Trust and Obedience in the Community of Faith

When you read the stories in the Old Testament about the nation of Israel, the key ingredient is to transfer the lessons that you find into the cultural setting in which we live. And the cultural setting deceives you a little bit. For example, when it is talking about the nation of Israel and it is talking about how they operated as a country or a nation, our tendency is to take that method and transfer it, say, to the operation of our own country's government or our city's government or our state government. This is not the parallel that needs to be made because the people of Israel become the citizens of the people of the kingdom of God and the nation of Israel by one thing. You go back to the story of Mount Sinai. God gave the commandments and the instructions as to how they were to live and he said to them, I will be your God, and he said by saying that, he was saying I will guide you in all the decisions and choices you make. I will provide for your needs. I will protect you and I will make you a great nation. Beginning with Abraham, he made that covenant and he renewed it at Mount Sinai. What he asked of the people of Israel at Sinai was, will you do everything that I tell you to do? That was the only requirement. Now we talk about that in different terms in doing everything that somebody tells us to do because it sounds like works salvation. If you do all these good things, then you will go to heaven or God will accept you. But you have to look back at this. If I say to you, okay, Terry, I'm going to give you directions how to get to my house. But you have to do everything exactly like I tell you or you won't get there. You'd have to trust me before you did all the things I told you. If you thought I didn't know what I was talking about, you would say, well, I'm going to listen to this and I may go a little while, but I'm going to figure this out on my own. You wouldn't have trusted me. What God is saying is, I ask you to trust me enough. So if I tell you things to do, you will accept that and you'll do it because I told you it's the right thing. So that faith always precedes, in the Old Testament, the actions of obedience. It does everywhere, but it's sort of assumed in the Old Testament. So they don't ask the people in the Old Testament to say, do you believe in God? They don't say, would you like to accept God as your Savior and Redeemer? What they say is, do you trust God enough to say, I will do everything you tell me to do? Now in the Old Testament, you look back in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, I mean there are endless details about what God wants them to do, about how to plant their crops, and how to harvest the crops, and how to treat the people around you, and how to treat your neighbor and your friend, and all these details about how to love other people. That's what they're really talking about. How do you treat other people with respect and serve them? So when the Old Testament is talking about the nation of Israel, it's really talking about the community of faith. We would refer to that, in our terms, as the church. The church is a community of people who say, I trust God enough that I pledge to live my life in obedience to Him. So all the problems that you see in the nation of Israel, when you read through the story of the Old Testament, are really most comparable to what you would find in church life. So when you see these stories of the nation, the comparable area in which you look for application is in the life of the church, the people of God. So when you read this story, they're talking about fighting, they're talking about war, they're talking about all these things. You want to stop and say, this is a picture of how the people of God live together and how they get things done. So the Old Testament is a picture of how individuals come to be able to live a life of obedience to God in community. The Bible makes it clear from the very beginning that obedience to God is always lived in community. Remember, God gives a summary of all the Old Testament law. Do you know what it is? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. What's the next one? And he said, what is the greatest commandment? The greatest commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love your neighbors yourself. Now see, that looks like two, doesn't it? But he says it's one commandment. And the reason is, if you really are going to serve God, it becomes, in your life, you then start treating other people the way God wants you to treat them. You can't back off and say, I'm not going to treat people the way God tells me to treat them. I'm just going to love God. You can't do that. You can't live the Christian life as a hermit. You read in Christian history, the great hermits of the early church would get out and live in a cave, or one guy's lived on a pole for years, you know, just up on a pole. Well, you know, it's hard to get in a fight with anybody up on that pole when you're the only one there. You know, you're pretty well able to deal with the people around you when there are no people around you. And what the Bible shows us is, this primary relationship with God is tested by how we deal with the people around us. And when we see people that are not nice to us, they're nasty to us, all those are tests not about how you treat people, but whether or not you believe God. God tells me to forgive people. You know what I'm going to need? I'm going to need some people that need to be forgiven. You can't forgive unless you have somebody that needs to be forgiven. And boy, the Lord will bless you with lots of those. So when you see the Old Testament, and you see all the struggles they go through, it's a picture of how the church deals with the world in which it finds itself, filled with difficulties and trials and problems. In this story, in the Judges, the people of Israel have just gone into the land of promise. They're beginning to fulfill what God asked them to do, to go to all these different places and conquer them and make them under their control. When God sent them to the land of promise, he said to them, the people of it, the people have