A Sermon on Judges 3:7-11 has been lightly edited.
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If you have your Bibles, please take them now and turn with me to the book of Judges. We’re going to continue through chapter three and we’re going to look at the first of the major Judges. And in many ways, he sets for us a model of what we are going to see in the other Judges as we go through.
Othniel, Ehud, and Deborah and Barak probably give us the most complete part of that cycle that we’ve talked about, that we’ve read about previously in chapter two and chapter three, that cycle of God’s grace, Israel’s rebellion, then God’s raising up a rescuer, and then God providing deliverance and rest for the Israelites.
It’s good for us to remember that much of the idolatry that Israel pursued is rooted in their doubting of God’s goodness. And we are tempted to doubt the same thing today. And so we will see ourselves in the Israelites and we will seek to see our faithful Savior in the Judges. So let’s turn now to the word of the Lord as we find it in Judges three, beginning in verse seven.
“And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. They forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Ashtoreth. Therefore, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Cushan-rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia. And the people of Israel served Cushan-rishathaim eight years. But when the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel who saved them, Othniel, the son of Kanaz, Caleb’s younger brother. The spirit of the Lord was upon him, and he judged Israel. He went out to war, and the Lord gave Cushan-rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia, into his hand, and his hand prevailed over Cushan-rishathayim. So the land had rest 40 years. Then Othniel, the son of Kanaz, died.”
Let’s pray. Father God, we thank you so much for your word that has been provided for us, that has been preserved for us, and was spoken through the prophets by the power of the spirit. Lord, may that same spirit be with us today to change us and to draw us closer to you. May that same spirit shine light into our hearts so that we might see where we should repent and turn our hearts towards you. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
Have you ever heard the description, “He was a man of few words?” Have you ever noticed that when it comes to conversations, there are typically two types of people that end up in a conversation? One is the person who you can ask a yes or no question to, and 10 or 15 minutes later they finally finish their answer that they have gone through.
And the other type of person is that person that you can ask a broadly open-ended question, hoping for that 10 or 15 minutes of conversation to go, and they can answer that broadly open-ended question with a maximum of about three words. God, in his sense of humor, often puts those two people together in a marriage.
Our passage today is very much like that man of few words. As we go through Ehud and the rest of the judges, we will see a great amount of detail. Some of the detail we don’t want to see, because especially as we go through places like Ehud or even the account of Jael and Sisera at the end of Deborah and Barak, the details that we are given are not pretty. They are gory. They are bloody.
Most of the other major judges that we will consider give us great detail, but Othniel here gives us the barest of detail. And it’s when we come to those passages that are really light, that are really skinny on detail, that we really should slow down a little bit, because even in those passages, like the man of few words, there are sometimes things that are deep and profound, but we have to be looking for them.
Today we will look for and see that the author of Judges comes to the same conclusion that Jonah came to in Jonah chapter two. In Jonah chapter two, he is in the belly of the whale and he gives us his prayer. He says,
“I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice, for you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me. All your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall look again upon your holy temple. The waters closed in over me to take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped around my head. At the roots of the mountains, I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever. Yet you brought my life up from the pit. O Lord, my God, when my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you and to your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed to pay. [And here’s the key.] Salvation belongs to the Lord.”
And so Othniel, even in his simple and sparse way, his lack of words that we have here points us to that glorious truth that salvation belongs to the Lord and to the Lord alone.
And because salvation belongs to the Lord, we can rest.
GOD’S ACTION & ISRAEL’S RESPONSE
So what I want us to do as we go through this particular passage is we’re going to bounce back and forth as we follow our way through between what God has done for the Israelites and then Israel’s reaction. And then we’ll go back to what God does based upon Israel. And we’ll kind of go in a back and forth as we fill out the details here just a little bit and seek to see this glorious truth that salvation belongs to the Lord.
And to see what God does for the Israelites, we really need to go back, back to the beginning of Judges, back through the book of Joshua, on back to the beginning of the book of Exodus. Because remember, Israel is in the land simply because God loved them, had mercy upon them and redeemed them from slavery in Egypt.
All the miracles in Egypt, all the miracles in the wilderness, all the miracles in the conquest of the land were from God to Israel. It says in Deuteronomy 7:7, I didn’t choose you. I didn’t rescue you. I didn’t redeem you because you were powerful or because you were wealthy or because you were popular. I simply did it because I loved you. It’s what God tells Israel.
And God, out of his love, out of his grace, out of his provision, has brought Israel to the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey.
