Gooding, David: 5 - Leading God's Nation

Once more, welcome, gentlemen, to this, uh, further study of the book of Judges. The Honourable Member for Waterford has not yet arrived, and it was my original intention to deal with the questions that he announced he had on our last session, uh, so that we might deal with them thoroughly. We'll reverse the procedures and start with Judges, therefore, and, uh, deal with his questions, eh, in the final session. That is to say, we shall, if he arrives, do see. But now let's, uh, uh, just recap what we were finding the last time, uh, in the, uh, uh, book of Judges, and then proceed with the further study today. We looked, of course, at the, um... contents. Oh. Curious. This computer thing here perverts the word of God. Yes, yes, he's no better than I am, you see. There you have it. Yeah. Dear me. This will have to move that a bit in, I suppose. Yes, that's right. Good stuff. We began last time by looking at the contents of the book of Judges. We noticed that there are two introductions, two formal introductions. There are two formal epilogues. Then we looked at the central portion of the book. It is given over to the major judges. Though the book mentions there were also minor judges, but very little space is given to them in the book, and we shall not concern ourselves with them. Our purpose is to deal with as many of the major judges as we can, though we shall not have time to get over them all. We noticed first the meaning of the term, translated judges, because yes, they did judge Israel in the sense that they were moral and spiritual reformers. So they applied God's words and commandments to the nation and brought them to repentance, and then delivered them from the enemy to whom God had handed them over because of their disobedience. So the judges were also military leaders, as well as being judges in our modern sense of the term. Even our modern sense of judge deal- who deals with, uh, uh, offenses against the law in law courts, our modern s- term judge is not really sufficient. As I say, the better title would be a reformer, perhaps. Who brought the people back to the word of God. But thereafter, he was a judge in the sense that he ruled the people, uh, governed them by keeping them in step with God's revealed word. The judges, therefore. Uh, we notice certain things about them and their activities. What I wish to concentrate on in these studies, therefore, are four things. One, to notice where the people went wrong. And because of their wrongdoing, God handed them over to be, uh, defeated and ruled by their enemies. Now, we're not told every time the details of where they went wrong. Sometimes we merely have the, uh, broad statement Israel did that was, was evil in the sight of the Lord once more and again. Sometimes we're given a more detailed account of where they went wrong. Where that happens, we shall investigate it. Two, we shall think of the individual deliverers and ask what were their qualifications for becoming deliverer. How was it that God was able to use them in particular? How were their qualifications suited to the particular need of the occasion? Thirdly, we shall, we look at the nature of the enemy. For the enemy was different on each occasion. Granted, there were confederacies of various tribes amongst Israel's enemies, but even then you will find there is one leading tribe, one leading nation that came against them. And we are trying to observe what the characteristics of the enemy were. You may remember that we discussed whether it is legitimate to try and characterize the enemy. The older commentators will tell you that this enemy here represents the world, and this one other he represents the flesh, and the other one, uh, represents the devil or something. And people objected to that. To say that the Moabites represent this is to stereotype the nation, or even to a- a- to engage in fanciful allegorization or something of the sort, something wicked anyway. And I will point out to you that Englishmen as a whole can be regarded as something undesirable, but not all Englishmen are the same, do you see? You can't tar every Englishman with the same brush. Mm. On the other hand, we then reminded ourselves of what is called culture. The very people who would sometimes criticize any attempt to characterize these different nations and say that's bad, that's stereotyping, would exhort would-be missionaries going out to a foreign land that they must study the culture of the people to which they go and be sensitive to the culture. Where the culture is good and healthy, they must try to adapt to it. Like Paul says in First Corinthians, to the Greeks I became a Greek, and to the Jew I was a Jew. Anything so that I might gain the more. But of course, some features of culture are bad. I won't list all the bad features of Irish culture because I, we haven't got the time today, you see. But, uh, uh, some features are bad, and there, of course, a missionary will not, uh, bow down to and copy what is bad. The ancient nations were no exception to this rule. They had developed their cultures. Their basic, uh, uh, uh, DNA and all the rest of it, plus their history, plus the climate, and so forth and so on. They had their different cultures. The culture was not always bad, of course, but