A Sermon on Judges 2:6-15 has been lightly edited.
Please visit our Sermon Archive for more sermons in this series.
Please take your Bibles and turn with me to the book of Judges. We’re going to continue our study in the book of Judges and in some ways today we are going to cover ground that we’ve already covered in chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2. We’re going to look at some of that that same time frame from a different perspective.
If you’ll remember in chapter 1 Joshua has died and the tribes of Israel have gone and inquired of God who will go first to continue the process of settling the land of Canaan. God singles out the tribe of Judah; and Judah and Simeon go and begin settling their tribal areas and then things begin to go wrong.
Things begin to go sideways so to speak and by the time we come to the end of chapter 1 we see that Israel is settling in the presence of the Canaanites rather than pushing them out and settling the land as God has called them to do. And then in chapter 2 verses 1 through 5 the angel of the Lord comes and views the situation and proclaims God’s discipline against the nation of Israel. And then we pick up today in Judges chapter 2 beginning in verse 6.
“When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his own inheritance to take possession of the land. And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua who had seen the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of a hundred and ten years. And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath Heres in the hill country of Ephraim north of the mountain of Gaash. And all the generation who were gathered to their fathers and there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed down to them. And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtoreth. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he gave them over to plunderers who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of the surrounding enemies so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm as the Lord had warned and as the Lord had sworn to them. And they were in terrible distress.”
Let’s pray. To God and Father above, we do thank you for your word, for your truth. We ask that you would speak by the power of the Holy Spirit through me so that your people might be changed and so that your people might strive to glorify you more and more. I pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
In Judges chapter 2 verses 1 through 5, as I mentioned already, we have the angel of the Lord coming to Israel and declaring God’s discipline against Israel for their military failures, or at least that’s what we know God is disciplining them for at this point. And the question could be asked, “Why is God giving so much disciplinary weight to the people of Israel simply because they failed to carry out the military program that God had told them to do when they entered the land of Israel?”
In many ways our passage today is the summary and the beginning of the explanation why God comes with his discipline merely for their military failures. And we’ll see today as we look at this that their military failures flow out of a failure to worship and to know God as he commanded them to worship him and to be known.
Because of that, we will begin to look at the cycle of discipline that God places upon the Israelites for their rebellion and for their false worship.
A FAILURE OF WORSHIP
Our passage opens today with an account of Joshua’s death, and this is an account that has been written for us before. We saw at the beginning of Judges chapter 1 that Joshua had died, and that’s what sparked the rest of the settling of Israel and Israel seeking God’s face and God’s answers. But if we were to turn back one more page to Joshua 24, we would see the account of Joshua’s death almost word for word in what we have here.
On the one hand, the author of Judges is signaling for us that he is going to cover the same time and some of the same information that he has already covered for us in the first chapter of the book of [Judges], but he’s going to do it from a different perspective.
But on the other hand, he is sending us beyond Judges 1:1 and Judges 24 and all the way back to Joshua 24 and all the way back to Joshua chapter 8.
What happened in Joshua chapter 8? They have entered the land, they have begun the conquest of the land, and they have gathered in the valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, and they have had the book of Deuteronomy read to them.
The covenant of God that explains to Israel what God has done for them. I called Abraham out of the nations of the world. I protected him as he was a sojourner in the land. When famine came to the land, I sent the family to Egypt so that they could have food. And as they grew into a nation and became slaves in Egypt, I released them from slavery in Egypt. And when I brought them to Mount Sinai, I told them how to live in relationship to me.
Whenever God calls us to live a certain way, he doesn’t do that in order for us to earn his rescue, in order to earn his help. He always calls us to live the way he wants us to live in light of what he has done for us already.
For you and I, that means that we have been set apart as holy by the work of Jesus, and then God calls us to live out that holiness according to what he tells us to do.