And how does Israel react to God? How does Israel respond to this gracious gift of the land that God has given them? Verse 7 says, “The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” What does it mean that they did evil in the sight of the Lord? Well, later on in chapter 17 through 21, we’ll see that it means that they did whatever was right in their own eyes. They defined truth for themselves. They decided that they were going to go their own way, regardless of what God tells them.
But here it tells us in verse 7, the second half of verse 7, it says they forgot the Lord, their God, and they served the Baals and the Asheroth. The Baals and the Asheroth are generic terms right now, with them both being in the plural there. It’s just pointing to the gods of the Canaanites. We will meet Baal later on, the specific god Baal. We will also meet the specific goddess Asheroth. But for right now, they’re just worshiping the generic gods of the Canaanites.
It says they served them. And we’ll see in a few minutes that serving false gods leads to being enslaved by those false gods, because we’re told a little bit later on that Israel served, very same word, Cushan, this king that invaded for eight years.
But the other thing they did was they forgot the Lord, their God. They worshiped the false gods, and they forgot the Lord, their God. Now, to forget the Lord, your God, is not to have amnesia. You know, sometimes we watch movies or television shows, and one of the main characters gets bonked on the head, and they forget everything. And then the rest of the movie, the rest of the show, is them trying to get the memory back.
If it’s a comedy, he gets hit on the head again, and everything is set right. That’s not what we’re talking about here. To forget, or the flip side of that, to remember in the Old Testament is an act of the will. It is a statement that Israel knew exactly what God had done for them. All the miracles, all the provision, all the law that God had given to them. They knew that God had entered into a covenant relationship with them.
They knew that God had redeemed them and called them to live in a holy way, and they chose not to do it. They chose to turn their back on that.
Now, why would they do that? Well, it probably boils down to something I’ve mentioned a couple times in the prayer. Bruce mentioned it in Sunday school today. He said they doubted God’s goodness.
Yeah, God got me here, but is God really going to be the one that’s going to keep me here, that’s going to protect me while I’m here, that’s going to continue to provide for me while I’m here? And you know what? I’m just not really sure that he is, so I’m going to assure that he takes care of me or that I’m taken care of in my own power because I don’t think God’s good enough to actually do that.
It’s a temptation that we come to when we are in chronic pain or chronic illness or chronic sickness. God, you promised to heal me. You promised to protect me. You promised to walk beside me and you seem so far away and I’ve been suffering so long. Are you really good? And we have a choice in that moment. Do we turn to the things of this earth as our only hope? Now, I’m not saying don’t go to the doctor. We should go to the doctor. That’s one of the ways that God heals us, but is the doctor our only hope or do we still rest and pray in God?
Psalm 88 opens up with, “Oh Lord, I cry out to you.” And it talks about in poetic language throughout Psalm 88, it talks about chronic illness and being suffering with this chronic illness from the time that the psalmist was a little kid. And it ends with this just horribly dark picture where the psalmist says, I’ve suffered, I’ve struggled for so long. Darkness is my only friend.
And yet it’s a glorious prayer because all of that is offered up to God because the psalmist knows that regardless of what happens, God is still the ultimate hope of the psalmist and he’s still our ultimate hope.
Do we forget God and turn toward the idols of this world or do we continue to rest in God’s goodness? So God provides. Israel rebels. How does God respond to Israel’s rebellion? Verse eight,
“The anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he sold them into the hand of Cushan-rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia. And the people of Israel served Cushan-rishathayim eight years.”
So God, we talked a little bit last week about God’s anger, his wrath, his hatred against sin, because he is a holy God. He is a just God. He cannot stand idolatry and rebellion. And he promised Israel back in the book of Deuteronomy when he was finalizing his covenant with them. He told them, when you rebel against me, I will sell you into the hands of oppressors.
And God’s a promise keeping God. And so he does that very thing here. He disciplines them.
He disciplines by selling them into the hands of Cushan-rishathayim, king of Mesopotamia. We don’t know much about this man from archaeology, but remember, archaeology is never the final say upon the truth of the Bible. Just an example, it was up until 1960s where people told us we couldn’t trust the gospels because there was no archaeological evidence that Pontius Pilate existed.
And then in 1961, we found proof that Pontius Pilate existed. Even though we don’t have archaeological evidence right now of Cushan-rishathayim, archaeology is not the final arbiter of God’s truth. God himself is.
But what we do know from his name, that last name there, Rishathaim, it means “doubly wicked.” It was probably a nickname given to him by those that he defeated to highlight his cruelty, to highlight how bad of a person he was.
The phrase king of Mesopotamia literally means king of the land between the two rivers. And it could be anywhere from Syria, which is just north of Israel, all the way over to between the Tigris and Euphrates River over Babylon or modern-day Iraq. He was a strong king who likely entered Israel through the north, marched his way all the way to the south, and then maintained control over Israel for at least eight years.