there were bad things about the different cultures, so that in the book of Judges we look to see the nature of the culture of each individual enemy that God allowed to overcome the people of Israel from time to time. And the fourth thing that we are looking for in these stories is the tactics used by the military commanders to deal with the enemy. It is these features that I want to emphasize. I say it again, we shall not cover all the judges, we haven't got the time. What I want to get across, if I can, is this important thing, learning how to reconnoiter the enemy, to judge what the enemy is, and then to observe the qualifications necessary to deal with the enemy, if we are to be ourselves deliverers, if you like, amongst the people of God. And then to observe the tactics, for they differ every time in the book of Judges. So that we can show that the tactics that were used were the best that could be used on that occasion. And that will invite, uh, uh, involve us on on some occasions at least, in observing that some of the tactics were used were desperately wrong. Some other things in general that we noticed, let's just repeat them now to get them well into our heads and hearts. That the second introduction to the book makes the following observation. The Israelites would do that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. The Lord eventually delivers them into the hands of the enemy. The enemy oppresses them. They cry to the Lord. He raises up a deliverer who delivers them from the enemy. Bring them to repentance and back to obedience to God. Then all goes well as long as the judge lives. When he dies, eventually the people do that which was wrong in the eyes of the Lord all over again. And all over again, the Lord delivers them into the hands of their enemies. And then they cry to the Lord, and he raises up a deliverer and delivers them. So it goes round in circles. But the second introduction makes the other serious point, that the wheel not only went round, every time it went round, it got worse than it was before. The second introduction tells you that. This is not something that I have concocted in my own mind. And this particular sheet of notes is arranged so as to make us aware of that feature. The first deliverer was Othniel's success and his qualifications to be a deliverer from that particular enemy, secret of his success was his wife, of course. She must have been, uh, sizably beautiful, I suppose, because to get her, Othniel was prepared to face, I don't know how many giants and overcome them. And along with the wife, he got a whacking lot of inheritance from his father-in-law, Caleb. It was his wife also that subsequently urged him to seek even more inheritance. He was the man whom God chose to deliver the people from the captivity they had got into because of their intermarriage with the wrong type of women. Then we notice the last judge, Samson. Yes, he did some exploits. And the Holy Spirit himself in Hebrews eleven tells us that Samson was a man of faith. But he never delivered the people from the Philistines. And he died, blinded. And when he died, the people were still under the Philistines as they had been before. And the secret of his failure... was his wives, if that's the right term to use of the young, of the various ladies with whom he consorted. So in Samson's case, the very deliverer himself, Samson, was guilty of the very sin from which the people in Othniel's day had to be delivered. They got into trouble because of their intermarriage with the heathen women. Had to be delivered by a deliverer. Samson, if you please, was guilty of that same sin. And never did get delivered. The wheel has not merely gone round, it's gone one worse. We find the same thing with Ehud. Among the tactics he used for overcoming the Moabites was to take the fords of Jordan, and as the Moabites tried to escape back to their own country and tried to cross the fords, he picked them off one by one, so to speak. And thus killed the enemy at the fords. His opposite number in the story is Jephthah. He He like likewise used the same tactics, took the Fords of Jordan, and killed those who wanted to come across. Unfortunately, the people that he killed at the Fords were not the enemy, but his brothers, his brethren. Things have gone a little bit awry, haven't they? When people can't distinguish their own brethren from the enemy and start slaughtering the brethren. We notice the same principle at work. The case of Deborah, Barak, and Jael, who fought the Canaanites. We notice the similarity. In fighting against the Canaanites, it was a woman who dispatched the commander of the enemy forces. His name was Sisera. In the panic of defeat, he ran away and came to the tent of a certain jail, who had no option but to receive him into her, her tent. He was wanting to, uh, hide from the, uh, Israelite forces that were attacking. She served him, uh, with a, a nice bowl of porridge or something, put him to sleep in the inner part of the tent, and when he was asleep, took a tent peg and put it through his brain. There's a woman who killed the enemy commander. In the story that stands opposite, it was likewise a woman who killed the commander of the opposing forces. She did it not with a tent peg. She heaved a millstone over the walls, and it