The Cycle of Idolatry

We're going to read from Judges chapter 2 continuing our series in Judges

Judges 2 · chapter mention

so judges 2 and

from verse 6

When Joshua dismissed the people the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land and

The people serve the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who I live Joshua

Who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel and

And Joshua the son of none the servant of the Lord died at the age of 110 years and

They buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance and Timnaf Harris in the hill country of Ephraim

North of the mountain of Fgas and all that generation also were gathered to their fathers and

There arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel and

The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the bails and

They abandoned the Lord the God of the fathers who had brought them out of the land of Egypt

They went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed down to them and

They provoked the Lord to anger they abandoned the Lord and served the bails and the asterisks

So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he gave them over to plunderers who plundered them and he

Sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies so that they could no longer withstand their enemies

Whenever they marched out the hand of the Lord was against them for harm as the Lord had warned and as the Lord had sworn to them

And they were in terrible distress

Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them

Yet they did not listen to their judges for they hoared after other gods and bowed down to them

They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked who had obeyed the commandments of the Lord

And they did not do so

Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them the Lord was with the judge and he saved them from the hand of their enemies

All the days of the judge for the Lord was moved to pity

By their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them

But whenever the judge died they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers

Going after other gods serving them and bowing down to them

They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways

So that so the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he said

Because this people have transgressed my covenant that I commanded their fathers and have not obeyed my voice

I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died

In order to test Israel by them whether they will take care to walk in the way of the Lord as their fathers did or not

So the Lord left those nations not driving them out quickly and he did not give them into the hand of Joshua

Now these are the generations that the Lord left to test Israel by them

That is all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars in Canaan

It was only in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war

To teach war to those who had not known it before these are the nations the five lords of the philistines

And all the Canaanites and the Sidionians and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon from Mount Balherman

As far as Lebo Hamath

They were for the testing of Israel to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the Lord

Which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses

So the people of Israel lived among the Canaanites the Hittites the Amorites the Perizzites the Hivites

And the Jebusites and their daughters they took to themselves for wives

And their own daughters they gave to their sons and they served

their gods

And this is God's word

Good evening. It's great to be with you and to get to spend some time sharing God's word together

With you from the book of Judges chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, please keep it open

Judges 2 · chapter mention

On that page some page 201 of the church Bibles

I'm just going to read the first five verses of chapter 2 as well

It's really important to set up the the verses that we read

That Lewis read for us

Now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochum

And he said I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers

I said I will never break my covenant with you

And you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land

You shall break down their altars

But you have not obeyed my voice

What is this you have done?

So now I say I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides

And their gods shall be a snare to you

As soon as the angel of the Lord spoke these words to all the people of Israel the people lifted up their voices and wept

And they called the name of that place

Bochum which in Hebrew means weepers people who are crying

And they sacrificed there to the Lord

And after that then we have the reading that we had earlier with the death of Joshua and then the Lord raising up judges

Last week Tom Muir was here and he preached on chapter one of judges

And if you were here, so refresh your memory if you weren't here, this is a one minute

Summary of a really important part of his sermon

And so he spoke about how strange the world of judges is to us

It's full of really odd characters

People that can be quite hard to relate to if you just step into the book if you open it for the first time

A lot of the people that the book sets up as heroes are actually

When you read their stories are deeply flawed characters really strange people really odd heroes

And the book has lots of people who are constantly lots of peoples who are at war with each other across their different groups

It's the story of people trying to take over the land that other people already live in

And where you have people converting to different religions choosing entirely different ways of life

And the story is like a pendulum of extremes that never seems to settle anywhere in the middle

And there's all kinds of intermarriage. There's lots of violence in the book of judges

And that can make the book seem really difficult to make sense of for a lot of people in our culture

If you were to pick up the Bible for the first time in your life

If you'd never read it before

And you open it that judges chapter one

And that's really difficult because of what I was just sketching out there borrowing from tom last week

But also because a lot of people in our culture

Haven't read the Bible before they have very little

Knowledge of it or experience of it and very little sense from the Bible itself of how the Bible is to be read

How do you make sense of a book like this?

