I reckon that if Moses was sitting here, reading Judges with us, he would just shake his head. And Joshua would pull his hair out. At one level, the book of Judges should never have been written. It’s existence shows us human stupidity and sin. It is a testament to human stubbornness. It demonstrates how persistently evil men and women are. They pursue their own destruction. It shows God’s people in a suicidal spiral into sin in worse and worse degrees. It shows how dangerous it is to forget our history.
History is the way a community remembers its past. History is our community seeking to remember. In a way, it is an inoculation against communal Alzheimers. We have history departments at school and university because our community needs to remember. ‘Lest We Forget’. So we teach our young people. And all of us have little yearly checkups. They are called Anzac Day and Australia Day. That is the minimum we want people to remember. Hence, the Ode to the Fallen. “We will remember them” That’s why, for different reasons, we can be thankful that we still have Christmas and Easter.
History is our community saying, ‘Where did I come from? Why is our society, our community, the way it is? What shaped me and my society? Why do I think this way, do these things, value these things?'
So history is not about the past. It is about the present. The reason you write history is for the present. Otherwise, you wouldn’t want to write new history books. Surely the old ones would be good enough? You might even say, they would be better. They were written closer to the event, perhaps within living memory.
History is about the present. It is about re-appropriating the past for the present. History is a younger generation looking back. We look back to the years before we were so that we can understand ourselves.
Friends, we’ve now come to Judges chapter 2. Judges chapter 2 is the executive summary, the crib notes, for the whole of Judges. It gets to the heart of what Judges is about. Understand Judges chapter 2, and you will understand chapters 3 to 21.
The story so far.... Exodus and Numbers are the story of a disobedient generation of Israelites. They disobeyed God. As punishment, God killed them off. But it is a 40 year suspended sentence. For 40 years they wander in the desert, until the last one dies. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). And the last one to die is Moses. Then God raises up Joshua. And Joshua leads the people into battle. They take the promised land. And they are commissioned to wipe out the inhabitants. The command is to clear the land. And last week we saw that, while they started well, the people failed to clear the land. Again, the problem was disobedience.
So there are all kinds of problems in Joshua’s time: disobedience, idolatry, failure. However, compared to what would follow, Joshua’s were the ‘good old days’. Joshua left a good legacy.
Judges Chapter 2 verses 6 and 7:
After Joshua had dismissed the Israelites, they went to take possession of the land, each to his own inheritance. 7The people served the LORD throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the LORD had done for Israel. (NIV)
As a nation, they followed YHWH. Generally, they worshipped God the way God said. His laws were the laws they broke. And when they sinned, they sought Yahweh’s forgiveness his way.
But it was different for their children and grandchildren. Chapter 2 verses 10 and 12:
After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. (NIV)
Here is national apostasy within a lifetime. How quick it is! The grandfathers saw and knew Yahweh. But their grandchildren didn’t know him. Who is this Yahweh, that I should serve him? The churches of the grandparents were emptied. The books of the grandparents lay unread on the shelves. The God of the grandparent was forgotten.
And so the grandchildren said: ‘That’s all very old fashion. They were so restrictive and quaint back then. Now, we’ve moved on. We know better. We’ve done research and made scientific discoveries. We know that they were wrong, and we are right.'
So the grandchildren departed from the faith of the fathers. 'Yahweh the only way to God… Pah! We don't’ believe that. We live in an inclusive, multi-cultural, multi-faith environment. After all, God didn’t drive out all the nations before our fathers.'
It was a much more ‘tolerant, liberal’ environment. They would join in ecumenical worship. They would offer the incense to the idols. They could appreciate the gods of people around them. And from appreciation, they moved to following and worshipping the various gods of the peoples around them. They became just like them.
They had a great heritage. But in a lifetime, they lost it.
Friends, we have a great Christian heritage. Intellectually, western thought owes much to Christianity, and particularly Protestant Christianity.
For example, it is Christianity and theism that sees the world as understandable. The world is understandable because the one true and living God made world and upholds it. So the idea of a ‘university’ is a particularly Christian idea. A university assumes that there is one overarching truth, which branches out into many faculties. And that the study of theology, far from being opposed to science, is the queen of the sciences. And because God works in his world in repeatable ways, we have the foundation of scientific theory: empiricism. So historically, scientific progress was enabled by Christianity.
