Living with the True God III: Right in Our Own Eyes

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm John Snyder, and with me again is Teddy James, and we are looking, our final look, at some key themes in the book of Judges.

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Of course, being in the Word of God, it's always appropriate to take it seriously, but there are times where aspects of Scripture, certain portions, seem particularly applicable to our situation, and Judges, I think, is particularly necessary for the evangelical church today to understand the dealings of God and how do we read the decline of society and the role of God's people in light of the book of Judges.

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So, we're going to pick back up today with our last big lesson. Yeah, we've got the one big point.

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So, like you said, there's so many things that we could focus on in the book of Judges, and just so you know, listener or viewer, we're really only hitting the high points and hitting just major points, major discussions.

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So, if you want to go a little bit deeper into the book of Judges, we do have a study. It's kind of what this is about.

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We're reintroducing that study. It's called Living with the True God Lessons from Judges.

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We'll put a link to that in the description below, but this episode, this discussion,

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John, we're going to talk more about the expansive influence of sin.

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So, I remember years ago, here in Mississippi, we have a plant, and it's called kudzu, and if you've ever been to the

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South, you've likely seen kudzu. It's actually a really pretty bloom. It's nice purple. It has a good scent to it.

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It was brought over from Japan to help with erosion, but it is one of the most invasive plants known to man, and it will, and it did, it covered our barn when

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I was a kid and made the whole building collapse, and I remember a preacher telling me, you know, sin is quite a bit like this.

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This is a good illustration. It can grow up to six feet a day. It can destroy anything that it wraps its tendrils around, and there's absolutely no controlling it.

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You can think you can control it, but ultimately, it will just destroy everything it touches. Yeah.

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So, when we look at the book of Judges, because of the nature of the account, we have a series of, we would say, historical cycles.

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So, we have the people walking with the Lord, and then there is a dangerous, slow, you know, imperceptible at first drift away from God toward the idols of the nations around them, and as that drift begins to accelerate, you know, it kind of picks up speed as it's going spiritually downhill, then there are perhaps warnings that are ignored, and eventually, in gracious judgment, a judgment not meant to destroy, but to restore a people and to cut them off from their idolatry,

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God raises up the nations around them, which He at one point, in the days of Joshua, had handed over to them.

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Now, God hands Israel to its enemies. He gives the enemies the ability to rule over Israel, and we have this rule, then, by a foreign power, and things become worse and worse until finally, the children of Israel cry out, and they just cry out in misery to God or cry out in repentance.

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Same Hebrew word can be used different ways. So, certainly, I think we would expect that, you know, as the cry goes up, that many of the godly in the land are crying out with the broken heart for the spiritual condition, and many of the unbelieving

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Jews are crying out simply because life is miserable. You know, the Midianites, the Philistines, the Ammonites, these people are ruling us again.

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So, when the cry goes up, God is merciful, and He raises up a judge or a military, spiritual, and political leader, all in one.

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And the judge, then, is used by God to call the people, really, to repentance and to lead the people's armies against the enemy, and God, then, gives

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Israel success in battle. And they, you know, they're free from the foreign power. They've put away their idols, and they're worshiping

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God and walking with Him in a time of peace and prosperity, again, as long as the judge lives.

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And then, we find that when the judge dies, then the people begin to drift again. And this cycle happens about seven times in Judges.

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And because of the nature of that, you can see things that you wouldn't necessarily notice if you're looking at that cycle, say, reading from the book of Samuel to the book of, you know, 2

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Chronicles. It's the same principles we see repeated, but here in Judges, one after the next, the rapid, consecutive fashion of giving you these histories.

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In looking at it in that way, there are things that we notice quite clearly.

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And one of the things is that when a people sin and God restores them, if they return again to that sin at the next generation and the next generation, again and again and again, return to the idolatry of their parents and their grandparents and their great -grandparents, even if things get so bad that they're willing to put their idols away and God is merciful, that that downward spiral, it's not, we said the other week, it's not a merry -go -round that just goes, you know, in the same rut.

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It's kind of a spiral staircase down. It's a whirlpool where every time we read of the

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Israelites embracing idolatry again, after mercy, even though they do eventually cry out and God restores them, it's as if they don't come all the way back up.

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So, where they are at the beginning of the book and where they are at the end of the book are two very different places, even if they've put away their idolatry.

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Because sin, as you mentioned, has this invasive permeating influence that if it is continually embraced, one of the consequences is that we get hard and indifferent and we don't even notice it.

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There's a Psalm, Psalm 85, that begins with a statement of God's mercy.

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Verse one, O Lord, you showed favor to your land, you restored the captivity of Jacob, you forgave the iniquity of your people, you covered all their sin.

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So, wonderful statement. But then if you jump down to verse eight, after praying for God not to be angry again because the people have drifted again, and God to show loving kindness again, grant them salvation again.

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Verse eight, he says this, I will hear what God the Lord will say, for he will speak peace to his people, to his godly ones, but let them not turn back to folly.

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And if they do, then what we see in Judges is that there can be a hardening that begins to occur and we don't even notice that after repentance, things are not quite where they were before.

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So, there's some examples of this. And if you were to read Judges, Teddy, where would you say you see this most clearly?

