Personal Relationship with God: Lessons from Judges

Beginning this evening, the study in the book of Judges. If you'd like to find that in your Bibles, it's on page 269. You'll find it. We finished, I'd done the book of Joshua some time ago, went through the book of Joshua, and then decided to go back and do Deuteronomy, because I'd done Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy's kind of a repetition of that. So I skipped over Deuteronomy and went to Joshua and did a study through that book. Then I decided I wanted to go back and do Deuteronomy, because there's enough time going by that people forgot it, so I wouldn't think it's a repetition. So then I jumped forward to the book of Joshua, but the book of Judges sort of is a, it's not a continuation of the book of Joshua, but it's a companion book. And in the story of Joshua, whenever he's given, when God leads the people of Israel out of Egypt, he anoints Moses as the leader. He anoints Moses as the one through whom he talks to the people of Israel. So that he is the one who goes in the tent, God speaks to him, and Moses talks to the people about what God wants him to do. And whenever Moses is dying, he anoints Joshua, and Joshua, whenever the book of Joshua is over, it says he is the servant of God in the same way Moses was the servant of God. But then God changes his method of how he deals with the people of Israel with the death of Joshua. And in the last part of the book of Joshua, Joshua, he came into the land, they fought the battles, and won the majority of the territory. The back of the people in Canaan was broken, that is, they were no longer in control, but there were still pockets of all of the land of promise that had not turned loose. They were still under the control of the native people who were Canaanites. But enough had been won by the time Joshua was ready to die that the people had possession of the land. What each of the tribes needed to do was go to the place that was apportioned to them and drive out the enemy that was there in those locations. But Joshua made sure that the big part of the nation was taken. Now his message to the people of Israel, chapter 23 of the book of Joshua, I just want to read what Joshua is saying. He said, the Lord your God himself will drive them out of your way. He will push them out before you, and you will take possession of their land as the Lord your God promised you. Now what God was doing was he was fulfilling a promise that he had made years ago. So I'm going to step back to the book of Genesis and read from chapter 15 of the book of Genesis. Verse 13, the Lord is talking here to Abraham. He said, Then the Lord said to him, Abram, know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country, not their own. They will be enslaved and mistreated for 400 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 in a good old age, and the fourth generation, your descendants will come back here, for all the sins of the Amorites have not yet reached full measure. Four hundred years, God said, I'm going to come back, bring the people back, and then they will take the land. And what kept him from doing it then was this phrase, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure. What he was saying was, I'm going to drive the Amorites out of the land of Canaan because of their sinfulness, but I'm giving them some time to turn around. We don't know what God had said to the Amorites over the years, we don't have that in scripture. But obviously, he was holding them accountable for their behavior. Four hundred years now, now the time has come when God has said to the Amorites, it's over, I'm going to destroy you. I've given you plenty of time to change your mind and change directions, you've not done that, it's become worse and worse and worse, so now I'm going to bring capital punishment on your land. So the people of Israel, when they went in to fight in the land of Canaan, they were really acting as God's agents to destroy the people who had rebelled against God, the Amorites. Their sin had been so great that God felt it was time to cleanse the land of these people. Now that's what the invasion of the Holy Land really was about. God was now bringing to pass what he had promised Abram four hundred years earlier. So the message that Joshua is bringing, be very strong and careful, verse six of chapter twenty-three of Joshua, be very strong, be careful to obey all that's written in the book of the law of Moses without turning aside to the right or to the left. Do not associate with these nations that remain among you, do not invoke the name of their gods or swear by them, you must not serve or bow down to them, but you are to hold fast to the Lord your God as you have until now. The Lord has driven out before you the great and the powerful nations to this day no one has been able to withstand you. One of you routes a thousand because the Lord your God fights for you just as he promised. Be very careful to love the Lord your God. But if you turn away and ally yourself with the survivors of these nations that remain among you, and if you intermarry with them and associate with them, then you may be sure that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you, instead they will become snares and traps to you, whips on your back and thorns in your eyes until you perish from this good land which the Lord has given you. Now I am about to go away, the way of all the earth. You know with all your heart and your soul that not one of all the good promises that the Lord your God gave you has failed. Every promise has been fulfilled, not one has failed. But just as every promise of the Lord your God has come true, so the Lord will bring on you all the evil he has threatened until he has destroyed you from the good land he has given you. If you violate the covenant of the Lord your God, which he commanded you, and go and serve