Gooding, David: 1 - Leading God's Nation

This day, and God willing, a fortnight today, together give us eight sessions to occupy ourselves with the book of Judges. So let's begin our study by reading from the Epistle to the Hebrews. And we shall read there from chapter eleven. beginning at verse 32. And what shall I s- say more? For the time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, and of David and Samuel and the prophets, who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouth 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. Verse thirty nine, of these all, having had witness borne to them through their faith, sorry, 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 the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our 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. And then a verse from the first epistle of Paul to Timothy. First Timothy, chapter one and verse eighteen. This charge I commit to thee, my child Timothy, according to the prophecies which went before on thee, that by them thou mayest war the good warfare. The book of Judges, gentlemen, was written some three thousand years ago. For all that, it is the record of some of the heroes of the faith, which still have power to stir us and to challenge us in our modern world. It is on those military leaders that I shall be concentrating on these two occasions. But so that we can put their stories into their historical, uh, context and restrain ourselves thereby from fanciful interpretations, let's consider, first of all, the contents of the book as we find it in the Old Testament. The book is of a very simple construction. It has two introductions, then it has the records of the judges, and then at the end it has two epilogues. The first chapter of the book puts us conveniently into the right historical context. Judges begins with the second phase of the conquest of Canaan. You will see that in its opening words, Judges one one, and it came to pass after the death of Joshua that the children of Israel asked of the Lord, saying, who shall go up for us first against the Canaanites to fight against them? And the Lord said, Judah shall go up, behold, I have delivered the land into his hand. This then is the beginning of the second phase of the conquest of Canaan. That conquest was in two phases. The first phase was led by Joshua as commander in chief of all the twelve tribes of Israel. During that first phase, the armies of Israel had to proceed as one whole army. For Joshua's objective was to defeat the kings of Canaan. There were a whole lot of kings, each with his city, his fortified city, and the villages around that city. And Joshua aimed to defeat them one by one, or as when they came against him in certain confederacies of kings. Systematically, he went round the country, defeating the kings and taking their cities. So Joshua broke the backbone of the opposition. You will see from the record in Joshua, that when Joshua attacked a city and defeated its king, he then moved on to the next city. None of the tribes was allowed then to peel off and settle down. When they took Jericho and Ai and various of the other cities, no tribe was allowed to say, well, thank you, Joshua, now we would be content to stay here and develop this part of the land. If Joshua had allowed the individual tribes to settle down, there would come a point when his army was so weakened that the Confederate kings of Canaan would easily have defeated him. It was of major one importance, therefore, that the army stayed together and defeated the kings, took their cities and proceeded, but didn't try to settle down at that stage. We should also notice in passing that when it says that Joc- Joshua took various cities, it didn't mean that he always destroyed them. Jericho was destroyed, and Ai was burned, but they weren't all destroyed. Nor did they necessarily destroy all the inhabitants of every city, or the inhabitants of the surrounding villages. The main aim was to break the back of the opposition and of the kings. And when you come to chapters eleven and twelve of Joshua, you will find a list of all the kings and the cities that Joshua took, defeated, and the kings executed. It was when that first phase was completed, that the various tribes were then allowed to peel off and go and enter into the area and into the cities that fell to them by lot. That is the point, of course, of the opening marks of the book of Joshua- Ju- Judges. It came to pass after the death of Joshua that the children of Israel asked of the Lord, saying, who shall go up for us first against the Canaanites to fight against them? And the Lord said, Judah. It wasn't, of course, a, a, a an altogether safe thing. It had to be done with great care, that the solid army should now begin to peel off and go in different directions. For whereas Joshua had, uh, uh, taken many cities, he had then moved on. And after he moved on, survivors would come back into those cities, as you will see from the opening chapters of, uh, Judges. So that though all the kings had been, uh, uh, destroyed and their cities in that sense taken, when the individual tribes came to go into their particular part of the inheritance, they would frequently find Canaanites had come back into the cities or into the countryside, and therefore each individual tribe had to fight against the Canaanites that they found, uh, still in, uh, possession of their particular part of the land. So they