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Do you see it most clearly in the pagans, in the common people who are embracing idolatry, in the leaders?

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Where do you see it? Yeah, I mean, I think it's clearly, and I think that the writer of Judges makes it clear that we ought to see it in those leaders.

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So, everyone, whatever leader you tend to think of when you think the book of Judges, you know, when we start out, we start with Joshua, godly man, he finishes well, and then immediately afterwards, you see the people have fallen, a leader comes up, but every leader, even if he's an earnest man, he falls away into sin.

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And then you also have the leaders who have no interest in God. Really, they're selfish leaders.

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Yeah, so it is the people that God Himself has chosen to rescue, the people, it's the judges themselves, like you said, who are, these judges, we'll mention a few of them, they are found, the ones we'll mention, they are found in Hebrews chapter 11, all of them, these are men.

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Which is, when you're reading the book of Judges, you would not expect to read them in Hebrews.

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Not all of them, right, yeah. So, you know, maybe Gideon, but then you look at Samson or Jephthah, and you think,

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I don't know, you know, where do we see faith? A very imperfect faith, but these men,

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Scripture tells us, are men who believe God and responded to God. So, we would call them believers.

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I think one lesson, before we even look at their lives, is that the new covenant is a superior covenant, and the provisions of the new covenant, though people in the old covenant were saved by grace through faith, looking forward to what the

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Messiah would do, in the same way that the new covenant believer is saved by grace through faith, looking back at what the

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Messiah did. There is a fullness that comes by living in the period of the completion of the

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Messiah's work, rather than living in the period of the anticipation, and that fullness is seen in the way that the new covenant does produce superior lives.

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We can't imagine reading what we read about in the life of Samson. We can't imagine that being the life of the

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Apostle Paul. You know, you would think, well, who would even listen to anything Paul said if he lived like Samson?

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You can't imagine, you know, Peter or John in the New Testament, pastoring and ministering in a way that reflects

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Jephthah's confusion. So, a superior covenant, and we're grateful to live in these days where what

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Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 3 is true. We see God, not in the terrifying pictures of His holiness and the need of a

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Savior in the old covenant, but in the face of Christ, this same holy, you know, terrifyingly holy

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God has shown us Himself in the Redeemer. And in looking at Christ, we are transformed from one level to the next of Christ's likeness, you know, we're transformed.

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But we can look at these leaders. They're all mentioned as believers, and we'll give you them in the order that Judges gives us, these leaders.

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We'll get into why in a bit. And we will see that there is, with these leaders, a progressively gloomy portrait of these men.

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So, give us the first one. Yeah. So, first, we start off with Gideon. So, everybody, we know the story of Gideon.

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You know, he sets out the fleece, Lord, if this is You, if this is what You want me to do, let there be dew on the grass and let the fleece be dry, and then he flips it.

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So, he's a man who has communion with God. He talks openly and freely with God.

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He sees great success, military campaign, revival of the people.

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And at the end, he has the opportunity to become king. And he even says,

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I will not be your king. My sons will not rule over you. We have a king, and it's God, faithful man.

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And then he makes a golden ephod that he worships and generations after him worship.

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Yeah. So, an ephod is, it's a part of the high priest's garment. It's kind of a golden plate.

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So, it hangs, it's attached to the garments, and it's used in the high priests representing all of Israel as he goes into the

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Holy of Holies. But for our purpose here, the ephod is just a really important religious thing.

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Gideon takes some of the gold that he's given from Israel. Like you said, he refuses to be king.

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They want to make him wealthy. He accepts some gold, and some of that gold he takes, and he makes this golden ephod.

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What possesses him? I don't know. Maybe he thinks, if we make a golden ephod, my family, my little town that I live in will be closer to God.

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I mean, this is a thing that the high priest wears. It's not... Could have been like a representation of God's presence or something like that.

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Yeah. Does he think that God is extra close to them because he has an ephod, a copy of the ephod?

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Kind of like, for me, if I could get Spurgeon's Bible, I would think, would I be like...

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I could preach like Spurgeon if I had Spurgeon's Bible. So in anything, he makes a copy of something that God designed.

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It's not a molek. It's not Dagon or Baal or Asherah. It's a copy of something that the high priest uses, but they turn their hopes toward it.

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And he, his family, his town, and as you mentioned, the Bible says all Israel, plays the harlot or is adulterous in their hearts, not loving the one true

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God. They run off and have this spiritual affair with this other

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God, this ephod. And I think it's important too to take a note there that Gideon would not have called his actions wicked.

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I don't think. I think he felt like you were kind of insinuating here. He thought that what he was doing, and we'll see this as a theme as we continue this episode, but he really thought, was convinced that what he was doing was pleasing and honoring to the

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Lord. Yeah. It seemed like the best thing to do for some reason. And so I think it's so interesting with Gideon, you know, that when

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God calls him, you remember that in order to obey the Lord, he has to go against not only the idolatry that Israel had embraced, but he has to go against his own dad.

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He's the preacher of the idol church. Yeah. So his dad is the preacher in town who has led the people in worship of Midianite idols.

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And so they're worshiping these idols and this Baal that promises, you know, Baal always promises he's a fertility

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God. So he promises more, more children, more money, more crops, whatever. And he's supposed to rule over the weather.

