Judges 2:6-13 | "The ABCs of Apostasy"

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning.

Always a privilege to fill the pulpit for my pastor who's away.

I think he's somewhere in Kansas or somewhere.

I don't know, but he's helping his mother-in-law move.

So he's doing a good deed this morning.

If you open your Bibles to Judges chapter 2, we're going to take a bit of an introductory tour into the book of Judges.

Judges 2 · chapter mention

But very interesting this week I was reading on this thing called scurvy, just a horrible disease to have.

And they say during the age of exploration, over a period of about 300 years, it is estimated that two million sailors died because of scurvy.

And for the longest time they believed scurvy was something, the presence of something bad rather than the absence of something good.

However, it was not until 1747 when this bright English gentleman named James Lind made the discovery that scurvy is not the presence of something bad, but the absence of something good, and that is vitamin C.

Wow, you guys are clued up on history.

And so sailors from that point on would be given a daily dose of lemon juice to supplement the loss of vitamin C.

And when it comes to the book of Judges, there are some lessons about the absence of something good.

This is the story of Judges, where we see a new generation arising.

You see, when the people of Joshua were surrounded with the perils of the wilderness, they displayed moral heroism and godly resolve, but that melted beneath the sun of peaceful prosperity.

It would not be long before worldliness would be a great inducement into religious pluralism.

If you open your Bibles and read with me Joshua chapter two, and we will read there verses six to ten.

Verse 7.

The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who survived Joshua, who had seen all the great work of the Lord, which he had done for Israel.

Now look here, very interesting the author wants us to focus on verse eight.

Then Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of one hundred and ten.

Verse ten.

All the generation also all that generation also were gathered to their fathers, and there arose another generation after them, who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which he had done for Israel.

What we see here is a new kind of generation rising up.

And this generation is a godless generation.

But before we dig in too deep, I want us to think about a few things here.

Firstly, this passage is not teaching about parenting.

I've heard many great sermons preached from this passage about parenting, and here's nothing to be said of parenting.

Secondly, here is no blame given to the former generation.

I've heard many sermons where somebody said, Well, this is the former generation's problem.

They caused all this.

No, simply what the author is saying here to us is the state of affairs.

The point being, here is an absence of something.

Verse 10.

The main point is in verse 10.

Then there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord, nor the work that He has done for Israel.

The author's point here is simply to say here is another kind of people.

This generation's epitaph read.

And they gradually descended into religious pluralism.

After the death of Joshua and the passing of his generation, there was an absence of biblical leadership.

There was a breakdown in the moral absolutes of God's law.

And there was ultimately no godly resolve to resist worldliness.

And hence, this morning, my message is titled, The ABCs of apostases.

I believe this passage is very relevant for our own time.

And I think we need to be very introspective here this morning.

And we need to look at the cascade of compromise that gave rise to this generation of degenerates.

But I certainly don't want an eerie cloud hanging over us here this morning because the problem and the solution is as simple as the ABCs.

And so let me outline for you what we're going to cover here this morning, and verses 7 to 10 will show us here that there was an absence of godly leadership.

There was a breakdown of an experiential and personal faith in God and C the comfortableness with the world.

There was certainly a comfortableness with worldly ideologies.

As I look at verses seven and ten, you can see the intent of the author here is to compare and contrast two generations here.

One who served the Lord wholeheartedly, and another generation which Jesus would call a wicked and perverse generation.

Now I think this morning, too, we gotta be careful of looking at the young people around us, the kids, and say, pastor is talking about you, okay?

Don't do that.

And you know, it's revealing of how old you are when you say things like, you know, these young kids, you know, these they they know nothing, you know.

Don't go there.

Don't go there.

Rather, let's take a moment and look at ourselves.

And maybe we will see ourselves being part of the problem.

And if we can see ourselves as part of the problem, we can see ourselves as part of the solution.

Why are you walking around, Webb?

Am I doing something wrong?

Okay.

These young kids, you know.

He, when I got you, he said to me, How old are you?

I said, old enough to give you a spanking.

Talking about leadership, godly leadership.

A is for the absence of godly leadership.

