemy and learning to see what an old merbite is, so to speak. Learning to distinguish enemies from your brethren. That wasn't always successfully done in the days of the judges. Some of them, good at fighting enemies, mistook brethren for enemies and fought them as well and sliced their heads off. And then we must learn also, we can learn from... I now have to confess that I spent the whole first hour of our seminars this morning on my introduction. As if that were not tiresome enough, now I have to tell you that the book of Judges has itself an introduction, and not one introduction, but two. My only excuse here is that I didn't write it. So let us spend what is left of this first session considering the, uh, introduction. The function of the first introduction to start with. It sets the context of the era of the Judges. It is, as you see, the second phase of the conquest of Canaan, and not the first one. The first phase was under Joshua. This is happening now after the death of Joshua. Do you see, and uh, it is to do with the second phase of the conquest. Why is that important? Well, of course, it is theologically important and doctrinally important, and particularly for us today, it will be important when we come to consider our personal response to this book. When it came to the great God-given inheritance, given by God to his chosen people, Israel, then in the first phase, God appointed to them a captain of their salvation, of equal status as Moses, to bring them into the land and fulfill the final stage of the covenant that God had made with Abraham. He covenanted with Abraham to, uh, give him a son, a seed, and then he covenanted by sacrifice to give to that seed a great inheritance. And in the covenant sacrifice of Genesis fifteen, God himself, uh, uh, delimited the inheritance with specific boundaries. He told Abraham that they should not inherit at once, but his seed would eventually be a stranger in a foreign land, and they would be evil intreated for four hundred years. But then God would bring them out and bring them into their inheritance. And so he did. They were under Egypt for four hundred years. Then God raised up a great savior for them, Moses, who delivered them by the Passover lamb, shielding them from the wrath of God that felt- fell on Egypt. And then by the power of God, as his judgments came falling on Egypt, and Israel were taken through the waters of the, uh, Reed Sea in safety, saved by blood and by water. Moses also brought them along the desert right to the borders of the Promised Land, to their inheritance. Then Moses died. He had failed, he had disobeyed God, and was unable in the end to bring them into their inheritance. Poor Moses. And if that had been the end of the story, then all God's great covenant to Abraham would have ended in disaster. But God, you'll see, knew what he was doing, surely. And what Moses could not do, he couldn't bring the Israelites into, into Canaan. He brought them out of Egypt, couldn't get them into Canaan. What Moses could not do, Joshua did. No wonder his name is the old form of the, the term Jesus. For if Moses stood for the law, for what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh. God sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sacrifice for sin, uh, you'll see performed it. So Joshua brought them into their inheritance as the captain of their salvation. It involved the nation, of course, siding with God and with Joshua. When they came into the land, the land was full of Canaanites. They were indescribably corrupt and sinful. So sinful that four hundred years before then, God had said to, uh, Abram, I'm going to bring your seed into the inheritance, the land of Canaan, but not yet. For the iniquity of the Canaanites is not yet full. For four hundred years, God waited, for he is slow to anger. But eventually, God would wait no longer. The cup of their iniquity was full, and the judgments of God must descend upon them. If you feel that that is barbarous, too much like ethnic cleansing in our modern world, then pray remember what scripture itself says. That this was not Israel going in, savages from the desert destroying civilizations that they didn't understand because they were superior to Israelites. No, no. When Israel was asked to join with Joshua to execute the judgments of God upon Canaan, many of them found it distinct- distinctly unpleasant, and instead of doing it, compromised and let the Canaanites survive. Why did God make the Israelites come and join with Joshua in executing the judgments of God? Why didn't he leave them down in Kadesh Barnea, their camp in the wilderness, and say to them, now look here, this is a beautiful oasis, gentlemen and ladies, beautiful oasis. I'm going to leave you here for a while. You enjoy yourself, says God, and I'm going to, I've got a job of disinfecting to do in Canaan, you see. I'm going to disinfect the whole place, and then when it's all cleaned up, I'll come and fetch you and bring you in. Why didn't he do that? Could have done, couldn't he? Didn't. He made the Israelites join in. Why so? Why? Because they had to agree with God about his judgment on sin. That