And I think that's difficult because in our culture there are a lot of people you're going to put them into two groups

In group one, there are a lot of people who haven't read the Bible

But assume that when they do

It's going to be like opening up a mindfulness app

But it's an ancient book and what you expect to find there is something that'll give you really

Good vibes that'll put you at ease like a kind of pillow of affirmation

That will give you an instant sense of inner peace and it's there to give you that kind of feeling

Other people though assume that the Bible

They might not have read it much

It's a book of commands of things to do

And it's a book about stories where everything that happens is affirmed by the Bible and you're meant to copy what you find literally on every page

And with that assumption

Well, let's say with both of these assumptions group one opens the Bible at the book of judges and it's not really like opening an

A wellness app to give you those feelings

And group two opens the book of judges and it's full of

Of a lot of really difficult stuff to process

And is this really what you want to copy and why would the Bible affirm all of these people doing all of these things?

But

Neither group then well

If that's how you begin reading the book of judges will get very far before giving up because why is the Bible like this?

Why is there a book like this in the Bible?

Judges is not

Chicken soup for the soul, but it's also not 12 rules for life

But of course that's not how the Bible itself works. It's not how it's to be read. It's not how we're to make sense of a book like judges

So the way that kori introduced the series of sermons that you're doing just now in st. columbus and sunday nights on judges was the title

The gospel according to judges

Okay, and that's a great title

You know if you're if that phrase rings

A true every rings familiar to you

You're thinking of the gospel according to Luke the gospel according to Matthew and you're thinking of these stories directly in the new

Testament about Jesus, but this is the gospel in the old testament in

This book that's really difficult for a lot of people to read and to get into at the beginning

But it is actually in the Bible the gospel the gospel according to judges

and here's

What I mean by that

The Bible is one great story

From Genesis to Revelation from beginning to end

The Bible tells one huge overarching story

But when you start to zoom in on all the different things that make up that story

You see that the story is made up of tiny versions of itself repeated over and over

Imagine you see a big portrait of a face

And the closer you get to it you see that it's a mosaic and it's actually full of tiny pictures of the same face

The Bible is like that, but it's one big story made up of repetitions of itself that start off really small

And as the repetitions go on they get bigger and bigger they expand

They start to get fleshed out

until

God takes on human flesh

And what the meaning of the story is is crystallized in the person of Jesus Christ

So here's how this works the Bible begins with God in the beginning God

God creates our world this universe. He creates human beings

And their starting point is this perfect relationship with him

And with themselves and with one another and with their universe

But then

those humans rebel

And they ruin the relationship with God with themselves with one another

with their world

And then immediately we have the story that gets repeated over and over being told for the first time

in a promise from God to that first woman Eve

That one day one of her offspring will come one of her descendants

And he will undo

Everything that they have put out of joints everything that they have undone in God's world

So this offspring will come

And that's the this this tiny bear promise that they get but that is the story that's going to be repeated throughout the Bible

Expanding and expanding as the story gets retold

And it gets retold in

The book of judges it gets retold in the exodus it gets retold in the 40 years in the wilderness

It gets retold in the the temple it gets retold in the sacrifices

It gets retold in the prophets until one day the story is told definitively because that promised offspring comes

And that is Jesus who enters the story

As God who becomes human who takes a human nature the word is made flesh and eve's

offspring

Is actually her creator

The author who writes himself into the story

Now here's what to give you one mental image to think about this. Okay, that'll take us into judges

And it's from a theologian who lived in the second century. He was from north Africa. His name was tertulian

And he was a pagan roman who became a christian and if you've never heard of him

I'm confident that you all regularly use words that he invented like old testament new testament

Trinity so he was that guy. He was a wordsmith

And one of um one of his most helpful creative terms in talking about the old testament and what I was just saying about how it's one story being repeated over and over

is

That the old testament is full of what he called rehearsals

of the gospel

Okay, so the gospel gets rehearsed over and over and over until it all happens for real

The old testament is full of rehearsals of the incarnation of jesus. It's full of rehearsals of the ultimate story

In all the ways that that story gets retold over and over and over

And the mind blowing thing that tertulian said about these rehearsals is who directs the rehearsal

It's actually jesus himself

He's the one who coordinates them. He's the one who orchestrates them and he does that the rehearsals are there for our benefits

They're there to prepare the world for what's going to happen when jesus entered definitively

So when we're talking about the gospel

according to judges

What we're looking to see really is what kind of a rehearsal

Of his entrance into the world is jesus orchestrating

In that world as strange as that world seems to us and for those people

And of course he was doing that in a world that was unimaginably different to our own

And the ancient world was a really violent place

Resources were scarce

People lived with all kinds of precarity

They did not know how to imagine religion as a sort of private choice that you have

Within your own life in your next door neighbor might make completely different private choices and you can all just live in that live

That wasn't the world that they knew how to imagine

And so in all of those fronts think about it like this

If people from the time of the book of judges could read a book that was set in our culture in edinbrun 2024

It would be as unimaginably weird to them as their world seems to us

And actually they would be deeply suspicious of you

Because of the kind of diversity that you live with the kind of live and let live attitude

That would make no sense because their world was so much more about the group than the individual and our culture is the inverse

So they would they would actually find us really suspicious

They would wonder how can you trust these people? What do they live for beyond themselves?

