Understanding God's Judgment and Mercy

Back to Deuteronomy chapter 7. This is Moses' summary of what's happened in the first several books of the Bible. Deuteronomy chapter 7. What the first chapter of Judges talks about is how a person easily slips away from obedience to God. And it begins with this obedience can only be gauged in light of what you're supposed to do. For example, if you went home and sat down in front of the TV, it wouldn't necessarily be anything wrong with that. Except if your boss says to you, I want you to come and work for these four hours, and then you went home and sat in front of the TV, you would be disobedient. If you had no instructions, then you could make your own choice and there would be no sense of rebellion or disobedience. So the context of the first chapter of Judges comes from what's happened previously. In chapter 7 of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses is giving a sort of a summary of what was taking place. And here is what he said to the people. This is what you are to do to them. Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles, burn their idols in the fire. For you are people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possessions. Now the Lord is indicating to them the very important ingredient that is a great part of the book of Judges. Whenever the Lord was talking to the people of Israel in the beginning, before they ever made it to the land of promise, he indicated to them in Genesis chapter 15 what they were to do. This is the command for obedience. This is a prediction that God made with Abram. He was telling them, in this passage he was talking about his covenant promise to the people of Israel. Verse 12, As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick, dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own. They will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions. You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sins of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. What God was talking about with Abram here was, I promise you to give you this land, but it is not now yours for the taking. For there is something that has to happen before I give it to you. And what has to happen was, the full rebellion of the Amorites against God had to take place. It was not yet in place. So he said, Whenever the full time of their sin comes, we don't know how that is or what it means. God did. He knows when the time of judgment should come. It gives us some idea of the patience of God. Four hundred years he's going to wait before he brings judgment. He's already seen in the lives of the Amorites they're pulling away from God. It takes a country a long time sometimes to move from where they are in righteousness to being a very rebellious and wicked country. Four hundred years. But he saw already in their lives the evidence of where they were headed. And he knew that they would have to take time for this to fully take place before God's judgment came. So when you read in Deuteronomy chapter 7, what the Lord is saying is he's saying, The time for my judgment has come. And whenever you capture these people, that God has delivered you and you've defeated them, you must destroy them totally. Whatever they did made them worthy of capital punishment by God. So this wasn't simply that God was, you know, irritated or angry. It was a judgment that God was bringing that was a long time coming. They have earned this, so you're to destroy them totally. Now, make no treaty with them. In other words, don't make a peace treaty that says, OK, we'll capture your city and leave your city here as long as you don't fight against us. And show no mercy to them. It's not that God is not a God of mercy. It's that there's a time for forgiveness and a time for mercy and a time for judgment. And so when the time for judgment comes, judgment will be brought. A lot of times the delay of God's judgment to us causes us to think it's not going to happen. It's this, you know, the Bible says you should read the Bible. You should gather for worship with other believers, whatever the commandments are. And you do something that you know you're not supposed to do. And nothing happens to you, you think you got away with it. Well, God knows everything. He sees everything. He knows that I'm not reading the Bible. He knows I'm not praying. He knows I'm not going to church like I know I should. So, it must mean that it's OK. And the rebellion gives us a sense when God's judgment doesn't come immediately because of His mercy. It gives us a sense that we got away with it. And it leads us to become less and less careful about obedience and submission to God. So, the time has come, He says, whenever you'll be there and the judgment is to come. So, you're to do nothing that would allow their influence on your life to impact you. You're not to intermarry with them because if a man marries a woman who's a pagan, it means that the house is divided in some way. He wants to go to make sacrifices that God said they should do. He wants to live according to the instructions in the Old Testament. And his wife doesn't want to do that. It's the other way around. It's the same thing. The wife may feel like these are the promises God made and the commands He made. And her husband