is true at a higher level when we first of all come to Christ, isn't it? You said, what do you mean by that? Well, if you're ever going to be saved, or I either, it will be through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, crucified at Calvary. Tell me, why was he crucified? Biblical answer is because of the judgments of God upon sin. You say, yes, this world is a wicked place. Oh, but half a minute. He was being judged. For our sin. If righteousness came by the law, we could earn our way to heaven by being good, then Christ has died for nothing. The terrible judgments of God that fell upon him at Calvary. We must agree with God. Tell us how sinful we were. As many a person won't admit that. Oh, but you mustn't despise yourself. You might, you're, you're, you're not perfect, but you're not that bad. Well, as long as we maintain that we're not that bad, there is no salvation. There is no entry into our inheritance. The cross demands that we agree with God and with his son in God's judgment on human sin. So under Jo- Joshua's captaincy, the armies came in as a whole, and now their feet stood in their inheritance, and the back was broken of all resistance. The land was theirs, the title deed was theirs. They were in the inheritance. And all who trust Christ, witness the epistle to Galatians chapter three, through faith in Christ, are, uh, covered with a robe. There is no difference male, female, bond, Jew, slave, what have you. You are all one in Christ, and if you be Christ's, then are you Abraham's seed and heirs according to that irrevocable covenant, the great spiritual inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for us, all of us heirs of it, solely through faith in Jesus Christ our Lord. Yes. If the first phase of Joshua's, uh, of the conquest reminds us then of the work of Christ on our behalf and how we come into our God-given right of inheritance, the second phase has a lesson to teach us too. For being in the inheritance is one thing, enjoying it is another. Making it personally ours. That will involve quite a bit of hard work. That will involve struggle and fighting. For you know, when they came in, there were still odd pockets of Canaanites all over the place. And when you went to take your particular part of the inheritance, three acres and a cow maybe, in a bungalow, hope a nice modern one, and you were going out to to to sow the field and take advantage of your inheritance and enjoy it, you happen to turn your nose around the barn and there was an old Canaanite. What ho! Now what did you do? I don't know if you've had the experience ever. You're now going to be devoted to the Lord. In fact, you're going to rise up and serve him, be a man and woman of faith. That's what you're going to do, not an also-ran. You set about your work for the Lord. Ha. And presently, coming around the corner, you meet a Canaanite in your own heart, yes? And you think it's easy to suppress him or her and chop the head off, but they refuse to lie down. And then begins the struggle. No good being unrealistic, is it? That will be a warfare for the rest of our lives. Oh, there will be victories, yes. We shall not be perfect this side of glory. The second phase. Now, it's very interesting in that, uh, uh, uh, uh, chapter to, um, uh, look at the account of the various tribes as they entered into their own particular pieces of inheritance, getting ready to enjoy them and to develop them and all their potential. Some, like Judah, drove out the Canaanites. Well, most of them anyway. Some, like Benjamin, did not drive out the Canaanites. Oh dear. Some did not drive out the Canaanites, but put them to task work. Some could not drive out the Canaanites of Judah, parts of it. Some did not. There's a difference, isn't there, between could not and did not. Uh. And the long record given us in that chapter surely has echoes in our own heart. Thank God for all the victories that we have been able, by God's grace, to strive against sin and God's power within us achieve a victory. Thank God for God's realism. Some of them didn't manage to drive the Canaanites out. They couldn't. Great embattled towns they were, armed to the teeth. The noble souls, they didn't necessarily give up. Some didn't drive them out, but put them to task work, and that's debatable, isn't it? Here's a dear lady, oh, she has her standards. Ho, ho, ho, ho. Talk about perfectionist. You would need a magnifying glass to see a speck of dust in her house, you would that. You say that's very commendable. Amen. Amen. If you looked a little bit deeper, you might get just a faintly bit worried. Is this genuine self-respect and care? Or is this the old slave driver of perfectionism? Perhaps the dear lady knows it, and uh, she feels herself compelled and under compulsion. So she's not left time to do other things because she has to get the dusting done. She can't eliminate it. Well, you say, wait a minute, could she control it? And this perfectionism, if it were directed at least in the right channels. And so it is directed not merely to dusting, but to really worthwhile things in the work of the Lord. You