And so he goes on throughout the book of Deuteronomy, giving the stipulations for how they are to live, promising them that if they keep his law, if they live as he has told them to do, he will bless them with a prosperous land, a land flowing with milk and honey. But if they disobey his laws, if they intermarry with the people of the land, if they chase after or, as we’ll read next week, if they whore after the gods of the land of Canaan, then he will bring discipline upon them.
The author of Judges, by calling us to look at Joshua’s death, which was preceded by a gathering of people, sends us not only to Joshua 24, but to Joshua 8 and on into the book of Deuteronomy, is reminding us that the problem with this particular generation was not merely that they failed in their military conquest, but their failure in their military conquest reflected a greater and a deeper problem.
And that greater, deeper problem is given to us in verse 10.
“And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work he had done for Israel.”
So Joshua has died. The generation that followed Joshua has died. And this new generation grows up and it says they do not know the Lord or what he had done for them.
Now, is this merely a failure of the parents not teaching the next generation about the goodness of God and the things of God? That would be the easy interpretation and application of this. I could just tell all of you parents and grandparents to make sure you’re telling your children and grandchildren about Jesus. Go be warm, well-fed and prosper.
But that’s not what it means here. Knowledge is not just information that we have in our head. Knowledge in the Scriptures is information with intent to act upon that information.
When it says that they did not know the Lord or what he had done for them, what it is saying is they knew what God had done for the nation of Israel. They knew that the nation of Israel had been freed from slavery, protected and provided for in the wilderness, and that God had brought about miraculous military conquest in the nation of Israel. They knew that up here, but then they made the conscious choice to ignore that.
In other words, they grew up and it was time for them to make a decision. Is this my faith or my parents’ faith? And they said, “Well, this is my parents’ faith and you know what? It doesn’t matter anymore, so I’m going to go my own way.” They chose to turn their back upon God and we’re told what that looks like in the next section.
Look at verse 12 & 13. “They abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtoreth. The first thing they did is they turned their back on God. They abandoned him.”
They say, “Lord, you’ve done all these things and we don’t care. You tell us to live a certain way, but we want to live a different way, and so we’re going to answer the question that has been asked since the beginning of time. Did God really say? We’re going to answer that our own way and we’re going to live our, we’re going to live the way we want to and we’re going to do what we want to.”
And it goes on to say even more that not only did they abandon God, they turned their back on God and went after the gods of Canaan. The second half of verse 12. “They went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who are around them and bowed down to them. “
Verse 13. “They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtoreth.”
You know, the Israelites have come into the land, the promised land, the land that the Lord promised to give them. It is a prosperous land. It’s a bountiful land. God describes it as a land flowing with milk and honey.
What does that mean? It means that the cows and the bees are so prosperous that there’s not enough people there to milk the cows and collect the honey. So so much milk is dripping from the udders of the cows and so much honey is coming out of the honeycomb because there’s not enough people there to eat it, that it just flows like rivers throughout the land.
This is a prosperous land and the Israelites come in and the first two generations know that it is God who gave them the land. It is God who made the land prosperous, but this third generation, as they begin to settle, they go to get advice from their Canaanite neighbors. “Hey, what makes you so successful in this land?”
Think about it. If you’re a farmer or you’re going to garden, you know, you go get advice on farming or you go get advice on gardening, do you not? You ask, hey, what fertilizer do you use? What plants do you plant? What do you do in order to make your garden, whether it’s a flower garden or a vegetable garden, so prosperous? And hopefully the person you go talk to will say, oh well, you know, I do this at this time of the year and I fertilize then and you got to fight the weeds almost every single day.
But the Israelites go to the Canaanites and they say, “What did you do to make your land so prosperous?” And the Canaanites say, “Well, we worship Baal and Ashtaroth. Baal is the god of rain, Ashtaroth is his consort and helps with fertility, and so we’ll show you how we worship, which makes the land prosperous.”
And so these people look to the land, they see the people that have been living there for four to six hundred years and they look at God who helped them out in the wilderness and they say, “Well, the people who’ve been living here for four to six hundred years probably know more about this land and so we’ll turn our back upon God and serve and worship the gods of the Canaanites.”
