A New Study! Living with the True God: Lessons from Judges

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. The last few weeks, we have taken some time to present to you materials that we've produced outside of the podcast network. And up to this point, we've only presented to you previously published material.

However, this week, we are pleased to present to you the first session of our brand new study, Living with the True God, Lessons from Judges. This is a seven-session walk through the book of Judges with Dr. John Snyder, where he examines many of the important realities found in this strange book and how they have very real implications and applications to our modern-day lives, families, and churches.

Living with the True God, Lessons from Judges is available for digital access right now by clicking the link in the description of this episode. We will have physical DVDs and workbooks available in the coming weeks.

We pray this first session is a blessing to you, and we believe the study as a whole will be as well. We'll see you again next week for a normal episode of the Whole Council Podcast.

Why Judges Matters for the Modern Church

Judges is a unique book for us to study. I think Judges is also one of the most significant books for the modern evangelical church. 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. There are other events that morally alarm us. And studying the book raises certain questions for the true believer. That means how you approach this book is of great significance.

If we come at it from a wrong angle, we may come away with the wrong message. 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.

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 God than when we entered it.

Judges and the Danger of Doing What Is Right in Our Own Eyes

Today, as an introduction, we're really only going to be able to do two things. First, I want to mention an overarching statement that we find in this book. It shows up twice. And this statement really explains the whole book from a human perspective.

And then we're going to be getting help from a man named Joshua, eavesdropping on his farewell messages to Israel, which in chapter 23 and 24 of Joshua, they form kind of a bridge from the life of Joshua to the days of the judges.

Well, let's look at the overarching statement. In Judges 17 verse 6 and 21 verse 25, we read these revealing words. In those days, there was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes.

Now, I hope you notice that there are two fundamental sins described there, two big problems in Israel. First, the book of Judges is full of bitter examples of what it looks like when religious people try to do their best living their lives the way they think they ought to be lived.

And second, that kind of life is only possible because the religious people forget that there is a king in the land. Obviously, there was a king in the land during the time of judges. It was God. But because there was no physical earthly king, the people mistakenly felt that they were free to live life the best they knew how.

As we study the book of Judges, we're going to see that kind of self-ruling lifestyle play out in some of the more horrific sinful choices in this book. But I want you to notice as we study that that lifestyle also is viewed in the way that those that want to fix the problem of sin, they go about trying to fix it by doing what they think would be best.

I think this is particularly important for the modern evangelical because while we would defend the infallibility of Scripture, I'm not sure that we are as convinced of the sufficiency of Scripture. Is the Bible really all we need to answer life's questions?

One result is that while we defend its infallibility, we may be largely ignorant of portions of the Bible. We have general ideas in our mind. We know kind of what Jude talks about or we know kind of what Habakkuk or Nehemiah might be saying.

But to be careful with the specificity of the Bible, to be careful to take seriously all the words of the king, well, that's something that we're not so good at. And in our ignorance, sometimes we come to the world and we offer the world, the culture around us, a cure for its sin problem.

And our cure really is no better than what the people of Judges did. We tell them what we think would be best to do. We talk to our children as they're grown and they face grown-up problems. You know, we look in the mirror and we try to deal with our own struggles.

We offer the church our advice. And if we're not careful, we can be good, well-meaning people who live as if there's no king in the land. And it's demonstrated by the fact that, well, we offer people advice based on what we think would be right.

Joshua's Farewell Speeches and the Ordinary Days of Faith

Now, I want us to eavesdrop on Joshua's farewell speeches. Actually, there are two of them. And they show up in Joshua 23 and 24. And we're only going to hit the highlights right now. In fact, I only want to read chapter 23 to you.

But even before we read the chapter, there are two initial matters regarding the timing of these messages. These are significant. The first is, this is the farewell speech of Joshua, chapter 23, and again in chapter 24.

And farewell speeches, those are important to us. The final words, you know, the final words of a loved one, the final words of a spiritual leader. We're used to this in the Bible. John chapter 13, 14, 15, and 16 comprise, these chapters comprise Christ's final messages to his disciples before he goes to the cross.

The book of Deuteronomy really is just a collection of three very thorough sermons from Moses. It's his farewell sermons to the people before he hands them off to Joshua and they enter the promised land.

