What Now: Introduction; Sept. 20, 2026

Well, last week was our kickoff service.

And uh despite some colder weather and uh an unfortunate slip of the tongue that thankfully none of us remember, um, it was a good start to the year.

Uh we talked a little bit about how we just finished celebrating this huge milestone of our centennial, uh, for which we are incredibly grateful.

And then we introduced our new theme of what is it?

Yeah, how many of you would have gotten that right off the bat if it didn't pop up on the screen for you?

Okay.

Four people.

We'll take it.

All right.

We talked about our theme verse from Isaiah 43.

Um, can we read that together?

Behold, I am doing a new thing.

Now it springs forth.

Do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

We talked about how God is doing this new thing, and it is all centered on his son, Jesus.

Uh, this theme and this verse were inspired by the consideration that we're now in year 101 of our history, which leads us to ask at the start of our second hundred years.

Now what?

And this question, at this key point in our history, got me thinking, the nation of Israel faced a very similar question at a key point in their history.

Joshua had led them on a conquest of the promised land that took about seven years or so.

And then sometime after that, Joshua and his generation passed away.

Similar to where we are as Trinity, having opened a new building, mostly experienced all the changes that God has brought about for us, Israel in a very similar way was looking forward to their bright future.

And they were asking, What now?

Now that they had found themselves in the long-promised land of their forefathers, what was next for them?

How are they going to live?

How would they respond to the amazingly generous goodness of God?

And the book of Judges is where we find the answer to that question.

Judges is one of the most interesting and action-packed books of the Bible.

It reads like a comic book.

It's certainly one of the most violent and eventful, one of the most chaotic, one of the most depressing in some ways, probably one of the most relevant books of the Bible to our day and age.

And so as we move into this new year of ministry at Trinity, we're going to be spending some time in this strange and fascinating book.

And we're going to do so by taking a good look especially at the five major judges in the book and using their stories as case studies.

What can they and the people of Israel in their day teach us about faithfulness and unfaithfulness, about our sin and God's mercy, about the God who continually rescues and never gives up on his people?

Most of all, how can they show us Jesus?

Throughout this whole series, Jesus will help us to fix our eyes on him.

And we will see him pictured for us over and over again in spectacular ways.

But today, before we dive into the stories of the judges themselves, we're going to take some time to acclimate ourselves to their context and the new era in which they find themselves.

And it all starts with an incomplete, failed mission.

The story begins where the conquering of the promised land should have ended.

God had rescued his people from slavery in Egypt by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

He had led them through the desert and into the land that he had promised their forefathers, and he had commanded them repeatedly to completely drive out the land's inhabitants.

He knew that if they didn't, the idols of the people in the land would steal his people's hearts away.

And so he gave his people success in every battle.

He knocked down city walls, he gave them triumph after triumph after routing every enemy army.

But Israel didn't complete the mission.

They quickly lost sight of what God had commanded them to do, and in doing so, they lost sight of God Himself.

And in the first two chapters of Judges, there are nine mentions of how Israel did not drive out the idol worshippers as God had commanded.

Tribe by tribe, Israel's disobedience and failure to finish the charge given them by God is highlighted in painstaking and painful detail.

And it all culminates with God telling them that because of this, he is no longer going to drive out the nations before them, that they're going to be thorns in Israel's sides, and their false gods will be a snare to them.

And honestly, I think we know a little bit of what that's kind of like.

We know what it's like to have very clear commands from God and fail to walk in them.

We know what it's like to love our neighbor half-heartedly.

We know what it's like to love God with our heart and soul and mind and strength.

Kind of.

We know that Jesus had to come to complete the mission in our stead, because otherwise all would have been lost.

In Judges, it looks like it soon will all be lost for Israel.

Their incomplete conquest is just the beginning.

As God promises, this unfulfilled mission leads to a devastating unfaithfulness on a much broader level.

When Joshua's generation dies, the next generation arises not knowing the Lord or what he had done for them.