gods and bow down to them, the Lord's anger will burn against you and you will quickly perish from the good land he has given you. In other words, what I have done with the Amorites, I will do with you. That was his threat. If you act like the Amorites, I will punish you like the Amorites. So this is Joshua's message to them. In the next chapter of Joshua, chapter 24, Joshua brings the people of Israel together and he wants them to renew the covenant that they had made with God. So chapter 24, verse 14, Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshipped beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourself this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the river, he's talking about the river that separated them from the land of promise, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. Then the people answered, Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods. It was the Lord our God himself who brought us out, our forefathers, up out of Egypt from the land of slavery and performed those great signs before our eyes. He protected us on our entire journey among all the nations through which we traveled. And the Lord drove out before us all the nations, including the Amorites who lived in the land. We too will serve the Lord because he is our God. Joshua said to the people, You are not able to serve the Lord. He is a holy God who is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion or your sins if you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods. He will turn and bring disaster on you and make the end of you after he has been good to you. But the people said to Joshua, No, we will serve the Lord. Then Joshua said, You are witnesses against yourself that you have chosen to serve the Lord. Yes, we are witnesses, they replied. Now then, says Joshua, throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel. So all of this is a precursor to what we are going to find in the book of Judges. The main armies had gone into the land of Canaan and had driven out the people who possessed most of the land. But each tribe had its own section that they were given and their responsibility was to go to that section and completely eliminate all of the native Canaanites. So their task was to finish the work that had been started. Now something very big happens to them. When Joshua dies in Judges, the first verse, after the death of Joshua, the Israelites asked the Lord, their word is capitalized, each letter, meaning they asked Yahweh, personal name for God. Now what had happened to them before, from the very beginning of their trip up out of Egypt, many years before, when they wanted to know what God had to say, they went to Moses and said, would you go to God and ask Him what we are supposed to do? Whenever Joshua then had his hands laid on him and he was the military leader that led them out of battle, Joshua would talk to the Lord and the Lord revealed to him what they were supposed to do. You recall how they went to Jericho and tried to figure out how they would get the city. God said to Joshua, walk around the city, blow your horns and the walls will fall down. Every time they went to battle, Joshua received from the Lord instructions about what they were supposed to do. Now Joshua is off the scene. God is doing something entirely different. After the death of Joshua, the Israelites asked the Lord. They didn't have Joshua to ask anymore. They didn't have Moses to ask anymore. This phrase is a powerful indication of what God is trying to do. I have now changed my plan as to how I'm going to work with you. No longer will you have one person who is the leader of your nation. Each of you tribes, as you go into your own location, you'll be on your own, but you will have priests with you, and if you have an interest in knowing what you're supposed to do, ask me and I will reveal it to you. Now God is setting the stage as to how he wants to handle his people in the land of promise. He wants them not to have any human instrument between them and him. You'll recall as time went on, the people of Israel wanted a king. They said, we want a king like all the other nations have a king, and then that person will be responsible, and he'll talk to you, and he'll tell us what to do, and we won't have to search for you ourselves. God did not want them to have a king. He wanted to have personal relationships with each of the tribes as they settled their land. He wanted to be their king. He wanted them to look at him and the one that was in charge. You'll remember when he talked to Moses, the people of Israel stood away, and Moses stood between them. When Moses went to the mountain, the people were afraid. They said to Moses, you go up there. We're afraid we'll die if we go up there, so you take the risk and come back and tell us what he says. With Joshua, it's the same situation. Now he says, I want to directly talk to you. This is very similar to what's happened in the New Testament. At the time in the New Testament, Jesus came to his disciples. They came to him, and he taught them. He walked around with them. He explained to them the scriptures. He told them what God was like. He demonstrated the power of God. He demonstrated the love of God. He demonstrated the compassion of God. He demonstrated the nature and character of God himself in a way that no one had ever seen before. For three years, he walked with them. For three years, he let them know exactly what the message of the Father was to them. And then he brought them together one day, and he said, I'm going to be leaving. This was shattering for them. Where are you going to go? What are we going to do? He said, well, I'm leaving, but then I'm going to send my spirit. The beginning of the book of Acts is like the beginning of the book of Judges. Like the beginning of the book of Judges, it's the time in which a tremendous change had taken place among the