may stand in the way of her being able to do it. So, don't intermarry because it causes division between you and your wife or husband. So, this requirement was to isolate them. Do not give your daughters or sons or take their daughters for your sons for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods and the Lord's anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. So, the Lord had promised early that there was going to be a time of judgment. Now, Moses in Deuteronomy said that in chapter 7, but he emphasized it again in chapter 20. Chapter 20 verses 10 through 20. He wanted to make sure that the people understood exactly what the laws, what the rules were for what they were going to do. Chapter 20 beginning at verse 1. When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them because the Lord your God who brought you up out of Egypt will be with you. When you're about to go into the battle, a priest shall come forward and address the army. He shall say, Here, O Israel, today you're going into battle against your enemies. Do not be faint-hearted or afraid. Do not be terrified or give way to panic before them. For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to give you the victory. I'm going to skip to verse 10. When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept, then open their gates and all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace, they engage you and engage you in battle laid siege to their city. When the Lord your God delivers them to your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women and children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take them as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. So for the nation, for the cities that were far away, there was a little bit of a different offering because of the distance. If they agree to be servants of yours, you don't have to kill them. However, in the cities and the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave anything alive that breathes. Completely destroy them, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods. And you will sin against the Lord your God. When you lay siege to a city for a long time fighting against a captor, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them. They were ecologists. They didn't want to destroy all the trees that were in the place. Because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down as the trees of the field people that you should besiege them. However, you may cut down trees that you know are not fruit trees and use them to build siege works until the city at war with you falls. So God had specific concrete commands as to how they were to go about the work that he had given them to do. These commands isolated the people of Israel from the influence of people who were not followers of God. God was not simply interested in killing people. It was judgment that he brought on those who were in the land of Israel that he gave to them. Those that farther away, the judgment time had not yet come for them. So now with all that background, when you turn to the book of Judges and you begin to see what took place, you see how the people of Israel fulfilled this. Chapter 1 with verse 3. Then the men of Judah said to the Simonites, their brothers, they'd asked previously, Lord, tell us how we should enter the land of promise and who's to take the property. He said, first of all, Judah will be the one who will go in first. He'll be the leader. That tribe will be the leader of the of the invasion. Then the men of Judah said to the Simonites, their brothers, both of them were children of Leah, one of the wives that was not liked. So they were brothers of the same mother. They're not half brothers like some of the other tribes were. So they had some kind of national natural connection to each other. Then the men of Judah said to the Simonites, their brothers, come up with us to the territory allotted to us to fight against the Canaanites. We in turn will go with you to yours. So the Simonites went with them. Now, not only were they brothers together, but when the land was given and they located their plots, Judah had a great big piece of property. The Simonites were a very small tribe, about 22,000 soldiers in that tribe. If you take all the tribes of Israel, the 12 tribes and divided, they took a survey of how many warriors there were. You would find out that the average of the 12 tribes was 44,000 people. The Simonites only had 22,000. So of all the people, they got a smaller portion of land and they were less able to be warriors against the people they opposed. It didn't matter how big your army was. If you attacked a city where they had 40,000 soldiers and you only had 22, you'd be outnumbered. So what they knew was the cities in their territory, they might find themselves in positions where they would need help. So the people of Judah made a deal with their brothers, their relatives, their kin, let's band ourselves together. Instead of you being 22,000, now we'll be like 66,000, except Judah had more than the average. So they would have an enormous army. And we go and capture the territory that's ours. And then right in the center of that, the place that was the Simonites, we will help you go then and capture yours. So instead of 