say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that perfectionism is wrong, it's sin. Oh, I see, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, perhaps you've never suffered from it. Could be something to be said if you can't drive it out, harnessing it for better purposes. I don't, I leave you to to work it. You'll see. But when at last they gathered to hear the man of God's denunciation, God's complaint at them was this: I promised you this, this, this, this, and this, made my covenant with you. Why have you left my covenant and made covenants with the Canaanites? And there were buckets of tears. You see, God recognizes in his practicality, recognizes our struggles, and we strive sometimes and can't drive them out, so to speak. What we are asked to do is to not give up. Yes? We've made a covenant with us, with us, hasn't he? Oh, what a practical thing is the Lord's Supper. As we come in, perhaps you don't, you come in full of joy, raise the roof with your hallelujahs. But some of us come in, and the week has been a struggle against old Canianites, within and without. We feel defeated. I feel like giving up. The blessed Lord hands to us the bread and hands to us the cup and says, this cup is the covenant in my blood. Covenant to do what? I will write my laws on their hearts, and on their minds will I inscribe them. There is his standing covenantal promise. We've no need to give up. Defeated and weak hitherto. The sin would be giving up, wouldn't it? And as we come to take the symbols of the covenant, we come judging ourselves, confessing our weakness, and yet finding the glorious assurance, their sins and iniquities I will remember no more forever. And the concomitant promise, I will write my law on their hearts, and on their minds will I inscribe them. A realistic God, when it comes to the question of our fighting for our inherit- our particular part of the inheritance, yes. One brief look at the second introduction. You say, what, how is the second introduction different from the first? Well, they're not ditto repeato, of course not. Now, it's not a question of, uh, so much, uh, their, um, failure to enter in to their inheritance as God's response to Israel's failure and compromise. What will God do when experience shows that his people are so full of tendencies to give up, to compromise, to make covenants with idolatry. How will God respond? Well, first he diagnoses the cause. There was a special danger for the people of the third generation. He'll say, they knew not the Lord, nor yet the work which he had wrought in his for Israel. You might say, well, whose fault was that? It wasn't their fault, was it? You see, the generation before them, they'd known Joshua and all the tremendous experiences of God in those early days. Phew, had enough to go on to be the engine of their devotion for the rest of their lives, should they live to one hundred and twenty like Caleb. But the third generation had missed all that. Born in the land. Never having had to fight, not having that great personal stirring experience of God. And that carries with it certain difficulties, doesn't it, and dangers. It happens in society, doesn't it? Here's a man and a woman absolutely up to their eyebrows in sinful life and worldly living. Get converted. What a colossal change it makes in life. They don't need to be argued about, uh, to be argued into believing that salvation is real. They point to the colossal revolution it's made in their lives. Their children feel the power of it. They grow up sterling believers. But of course, they were good and godly folks from the start, weren't they? And then the third generation comes along. Well, mum and dad are concerned to see that they, as soon as possible, make their faith in the Lord and get baptized. The truth to tell, they hadn't had these remarkable experiences of the reality of salvation. You say, well, how could they? Well, Satan perhaps. So everyone is telling us the same story, fight against Satan. Well, that's a good lesson to learn. Well, there's a bit more detail in it, isn't there? We are surrounded by a host of enemies of different kinds, and this one will s- will surface in one place, and another one will surface prominently in another place. We must learn to diagnose our different enemies, what they stand for. And then we shall notice that they had, um, different tactics each time, do you see? Look at this one here. Ehud, tactic of killing the enemy at the ford. Do you see? Uh, this one, Jo pierced his skull with a tent peg. This one, Gideon, his tactic was light in an earthen vessel, and so forth. So that will set us a question, won't it? Why did Ehud use this particular tactic here? How was that the suitable tactic to use for his particular enemy? And why did, uh, Jael and company use this particular tactic with all Sisera of the Canaanites? And why, oh why, oh why did, uh, Gideon and company use this technique of light in earthen vessels, and they smashed the vessel and the light shone out? Why did they use it? Why was it, for instance, we can say that when Deborah commissioned Barak to go up north to Mount Tabor, he went up with ten thousand ca- uh, uh, soldiers