And this here is the key to the military failure. It wasn’t simply a failure to kick out the people; it was a failure of worship and allegiance to God who had brought them out of the land of Egypt.
And the author summarizes this for us in verse 11. He says,
“And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals.”
I want us to kind of mark this particular verse as we go through the rest of the book because it will show up another seven times between here and chapter 16. Every time one of the major judges, there are 12 judges throughout the book of Judges, six of them are minor, they’re only given a verse or two, six of them are major judges and the accounts of each judge get a little bit longer as we go through.
But at the beginning of each of those six major judges, we are told, “And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” This doing what was evil in the sight of the Lord is a combination of worshiping the false gods. And we find out later on in chapter 17 through 21, that it also involves doing what was right in their own eyes.
The key word shifts in chapter 17 through 21, where it says there was no king in Israel, and the people of Israel did what was right in their own eyes. You know, they looked at the land and they said, “You know what, I know what God has told us, but you know, God told us that 40 years ago and that just doesn’t apply anymore because the world has moved on. And so we’re so much smarter than we were back there at Mount Sinai, so we’re gonna do what’s right in our own eyes rather than what God told us to do. Because that’s old-fashioned way back there.”
We do the same thing except that instead of saying God told us to do that 40 years ago, we say God told us to do that a couple thousand years ago. We do that very same thing in our culture.
We do what is right in our own eyes. We worship the created rather than the Creator. We seek after the gods of this world, which we don’t have gods that are statues and covered in gold anymore, but we seek and we pursue love for the sake of love. It becomes our God, and we compromise God’s law on relationship and sex in order to worship at the altar of love.
We seek the security of the god of money in our world, and we compromise God’s calls to generosity. We compromise God’s calls to honesty and integrity as we bow down to the altar of money.
And finally, power. Whether it’s a personal power, as I just want to be the captain and have control over my own life, or whether it’s political power in our culture, we worship at the God of power, compromising and turning our back on what God has done and continues to do for us.
THE DISCIPLINE OF THE LORD
And so the Israelites turn their back on God.
They worship the Baals. They worship the gods of the Canaanites. And what did God say in Deuteronomy that he would do when that happened? He said, I will discipline you.
And that’s what he does here. It says, verse 14,
“So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers who plundered them, and he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm, as the Lord had warned and as the Lord had sworn to them, and they were in terrible distress.”
Because they have turned their back on God, God has now become their enemy. And he does this for discipline, not for rejection, and I think that’s important for us to understand.
Many times people say, “You know, what about grace in the Old Testament? There’s no grace in the Old Testament.”
God put up with Israel’s idolatry for a thousand years, brothers and sisters, and he left them in the land that entire time. That land that he promised to give to them as long as they were faithful to him, he left them there even when they were unfaithful for a thousand years. And even when he took them out of the land, he said, I’m going to bring you back. It’s going to be your land once again, and peace with God will be found in the land.
Now, we know that peace with God comes through Jesus, not through the land, and that ethnic Israel has been expanded to cover Jews and Gentiles through the blood of Jesus. But we still know that God showered the grace of his discipline upon the people of Israel, and when God’s discipline comes upon us, it is a grace as well.
It is not rejection. It is God calling us back into his glorious presence. Hebrews chapter 12, beginning in verse 3,
“We say, consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself so that you may not grow weary or faint-hearted. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. But the Lord disciplines the one he loves and chastises every son whom he receives.”
Why does the Lord discipline Israel? Well, number one, because they’ve broken his law, but number two, this distress is there for the people of God to be drawn back into fellowship with God. And really, the life, the cycle that we’re going to study beginning next week is a cycle that you and I live out on a regular basis as well. We’ll see that Israel does what is evil in the sight of the Lord, and then God raises up a nation to oppress, to discipline the nation of Israel.
