A little background to begin this journey through the book of Judges over the next few months.
After the death of Moses, God appointed Joshua to lead Israel into the Promised
Land to conquer it. The book of Joshua reveals a God who keeps his promise to
his people to bring them into the land and help them defeat their enemies. The
people begin to experience God’s promised rest and blessings. At the start of
the book of Judges, there is still work left to do to finish conquering the
land. The people turn to God and ask, “Who of us is to
go up first to fight against the Canaanites?” and God tells them, “Judah shall go up; I have given the land into their hands.”
A pretty straight forward command, Judah is called to go up to fight.
Judah gets ready to fight and does a smart thing
militarily, they ask their brothers, the Simeonites, to come
fight with them. The more the merrier and the greater the guarantee of victory,
right? Just one problem here, they’re not really listening to God, God didn’t
say Judah and Simeon go fight, he tells Judah to fight. The people are
beginning to show that they are going to hedge their bets when it comes to
listening to God, showing they don’t completely trust God. They depend on their
own strength and wisdom; a sign of things to come. Yet God blesses their battles
and they take the hill country, including Jerusalem. We also meet Othniel for
the first time as he wins Caleb’s daughter in marriage by capturing the city
Kiriath Sepher.
Israel is defeating the people of Canaan, but they always seem to stop before completely driving
them out, choosing to allow some of them to stay, taking some of them as slaves
or restricting them to specific areas in the land. God is frustrated with his
people. He’s always with them in their battles, giving them victory, but the
Israelites can’t be bothered to finish the conquest. God’s frustration comes
out when he sends an angel who tells the people, “I
brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land I swore to give to your
ancestors. I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall not
make a covenant with the people of this land, but you shall break down their
altars.’ Yet you have disobeyed me. Why have you done this? And I have also
said, ‘I will not drive them out before you; they will become traps for you, and
their gods will become snares to you.”
Did you hear what God is saying here? He’s telling his people that when they don’t obey
him, what they’re doing is failing to remember who he is as their God, failing
to remember that he rescued them from slavery, but he’s also telling Israel
that he’s never going to break his covenant with them, he’s never going to give
up on them, but there are consequences to their failure to remember and obey.
The consequences are that God’s going to allow the people of the land to stay
in the land alongside the Israelites and their gods are going to become traps
and snares to them. God is telling them outright that they’re going to keep on
rejecting him for other weaker gods.
God has the power to defeat these pagan peoples and their gods, but because of Israel’s disobedience
and insistence on doing things their way instead of God’s way, God allows them
to be tempted by the other nations and their gods, knowing that they’re going
to end up captured and snared by them again and again. This is the main story
of Judges; Israel rejects God, they cry out to him, he saves them, but then
they go back to their old ways and other nations’ gods again, starting the
whole process of punishment and salvation over again.
Following God his way takes bravery combined with a deep trust in God and his call on our
lives. When God tells Judah to go up against the Canaanites, it takes courage
for a smaller tribe to simply listen and go and do as God said. It takes
bravery and a deep trust in Jesus to follow in his way, to love so deeply that
you love even your enemies and those who persecute you because you hold to very
different values and morals than the world around us, it takes bravery to
forgive deeply when you’ve been hurt or betrayed. This doesn’t mean you put
yourself in unsafe situations, but forgiveness is hard, it’s easier to hold
onto hatred and make sure they get back what they deserve, and maybe even a bit
more. It takes bravery to be generous when you are stretched, trusting that
Jesus will provide whatever we need.
Sure enough, Israel gets tangled up with the gods and people around them, even marrying their sons and
daughters to the daughters and sons of the pagan peoples around them. As a
youth pastor and father, I would often remind my students that dating someone
who doesn’t believe in Jesus is not evangelism and that it will probably be
more likely that they end up out of the church than they bring their girlfriend
or boyfriend to Jesus. That’s what happens here, the Israelites get so
comfortable with the pagan gods and goddesses, they get so comfortable around
the pagans that they become pagan themselves, worshipping the Baals and
Asherahs along with God, doing the same evil as the nations around them. God
gets angry and gives them into the hands of Cushan-Rishathaim, whose name
actually means Cushan the Wicked.
God does this so that his people will come back to him, and sure enough, after 8 years of being under the
fist of Cushan the Wicked, Israel cries out to God. God, in his faithfulness,
responds by sending his Spirit onto Othniel, son-in-law to strong faithful
Caleb. Othniel becomes a judge, a leader of the people of Israel and leads them
into battle against Aram and the Lord gives Othniel victory over Cushan the
Wicked. This becomes the pattern of the book of Judges: Israel gets comfortable
with the other nations, dabbles with their gods, mixing worshipping Israel’s
God with the gods of the nations, God gives them over to the other nations,
basically saying that if you prefer their gods to me,
they can have you, Israel then realizes they’ve messed up bad and are
suffering the consequences of their choices so they cry out to God for
salvation and God sends a judge to lead them to freedom again and the people
have peace for a while, the judge dies and the people start getting comfortable
with other gods again and the pattern repeats all over again.
The great message of hope in Judges is that God, that Jesus, is continually faithful to us
even though we fail time after time in loving him with all our hearts, souls,
minds, and strength, even though we are continually seduced away from Jesus by
the philosophies and gods of our culture, often even conflating the gods and
philosophies of our culture into Jesus, mocking Jesus by shaping him into who
we want him to be to suit our own beliefs and wants.
Jesus has every reason to walk away from us, and yet he loves us so much that he went to the
cross to save us from our sin. He reveals his power over sin, death, and Satan
by rising up from the grave and now is with God in heaven waiting to return and
establish his kingdom; banishing Satan, sin, and death forever while completely
renewing and restoring us, filling us with his new life, healing all our
brokenness, our hurts, our pains and sorrows. Can you even imagine the power of
Jesus’ love in you, the power to give you a hope and grace filled life,
forgiven of every single sin you’ve ever committed.
This is the strength and hope that carries us through
life, knowing that we’re sinners at heart and we keep
getting tempted to take our eyes and focus off of Jesus and onto ourselves or
something else that seems shiny and brighter than Jesus. But Jesus doesn’t give
up on us, he stays faithful to his promises to us to never abandon us and has
provided us with the presence of the Holy Spirit in us, part of why we read the
Belgic Confession about God’s providence. The Holy Spirit keeps working in us
to show us how the shiny and bright will always fail us, but that Jesus never
will. The Spirit works in often quiet ways: a friend who sticks with us when
others walk away, a parent who keeps praying for us, a nudge to pray ourselves,
or a reminder of a Bible story that won’t go away. The Spirit doesn’t give up
on us either, even when the consequences of our sin make it feel as if Jesus
has given up on us. Forgiveness and grace walk hand in hand, Jesus’ forgiveness
calls us to repentance, to changing our path to walk Jesus’ path.
Judges is going to show us that we can always come
back to God, to Jesus and Jesus will always
hear us, always have compassion on us, and always welcome us back while calling
us to obedience so we can know Jesus’ peace and healing.
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