22,000 soldiers, you'll have a great army to be able to do what you're supposed to do to make this land for yourself. So the plan was made that they would be able to find a way to conquer the territory that they had. No problem in this. The people of Judah were chosen to be the first to lead. They made an arrangement with their brother tribe to help them. This was not outside of what God had planned for them. But in verse 4, it begins to talk about how they executed this responsibility. Now in verse 1 and 2, they begin this by saying to the Lord, in the past they'd had Moses to tell them what to do. When Joshua was there, he led the armies. And he talked to the Lord, and the Lord told him how to fight these battles. Now Joshua's dead, and God wants to deal with him directly. So he says to them, no longer will you have a spokesman to talk to you and tell you what I want you to do. You're going to have to find this for yourself. And so they asked the Lord, at the very beginning, who will be the first to go up and fight for us against the Canaanites? And the Lord answered them. They had some method by which they determined what God's choice for them was. We don't really know what it was. We know they had an unum and thumum, which were two stones that they would use. We don't know exactly how they used it. Maybe it had all the tribes on it. Maybe it just had numbers on it. We don't know. But this was one of the methods by which they determined the will of God. So whatever it was, the answer came back, Judah is the tribe that's to go first. Now, the first tribe takes the leadership, and they begin their battle with verse 4. When Judah attacked, the Lord gave the Canaanites, the Perizzites, into the hands, and they struck down 10,000 men at Bezik. It was there they found Adonai Bezik. The word Adonai simply is a transliteration of Hebrew. Like if you wrote the Hebrew A, B, C, D in Hebrew letters, it's transliterated into English, our English language. And the word means ruler, means the king. And then Bezik is translated in almost all the Bibles as if it were the name of a person. Adonai Bezik. Many think that it's really the title of the king, like Pharaoh was the title for the king. It wasn't really a name for someone. It was just the title of the king. And here, some people think that's what this is, but it's used in a way that indicates maybe it was his name. And most of the translations do that, even though literally the word means the king of Bezik. So the king of Bezik, or Adonai Bezik, however, it's really whatever it really means, they found him and fought against him, putting to rout the Canaanites, the Perizzites. Adonai Bezik fled, but they chased him and caught him and cut off his thumbs and big toes. Now, what they were doing here was in conflict specifically with what God told them they should do. They decided to have mercy on this king for some reason, cut off his thumbs. And if you were to grip a sword, you need a thumb. It's hard to grip a sword with the hand like this. If you're going to be able to fight and battle, your big toe gives you a way to be able to hold your balance. So what they were doing was customary for Canaanite soldiers. Whenever they caught people and won the victory in battle, they would leave them to live, but cut off their thumbs and big toe so that they would no longer be a military threat to them. This was in direct conflict with what God told them to do. They may have thought that there was some reason for doing it. Maybe we can use this man to help us learn how to get around the countryside or negotiate with some of the other guys that are here. We don't know what their thinking was. Except in this instance, they specifically did the opposite of what God said they should do. They had mercy on this man who was to be slain, and they treated him, instead of like the enemy, as somebody that they could use or be a part of what they were trying to accomplish. Almost all the rebellion that we have against God starts in an innocent way. When you talk to people whose lives have sort of strayed away from God, they usually don't go from being a faithful follower of Christ to the most wretched place that they are. Generally, it starts on a very simple basis. People, when you see them drift away from God, it's not that they're coming faithfully, reading the Bible, serving in the church, doing what God wants them to do, and then the next day they don't ever do any of those things. It usually comes and people say, Well, I don't want to come on Sunday night. I don't want to come on Wednesday night. And they say, I don't think it's necessary for me to go on Sunday morning. You know, if I've got something else to see. Slowly, slowly they begin to drift away from their faithfulness to God. It generally starts in the privacy of your life, not even in attendance at church. It starts when a person says, Well, you know, I'm really busy. I don't have time to read the Bible today. So you miss. And it doesn't seem like anything bad happened to you. So you don't get worried about it. Well, I'll pick it up later. And so you may do that. And then another time comes and it's a little longer before you pick it up. First thing people know, they're not reading the Bible at all. They're not asking God for direction in