at his feet. Wow. And they were all used, they were all necessary for the battle. Here, Gideon had collected a whole lot of troops, and God came to him gently one night and said, Gideon, send them home. I don't need all them. Well, a tactic that was eminently suitable here wasn't suitable here. That's obvious, isn't it? Should be. So if we're going to learn to war, as Paul put it to Timothy, we must first recognize our enemies, what they stand for, and then we must learn what the, uh, tactics are that are appropriate to each enemy. Eh? That's rather a lot to learn. I content myself with John three sixteen generally. But don't give up John three sixteen, well, whatever you do. But now and again, on an occasional Thursday, read John three seventeen. And read John three fifty. If you carry on that process, you'll eventually come to Judges, of course. And then we must ask, are these deliverers, well, what was the secret of their preparation? What was the secret of this man's success, for instance? For deliverers don't just happen overnight. Generally, there's a period of preparation, and some a long period of preparation. Deliverers have their secrets, don't they, of success? And the secret of this man's success was his wife, as judges will tell you frankly and fully. Some woman she was. That's another story, you'll see. Ah. And then our eye is caught by this over here. Samson, he was a deliverer too. But he came unstuck. The secret of his failure? Wives, of course, if you can use that honorable name of them. Whew. If I hadn't more sense, I should be moved, young ladies and gentlemen, to preach your sermon. But I'm not going to. Well, I'm not going to now, but I, if I had have told you, I would have said, um, if you want to be a deliverer amongst God's people, be careful who you marry, won't you? And that alerts us to a good interesting thing. Let's have this down again. In Judges chapter three, if you've got your Bible open, which is a good thing to have, Judges chapter three, Uh, sorry, Judges chapter two, verse nineteen. Two nineteen it is. The historian confides in us an very interesting, important detail. Two nineteen, Well, verse eighteen: And when the Lord raised them up judges, then the Lord was with the judge and saved them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For it repented the Lord because of their groaning, by reasons of them that oppressed them and vexed them. But it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they turned back and dealt more corruptly than their fathers in following other gods to serve them and to bow down unto them, and they ceased not from their doings nor from their stubborn way. I see. So the writer is forewarning us that we should must expect certain cycles. The people disobey the Lord. The Lord has to allow them in the end to fall captive under their enemy who oppresses them. Eventually, they learn to see sense, they repent, and they cry to the Lord, and he raises up a judge, and the judge brings them back to God and his covenant, and they repent, and the judge goes out to war and delivers them from their enemies. And so long as the judge survives, they behave pretty decently. The judge dies, way you go round again. The same old cycle again. They depart, they come into captivity, they cry to the Lord because of their distress, they come to repentance, the Lord lays up a deliverer, and so forth. Ah, but there's something more serious. Each time the circle goes round, it's worse than before. Isn't that what it says? Hmm. But it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they turned back and dealt more corruptly than their fathers. The circle not only went round, it went deeper each time. And you'll find that that thesis marks the book, particularly when we look, first of all, at these, uh, uh, uh, captivities and the deliverers. Uh, you'll see. We have already noticed Othniel, we're talking not now of the people so much as even their deliverers, but this feature marked the deliverers. Othniel, the secret of his success was his wife. The trouble had been, the cause of the captivity, that Israel had disobeyed God, and they had intermarried with the idolatrous Canaanites. And the men had taken Canaanite women as their wives, which led to them into idolatry to please their wives. And then to captivity. The secret of Othniel's success was... He'd been attracted to a wife as well. Jolly good stuff, Josie, but um, what a wife. The secret of his success. Look over the end, Samson. Man of God, man of faith. But he died a captive. He never did deliver Israel as he should have done. The secret of his failure, his wives. And now you see that at this late stage, Samson, the judge and deliverer, is guilty himself of the very sin from which, in the early days, the people had to be delivered. That's going downhill, isn't it? Look at this great chap here. He was dealing with the enemy, uh, uh, enemy Moabites, and his final tactic was to row down to the fords of Jordan, and as the Moabites came running back to escape out of the land and across the Jordan, they naturally came to the fords one by one, and they picked them off there. They killed