inquired of the Lord, did the Israelites, who should be the first tribe to go off into its own particular part of the inheritance and face the Canaanites that would have come back, uh, into that part. And the Lord said, Judah. And the rest of chapter one is the story of the various tribes and how they fared as each tribe went off into the different parts of the land that had been given to them. Sometimes two or more tribes would go together, but by definition it was very much an individual thing, as they now went, each tried to claim and settle down on its allotted inheritance. Some were very successful. Some were not so successful. Some were not so successful because they found the opposition too hard, and for the moment they couldn't cast them out. And some were not so successful because they just didn't cast them out and preferred to compromise with them, which became the source of endless trouble in the succeeding years. When they had all settled down, then things went generally well throughout the period when the elders that had grown up with Joshua still survived. So we are told in chapter two onwards. And when their sons, uh, were still surviving. But from the third generation onward, things started to go wrong. For the third generation had grown up, they never knew Joshua, so says the text, and scarcely knew the men that had succeeded him. To them, the famous battles, the conquests, the acts of heroism that had marked the first and then the second phase of the conquest were past history. They hadn't shared, so to speak, in the faith of their forefathers. They had been, certainly they didn't remember the wil- the desert years like Joshua and Caleb did. They had been brought up in comparatively easy circumstances. Each in his own father's farm, so to speak. And therefore they didn't, uh, see why it was necessary to carry out the commands of the Lord through Moses. And they began to slide. They began, for instance, to marry the local girls, and found eventually that it did what Moses had warned them it would do. It would compromise their faith in the one true God. As in deference to their wives, they allowed their wives to practice their pagan religions, and then joined in themselves in those pagan rituals. And so they departed from the Lord. And the Lord allowed them to reap the consequences of it. Eventually, the nations with whom they had compromised overcame them and subdued them, so that although they were in the Promised Land, they weren't all that better off than they were when they had been in Egypt. They were now subjects to these foreign tyrants. Then it is told us that when they were in sore distress, they cried to the Lord, and he raised them up deliverers. So let me pause here to point out that the term judge, as used in the book of Judges, doesn't mean exactly what it means in modern English. These judges were not, first and foremost, men who sat in a law court, though they did some of that kind of work. They were men whom God raised up. They judged Israel in the sense that they exposed the sinfulness of the people, their evil practices, their compromisings with the world, and brought the people to repentance on that score. Judges in that sense. But in addition, they also were, or tended to be, military commanders. Who didn't simply bewail and wring their hands over the worldly state of their fellow Israelites and their bondages and their evil practices and simply bemoan it. They rose up, led by God and empowered by God, to lead the nation or to lead their tribes, to fight the enemy, and brought victory and deliverance and restoration. Now, it is at this level, of course, that we shall find the history in Judges relevant to us. For this is a pattern that has repeated itself all down the ages. A great work of God, as it was when Joshua brought the Israelites into Canaan. Tremendous enjoyment of the inheritance, uh, given of God. And this lasting for a generation or two. But presently, a third and fourth generation come along, who never knew those great exploits, weren't part of the great exercise of faith, never fought those battles, got everything, so to speak, given them on a plate. And that generation, because they didn't, uh, come themselves to be part of the movement of faith, become progressively more worldly and don't see why you shouldn't compromise with the world, and so forth and so on. It's not for an Englishman to apply the lesson too closely to Ulster, of course not. I would never dream of doing that. But when I first came to live in this province, in the year of grace nineteen fifty nine, it interested me much that various visiting preachers would sometimes ask all those in the congregation who were converted under W. P. Nicholson to raise their hands, and a whole forest of hands would go up. And all sorts of tales I was told of the tremendous revival that had taken place throughout Ulster under the pre- pre- preaching of W. P. Nicholson. Uh, the men from the shipyard would coo up straight from work without going home, with their little boxes in which they had their lunch, and they coo up in their working clothes outside the churches where he was to preach, because if they went home to get a meal, they never would have got a seat when they came back again. I also met some, and they were very elderly, whose grandparents had been involved in the eighteen fifty nine revival and could tell remarkable stories about that great revival. There has grown up a