This kind of hyper individualized society and they would really struggle to imagine us just like we struggle to imagine them

But that is the world that these people were born into

In history and God was pursuing them in that world Jesus was rehearsing the gospel in their world for them

So how does he do that in judges too?

So I've got two points

The first is that God is faithful

And the people are not we are not and the second is the kind of judge

Who saves us of what is the truth

We are not and the second is the kind of judge who saves us so God is faithful and we're not

Now the reason I read verses one to five there

Is that they give us this key idea that help us unlock the whole of the book of judges

This idea that God is faithful to his people the people are not faithful to him

But the way that God deals with that is that he gives them a leader

Who is a good leader and who mediates between them and him?

So the backstory to this to the book of judges is

Joshua and the story of the exodus from Egypt

So Joshua

If you don't know the story

He was Moses assistant and Moses was the guy who led the Israelites out of Egypt where they'd been slaves

for hundreds of years, but after

Moses dies

Joshua then led leads the Israelites to the promised land, but when they get there

Joshua makes this dramatic speech so it's on the page just before this literally in the church Bible

Joshua makes a dramatic speech when they're just about at the promised land

When he tells them that the peoples who already live in this land worship lots of different gods

And those gods define their lives and as you enter this land, you must choose whom you will serve

Okay, and so maybe you know this line from the Bible as for me in my house

We will serve the Lord. This is where that gets said the original place where that gets said

So they're about to enter this promised land full of all of these

Peoples who worship all of these other gods and the question that Joshua gives them as they're just about to cross into that promised land is

Whom will you serve?

Who will you make ultimate in your life? Will it be the Lord the one true God?

Or will it be Bale or Maloch or Ashtara?

Will you focus your life on God or on these idols?

Now you may be thinking when you hear this

Well, you know, that's nice ancient history of the Bronze Age in Canaan

But I don't know anyone who has a shrine of Maloch or of Bale or an Asherapole

in their house

For me, this is really detached and it's meaningless. I don't know anyone who worships these gods

See, this is this is totally irrelevant

But think about this

Do you know who the New Testament calls the true and greater Joshua?

It's Jesus right same name even Yeshua and the Lord saves

Jesus said exactly the same thing in fact a bigger better thing

than Joshua said when they're about to cross into the promised land and he says

Who will you serve? Will it be the Lord or will it be Maloch or Bale?

Well, Jesus said you cannot serve God and money

Choose who you'll serve

Maybe nobody you know worships Maloch or Bale

Do you know people who believe that money makes the world go round?

I do

So

Joshua's question is contextualized

It's how you address the specific ways that idols are packaged and presented

If you live in Bronze Age Canaan

For us the same idols are still there. They're just packaged differently and they were we're more subtle than they were

They called their idols gods. Maybe we don't but we treat them like that

So Joshua's question is still the same question for us

We although we can package it differently choose whom you will serve

So that's the backstory they're about to enter the promised land

He tells them this choose whom you will serve and the people say

We will serve the Lord

Because as boldly as that and we will be faithful to him

And Joshua tells them

No, you won't

You will fail

And your hearts will wander you'll go astray

And at the very beginning of Joshua of judges too, that's what Joshua tells them

Okay, so it's a recap of what you have at the end of Joshua

He God tells them I have been faithful to you, but you have not been faithful to me and in response they weep

They they break down in tears and I'll talk a little bit later on about why they do that and why there's good news for people in that situation

So God tells them he's faithful to them and they're not faithful to him. So what does it mean to say that God is faithful here?

