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At the end of our last session, gentlemen, we had launched ourselves upon the study of the four anecdotes, and I use the term anecdote in its literary sense, the four anecdotes, the four stories that come in the midst of the lists of details given us in the first introduction to the book of Judges. And we had considered the case of Adoni Bedzik and sought to draw some spiritual general principle therefrom. Now we move on to the second story relating to Othniel and Axar, daughter of Caleb, where we are told what we had earlier been told in the book of Joshua. Story is now repeated here. How that Caleb offered his daughter to wife to the man that would smite Kiriath Sepher, the city of the book. Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother, took it, and Caleb gave him Exaw his daughter to wife. So that, when it came to entering into his God-given inheritance, Othniel had an additional spur, a motivation for going for this notable city, armed to the teeth as it was. It required, as Caleb judged it, a special motivation to be held out, a special reward to be held out for any who dare take his courage in both hands and assault the city, capture it. He would get not only the city, he would get Caleb's daughter as his wife. It reminds us that it was not merely God's sovereign choice that decided all by itself who got what inheritance. Room was left for people's own initiative, whether they would or would not respond to the challenge in front of them and go for the subduing of very difficult cities with comparatively greater rewards than being content to go for easy little villages and settle down with a tiny inheritance. The chapter, of course, raises profound questions, gentlemen. Who decides how big an inheritance you get? Does it all depend on your effort? Well, not completely, does it? Who decided your physical inheritance? I think you didn't decide that, did you? Whether you were born capable of studying God's word and going into its depths, or whether you were born dyslexic or a Mongol, Mongolian. Who decided that? And who decided that you were born in blessed Vancouver and not in Timbuktu, whether you never did hear the gospel? Was there not some sovereignty at work? Who decided that Peter, James, and John should be specially favored and taken into deeper experiences with the Lord than the other nine of the twelve? Who decided that? Who decides whether we get one talent, five talents, or ten talents? Presumably, that is in the sovereign giving of God. Indeed, one of our Lord's parables allows for this, doesn't he? Even when it comes to opportunity for working. Among the many parables that deal with the question of reward, for instance, and those parables deal with many, many questions relating to reward. One of them is geared to this very thing of what opportunity you have. There are lasts that shall be first, said our Lord, and first that shall be last. And while the going rate for reward is ten thousand percent, if you have left anything or sacrificed anything, you shall be recompensed a hundredfold, which is ten thousand percent in commercial terms. Nevertheless, forget not, said our Lord, that there are some that are last that shall be first, and first last. And he told the story of the vineyard keeper who went out at the beginning of the day and hired workers and came to an agreement that they should work the whole day for one penny, one denarius. He went out subsequently at different hours of the day, and men made agreement with him that they would work so many hours for so much pay. He went out at the eleventh hour and saw chaps idling about in the marketplace, and he says, why are you idle here? They said, because nobody employed us. He said, would you like to work? They said, wouldn't we? We're fed up with our back teeth, standing here twizzling on our thumbs and doing nothing. Go and work in my vineyard, he said, I'll give you what's right. And off they ran without bothering to come to any agreement for the sheer joy and relief of being able to do some work. The sun went down, the time to give the wages came, the Lord called them first. Though they had worked only an hour, he gave them a whole denarius. The chaps who had worked twelve hours, they began chuckling and rubbing their hands, and they said, well, if he gives some people who have worked one hour a whole denarius, what will he give us who work twelve hours a day? They were already planning what kind of a Cadillac they would buy. When their turn came, and they got just one denarius, they were furious for what they thought was a break in justice and complained. Our Lord said, gentlemen, there are no grounds of complaint. Didn't you bargain with me? Twelve hours work for a denarius? You worked, here's your denarius. You've got what you bargained. Do you deny me the right, however, to be not only just, but positively good? This is my own money, gentlemen, and if I decide to be generous to these men and give them more than they strictly deserve, that's my business. Thus our Lord established that he reserves the right to be more than just when it comes to giving reward. It wasn't the men's fault that they hadn't got the opportunity. Nobody'd employed them earlier. How would you dish out rewards if you were the Lord? Here is one gentleman. He was saved at ten