been living here, have rebelled against me, they haven't done what I asked them to do. And because they live lives that are so wretched and so wicked, I'm ready to pass judgment on them. It's a whole interesting thing that we see in the Bible that God tells us the story of Israel, but he doesn't tell us how he dealt with the Moabites. He doesn't tell us how he dealt with all these other nations. But in this little window, we see that he had said to the people who were in Canaan, I'm going to ask you to live in these certain ways. We don't know what he told them. All we know is he said they have not done what I asked them to do. And they're beyond redemption, so I'm going to wipe them off the face of the earth. And you go in here now in this place when there's no negative influence around you and you live according to what I've told you to live, and I'm going to build a nation that's never been anything like this in the history of the world. I will give you the victory. That's what he said. Well, the beginning of the book of Judges, they started out trying to do that. They made it just in one verse. By the time they got to the second verse, they were already compromising what God told them. They thought we got a better plan. He said, destroy every city that's there. So they came up on a city. And they found it was had a big wall around it, and they said, well, it's too big for us to get around. They forgot that God said, I'm going to do what I'll make it possible like he did at Jericho. They forgot about Jericho. So they come to the city and said, this is too big. Saw a guy slip outside. They caught him instead of killing him. They said, you know, if you'll tell us how to get inside this city, we'll let you and your family go. Compromised exactly what God told them and went downhill from then on. What we find in the book of Judges, a series of stories about how the people of Israel deteriorated in their relationship with God. How they compromised one thing after another until they were so far away from him that he simply removed his presence from them. He no longer was helping them in the beginning. He did miraculous things. City of Jericho. You all know about that. He walked around there seven times or whatever. The walls fell down. Those stories didn't keep on. They began to compromise what God asked of them. Now, the story that we're reading today from chapter five in the book of Judges tells of a time in people's in the history of Israel. When Israelites had drifted away from God and this in the book of Judges, it says they did evil in the eyes of the Lord and what it meant by that one meant that they lied or cheated or stole. It was the first commandment. There was the one that they were missing. They were not making God the supreme ruler over their nation and over their individual lives. What they had done was they said, you know, this stuff that God gave us in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, that was good stuff. But, you know, after all, this is the modern age. That was old fashioned stuff. Our grandparents did that. You know, we're in a different world here. They were out in the desert. They didn't have anyone else to help them. But we're here in this promised land God's given us. And these people that live here have been farming this ground for centuries. We need to learn from them how to live and how to farm because they are people who have practiced it. So they begin to do not what God told them. He told them how to farm. They didn't dress the way God told them to dress. They didn't eat the way God told them to eat. They didn't plant their crops the way God told them to plant their crops. And so God, as they began to move away from him, he began to do less and less to help them. Until finally, as the less and less help that he gave them, the more things happened that were wrong. When he removed his protection like an umbrella, you have an umbrella over you, the rain comes off, you know, if you begin to move it over away first, you get a few drops on your hand and your arm and your shirt and your shoulder and your head. And then when it's gone, you're drenched. God's protective covering over the people of Israel were being removed as they moved away from him. You've broken the contract. You're not doing the things I told you to do. I am not the Lord of your life, so I'm not going to keep the promises I made to you. So they find themselves over and over again in serious situations. They do not repent. Repentance is when you say, God, I realize I've quit doing the things I was supposed to do. I'm not doing them anymore. In fact, I'm doing things you told me not to do. I realize that I've offended you. I realize I've rejected your authority over my behavior. I ask for forgiveness and I pledge myself to renew my devotion to do everything you've told me. That's a repentant lifestyle. What happens in the book of Judges is that they get in such messes that they're just overwhelmed. They don't repent, but God looks down on them and says, these are my people, even though they've turned their back on me, I am not going to quit them. I still have hope for them. This is really an important thing for you to realize when you've made a commitment of your life to Christ. When you made a commitment of your life to Christ, I can tell you this, you are going to drift away from it. That's a given. Because everyone does. Everyone is tempted to sin and sooner or later we give in to it. It can be all kinds of different sin. And don't get upset or angry about someone who does what you'd say is a bad sin compared to, say, somebody who doesn't read the Bible anymore, who goes to church. All those are the same in God's eyes. They're failures to do what he wants us to do. All of us go through those. And what happens to us is we come to a place where we say, man, my life is really not working like it ought to. And then you read a book on how to make your life work better and you try to do that and that doesn't work and you think of all the things in the world you can do. And all the while, God is saying, you know, you don't pray anymore and you don't go to church anymore and you think, well, I know that, but, you know, I