And historically, it is particularly protestant Christianity that has emphasized education. We are bible people, so we want people to read. We don’t say, “you can’t read, but don’t worry! We’ll put holy pictures with holy people who have dinner plates behind their heads on a stained glass window. We will give you a statue. They can be ‘books for the ignorant’.
No, we teach people to read. We want our children to read. We want them to read the bible. We want them to read theology. The invention of the printing press and the reformation were not just co-incidences. The printing press enabled a mouse like Luther to roar like a lion across all Europe. It enabled Tyndale and Wycliff to have their dream, an English bible for every English Christian. And even now, we teach and learn languages. So we can translate the bible and share the gospel.
It is protestant Christianity that saw the key to right living in God’s world is not luck, or the stars. It is wisdom and diligence. Wise, diligent living is generally speaking the God provides us the material things we need to survive in God’s world, to have food, clothing, shelter. And this was called the ‘Protestant work ethic’. Which led to things like the industrial revolution. Technology as we know it first developed in Europe and England, in the wake of protestant Christianity.
Closer to us historically and in time, we thank God for Protestant Christianity in Sydney. The Protestant gospel was embodied in the first fleet through Richard Johnson, Samuel Marsden, the first rector of this Parish, Thomas Hassell, and Dean Cowper. But it also undergirded the fabric of the emerging nation.
There are still vestiges of a common protestant Christianity in Australian society. For example, in the Commonwealth Constitution’s preamble, it speaks of our Commonwealth as a union of people ‘humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God’. Or in the fact that in our courts ‘Oaths’ are still taken in the name of Almighty God. Or in the fact that sittings of our parliament still commence with the Lord’s Prayer. Or in the fact the scripture in schools is enshrined in law. Or that marriage is still a lifelong union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others.
Even more immediately, we have a heritage of great evangelical leaders. We think of T C Hammond and Broughton Knox and Mary Andrews. Under God, they have given us thoroughly Evangelical Theological Colleges. We think of Archbishop Mowll. It was his vision to open churches buildings all over Sydney, a church in walking distance from everyone in Sydney. On three corners, a service station, and on the fourth, an Anglican church. He was one of those who invited Billy Graham to Australia. And a number of the older saints here were converted during those days.
But that was a lifetime ago. Another generation has arisen. And they remember nothing of Billy Graham, or Mowll or Broughton Knox or Hammond, nor the God they served. Since the 60s, this generation has been chipping away at the foundation of our society. And now their voices can be heard in unison. They have columns in the Sydney Morning Herald. They have TV and Radio shows on the ABC and commercial networks. They are professors in our universities and the judges on our benches and the politicians in our parliaments.
Under their watch, what have we seen?
We have seen the separation of sex from marriage and family life. Now, they use the word ‘partner’, not ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, because cohabitation, de facto relationships, pre-marital sex, serial monogamy, abortion and homosexuality are accepted social norms. All these things have always happened, sure. But now they have become the social norm. We Protestant Evangelicals are the ones out of step.
We have seen the break down of family life. Husbands work longer and longer hours. Wives go out and work to meet mortgage payments. Woman were promised the world: be a wife and mother AND financially independent. 'You can have both, a family and a career'. Yet, in the words of Hugh McKay, many working mothers feel that liberation too often feels like enslavement (Reinventing Australia, 34). No wonder divorce rates are so high: between one in three and one in two marriages end in divorce.
We have seen the rise of Sunday trading and Sunday sport. Even sympathetic parents choose dancing or sport or music or schoolwork for their kids, rather than Sunday school or kids’ clubs. And the steady commercialization and paganization of Christmas and Easter continues. Mainstream Christianity is being progressively marginalized. We are told that we are the extremists, we the right wing fringe loonies.
And the pressure on us, the church, is to forget, to become like the Canaan around us. Why can’t women be rectors or bishops? Why are you so homophobic? Why can’t two men or two women be married? Why do you give up Sunday sport? Why do you have such backward attitudes about sex and divorce? Come on, be like us!
Was Israel able to survive such pressures as these? Would she be faithful to Yahweh?
The answer is, no!