And that is very clear here in verse 7.

As we look at verse 7, the author points to us to that great leader, Joshua, who served the Lord wholeheartedly.

His leadership spent 30, 40 years, and he impacted even generations after him.

He was a man of godly resolve.

Things went well as long as Joshua was at the helm of things.

But then, verse eight, Joshua dies, and things begun to unravel.

Then there arose a generation known for its opinions about moral absolutes.

They were a generation of moral relativism.

They were of ungodly resolve, and they eventually declined and spiraled down into paganism, as verses 10 and 13 will explain to us later.

And the rest of the book of Judges speaks of that downward spiral into apostasy.

I think the author is very clear and highlighting the great and impeccable leadership of Joshua and his influence, in a sense, permeated the next generation and the generations to come.

But at some point, as the people were settling down, as verse 6 describes to us, in the land of milk and honey, after the death of Joshua, there was a void.

A void in leadership that would set off a cascade of compromise.

Perhaps the author wants to give us a warning here that generations arise and fall based on their leadership.

Likewise, I think churches too have shown that churches rise, stand, and decline dependent on the caliber of its leadership.

Joshua was a leader of conviction.

He is seen as a man of moral absolutes.

He was a man convicted and guided by the moral absolutes of God's word.

He was a man of godly resolve.

He served the Lord wholeheartedly, and he was also a man of intolerance, meaning to say he would only serve God.

Joshua 24, 15, we all know the familiar words of Joshua.

As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

You get it.

Joshua's commitment to the moral absolutes of God's law and his godly resolve to serve the Lord exclusively had a sanctifying influence in the lives of his contemporaries and even the generations after him.

Verse 7 highlights that.

Joshua 24, 16.

After he addresses the people, they respond and he asks them for an answer.

He's like, I need an answer from you guys.

And they say, Far be from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods.

You see, as Joshua underscored the centrality and the primacy of God's word, and he declared God's word as truth, firm and settled, the people had only room for one response.

We will serve the Lord our God and we will obey his voice.

Joshua 24, 24.

And Joshua even held his people accountable for the word that he taught them.

He said to them in Joshua 24, 27, Behold, the stone shall be for a witness against us, for it has heard the word of the Lord which he has spoken to us.

Thus it shall be a witness against you.

So there was some stone, some rock, and he said, This is a witness against you.

You have no excuse.

You cannot claim ignorance.

Joshua was a man of careful exegesis and bold proclamation of the Torah.

But he also, as I said, held his contemporaries accountable for precise, accurate, and careful obedience.

And of course, the bold application of God's word was in the order of the day.

Joshua was a man of doctrinal precision, sound biblical theology, and his contemporaries understood nothing less.

However, verse ten, then there arose another generation.

Another generation that would speak scornfully of Joshua's theological precision.

They will mock his godly resolve.

This generation that arose would be critical of exegetical precision.

They will mock systematic teaching of God's word.

And in the wake of this man's death, it was a real absence of godly leadership.

In its place arose a generation of people who did not have the moral backbone to support and sustain their nation's faith in God.

Meet the Did not.

Do you know who the Did not are?

This is Gendee, the Did not generation.

Look at verse ten.

Then there arose another generation after them who did not.

If you go through the book of Judges, all the way up to Judges chapter eight, you constantly hear this repetitious phrase, and they did not.

They did not.

They did not.

So I thought, these are the did not.

Gendee.

They did not.

What is the author saying here in verse 10 about this very peculiar generation?

Is it that they did not know who the Lord was because they were never taught who God is?

Is this generation a generation who had no memory of the great work of the Lord because they were never told about it?

We might be knee-jerking it here to blame it on Joshua and his contemporaries for the loss of a generation.

It must be their fault.

Perhaps we would say, well, you see, Joshua's generation was, they were old school.

They were sociologically rigid.

They were narrow-minded.

That could have alienated these young folk.

Oh no, it's because Joshua's generation forced the Bible down their throats.

I hear that so often.

Some people would sit in my office and say, Yeah, I don't have any desire to be a Christian because my parents forced the Bible down my throat.

And I would say, that's good for you.