Again, apparently God's command to instruct their children in God's word and truth wasn't happening either.

So as a result, the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

They served the Baals.

They abandoned Yahweh and went after other gods.

Seven times he says in the book of Judges that Israel did evil in Yahweh's eyes, forgetting him, worshiping the Baals in the Ashtaroth, the pagan gods worshipped by the people they were supposed to have driven out.

The people of Israel settled down and settled into an unsettling pattern of sin that stole away their very souls.

If you're familiar with Israel's history throughout the Old Testament, you know that this pattern will continue for centuries, to devastating effect.

For Israel, this is truly a time of chaos.

It's like the Wild West in the ancient Near East.

It is well summarized by what has to be the most famous verse from the book of Judges, which makes sense not only because it so succinctly captures the age, but also because it appears not once but twice, word for word, in the book.

In those days, there was no king in Israel.

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Now don't misunderstand what this is saying.

That there is no king in Israel does not mean that Israel is simply simply in the infancy stages of their nationhood, and all they need is a better political system to be put into place.

This is no mere articles of confederation situation.

It's far worse than that.

Because the truth is, Israel does have a king.

They just refuse to acknowledge him.

Yahweh is their king.

But they're living like he's not.

They have turned their eyes away from him, despite his repeated warnings, to avoid this very thing.

And as a result, they find themselves descending into a state of social and moral and spiritual decay, a chaos that is all-encompassing and totally devastating.

When some people decide that green means stop and red means go, there are going to be lots of collisions and lots of people are going to get hurt.

Israel decides not to honor Yahweh as king, and it goes poorly.

And just to warn you ahead of time, one of the instances of that verse about no king in Israel and doing whatever is right in their own eyes, it is the very last verse of the book.

It is the definitive closing statement encapsulating the whole era.

It's an open-ended conclusion that leaves its devastating weight ringing in our ears.

And we know this too.

We float adrift in a sea of moral relativism where it is a cherished value to do what is right in his or her or they them's eyes.

We say things like, Don't judge me.

And what's right for you isn't what's right for me.

We exchange the truth of God for a lie, and we make ourselves God, the arbiters of right and wrong.

And even we, as individual followers of Jesus, have been far too comfortable assimilating to our environment.

We allow the world around us to dictate our tastes and our behaviors and our priorities, even our worldview and our identity.

This is where Israel found themselves in this time period.

And in our Old Testament reading today from Judges 2, we got a really good overbook overview of the book as a whole.

Because there we saw Israel abandoned God, so he gave them into the hands of their enemies.

But even then, God did not withhold his mercy.

He sent judges to rescue Israel.

And many people have noticed that there's a bit of a cycle that takes place in the book of Judges.

It's really kind of hard to miss, honestly, though perhaps it's better described as kind of a downward spiral.

So picture less like a circle and more a crass image that we're all familiar with.

A toilet being flushed.

It's a bit off-putting, I know, but that's kind of the point.

It's a very apt description in more ways than one.

And an easy way to kind of remember this downward spiral is with the letters A, B, C, D.

Easy enough to remember, right?

First, Israel would abandon God, turning to other gods instead of Yahweh, the one true God.

Then they were beaten down by their surrounding enemies, being horribly oppressed.

This would lead them to cry out to God for rescue.

And God would then deliver them by sending a Savior.

So again and again in the book of Judges, we see this play out as things just get worse and worse and worse.

At the end of our servant trip to Idaho this summer, both our high schoolers and middle schoolers got to spend a day at Silverwood, that amusement park over in Idaho.

And one of the classic rides there that I bet many of you have been on, if not there in other places, is a roller coaster known as the corkscrew.

Anybody been on the corkscrew wherever?

Yeah.

More of you have been on the corkscrew than remembered the theme from last week.

Um well for a few of the few of the kids uh on our trip, the corkscrew was a favorite.

Uh for most of us adults, it was a bit rough.

Because as it spins you around and around and upside down three times, it kind of throws your head back and forth against the restraints.

