When We Make the Rules, God Breaks the Game We Play

This morning, we're going to be starting a series on the book of Judges. It's an Old Testament book, and I suspect you would know perhaps not the name of it, but you'll definitely know the characters within it. Famous children's Bible story characters like Samson, we find in the book of Judges, Gideon, Deborah. It's a wonderful book of heroes, and so it's an absolute gold mine for Sunday school teachers. Great, vivid stories in the book of Judges.

The style or the genre of the book of Judges is Old Testament narrative. It tells stories or historical accounts of God's people as they make their home in the promised land that they have crossed into. This is directly after the time of Moses and Joshua. But as you will see, as we head into the book of Judges, it's not an easy read. It's not an easy book to sort of wrap your head around and to feel very good about. It's in some ways like reading the Game of Thrones, or a horrendous medieval story of intrigue and deceit and backstabbing and corruption.

On the whole, there is probably more bad stuff that happens in the book of Judges than good stuff. And yet, if you read closely through these bad stories, you can't help but see the goodness of God as He again and again makes a way. And so it's a very good book for us as believers of Jesus, God's people to know and to study as well. Tim Keller, his commentary on this book, and I recommend this, this is a Quran book, you can get that easily. It's a really nice commentary.

It's not technical, but it's a book I think you can read devotionally as well. Tim Keller, in his opening sort of chapter on this book, says this: the book of Judges shows us that the Bible is not a book of virtues. It's not a book full of inspirational stories. Why? Because the Bible, unlike the books of other religions, is not about following moral examples.

It's about a God of mercy and long suffering, who continually works in and through us despite our constant resistance to His purposes. Ultimately, there is only one hero in this book, and He's divine. God is the hero of the book of Judges, despite all these heroes, the Samsons and the Gideons and the Deborahs. These individuals, we all look at and we'll notice that they are tiny blips of good in a sea of despair. There is only one saviour in these stories and it's God.

So then we have to ask the question: well, is it worth us reading this book then? If it's such a grim story. Well, I would say yes. Because this book shows us a God who is relentlessly willing to offer grace to people who don't deserve it. This book teaches us that God wants to bring every area of our lives under His reign, not just some parts, not just the parts that we are willing to offer Him.

This book teaches us that there is a need for continual spiritual renewal, proactive decisions in how we live out our life, how we live out our faith. And then again and again, a recurring theme also is that despite situations looking hopelessly grim, God is still in charge and He always makes a way. So we are going to jump into this book by opening to the first chapter, and we're going to read chapters one and two. We'll read the first ten verses of chapter one, and then we'll read the first five verses of chapter two. Judges, the book of Judges, chapter one, verse one.

After the death of Joshua, the people of Israel inquired of the Lord, "Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites to fight against them?" The Lord said, "Judah shall go up. Behold, I have given the land into his hand." And Judah said to Simeon his brother, "Come up with me into the territory allotted to me, that we might fight against the Canaanites. And I likewise will go with you into the territory allotted to you."

So the tribe of Simeon went with him. Then the tribe of Judah went up and the Lord gave the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand, and they defeated ten thousand of them at Bezek. They found Adoni Bezek at Bezek and fought against him and defeated the Canaanites and the Perizzites. Adoni Bezek fled, but they pursued him and caught him and cut off his thumbs and his big toes. And Adoni Bezek said, "Seventy kings with their thumbs and their big toes cut off used to pick up scraps under my table.

As I have done, so God has repaid me." And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died there. And we jump ahead to chapter two, verse one. Now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bokim, 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 Bokim, which means weepers, and they sacrificed there to the Lord. So far, our reading.

The Trump boys take board games very seriously. You need your game face on when you take on the three of us. Growing up, we took it as a personal offence if someone thought board games were just a little group activity that could be had before dinner was made. No. It's not just a fun little group activity.

We were there to crush our enemies, I mean, fellow players. Needless to say, board games were a supremely competitive activity. I know that Vince's here are a bit like that with you, you know? And woe betide anyone who dared to cheat or slightly bend the rules for their own benefit.