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And, you know, and if you're a farmer and your God rules over the weather, then man, you're rich, you know, you just, as long as he's happy with you.

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So he, at night he gets some friends, they tear down the Baal altar and they burn it, you know, and they destroy it.

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And the next morning when the town wakes up and they go to have their morning devotions at Baal, you know, 40 days of Baal, then they get there and it's gone.

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And they go to the preacher and say, where's our God? And somebody's destroyed it. And they say, we'll kill whoever has dared to touch our

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God. And it's the preacher's son, Gideon. The preacher, his father wisely says, if Baal is a real

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God, then he can take care of himself. He can fight his own battles. Let him kill my son. If he's not a real

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God, you know, kind of by implication, then why are we wasting our time? And Gideon is renamed from that point forward,

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Jeroboam. And in the Hebrew, that means let Baal be against him.

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In other words, if we were to give a nickname, we'd say, this is my friend Gideon, but everybody calls him

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Baal is out to get him. Baal hates Gideon. And now

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Gideon, at the end of his life, leads his family and his nation really probably inadvertently to put hope in a golden ephod that he made and to treat it as if it's a

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God. So very godly man, but doing what's right in his own eyes, we see that sin is embraced.

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But that is kind of small compared to if we keep following the history.

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That whirlpool like you've been talking about, going down. Let's mention another one, Jephthah. So Jephthah is the son of a prostitute that a

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Jewish man has a relationship with the prostitute. He's a wealthy, influential man. He has a relationship with a prostitute.

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She has a son. When this man grows old and dies, his other sons from his legal marriages, they look at their half brother and they say, whoa, whoa, whoa, he doesn't get any of the inheritance because he's the son of a prostitute.

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Our dad shouldn't even have had him. Illegitimate child. He's illegitimate, so you get nothing.

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They drive him out of their land into the land of Tob. Archaeologists are not exactly sure where the land of Tob is, but we understand where the region is.

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We don't know exactly where the city was. The region of Tob, it's the region on the far edge of Israelite territory on the eastern side of Jordan.

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So you remember with Jordan, you have the Jordan River and then the West Bank. We hear that in news all the time, the

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West Bank, the western side, and then you have the Mediterranean Sea. So most of Israel is on the western side, but there were a couple of tribes that were allowed to settle on the eastern side.

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But the problem with the eastern side is all their neighbors are pagans. And of course, by this time in the time of the judges, there's paganism everywhere in Israel, but especially in the area of Tob, Manasseh, and the other far eastern countries.

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The border countries are just, they've intermarried and intermixed with paganism for many generations.

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So what you have, I think, is you have a religion in that region that has Jehovah. So we have

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Yahweh, we have God, the God of Abraham. But we've lived for so long with pagan influence, we've adjusted

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Yahweh with pagan views to the degree, it's went on so long, we don't even notice that the

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God that we worship is really not the God of the Bible. It's the right name, but He doesn't resemble the

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God of the Bible very much. Maybe we could say there are large areas in their theology that need correcting.

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Yeah, well, and it's because the idea that they've gotten for God, it's always interesting to me the things that people will keep when they've gotten away from a biblical idea of who

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God is. It's always interesting to me to see the things that they keep, what culture will keep. So in our case, I think we both agree that culturally, we've left the

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God of the Bible in kind of American culture. But we have absolutely kept

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God as a God of love. God loves everybody. John 3, 16, years ago, the most popular verse, the one known by most

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Americans, and this was like a survey maybe 30 years ago, was not

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John 3, 16 any longer, but it had shifted, which was a historical shift. It had shifted to another verse that was even better known than John 3, 16 for Americans, and that was in the

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Sermon on the Mount, judge not that you be not judged. Yeah, so these things that culture just kind of catches and grabs hold of, more so in a way of excusing their own sin and the celebration of sin rather than examining the

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God of the Bible. But that is what was happening in the days of Jephthah. They had let go of everything that didn't make their life easier to live with these other pagan nations, but they held on to the things that could be twisted to make it easier to add on Dagon, to add on Baal.

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We talked about this last week, or maybe it was the week before, an idol never minds sharing you.

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They never have a problem. Sure, you can add Yahweh onto the worship of Baal, but the

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God of the Bible is jealous and zealous for his worship. He doesn't share. So Jephthah, driven from his family, he is quite a capable man.

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He is great at leading. He gathers around himself men from the land of Tob.

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They kind of see him as a natural leader. They come to him, and they're worthless fellows, it says.

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All right, so these are like not Sunday school teachers, and so he lives in basically a paganized area, and his views of God are affected by that generation after generation of that, and these people that he's leading are not godly, and he's contacted by those that drove him out, and they say, look, the enemies have pressed in, and nobody here is very good at leading, and we know that you are a mighty man, a great military leader, and so if you will come back and lead our armies, then we'll reward you, and so there's some bargaining going on, and then he does.

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He comes back. He's actually God's chosen man, and through Jephthah, he will lead the people who have become miserable and cried out to God.

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He will lead them to conquer their enemies, push the enemies out of their territory, and to turn away from idolatry, but we know the strange account of Jephthah that he makes this vow.

