Sermon manuscript:
One of my goals as a pastor is to help you read the books of
the Bible for yourself with more enjoyment and with greater understanding. We
Lutherans do not read the Bible on our own like we should. Part of the reason
for this is the spiritual problem that afflicts all who are born of Adam and
Eve. We naturally are inclined to be bored by God’s Word and are eager to do
other things instead. It is similar to that other great spiritual problem of
ours with the second commandment. It is mysterious why we have such a hard time
calling upon God’s name in every trouble, praying, praising, and giving thanks.
Even Luther complains about that. He said that praying was the hardest work for
him to do properly.
But besides these great spiritual evils that cling to our
flesh, we also have some difficulties when we are unfamiliar with what some
portion of the Bible might be talking about. It’s kind of like jumping into the
middle of a movie. When you don’t know what comes before or after, it is
difficult to orient yourself to what is going on. It requires real effort. No
doubt this is why we don’t often watch movies starting at the middle of them.
We watch them from the beginning and thereby can understand it better. I can
understand how it is frustrating for people to pick up the Bible, not knowing
much about it, and not getting a lot out of it. Going in cold requires a lot of
effort.
So your homework assignment, if you should choose to accept
it, would be to read the book of Judges during this advent season. Over the
course of these three midweek services we will be looking at chapters 2-4. What
we heard about tonight serves well as an introduction to the book as a whole.
In the two weeks that follow we will begin to look at more specific people and
events.
Let’s begin our series tonight by talking about the time
period we are dealing. Genesis tells us about the three great patriarchs,
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacob is given the name “Israel” by God, and his
twelve sons become patriarchs for the twelve tribes of Israel. When Jacob was
an old man a severe drought and famine gripped the land of Canaan, which God
had given to Abraham and his descendants, so they were forced to move to Egypt
where Joseph was able to help the whole family.
Now over the course of time the descendants of Jacob somehow
eventually become enslaved by the Egyptians. The Bible doesn’t go into any
detail about that beside saying that it happened over the course of 400 years.
So the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were not living in their promised
homeland in Canaan for 400 years, because they become slaves.
God heard their prayers while they were being oppressed and
sent them the mighty deliverer, Moses. This story is told in the second book of
the Bible, Exodus. As you know, God did many signs and wonders through Moses so
that Pharaoh was forced to let God’s people go. They end up at Mt. Sinai where
God gives them the 10 Commandments and the rest of the Law.
The way that the story was supposed to go after that was
that the Israelites were supposed to immediately enter into the land of Canaan,
take it over from the inhabitants, and settle it for themselves and their
descendants. But this did not happen. When Moses sent 12 spies into the land,
10 of the 12 came back and frightened all the people concerning the power of
the Canaanites. These spies told the people that there was no way that they
could ever win against the people who lived there. Only two of the 12, Caleb
and Joshua, believed that the Israelites could win by the grace of God.
Because the people believed the 10 spies who were
frightened, God punished the Israelites with 40 years of homelessness in the
desert wilderness between Canaan and Egypt.
After those forty long years were over, God finally brought
the people into their inheritance. They did under the leadership of Joshua, one
of the two faithful spies, because Moses died before they crossed over the
Jordan. Then, beginning at Jericho, the Israelites took over one territory in
Canaan after another, until each of the twelve tribes received its own
territory.
This brings us up to what we heard about in our reading
tonight. While the Israelites were successful in driving out the inhabitants of
Canaan, they did not fully carry out God’s will in getting rid of the people
who lived there. God did not want the Israelites to move in together with the
Canaanites. He wanted the Canaanites killed or driven out of the land. The
reason why God was bringing such a disaster upon the Canaanites was because of
their disgusting and abominable practices. The Israelites exterminating the Canaanites
was God’s just punishment for their sins. However, the Israelites did not do as
God wanted them. They allowed the Canaanites to live among them, perhaps
enslaving them, but not devoting them to destruction.