generation or two that knew not Joseph, that knew not Joshua, nor the elders that came after them. And there is always a tendency in those generations, not simply to question what was not biblical in their grandfathers and fathers' day and put that right according to scripture, but a lack of faith and an increasing worldliness. The book of Judges therefore speaks to us in our day and points out that we don't have to sit still and wring our hands and bewail and bemoan it. We could seek grace of God that in his mercy he might bring us to a time when he could even use us to restore God's people, to enthuse them about the glories of their spiritual inheritance in Christ, so that they won't want to compromise with the world anyway, and so forth and so on. Meanwhile, there is what to my mind is a very encouraging and comforting statement. Let's look, if you will, to Joshua, uh, Judges chapter three. or chapter two. Uh, we can, uh, start reading in verse eighteen of Judges two. 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 reason 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, they ceased not from their doings nor from their stubborn way. Now notice in those verses a cycle. Because we shall find it in the actual history as we proceed. Their people... uh, disobey God, disobey their judges, go a-hauling after other gods, and so forth and so on. And pay no heed to the commandments of the Lord. Then they cry to the Lord, and he raises them up before the judge and saves them out of the hand of their enemies. And all goes well while the judge still lives. But then, when the judge was dead, they not only repeat the cycle and disobey the Lord again, but with every turn of that wheel, they go worse than they did before. When in a moment we come to look at the book itself, we shall see how that true that is of the picture that the book as a whole paints. Because of that, verse twenty says, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he said, because this nation have transgressed my covenant which I commanded their fathers and have not hearkened unto my voice, I also will not henceforth drive out any from before them of the nations which Joshua left when he died, that by them I may prove Israel, whether they will keep the way of the Lord to walk therein as their fathers did keep it or not. So the Lord left those nations without driving them out hastily, neither delivered he them into the hand of Joshua. And this bids us think of God's foresight. He saw what would happen, and therefore he always left some of the enemies, even from the time of Joshua onwards, that they might set a test, so to speak, to the subsequent generations. Gentlemen, God can't introduce us to paradise too quickly. By the time he gets us to heaven, we shan't want to compromise with the world. There won't be any in heaven that say, well, this is rather boring and old fashioned. I mean, we're doing this a thousand years ago up here, and we're doing the singing the same hymns as we were before. I mean to say, and heaven is okay, but always heaven. I mean, there's something to be more balanced in life than to always have nothing but heaven. Yes. There will be nobody in heaven that eventually turns round and says, well, if I'd have known it was going to be like this, I wouldn't have come. We need to fight, gentlemen. We need to be faced with evil and to have to face it and to learn to fight it. Must I be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease while others fought to win the prize and sailed through bloody seas. Yes, gentlemen. That's a part of God's deliberate tactics with us. He will leave us things that we have to fight, and not wave some fairy wand and banish all opposition. And of course, as you will have observed, or perhaps you won't yet have observed because you're not, uh, uh, uh, uh, grandfathers yet, that the enemies that you face today are very different from the world that I knew in the nineteen twenties and thirties. And you have my sympathy, you fight a bigger foe than we ever had to face. But look at now the early verses of chapter three. Now these are the nations which the Lord left to prove Israel by them, even as many as had not known all the wars of Canaan. That is, these are the Israelites that hadn't known the original wars. Only that the generation of the children of Israel might know to teach them war. At the least such as before time knew nothing thereof. So here was God using these adverse circumstances to advantage, to teach the new generation war. And that, gentlemen, is the lesson that I want to concentrate on in our studies today, and God willing, in a fortnight's time. What lessons can we learn from judges on the art of spiritual Warfare. warfare? Now, of course, you will immediately see that if we are going to use the book of Judges for that purpose, we shall need to make some very clear distinctions. And emphasize to ourselves the difference between the warfare that those heroes were called to, and the kind of warfare that we are called to. They were called to fight with literal physical arms. In the Christian era, we are forbidden it. The weapons of our warfare are not physical and carnal. This is Paul the Apostle talking to the Corinthians. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, says Paul at the end of Ephesians, in a passage that is the classical passage of our spiritual warfare as believers. We wrestle against the world rulers of this darkness, against the principalities and powers, the world rulers in heavenly places. In other words, ours is a spiritual warfare. And we have it from our Lord himself that we are not allowed to use physical arms and literal warfare, either to protect or to promote his kingdom. He told Pilate, now is my kingdom not from hence. It is not of this world. If my kingdom had been of this world, he said, my disciples would have fought that I should not be delivered to the Jews. But on that famous occasion in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the leaders of the Jews came, plus the Roman, a- a squad of Roman soldiers to arrest Christ, and Peter, meaning well, drew his sword to protect the Lord and cut off the ear of one of the high priest's servants, meaning presumably to cut his neck off, his head off, but missed and cut his ear off instead. Our Lord forbade him. You'll notice how serious a mistake that was on Peter's part. The Jewish authorities had gone to Pilate and asked for the help of Roman soldiers, a squad of Roman soldiers, to arrest Christ. That shows they must have persuaded Pilate that Jesus was the leader of an insurrectionist gang, who, if they were cornered in the garden, would bring out their swords and start fighting, because that is what they intended to do anyway, to raise an army against the Romans, to drive out the Rome. That had been done earlier, in earlier times, by hot-headed revolutionaries. It was done again in AD sixty six when such insurrectionists got the upper hand and forced the authorities in Jerusalem to join against the Romans, and with what disastrous results for Israel, we know. Our Lord forecast them, of course. So then the Romans came, the squad of soldiers came with the high priests and their servants to arrest Christ, and they came by night, as our Lord pointed out. Why have you come against me, said he, with swords and staves? I mean, I was daily with you in the temple. Why didn't you arrest me then? And if you choose to arrest me now, why come with swords and staves? Yes, why? Because they were making out that he was the head of an armed gang that was going to fight. That's why. And if he had allowed to Peter, Peter to go any further, or others to copy Peter, the high priest would have clapped their hands and gone to the Pi- Pilate and said, there you are, we told you what they were. It was a ghastly mistake of Peter that would played straight into the hands of Satan himself. Get our Lord's kingdom completely misrepresented. He told him to put up his sword into his sheath, for they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Now, gentlemen, I need not tell you how often throughout the history of Christendom that straightforward command of Christ has been pushed to one side, and all sorts of excuses raised why it should not be obeyed. And Christendom has taken to the sword ten thousand times to fight against the pagan, uh, Muslims, for instance. To fight each other, Protestants and Catholics. And they have, uh, fed themselves on the Old Testament, imagining the church to be Israel. And because Israel was a political unit as well as a religious unit, then Israel's religion was defended by literal swords. Christendom imagining that it was a continuation of Israel, not only on the spiritual side, appointed a high priest, an ordinary priest, and then Levites, bishops, archbishops, bishops, and curates, and transformed the Lord's table into an altar. But also suppose that Christianity was a political thing to be supported by literal armies. Islam still believes the same thing. Islam is not just a religion. It is a political force, and aims to establish itself in every country that it conquers, so to speak, not merely as a religion, but as the reigning form of politics. We in Ulster know the sad consequences of that attitude. So that in reading our Judges and drawing lessons from it, we must make this basic distinction. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. They are spiritual. We are not allowed to take to the literal sort, either to pro- protect or to promote the Kingdom of Christ. You will know from history how, how shall I call it, Christianity advanced. It was in Rus, in where Christianity first came to Russia. It was so by some of the Saxon kings in England. When the missionaries came, the king listened to the missionary, decided that this was the good religion, lined up all his subjects, they had to be baptized willy-nilly. If they weren't baptized, their heads were cut off, and that was the end of them. That's a very quick way to evangelize. But whether you can call it evangelism is another story. It produces a so-called Christian nation, many of whom were never Christians in the true sense of the word at all. Having said that, and issued all those warnings to ourselves, nevertheless, we can gather from, uh, the book of Judges lessons for ourselves. There is the lesson taught by Hebrews chapter eleven, that these were men of faith, as we shall see when we come down to the details of their battles. Men of faith. We're to, uh, copy their faith, of course. But then we could look at their tactics. Now, one other general observation. Under Joshua, the army fought as a whole, as we have already said. But in this period of Israelite history, the captivities were re- rarely suffered by the whole nation. It might have been a local tribe or two or three local tribes that, uh, compromised with the Canaanites or the Philistines or the