happened to fall on his skull and crushed it. The sad thing was that the man whose skull she crushed and then put thus put an end to all his nonsense was, well, he was meant to be. He is, uh, meant to be the deliverer, but alas, he was an Israelite. He stands in the place of a judge, a military commander, but instead of delivering God's people, the very deliverer, so to speak, now you'd have to put the word in inverted commas, turns out to be a veritable diotrephes. Who crushed the people of God under his tyranny. Gideon is the centerpiece. I hope we shall get as far as Gideon today, at least. We shall find that the first part of his career is marked by brilliant success. And by the use of godly tactics taught by God. But the second part of his career is marked by failure, the beginnings of a very slippery slope downhill. That's enough then to show that the, uh, stories... are very deliberately, carefully written, selected and written, which will encourage us to take them seriously in their detail, and think about the first, uh, the, the four things that I have mentioned. Point at which the people went wrong. The The qualif- qualifications of the deliverer, to be chosen of God, to deliver the people. The nature of the enemy. And the tactics that the deliverer used. The other general principle that we noticed on our last occasion, but I repeat it now because it is of some importance. And that is that each Each captivity captivity. involves a denial of first principles. The first captivity was to the king of Mesopotamia. At that time, exercised his, uh, authority in the northern part of Mesopotamia. It was from Mesopotamia that That Abraham Abraham ca- came out. Having come from Ur of Chaldees with his father Terah, he lived in Haran, in northern Mesopotamia for a while, and from there he came into the land of promise and lived there the rest of his life, apart from his going down to Egypt temporarily. And though he himself never came into possession of any of the land, except the bit of ground he he bought to bury his wife Sarah. Yet he dwelt there as an act of faith, for this was the land that God promised to him and to his seed. God set the timetable of when his seed would eventually come in actually to possess the land. And now, under Joshua, they came in. But what's the point of being in the land given to Abram when he left Mesopotamia, if you fall under the, uh, tyranny of the king of Mesopotamia? Curious, isn't it? When under Joshua, Israel came into the land, the first big city that stood in the way of their conquest was Jericho. They took Jericho. God did a miracle to bring the old walls of Jericho down. And the city was placed under a curse, Harem, anathema in Greek. It was to be destroyed and never built again. From Jericho, with Jericho destroyed, Israel went on bit by bit to destroy all the kings of Canaan, north and south, and then to begin to take over their individual inheritances. And here comes Moab, crosses the Jordan, takes Jericho, not necessarily the exact same spot, but that's the, the place that we call Jericho. They called it the city of the palm trees and obviously built up the city of the palm trees, and there they lived. What is the good of going on forward to conquer all the rest of the land if the enemy is coming in behind and retaking what you thought you had conquered. The third captivity... brought Israel under the tyranny of Jabin, king of the Canaanites. And the text says that the Canaanites mightily oppressed the children of Israel for I don't know how many years, mightily oppressed them. But that's what Pharaoh did when they were in Egypt. What is the use of being out of Egypt and out of that oppression, and now in the Promised Land, if through your sin you've fallen under an equally bad oppression? The fourth captivity. Israel were now, of course, in the land of Canaan. The land that had been promised to Abram and their fathers. A land, as Moses described it, flowing with milk and honey. Yeah. Marvelous after forty years and more in the wilderness, to be in a land of luscious green grass and cows and flowers and bees and honey and all the rest of it. Marvelous. Land flowing with milk and honey, except at this particular stage, because of Israel's, uh, sin and disobedience to God. God allowed the Midianites to come up. They came on camels. They were what are called nomads. They came up like locusts, for like the sand of the seashore for numbers. They waited till near harvest time, you see, and when the crops were ripe, just as the Israelites were going to put it in their mouth, here come the Midianites and, uh, swept the whole harvest away, took it. And so began to starve Israel out. And you can see the point of the question, can't you? What is the point of being in a land flowing with milk and honey if the enemy is starving you out and you can't eat, find the benefits of it? Mm. Well, I needn't go on further because of time's sake. But we shall find, and it's a thing to be looked for, as we go through these various captivities, how each captivity denies a first basic principle. Now, on our last occasion, when we considered the, uh, captivity to the king of Mesopotamia. We diagnose the enemy. As being one feature of what the New Testament would call worldliness. King of Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia being the place where Abraham first came out into the Promised Land. We're told in Acts chapter seven by Stephen what it was that brought Abram out from his original country, Ur of Chaldees. What brought him out from those cities where the culture was idolatrous? It was that the God of glory appeared to him. It wasn't simply these people are bad, so get out. They had a flourishing civilization, in many respects beautiful. But it was a civilization and a culture built on idolatry. That is an idolatrous interpretation of the universe. The deification of the forces of nature. The storm god, the wind god, the god of sex, the god of anything you like. Deifying the forces of nature and man's own psychological forces. A very modern topic, gentlemen. What brought him out was a vision of the glory of the true God. Notice the positive side. And Abram saw the surpassing glory of the real God and came out and began his life of pilgrimage. And with the vi- vision came the promise of an inheritance, of course. What causes Israel's, uh, uh, uh, um, fall and then captivity? We're told under the simple story that God had warned, uh, through Joshua that once in the land, they were not to intermarry with heathen. For if they allowed their love to get entangled with heathen women and with the heathen culture, it would inevitably draw them away from the worship of the true God and lead to a divided heart, and eventually disloyalty to God himself. Cause of Israel's downfall, therefore, were false loves, false gods, misdirected desires and energies. If false love was the cause of the downfall, true love was a secret of Othniel's success and qualifications. And that led us to notice the advice of John in his first letter. Love not the world. You will know, gentlemen, and I mustn't stop to expound it, but in John's first letter he deals with three aspects of the world. The first is the one here, love of the world, the world's attractiveness. Don't love it. You have to use it. Don't love it. All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life is not of the Father. Don't love it, says John. And if you inquire, John, why shouldn't I love it? He'll say, well, love it if you have to, but you'll find this, that the world is passing away, and all the love you spend on it you'll lose. Go down the drain, for the world is passing away. Don't love it. He also deals with the hostility of the world. That's another side of the world. Don't be surprised if the world hates you. He deals with the third aspect of the world. The world as a weight. A pressure that makes it difficult for the, for the believer to live according to the commands of God. Here it is not a question of the world's persecution, it's just the way the world is organized. And it's organized in such a way that presently you may discover that living and keeping the commandments of the Lord, well, the world makes it, simply makes it difficult for the way it's arranged. We'll take, say, Eastern Europe, where what we would call the civil service is corrupt all its way through. Should you give in to the bribery? When it amounts to thousands of pounds if you pay it. Doesn't make life easy, of course. Anyway, I mustn't sermonize there. Three aspects of, uh, worldliness in John's first epistle. This is the first of them that we're dealing with here. Uh, Josie. Don't love the world. And Peter takes up the same notion, the connection between our inheritance and our desires. And our loves. We've been begotten again unto an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. And we're on our journey towards that inheritance. First Peter chapter one. Watch your desires, therefore, says Peter. Be not conformed to the former desires in your ignorance. Desire, gentlemen, is a very strong thing in human life, isn't it? And what you pet let, uh, your desires focus on, you will find that has an exceedingly strong pull. It's like the old heat-seeking device in, um, missiles, you know. Of course, they're old-fashioned now, but they used to be. You fire, you saw a, a, a German plane coming across, you got your pea shooter thing out and, uh, aimed at this, uh, I don't know what you call them, missile or something. And the old, uh, German pilot would put his plane into all sorts of twists and turns and ups and downs, all to no avail, because this missile thing had a heat-seeking whatnoter in it somehow, that wherever the old engine of the German plane went, uh, the heat-seeking missile would seek it out, you see, pulled it in that direction. Watch your desires, says Peter. Because those desires will pull you. If you set your hope firmly on the grace that is to be brought to you, if you set your desires no longer according to ignorance, but on the glorious inheritance ahead, it will pull you there. If you set your desires on less things, and then on bad things, it will pull you. And of course, I have no, I, I, I have no qualifications to start talking to you, gentlemen. But on this matter of, um, hm, uh, Othniel and his wife and things, you'll say, huh. You see the illustration, don't you? The point, the example. This isn't make-believe or allegorizing. The heathen women pull the Israelites in one direction. Say what you like. Axar, he pulled old Othniel in the other direction. Uh, so you see, and