MESSAGE
FROM JUDGES 3:1-6 FOR MAY 19, 2002
This
week, we continue in our series of messages from the Old Testament book of Judges.
In this book, we see the patience of God
as the Jews lived during this time period not only with no human king but they also certainly did not recognize
God as their King.
Last week, we saw there is a repeated pattern
that occurs in the bible as God relates to His covenant people.
We said that God always initiates any of
His covenants with an act of grace.
He reveals himself to His covenant partner
in some way or does some act of deliverance like the Exodus from Egypt, which serves as the basis for the covenant
at Sinai or He gives His only Son at Calvary, which serves as the basis for the New Covenant in Christ. After
God acts in grace toward the covenant partner (whether it be a man like Abraham or his covenant nation Israel)
he then waits for their response.
If the response is appropriate like praise,
worship, sacrifice, obedience, etc… then his covenant people live with his blessing.
If the response is inappropriate and his
people rebel against him by turning to idols, he brings discipline on his people.
In the Old Testament, as the rebellion persisted,
he invoked the curses of the covenant on His people.
Both the Old Covenant blessings for obedience
and the curses for disobedience are found in Deuteronomy chapter 28.
The blessings for obedience included things
like fertility, the conquest of all military enemies and abundant harvests.
The curses for disobedience included things
like infertility, plagues, defeat by their enemies and eventually exile from the Promised Land.
Centuries after the events described in Judges
that is precisely what happened to both the northern and southern kingdoms after centuries of disobedience.
You see this pattern repeatedly in the Old
Testament. In the book of Judges we see God only administering the
curses of the covenant because the history of Judges is one of repeated rebellion and turning away from God. That’s
why God inflicts discipline on his people by allowing these neighboring pagan Canaanites to mercilessly oppress
them again and again.
If you’ll remember, chapter 2:6-23 serves
as a broad survey of the entire book of Judges.
As we move to chapter three, we go back to
a “real-time” telling of the events and the narrative picks up what happens after God sends his angel to the Jews
at Bokim in 2:1-5 and He tells that them He will not remove the Canaanites from their midst because they had been unwilling to fight hard enough to drive them
out. That tells us something important about God that I want
to treat here before we get into this week’s text because there is an important and intensely practical spiritual
principle seen in the way God deals with his people here.
That is: God
will not do for his people what we are unwilling to do for ourselves.
I did NOT say, “God
helps those who help themselves.” That’s
not in the Bible but it is true that God will not do for us what we are unwilling to do for ourselves. God
is not in the business of raising spoiled children and if He were to do for us what we were unwilling to do for
ourselves, that is precisely what we would be.
It is clear that driving out the Canaanites
from the land was a cooperative effort between the Jews and God.
God had promised to drive out the pagans
but he would do that ONLY as the Jews fought against them.
These Canaanite nations were seven nations
larger and stronger than them according to Deuteronomy chapter seven.
There was no way on their own the Jews could
hope to prevail.
So God assures them that He will fight for
them as
they fight against these pagans. This
cooperative arrangement between God and his covenant people hasn’t changed.
God works in and through us as we by his
grace step out in faith for Him.
We
see this in Philippians 2:12-13 where Paul says, “Therefore,
my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to
work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to
his good purpose.”
We do not work to BE saved—that is a free
gift of God’s grace.
But we do work OUT this salvation process
that God has begun in us through our conversion and which will be completed in glory.
A text we have quoted before expresses Paul’s
own process.
He says in 1 Corinthians 9:27, “No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after
I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” Being
a Christian for Paul was to “wrestle,” to “fight,” to “run with all his might.”
Christianity is not for the faint of heart. It
is a fight against our own lazy, carnal flesh and the devil and the satanic world system we live in. It’s
a marathon race--it requires perseverance and sacrifice.
Paul sums all that up with this phrase in
Philippians “work out your salvation.”
The
reason we can fight this fight, run this endurance race is because [v.13]“it
is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.”
The fight, the race is only possible because
God energizes
our will to have a desire to fight the
fight and run the race and because He
enables us through his power to actually
accomplish what he has given us a will to do.
Paul says God is the One who energizes the
will to cause us to want to obey Him and He provides the power we need to work out our salvation.
Our job is to enter into the battle, do our
work; run the race with everything we have, as we trust him to do those things in and through us.
That’s the balance between working out our
salvation and trusting in God.
We dare not be spiritually passive, expecting
God to do what we are unwilling to do.