people of God. No longer could the disciples walk up to Jesus and say, I've got a question. He wasn't there anymore. No longer in Judges could the people go up to Moses or Joshua and say, what should we do next? God has always wanted, even from the Old Testament times, to have personal relationships with his people. He doesn't want a priest standing between you and him. Peter says, you're a royal priesthood, you're priests. You can enter the very presence of God. You don't have to have someone standing between you and God. Sometimes people see the pastoral role as someone who is sort of above them and between them and God. This is contrary to the entire nature of the Bible. One of the reasons I don't like to have a title is one of the reasons I like to use my name like you all use your name, because I think it is scriptural that God wants not for you to look to me to get to him, but to look directly from your heart to his heart. This is a pattern throughout the scripture that God has been trying to accomplish. Sometimes people talk to me and say, well, I have a neighbor I want to witness to and lead him to Christ. Would you come and talk to him? What they're trying to do is avoid the responsibility of doing that themselves for fear that God will not give them the words to do that. But that as a preacher, God would give me words that he wouldn't give them. This is not true. God wants directly to be able to communicate with each of you. He wants directly to guide your mind and your heart. And there's not a level of significance of one person over another so far as God's concerned. So this is what's happening in the Old Testament. God wants to have his people directly encounter him. The people of Israel later on are going to get to the place where they say, no, we don't want that. We want a king who will be responsible and we won't have to do all this stuff. Now, I think it's a lot of what a lot of religious groups are. You have people who are in positions of leadership to tell you what God says is true instead of encouraging you to discover for yourself what God says is true. So what God is interested in is individuals who come to know him because the presence of the spirit is in them to guide them. So the beginning of the book of Judges is a beginning of a new epoch in Israel's history. Joshua is dead and no longer is there a person who stands between the tribes of Israel and God. God is directly dealing with them. After the death of Joshua, the Israelites asked the Lord. Now we don't know exactly how they did this then, but they used to have the little thing like dice, umun, what do they call them? Umun, pardon, umun or something like that, I forgot what they are, but they were something like they would just throw out on the table and we would look at that and say, well, you know, that's just pure chance, throw seven double sixes in a row. But what they believed was that the God of the universe would make the right numbers come exactly as he wanted. You see, that's risky if you don't believe in the authority and power of God, but they believed it and God responded to that. That's a method he used with them. So they would come before the Lord and say, okay, we're going to throw these out and we want you to tell us, should we go to battle now? And if these come up, we don't even know what they were. We don't see them. They used to have them. The priest carried them around with them because it's the way the priest talked to God, a method by which they used in the Old Testament. We don't know what they were, no picture of them or description of them ever been shown to us, but they believed that this was the way of guidance from God. He personally directed, in response to their questions, an answer like that. It's a wonderful thing we don't have to rely on that, you know. We have the Holy Spirit inside of us to tell us when we ask a question. If you roll the dice out on the table and say, okay, God, if you want me to witness my neighbor, I want a double six, and it came up, you'd say, I'm going to give you another chance, God. I'm going to roll another one. We'd roll them until it was a five and a six and say, okay, now I don't have to do it. But the Spirit of God, when he comes to us, he tells us what we want and it stays with us. You may not do what he tells you to do the first time, but you know that. It just keeps haunting you, stays with you. The Spirit of God is in you, it just keeps haunting you. You know what you're supposed to do. You know when you're supposed to do it, and you're just pushing it aside. God has worked all the way through the Bible to come to this place where each of us has the presence of the Spirit. Now in Joshua's time, the tribes individually didn't have this. They had the priest who would roll these things on the table or floor or on the ground, and only the priest could do this. So God is slowly but carefully moving toward the world in which we live today, to be able to be personal with us. So here the people of Israel now go to the Lord, and the only mechanism they had, Joshua was gone. This was new territory for them. Now I know if you try to do something for the very first time, you're always a little cautious about it. But they rolled these things and came up with what they were supposed to do, and they accepted it as the voice of the Lord. Who will be the first to go up and fight the Canaanites for us? That was their question of God. Who shall be the first team or tribe that will go out to fight? Now this verse begins the book of Judges, and it's a very exciting verse because the people of Israel have lost their leader. He's told them what they should do, and they eagerly do exactly what they're supposed to. We're going to go to the Lord, even though we've never done this before in the history of our nation, and we're going to ask God what he wants us to do, and whatever he tells us, we're going to