In chapter 23 and 24 of Joshua, Joshua is now 110 years old and he is about to die and he's passing the torch. And so the things that he says are significant. But another thing about the timing is that these are words that are spoken to people at a time where there are new temptations they're facing, but it's easy not to notice them.

So these words are custom designed for people who have become comfortable in their religion, who have become satisfied. And the enemy will use that as an open door if they're not careful. Just compare Joshua 23 and 24 with Deuteronomy.

In Deuteronomy, those three long sermons are preached and imagine that you're listening there with your family and if you're a man in the family, Moses finishes the final talk and basically Moses is going to be taken by God up onto a mountain where he can see the promised land and then he's going to die.

He's not going to go with you. Joshua is going to lead you. At the end of the third sermon, you say to your wife and children, go back to the tent and you go get your armor and you enlist in the army.

And what follows then is month after month, year after year of life and death crisis moments and conflict and war and how significant every hour must have felt. They were living out what God had promised four centuries earlier to Abraham.

This was God fulfilling his promises. Every day was significant. Now compare that to Joshua. Short, two short talks, just really reminders. Chapter 23, 24, you're there with your wife and children, but you're not living in a tent now.

You're living in a home that you've been in for 25 years on a farm that you didn't plant olive groves and vineyards and cities that you didn't build. And you've become happy living in these blessings that come from belonging to God and him being faithful.

And you hear Joshua and he gives his final speeches. And instead of going to war, you just go home. You feed the kids, put them in bed. You and your wife go to sleep and you wake up tomorrow morning and go to work.

And everything is so ordinary. And it is easy to forget the extraordinary spiritual significance of ordinary days. So again, I think for a Christian, there's a big lesson for us here. It's been 31 years since God saved me, but I can look back at age 20 and I can remember those days where every day was like a crisis, you know, God stripping away from me all my false hope and every excuse just knocked down.

God chasing me from one hiding place to the next until he cornered me. And when I felt that he had come to destroy me, instead he shows me, he opens my eyes to the cross and you realize it's the love of God that's pursued you.

And you just throw it all at his feet and you say to him, you can have everything that I know of me. And with both hands, you grab hold of Christ and you say, and I take everything I understand of you.

And that's just the beginning. And then everything's changed. You're alive from the dead. You're a new creation. You've moved from a realm of condemnation and darkness and death to what Paul calls in Romans 5, a realm of grace, where you live dominated by the unexpected and undeserved friendship of King Jesus.

In those early days, everything is significant. It's like every promise in the gospel. For the first time in your life, you're seeing it be fulfilled. You're tasting of the kindness of God. But that was 31 years ago for me.

I don't know how long ago it was for you, but it hasn't been long enough that you've become accustomed to living in the realm of grace and you've become comfortable. The problem with Israel was that she was still on a battlefield, even though by and large, the nations around her were conquered and they moved into the land.

For 25 years, they've been possessing the land that God promised, but they were still living in a war zone. The battlefield shifted from acres of property and territories to the hearts and to the thoughts of God's people.

Judges is a sad picture of how the enemy conquered the hearts, seduced the hearts of God's people after they conquered the land. Well, with these things in mind, the significance of the timing for them and for us, let me pull out just a few key themes from chapter 23 and 24.

Joshua writes in chapter 23,. Now it came about after many days when the Lord had given rest to Israel from all their enemies on every side. And Joshua was old, advanced in years, that Joshua called for all Israel for their elders and their heads and their judges and their officers and said to them, I am old, advanced in years, and you have seen all that the Lord your God has done to all these nations because of you.

For the Lord your God is he who has been fighting for you. See, I have apportioned to you these nations, which remain as an inheritance for your tribes, with all the nations which I have cut off from the Jordan, even to the great sea toward the setting of the sun.

The Lord your God, he will thrust them out from before you and drive them from before you, and you will possess their land just as the Lord your God promised you. Be very firm then to keep and do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses so that you may not turn aside from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you will not associate with these nations, these which remain among you, or mention the name of their gods, or make anyone swear by them, or serve them, or bow down to them.

But you are to cling to the Lord your God as you have done to this day. For the Lord has driven out great and strong nations from before you, and as for you, no man has stood before you to this day. One of your men puts to flight a thousand, for the Lord your God is he who fights for you, just as he promised you.