can learn, I can figure it out, I can make it go. And he just keeps withdrawing his hand from you until finally one day you say, I've got to do something about it. And every preacher has stories to tell you about someone that just comes and knocks on his door and say, I got to talk to you about God. And they're the place where they say, I've just got to go back to him. And what he wants is for you to say, OK, I'm ready now to live my life the way you want me to live. This is the story of Israel. And this story I want to read today in chapter five of the book of Judges. This is a story of the people of Israel, how they fell away from God. It's written in poetry form and chapter four is the same story, but it's written in prose. Now, this chapter is written in poetry. Deborah is the hero, heroine of this story. Barack is the hero of the story. Deborah was a woman who was a judge. She was a prophetess in the Old Testament. A lot of people have trouble with women having significant roles in the church, teachers or preachers or whatever else. God can put people anywhere he wants to put them and he can take anybody and put them where he wants to put them. The key ingredient is you don't achieve this yourself. You don't say, well, I'm going to become this. You say whatever you want me to do, God, I'll do it. And he'll put you wherever he wants you to be. He doesn't have any trouble with this. You know, David was a shepherd boy and Samuel went out to find the new king of Israel. And they brought in all the grown up adults that were strong and nice looking and they didn't work. But God was looking for the one person he wanted and he found the only person nobody there thought would be a candidate for the king. God knows where you are. He knows who you are. He will never let you be lost from the place of significance he wants you to have in life. So long as you're doing the things he wants you to do. He will put you in the place of significance and importance in service to him, regardless of what people around you do. He will find you and he'll put you in the place where you can be important to him and fulfill your life purpose. So here, Deborah and Barack were heroes and heroines of this story. Deborah has been talking, she was a judge and people were coming to her and we used the word judge. We think of somebody who says, OK, bring me the next case of theft. You know, that wasn't what it was. They would come to him and say, come to the judge and say, this is what the Bible says you do when a man's ox gets in here and eat your crop. What are we supposed to do? We've had a disagreement about how this has worked. He tells you a story. I tell you mine and you decide who's right and who gets the who gets repaid. That's kind of judgment that he gave because what they were really doing was interpreting. How do you love your neighbor? How do you treat people fairly? That's what the judge was doing. Now, you know why we don't have that today? It's not the pastor that tells you that. When you surrender your life to Christ, he places the Holy Spirit inside you, who takes the place of the Old Testament judges. All you have to do is say to God, well, God, what should I do about this? And he'll tell you, I don't want that seem like you say it and immediately get it. He says, keep on knocking, keep on asking and keep on searching and sooner or later you'll find if you do a couple of times you don't get it. That just means he realizes you're not patient enough to get it yet. So when you keep knocking and asking, you will eventually find it. That's his promise to us. I will always answer your questions to me. Just don't give up before I do. I will answer them, but if you give up, I can't answer them. So he's talking to the people of Israel now. They've strayed away from him. They've already turned their back on who he is, and God has allowed the enemy to take over their land and take over who they are. I want to begin. I want to begin in chapter five. With verse, let me see where I'm. With verse six, I think, verse six, where I want to start. In the days of Shamgar, son of Anath, Shamgar was a pagan. He was a soldier in the army of the Egyptians, but he came to the land and drove out the enemies of Israel. And they saw this as the hand of God working to a pagan to rescue them. So he was one of the great heroes in one of the first early chapters. He was Shamgar, the son of Anath, Anath was a Egyptian God. He was really a servant of the Egyptian God, but God used him to do what he wanted to do in Israel's life. See, God's not limited just to using godly people to help you out. He can use the worst pagans in the world to help you out. They don't know it at the time. They don't realize it at the time, but you will know it because you know God and you recognize his hand in your life. What would it be if somebody was nice to you? Would you think that was a friend or if they tried to club you in the head, which would be your friend? Pretty easy to figure out, isn't it? So you look at your life and you see God is the one who blesses you. Satan is the one who hurts you. So you know who God is by what's taking place in your life and your blessings are not with regard to what the world thinks are good things, but what God thinks are good things. So they're gathered together facing this difficult days because God is now prepared to bring judgment on them. In the days of Shamgar son of Anath and the days of Jael, the roads were abandoned. Now Jael is one of the heroines of this story. In the beginning, Deborah prophesied that God would deliver the nation of Israel from their enemies through a woman. Now you see what's happened in the Middle East today. You can imagine how you don't see any women generals in the Islamic armies. They recruit them over there, but they don't give them places of leadership or power. Well, this was the culture of the Old Testament. But Deborah was given by God abilities and skills. So men and women alike came to her and said, tell us what God's will and direction really is. So he's giving here. She's saying in the days of Shamgar, the son of Anath and the days of Jael. And this is starting now the future story. The roads were