I mean, you didn't want to have it, so they had to force it down your throat.

It's like vitamin C, right?

You will get scurvy, spiritual scurvy if we don't do it.

But who has to fit the bill for this national disaster?

We'll either speculate or we'll look to the text and make a careful analysis of things.

Look at verse 10.

It says, when that generation arose, what characterized that generation was that they did not know the Lord.

That word in Hebrew is very particularly nuanced.

It's the Greek Hebrew word yada.

Its Greek equivalent is ginosko.

And it speaks of a personal, experiential understanding of something.

It's not just like know about.

It is this personal, intimate, and experiential understanding of something.

And I got a lesson into that this past summer.

I learned about golf and I took an interest in golf.

I got this manual at some point.

It's a weekly subscription, and they sent you all stuff about golf.

And I would read that and check it out.

And then Tom Morad comes and he says, you know, people play a lot of golf around here.

Maybe you should uh take up golfing.

I'm like, yeah, I know a lot about golf.

You know, I read all those books and stuff, and and so he says, Well, before we uh go play a game of golf, how about you and I go to the driving range and I do everything I need to do?

I mean, you followed the rules.

Keep the shoulders parallel, uh, keep your head down, put in the hips.

Where did that go?

Still on the ground, same place.

I have to confess I have not graduated from the driving range, and I'm still unfamiliar with the golf course around here, but there's something to be said about knowing about something and actually understanding the game of golf.

There's something to be said about knowing about God and actually knowing God in a personal, experiential, and practical way.

Verse 10 says, This generation did not know God in a personal, practical, and experiential way.

This generation did not.

No, not because they were not because they were ignorant or perhaps of a lack of memory.

No, they were without excuse.

What is very evident here is that they refused to know God in a personal, relational and experiential way.

They were fine to know about God, but they were not okay to know God in a personal, relational and experiential way.

Perhaps bit of stated here by the commentator Dale Ralph Davies, he said they did not acknowledge Yahweh, nor his works.

It didn't matter to them and it had no influence over them.

Here's maybe a moment for us to pause and say, are we just going to be a people here that is fine with just knowing about God?

Or are we going to be known as a generation that has known God in a personal, intimate, and a practical way?

And what we know about God, would that have an influence over us?

It speaks there that this generation had no memory of the great works of the Lord, which he had done for Israel.

It is not that they did not know about it, it's just that they did not care to know about it.

History was boring.

God's history was like grass growing.

And this is what Ralph Davies says, which I think is a wonderful reminder to us all.

He says, this is a perennial peril in the church.

One generation can rejoice in a living faith, enjoy intimate communion with God, revel in the kingship of Jesus over daily life, even delight to teach their faith to the closest of them.

Yet the next generation may come along and cure nothing for all that.

Not that they will formally repudiate everything, it's just that they will know about the Lord rather than know the Lord.

I think that is well phrased.

Generation D did not care to know God in a personal, relational, and experiential way.

And therefore there was a real absence in an experiential faith.

There was a breakdown.

If we read here in Judges 2, 12, it says there, and they forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt, and they followed other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed themselves down to them.

This they provoked the Lord to anger.

You see, what happened with Generation D is that they found the great works of the Lord in the past not appealing, sensible, or practical.

Instead, they found paganism, Canaanite paganism, more appealing, more sensible, and more practical.

And I'll explain to you how we got there.

Look carefully at verse 12.

There's real comfortableness with the people around them.

It says that firstly they forsook the Lord, and then later on in verse 12, it says they followed other gods.

And that is bad enough.

That's very disturbing.

But you know what is equally disturbing?

Are two words there, among and around.

Among and around.

Why are those bad words?

They were not supposed to be among them and around them.

You see, firstly, we have this absence of godly leadership, and then B, a breakdown in a personal, experiential faith.

But C, we have this comfortableness with the world around them.

You see, the paganism around them and the idols among them shows that Israel grew very comfortable with pluralism, relativism, and religious tolerance.

Why were the Canaanites all around them in the first place?

How is it that these pagan idols were all around them?

Well, the answer is to be found in Judges 1.28.