This is a very important word to the church today where
Christianity is sometimes understood as praying a prayer, going to church, passively “trusting in God” without
ever breaking a sweat and waiting for heaven.
There is in that understanding no fight to
be fought, no race to be run, no struggle to engage in.
It’s a passive understanding of Christianity. Just
trust and God does the rest—let go and let God.
People who have a high view of God’s sovereignty
can sometimes get off here.
It’s easy for some people to confuse trusting
in God’s sovereign control with spiritual passivity or laziness.
This warped, unbiblical thinking is often
expressed by sentiments like,
“Since
I know God wants this particular thing or ministry to be accomplished and He is sovereign, I don’t need to plan
or work or sweat, I’ll just trust him.”
That’s NOT reformed theology. In
many cases that’s just plain laziness.
That would be like the Jews saying to Moses
when he told them that God had promised them Canaan as their inheritance and would fight for them in to take the
Promised Land, “Great, let us know when
He’s finished killing the pagans and we’ll move our stuff in.” The
call to Israel was to fight and as
they fought, God would win the victory
through them.
God will do the same for us but He will not
do for us what we are unwilling to do for ourselves.
The context of Judges chapter three is God has told the
Jews He will not drive out the Canaanites because they have been unwilling to do the hard work necessary to destroy
them. The Jews are being disciplined for their disobedience
by Yahweh’s refusal to drive out these Canaanites.
That’s the clear message of chapter two. God
has blessed these people by delivering them from Egypt, by preserving them in the wilderness, by beginning to conquer
the Canaanites on the east side of the Jordan and the people respond to God’s grace by being unwilling to drive
out the rest of the pagan idolaters.
God in turn responds to their disobedience
by disciplining them through the ongoing presence of the Canaanites.
Now, this morning’s text beginning with verse one of chapter
three says, These
are the nations the Lord left to test all those
Israelites who had not experienced any of the wars in Canaan 2(he
did this only to teach warfare to the descendants of the Israelites who had not had previous battle experience):
3the
five rulers of the Philistines, all the Canaanites, the Sidonians, and the Hivites living in the Lebanon mountains
from Mount Baal Hermon to Lebo Hamath. 4They
were left to test the Israelites to see whether they would obey the Lord's commands, which he
had given their forefathers through Moses. 5The
Israelites lived among the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 6They took their daughters
in marriage and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods.
One
truth this text communicates about how God works in his covenant relationships is this:
God
works redemptively in us as he disciplines us for our disobedience.
By discipline, I do not mean God’s condemning
judgment. This is, as we will see, the corrective or training discipline
of a loving Father.
This text, which speaks of God’s hand of
discipline on his people, is filled with hope because in it we see that God through the discipline of his children
is still at work to redeem them—to bring them back to him.
And that is so encouraging for us. God
doesn’t discipline his children simply because he is “ticked off” and in his rage lashes out at us only to assuage
his anger. God uses the discipline He administers and the hardships
that come in the midst of his discipline for the good of his people—there are redemptive purposes behind his discipline. In
this text, let’s look at three redemptive purposes God has for Israel and for us in the midst of His discipline.
The
first redemptive purpose we see in his discipline is this:
In
the hardships of God’s discipline, we can learn to trust God as we see his power and grace. Look
at verses one and two again, “These
are the nations the Lord left to test all those
Israelites who had not experienced any of the wars in Canaan 2(he
did this only to teach warfare to the descendants of the Israelites who had not had previous battle experience)” An entire generation
of Jews had not done any fighting and because of that had never seen God’s hand of power and deliverance.
So God
wants this current generation to learn how to fight his holy war so that they can see his power.
You’ll
recall from last week that we saw in 2:10 that an entire generation who had not been in the wilderness “knew neither the LORD
nor what he had done for Israel.”
So God
disciplines the Jews by leaving the Canaanites in the land so
that
he might teach them to fight BUT as they fight His intention
was that they would come to know God and his power and grace to deliver them from the Canaanites.
As they
fight, they would learn what their parents and the priests had tragically not taught them—who God is and what He
can and does do for his people.
God uses
his discipline to help them know what kind of God He is and what he will do for his people.
This purpose
of having his people know Him was so important to God the author in verse two uses an emphatic Hebrew construction
that the NIV translates, “he
did this ONLY to teach warfare to the descendents of the Israelites…”
His point is not to say that the exclusive reason God did this was to teach the Canaanites His power in warfare,
but that this was especially his purpose in this.