the enemy at the fords. Mm. Great victory that day. Look over his opposite numbers. He took the folds of Jordan and killed people. But whereas the people that Ehud killed were the enemies, the people that Jephthah killed were his own brethren. And things have gone downhill, haven't they? When a great deliverer cannot distinguish between enemies and their brethren. Read church history, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, read church history. Here's Deborah Barak and that famous woman, Jael, fighting Canaanites. And the victory was sealed when a woman got a tent peg and hammered it through the head, the skull of the commander in chief of the army. Of course, the commander in chief of the enemy army, of course. Yeah. That was a victory. Well, there was a victory here as well on this side. When a woman got hold of a millstone with which she was grinding the family's daily flour and bread, of course. With all this nonsense of going outside when the important things of life were being neglected, the nation had to be fed, didn't they? The people had to be fed, and all this dispute as who should be king and all this that was destroying the people of God. Well, when she got to the end of, um, milling her flour that day, she got the mist and he did over the wall. It crushed the skull of the army commander. But with this difference at this time, the skull in question belonged to an Israelite, son of Gideon. Hm. Things have gone downhill, haven't they? And we shall notice when we come here, marvelous as Gideon was, there were two parts to his life. There was the first part of success. There was the second part where he trailed away into failure and set the pattern, alas, of failure for the ensuing judges. The point I'm making, well, it ain't very profound, is it? But it's worth making out a table of contents and considering the relation of the stories one with another, how they contribute each one to the whole. They are not repetitious. They're not just preaching the same old boring sermon, we have a spiritual enemy, fight him, doze. They're different enemies, different tactics, different qualifications needed. Yes? And then to be on the watch, to see how things eventually declined and why they did. So if we go no further, we've learned a great thing about the book of Judges. Let's look, before we go from it, to the, um, uh, the two introductions and the two epilogues. And most students of the book of Judges regard the introductions as not too bad, but the epilogues almost impossible. I very rarely heard a sermon on them. I, I, I'd be interested to hear when you heard last a sermon on the last, uh, uh, two things, you'll see. Mm-hmm. Anyway, two introductions, two epilogues. But have a look at them. This first, after the death of, uh, uh, uh, Joshua, all Israel were gathered together, and they inquired of the Lord, who shall go up first against the Canaanites? Joshua had brought them into the land. He had broken the back of the resistance. The land lay before them. But still there were a lot of Canaanites holed up in different cities and villages around about the place. So now the tribes had to peel off from the main united army and each go into his own allotted territory to take personal possession and practical possession of the inheritance that already belonged to them. That meant a lot of fighting, of course, and it was a question of who shall go out first. Heretof the army had been all together, they dared be anything else. When the army conquered Jericho, they didn't say, well, now you tribe can settle down in Jericho. And when they conquered Ai, they didn't say you could settle down in A- uh, because if they had have done that, it wouldn't have been long before the army would have been dispersed. And when the great confederacy of the northern kings came against them, they would have been hopeless, helpless. So the first stage of the conquest had to be the united armies of Israel, all going at a time, couldn't start to actually go into their different inheritances. They must work together to break the back of the Canaanite resistance throughout the country. When it came to the second phase, then it was a question of which tribe should be entrusted to go first, leaving the main united armies, and go off first to its particular inheritance. That was a very delicate tactic, wasn't it? And they rightly waited on God to have his direction. Who shall go out first against the Canaanites? Good stuff. The last story will involve at its center another meeting of the all-tribal assembly. They too, at one stage, got together before God and inquired, who shall go out for, for us first to battle? Oh, but notice the next thing. Not against the Canaanites, but against the Benjaminites. That's sad, isn't it? Very necessary. The Benjamites had been guilty of such gross immorality, as even the Canaanites very often weren't guilty. Like the dear believers in one Corinthians five, one man there had his father's wife and committed such a scandalous bit of immorality that even the unconverted Greeks would have been shocked at it. And Paul called on the church to discipline that man. Necessary, necessary