Here we have one of those things from the Bible that sounds
harsh or even evil to our modern ears. There’s not much that I can do for you
to make it better. One of our flesh’s deepest desires is that God will just
forget about our sins. This was Adam and Eve’s deepest wish after they sinned.
This is every child’s deepest wish when they are afraid of being found out
after doing something wrong. This is the criminal’s deepest wish. The last
person the criminal wants to see at his doorstep is the police.
So the notion that God should execute such harsh judgment
against the Canaanites where they are entirely wiped out, is an intolerable thought
to us sinners. Those who have no fear of the Lord will even rise up against God
and pass sentence on him. They will declare God guilty of genocide, and, therefore,
obviously evil. There is no way to convince people who are like that. The fear
of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. There are no arguments that can change
their mind. They don’t want to be accountable to God, and there is no way to
make them accountable to God. We will just have to wait and see what happens
when God acts and judges. When the end comes, then all things will be sorted
out. Until that time, people can believe all kinds of things about God that
aren’t true.
Since we are really dealing with a spiritual problem here, it
seems likely to me that the softness of our modern times was probably also
there with the Israelites. That was at least part of why they spared the
Canaanites the way that they did. Perhaps the Israelites’ leniency was because
they themselves were hopeful that they could define for themselves what is
right and wrong. We all want to believe that we all aren’t that bad, and so
live and let live. It takes work, courage, and conviction to do what God told
the Israelites to do, but they weren’t willing to do it.
Because they wouldn’t do what God wanted them to do, they
were going to suffer accordingly. That’s how it is so often with God’s justice.
Through the very sin that we commit we find that it boomerangs back upon us.
With the continuing existence of the Canaanites among the Israelites, they
worked like a cancer to the Israelite’s faith. They worshipped false gods and
the Israelites were tempted into it too. The Canaanite boys fell in love with
the Israelite girls, and vice versa. Soon you had mixed households where the
father believes one thing and the mother believes another. How, then, should
the children be raised? That is a perennial problem as we all know.
In sum, God was faithful to his covenant with the Israelites,
but they proved to be unfaithful to him. They became like the Canaanites who
had stirred up God’s wrath because of their sins. Therefore God punished his
people. In our reading he said, “Because this nation has violated my
covenant, which I commanded to their fathers, and because they did not obey my
voice, I will no longer drive out from among them a single one of the nations
that Joshua left unconquered when he died.” God punished his people by
giving them the very thing that they wanted. Forever after this the Israelites
would constantly be dragged into idolatry by the unbelievers in their midst.
They were in constant danger of simply melting into the general population.
This is the blight also among us. When we lose our
saltiness, when we are no longer willing to declare that something our loved
ones are doing is evil, then we lose our distinctiveness. We and our children
get thrown into the melting pot. We lose our grasp of God’s Word. We quit
calling on the name of the Lord. Because we lose our faith in God. It takes
work, courage, and conviction to judge. The default position is that we do
nothing, and let the trouble pass from us. Live and let live.
So the book of Judges is very applicable to us. The
Israelites were struggling with a lazy multiculturalism where everybody could
do as he or she pleased. They grew colder and colder towards God as the
generations passed. But God was merciful in that he did not just turn them over
to their desires entirely. He did not harden their hearts where they had no other
choice but to do what came naturally and easily to them.
The way that God had mercy on them was that he sent trouble
to them. This trouble took different forms, but one of the troubles was that
they were harassed in life and limb by the people around them. They were left
in poverty when the neighboring Philistines, for example, would sweep through
their territory and take all their money and property. Having been humbled,
they called out to the Lord, and he would save them. The book of Judges is
about these people whom God raised up to help his people. They are known as
“judges.” Hence the name of the book.
The Bible is always the most applicable of books, because
our human condition never really changes. We are cut from the same cloth as all
those who have come before us, including the Israelites. And so we, like these
people we will hear about, are in need of examining ourselves, repenting of our
sins, and calling on our God for salvation.
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