God is VERY serious that his children come
to know him and what he can do and he uses the hardships of his discipline to teach them.
This way God deals with his people by teaching them about
himself and his power to deliver them in the midst of his disciplining them is nothing new.
You’ll recall that the 40 years the Jews
spent in the wilderness was disciplinary.
They had failed to trust God’s original command
to conquer the Promised Land and so he sentenced that generation of rebels to live and die in the wilderness. But
in the midst of that discipline in the wilderness, God was teaching the Jews some very important lessons. We
see this in Deuteronomy 8:2-5 as Moses is reminding the Jews of God’s redemptive purpose for them in the desert. He
says, “Remember
how the Lord your God led you all
the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart,
whether or not you would keep his commands. 3He
humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known,
to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 4Your clothes did not
wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. 5Know
then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines
you.”
Also notice
verse 16. “He
gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble and to test you so that in the end it
might go well with you.”
God
was disciplining the Jews in the wilderness for not trusting him but in the midst of that discipline, he is teaching
them crucial lessons so that it will go well with them.
This not purely a waste of time in God’s
wilderness woodshed—God’s discipline of his children is redemptive—He uses it to help them know Him better. In
the wilderness God made his children hungry and then he fed them to show his provision. He
gives them manna from heaven to help them to know that their deepest need is not food but God’s word. He
put them in a hot, barren, hostile environment and then he miraculously protects them so their feet don’t swell and their clothes don’t
wear out.
He uses the trials of the disciplinary time
in the desert to humble them so they would learn to trust Him as he revealed his hand of provision and protection
among them.
What a wonderful God we serve that when he
disciplines us for our disobedience, he is in
the discipline working to reveal
himself so that we can be more like Him.
We know this way God relates to his people in the covenant
did not end with the Old Testament.
In the New Testament book of Hebrews chapter
12:5-11 we read, “And
you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons:
"My
son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, 6because
the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son."
7Endure
hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? 8If you are not disciplined
(and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. 9Moreover,
we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to
the Father of our spirits and live! 10Our
fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may
share in his holiness. 11No
discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and
peace for those who have been trained by it.
This discipline can come in many forms. It
may be the rebuke of a brother or sister in Christ when we are out of line.
That stings us and bruises our pride but
it is good for us when it is on target.
It may be the pain of the Holy Spirit’s conviction
in us that brings us to deep, painful grief.
And it may be like the Jews experienced in
Judges—a time of prolonged hardship that comes from God in response to rebellion against his revealed will. Some
of you may be experiencing the discipline of God right now.
Maybe you rejected God’s will for you in
some way and you are under hardship for it. Maybe you have forfeited the life you could have had because of sins
you committed years ago.
Never forget that God’s discipline is a sign
of his love for you and the hardship is there to teach you about him and his grace.
God still loves you and is at work redemptively
in your life through the difficulties you face.
He will use even our disobedience to bring
us to holiness and righteousness as he disciplines us.
This is not to say that every difficult thing
in our life is God’s discipline.
We live in a fallen world where bad things
just happen at times.
But there are times when the hardship that
comes into our lives is God’s discipline for the sinful choices we make. In those situations—we have this word
of comfort from God.
He is treating us as a loving Father and
is at work redemptively in us to make us like Jesus.
In the case of Judges three, God wants the
Jews to see his power and deliverance in the midst of his discipline as he teaches them to make war against these
Canaanites who constantly seek to destroy them.
A second redemptive purpose of God in the
midst of his discipline here in Judges three is
in the hardships of God’s discipline, we learn where our hearts really are with God. We
see this purpose in Judges 3:4 as the author is speaking about these Canaanite nations.
He says, “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.”
God had commanded the Jews through Moses
to remain truthful to Yahweh—to shun idolatry, to “have
no other gods before me.” God
leaves the pagans in the land to help the Jews know whether they would be faithful to God.
God didn’t need to know where their hearts
were—He knows everything before it happens.
But one of the most important truths we can
know about ourselves is the condition of our hearts before God.
We must regularly ask ourselves, “where am I with God?—Am I being faithful? Am I putting
him above all others?
Are there areas where I am habitually being
disobedient to his word and if so, what areas?” The
answers to those questions are crucial if we are to live faithfully to God.
So God allowed these Jews to live in the
midst a bunch of idolaters to help them to see how devoted they were to God.