He wants to be their God

exclusively

um, he wants to be the one whose standards of goodness and truth and beauty

Order their lives and his commitment to them is exclusive. He is saying in effect. I want to be your God

I want to be loyal to you. I created you

I want I want to redeem you. I want to hear you. I want to answer your prayers

I want to be the one who gives your life its dignity and

um, it's

Its purpose and I want you to know that and live within it

So that's God's side of this

But the people God says have not been faithful to him. So what does that mean? So in verse

In verse two

There are two things that God says he doesn't want them to do and they do both of these things

One is to make covenants with pagans and the other is to take part

in their religions

To illustrate just how how weird our world would be to them. Just like their world is so strange to us

imagine

You're about to sign a contract. I don't know you're a student and you're about to rent your flat for the coming year

and

Your landlord is a hindu and you both sign the contract and your landlord says at the end of it

To make this contract valid. We are both going to make an offering to

Vishnu

In scotland you would think what like I don't need to do that to sign a contract that seems odd and an overreach

I imagine you like you're about to

Sell something you're about to sell your bike to someone

And you say okay just before the money changes hands. I'd like it if we could both recite the apostles creed

And the person's probably gonna say what?

Why do we need to do that to have a contract? But their world was completely different

So to make covenants

It's not just kind of let's ignore one another's differences and sign a piece of paper together. It's let's

Let's make oaths to gods. It's a really religious thing

And god doesn't want them to do that to other gods

And the reason that god doesn't want that okay, here's one way you can think about this that

Living your life under one god

Who relates to you by grace

Is completely different as a life to living under thousands of different gods

Who all want you to do things to keep them happy and you've got to appease every single one of them

Those are two completely different ways to live

utterly different

If you become a canaanite

Polytheist it means that every day you've got to spend your life trying to serve a thousand different masters

You have this huge list of gods as long as your arm

If you want to get pregnant, there's a fertility god you've got to keep happy for your harvest

There's another god for the fruit that grows in your garden. There's a god

There's a whole list of different gods for every part of your physical health

And do you want success in war? Do you want the sun to rise tomorrow?

And do you want good fortune?

Do you want victory over the gods of the other peoples?

And if if you're a pagan canaanite

And everything goes wrong in your life, you know, if it seems like the bottom has completely fallen out of it

You had a nuclear option

The ultimate sacrifice to get the gods on your side

Which was that you go to the god malloch and you offer your children

Who'd be burned to death

As a sacrifice to him. So that's what you would do in ancient Canaan particularly of all the crops failed

Because there's nothing above that that you could say that you could use to say to malloch

I need you. I am my life is over without you. I am nothing without you

And there's nothing more costly than I can give than the children that I've sacrificed to you

And what you see across the Old Testament is that god hates that that this is a thing where god that god calls out

It's what he means in judges too when he says at the very beginning

You might think it's just signing a contract to buy a fields

You might think it's just you know marrying off one of your sons or one of your daughters

But these gods are a snare to you. You give this an inch and it will take a mile

You think you're just staying in the shallow end of the pool, but before you know it

You're in the deep end

You think that it's just lip service to these gods that you don't really believe in

But actually before you know it the it's it's really heavy commitments and the lip service is to the god you say you believe in today

So choose whom you will serve

That's the message as they enter the promised land

And that's what you see as the chapter goes on they go from the shallow end to the deep end really quickly

But before that happens in chapter 2 so verses 6 down to 10

There is a there's a while where things go reasonably well for the Israelites

So they still have their good leader at this point. They have Joshua

And he stands in their place before god and he mediates between god and them

But after Joshua dies, there's still a generation who remember him

And who remember what it was like to have someone who mediates between them and god

They remember what it was like to have this savior figure

But after that generation passes away things change

Dramatically and very quickly so look at verse 10

And all that generation were gathered to their fathers and there arose another generation after them who did not know the lord

Or the work that he had done for Israel

Now if you are

An attentive reader

If you know lots of biblical stories

And you join the dots between them if you hear echoes of stories in other stories from the bible

There's something that's ringing here for you in the background

Something sad and something ironic in this line that there arose another generation who did not know

And the reason for that is that the story of Joshua

Which is the story that is just ending in this verse

Is actually the very end of the story of the Exodus

Because the Exodus is the Exodus from Egypt to the promise of the Bible

Because the Exodus is the Exodus from Egypt to the promised land

It's the story that where if you go right back to the start of that story

It takes you to Exodus chapter one where the Israelites are living peacefully in Egypt and flourishing

And this is before they become slaves

And they live under the protection of a good leader

Joseph

But then what happens?

