Judges: The Futility of Reaching for Control

So Judges 9 is super interesting for a couple of reasons.

The main reason is the pattern changes.

The pattern that's been set in the book of Judges has been pretty much God raising up leaders at the right times.

These leaders are called judges.

That's why the name of the book is Judges.

But in Judges 9, we have the pattern change, and that is Gideon's son, Abamelech.

And thank you, Lindsay, for reading the passage.

It got me out of having to read all these different names.

I'm not going to reread it.

I'll spare myself that privilege.

The pattern changes is Gideon's son, Abamelech, this guy, he wants power.

So he goes to his family, he gives kind of an inspirational speech of some sort.

At least he's able to do that because they give him money.

He goes out and he hires these reckless guys, and then this group goes and they hunt down the 70 brothers, all of which somebody could have tried to step in to become king, and they kill all 70 of those brothers.

So what changed in the pattern of judges at this point was before God had raised up each leader, and then in Judges 9, we have a guy who he takes control by his own means.

He's the one that steps in.

It's also interesting that this story receives two chapters.

So it receives a huge chunk of the book.

And then what's interesting is in that huge chunk of this book, the Lord is never mentioned by name.

So that kind of gives us our first point.

This is what it tells us.

Point number one is this our desire for control is not from the Lord and welcomes frustration.

I mean, just the fact that we have a story about a guy taking control that wasn't his to take, and that the Lord's name is never mentioned in any of the story.

This tells us that this urge of ours to always have as much control as possible, to have everything under control.

It's not from the Lord.

It's an impossibility for us, and it welcomes frustration.

Last week I watched ABC's new documentary on Mike Tyson.

I'm kind of like a secret Tyson fan.

I don't know what I call it a fan.

I don't know if that'd be a great thing.

More like I'm fascinated by this guy's life.

So Tyson grew up in extreme poverty in New York, neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse, bullying, violence.

All he knew, all he knew was fear, and all he knew was defense.

And he, by the age of 13, he had been arrested 38 times.

So by the age of 16, he was in a youth prison.

This is him at 16.

I'm still waiting to get those muscles that are never gonna come.

He had that at 16.

You should have seen me at 16.

I should have put a picture up of me at 16.

That'd have been interesting.

Also, when he's 16, his mother dies.

So he's 16, youth prison.

A guard starts to teach him to box.

Uh he gets introduced to a boxing trainer.

This boxing trainer takes him into his home, his mom dies, he loses the one somewhat supportive figure in his life, and then the boxing trainer adopts him, but he's this boxing trainer also vested in his interest, and he starts to train.

Right?

And he just starts to pound people, he starts to box and just demolish people.

I can remember one time in high school where, you know, like one person would buy the fight and everybody's show up for like$3, and you'd have like, you know, like 100 people in one living room.

And like if you went to the bathroom when the fight started, then you came out, it was over.

Like that's how fast it was.

I mean, he was demolishing grown men as a teenager, and at age 20, he becomes the champion of the world.

Age 20, he's a kid.

Millions of dollars.

And yet he has no self-control, he's self-destructing, and he's dangerous.

And then he ends up, eventually, he ends up in jail.

And then he comes out of prison to regain his titles.

And I'm getting to my point.

I will get to my point here.

Because the point is, is eventually he fights Holyfield.

And maybe you remember this fight.

Okay, so Holyfield, the first fight goes to the 11th round, stoppage.

They give it to Holyfield.

Second fight, this is the refight, and this was a huge fight.

Tyson gets$30 million for this one fight.

Holyfield gets$35 million for this one fight.

And this is an infamous fight.

Because this is what happens.

Here's the image of what happened.

Holyfield starts to bully Tyson.

Tyson hasn't been bullied since he was a kid.

Tyson had become the bully.

Tyson had always been the one to take control, but then Holyfield finally is a boxer who can take control in the ring.

Tyson doesn't know what to do with it.

Holyfield ties him up, he headbunts him over and over again.