their life daily. They just get up and do the best they know how. In the beginning, it's not a problem for many people. But when you begin to stray away from the wisdom of God, what begins to happen is problems compound themselves. And so oftentimes people think, Well, you know, I've got a lot more problems than I used to have. So I'm going to need to spend more time taking care of my problems. Less time talking to God or dealing with the Scripture or going to church. And so that alienation makes it even more difficult and more trouble and more problems arise. It starts small all the time. Satan didn't say to Adam and Eve in the garden, I want you to get kicked out of the garden. He just said, That sure does look like good fruit there to eat. Nothing wrong with that. Just have a bite. Satan's temptation is that way. It was true of Israelites. And so the beginning of this, on the very heels, on the very heels of the people of Israel, doing exactly what God asked them to do. God said, Now, Joshua is going to be gone. And what I want you to do is to ask me what I'm supposed to do for you. And they did. They brought the tribes together and said, God, who should be the first one to go? He named who it was, exactly what they were supposed to do. And when that started, they went and won the first battle. Sometimes that's a difficult thing. Great victories, spiritual victories, sometimes cause us to feel self-confident. I can do this. Look how easy that was. We went out and fought this battle and we defeated 10,000 people. We can do this. We're strong. We're sufficient. We can do this job. And the confidence in ourselves caused us to lose confidence in God, so we began to trust ourselves and our own judgment and to leave aside the very instructions of God himself. This begins to happen with the people of Israel. It's simple at the first, and maybe it doesn't even seem significant. But what they did to the king was exactly what the Canaanite people did when they won victories. So what they did was they adopted the military customs of the Canaanites. We can kill these people, but we can leave their king because he might be of value to us. We can see how he might be of value to us. And they took the first step of rebellion and disobedience. Then Adonai Bezik said, 70 kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off have picked up scraps under my table. Now God has paid me back for what I did to them. They brought him to Jerusalem, and there he died. It shows us kind of a picture of what the ancient world was like. Pardon? Adonai Bezik. It shows us a picture of what it was like in those ancient days. If people today have hard times come to them, they say, well, I've had a rough time. Things haven't gone very well. The ancient world, pagans, followers of God in the Old Testament, believed that the events of life were the result of God's activity in their life. And here the Canaanite king sees a direct connection to what's happened to him and what he had done before. I've cut the thumbs and big toes off of 70 kings that I had. And what he's talking about was there was kind of a tradition. If a king was captured, he was the ruler of the country. The person that captures them wants them to understand that this king is under their control. So he would sometimes be put under the table to eat the scraps that fell off the table. So that the king who was once on the throne and served by everybody now is seen as a dog under the table eating the scraps. It's a way by which the conquering king or military leader has to say, I've turned the most powerful man in your nation into a dog. No strength or power at all. This causes the people who are the victors to think they're powerful and strong and causes them to look at themselves as if they have power and strength instead of thinking that God does this. Oftentimes when we drift away from God, in the process of doing this, I guess every time really, when you drift away from a relationship with God that's close in which you're talking to Him and listening to Him and following His directions, when you turn away from that, what you're doing is saying, I can handle this myself. I can do in life what needs to be done. I don't need this constant feeding from the scriptures. I don't need the fellowship of believers. I don't need the instruction of teachers and preachers. I can do this on my own. That kind of arrogance is what happened here in this story. The king, the Judean kings who believed in the military people who captured this guy want to show the power that they have over him to say, look how strong we are. And when the king is there under their table, scrapping around trying to find food, every picture of that would say, we are powerful. The customs that they picked up and giving him life and the punishment that they gave him were in direct violation of what God asked them to do. The men of Judah, in verse 8, the men of Judah attacked Jerusalem also and took it. They put the city to the sword and set it on fire. Now, they turned from fighting in the countryside, moving north on the map of Canaan, to the position of where Jerusalem was. This was to be the center of attention for the nation. And they came to the city and they set it on fire and burned it. Now, what you'll find in the Bible in