And the sad truth is in 3:6 where the author
says, “They [the Jews] took their [the
Canaanites] daughters in marriage and gave their own daughters to their sons, and served their gods.”
The Jews compromised in the deepest way possible. They
were hopelessly seduced by the Canaanite gods.
Not only did they practice the immoral occult
religion of the Canaanites, but they also intermarried with them and that could have eventually blurred the genetic
distinction between God’s people, the sons of Abraham with the foreign Canaanites.
Their intermarriage with the pagans threatened
to destroy the Hebrew race as a distinct group of people, which would have been disastrous because God had promised
that His deliverer, His Messiah would come through the children of Abraham.
If the line of Abraham would have been thoroughly
mixed in with the pagan nations there could have been no Messiah to come through the Jews as promised because there
would have been no distinct Jewish race.
Part of the underlying plot of the Old Testament
is Satan’s persistent attempts to destroy the Jewish race through genetic impurity because that would render God’s
promise of a Jewish Messiah null and void.
It was only by God’s sovereign grace that
the line of Abraham and the line of Judah through which Christ came and redeemed us was preserved.
The Jews, when confronted with the hardships
of God’s discipline revealed that their hearts were full of idolatry.
When we are in times of testing as a result
of God’s discipline of us in hardship, our hearts are revealed as well.
We are like sponges.
You can dip a big fluffy natural sponge in
colored water and set it on a counter and not know what color the water is inside until you squeeze the sponge. Then,
what is inside the sponge comes out—when pressure is exerted.
We are the same way.
It’s easy to be happy when things are going
well. If you like your life and are healthy and well fed, even
the world does well there.
It’s when things get tough and circumstance
put the squeeze on you that you know what’s inside your heart because it comes out.
That’s when we find out if we are really
people of genuine faith or if we just go to church and intellectually assent to the Bible.
If we are people of true saving faith, when
the tough times come, rather than gripe and whine and complain, we will learn to accept God’s will and seek him
in the midst of the trial.
God works redemptively in the midst of his
discipline of us to show us where our hearts are.
If when trials come, we have a spiritual
melt down, then that shows us that our faith is a fair-weather faith and that is an indication that it doesn’t
come from God.
Again, what a great God we serve who would
use the hardship of his discipline to work out his redemptive process in us by showing us the condition of our
hearts.
A
third and final redemptive purpose seen in the discipline of God is one we’ve discussed at some depth in our series
on the church.
It is in
the hardships of God’s discipline, we learn the spiritual militancy required to follow God. God
disciplines the Jews [verse 2] “…to teach
warfare to the descendants of the Israelites who had not had previous battle experience)
It’s clear that God wanted the Jews to learn how to fight.
In our message on the church as the army
of God we saw that God’s people, whether we live like it or not, are a spiritually militant people who live in
a spiritually hostile environment.
That’s the way it was with the Jews and that’s
the way it is with us.
God’s people who live in this fallen world
are in for a fight because the spiritual forces temporarily running this world and their Prince, Satan are in opposition
to God and his kingdom.
God, as the great Warrior King, wants us
to live out a biblical militancy.
We need to know that at all times, but during
times of hardship, some of which are brought on by God’s discipline, we especially feel the hot breath of our enemy
more clearly than when things are going along smoothly.
It’s
when we are enduring hardships that we sense the opposition most strongly.
Its when we are under God’s discipline that
we begin to understand what it means to live in a world run by a devil who “prowls
around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour”
[1Peter 5:8].
That’s crucial for us to grow in grace. It’s
as we learn to fight against our spiritual opposition that we learn to walk in victory as God’s overcoming army. And
God uses times of discipline to teach us the reality and the principles of spiritual warfare.
Times
when God is disciplining us are no picnic.
But during those times we must always remember
that his discipline is proof of his love for us and that we are indeed his children.
We must not whine or complain but rather
learn what God is teaching us and rejoice that in the midst of the discipline, God is accomplishing his redemptive
purpose in us, fitting us for heaven.
And that should be our highest goal. The
Hebrews text we read says God’s discipline produces “a
harvest of righteousness and peace for
those who have been trained by it.”
We must submit our selves to God’s discipline
and choose to learn from it if His redemptive plan through it will be realized in out lives.
May God give us the grace to understand and
exult in the love of God even when it comes in the form of his discipline.
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Page last modified on 5/7/2002
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