Tyson loses it, he bites a chunk off of the ear of Holyfield, one of the most infamous sporting events in history, right?

And it's just because Tyson got bullied to the point he triggered back to being a kid.

He just triggered back to being a street brawl where you're fighting for your life and you'll do anything to get out of it.

One of Tyson's famous quotes is this everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

You've probably heard it, right?

I mean, that was his life motto.

Like, I'll just punch everybody in the mouth so that I have power and I have control.

I'll be okay because I cease power.

And then what?

Like for your life and for my life.

Like, and then what?

What if you're not in control?

What if you're the one getting punched in the mouth?

What if you can't control the timing of that thing that you want to happen?

What if you can't control that other person?

What if you can't control what they're doing?

What if you can't control your health?

What if you can't control your job?

What if you can't control your children?

What if you can't control that somebody's disappointed with you?

Now what?

Control idolatry says this.

I am okay or I have worth as long as blank is under control.

And we all have control idolatry at some point, right?

I mean, it may be family, it might be finances, might be the job, it might be people's respect, admiration, but all of us have control idolatry in some way.

Now, if we go back to Abel Malek in this story and judges, he has a father from one race and he has a mother from another race.

So in the ancient Near East, sadly, still today, this could put a person in a lower view from society.

That's unfair.

But he didn't have the pedigree from society.

Right?

Those other brothers had the pedigree.

They're the ones that had the pedigree, but not him.

So he's the outcast and he has to prove himself.

He feels like he has to prove himself.

He has to step in.

So he overly asserts.

Point number two is this undealt with past, undealt with pasts affect our present and our future.

So when Tyson bit the ear off, he hadn't been bullied since he was a kid.

He triggers back into what it was like to be a kid in a street brawl.

You do anything to get out of it, there's no rules.

I mean, Tyson even said this in another quote of his Sometimes I put on a ski mask and dress in old clothes, go out in the streets and beg for quarters.

So he said that as a famous, rich, successful athlete.

He said that.

See, we can run from our past.

We can even band-aid.

We can even band-aid our past.

And when I say that, I mean sins we've committed, mistakes we've made, wounds that have been committed upon us.

We can even band-aid that with religious talk.

And we can end up metaphorically stuck there forever.

Or in Tyson's situation, he was physically going back there.

But see, what Jesus calls us into, it's the most interesting thing because he gives us a state, a position of fully healed in him as his beloved child.

And yet in this world, we're still broken.

So we're already, but not yet.

We're healed, but we're still in the journey of healing.

You remember the woman at the well in John 4?

It's one of my favorite stories of I think this kind of being fleshed out, because Jesus shows up to this woman who's an outcast in her own way, and he tells her, Hey, I have living water for you.

And she's not picking up on the metaphorical talk that this living water is about her heart and her soul, not just like her coming and physically getting this water.

She's like, hey, I'll take the, I'll take the water.

Give me that water.

I'll keep coming here over and over again.

And then he says to her, he says, Hey, by the way, like you had five husbands and you live with a six man.

And so this wasn't, Jesus wasn't saying this to shame her.

He was already welcoming her to himself.

So that wouldn't have made sense for Jesus to be welcoming her and accepting her and saying, Hey, I want to be your Lord and Savior.

I want to pour into you living water, but I'll also shame you along the way.

So that's not what's going on here.

It's not a shame talk, but it is a walking with her through all of her sins and all of her wounds.

This is how we both need to be healed in Jesus and how Jesus wants to be with us as we process through our paths of sin and wounds.

We can allow the security of our healed position as we grow in our identity, the great wealth we have in Jesus, that we can become more and more secure in Him and that we're not at risk to feel pain.

That pain will not destroy you because you are at peace and secure in Him.

Dan Allender says this in his book, To Be Told, Know Your Story, Shape Your Future.

In those moments of unnaming, when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame.

We wrongly believe that we will be happy if we can escape the past.

But without our past, we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories.

When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name.

So Alander is saying that we all have unnaming events in our lives.