Now, how do we know he made it to the south? Well, that’s where Othniel lived. We know from chapter one, and we’ll talk about this in a few minutes, he lived in the southern part of Judah. And so that’s where Othniel would have come in contact with him.
And so God’s response to his people’s idolatry is discipline, is judgment. And I think it’s important for us to keep that in mind, to remember that God is a patient God, and God loves his people. But we’re told in Hebrews chapter 12 and 13 that God disciplines those that he loves. And so we need to keep that in mind, that when we turn our back upon God, that he will discipline us if we don’t repent soon.
So how did the people of Israel respond to God? Well, for the first eight years, they didn’t. They served Cushan-rishathayim. And as I mentioned earlier, that’s the same word that’s used in verse seven, where it says they served the gods of Canaan.
Real quick, I think it’s important for us to understand that when you sell yourself to an idol, you will ultimately become enslaved to that idol. Is money the idol that you pursue? You will ultimately become enslaved to it. One of the great industrialists of the early 20th century, in an interview was asked, how much money is enough? He said, one dollar more.
Do you ever get to one dollar more? No, you always need one dollar more. So if money is your idol, you will become enslaved to money. If love is your idol, if love is your God, you will ultimately become enslaved to love.
Whatever it is that you seek to worship other than God, you will ultimately become enslaved to. So the first eight years, the people of Israel were okay with that. But then it says in verse nine that they cried out to the Lord.
Thomas Watson, in his book, The Doctrine of Repentance, lays out six signs or identifiers of true repentance. He says that there is the sight of sin, being able to see the sin from God’s perspective. There’s sorrow for our sin. There’s confession of our sin. There is shame for sin and hatred of sin. And finally, turning from sin and back to God.
It’s what we should pursue when it comes to repentance. And it’s also what is not talked about in this passage. The word cried out there is literally someone who whines or cries out in pain, hoping that someone will hear and help.
It’s the toddler that falls and just cries out. And every now and then they kind of open their eyes and they look around to see if anybody’s coming to help them while they’re crying out. It’s a half-hearted prayer.
It’s a less than half-hearted prayer to God. It’s just a whining or throwing a fit, hoping that God will come and help. And what would you and I expect God to do? If you’re a Gen X kid, you would expect God to say, you know, “Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
But what does God do? It says
“He raises up a deliverer for the people of Israel who saved them. Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother. The spirit of the Lord was upon him and he judged Israel. He went out to war and the Lord gave Cushan-rishathayim, king of Mesopotamia, in his hand. And his hand prevailed over Cushan-rishathayim. Think about that.
This less than half-hearted prayer, this abandoning of God, willful forgetting of God, willful turning their back on God and serving other gods, God giving them their discipline. I mean, we would expect a little bit more, wouldn’t we? We would expect a little bit more of a response from Israel than just kind of laying there whining in their pain, hoping that somebody will come and fix it. And yet God responds anyway.
God comes to their rescue anyway. No picture of them changing their hearts, changing their mind, no picture of them really truly seeking out the Lord. And God rescues them anyway.
He does this by raising up Othniel. We’ve met him already in chapter one. He is Caleb’s nephew. He is also Caleb’s son-in-law. He had some military success back in chapter one and he has a great military success here. This is an exterior king that has invaded the land of Israel and kept it under subjection for eight years.
And God calls and empowers Othniel and Othniel frees the Israelites from their oppression. I love the language here. It gives us two pictures of how God helped Othniel.
It says the spirit of the Lord was upon him. Every believer has the Holy Spirit, but sometimes God calls us to extraordinary work. And when he does that, he gives us his spirit to help us with that.
Nothing flashy, nothing showy, no, you know, spectacular miracles or claims to being prophets or apostles or things like that. But like the two men in Exodus 32 who were already artists, God’s spirit came upon them so that they could do the special work of leading the building of the tabernacle. God’s spirit comes upon Othniel to help him finish the work that God has given to him. And it also says that the Lord’s hand was upon him and that because God’s hand was upon him, Othniel’s hand was successful.
You know, sometimes God calls us to things that we don’t think we can do. And we’re absolutely right. We can’t, except that his spirit is with us and his hand is upon us to give us success in what God has called us to do. And there’s a sense in which all we have to do is go along with what God is doing, what God is going to use us for, and he will make that successful.
So the last thing God does for the Israelites in response to their crying out is he gives the land rest for 40 years. Now, if you do your math, you look at eight years of service, that’s 40 years of rest is five times longer. God is a generous and abundant giver when he gives to his people. He gave the land rest for five times longer than the people of Israel turned their back upon him.