Amorites or, or the Midianites or whoever it was in their particular area, and therefore fell under the domination, say, of the Moabites in the south or the Canaanites in the north, or the Ammonites on the other side of Jordan, and so forth and so on. They were often local things, two or three or four tribes involved, but not necessarily all the twelve tribes involved at any one stage. That means that, generally speaking, the leading enemy was different on each occasion. Of course, the enemies would call others to support them, so you might have a mixture of nations, Moabites, uh, with Ammonites and various other things, but each, in each of these, uh, uh, battles here recorded in Joshua, in Judges, the enemy was different. And therefore, we can begin to draw certain general lessons in our study of these Judges. One, we could notice from the history, at what particular point, if it is mentioned, did Israel go wrong? What was it in particular that they did wrong that eventually landed them into these slaveries. Secondly, is there any evidence to show us why, on any occasion, did God raise up this particular person to be judge and deliverer? Had he special qualifications? Or qualities? Or experiences? What was it that fitted these men to be chosen of God in their particular day to lead the people of God to victory against this particular enemy. Thirdly, we could study the enemy. Notice what he represents. The Moabites were not the same thing as Canaanites by a long way. The enemies were different. Therefore, we can study the enemies and ask what they stood for. Now here, we need to do a little bit of, uh, deeper thinking. If we take the enemies, for instance, let's take Moab, and say Moab represents this or that or the other, we can be accused of two sins. One, of being fanciful, and two, of treating these ancient people as stereotypes. We should be told that not all Moabites were exactly the same. It's wrong to judge people as stereotypes. What do you mean? Well, to say he's a typical African, but Africans are all different. He's a typical American, but that is to stereotype individuals. Perhaps you think you know what you mean when you say he's a typical Englishman. I have my ideas on what a typical Irishman might be. And of course, it would be false, wouldn't it, to stereotype people. So that we do observe. But on the other hand, the very same people that will accuse you of stereotyping and fancifulness, when they come to to be missionary minded, will tell you that if you're going to be a missionary to a foreign nation, you must consider their culture and all the cultural differences. Oh. So nations do have cultures, do they? And if you're going to be a proper missionary, you have to study the culture. Yes, they do indeed. By their history, by their temperaments, by their breeding, by their arts they have developed. Yes, different nations have different cultures. And of course, uh, culture can be a good and healthy thing. Can also be a bad thing. Certain tribes of Papua New Guinea until recently had their very distinct culture. It came out in their cuisine. The way they cooked people and ate them. That was part of their culture. Yes. We have no hesitation, we who have long since d- not done that. We have no hesitation in saying that that is not only wrong, it is positively sinful. There are things in culture that are sinful. And of course, uh, those of you who come from the so-called Protestant North and work in the Catholic South will know what an important part culture plays, and how we have to observe the effect of culture and cultural attitudes in the folks to whom we go. I'm going to suggest, therefore, that it is quite legitimate, legitimate of us to ask questions on, uh, this level about the, uh, enemies that, uh, the judges had to fight. When we're told that some were Moabites and others were Canaanites and others were Midianites and some were Philistines. To ask about their cultures and what were their predominant characteristic as tribes and nations. What were their strengths, of course, and what were their weaknesses? And what was sinful about them? Uh, so we have to ask these questions, these basic questions in each of these, uh, stories. Where did Israel go wrong so as to land them in trouble? If that is mentioned, particularly and specifically. It is not always specifically stated. It's just told sometimes that Israel did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and he delivered them, uh, into, uh, bondage. Then we could ask about the nature of the enemy. Then we can ask about the deliverers. What special qualifications, experiences, and so forth did they have to make them fit vessels in the hand of God to deal with the particular enemy that they dealt with? And fourthly, we can ask about the tactics and strategies that they used. For it is evident that they used different strategies with the different enemies. Beirak, for instance, when he was sent against the Canaanites, took ten thousand men with him. Yes. At, uh, Gideon, when he went against the Midianites, who were a very numerous foe, had his army scaled down by God himself. Send the lot home, says God. And eventually his army was scaled down to a mere three hundred men. Why the difference between the tactics he used and the tactics Barak used. The enemy were killed in different ways. Eglon, king of Moab, was eventually dispatched by a daggy- dagger through his belly. Cisera, commander in chief of the Canaanite