And then when it gets bad enough, they cry out to God, and God sends rescue from his discipline. And as long as that judge is alive, they do well. And then that judge dies, and they falter and stumble into idolatry again, and the cycle starts all over.
Idolatry, discipline, rescue, rest. Idolatry, discipline, rescue, rest. The cycle goes over and over again.
The first time I had the privilege of teaching the book of Judges in Sunday school here in this church, I went through that cycle. Sin and idolatry, discipline, crying out, rescue and rest. And somebody piped up and says, “Hey, I do the exact same thing.”
And so do I. And so do all of us. This is the cycle that we see in our own lives as we do what is evil in the sight of the Lord. God disciplines us so that we will cry out to him, and he can rescue us from that and give us a period of rest and peace until we forget him once again.
And so God’s discipline is not intended to harm and to abuse. God’s discipline is a loving rebuke to draw us back, to desire to be restored to him once again. It is not a rejection from God.
It is God’s loving grace upon our lives.
CONCLUSION
So what do we do with this? Well, the first we see in Deuteronomy chapter 6, beginning in verse 1.
“Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land which you are going over to possess it. That you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey.”
So the first thing we do is we attend to our own holiness. Not a holiness that we pursue in order to earn God’s favor. In Jesus Christ, God loves you. If you are a child who has put their hope, who has put their faith, who has put their trust in God. The immediate call is for the child of God to examine their life and to make sure that the call to holiness is being followed in the power of the Holy Spirit.
And then the next part of the call, verse four,
“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
If you’re a parent, a grandparent, or a member of this church who has stood when we ask, will you join with the parents of the children being baptized to help raise those children in the fear and the admonition of the Lord? Once you have attended to your own holiness, we then teach the next generation.
We don’t just teach them to be moral people, though. We don’t just teach them to follow the rules. As the oldest child in my family, you know, sociologists, psychologists, all those “ologists” that are out there that study family dynamics, they look at the oldest son, the oldest child in the family, and they name the oldest child the rule keeper.
Why do they name the oldest child the rule keeper? Because typically that’s what they’re taught to do. They’re taught to keep the rules. And I can guarantee you that up until the time I was about 23 years old, I was a great rule keeper, but going straight to hell. Until such time as the gospel that my parents had taught me as well sank in by the power of the Holy Spirit, and I was converted. We’re not just teaching our children to keep the rules.
It’s important that our children keep the rules, but they also need to know that when we fall, when we stumble, when we break the rules, that there’s a Savior who kept the rules for us, who was righteous before God on our behalf, so that when we stumble in keeping God’s rules, we still have forgiveness, we still have reconciliation with God. Parents, grandparents, everybody who is helping a parent or a grandparent raise a child in the fear and the admonition of the Lord, those kids don’t need to see you perfect. They need to see you repentant.
They need to see you relying upon the grace of God, relying upon the power of the Holy Spirit. When you stumble, when you mess up, own up to it and remind those children that there is a God who saves, there is a God who forgives.
And then the last thing I would encourage us to do as we consider the sin of the false worship of the Israelites is this: If you find yourself right now under the discipline of God, run quickly back in repentance to Him. Don’t wait.
It’s going to be hard to get out of that discipline because we’re there because we’ve made choices in our lives. We have decided to cling to a relationship rather than to God. We have decided to compromise the law in order to gain more money instead of following God’s law. We have decided that control and power is more important to us than surrendering to the sovereignty of God and getting out of those situations may hurt.
But I can guarantee you that living a life reconciled to God by the power of the Holy Spirit and through the blood of Christ is worth turning back to Him and seeking His face.
Let’s pray. Father God above, we do thank you that you call us not only to be holy but you have also called us to rest in the holiness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. May we find our hope and our peace in you and in you alone. And may we not forget you in this world. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
As you go this week, take this blessing with you into your work, into your family, into your play.
“To God’s elect who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father through the sanctifying work of the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with His blood, grace and peace be yours in abundance.”
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
Please visit our Facebook Page.