abandoned. What was taking place is the people were in control. The Canaanites were in control of the land. They had driven the Israelites back into their homes because they no longer had power to take to win the battles. God had removed his presence from them. And every time they'd go out to fight, they would lose until finally they were just hiding in places they could hide because they had no power, no way to be able to win or be successful. And we talk about for us, when you find yourself living in a way and everything seems to be falling apart on you, no matter what you do, how much you try, it seems to cave in on you. It's one of the issues that should alert you. God is not at work in my life. Now, you'll have times when that happens to you and God is preparing to do something for you. He just wants you to be more faithful. But if you see a string of these things taking place, you might stop and say, wait a minute. Search me inside, God, see if I'm doing the things I should be doing. Is there something that's missing in my life? There's something I'm not quite have. And first thing you'll find when you start looking at that is you'll look around at other people and see why they're causing these bad things to happen to you. And you'll say, well, it's other people in the church are not doing what they ought to. This preacher is pretty bad. You know, he doesn't preach good sermons. And, you know, you find all kinds of reasons, but you want to stop and look first at yourself. What is there inside of me? So they're ready now to take this step. The days of jail, the roads were abandoned. People were afraid to get out on the roads. They were afraid to travel. So the travelers took to winding paths. If they had to go somewhere from one house to another, they found a little trail in the woods where no one could find them. And they would sneak around so that no one would see them constantly in fear that the enemy was going to kill them. So you get a picture of a nation that is overrun with their enemy in constant fear of what was taking place with no confidence at all that they had any future village life in Israel ceased. Now, the villages that they had were not walled cities like the Canaanites had. So they had villages where people lived and they had normal activities in life. You'd have festival celebrations, a Passover celebration where all the community would gather together and do things together. But people were so terrified of the enemy around them that they lived in their houses as prisoners, like you might think of what happened in World War Two in Germany with the Jews. They were constantly listening and watching for the enemy who had come to kill them. This is a picture of a land in great crisis. You know, one of the things you see as you live your life for God is when you get in a place where you're constantly afraid. You know, God promises to guide us, provide for us and protect us. If you find yourself afraid to make a choice, when you find yourself, you say you're afraid you're not going to be provided for and you're afraid every day someone's going to kill you or destroy or hurt you, you should know that you're in a position where God is drawn away from you and you no longer find confidence in him. So there's a spiritual condition here. That's what was taking place with these people. Village life in Israel ceased, ceased until I, Deborah, arose. Now she opens the story by pointing to herself. There's a change of tone. She's talking about third parties, people who were afraid. Now she said it ceased until I, Deborah, arose, arose a mother of Israel. She sees herself. She identifies herself with first person. She points to her own name, announces that she uses the word arose twice to make sure that we see that this was someone who is coming out from where they were. And then she identifies herself as a mother, someone who is nurturing, caring and protective. She does not identify herself as a warrior, but instead as a nurturing mother. Now, you would want, you know, if you were in trouble for some strong person to come if you were being attacked. But a strong person oftentimes may give us protection, but they don't give us nurture. What she's pointing to is her role is not only to see the victories won, but to give the nurture that the people would need. The outside protection is part of this. But the inside care and protection is the next part of this. You can be perfectly well and protected and safe and even rich and inside feel like you're worthless. Tortured with demons. Constantly questioning your own nature and your character in your life. So what she points to is not only the role of protecting, which a mother does when they can, but also the role of nurture. So God sent to the people someone who are in desperate trouble, locked up in their houses, afraid to be able to move, someone to give them nurture and care. I, Deborah, arose, arose a mother of Israel. Verse 8, And when they chose new gods. Now, this is a very difficult verse in Hebrew to translate. The Old Testament is written in Hebrew and this passage was written in Hebrew. Most of the Old Testament is Hebrew. Some of it's in Aramaic, but this is Hebrew. And it says when they, the word they here is really singular in Hebrew and is translated in this NIV. I don't know other translations you have might do differently, but it's translated as they chose new gods and the word for gods is simply leaders or rulers. And some people look at this and they think that what's really said here should be translated and God chose new leaders. It changes the word they in the reference not to the people around them, but to God. And the idea being that here you have Israel in desperate crisis and God moves then to choose new leaders. That's where Deborah comes into the picture. God chose a new leader in Deborah. And whenever that happened, they brought war to the gates of the city. Now, I talked earlier about the fact that the community that they lived in were open houses without walls on them. So it couldn't be talking about bringing war to the gates of their own city since they didn't have them. What he's talking about is the offensive action of the nation of Israel. They