Well, it would end up something a little like this Monopoly meme that I saw on Facebook the other day. That's not a picture of our house by the way, but you see the Monopoly pieces all over the place. Someone did not win. There's something in us that doesn't mind or is often tempted to change the rules for our benefit, especially when it comes to a board game. It is not considered cheating if you interpret the rules in a slightly more beneficial way.

If we find a loophole, or if we can fudge the lines to suit our own needs, we can be very tempted to do so. This is a human condition. We've seen that even in this time of the coronavirus, where we saw the national health minister of New Zealand break his own lockdown laws when his whole country was in lockdown and chose to take his family to the beach. The health minister of New Zealand. In the UK, we also know something similar happened to the senior adviser of the Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

This adviser decided to drive two hundred and eighty miles to visit his family during the lockdown. There's something in us and something similar that is happening here in the opening chapters of the book of Judges. What we see here is the first steps of Israel into the promised land. While they've been given very clear instructions by the likes of Moses and Joshua of what God wanted them to do, when it came to actually doing these things, well, the rules started to get bent. Compromises were being made.

We see this happening in Judges one and two, and it's a pattern that will continue throughout the whole book. It's a great summary, chapters one and two, of what is going to follow. And this is the point that Judges chapters one and two is making: when we make the rules, God is happy to break the game. And that's what we see here with Israel, God's chosen people.

But how does it get to this point? God makes that promise, doesn't He, in chapter two, that I'm going to give you over to these enemies. How do we get to that point? Well, let's have a look at how it all starts. The first steps in the promised land.

We read in verses one and two in your Bibles that Joshua has died. Joshua was the leader of the people after Moses, who was a capable and an organised general. Joshua was a fighter where Moses was a statesman. He will take these people into the promised land. It seems that Israel don't start to immediately conquer the promised land when they cross the Jordan initially.

We see in chapter two, verses six to ten, that the people here have been living in the south of Canaan for a while, long enough for Joshua to actually die there. Joshua dies just across the border in Canaan at the age of one hundred and ten. And the passage says that the people of God continued serving the Lord during the days of Joshua. They were faithful to God. And not just Joshua, but the elders that worked with Joshua and among the people.

And yet, here in verses one and two of chapter one, it says that the people now that Joshua has died decide to make a move. They're about to start taking some territory. And it says that they inquired of the Lord, "Who should be the first to take on the Canaanites? Who should be the first to start conquering these settlements?" And God tells them that Judah, the tribe of Judah, is the one to go.

Then in the next sort of section from verse three to verse twenty-one, we see the conquest of both Judah and the tribe of Simeon, as they start taking these stronghold cities of the southern parts of Canaan. We find the people of Judah asking their cousins, the tribe of Simeon, to join them, to ally with them as they start taking this territory. And it's fine for Simeon because Simeon has been promised these southern parts as well. So it makes sense that these two tribes start taking this territory. All in all, this is a good start.

This is exactly what God said would happen. This is the area that Judah would have according to God's will. This is the area that Simeon should have, and we find that they are successful. They do conquer these cities. They do drive out the Canaanites and the various other people groups.

They are being obedient to what God had told them through Moses and Joshua. And they're successful because of it. At one point, they capture a local king by the name of Adoni Bezek, whose big toes and thumbs are cut off. Now we're to understand that this is an act of justice, because he confesses in that passage we read of doing the same to his enemies, up to seventy other kings, who he says became beggars eating food scraps from his table. This little detail also starts hinting at what God has been promising to do and how to use Israel, that Israel would be a tool of justice.

That God's judgment would fall on these nations. In the book of Genesis, when God promises Abraham to give him the land and his descendants the land of Canaan, God says, "It won't happen in your time yet, Abraham, because the sins of the people in this land has not yet reached the level that it needs to." God was patiently waiting. But now it seems the crimes of these nations have been endured by God long enough and His justice will be meted out. The gift of the promised land to Israel is then not simply a gift of grace for their own comfort, it is also the drop of a judge's hammer on the nations who had rejected God somewhere along the line.

