May We Be Purged And Reformed. Entering Into Judges. Series

Entering into Judges. May we be purged and reformed.

A couple of weeks ago when I last spoke on the last few verses of Joshua, and the inheritance of three people and their descendants. Joshua, Joseph and Eleazer. However, there is this great summery of the journey into the promised land that comes in chapter 24, down to verse 13. This is a concise account given by God, yes the Lord himself from the time of Abraham’s father Terah until that day. Then Joshua says this, “So revere Jehovah and serve him in sincerity and truth. Put away forever the idols which your ancestors worshipped when they lived beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt. Worship the Lord alone. But if you are unwilling to obey the Lord, then decide today whom you will obey. Will it be the gods of your ancestors beyond the Euphrates or the gods of the Amorites here in this land? But as for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.” And the people replied, “We would never forsake the Lord and worship other gods.” The reading ends (Joshua 24:14-16, NLT)

They then remained faithful to the Lord their God and everyone in the land had all they needed and they all lived happily ever after.

Well. If we look at the next book in the Bible, Judges, we see that there is certainly an issue with any likelihood of a fairytale existence, in reality, any type of peaceful future for the tribes of Israel. The whole first chapter is dedicated to God’s instruction to the go to war against the Canaanites. You may be thinking here that it’s a bit mean of God setting the Israelites on the Canaanites but remember these people were well off beat, to the point of sacrificing their children to their gods and this Israelite takeover was four hundred years in the planning. What happens is that God’s instructions are not followed through with by the Israelites, the Israelites go soft on those already in the land and allow them to live among them. This all takes place over a period of around 200 years from about 1200-1000 BC up until when Israel gets its first king. About the Judges, they were people, both men and women God had raised up to lead the people usually after an intense period of stupid, and this happened quite often. These Judges would be raised up by God when the Israelites came through periods of ignoring God, doing their own thing falling back into their old ways of worshipping foreign gods like those around them, who sacrificed their children to these gods. Yip, their children, to the Baals and Ashtoreths who were male and female fertility gods, who it was believed controlled the soil and the water, both necessary things if you want to have food to eat. Remember different times, if you didn’t grow it or hunt it you had to trade for it or pay for it somehow and it didn’t come in cans, or frozen or full of preservatives and there was no refrigeration. Hunger was often a very real issue. The Israelites hooked into their neighbour’s belief systems, were interested in these gods and worshipped them along with The Lord.

As a result there was a degrading of spiritual and moral values. Does this remind you of the Church and wider society in the modern age? Just thought I’d ask. The nation of Israel fell into a corrupted state with infighting and immoral practises, each person looked to their own interests. What was my last question? The scholars who know these things are firm in believing that the book of Judges was written as an historical record of actual events, soon after they occurred and some later editing. You could say an account of stupid did what stupid does and it was recorded as having occurred, maybe just as historical account. But it also can be seen as a warning of what can and usually occurs when people in this case a good part of a nation wander from God’s will for them. (ref: NIV Bible Commentary, IVP, 2005, ((Con Ed’s) D.A Carson, R,T France, J.A Motyer & G.J Wenham) pg. 262.) The book of Judges is an historical account of this extended family, how they had been warned to behave in a certain way by God but failed to respond to God’s direction. The result was that they found themselves for a good part of their history in deep, dire, dookie. Does this remind you of anything?

However, there is one judge who nails his role. Let’s have a look at him, Othniel. If you would like to open your bibles to, Judges 3:7-1. In the meantime I can give you a bit of a run down on Othniel, he had married Caleb’s daughter, Achsah for defeating the city of Debir. Remember Caleb to who God had given Hebron, Caleb who was one of the twelve spies but one of only two who believed that Israel could take the Promised land.