here. Oh, what a sad thing when the forces of the people of God, instead of being going against the enemy, have to be drawn up against one of the tribes. Things have gone downhill, don't you think? Look at this one here. The second introduction, this was one, uh, uh, uh, after the death of Joshua. This is the third generation after Joshua, and it's the story of Israel's recurrent lapses into and rescues from idolatry. And they were, uh, uh, you know, from time to time, they fell into idolatry. Then under God's chastening, they repented and were saved and delivered. Intermittent idolatry, you might call it. Recurrent. But when you come to this first epilogue here, isn't the question of intermittent idolatry, the question of institutionalizing idolatry. So old Micah made an idol, put it in his house of gods, if you please, and got a passing Levite who was looking for a bigger wage, uh, to be his priest. And I said, now I'm well set up now, ooh, tremendous. I got a Levite to my priest. Ooh. Well, obviously the man and his mother had completely lost any notion of what Exodus and the Ten Commandments were about. Worse than that, presently the Danites came by, the Danites or what you call them. They hadn't been content with their little bit of territory in the south. They were determined to go up north and conquer a bigger bit of inheritance, so they went right up to the north, came across a Canaanite city called Laish. There's a picture here of the main gate of that city, recent, not so long ago, twenty years ago, discovered. They conquered that city and established in it, what do you suppose? Idolatry. Set up an idolatrous shrine, and if you please, Moses's grandson and his sons, uh, thereafter served as priests in the day-night system of institutionalized idolatry. It's enough to take a breath away, isn't it, Bob? How could, goodness me, some hot and tot, but Moses' grandson... going as a priest, installed in the institutionalized idolatry up in Dan. Became a very serious weakness among the Ten Tribes, center of idolatry for centuries. When Jeroboam came to the throne, he established his high place in, um, Dan. Used to be called Laish, was then after called Dan. And Ahab, in his idolatry, he enlarged that high place. It became a sin from which Israel never recovered. Now, if you go on your tours to Israel and they let you go up that far north, it's getting pretty dangerous near the border, of course, but if they let you go up that far, well, have a go. It'll burn into your heart a bit more than some of the pseudo-Christian relics. For there they have encouraged, uh, uncovered the high place. What a sad thing it is to stand there and look at it. Institutionalized idolatry among the so-called people of God. Mm. That's serious, isn't it? Earlier tradition. But let that be gone by. Danger was that the third generation, not nearly really knowing God in a practical way, would be tempted by the worldliness of the Canaanites. Happens, doesn't it? I have every temp- uh, sympathy with parents who long to keep their children, but their children are overwhelmed with worldly interests and worldly pursuits and worldly entertain- uh, entertainments. And so to keep them, the church is persuaded to bring worldliness into the church. To keep them for what? When they departed, God kept his promise, as the Lord had spoken, as the Lord had sworn to them. And the keeping of the promise meant that he disciplined them. You'll see the covenant says, I refer to it again, the covenant that we celebrate at the Lord's Supper each Sunday. If we confess our sins, if we judge ourselves, we shall not be judged. What happens if we grow careless and we don't judge ourselves and become worldly. Well, the covenant stands, doesn't it? If we don't judge ourselves. We shall be judged. Judged in the sense that we are chastened of the Lord, so that we be not condemned with the world. He keeps his covenant. And if he sees me giving way, going with the world, and I am a believer, covenant stands. He will use every means he has at his disposal, eventually to bring us back. Yes? That's not God being cruel. That's God being faithful. God's mercy. When they cried, he raised up great deliverers. And then God's providential turning of evil to good. By not driving out the nations all at once, but leaving them in order to prove Israel whether they were genuine in faith and obedient. By leaving the nations in canyons so the younger generation of Israelites might learn to fight. Oh, how nice of God. So there's the eighteen fifty de- uh, revival. They didn't destroy all the enemies. There's some left for me to have a go at. I'm glad of that, aren't you? You imagine getting home to heaven and say, well, I didn't have to fight. Uh, they all fought the battles before me, and so that's that finished. What, must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease while others fought to win the prize and sail through bloody seas? Yes, I must fight if I'm a I will reign. Increase my courage, Lord. So much then for the introduction. In our next session, God willing, we must get down to the marrow of the Book of Judges. Shall we pray? Right.