Now, for some of us, we get uncomfortable and we will be uncomfortable in the book of Judges hearing about these sort of stories, the story of Adoni Bezek and what happens to this man. How can someone believe in a God? And we can rightly ask this, and I've got non-Christian friends that have asked me this. How can you believe in a God who commands the slaughter of Canaanites, or Philistines, or Perizzites, or Hittites in these parts of the Bible? My friends say this as a way of saying, "This is why I can't believe in your God."

So it's worthwhile for us to think a little bit about that as we move through this passage. In his book, Skeletons in God's Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler wrestles with this very issue. He sympathises with the inclination in our hearts to recoil at the idea that God could do such a thing, could command such a thing. But as he wrestles with this, he helpfully points out a few things that I think is important also for us to know, that gives us a little bit of a better insight rather than sort of a cursory glance at these stories. Firstly, Butler makes the point that God isn't crushing weaklings in these stories.

He is taking on the big bad bullies of the ancient world. It's easy to miss it as we sit on this side of history, but back here, Israel is a ragtag group of slaves, going up against the mightiest powerhouses of their time. When they left Egypt, they didn't wander into the desert and find a cache of AK-47s lying there. Whatever they have when they go against these nations is whatever they've cobbled up in the desert over forty years. Canaan, in contrast, has the most advanced weapons of the day.

In this first chapter even, verse nineteen, we read that Judah fails to drive out some of the Canaanites in the plain country, in the plains of these southern parts, because they had chariots of iron. Remember how the Israelites feared the Egyptians who also had chariots? Chariots make quick work of slaves on foot. Horses or mules, as they probably would have had, outrun ground fighters every time. God isn't crushing a weakling, He's using Israel to take on the big bad bullies.

Butler writes, "Ancient Israel is a lone kindergartener taking on the whole high school senior class with a wiffle bat," which is those spongy baseball bats that kids use. "Israel's only hope is that God fights for her." So first, we have to see how supremely weak and what an underdog Israel is. Secondly, God gives Israel the most ridiculous strategies to conquer these enemies. One of the first conquests in the promised land is, you probably know, the heavily fortified city of Jericho.

What is the strategy for conquering Jericho? Is it to build catapults to break down those walls? Is it to send guerrilla troops over the walls at night to capture the gatehouse to let them in? Nope. It's walking around the wall seven times and then blowing trumpets.

Can you imagine the Allied forces in World War Two storming the beaches of Normandy with a guitar and a tambourine? This is not a strategy for success, it is a recipe for disaster. The same pattern is repeated again and again in the book of Judges. When Israel is faithful to God, God brings a Gideon, the judge, who takes on an army with pots and pans. Samson, a judge, takes on enemies attacking him with swords and spears.

What does he take them on with? A bazooka? No. A donkey's jawbone. In other words, Butler says, it is not Israel taking on enemies for God, God is taking on enemies for Israel.

Then one of the third most important things here, I think, is to realise the language of the Bible as they talk about these events. Israel is commanded to conquer cities, it says. The Hebrew is yar. That's the word for these cities. They are strongholds like Jericho, fortified cities with military backing.

Israel were told to conquer and destroy these strongholds, so that the surrounding villages would realise they've been conquered and move out of the territory. Repeatedly, God tells Israel to drive out the people. You'll probably hear that in our readings as well. Driving out is different to killing off. While there are instances of entire cities being destroyed, the overall aim is that the surrounding inhabitants would be driven out.

It's the language of eviction rather than murder. And so, even as God's judgment falls on these nations, who have been living for generations in ways contrary to God's supreme law, it is their leaders who are judged. It is their militaries that are destroyed. And we see again and again, people are given second chances, even in these nations. Rahab in the town of Jericho spares the spies of the Israelites, and her family are protected and included in the people of God.

So when I try to answer this tricky, hard question, "Can you believe in a God who commands warfare?" I explain that injustice got the justice it deserved. That Israel was a vehicle and a metaphor of the power, the justice, and even the mercy of God. And so what's happening here with this local king, Adoni Bezek in verses five to seven, who loses his thumbs and his big toes, while he receives the direct and comparable justice of his treatment of up to seventy other local rulers. So we see the first steps of Israel into the promised land. But then we come to the second point.