Turn back there to verse 28 in the first chapter.

And there you'll get a glimpse of the folly.

It says, It came about when Israel became strong that they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but they did not what?

Drive them out completely.

My translation says completely.

You see, what happened here was that Israel started becoming comfortable with things around them.

And you see in Canaan, every man, woman, and child did what appeared right in their own eyes.

And it's no wonder that that would have had a hypnotic and a magnetic effect on generation D.

And hence Generation D was known as a generation who did what appeared right in their own eyes.

And so these Canaanites are among them.

They are employed by them, they are put to work.

No, no, no.

God told them to drive them out.

And I can just imagine the conflicts.

I can just imagine.

Johnny coming to his mom, Johnny from Judah.

And he says, Mom, why can't I get a new iPhone?

Because Casper the Canaanite has fact book and ideogram on his phone.

Not that they had phones, but they had clay tablets.

It's true.

Look it up.

Touch screen.

Look at the compromise here.

There's no accident that the pagans are in close proximity, intimate proximity.

And that fostered a comfortableness with the paganism around them.

You see, Canaanite, what do you expect when in a Canaanite household there is no biblical leadership, no authoritative teaching of the Word of God, everyone in the household just do what they think is right in their own eyes, and now you tell little Johnny, no, you cannot have fact book and idiot gram on your tablet.

And this is not a war on big tech.

But in any case, I wonder at which point paganism started looking more sensible and a smarter alternative than this very rigid moral absolutes found in the Word of God, the Torah.

The godly resolve to worship Yahweh wholeheartedly, experientially, and exclusively must have become such a heavy burden to the people who looked across the street and saw the Canaanites just do whatever pleases them.

I wonder how appealing the practicality and the pragmatism of Canaanite paganism would have been.

You have little Johnny go in and say, you know, mom, dad, you know, you guys are so old school.

Caspar the Canaanite, things are really simple there.

You see, their crops fell.

So Dad ran over to the temple of the fertility gods.

He burned some incense there, he sacrificed my little baby brother, and voila, things are solved.

Really simple.

Practical, quick, and easy fix.

You see, incidentally, here is the great divide between paganism and biblical Christianity.

In paganism, the gods must be coerced rather than trusted.

Joshua 1610 explains something about a generation who did not trust God.

It repeats that folly, they did not drive the Canaanites out of Gizer.

So the people of Gizer live as slaves among the people of Ephraim to this day.

Nothing changed.

It became a way of life, it became the new normal.

Generation D may be no different than us.

Perhaps we have been ramping up things, preparing us for this downward spiral into full-on religious apostasy.

How many of us here would sit here today and say, we don't formally repudiate everything we are taught here on a weekly basis?

But are we okay just to know about God and we don't care to know God in a personal, experiential, and practical way?

Have we grown comfortable with importing the exports of the world?

Paul speaks in Colossians 1 28 about embracing the philosophies of the world.

Be sure that you are not taken captive by the empty philosophies of the world.

Generation D was a generation who made a pact with themselves and a pact with a culture around them.

And I've used this, you all know what a pact is, and I've used that as an acronym here, PACT.

This is what took place.

This is how they grew comfortable with the paganism around them, and eventually they became pagans themselves.

Generation D was known to have a form of partial obedience.

They did not drive out the Canaanites completely.

They accommodated paganism.

These pagans lived in the midst of them, and that word in the midst means like right in their midst.

This is not just neighborhood, this is like making them part of our lives.

And then there was this concession to pragmatism.

The word pragmatism speaks of doing what works, what is practical.

They put these folk to forced labor.

They did not have the privilege to do that according to God.

And then it speaks of tolerance.

It says there to this day.

To this day it became the new normal.

It became the new normal.

This pact that they made with themselves and with the culture around them, I think, may look like little compromises.

But in fact, I think these were more like hairline cracks in a concrete wall of a salt pond that would at some point give way, engulf Israel with full blown paganism.

There was no escape when that wall gave in.

Judges two thirteen, it speaks there of the final outcome of things.

So they forsook the Lord and served Baal and the Ashtaroth.

We might wonder, how did we get here so fast?