years old because he came of a Christian family. He dithered around until he was thirty five, doing nothing in particular for the Lord, generally enjoying himself. Then, in the mercy of God, he began to see sense, and from thirty five to seventy five, he worked as hard as he could for forty years and went to his reward. Got forty years of service, but he wasted, ah, twenty five years. Here's another man. He never heard the gospel till he was sixty, And when he heard it, he went full steam ahead from the word go and serve the Lord at once, night and day for five years, took cancer and went home at sixty five. How would you reward him? Didn't have the same opportunity to serve, did he? Not his fault he didn't hear the gospel till he was sixty. He was only given five years. He will be rewarded not by the laws of strict justice. The Lord reserves the right to be more than just and to give him more than he strictly deserves. All kinds of instances, therefore, you could be cited to show that in the matter of entering to our inheritance and in the matter of rewards, basic potential and opportunities lie in the sovereign gift of the Lord himself. That does not do away with the fact that the Lord's sovereignty is big enough to leave open the possibility of our choice and our initiatives, so that it is possible for us to get more if we put our mind to it, or less if we don't bother to. And here in Othniel, you see a prime example in Othniel and Exa of the principle that our Lord laid down. To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have more. And to him that hath not shall be taken away even what he thinks he has. There is a snowball effect in Christian life and progress. The more you have, the more you are likely to get. Our Lord enunciated the principle in the Gospel by Luke in chapter eight in relation to understanding the mysteries of the kingdom. Luke chapter eight and verse sixteen reads as follows. No man, when he has lighted a lamp, covereth with it, covereth it with a vessel or putteth it under a bed, but putteth it on a stand, that they which enter in may see the light. For nothing is hid that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light. Take heed, therefore, how you hear, for whosoever hath to him shall be given, and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away, even that which he thinks he has. An exhortation to be careful, therefore, in our hearing, and in the context, our hearing of the Word of God. Take heed how you hear. For to him that has shall be given. And strain every nerve to get, gentlemen. For the more you have, the more you will be given. But if having some, you rest on your oars and think you've got it, and you don't bother to improve the situation and go in for more. Presently, after twenty five years of having thought you knew the doctrine of justification by faith, you'll wake up one day, try to explain it to somebody, and find you haven't even got it. You've forgotten it. And a lot of other things that you thought you knew. You'll find out that you've let them slip and you don't know them. To him that has shall be given, but to him that has not shall be taken away what he thought he had. And this in relation to hearing the word of God. The same phrase is used in the exaltations at Luke chapter nineteen verse six— Oh, sorry, nineteen verse twenty six— in the matter of reward. But I say unto you, of verse twenty six follows the Lord's decision that the man who had not worked with his pound, the pound should be taken away from him and given to the man that hath ten pounds. And they said unto him, Lord, he hath ten pounds. And our Lord replied, I say unto you that unto everyone that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away from him. And there you'll see the remark is in the context of reward and deals with our potential. The original pounds given to each man were the potential for trading, weren't they? They were the capital, they were the potential. And what some men did with the potential and capital God gave them is to exploit it and made profit, that when the day of reward came, was translated into further potential for service. Man who didn't use his pound and didn't, uh, develop his potential had the pound taken from him. Gentlemen, we are to think not only of our potential now, but our potential for our eternal service of God. We shall not be sitting twiddling our thumbs, shall we? It is the concept of some that heaven is a re- a beautiful retirement home for the elderly and tired. But having worked all life, they shall eventually be able to sit down and put their feet up forever on the eternal couch. And listen to sweet music. There's a fallacy in the concept that nobody in heaven will be tired anyway. Some of the highest blessings will be the ability to be allowed to serve God. For that service, you will need potential. And how big the potential will then be will in part be determined by the way we develop our potential here. To him that hath, as a result of his having explored and exploited his potential, shall be given. But to him that hath not and has not developed his potential, even the potential he thought he had, shall be taken away. We are in the first introduction to the book of Judges. It's all about exploring and exploiting your inheritance. The third anecdote comes in verse twenty two uh, to, uh, twenty