A good start turns into a false start. Things are starting to look pretty promising in the promised land. The biggest tribe of Israel, Judah, is starting to gain some serious footholds in the southern parts. The second tribe, Simeon, is also starting to settle in their lands. And yet, even this early on, we start seeing some of the cracks starting to appear.

In verses twenty-two to twenty-five, we see an incident where the tribe of Manasseh and Ephraim, called here in the ESV the tribe of Joseph. Joseph being, you know, the one with the technicolour dream coat. There's always one in the family who has the nicest clothes. Joseph's descendants attack and start driving back parts that they would inherit. And they attack a stronghold city called Bethel.

And it says in the passage that the Lord is with them. Even as they go towards Bethel, it says they know that God is with them. They meet a man on the road who belongs, who lives in Bethel, and they make a deal with him. "If you can somehow get us in, if you can somehow show us where to go, we will spare you." It says that this tribe, they conquer the city of Bethel.

They spare this man as they've made this agreement with him. What happens? He walks down the road, he starts another city called Luz, which was the same name for Bethel that these people had. And what is happening is pretty much that whack a mole game. You hit one mole, he goes down, and another Canaanite city pops up.

Have they gained any ground? They haven't. They've conquered one, they've set up another. They are rewriting God's will, even as they know God is with them, even as they know this is their victory. This incident sets up a sequence of deteriorating other incidents, which follows in verses twenty-seven through to the end of the chapter.

Verse twenty-seven starts with these words: "Manasseh, the tribe did not drive out the inhabitants of Bethshean and its villages, or Taanach and its villages, or the inhabitants of Dor and its villages, or the inhabitants of Ibleam and its villages, or the inhabitants of Megiddo and its villages, for the Canaanites persisted in dwelling in that land." And so you see the promising start of the chapter starting to unravel, and it gets progressively worse. Have a listen to this. First, in the verses of twenty-seven through to thirty, we see the wording that it's the Canaanites who are living amongst the Israelites. The Israelites are the majority group.

The Canaanites are dispersed amongst them. Start heading down, you get to verses thirty-one to thirty-three, and the wording changes, and it says that the Israelites, particularly here the tribe of Asher, is living amongst the Canaanites. And then finally, at the end of the chapter in verse thirty-four, we see that the tribe of Dan is pushed back into the hills and are confined to live there, while the majority of the Canaanites live on their own in the plains. This is not the way that things were supposed to go. What's been the problem?

Why has there been no success? How do we end up here after a pretty good start? Well, it's because Israel overlooked this very thing. The enemy that no one ever sees coming. This disappointment leads people to see that the main question that the book of Judges is actually trying to deal with, that the main reason that the original author wrote the book of Judges is to answer this very question: why has Israel failed at capturing the promised land?

Where has it gone wrong? And the answer to that question, the book will explain, is because of the apostasy of God's people. God's people turn their back on God. During a study tour in Israel, and I think I have mentioned this before, we went into this very exact area that the Israelites first started conquering, in the south of Israel. And we went to an archaeological dig site of one of these little towns.

And it's amazing, I mean, these border towns especially, were ones that were conquered and reconquered over the thousands of years. And I mean, they would be levelled, and then on top of that, they would be rebuilt, and then levelled again. And so, as you dig, as these archaeologists dig down, they can see the burn lines, they call it, of every generation that was destroyed and rebuilt. And so they can actually, very accurately, discover whereabouts the conquest of God's people Israel in the entering of the promised land was. They can say, "This is more or less that time."

And so they've dug in places to this sort of level to see what is there. And when we got to this particular dig site, the tour guide took us to just a little house that would have been owned by some sort of commoner in the city. And in one of the rooms, lo and behold, there is this statue. And the tour guide says, "What do you think this is?" And we couldn't figure out what it is.