Now this, the idea of giving the land rest is not the Sabbath rest that we long for when Jesus returns. It is what we typically think of when we think of peace. When you and I think of peace, we typically only think of lack of war, the lack of strife, the lack of argument.
And that’s what the land had here. Remember, God had promised that the land would provide prosperity for the people. And so God brings prosperity to the people by allowing the land to have rest for 40 years.
And then the passage ends with this ominous sentence, “Then Othniel the son of Kenaz died.” And if you ever have read through the book of Judges, you know the very next sentence is going to be that repeated theme, the people did again what was evil in the sight of the Lord. They had a short memory once again.
CONCLUSION
As I’ve mentioned, you and I are the nation of Israel. We doubt God’s goodness in our life. We doubt and turn from God to the idols of this world.
And yet the account, the story of Othniel teaches us something very important and it’s that salvation belongs to the Lord. I added a lot of detail to this that is not there in the original. And I got that detail from trusted sources, from archaeological sources, from language studies and things like that.
But the most important thing to do is to look through here and to see if the author of Judges repeats a word a certain time. Now, you probably heard me say Cushan-rishathayim over and over again throughout this, but there’s a word that you probably missed. And I say that because I missed it because I’m so familiar with reading it in the Bible.
But there’s a word that’s repeated more than the name of Israel’s oppressor. And that is the covenant name of God, Yahweh. It’s there in capital letters, capital L-O-R-D.
And in these five short verses, the covenant name of God appears seven times. Who’s the star of the show, do you think? It is the Lord. This cycle, everything Israel has, everything you and I have comes from the Lord.
Jonah figured that out in the belly of the whale. Salvation comes from the Lord. And that is what we will see throughout the book of Judges. The author of Judges wants us to see that everything, including salvation and deliverance, comes from the Lord.
Othniel is presented to us here as righteous. There is no deficiency in the life of Othniel presented to us in this account or in the book of Judges. And we know that salvation comes through the one who was truly righteous for every moment, every second, every day of his life.
Othniel died and rest ended. We serve the eternal God through the work of Jesus who will never die, which means that our rest is eternal. We don’t long for a salvation that necessarily puts us in a land with a fruitful garden. We long for a salvation that leads us to the new heavens and the new earth where God dwells forever with his people. And Jesus has secured that salvation for us.
I want to revisit the doctrine of repentance before we leave. I mentioned Thomas Watson’s book, The Doctrine of Repentance, and his six signs of true repentance. The first sign is that we need to see our sin. We need to pray to the Holy Spirit, shine the light of your word upon my heart in such a way that I see that I am aware of the sin that is in my life.
Secondly, we should pray that the Holy Spirit would give us a godly sorrow for that sin. Not sorry that we got caught, not sorry that God is disciplining us, but actual sorrow for the fact that we turn our back on God, on Jesus, on the Holy Spirit and seek our own way.
Confession of sin is the third part of repentance. It is a particular, a detailed, a specific accounting to God of where we fall short and confessing those things to him.
Fourthly, shame for sin, a legitimate guilt that should drive us back into the hands of a gracious God.
Hatred of sin, desiring temptation to be taken away from you and sin taken away from you because you hate that sin still resides in your heart. It’s not a hatred of yourself. You are wholly chosen and beloved in Jesus, but it’s a hatred of sin that still dwells in your life.
And finally, after all that, it is a turning back to God, abandoning those idols so that we might pursue him and pursue his holiness and live as he calls us to live in Christ.
And God commands repentance. Let every man, let every woman everywhere repent, we’re told. But does God require perfect repentance? Do we have to have all of those six things in line before God says, “OK, Ike, you got it with that one sin right there. You got it. I’m going to forgive that one.”
Thanks be to God, no. Just like Israel just cried out and God came to rescue them, God does not wait until we have perfect repentance to come and to offer us his salvation and his reconciliation. Take comfort in that truth, brothers and sisters, we can pursue repentance knowing that God will take imperfect repentance because Jesus has stood in our place.
God does not only give peace and rest to those who perfectly repent in Christ. God accepts the weakest of repentance from his people and comes to their rescue.
Let’s pray. Father God, we do thank you so much for this glorious truth that even though we doubt your goodness, even though we often pursue idols, that you come flying to our rescue even when we are not perfectly repentant. Lord, lead us to repentance. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Our God desires to bless his people as they go about their daily lives, as they go to work, as they go home, as they go to pursue hobbies or friendships or relationships. And so I give you this blessing from 2nd Peter chapter 1:
“Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.”
He who testifies to these things says yes I am coming soon.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
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