different places are different stories about the capture of Jerusalem. David was one of the leaders in 2 Samuel who captured the city of Jerusalem and made it his place for ruling the nation. You'll find later that another, the Benjaminites, attacked the city of Jerusalem and burned it. The city of Jerusalem was on a kind of a property line between Judah and Benjamin. So, it's possible for the Judean soldiers to come and capture one side of the city while the Benjaminites had a chance to capture the other side. If you look at this, when you read the Scriptures, you find out that the area of Jerusalem was hilly. And the city was not built on one level plain, but it was built on these hills. So, it's possible for this battle to be fought. The people of Israel then attacked it and captured, the Judean people, captured a portion of the city and burned that, maybe where the leader of the military was, and left some of the other territories alone. Benjamin came up from the north side and captured part of the city of Jerusalem later and left. And the city of Jerusalem then continued to grow. The city of Jerusalem, we have records of it, as early as 3000 B.C. And this story takes place about 1400 B.C. So, the city of Jerusalem was an old, old city. By this time, it had already been in existence for 1600 years. Now, you think about this on our calendar and you go back to say it would be like something here in this country from about 700 A.D. or 400 A.D. What would 1400 minus from 2000 be 600 A.D.? So, you look way back at that time in our world's history. We don't have any cities in our country that have any kind of heritage like that. And when you look around the world, there are some places where that was true. But those old, old cities like Rome are completely gone and new cities built on them. So, the city of Jerusalem was from an ancient time a city of value, significance, and importance. The name of the city Jerusalem is found in the Bible in several different ways. It's in the Bible sometimes called Jabez. It's sometimes in the Egyptians called Yerusalem with a U instead of a J. Its name meant the establishment of the god Shalem. That's what its name was. So, it was known as a religious center for thousands of years and hundreds of years before the people of Israel ever came to the city. The city was a powerful place and to capture and hold it, when David made it his capital city, was to establish himself as the conqueror of the gods of the Canaanites. That's why this picture is important throughout the Old Testament until the establishment that David makes as his capital city because it was the center of Canaanite religion. And when the people of Israel captured it, it was a declaration that the god they served had power and authority over all gods in the world. So, for the people of Israel, this was a critical city. The first time now, the Judeans came and captured the city and burned it. The men of Judah attacked Jerusalem also and took it. They put the city to the sword and set it on fire. After the men of Judah went down to fight against the Canaanites living in the hill country, the Negev and the western foothills, they advanced against the Canaanites living in Hebron, formerly called Kiriath, Ereba, and defeated Sheshai, and Hinnom, and Talmai. The people of Judah made the first victory and this is sort of a brief summary of what their fighting was and what they did and how they conquered. But it also begins to tell us that in the victories that they had, there was a small break in their sense of obedience and submission to what God wanted. It's the beginning of the book of Judges to warn us of the impending danger that's going to come. A small crack in obedience will soon become an open revolt by the time the book ends. And now we see how it begins. Very simple. One single act of saying to God, I don't think it's necessary for me to do everything you tell me just the way you say I should do it. After all, if it makes sense to me, I don't see anything wrong with that. The seeds of rebellion are sown and soon they will take root. And the story of the book will tell us how it grew. Would you join me please in a moment of prayer? If you think of your own life living in obedience to Christ, all of us can look back at times in which we didn't take God as seriously as at other times we took Him. We find that this pattern is as old as the Bible. The benefit we have is we see the dangers that it resulted in. So it's important for us as followers of Christ to ask ourselves, how is it you want me to live? And to be careful to do what He tells us. For complete submission to Him is the only safety we have against the things that destroy us, our lives, our homes, our church. Father, this week as we live, help us to see places in which we might compromise what we know You want us to do, how You want us to live. Help us to see the compromises as deadly poison and not just simple choices. Guide us with Your Spirit to let us know what You want and to give us courage to be submissive and obedient. That we might not practice living like the people around us live, but instead live as You direct us to live. In the name of Christ, we ask for You to keep us aware of the safety and the dangers that obedience and disobedience bring to us. Amen.