And he says, "It's a statue of Baal. It's a statue of the local fertility gods that the Canaanites worshipped." When God had commanded the Israelites to claim to take the land that He was giving them, to make it the kingdom of God that they would live in, they started living as if they were Canaanites. They became indistinguishable from their neighbours. What happened is that Israel, commanded to establish this promised land as a kingdom under the reign of God.

As people move to acknowledge God as their only saviour, as their true king, the people become like the rest of the land. This is exactly what happens or what we read about in Judges 2:1-3 that we read earlier. The angel of the Lord, verse one, went up from Gilgal to Bokem, and he said to the people there, "I brought you up from Egypt, and I brought you into the land that I swore to give your fathers. I said, I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land." What does Manasseh do?

They make an agreement with that man. "And you shall break down their altars. But you have not obeyed my voice. What is it that you have done? 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."

The enemy that no one ever sees coming is not the enemy out there. It's not the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hittites. It's the enemy within. It's the enemy that lives beneath our skin, crawls in our bones. Israel thought by conquering physical enemies that they would be safe, but that wasn't the real threat.

It's the desire to do it our way. It's the worship of self rather than God. That is what idolatry is. That statue in that little house is just a manifestation of what we are trying to conjure up for our own sake. When we blend the values of God, His will for our lives, with the will of the people around us.

When we lazily adopt everything that people around us are saying loudly and repetitively enough for us to start believing. When we go down the slow decline of one small compromise, followed by another small compromise, it all results in the same thing: defeat. We are not Christians today living in a Christendom that has values that we can intuitively adopt and accept. We are closer to the Israelites in the land of Canaan that have to fight to believe God despite everything that they see around them. This is why the book of Judges is such a hard-hitting book for our generations.

We are not the powerful trying to stem the tide of rebels. We are the puny, insignificant Israelites being overcome by those around us. So if we were to think that in Australia, how we fight this, how we find a solution, is a return to some sort of Christendom, we are mistaken. Frankly, while Christendom may not have been a bad thing, Christendom in many ways instituted some good things, it brought about a lot of bad as well. The solution won't be by trying to reclaim some long lost era of reclaiming metaphorical strongholds and, you know, dominating the media again, or politics again, or schooling again.

That way is to think that Israel would have won by conquering Jericho simply and conquering Jerusalem simply. The book of Judges shows us that even as they were winning, they were losing. Because they never consistently understood the critical point: the enemy out there is not half as powerful as the enemy within. Every time a Christian fails, they fail not because they live under a progressive Prime Minister who has progressive laws. Every time a Christian fails, they fail not because they were educated at a liberal university, or because they listen to CNN or ABC or The Project on Channel Nine or Ten.

Every time a Christian fails, they fail for the exact same reason as the Israelites failed. They don't believe God. They don't obey. They don't trust. The Israelites didn't consistently believe in the revelation that God is God.

And when we fail, we're doing the same thing. When we fall, it's not so much that we haven't believed in God, we maintain some belief in God, it's that we don't obey His will. We don't believe God and what He said. It's as simple as that. Disobedience therefore becomes a practical atheism. The commands: "You shall not steal. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not bear false witness. You will love your neighbour as you love yourself."

We don't do those things because we don't believe that God's commands are directed at me, for my life. They may apply in some conceptual ideal for people generally. Maybe next to each sentence as we read it in Scripture, there's a little asterisk, we think, that says in the footnote, "These are true for everyone but me." And it only takes a couple of Israelite spies to make a compromise agreement with the Canaanites, who goes on to build another Canaanite town with exactly the same name down the road. It only takes one Israelite to see the green fields of the promised land of Canaan, to think to himself, "Wow, these people were prosperous.

They must have good gods. I want to be prosperous. If this pattern works for them, maybe it works for me." And so keeping one eye on God, another eye on their neighbour, that Israelite hides a little idol, and it's not about the physical idol. They hide a little bit away from God, and they become wealthy.