We shouldn’t be surprised. Ever since the fall we’ve seen humanity's suicidal spiral into sin. God’s judgment on humanity is Genesis 6:5. Let me read one of the saddest and most tragic verses of the bible:
The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. (Genesis 6:5 NIV)
The heart of the problem is the problem of the human heart. And the only explanation is universal bias toward sin.
So we read in verses 11 to 13…
11Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. They forsook the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They provoked The LORD to anger. (NIV)
Here we see the spiritual adultery and unfaithfulness of God’s people. Israel is attracted to the Canaanite gods. So they switch allegiance from Yahweh to the Canaanite gods. So what Paul says of the Gentiles is also true of ancient Israel:
Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him… [they] exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the creator. (Romans 1:21, 25 NIV)
And for Israel this leads to punishment. God’s love means he punishes his people. The fact that God punishes his people shows his love. He isn’t indifferent to their sin. He is outraged and angry as a cuckolded husband. Verses 14 and 15:
In his anger against Israel, the LORD handed them over to raiders who plundered them. He sold them to their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the LORD was against them to defeat them, just as he had sworn to them. They were in great distress.
Yahweh once went before Israel’s armies. Now he turned his hand against them. He had promised them rest, if they were faithful. But now, they suffered his anger because they were unfaithful. But at the same time, he also loved the people. At one and the same time, God loved his people and was also angry with them.
So verse 16:
Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hands of these raiders. (NIV)
In the desperation of Israel’s pain, God acted. He who sent the raiders also raised up judges, saviours. There is no mention of Israel’s repentance. The initiative of grace lies with God. God goes beyond his promise. God is merciful, and sends a saviour to judge the nations and rescue his people.
But even this action by God is inadequate. Verse 17:
Yet they would not listen to their judges but prostituted themselves to other gods and worshipped them. (NIV)
The Judges could not work any lasting reform. Their sin was spiritual prostitution. They flirt with Baal and Ashtoreth, the lusty male and female Canaanite gods. They offered fertility, prosperity, security. Often their worship involved erotic or sexual activities. Worshipping them seemed more exciting that worshipping Yahweh, who said to only have sex in faithful heterosexual marriage.
For a time, the judge arrested the decline of the nation. But the reform the judge brought was partial and temporary. Verse 19:
But when the judge died, the people returned to ways even more corrupt than those of their fathers, following other gods and serving and worshipping them. They refused to give up their evil practices and stubborn ways. (NIV)
The judge brings temporary relief and reprieve. But, like the old medical warning, ‘If symptoms persist, consult your doctor’. And Israel’s evil still persisted. And after the judge dies, their wickedness comes out. Israel spirals uncontrolled into worse evil. The things their fathers’ thought cutting edge wicked, they thought boring and passé.
Like how old 50s horror movies, which would’ve given kids nightmares in those days, now get a PG label, along with the shows on ABC kids. After all, where do you go, once you’ve gone to the edge? You go over the edge. The new generation kept pushing the boundaries of bad taste. The spiral is into worse and worse apostasy. So as we go through Judges, expect things to go from bad to worse. The Judges were just stop gap measures. They didn’t arrest the slide, merely halted it for a time.
And so it is with our city, the city of Sydney, in 2012. On Friday at 3pm, we were driving in the car with our primary school kids. We turn on ABC local radio, and we heard the Bushfire updates. But in between bushfire updates, the Drive presenter interviews some academic whose new book ‘the Joy of Sin’ tells HSC students that reading a bit pornography is good for study. And of course, in his ‘research’, he discovered that his own pornography habit was good for him. And the next story was an interview with a teacher who became a prostitute – now we call them ‘sex workers’. She was servicing her former students and was writing a book about it.
ABC local radio 3pm on Friday in the school holidays, in between bushfire announcements.
We too are getting worse, and we don’t even notice it.
The people of Israel are in the promised land. But the promised land is not everything that God promised. Because peace in the promised land was conditional on obedience. But Israel continued to be unfaithful. And God promises not to drive out the Canaanites anymore. Israel has broken it’s promises. So now, the land will not be a place of rest. It will be a place of test. And the surrounding Canaanite nations are part of that test.
There are two reasons given for the test.
The first is, would Israel obey Yahweh and Yahweh only?