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There's no need to make a vow. God had already chosen. You know, Gideon didn't have to make a vow. He didn't say,

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God, if you give me success, I promise to do A, B, and C, but Jephthah feels that he should do this, so he makes this vow to God.

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The first thing that comes out of my house, I will sacrifice it to God, and you know, if you go to commentaries at this point, you'll get a lot of different views.

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Basically, there's two different views that he, you know, being

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Middle Eastern at this time, well, animals would be in the house, so whatever animal comes out of the house first,

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I'll sacrifice it, and perhaps that's what he meant, but the real difference in commentaries, the real diversion where they all go their own way is when it comes to what happens.

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His daughter comes running out of the house. She's the first thing he sees coming out of the house, and he has vowed to God that he would sacrifice the first thing he sees coming out of his house, and so he is just, his heart is destroyed.

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He's promised God this, and she says, well, you have to keep your word to God, and so she has a period to go and mourn with her friends.

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She's never been married, never had children. Her life is, you know, going to be truncated by her father's foolish vow, and then she is sacrificed.

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Some commentators say, no, she wasn't sacrificed. She just had to stay the rest of her life as a virgin, unmarried, you know, isolated, but I think that when we read the text,

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I have not been convinced by any commentator that disagrees with what the text seems to clearly say, and that is, no,

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Jephthah does what he promised. He actually performs child sacrifice or the sacrifice of his daughter, human sacrifice, and there are commentators,

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I think, that clearly show that is the clear meaning of the text.

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But like with Gideon, he thought that's what would please God. Yeah, so that's the question. What in the world, and how could that guy be in the book of Hebrews?

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I mean, and that's the point. He can't have sacrificed his daughter because human sacrifice is offensive to God, and yet he's in the book of Hebrews as one who really believed

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God. So that can't have been what he did, but I think, tragically, it is what he did, and I think that we can see hints at why he would do this.

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I think it's more than just keeping his word, more than just what his daughter said, but there is that whole, if you look at the context of Judges, there is that decline that is occurring.

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It's much worse than what Gideon did. He is so confused about the nature of God that though he believes in God, he has some areas that are really wrong where he's mixed pagan influence in with biblical pictures of God, and the pagans have always believed that child sacrifice would receive, you know, this great response by their

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God, because it's the ultimate for a parent. If I gave up my child, there's no greater gift that I could give.

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Yeah, so I will give the most expensive offering. I'll offer one of my children, and then this

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God that I offer it to will be so impressed with my devotion. He will give back, you know, far more than if I just gave crops.

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So, I think Jephthah represents a man who lives in an area of Israel that does have the true

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God, but their view of the true God through generations of synthesis with idols, they have such a wrong view of the true

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God that he believes that God would be pleased, even though it's tragic and costly to him and his daughter, that at least

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God would be pleased that he keeps his word and he offers his daughter, because after all, that is the greatest sacrifice any believer can give.

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You know, and it's kind of like in the medieval period, you know, martyrdom by the

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Romans or the Jews really doesn't occur anymore. So, how can you be a Green Beret ultra Christian?

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Well, you can be a nun, you can be a monk, and you give up all this life, you give up family, and you go and you live in the cloister, in the monastery, and God never commanded that.

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So, that ultimate sacrifice, what if God is not at all pleased? But certainly in Jephthah's case, the sacrifice of a human to the

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God of the Bible is heinous. It is a gross offense of sin, but I think

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Jephthah thought he was doing what would be the right thing. I think we would agree that he is, and I mean, we get it from Hebrews, he was an earnest believer, but even his best effort, his highest thoughts that he had that came from himself, my highest thoughts of God is that this would please him.

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But not all the leaders in the book of Judges, they are earnest believers because they're in the book of Hebrews, but if it weren't for Hebrews, we would not say that they're earnest believers.

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We have Samson. Yeah, Samson. So, his parents raised him in a godly way according to what the angel of the

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Lord told him to do. Unique. None of the other judges have this. I mean, he's chosen by God before he's born.

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So, this is not just the people's choice, this is God's choice, and he's raised in the way God said to be raised, and the first thing we hear out of Samson's mouth is he sees a

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Philistine girl because the Philistines are ruling over Israel because Israel's idolatry. He sees a

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Philistine woman and he says, she looks good in my eyes, which is a play on words because over and over,

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Judges says they did what they did. They did what was good in their eyes as if there's no king in the land.

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So, what's good in God's eyes or what's good in our eyes? And so, Samson is only interested in what's good in his eyes.

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So, he does what he thinks is best. I need this girl. I'm in love with this girl. She's beautiful. And the parents are so grieved because he's not interested in marrying a godly young Jewish woman.

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He wants an idol worshipping woman because she looks great. So, you know, obviously, it would be quite heartbreaking to any believing parent.

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But this is a mom and dad that raised him, according to God's rules, to be the deliverer of Israel.

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And his first choice as a young adult is as far from God as he can go.

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And the Bible says, amazingly, that the parents were brokenhearted and they did not understand that this was of the

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Lord. That is, that God was ruling over even Samson's selfish choices so that even

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Samson's sin does not derail the merciful plans of God. God is not pleased with those choices.