Joseph dies

And there arises another generation a new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph

And just like that everything changes for them and they end up in slavery

And things take this dramatic turn for the worst

And that happens in the is in Egypt because they end up as slaves in Egypt, but in judges actually it's even worse

Because they're in what's meant to be the promised land

They're not in Egypt

And it's not the Pharaoh the new Pharaoh this pagan king who thinks he's a god who doesn't know the Lord

It's actually the Israelites themselves who don't know the Lord

So there's an echo that goes right back to the start of the book of Exodus here

And the effect that this is meant to have on you when you read it if you know the backstory

Is you're meant to ask

Okay, they left Egypt physically but in their hearts

Um, are they still slaves?

So they're not physically there, but they they don't know how to be free

And then what comes after this versus 11 down to 16 is really terrible

So they go from the shallow end to the deep end in one plunge

They abandon the Lord and they're not even subtle about it

Like they're not trying to say well, you know, it's just lip service and we still were really loyal to the Lord

They give up on him entirely and they convert to these other religions. They follow other gods

So verse 13

Reduces it to two things that lure them in

And they went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who are around them and bowed down to them

They abandoned the Lord and served the bales and the ash to Roth

So they gave up on the Lord in pursuit of two other things

The gods that they're that these cultures around them offered them

And the two things were power and sex

And that's what the bales and the ash to Roth represents the bales are a group of gods

If you're a pagan canaanite, these are like the the ideal form of masculinity or the bales

They're they're male gods and the bales lust after this ideal form of sexualized femininity

the ash to Roth

um

Well, Astarte was her name this goddess of fertility this object of male desire

So the Israelites gave up on following the Lord because they become transfixed with how their culture mediates to them

masculinity and femininity power and sex

desire

Of course our culture has its own many many different ways of mediating those things to us as well

So there's at this point there's another echo of something in the Exodus story

Which is that because they've done this

God sells them into the hands of their enemies

Sells them into slavery

And what's really shocking about this again is if you think about this

And you've got the story of the exodus behind it

The very beginning of the story of the exodus like the backstory to the exodus is well, how did Joseph end up in Egypt?

He was sold into slavery by his brothers

So there's this other it's a sad echo

And the Israelites are now slaves again. It's like the exodus from slavery in Egypt never happened

So the way that judges to begins the book of judges is that it's like we're back at the very beginning of the book of exodus

It's like there's a there's a meme that goes around

of a shepherd

Who's trying to pull a sheep

The sheep's head is stuck in this ditch

So love you've seen it and the moment he pulls it out the sheep springs off and jumps and then

Head straight back in the same ditch

Okay, that's the kind of effect that you're meant to have when you read judges one and two if you've read exodus as it comes before

They've gone straight back into the same ditch and it's like the exodus

Well, the question you're meant to have is was the exodus for nothing

Can god save his people at all?

And at this point, you know, if you're reading judges back in ancient israel

Maybe another thing that you're thinking of is again the page before this in the church bibles

What joshua said to the people after he said choose whom you will serve and they say we will serve the lord and joshua says

No, you won't

Do you know what just do you remember what joshua said to them after that?

You will fail him and because he is a holy and jealous god. He will not forgive your sins

so there's something

Something true about god that joshua grasped in that moment, which is that god is a holy and a jealous god

But there's something about god that joshua didn't grasp which is that god is also a gracious god

So he tells them you're going to fail and god will not forgive you and that is why they wept

That's why they called the place bohem the weepers because at this point

You know, they're that sheep that has jumped straight back into the same ditch and it is over

joshua himself told us if we get this wrong once then there's no way back

We were already in the last chance saloon

so they cry

And that's what makes the plot twist at the very end of verse 15 and the start of 16 so amazing

Because and this is also an echo of exodus

They were in terrible distress then the lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them at this point

So it's like in exodus

You know, they're they're groaning in slavery in egypt and god hears their groans and then god sends them someone to save them

So judges too is a rehearsal of the gospel in exactly the same way that the book of exodus is a rehearsal of the gospel

It's the story of god coming to save people who could not save themselves a story of god liberating people from slavery of god

Turning mere existence into the abundance of life

So that was point one point two is going to be a lot shorter really the point two is the conclusion the judge who saves us

When you hear the word judge in our culture, you probably think of you know, someone who sits in a court and

You know who hears cases

A judge in the old testament is not like that

Think instead

Decisive warrior savior

Okay, category of person that we don't really have in our culture. It's another thing that makes the book of judges odd to us

So one of the things that you'll see through judges is that the people are just a mess throughout