do it. No more submissiveness could you find anywhere than in this single sentence. Tell us who will go up first and fight for us against the Canaanites. The Lord answered, Judah is to go. I have given the land into their hands. Now Judah was the most prominent tribe, and it got the territory that was the most fertile territory in the middle of the nation. It got the territory that was around Jerusalem, which was to be the city that was to be the focus of God's attention throughout the history of the Israelite nation. And so Judah was selected as to be the one that would go out and win the battle for this prime land in the middle of Canaan, and claim it for the Lord. Their task was to drive out all the people who inhabited that land and claim it for God. Now when you look at the New Testament and you see what the people of the followers of Christ did, they came to Jerusalem and they waited patiently for the Spirit of God to come. And when the Spirit of God came on them, they went outside in the city of Jerusalem, and they began to tell people about Christ. And they discovered when they walked up to someone and began to talk, that the person they were talking to, even though they spoke a different foreign language, could actually hear them. The most miraculous thing took place. Like the Holy Spirit was a translator from the mouth of a person to the ears of another. And all of a sudden, in that location, the message of Christ was distributed to people who would be all over the world. City of Jerusalem at the time of the Passover often had a lot of people there. I've seen estimates of a million people who would be in that area coming for this annual celebration, the Passover. They were from all parts of the Roman Empire. And there they came and they heard about Jesus, maybe one day, one time, one hour. The converts of that day, we oftentimes talk about how many people were converted. And so we talk about thousands of people being converted. But it wasn't exactly like you might think. There weren't 10,000 drunken atheists there who were just suddenly converted. These were people who believed in God and had come from all over the Roman Empire to worship God, longing for the Messiah. All they needed to hear was the Messiah has come, and then believe it. And because they were so devoted to God, they were open to the message of these people who came. And they came telling who Jesus was. And suddenly the power of God not only gave them the ability to do something they couldn't do otherwise, but the Spirit of God that had been drawing people there for the Passover, cleaning and preparing their hearts for an encounter with God, heard inside of them by the power of the Spirit poured out the very message that they longed for. And thousands of them said, this is the truth. What you had were people who had been looking for God, trying to find Him, and what they found was the next step. The step that they couldn't find anywhere in the Old Testament, for what they found was the promise of the Messiah. So the conversions that were sort of indicated on that day were not like you would say, okay, we're going out to New York City and preach to 10,000 people and 5,000 of them are going to be saved. They were the most religious people in all the world. They were searching for God. And when they heard the message of God, their heart was so prepared that inside they said, this is what we've been looking for. It wasn't evangelism in the sense that you think of, you know, you meet someone and they've never followed Christ. These were people who were taking the next step from the faith of the Old Testament to the faith of the New Testament. And they found Christ, a transformation. In the book of Judges, the people of Israel were taking another bold step. We have never been able to know how to find the will of God. We say, Joshua, what is it? Moses, what is it? But now we have found this. What we're going to find is this wonderful beginning in the book of Judges is the beginning of a terrible story. For the great promise that God has in this very first two verses didn't last. It's a story of tragedy. It's a story of missed opportunity. It's a picture of what happens when people begin to compromise the promises they've made to God. It's not a pretty book. It's a powerful book. But the stories in it are wretchedly painful because we see that the people who start with such wonderful promise don't end up there. I think you see it around a lot of times. See churches are powerful and filled with the Spirit of God. Our nation started with people who were completely devoted to God. And just little by little by little, it's changed. It's an old story, a story that we see over and over again, where regardless of how much people mean it, it is difficult for them to hold on to the passion of obedience that allows God to finish what he starts. It can happen to each of us, really. This book is sort of a pattern by how it happens. We learn from their mistakes how to watch ourselves. Would you pray with me? We're thankful, Father, that we have your Spirit. We get up in the morning and we say, what do you want me to do today? You put things in our minds. Sometimes we do them and there are other times in which we say, well, you know, I don't want to do that. I'll put it off until tomorrow. Help us have a passion for obedience, a passion to make sure that there's nothing in this world that becomes more important to us than doing the things we know you want us to do. We don't have somebody looking over our shoulder, a human being to whom we have to answer. We have you. You don't send your messages to someone else to tell us what to do. You send them directly to us. Help us to cherish that, to know the difference between your voice and the voice of the deceiver. We might never write our own chapter of descending into rebellion from obedience. In the name of Christ we ask this, amen.