It beats you up.

That's Israel in the book of Judges.

They're thrown about by their sin and they have the bruises to show for it.

And yet God never gives up on his people.

And the name of the book of Judges is the proof.

Now, the English translation can be a bit misleading for us.

It's a translation of the Hebrew word shaftim, which usually means judges.

But in the context of this book, it isn't talking about the person in the courtroom with a robe and a hammer shouting order in the court.

It's not talking about Judge Judy or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

These judges are military leaders sent by God to rescue his people from foreign oppression.

They're deliverers, they're rescuers.

So perhaps a better name for the book in English would be saviors.

The judges were saviors sent by God to save his people.

But as we will see, these judges were by no means perfect.

The book of Judges is not a memorial to Israel's heroes in days of old.

And we all need that just as much as they did.

Today in Romans 7, Paul perfectly captured the vicious cycle of our own sin.

We who live in the forgiveness of God should theoretically live wholly apart from sin.

That's who we are.

But Paul honestly confesses that that's not the reality, that our sin can be unrelenting, that we have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.

We get caught up in that downward spiral, the swirling that pulls us closer and closer to the drain like a riptide.

And we're left to ask the same question that Paul asked.

The same question, by the way, that the people in the time of the judges asked over and over again.

Who will deliver me?

Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Judges is the perfect book for those who find themselves in spiritual chaos.

And Romans 7 is its perfect companion passage.

And this painfully honest, anxious, desperate question is where both of them lead us.

Who will deliver us?

And when we arrive at that question, we hear our voices begin to blend into the grand chorus of all of God's people throughout all of the ages asking the very same thing.

And God answers it every single time.

In the book of Judges, he answers in the form of Ehud and Deborah, of Gideon and Jephthah and Samson.

He answers with his saviors.

But even as these rescuers are part of a story that swirls down lower and lower, they ultimately lead us to lift our eyes to the rescuer, the deliverer, the savior.

Ultimately, the judges lead us to answer in joyful chorus with St.

Paul and his grand crescendo in Romans 7.

Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And then Paul springboards into my very favorite chapter in the entire Bible, Romans chapter 8, which proclaims that there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, that we have been set free, that all of creation will be set free, that the Spirit intercedes for us in our weakness, that God works all things together for the good, that there is nothing in this world or out of it that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Praise the Lord that we Romans 7 sinners have a Romans 8 God.

Praise the Lord that Jesus, our rescuer and deliverer and savior, takes us from Romans 7 to 70 times 7.

After spending this summer in Matthew, I thought a quick revisit of Matthew 18 was fitting today.

What do we learn there?

We've heard it three times in this past, like, I don't know, six months or so.

We learned there that God meets our unrelenting sin with his unrelenting forgiveness.

You might remember from our spring series on forgiveness how to do that particular math problem that Peter's kind of asking about that Jesus presents him.

You remember 70 times seven equals?

No, not 490.

That's our math.

What's God's math?

70 times seven?

Infinity.

God never stops forgiving.

He never gave up on Israel 3,300 years ago, and he will never give up on you.

He has rescued you from death through Jesus, who went to the cross.

And when he was on the cross, he expressed their feelings of abandonment.

He was beaten down for our sins.

He cried out to God with dereliction and confidence.

And he delivered us by his death and then his victory over it.

He suffered the downward spiral of our sin, and then he obliterated it by walking out of the grave.

And so in this series, over the next five weeks, we're going to encounter the surprising, relentless love of a God who forgives and forgives and forgives, who delivers and delivers and delivers.

We're going to come face to face with Jesus.

And he's going to show us in brand new ways how he has rescued us from our bodies of death.

It's going to be a fun ride, like the corkscrew is for some people.

I hope you're looking forward to it as much as I am.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Next week we are going to experience the story of Ehud, the left-handed assassin, a lone gun hero whose secret mission destroyed his people's enemies.

Until then, may the peace of God, which transcends our understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus our Lord, now and forever.

Amen.