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God does not entice Samson. But God uses Samson's selfish choices to create strife between Israel and the

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Philistines because Israel is no longer crying out. This is the first time that in that cycle where judgment hits and a foreign power rules them that the

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Bible doesn't mention a cry going up. So it seems as if they've gotten so used to living under the boot of another country and the emptiness of another idol that they don't know enough to look around and think, this is not the way

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God intended for us. This is not how God's people should live. So they don't cry out. This is norm, the new norm.

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Samson causes strife with the Philistines.

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And so there's fights and Samson ultimately is used to deliver Israel from Philistines and the false god

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Dagon. But what a sad picture. Worse than Jephthah.

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Jephthah seemed at times to be in earnest to do what was right. Samson, we don't see any time, every time he fights the

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Philistines, every time he pleads with God to give him strength, it's like it's only for you

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Samson, but Samson is the tool in God's hand. And of course we see this decline.

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It's getting worse and worse and worse. But we're still not done. We haven't hit the absolute bottom that the writer of Judges talks to us about because, and this is not a judge, right?

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This was the 11 tribes. Yeah. It's the princes and elders of Israel.

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Right. But not judges. So these were, this is more of the common culture of all of Israel and they have this one tribe doesn't have wives.

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So we got to fix that. Yeah. So the way we got there. So toward the end of the book, the last few chapters, like you said, it's the darkest spot.

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Starts off with this strange twisted love story, a priest. Okay. So a spiritual leader, he and his wife, but wait, it's not his wife.

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It's a concubine. So it's his kind of mistress, his sleep -in girlfriend. They're having trouble.

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So she leaves him and goes back and stays with dad for a while. The priest gets so lonely. He misses his girlfriend who he's been shacked up with.

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And he goes and he finds her at her dad's house and they stay a while. And the dad's just so proud of the daughter, you know, you're a concubine of, of a priest, of a preacher, you know, and he's, wow, that you got a nice boyfriend this time.

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You know, you're not like the other boyfriends you've brought home before. He's a nice guy. So they, after a visit with father -in -law, they head back home.

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As they're traveling through areas where there are a lot of, of the pagan nations, there's still pockets of them living in, in Israel's territory.

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Not all of them were removed. And so they're going past the city and they say, it's, it's getting very dark.

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And so, you know, should we stay there? Oh, no, no, no, no. That's a pagan city now, you know, foreigners live there and they worship foreign gods and those foreigners, you can't trust foreigners and they worship foreign gods.

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They'll act any way they want, you know, they're bad people. So we don't trust these people. But if you go, you know, 15, 20 miles further, there's an

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Israelite town. And so we're going to stop there. And so they stop in the town of Abed -Gibia and it's in the tribe of Benjamin.

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So these are Jews, God's people, they're safe. They arrive in town at night, an old man meets them, offers to kind of, you know, take care of their livestock and lets them stay with him.

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He feeds them and gives them a place. And he says, whatever you do, do not stay in the city square, the town square.

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Because that's where they were going to stay. Yeah. They were just going to camp out. Right. And he says, no, no, no, you don't want to do that. That's not safe.

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Come to my house. And when they're having supper with the old man, the door gets beat on and there's a, there's a mob of men.

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And it's so much like the scene of Sodom and Gomorrah. So the

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Sodom -like Jewish men, not pagans, Jews, are at the door and they said, we noticed you have a stranger with you, a man.

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So you put him out, unlock the door, let us have him and we can do what we want with him.

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And and the old man is horrified. And, you know, culturally, he's, you know, this is unacceptable.

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I gave this man protection under my roof. You can't do this. You know, the shame that would be to the old man if he just handed someone over.

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And so he strangely, and this is another picture of how far they are from where they ought to be.

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This man who lives in Israel, who knows about the God of Abraham and has, you know, the benefit of scripture.

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He says, you can have my daughter. She's a young woman. She's never been married. You can have her. You can do what you want with her tonight.

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And they don't want her. They want the man. Well, the priest, being just a complete cad, decides that the best thing to do to save his skin is to take his sleeping girlfriend and he pushes his concubine out the door and locks it behind her.

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And so they molest her and then kill her. So she dies on the doorstep.

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He wakes up in the morning. There she is. He says, come on, wake up. And by the way, this is a rough story, but it's intended to be.

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Yeah, it's intended to be so shocking. And so she won't wake up because she's dead.

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He puts her on his donkey. They travel back home. When he gets home, he cuts her body into 12 pieces and sends it with 12 messengers to the 12, to the leaders of the 12 tribes of Israel and says basically this, do you see how bad society has gotten?

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I mean, our own people in the tribe of Benjamin, in this town, Jews are acting like sodomites.

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They're worse than the pagans. We need to take care of this. And so the tribes get together and 11 of the tribes say, absolutely.

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So they go to Benjamin and say, hand those people of Gibeah over. We're going to deal with them. But the tribe of Benjamin gets all territorial and proud and says, these are our people and you're not going to judge our people.

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We'll handle our people, but not you. And so the 11 tribes basically say, hand them over or we'll go to war and we'll take them by force.

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So Benjamin arms itself, the 11 tribes arm themselves, and they have a number of battles.

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And finally, the 11 tribes beat the Benjamites.