I think in the context of his writing, he's talking about things that have been happened to you.

But I think this can also be sins we've committed, our own mistakes.

And in that way, we're unnaming the creative beauty we have.

That we have hearts that have been wounded by our own sinful past, we've been wounded by the evil of the world, by the evil of other people.

And in this way, we've been unnamed.

But in Christ, we have a new name.

We have a redemptive story, a new identity.

And you think about somebody like Abel Malek, or we can think about something like Mike Tyson, or we think about ourselves.

And how often we try to escape from all of that, or we try to reach for more and more control or power in order to feel at peace, or as some measure of defense.

And then, of course, we know how that story works: that you'll never have enough control, and you'll never have enough power to be at peace.

Judges 9, it goes on to give us this parable of a bramble bush.

And it says that all the trees were looking for a king.

And so there's lots of amazing trees.

There's an olive tree, a fig tree.

These would have been good trees to exalt as a king, but in this parable, it's the bramble bush that steps up and volunteers to be king.

The problem is the bramble bush is small and scraggly and pretty useless, other than the fact that it can catch on fire.

That's about it.

So the only thing that such a worthless plant offers is destruction.

And that's the point of the parable.

It's an odd little parable.

Point number three is this evil always leads to destruction.

See, we may fool people for a little while, we may fool ourselves for a little while about what we're doing.

But evil, destructive thinking, destructive motives, destructive behavior, it always leads to destruction.

See, some of us are living in what I would say is deep waters of consequential sin.

And that's just a way to say some sin has bigger consequences in life in this world than others' sin.

We're not going to rate sin and rate sin, but some sin just has more consequences in this world.

Now, your soul may be saved in Jesus, right?

But you may burn your life down along the way.

And evil always leads to destruction.

And so just knowing this, knowing you're not going to escape that reality and that truth.

You may be saved, but you may burn your life down.

And so pastorally, I would just say, like, just stop.

Just stop now.

Like, get out of that.

Rearrange your life.

Confess.

Restore.

Come talk to me.

Email me.

We'll work it out.

Let's get you set up with a counselor.

Let's figure out a way so that the evil, the destructive behavior does not have to burn your life down.

And the Bible is clear on that, and reality is clear on that.

Live long enough with certain sins that have heavy consequences in this world, and you'll burn your life down.

And it happened to Abamelech.

That's what the bramble bush is about, and it happened here to Abamelech because three years later, Shechem tries to take out Abamelech.

Abamelech finds out about this, and so he goes and he fights Shechem, takes them out, routes them.

They lose about a thousand people.

And then he goes on to this next village, he captures it.

All the people in that village, they run to the tower in the middle of the village, they run up into the tower.

Abamelech's there at the bottom of the tower with his men.

And a woman high up in the tower, love this.

Abamelech can't stand it.

She takes a millstone, throws it out the window, it lands on his head, crushes his skull.

As he's dying, he looks at another soldier and he says, Draw your sword and kill me, lest they say of me, a woman killed me.

So, until his last breath, his last sentence, he is an insecure man.

He can't even deal with the fact that a woman might have killed him, right?

Like he can't even deal with it.

Insecure until his last breath.

Always needing control, always trying to assert himself.

I mean, how exhausting.

How exhausting of a life.

And then in Judges 10, the story shifts because we get two leaders showing up, Tola and Jar, who we know little about, but the story actually gives us a lot about God.

So Judges 10, 1 through 5.

After Abramelech there arose to save Israel, Tola, the son of Pua, son of Dodo, a man of Issachar, and he lived at Shemir in the hill country of Ephraim, and he judged Israel 23 years.

Then he died and was buried at Shemar.

After him arose Jaar the Gileadite, who judged Israel twenty-two years, and he had thirty sons, who rode on thirty donkeys and had thirty cities called Havoth Jaar to this day, which are the land of Gilead, and Jaar died and was buried in Kamon.

You go, okay, well, what does all that mean?

Here's what I think it means.

Point number four.

In Christ, God never gives up on you.