forces, was dispatched by a tent peg through his brain. Hmm. We shall find the tactics differ on each occasion, and we shall want to ask... why those tactics with this enemy? And learning and learning these lessons, we shall be coming, beginning to be ourselves learning how to fight. Well, gentlemen, when you come to the New Testament, these lessons could be useful. Most of the Christian epistles are written to attack and correct certain errors. Yes, agree? But if we're going to understand the, the letter, each letter right, we should have to be clear as to what the particular wrong was that the less letter is meant to put right. For instance, there was an obvious wrong amongst the Galatians, which meant that Paul had to write the letter to them to put that wrong right. There was a very grievous danger among the Hebrews to whom the letter to the Hebrews is written. Was it the same danger, the same wrong as the letter to Galatians. What was the wrong in the letter to the Hebrews? And once we have diagnosed what was wrong, we need to be able to see, or to learn, how what the apostle says on each occasion is fitted to put that wrong right. Take, for instance, the Epistle to the Hebrews and its famous warning in chapter ten. If we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sin, but a certain expectation of judgment. What is the sinning willfully? In my youth, I heard it often stated that this is believers who willfully do what they know to be wrong, and if you carry on doing it like that, there comes a point when you're no longer covered by the sacrifice of Christ. So you better make sure that you don't go and do things that you know to be wrong. In general, it is worldliness, in which you love the world instead of loving the Lord, and that's tantamount to treading underfoot the Son of God. And there is no forgiveness for it. Um, early on, I had to, in my own experience, face that. Is that really what Hebrews is talking about? Suppose the great wrong in the Epistle to the Hebrews is worldliness, believers becoming very worldly. How would you then account for the doctrines that the writer urges them, urges on them? For instance, he at great length goes to prove that the sacrifice of Christ once for all, brings us complete forgiveness. Would you adopt that? You come across a, a chappy that once was keen and has now gone worldly and he's sunk in the world up to his ears, and you say, my dear brother, I, I, I, I could cure your worldliness. Let me tell you that the sacrifice of Christ has purged your sin forever. You don't need to trouble anymore. Yeah? That makes sense? That's the kind of message you ought to preach to a man like that that has become worldly? That the one sacrifice for Christ is enough. It seemed to me that's the very opposite of what you would need to tell a man like that. And that the wrong in the letter to the Hebrews is not worldliness in that sense. The danger was that under persecution, these Jewish converts to Christ would be tempted to go back into Judaism. And therefore they need to have it spelled out to them, what going back to Judaism would entail. For if we re- uh, uh, sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, and you go back to Judaism, what it will involve in this is this, that you deliberately trample underfoot not only Jesus, but the Son of God. Trample underfoot is a deliberate action. You stamp something to the ground. It's not that you trip over it. You deliberately stamp it under the ground. To go back to Judaism is deliberately, despitefully to deny the deity of Christ. You cannot go back to Judaism without doing it. It will involve you in considering, therefore, the blood of the covenant as common blood. If Jesus is a mere man, just a prophet or something, if he's not the Son of God, then his blood is common, gentlemen, no more value than your blood. It follows logically, if you deny his deity, you regard his blood as common. If you do that, there remains it, please note it doesn't say there's no forgiveness. It says there remains no more sacrifice. For the Jew who have professed faith in Christ, have understood Christ and his claim to be the Son of God and his atoning sacrifice, to now go back to Judaism. It's no good he's saying, but I shall have the sacrifices by which I may be forgiven. No, you won't. For, uh, when Christ died and offered that one sacrifice for sin forever, all the Old Testament system of sacrifices was cancelled anyway. You deny Christ, you are left without any sacrifice whatsoever. In other words, excuse that, uh, diversion, what I'm now trying to i- uh, illustrate is this: learning our spiritual warfare, learning to, to, to, uh, reconnoiter the enemy and to diagnose what kind of an enemy it is, will then not only ask us about our personal qualifications to put it right, but secondly, what tactics shall we use? And it will mean applying the right kind of tactics to each particular situation. From that, we can learn great lessons from the epistles, those that are written to correct wrongs. What is the wrong being corrected? How does what the apostle then says, how can you show that that is exactly fitted to meet the particular need? Mm-hmm. And these become ways into our epistles and way to check our e- e- exposition of epistles. They then are some of the lessons that I hope to bring out by our study of the, uh, battles and the judges that waged them in this book of Judges. So let us cease for the moment.