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But by this time, the hatred and revenge in the heart of the 11 tribes toward the people of Benjamin, not just those men of Gibeah who did what they did, but the entire tribe, not just the leaders, everybody, that they go through Benjamin and they just kill every male

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Benjamite, boy, man, grandpa, and they kill all the soldiers in the

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Benjamite army that they capture. And there's just a small remnant left. So they took a vow before the arm, before the battle, anybody that ever lets his daughter marry somebody from the tribe of Benjamin, we will come and we will kill the entire family related to that daughter.

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Because the idea was we are wiping Benjamin out. Yeah. So it's genocide, you know? Well, afterwards, when tempers cool, they look and they realize we have killed the tribe of Benjamin.

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There's only a few hundred men left and there's nobody for them to marry. You know, we've wiped out men and women.

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And so there's no way the Benjamites are going to survive. The Benjamites don't have any women from their own tribe to marry.

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And nobody from any of the other 11 tribes are allowed to let their daughters marry a

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Benjamite. Because if you let your daughter marry a Benjamite so that the tribe can continue to exist, you, your wife, the rest of your family, your grandkids, you're all going to be wiped out.

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So they have a plan. We will tell those men who are left in Benjamin, the few hundred, there were some towns, there were some places that didn't go to war against you.

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And so, you know, they were cowardly and they didn't join us. So you can go and destroy their towns, kill all their men, and take whatever women you want for your wives, and we won't do anything about it.

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Well, that worked partly. A few hundred wives were gotten, but there were still a number of soldiers that didn't have wives.

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And so they said, okay, here's what you do. Over here, there's going to be a special, you know, festival, a harvest festival where the whole town worships

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God, grateful for the harvest. And in the early morning, the girls come out and the young unmarried women, they dance and sing to the

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Lord as part of the beginning of the celebration. But you hide in the fields. And when the girls dance through, you pick one that looks good to you and you run off back to the tribe of Benjamin.

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And they said, but if we do this, the dads and the brothers and the uncles and the tribe of those girls, they're going to hunt us down.

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They'll wipe us out the rest of the way. No, no, they said. The leaders of the 11 tribes say this.

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No, we won't let them. We'll tell them you're not allowed to pursue them and you ought to be happy because this is a win, win situation.

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All right. First win, Benjamin doesn't get wiped out. So all the promises about 12 tribes and stuff, that's still intact.

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Second win, you're not going to be put to death because you didn't volunteer your daughter to be married to a

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Benjamite. So we don't have to kill you and your wife and the rest of your daughters and sons and their wives and your grandkids.

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So this is just such a great cure. And of course, when we read this, we think, how can there be so many bad decisions made in a row?

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So many sinful misguided attempts to cure sin.

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And not just, it's one thing if you have one person making decisions, you know, and he's over, he's on an island and he's just making bad decision after bad decision after bad decision.

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These are bad decisions made in council. You know, I mean, so, so there, there seems to be more weight with those.

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These men thought through these things together and it's as though the more thought they put into it, the more crafty they became, the more wicked was the result.

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Yeah. And so like you point out, it's not just a bad egg. It is a systemic decline.

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And that's what judges has been showing us. That sin embraced again and again and again.

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There's this systemic decline to the point that even when the spiritual leaders get together and say, how are we going to fix this?

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I mean, we have Sodom like men in our own town, which is a problem.

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Our nation is in trouble. It's morally failing. That's true. What's your cure? And their cure is worse or as bad as the original problem.

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You know, the cure is as bad as the disease. And, and then, then they try again and again, you know, and so a systemic decline it's everywhere.

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And that brings us to the final verse of the entire book. And at the end of judges, it says that it explains all that you've just read and the, and the slide downward in spite of God's mercy with this statement, everyone did what was right in their own eyes because there was no king in the land.

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Now, in a sense, historically, it's preparing the reader of the Bible for the coming of God's chosen

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King David, who is a picture of course, of the coming King Christ. But we know from, from Gideon, there was a king in the land.

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He made it clear. Well, we don't have a physical King that we can see, but we have, we have a spiritual King. God is our

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King. And these people make these choices because it's what they think is right.

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Because they forget that there is a God who rules His people and His word has made

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His will clear, but ignoring the King, ignoring His rule,

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His word, they are religious and doing the best they can. And it's not like the

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Israelites that were coming out of Egypt who did not have the written word of God. They, they didn't, you know, they had spent so many hundreds of years with, with the

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Egyptian idols and, and Pharaoh and all of these things. These were people who were generations after the conquest.

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They were, you know, they had the law, they had the Torah, they had all of these things.

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And they, like you said, I think the word is, is wise. They chose to ignore who God is.

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So whether we're looking at Gideon and making a copy of something that God designed only for the high priest and it becomes an, an object of worship, or whether we're looking at Jephthah keeping a vow because he thinks, well, that's what

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God would want, even though it's, it's so costly. Or you're looking at the leaders who try to fix the nation's moral decline, which is true with, with ideas that are not rooted in God's character,

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God's commands, His, His principles. Wherever you look, you find men trying to do what they think is, well, this is good.

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It doesn't say everyone did what was wrong in their own eyes, you know, like, man, let's do the worst that we could do.