Now here's how we get that.

This phrase in verse 1 arose to save Israel.

That means everything because it's language.

It's language of God interacting and pursuing his people.

So you have all this mess of Abamelech.

The Lord's name is never mentioned.

And then you get these two leaders showing up, and we know so little about them.

And yet there's 45 years of peace.

It's his language of God interacting and breaking in.

Israel never cried out.

They never asked for mercy.

They never asked for help.

There's no prayer.

There's no turning.

There's no walking the aisle.

There's no retreat, you know, moment on the hill at a bonfire and they're praying.

There's none of that.

And yet, God, in his kindness and grace, sends them two leaders to lead them and have peaceful existence for 45 years.

Holiness and justice would have demanded punishment for all those years of forgetting him.

But he in his kindness steps back in.

Here's where my heart went this week with that.

So grateful for our story that we have in Christ as a redemption story.

Romans 5, 6 through 11.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

I mean, that's sort of what just happened in Judges, right?

A group of people who weren't remembering him, and yet he sends them, saves them, rescues them.

Verse 7, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die.

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life.

More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

So under Tola and JR, 45 years of peace.

And then, of course, you know what happens.

Same thing as always.

They forget again.

They mess up again, they turn from God, they become miserable, and then they're crying out.

Here's how God responds in Judges 10, 11 through 16.

And here's how we can see in the Old Testament so often, we see like this justice of God, and you like you hear the tone, you're like, oh, that's not like the God I like or the God I hear about in the New Testament, and but then you see like the grace of God stepping in.

And so we see this in this Judges 10.

You'll you'll you'll pick up on it here in these verses, verse 11.

And the Lord said to the people of Israel, Did I not save you from the Egyptians and from the Amorites, from the Ammonites, from the Philistines, the Sidonians also, and the Amalekites and the Maonites oppressed you, and you cried out to me, and I saved you out of their land.

Yet you have forsaken me and served other gods.

Therefore I will save you no more.

Go and cry out to the gods whom you have chosen.

Let them save you in the time of your distress.

And the people of Israel said to the Lord, We have sinned, do to us whatever seems good to you.

Only please deliver us this day.

So they put away the foreign gods from among them and served the Lord, and he became impatient over the misery of Israel.

So the Old Testament is teaching us.

And see, if we isolate just these verses, who knows what we end up with?

I mean, we have to take the narrative arc, the redemption story as a whole, to understand all these different pieces in these little stories.

But the Old Testament is teaching us about the justice of God and the grace of God.

Now, Paul in the New Testament really helps us understand that and put this puzzle together, what can feel like a puzzle.

Because in God's justice, God rightfully says, You want to be on your own?

You love control, you love these other gods, you love to do your own thing?

You're on your own.

Be miserable, be condemned, pay the price of separation from me.

Yet in his grace, he disrupts our selfishness and our sin.

And he pursues us and he loves us.

Now, what Paul's telling us back in Romans 5 is God's justice is fully satisfied in Christ.

That's why we need to talk about Jesus more and more.

Because God's justice is fully satisfied, and in Jesus what we have is full, limitless, unfailing, steadfast love.

And so what this means for us is we have confidence.

Through all of our insecurity, all of our sin, all of our unnaming, all of our control idolatry, that He never leaves us.

This is what the story of Judges is telling us over time through the story.

I close with this promise from Ephesians 1, 13.

In him speaking about Christ, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, we were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that we are sealed in you by your spirit in us.

And thank you that this is a gift of grace to us, that on our own, that we choose to go our own ways, that we are a forgetful people prone to wander.

But thank you that you are more prone to seek us and find us and rescue us and love us.

We're so thankful for the gift of Christ that all of your justice, that all of your justice that would need to come down upon any of our sin and our mistakes and our rebellion is fully satisfied.

And what we have left is a heavenly Father who adores us and welcomes us, accepts us, and wants to pour living water into our hearts and souls.

Help us not to diminish the full character of God, but to accept it as to know you and to be more astonished by your love for us.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.