And this one little Israelite influences and is seen by a single town. And they say, "How is this man able to become so prosperous when he lives this double life? I want to be prosperous. Maybe if I compromise here, maybe if I worship both God and wealth, maybe I can make it on my own as well." And one by one, a village influences another village, and an entire nation can fall into the same pattern of disbelief.

Why? Because a flood starts with a single drop. When we choose to wilfully do what God has told us not to do, we commit ourselves to idolatry. We don't believe that God is God. We don't believe that His will for our lives is true for every single one of us across every single generation.

Somehow we rationalise to ourselves that we are the special ones, that we are not the ones to which God's will applies. We say destroying the idols of the Canaanites, that would only be necessary for weak individuals who can't juggle between being believers, but also being clever. Also being shrewd. We say to ourselves, "I'm strong. I'm very careful.

I am the only one who won't get lost in the compromise." How arrogant we are. How little do we know our own hearts. What does the Bible say happens when God's people fail to believe? Well, we see again and again that God hands His people over in the book of Judges.

He hands them over to the Canaanites, He hands them over to the Amorites, to the Philistines, He hands them over to the very enemies they were wanting to conquer. When Israel makes the rules, God breaks the games they play. Israel, who were the tool of God's justice, become the object of that very justice themselves. Even in the New Testament, we know that God is not shy about doing the same to the church. Remember the words that the Lord Jesus said to the church in Ephesus in Revelation 2?

"You have abandoned the love you had at first. Repent, otherwise, I will come and remove your lampstand from you." That lampstand is the presence of God. That can be removed from an individual church. When God's people become indistinguishable from its culture, the Lord acts.

If you have a look just a little bit further in chapter 2, verse 15, again, there's a summary statement here that gives us an indication of what happened after this. "Whenever they, Israel, 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." But as devastating as God's justice is, as swift as His judgment can be, so amazing is His mercy. I'm stunned by the mercy of God in the book of Judges and that is why it's worth us reading as well. God is so patient.

God is so gracious. Again and again, He brings a deliverer. These judges that rescue Israel, that bring them back to knowing God. I'm staggered with God's patience. I'm not a patient man.

I've been trying to call Telstra. Has anyone tried calling Telstra in coronavirus time? Impossible. Your call is important to us. We'll wait six months before we call you back.

I'm not a patient man. God waits generations. Look at verse sixteen, the very next verse after fifteen that we just read. Verse sixteen in chapter two: "Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them." God is merciful.

And so even as we wrestle with these things, even as we make the lame excuses that we make, we say we think we're doing God's will, and yet, we don't study God's will. We make up excuses. We can't join small groups of Bible studies. We're too busy. We don't know God's will, but we think we're more or less doing God's will.

How do we know? We don't even do the basics. And yet God is merciful. And His mercy is on you every day, every generation. God raises up saviours and He raised up our saviour Jesus.

He is our hope. He is the one who has defeated this self-destruction of our hearts, this enemy within, once and for all. And so He is our hope. Even as we feel the weight of this brokenness, even as we recognise glimpses of it in our own lives, in our own culture, our hope is that God is the one who saves. And He has saved us in Jesus Christ.

Let's be warned that when we make up the rules for ourselves, God can break those games we play. Let's pray. Father, we commit our lives to You again in view of Your great mercy, in view of Your absolute unwavering demand for justice. Our God, where there are areas in our life that we know that You have been showing to us again and again, and we have for whatever reason tried to ignore, refused to obey, let today be the day we change. Let today be the day that we make the right decisions.

Help us to see that it's not simply that we believe in God, we believe God. We believe His will is true for our lives. Oh, God. And then we also believe, thankfully, that You are quick to forgive, that You're quick to restore, that You are endlessly patient, long suffering, merciful. And we see that in Jesus Christ, who again gives us the hope that there is strength in us, that we are more than conquerors, not in and of ourselves.

We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. God, help us to see the enemy within. Help us to push back and drive out those enemies in our lives. And then, God, even as we live in a land very foreign to You, increasingly so, help us to live lives that are distinguishable, lives that are different, wholesome, righteous, godly. Give us the strength and the endurance, the patience, the will to do these things through the Holy Spirit who equips us.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.