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Like the men of Gibeah, they did what was wrong in their eyes. You know, their conscience would have surely been against like, well, maybe we shouldn't have killed her.

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But when we're talking about the leaders, the leaders at least are, they're trying to do what's right in their eyes. But it's what religion looks like when it's divorced from the rule of Christ, the head of the church.

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And therefore it is divorced from the word of God. We may preach it and sing it and talk about it, but it does not rule us.

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What rules us is what we think would be best in this situation. And that leads to the horrific scenes that we see in Judges.

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And it is so easy for us, we've talked about this before, but it is so easy for us to look at these things in the book of Judges and to, to think, yeah, okay, they failed at that.

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They did that. They did what was right in their eyes that was truly wicked. But we've said this before, we're not different.

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We're not, you know, higher evolved or something like that. We, we can, and we see it in American evangelicalism.

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We see it throughout church history. People doing, they drift away from the word of God.

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They drift away from the reality of who God is and they begin to do what is right in their own eyes. You brought up earlier, the monastery and the cloister.

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I'm going to, I'm going to do all that I can because this must please God, even though God's not commanded it.

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But we see, you know, in our own culture, we see men who on the outside, it looks as though they have it all together and they have, you know, every bit of, of, of religion.

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They look nice. They speak nice. They are articulate. And yet they have idolatry in their lives as well.

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Yeah. And the Lord warns us, be sure, you know, don't be deceived. Be sure your sin will find you out.

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What a man sows, he reaps. And that's quite a terrifying thing. And the cross of Christ doesn't alter that.

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There is mercy and there is forgiveness of sin. And there is forgiveness of the greatest of sins.

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But, you know, so we have a man like David is forgiven or a man that hunted Christians, Saul of Tarsus is forgiven.

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But that does not mean that there will be no crop if we choose to do what we think is best and we ignore the word of our

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King. So it doesn't mean that God's great merciful plans get overturned and, you know, and, and the conquest of this universe by Christ when that doesn't happen, you know.

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But it means that though God may use our bad choices, there will be consequences of bad choices like there were in the lives of the leaders we mentioned.

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But think about how tempted we are today to do the same thing. Look at our nation.

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There is an open moral decline. It's not a secret thing.

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It's, it's not, it's not isolated. It's systemic. It's across the culture, religious or irreligious.

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And also from bottom to top, from the individual, family, churches to the nation at large. Yeah. So you don't have to be in Hollywood or in Washington and a person of extreme influence.

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You don't have to be, you know, an unbeliever. You could be a common, normal church member.

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You could even be a Christian. But because of a carelessness, I don't see a

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King. So I think that there is no King.

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And since the King is not here physically and I'm not aware of Him, perhaps the best thing

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I could do as a Christian is, well, I'll just do what I think is probably the best, you know, I'll do what I think is best in this situation.

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And I'm not talking about those that care nothing for God or those that show up at church just because, you know, your wife makes you or your, you know, or your parents make you, but someone who does want to follow

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Christ, but because of a carelessness with His Word has allowed the culture's view of God to shape your view of God.

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And you have forgotten that the church has a governing head, a

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King, that He is Lord and Savior. And then you try to fix things the best way you know how, apart from Christ and His Word, and it ends up producing such terrible results.

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So how do we fix our nation? And we have plenty of people, whether it's in books, radio, you know, or online, we have plenty of people who are very conservative and very concerned about the moral decline of our country, which we should be, whose cure is not from the

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Lord. It sounds like it'll work. It sounds like, you know what, that sounds like it might work.

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Let's give it a try. But it doesn't come from God. It doesn't represent God's character.

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So you find this braggadocious, arrogant, in -your -face, fight -fire -with -fire attitude.

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If the world is, you know, in -your -face, aggressive, anti -Christian, then we will be in -their -face, aggressive, anti -unbeliever.

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And instead of conquering the world with the gospel, prayer, truth, and lives that lend weight to those things, and God using all of that to crush

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His enemies with love so often, and make His enemies to be His friends.

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But if we don't do that, and we follow basically an American way of handling problems under the banner of Jesus, then we will,

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I think we will find that our cure is just as bad as the disease. It's often in the pursuit of a masculine

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Jesus. We miss the Jesus of the Bible. Yeah, who is the most masculine man ever without any of the toxicity.

50:19

Right. So one thing that, before we close up, John, we brought up early in the episode, particularly with Gideon and Jephthah, that these were earnest men who did what they thought was right.

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And like you just said, you know, we're earnest. We see the problems of culture. We see so many open sins that are not just allowed, but they're celebrated.

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I mean, we see a culture that bends the knee and bows at the of self constantly.

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And there are earnest believers who want to see that.

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How do we guard against, like we were just talking about, against that, that everything in the world that tells us this is what's going to work.

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How do we guard against that? Give us some steps. What is it that we do day to day in the normal Christian life?

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And one of the things that I've, even in our conversation and before we hit record, we were talking about this.

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One of the things that struck me was it is a faith in the Lord. We do the quiet things that the

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Lord has commanded and trust Him with the results. We don't look to the ballot box. We need to vote, but we don't look to the ballot box for the solutions.

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We don't look for solutions in anything other than the conquest of Christ. But how do we remind ourselves of that day in and day out?