six and tells us that the house of Joseph, they also went up against Bethel, and the Lord was with them. And the house of Joseph sent to spite out Bethel. Now the name of the city of before time was Luz. And the watchers saw a man come forth out of the city, and they said unto him, Show us, we pray thee, the entrance into the city, and we will deal kindly with thee. And he showed them the entrance into the city, and they smote the city with the edge of the sword. But they let the man go and all his family. The man went into the land of the Hittites and built a city, and he called the name thereof Loz, which is the name thereof to this day. Here, gentlemen, I desperately need your help. You'll say, let me expose my ignorance so that I may prompt you to answer the question. What say you about the that the House of Joseph used on this occasion? There was this city, look, they wanted to take. They saw a man come out of it, they made an agreement with him. He would show them the way into the city, and as a reward, they would allow him to live. So he did just that. They went into the city and took it, and the good gentleman went away, completely unconverted, apparently, and founded another city, Luz. Oh. If you don't help me, I shall fall to the notion expressed in the principle that compromise with what is false, in the interests of overcoming what is false, eventually leads to the proliferation of what is false. May I repeat that? Compromise in the cause of overcoming what is false and sinful. Compromise in order to overcome what is false and sinful. However successful it appears to be at the start, will lead to the proliferation and the perpetuation of what is false and sinful. Did here, didn't you? They could have destroyed Luz root and branch, and that would have been the end of Luz. They did destroy Luz, and that was the end of that Luz. But in order to destroy Luz number one, they made this deal with one of the inhabitants. So when they had destroyed Luz, they had to let him go. He went a little further up the road, and he built Luz all over again. So now where, how far have we gone? I say, unless you help me, gentlemen, I should be inclined to say that this incident is a, is an example of the principle that collaboration with what is false and evil for the good purpose of overcoming what is false and evil will in the end, however successful, lead to the perpetuation of what is false and evil. But when you've had time to ponder that, do tell me what I ought to think. Finally, there comes the story, the anecdote of the meeting when the angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim and rebuked the people of the Lord. He said, I made you to go up out of Egypt and have brought you unto the land which I swear unto your fathers, and I said, I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land. You shall break down their altars, but you have not hearkened unto my voice. Why have you done this? Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you, but they shall be thorns in your sides, and their God shall be a snare unto you. It came to pass, when the angel of the Lord spake these words unto the children of Israel, that the people lifted up their voice and wept. And they cry- called the name of that place Bokim, and they sacrificed there unto the Lord. So that here we see an example of the way the covenant of the Lord worked. He made his covenant with them and said, I will never break my covenant with you. They, however, were disobedient to the covenant, and they didn't drive out the enemy. Now see God's covenant at work. And they broke the covenant. He showed them the reality of that covenant. For it was written in that covenant that if they broke his covenant, he would chastise them. And he did chastise them. And it was a very solemn thing he did. He said, according to his covenant, that they were to drive out the enemy. You have refused to drive out the enemy, he says. What shall be the chastisement? Well, I shall not drive them out either, he says. Oh. So now he's giving them what they themselves chose. What they show themselves chose not to drive out the enemy, now under God's covenant discipline proved to be a long story of sorrow and suffering and snare that would break them. Until time, uh, from time they would, uh, repent and call out to the Lord, and he would raise them up a deliverer. The workings of God's covenant. We live and work, do we not, under a different covenant. Ours is the new covenant, which our blessed Lord covenants to write his laws on our hearts and on our minds. How does that covenant work? The covenant requires us, as we have said before, let us say again. The covenant requires us that we cooperate with the Lord. Says Paul in one Corinthians eleven, when you come to celebrate the Lord's Supper and you take the holy cup of the covenant, by which our Lord guarantees to write his laws on your heart, mind, and soul. Then you are required by the covenant to examine yourself. And if you have sin, to confess the sin, lest if you should come, having led a sinful life unrepentantly to the Lord's Supper, and take the cup and the bread that tell how Christ had to die for your sin. And you come carelessly, unrepentantly of sin in your life. Doing the very things that murdered the Lord, unrepentantly doing them. Then, says Paul, you'll find how this covenant