you notice Peter's remark, two Peter one three. He called us... It's doubtful whether you should translate the next phrase, to his glory. He called us by his own glory and virtue. So says Peter, talking about the Lord Jesus. If you listen to John, he will tell you similarly, the Word was made flesh and tabernacle among us, and we, we saw his glory. You You will. would deliver people from worldliness, gentlemen, you'll first have to see the glory of God yourself. And pray God his help to help you s- others to see the glory of God. So we said that was worldliness. And then we moved on last time to talk about the Merbites. And decided from what descriptions we could find of Merbites, that here it was not a question of worldliness, but of carnality. Lot was a righteous man. So says two Peter two. Began the pilgrimage of faith with Abram. But his final years were marked by what the New Testament would call the flesh. Moab, the first Moab, was both the son and the grandson of Lot simultaneously. And you'll remember the sad, sad story of Lot, who set out with Abram and looked for the city that hath the foundations whose builder and maker is God, and ended up living like a caveman and behaving like one. Balaam taught the king of Moab to tempt Israel into eating things sacrificed to idols and to committing fornication. It is that to which the Lord himself calls attention and warns the church. Revelation two fourteen. It's that to which Paul calls attention in one Corinthians ten. If you look forward into the prophets, Jeremiah issues God's analysis of Moab, has been at ease from his youth. It has developed in him pride, arrogance, haughtiness, wrath. Been at ease from his youth. Self-indulgence. And the king of Moab in the time of the judges. He was in his summer house. Well, it gets hot down in Jericho, of course, but in the spring it can be very beautiful. Had a nice summer house, and he called it the City of the Palm Trees. Mm. Photographs of it would have, uh, of, uh, decorated any decent travel agent brochure, wouldn't they? What a beautiful. And he was, there he was in his, in his old chair when Ehud went in, and he was very fat. Managed a bit to stand up, and uh, Ehud put a dagger through his belly. That was his strong point, of course. Mm-hmm. I don't have to say more to characterize the man, do I? We came to the conclusion last time that Moab represents the flesh. There are, of course, two sides to the flesh, but that's another long story. There's the flesh in the sense of giving in to carnality. There's the other side to the flesh, exhibited by Saul of Tarsus in his unconverted days. He wasn't a self-indulgent, dissipated rake, exceedingly religious. But his religion was built on the flesh in the sense of man's independence of God, trusting in man's own efforts. But we leave that, we must push on, because we come now to the third captivity. And our job to, um, now to... reconnoiter the enemy. First of all, Joshua chapter eleven. uh At Israel's entry into the land, led by the living God, as Deborah herself remarks in her song o- of triumph over the Canaanites. Jabin the First had led a great confederacy of kings against Joshua to thwart the purpose of God, which was to establish Israel in the land. There had been a southern confederacy of kings. Jabin led the northern Northern Confederacy. confederacy. Joshua conquered that northern confederacy, executed their kings. But by the time of Judges, there had been a revival of Canaanite power. And we're told that when Israel sinned and God delivered them over into the hands of the Canaanites, Jabin II mightily oppresses Israel. And from Deborah's song in chapter five, we learn how that the oppression by the Canaanites fragmented the nation of Israel. So that there was little in- intercourse between the tribes. The people were leaderless and unarmed. They had few shields for defense and few spears for attack. You would try, you should try to imagine the scene, gentlemen. Israel didn't have a king. God was their king. They had a central tabernacle. But apart from that, they were individual tribes in their different areas, ruled by elders. Sometimes, when one or other tribe was oppressed by the enemy, a judge might get two or three of the tribes to join together. These captivities did not necessarily involve the whole nation of Israel at any one time. So it was here. But in her song, Deborah laments the fact that when this great crisis, crisis took place, some of the tribes preferred not to know about it, and remained in their own business instead of rallying to the cause of the oppressed. I don't know, gentlemen, if you have been to Israel. If you have been to Israel, your enthusiastic guides will have taken you to places like, uh, Megiddo. Anybody here been to Megiddo, admits being to Megiddo? One taker here. You've been to Megi- no, you haven't been to Megiddo? Haven't been to Megiddo. Well, you can get to heaven without, uh, visiting Megiddo, that is certain. Uh, but, uh, if you were ever in that locality, and I don't know whether you're allowed to go these days to that particular part. Anyway, never mind. Megiddo. Or Hazor. Anybody been to Hazor? No? No? No? No? No? Oh, I see. Well, no, fancy that. Eh, uh. Anybody been to the pool of, uh, of Gibeon? No? No, no? Oh, I see. Well, no. Yeah. Pool