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Yeah. So, how to be salt and light in our culture?

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There are so many things we could say. But your question, how do we approach that question in a way that will honor the

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Lord and not be like those in judges who just did what was right in their own eyes?

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I want to be salt and light. How do you do that? Well, I don't know. I think in this situation, maybe this would be the best way.

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And as if there's no king higher than me, there's no authority higher than what

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I think would probably work. And so then we end up in the same way.

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So I think, how do you guard against that? I would say in this situation, as in so very many situations for the

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Christian, a good offense is the best defense. And a good offense would be that to cultivate a significant pattern in your life of time alone with the

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God of the Bible in the Bible. You cannot avoid idolatry if you do not constantly refresh your view of the

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God of the Bible and not just your favorite passages that you go back to, your favorite Psalms or your favorite statements, you know, in some encouraging statement from the

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New Testament. You go the whole of Scripture, walk over all of it with this question,

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God, who are you? Because if that can grip a person, the fear of the

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Lord is what we would call that. To be held in the grip of His immensity, His worth,

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His rights, His rightness, His beauty, then it holds a person on the course of obedience.

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Even when, whether nationally or in your own home or in your church, there are things that are going wrong and you think,

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I got to fix this. How do you keep from trying to fix it your way and creating a worse problem?

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Well, you must be convinced that God really is and that He is as good as He says He is and capable as He says

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He is. And there is no need to do what the leaders did in the days of judges, to do what's right in your own eyes.

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There is a King and this is His church, His nation. Every person on the planet belongs to Him.

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And so, He will guide us by His word. Cultivating a constant contact with this

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God of the Bible, I think, is the root. But let me say another positive thing, another offense matter.

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Apply it in your own life first, in your marriage, in your home, you know, at college.

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Apply it here. We cannot hold to principles in the bigger scene if we won't apply them individually.

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I mean, we can be a hypocrite and divide ourselves in half. You know, this is the me. I think this is the me

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I am, the godly religious talking person. But then when everybody's in bed and nobody's watching what

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I do or say or see or think, well, that's not the real me.

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That's the me the devil got a hold of for a second. And you live this double life. And instead of repenting, you're okay with it.

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But if you will not apply the Scripture to yourself first, when there are real problems in your marriage or with your teenage kids or with your church or nation, you will drop all of your boasting in Christ eventually.

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And you will revert to what you really believe in. And that is, you are probably the one that knows best how to fix things because that's how you've been living as an individual.

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One good defense is to quit listening to those who, in talking about problems that we agree are problems, these are real problems.

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And they say they're speaking as a Christian. And we say, but we're Christians too. But then when you hear them speak, it does not represent the holiness, the humility, the moral courage, the boldness mixed with a shocking undeserved compassion.

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Boldness, courage, clothed with compassion, bringing truth to people, trusting

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God so you don't have to step outside the pattern of Christ to fix things. If people aren't giving you that flavor, don't listen to them.

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I remember when I was first converted and I was reading old books. So I was starting to kind of read guys like I read

56:50

Spurgeon, then I read people Spurgeon read. So I read this guy named Whitfield, and then I read the guys Whitfield read. So I read some

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Puritans. So I was moving that way in my thinking. I would look at the Bible and say,

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I feel that what they say is most clearly what the Bible says, that they are closest to Scripture.

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Then I started reading a thing called Credenda Agenda, and it was a magazine put out by Doug Wilson.

57:16

And he was certainly Reformed and his brain was sharp and his tongue was sharper. And I was impressed at first.

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I thought, wow, he showed those Armenians. And then I noticed, but the way he showed it, the way he exposed them, the way he mocked them in print, it wasn't the way that Paul dealt with Jews.

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It wasn't the way that Christ deals with me, this arrogant way.

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And from that moment, I felt that I had to make a decision. Here's a man that I might agree with a lot on paper, but how he tries to fix the problems, it doesn't match

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Christ. So if I follow this, then I'm choosing to walk away from the pattern of Christ.

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And so I quit. And ever since, in spite of his growing popularity and his continuing kind of braggadocious approach,

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I have never regretted not following someone who had a lot of good things to say and said it in a way that's hard to refute.

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But the whole ethos, the whole flavor of it was as far as I can see scripturally from the aroma of Christ as you can be.

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And it's not a safe guide. So a good defense would be to turn off or to turn away from influences that may have a lot of truth, but they have brought in a lot of the world too.

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And it is a dangerous mix. Well, next week, again, we're going to have a special episode where we're going to present to you what is an in -depth study through the book of Judges, seven sessions.

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As with all of our material, the video is only one workbook. So make sure you check the link in the description below where we'll try to get you a preview, or we will get you a preview of the workbook as well.

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So look forward to that and we'll see you next week. Judges is a unique book for us to study.

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I think Judges is also one of the most significant books for the modern evangelical church.

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When we come to the book of Judges, we admit that it sounds strange to our ears. Sometimes there are a lot of events there that confuse us.

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There are other events that morally alarm us. So we want to come at this book in a way that guarantees that by the grace of God, we really will learn the things that God means for us to learn.

01:00:04

And our lives will be responsive to God in a way that they ought to be. So that having studied the book of Judges, we come out of this study more like Christ, a clearer picture of our