works. For our Lord on his side has covenanted that he will write his law on your hearts, and write them he will. He will do it with your cooperation, if he can. But if he can't, he will do it. Jews, says Paul, will be chastened of the Lord, that you might not be condemned with the world, until you are brought to a better frame of mind to cooperate with the Lord in the proposals of his covenant. We should not wait, should we, till we have sinned and then confess it. If we would discern ourselves, says Paul, we must from time to time engage in holy self-examination, not to become morbid, but hand in hand with the Lord, say to the Lord, what enemies still remain within, Lord, that need to be recognized and then rooted out? What attitudes in my life? What, uh, inadequacies in my behavior and work have I hitherto been unaware of? Show them to me, Lord, where I am wrong, where I need to confess wrong attitude and seek forgiveness and then deliverance. I must discern myself. And if I discern myself, I can come to the Lord. I needn't wait till I am perfect. I may come. What a blessed thing it is to come to the Lord's Supper after a difficult week. But then you don't have such. Well, I'm just telling you my experience. When you've had a difficult week, and you feel utterly unworthy, to come in sad confession and contrition, then to be allowed to take the cup. And here again, the words of assurance of the Lord, covenanted and guaranteed by his blood. I will write my laws on your heart, and on your mind will I inscribe them. Your sins and iniquities will I remember no more. What a blessed thing that is. How full of hope. How full of encouragement to get up and go and have another battle against the old enemy, to defeat him. But if I am careless, and I do not discern myself, and carry on through life with wrong attitudes so entrenched that they scarce come to my attention, though everybody else can see them. And I make no serious attempt to drive out the enemy, don't even recognize he's there, and sometimes boast of attitudes that are in themselves sinful, only I think they're very good and manly. And what will the Lord do? Well, he's made a covenant, gentlemen, and he will fulfill it. He may have to let us have our own way and find what these enemies in the end will do to us by way of damage and bondage, till our broken hearts cry out to the Lord for mercy, forgiveness, and release. Four stories then, and with that I complete my faltering remarks upon the first introduction and turn to the second, which in a way follows the first, of course. The second doesn't deal with the second phase of the conquest, it deals with the third generation largely, as we noted yesterday. Of, of children that grew up three generations removed from the great period when Joshua led the victorious armies of Israel into Canaan. These people, it wasn't their fault, but they had not known the great deeds of the Lord, the mighty victories won. They had been born when the memories of such things were growing pale. And they themselves had been required to do very little fighting. They'd been handed the grass and the honey and the milk and the cows and the bungalows and the territory. They'd inherited it from their parents. They'd not had to fight for it, many of them. They'd had life spiritually very easy, thank you very much. And instead of counting their blessings and taking advantage of the high pinnacle upon which they were born, they settled down to ease and failed to value the inheritance because it had cost them very little. They got it all for nothing, and they had never known what bondage was, and hence they had no means of contrasting it with the wretched state of bondage that some of their ancestors had been in. And then getting tired of the monotony of grass and milk and cows, Canyon. They fell to the attractions of the Cananite civilization, married their girls, married their fellows. Their hearts were won away from the law, and they transferred them to idols. I have a certain pity for them. You know, I was one such. I listened to men who were converted in later life, and I listened to their testimonies. They had to be very careful, as our brother Larry was the other night. He did it superbly. But some men I've listened to, they made their unconverted experiences so romantic and wonderful, I found myself saying, I wish I hadn't been converted quite so soon. These chaps, you know, they enjoyed the world and it was marvelous, and then they got saved and they're going to enjoy heaven as well, and here's me, I've only got heaven and I didn't get the chance to enjoy the world because I got converted too soon. Alas. Not having known the world and not having had to fight and hand it, have everything handed to me on a plate. The danger is, isn't it, that we don't see the benefit of what we've got. We don't see its glory. We come to despise it. And instead of reveling in the glorious truths of the gospel and making progress even to greater heights because we were born with an advantage, we get attracted by the attractions of the world and want to dilute the church with all kinds of entertainments that the world has. On the notion that you can't expect young Christians to be interested too much in God's conversation, want to attract them with all sorts of entertainments. And before long, you've compromised with the