have ceased to cower in their houses, afraid to get outside or open the door for fear of what would happen to them. And they were bold enough now to take the fight right to the gates of the city of their enemy. They're not asking for protection now. They're enraged and encouraged and challenged to carry the battle to the enemy. They're not running. They're not looking for protection. They're looking for victory. As a result of Deborah's being aroused and called into this battle, the people of Israel suddenly changed their direction and their heart and their mind and all about them. Suddenly they're prepared now to do whatever they could. They chose, let's say, and God chose new leaders. And they brought the war to the gates of the city of the Canaanites. Now, the next line gives us a contrasting that is startling. And not a shield or spear were seen among 40,000 in Israel. Here's a great encouragement to us. The Israelites now were ready to to storm the gates of their enemy city. They didn't have any spears, they didn't have any swords. I'll just tell you that sometimes in your walk with God, you're going to feel just like this. You're going to look at the things around you and the problems you're facing. And you go to church or you pick up the Bible and you read the Bible and it says some great, encouraging thing to you that God can conquer all your enemies, that God will defeat your enemies, that he will give you the answer, he will bless you. And you'll look at your character and you'll look at your ability and you'll look at your knowledge and you'll say, whoa, that can't happen to me. Look who I am. I don't have the wisdom. I don't have the knowledge. I don't have the power. I don't have the ability. God always, and I want to emphasize that, he always calls us in his kingdom to do work for him that we cannot do. It is a part of the nature of this life. He does this because he never wants us to feel that we're competent within ourselves because we cannot do or win the spiritual battles on our own over discouragement, defeat, depression, fear. We can't win those battles on our own. What God wants us to recognize is that that battle will always be won by his power. Now, whenever you read something in the Bible that encourages you and you say, wow, this is great, God can do this in my life. The very first thing that will happen to you is you'll start thinking about it and then in your mind will pump this. You don't know how to do this. You say, well, that's right, I don't. Then you'll think you're not smart enough to do this. You'll think about that a minute and say, you know, that's right. You don't have any training to do this. You'll think about it. You'll say, well, that's right. And then you say, OK, I guess I'm not going to do that. That's how Satan does you. What he looks at you and says is, do you have the skill, the wisdom, the training and the talent to do what I just took, what God just told you to do? And all of our answer has to be no, I don't have that. So Israel was called by Deborah to begin to fight. The battle was so big that none of them could win it. They didn't have the tools to win it, but they were charged up. They were now excited because God had said, I'm going to bring you the victory. And then he stops and says, but it wasn't because they were well-trained, it wasn't because of their military abilities, it was because what? God, that's what he's trying to bring us to in this story. Verse nine, some people break this up, so this is the second verse of this song, and some people think it's the fourth verse of the song, which makes no difference, except people see it in different ways. So verse nine, he says, my heart is with Israel's princes. With the willing volunteers among the people, praise the Lord. So. What comes out of this story is. God is saying my heart is with the leaders of Israel. The people in leadership, you know, you take this picture of the church. God has in his church people who are leaders, who are submissive and surrendered to God. And they are following God. That's the key to any solution the church has. You have churches go through different times, and sometimes the church does well. You have a lot of members, a lot of people that attend, and sometimes it goes backwards. And our temptation is in these moments to try to figure out how to change it. And we look at things that are popular, we look at things that other churches are doing, we look at all these other things. And what God really wants is for us to say, OK, God, tell us what you want us to do and we'll do it. He has to be true for the leaders. They have to believe that God can give direction that allows us to accomplish the purpose he has for us. No one else has that for our church, but God. It may be like other churches when he tells us, or maybe entirely different. But you have to be sure that the leadership is filled with people who are more interested in what God has to say than in what other people in the world have to say. What story here is, if my people, the leaders of my people, will listen to me, I will give you the plan. And I will give you the tools and I will give you the ability and I will give you the power to be able to succeed. To be able to succeed. So it starts with the leadership. My heart is with the leaders of Israel's princes and with willing volunteers among the people. That means the rest who are working. Not only do you need it in the leaders, you need it in all the other people, too. And what oftentimes happens, you know, is you have leaders that find the will of God and you start trying to do things God wants you to do. There are 50 other people out there that are criticizing all the time. It's not that they prayed about it, it's they just don't like it. So much of the conflict that occurs in families and in churches is not the result of people finding a Bible verse and saying, we're not doing this. It's I don't like it. Well, so what? Unless you're God, that doesn't make any difference. Does God like it? If he likes it, you better get used to liking it because that's the way it's going to be. He is God. And when the leaders are prepared to say whatever God asks of us, we will do it.