So take diligent heed to yourselves to love the Lord your God, for if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know with certainty that the Lord your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you, but they will be a snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the Lord your God has given you.

Now behold, today I am going the way of all the earth, and you know in all your hearts and in all your souls that not one word of all the good words which the Lord your God spoke concerning you has failed.

All have been fulfilled for you. Not one of them has failed. It shall come about that just as all the good words which the Lord your God spoke to you have come upon you, so the Lord will bring upon you all the threats until He has destroyed you from off this good land which the Lord your God has given you.

When you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God which He commanded you, and go and serve other gods, and bow down to them, then the anger of the Lord will burn against you, and you will perish quickly from off the good land which He has given you.

Remembering God's Holiness, Jealousy, and Faithfulness

Well, that's the first of the messages, and we'll just use that, and we'll be pulling a little from chapter 24, but let's think of some of the key elements here. First, if Israel is going to live with the living God in the promised land, they must remind themselves who they belong to.

Who He is changes how they think. Who He is changes how they live, and Joshua in this chapter and the next just mentions two things. First, he says God is holy, and second, He is jealous. They're about to continue living in a land where they will be surrounded all around by people whose lives have been polluted by idolatry, and the culture around them treats sin as a small matter, and Joshua warns them that the God that they belong to cannot treat sin as a small matter, and if they embrace and befriend the sins of their culture, then they will lose the friendship of their God.

God hates sin. Sin is all that God hates. All the hatred of God is toward one object, and they must not befriend that. Next, he says that their God is jealous. That is, there is a white-hot intensity to the love that God has for His people, and that means He will not share them with any other.

Now, in chapter 24, Joshua says to them that he and his family are going to serve the Lord, and they will have to choose who they're going to serve as they go back to their homes, and immediately the entire nation says, we will serve the Lord as well, and Joshua says to them, no, you won't be able to do this because God is holy and jealous, and the people affirm and say, no, but we will serve the Lord, and in Joshua 24, verse 21, we read this passage.

Joshua said to the people, you are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen for yourselves the Lord to serve Him, and they said, we are witnesses. Now, therefore, put away the foreign gods which are in your midst, and incline your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.

That's a shocking passage. Forty years they've been out of Egypt. Twenty-five more years they've been in the Promised Land. Sixty-five years since Egyptian life, and they still have idols in their homes.

They're standing there with Joshua saying, we will serve the Lord, and when he warns them that God is jealous, they say, we will still serve the Lord, and Joshua has to point out to them that if they're going to put their money where their mouth is, they're going to have to go home and immediately remove the idols that they've kept in their homes all these years.

How important for every Christian. Remind yourself of the God that you belong to, of the perfections of His character. He is still holy. He is still jealous. He still doesn't share, and we cannot befriend our culture and have the friendship of God at the same time.

We don't enjoy the nearness of God while we cling to our favorite sin. You remember what James 4 says. James writes to the church that friendship with the world is enmity with God, and he calls them to repent and return to God and promises them that God will return to them.

Obviously, there's been a distance that's developed. We may think that because of the cross of Christ and the fullness of the new covenant promises and all of this grace upon grace that somehow God has been altered by that, that maybe He isn't as jealous as He used to be or as holy.

Maybe He's become more reasonable and easier to live with, but that is not true at all. The cross demonstrates that God is just as holy as He was in the Old Testament and just as jealous. The second thing Israel will have to remember if they're going to live with the living God in the promised land is they have to remember His activity.

So in chapter 23, Joshua says, you are eyewitnesses. You remember seeing the extraordinary intervention of a living God miraculously delivering our enemies into our hands. Don't forget it. And then he says, remember what God will yet do.

He will still drive them out. He will still be your God, and you will still be His people. In fact, chapter 24, the first part of it is kind of a history lesson. God chose Abram. God initiated a covenant with him.

He kept His covenant. God gave him a son. God gave His son children. God multiplied the family. God rescued them from Egypt after 400 years. He led them for 40 years in the wilderness, never abandoning them, never leaving them.

He fought for them as they took the promised land so that one Israelite soldier could put 1 ,000 enemy soldiers to flight, and ultimately God gave them rest. Christian, take a moment each day before your feet hit the floor as you're getting out of bed.