of Gibeon is towards the south, of course, eh, north of Jerusalem anyway. But it's the place where, you may remember, I won't ask whether you do remember or not, that might be a little embarrassing, but uh, uh, remember, according to the book of uh, Second Samuel, that David's soldiers under the command of Joab and the Israelite soldiers under the command of Abner, one fine morning, uh, encountered each other, and they sat down, being a polite affair, like the Battle of the Boyne was, you know, you didn't just rush in and you organized it. When shall we meet to fight each other? And your heralds went between the two. Would uh ten o'clock be too early for you, sir, to come out? I mean, you have to have your breakfast. Well, half past ten? Uh, though you did it in a very gentlemanly fashion. And so these, uh, two commanders and their troops sat down each side of the pool, but it wasn't a pool, actually, that's the translation, you'll see. And then, uh, one of them said to the other, well, now let the young men rise and play before us. War games, you know. And so the young men arose, and they each caught his fellow by the beard and put the sword to his stomach. Wasn't it fun? Sandhurst and all that, you know. Yeah, war games. Anyway, let's get back to the point. The pool of Gibeon, if you should see it, is is a thing like Megiddo and like Hazor. It's Canaanite. And how in those days they managed to do it, who knows? You'll say if your, if your, uh, city, a little village or city, as they call them, was on a hill, like they tended to be for safety's sake, then if an attacking enemy came and your city was there and you had walls around your city, very nice, but he got your water supply. Mm-hmm. And you, you couldn't get any water. Well, then you died, didn't you? So to overcome that problem, the Canaanites, with a city like that, like Megiddo, for instance, on a hill, would of course have a wall around the city, but inside the city they would dig out a big shaft, circular shaft, down into the ground, deep enough to come under the walls eventually. So it went down, uh, lower than the walls, and then they built a tunnel from the bottom of the shaft under the walls and down to the water supply. And they built a, a, a, a staircase going on the inside of the shaft, all the way around the shaft, steps down, so that, uh, in time of siege, the women, that's they who drew the water, could walk down with their, with their pots, you see, down the stairs all the way around the inside of the shaft, right down, and then down under the walls through the tunnel, down to the water supply. And of course, when the siege was drawing near, they took the precaution of, uh, hiding the water supply, disguising the source, you see, so the enemy couldn't find where the water was, you see. And the women could fill their, their pots and pans and then bring them up round the circle. How they managed to cut out the shaft at, uh, at, uh, at, uh, Gibeon would be bigger than this room. How they managed to go cut it down through the rock in those far off days of civil engineering was a tremendous, of course. And Megiddo is like it. The one at the Gibeon, if you come from the outside, you'll have to pay a young Arab or something, a few dollars to, to show you where it is, and he'll take you to it. And when you come to the outside, uh, where the water used to be and look up, the roof is corbelled. It's a beautiful thing. And the stairway going up. So past masters at, at civil engineering in their day. The whatnoter, uh, down in Megiddo, you go down to the bottom and they go along the shaft that's about thirty or more meters long. They weren't Moabites, gentlemen, sitting around with a mighty great paunch, self-indulgent. They had, uh, nine hundred or six hundred chariots of iron, if you please. They'd learned how to smelt iron and make chariots. The Birmingham of this world, if you see what I mean. Rover and all that in the days when Britain used to make cars. Canaanites also, in subsequent centuries at least, became merchants, so much so that eventually the word Canaan comes to be a word for merchantman. There shall no more be a Canaanite in the house of the Lord. It's possible it means there shall no more be a merchantman in the house of the Lord. And now you will notice that whereas the king of Moab was killed through his belly, which was a strong point if you see the, or his weak point, whichever way you look at it. The commander in f- of the forces of Jabin, king of Canaan, was killed through his brain. You'd need to have a brain, wouldn't you? To engage in such activities, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and this, that, and other. And it raises the question, is there anything wrong in having a brain? Anybody here admit to having a brain? Is intellect a very dangerous thing when it comes to the church? I was brought up in a world where sometimes dear evangelicals thought that intellectual, being intellectual and thinking was a very dangerous, if not a bad thing, and going to university was next door to suicide. We have to think about that, can't we? Can, um, can, uh, an intellect be an enemy to the things of God, or not, or how? But for such a big task, we'll need, uh, fortification, can't we? So let's break off now and have our morning coffee.