It's just like here's Joshua.

But I think all along there was gradual compromises, small little compromises.

Perhaps one day somebody said, enough of this obeying guys.

Partial obedience is sufficient.

We have done enough here.

We've done our work here.

We don't want to become too rigid, too legalistic.

We don't want to be narrow-minded, do we?

Someone might have cried fell about this idea of driving out the Canaanites completely and saying, hey, dudes, don't be so harsh.

Don't be so critical on these pagans.

Let them live amongst us.

Let us learn from them.

After all, there's some good things they've got to offer.

After all, all truth is God's truth.

But I wonder which bright spark made a motion at some camp meeting saying, look, guys, let's think practically here.

We can save thousands of dollars here.

We can't drive out these Canaanites.

Let's rather put them to work.

Let them serve us.

We can save millions.

We might even have heard somebody saying at some point, guys, let's just be patient.

You know, we've been doing this for a year or two or three.

Let's just keep things the way.

Don't rock the boat.

We will deal with it next year or the year after.

They did not deal with this for over 300 years.

300 years would go by.

And a generation would just spiral down deeper into paganism.

Now the question here is, how much is generation D different from us?

Okay?

Let's make it about us.

If we make it about the guy next to us or the guy behind us, or the kids, we're gonna miss the point here.

Okay.

If we humble ourselves here and we repent, there's great comfort.

So let's think here.

What are some of the lessons we can learn here?

I think we need to think hard and fast about leadership.

Godly leadership.

Tomorrow at 6 a.m., I'm taking a group of twelve men through a course on leadership.

They will cry for mercy two weeks down the line, but they they smiling here, right, Carl?

Carl is like all excited.

Yes.

And we gotta think hard and fast about biblical leadership.

I think we gotta think hard and fast about our faith.

Is our faith highly theoretical?

Is our faith just knowing more and more every week about God and not getting any closer to knowing God?

That's another thing.

And then, of course, we gotta deal with this idea of a comfortableness with worldly ideologies.

So many things are encroaching the church at large.

And are we growing more and more comfortable importing pagan ideas into the church?

And so here's a point I believe we are to humble ourselves, but I did say that the problem is as simple as ABC, and I think the solution is as simple as ABC.

Let me tell you the solution here.

And we can draw great comfort from this.

We might not have the physical presence of an impeccable leader like Joshua of the Old Testament here, but we do have the example of the abiding presence of the Joshua of the New Testament.

Who's the Joshua of the New Testament?

Jesus, amen.

You see, we might not be a generation that have seen the miraculous experiences like the Israelites crossing the Jordan River in its flood on dry ground.

But we have something better.

We have the death, the burial, and the resurrection of the Joshua of the New Testament.

He is the one who regenerates the hearts and transforms the mind so that they can cross the river of death unharmed into the promised land.

Isn't that much more than these folk have?

We have the testimonies of so many saints before us who die, but we rest assured and we blessed that they had that assurance of entering the promised land.

You and I might not always have the luxuries and the comforts of the Canaanites around us, but you and I have something better.

We have the promises of God on our side.

We have the assurances of Ephesians 1 that says that He has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings in the universe.

We have everything that matters.

Everything that matters, you and I have, if we have put our trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And what more do we want than this assurance that we will safely enter into the promised land where there will be no more sickness, no more tears, and no more death.

We have it all.

We have it all.

Let us pray.

Dear Heavenly Father, we praise you that you have blessed us abundantly.

You have unleashed all the riches and the glory of Jesus Christ, and the love of God is shed into our hearts.

Thank you, Jesus, that you have saved so many here present with us.

So many you have saved in the in the weeks and the months prior to this day.

You are at work.

You are raising up a generation here that will serve and love you.

I pray God that we will be part of the solution, and that will we be humble enough to acknowledge the problem.

Let us keep the ABCs in the back of our mind and reflect upon those and come running to the cross seeking grace and forgiveness.

And you are faithful and righteous, you do forgive.

And so I pray God that we will not waste our lives.

That we will indeed be a people who take the opportunity and the blessings and the promises and be a generation like Joshua's.

I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

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