They don't really make progress at all

They never get back on track with following god

Obediently they're they're like the sheep that jumps into the ditch every single time more deeply than they did before

And as a spoiler alert, you haven't read the whole of the book of judges. The last line of the book is

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. So the people are just like obstinately

They run away from god every time and god runs after them every time

And he keeps on being gracious over and over and he raises up judge after judge after judge to save them

And the judges are another part of the weirdness of this book. They are a ragtag

Bunch of saviours say the least the best known probably samson

The strong man who has really obvious evident character flaws. Okay, put it like that. You'll be I guess you'll be hearing about him later

We also have a judge like Gideon who's samson's opposite. He's not naturally brave or courageous

You have women and you have another

Judge who has a really complicated backstory. He's a prostitute son saves the people

But then he makes this rash vow that he then ends up killing his daughter over

The judges are a really odd group

Very ordinary people who each save israel and they're able to do that chapter 2 says because the lord was with them

They are unlikely heroes

Really unlikely saviours

And one of the repeated things that you see in judges is that they save the people of israel with unlikely weapons

So Gideon's army uses jars and trumpets

Shamgar uses an oxgoat

Jail uses a tent peg

Samson has a donkey's jaw bone

So judges is like this case study of the most unlikely saviours whose weapons are the most unlikely weapons

And throughout them God uses these people to just rescue his people

So how is that a rehearsal of the gospel of Jesus Christ?

Well think about it like this

Who would the most surprising

The least likely savior of the world be?

A baby? More unlikely still a baby born to a virgin

A baby born in poverty

Born in a stable

Someone who grows up in a cultural backwater

Someone whose job is carpenter

Someone who gave that up even and then had no place to lay his head

And then he had to go to the hospital

And he had to go to the hospital

Someone who gave that up even and then had no place to lay his head

So voluntarily homeless and itinerant

Someone whose own family did not believe in him

First

Someone who taught values that the people around him thought were utterly bizarre like turn the other cheek

Love your enemies

Someone who ended up being executed by the Romans nailed to a cross

Dying the death of a slave

A common criminal

Someone who lost his last earthly possessions as he hanged there held by nails

When soldiers used dice to gamble over his last piece of clothing

A barbarian

A nobody whose body was lifeless body was sealed in a tomb

One of the things that um the god

God says about himself in the Old Testament in Sam 75 is that he is the judge

Same Hebrew word as judges and judges

And in Sam 75 it's about a world full of unrighteous people

And there God says that he is the judge

Whatever it meant for samson

jail

Gideon off neil

All of these other people

Whatever it meant for them to be judges to be saviors

However, unlikely that seemed of them

God was the definitive version of that

He said he was the judge

But did it ever

Does it ever occur to you

When you look at Jesus Christ

That you are looking at

The judge

That you're looking at the unlikeliest

The most unimaginable of saviors

That you're looking at someone who fulfills

The whole of the book of judges

By he doesn't just fulfill it by being a man whom God was with

Like off neil or Gideon or samson

He fulfills it by being

Immanuel by being God with us

By being the god man by being the

The word who is in flesh

That the most surprising way for God to keep the promise he made to eve

At the very beginning of that biblical story

That the promise that one of her offspring would undo the fall

That God himself did that by taking a human nature

That God did that by becoming one of eve's own descendants

And that he joined divinity

And humanity in one person forever

So that we can know that he will never let us go

That we have this judge who is with us forever

That's good news

That is the gospel

And that helps us I think

It's here in the word of God to help us understand

The gospel was rehearsed for these people in their world

To prepare the world for the Jesus whom we know

By name

And for that reason we're really privileged to live

When we do in history

Not because we're superior to those people in their strange worlds

Our people in thousands of years from now

If the world is still here we'll look back on us and find us utterly bizarre

In many ways

And yet we have this privilege of living on this side of the cross

This side of the fulfillment of all of those rehearsals

Let's pray

Lord our God

We praise you for your gospel

We thank you for your son Jesus Christ

Who's come into our world

Who has become our savior

Who defies all of our expectations

And yet in him

You had planned to bring time together

In all of its fullness to reveal yourself to us

In him

So Lord help us to grow in faith and love and hope

Because of the gospel

The gospel shown to us, rehearsed for us also in the book of Judges

But we praise you that we don't just know of rehearsals

But you've placed us in a time to know that

The one who orchestrated that rehearsal has come into our world

We praise you in his name

Amen