The alarm clock goes off. You've got to put your feet on the floor. Remember who you belong to. Remember what He's done. Just take one thing. You have so much more than Israel ever had. God chose you while you were His enemy.

God set His affections upon you before the foundation of the world. God laid His hand on the shoulder of His Son and appointed Him to be our champion. Christ came and accomplished all the Father planned for our rescue.

And then the Father and the Son sent the Spirit to apply to our souls all that the Father planned and all that the Son purchased. He opened our eyes. He gave us life within. There's a new dawn in our soul, a new creation.

We were brought to Him, united to Christ, and in Christ we are justified and adopted and sanctified. And He sustained us. But don't just remember what He did. Think about what's yet to come. And let that allure you on.

Let that distract you from every idolatrous distraction the culture offers. Romans 8, all of creation, Paul says, all of creation is groaning under the weight of humanity's sin, yearning. And the words there in the Greek, it's like creation is on tiptoe, leaning forward to see the coming of the Creator who will put all things right.

And the Christian also yearning, thinking of what's yet to come. Christ will be exalted over all creation. All of His enemies will see Him. He will judge the ungodly. He will put sin right. He will complete what He started in me and in every other Christian.

And coming together, we will be clothed with His moral perfection. And then there will be a new creation. And there will be no churches there because God Himself will dwell with us. Remembering these things is a great defense against drifting.

Firm Obedience, Holy Fear, and Clinging to the Lord

Third, Israel has to remember what was required of them. This is not legalism. They're not keeping God's love. But even in that old covenant, it's because of who God is and what He's done and what He will yet do that there are obligations.

I mean, you can think of it this way. If we take seriously what we've already looked at today, what kind of a life would be in harmony with those facts? Well, just a few things here. Joshua says in verse 6 of 23 to be firm in their obedience.

That is, to be courageous, to resolutely determine a course of allegiance to one master, one king, one voice that you will follow. And let nothing turn you to the left or to the right. Second, Joshua says, fear the Lord so that you will be able to serve Him with a sincere heart in chapter 24 and verse 13.

Fear is not that terrified, cringing child who belongs to an abusive parent. It's what happens when we step back and we become self-forgetful and we step away from all the minutia of life on planet earth and human history and the ups and downs of my own existence and I look and see only God.

And there He is in all of His immensity and His majesty, unapproachable glory. And then I see Him turn toward me and the flood of goodness that comes and that bigness and that kindness combine and I am held captive by someone infinitely more significant than myself.

And in comparison to Him, everything else becomes weightless. Third, Joshua says, cling to Him with love. Chapter 23, verse 8, again in verse 11. We know what that means. It's the word that the book of Genesis uses when it describes how a husband and wife will come together.

A boy and a girl fall in love and they're engaged and the time comes for the wedding and the boy leaves his family and she leaves her family and they cling to each other forever. We could say it in modern vernacular.

Israel, if you're going to live with a living God in a land that He's provided for you and you're not going to drift into idolatry, you're going to have to be spiritually clingy. When you're not near Him, you long for Him.

You think of Him. You plan for ways to be with Him. When He draws near to you, you're slow to let Him go, so to speak. Quick to come to the scripture. Slow to leave it. Anticipating Sundays. Anticipating special seasons of prayer.

The night watches that the psalmist talks about. Do you know what that is? For every believer living in a realm of grace, the only way to keep from drifting and the only way to keep enjoying the sweet fullness of the new covenant privileges that Christ has purchased for us is that we too, remembering who we belong to and what He's done and what He's going to do, we firmly set our determination to have an allegiance for one King.

To be filled with a reverential awe as we see His majesty and goodness and to cling to Him in love so that we become like Count von Zinzendorf. Zinzendorf was a nobleman, wealthy, but he's best known in the 18th century for leading a group called the Moravians.

Zinzendorf said this, I have one passion. It is He. What a wonderful goal for us to plead with the Lord that He would give us that kind of a statement, that that would be able to be written over every area of our life as we move through Judges.

I want to have one passion, one love. I want to be clingy. And my passion is Christ. Will you plead with the Lord that as you start to study of Judges this week that God would do everything needed to open your eyes to these realities so that you would take carefully what He says and you wouldn't carelessly drift in a time of the Christian life when it's easy to forget how extraordinary the ordinary days really are.

Well, may God help all of us.