world, and being fed up with the second rate entertainment you put on, they go for the first rate entertainments, and they're lost to you in the world completely. Ah, what shall God do to them? God said, now then, because you have not driven out the enemy, I shall not drive them out either. And that will have two effects. The one is that it will prove Israel, two verse twenty two, whether they keep the way of the Lord to walk therein as their fathers did keep it or not. So God left the enemy in his good providence. Woe betide the Israelite who misconstrued the reason, who said, well, if God didn't want us to join the Moabites and marry their girls, he wouldn't have let them here. The very God thi- fact that God has left the Moabites on our doorstep shows that there's not all that wrong with them. That would be to misconstrue the divine purpose, wouldn't you? The fact that God left them there and didn't drive them out was to prove Israel. The world, my dear young fellow believer, is on your doorstep. Alas, sometimes it's got its foot in the church itself. What for? For you to enjoy it with an easy conscience? No. To prove you in your generation, whether you are going to take your stand and be a hundred percent for God, whether you're going to yield to the temptation that has been put before you and compromise with the world. And secondly, says chapter three, the Lord left those nations, uh, so that to prove Israel by them, even as many as had not known all the wars of Canaan, only that the generations of the children of Israel might know to teach them war, at the least such as before time knew nothing thereof. So God turned Israel's original disobedience to the best advantage he could, and when they didn't drive out the enemy, then God refrained himself from driving them out and left them so that the next generations might have to fight, and in having to fight, they might learn how to fight. Learning how to fight, gentlemen, is an exceedingly valuable contribution to our personalities. God doesn't want wimps. God doesn't want us to remain with a slave mentality that will succumb to any old enemy that pokes his head over the battlements. God wants to put steel into our character and teach us to fight and resist the enemy. God wants people in heaven that want to be in heaven, if you know what I mean. God wasn't, doesn't want people in heaven that say, God, I wish I hadn't come to heaven so soon and had a chance to enjoy the world before I got here. God wants people in heaven because they want to be in heaven, because they're disgusted with sin and have learned to fight sin and won't tolerate sin. God isn't going to fill heaven with innocents. Who are there because they never saw what sin was, and if only they'd seen the glorious attractions of sin would have gone after it, but, uh, they didn't happen to see it, so... No, no. God will fill heaven with men and women that look sin in the face with all its temptations and said no, and fought it tooth and nail. Part of our ongoing salvation to be taught to fight. A good deal of the rest of Judges is the story of how God taught certain men and some women to fight, and in themselves they taught others of the Israelites to fight, and how between them, from time to time, they learn to fight, learn therefore how to lead revivals and renewals amongst the people of God and achieve their freedom. Those ancient battles are past, we fight on a different battlefield. But surely we can learn certain basic lessons from this book on how to fight. The first lesson we learn will be the lesson of reconnoitering the enemy. You will not fight an enemy efficiently unless you have first reconnoitered him. You know his strengths and you know his weaknesses. The second lesson we shall learn from these stories is to know the seriousness of the captivities that resulted from Israel's sinning, and how they contradicted the basic principles of the nation's existence, experience, and inheritance. The third lesson we should learn is a lesson on tactics in fighting spiritual warfare. And the third lesson we shall learn, the, sorry, the fourth lesson we shall learn is the importance of qualifications when it comes to being a deliverer of God's people. In other words, if we would be men who can be raised up of God to deliver his people by fighting for them, we must observe that such men need certain basic qualifications for God to use them as a fighters for his people. The importance, then, of qualifications. At least these are four areas which I wish to examine with you as we now, in future studies, come to consider the major deliverers and the battles they fought. Let me go over them again. First lesson, the need to reconnoiter the enemy, discovering his weak points and his strong points, to know what the enemy is. Secondly, to have a clear understanding of the nature of the captivities into which sin leads people, the seriousness of them, how they contradict the very basic principle of a nation's existence and inheritance. And in the third place, a knowledge of military tactics and the wisdom to use the right tactics on the right enemies. And fourthly, the need to be qualified, to develop qualifications that will be appropriate and therefore can be used of God to the deliverance of his people. That is the line I shall take. Now, for the moment, let us take a break in our studies.