Chapter 2 verse 22, Yahweh says:
I will use them to test Israel to see whether they will keep the way of the LORD and walk in it as their forefathers did. (NIV)
Or again, in Chapter 3 verse 4, the narrator adds:
They were left to test the Israelites to see whether they would obey the LORD’s commands, which he had given their forefathers through Moses. (NIV)
God tested Israel. He left the tempting Canaanite nations around them. Israel would see their religion and their sexual practices. And then God would see whether they could resist the temptation.
Secondly, by leaving the Canaanites in the land, the Israelites would learn holy war (Judges 3:1-2). Perhaps they would learn how to conduct holy war, but perhaps also they needed to learn why holy war was necessary. In other words, Israel needed to learn not only how to fight, but why they needed to fight – because they were God’s holy people.
And friends, we 21st century Aussie Christians too are strangers and aliens in the world. We too are being tested by the people amongst whom we live. Will we follow God and his Christ? Will we keep saying, ‘There is only one name under heaven by which we must be saved’. Will we keep saying, ‘Sex is for monogamous heterosexual marriage’ and nowhere else. Will we hold on to scripture in the midst of the perversity and sexual immorality of our city of Sydney.
And we too need to fight. But it is a different sort of fight. Ephesians chapter 6 verse 12:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (NIV)
I’m no prophet. But I think God has put us in this hostile world so we can learn holy war. And how do we fight. Paul has already told us: Ephesians chapter 6 verses 14 to 18:
14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. (Ephesians 6:14-18 NIV)
Well, what were the test results for ancient Israel? Did Israel pass the test? Chapter 3 verse 6:
They [The Israelites] took their daughters in marriage and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods. (NIV)
Israel was a dismal failure. She intermarried with the Canaanites. And she continued her love affair with Canaanite gods.
Well, what can we learn from these verses in Judges? How do they help us to live in 21st century post-Christian Australia, in anti-Christian, immoral Sydney? Here is my attempt to gather together a sinners guide for us who live among Canaanites here in Sydney.
First, know yourself. These histories call us to know ourselves. We mustn’t be deceived about our hearts. Our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked. They are beyond understanding. In other words, we have a traitor in the camp. Us. We see here in Israel’s sinfulness our sinfulness. These things were written for us. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. So we must watch ourselves.
Second, flee Idolatry. We are called to flee idolatry. Few of us will be tempted to Baal and Asherah. But some might be tempted to the Allah of Islam, or Jahbulon at the Masonic Lodge, or to burn incense to the Buddah at Forest Road Hurstville, as was offered to me one Chinese New Year, or to offer their prayers to Mary, because now apparently Catholics and Anglicans agree that there is no longer only one mediator between God and man! Closer to home, some of us might be tempted to the prosperity Gospel god. He is more like Baal and Ashareh. He wants us to have health and wealth. After all, look at the wealth and size of their churches. Surely their god is blessing them. Or maybe we are tempted to worship the gods of Self, Money, Sport, Sex, Education, and Family, those very ‘Australian’ gods.
The temptation is to first soften the line. So that tolerance becomes relativism. No longer can we say, ‘You’re wrong, but I love you anyway’. We must say ‘Everyone is right, and no one is wrong’. And then they will say to us, 'Sure, Christian morality is OK. Some of it, anyway. But all this stuff about Jesus being the only way, that really has to go.'
Third, do not intermarry. We must not intermarry with non-Christians. We should only marry those who worship the Father though the Son by the Holy Spirit. Marry those who belong to Christ. If you are single, do not be yoked together with an unbeliever. Remember Paul’s command to widows: You are free to marry, but he must belong to the Lord.
And also pray for your kids and grandkids. Teach them about Christ. So that they become Christians early, so that they persevere, so they can be godly Christian husbands or wives, if God so calls them.
Fourth, we must fight. We mustn’t given up. We’ve gotta fight. We have to fight against the world, the flesh and the devil. And how do we do that? By preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. By making the lordship of Christ known, by preaching his death and resurrection for our sin, and by declaring that all who call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ must turn away from wickedness. We mustn’t be distracted from our main job – to preach the gospel to dying men and women, knowing that God has his elect, and he will call them out. We must pray for our enemies. We must pray for ourselves. And we must do so knowing that our risen Lord Jesus Christ is with us, and will never forsake us.
Let’s pray.