Unfaithfulness rarely begins with one grand rejection of God; it grows through small compromises that seem harmless because life is still going well. In Judges 1, Israel receives clear direction and real success, then starts choosing what feels easier, safer, and more efficient. How far can those little shortcuts carry God’s people from him?
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Well, sort of continuing with the theme, we are actually continuing Gone Fishing tonight. I guess the computer wanted to go back to times when things went more smoothly, so it deleted the opening for this week that was really supposed to be last week, and we went back two weeks. But we are actually turning to Judges, which kind of actually fits because a lot of times when we look at how we behave, it’s an awful lot like computers. Because we give them a nice clear plan, and what do they do? They decide to do whatever they want.
The Book of Judges, if you’re really looking for what the Book of Judges is about, it’s about people who have clear guidance, who do whatever it is that they want instead. The question is, when we do that, which we do, do we realize it?
About 15 years ago, Domino’s ran a famous ad campaign that came out of a series of focus groups—the groups where everyone’s supposed to come in and try the new thing and see how wonderful it is. They brought in the people to their focus group and asked them to talk about their pizza, only it didn’t quite go how they had expected. Instead of saying, “Oh, it’s so delicious, I love the cheese, I love the sauce,” they got comments like, “It tastes like cardboard,” “It tastes like something I’d give someone I didn’t like.” This is an excuse for pizza?
And it ended up being a wake-up call for the leadership of Domino’s in which they decided, you know what we need to do? We need to go ahead and admit this because our focus group is not weird, and others are going to be thinking this too. So what we’re going to do is actually run commercials where we show clips from the focus group where people talk about how bad we are and what we’re doing about it.
What was interesting about that, I think, is that they recognized how they’d messed up. They recognized that they had gotten it wrong, but they recognized that after they’d gotten it very, very wrong. How did it happen? Well, it didn’t happen all just in a snap of a finger, you could say, “Ah, here was the one decision that they made,” and that decision went from pizza that was good enough that people all over the country bought it and it became a giant pizza chain to a sorry excuse for pizza. No, it was cut in corners here and there and everywhere a little bit at a time. As Hemingway talked about going bankrupt, it came very slowly and then all at once. They finally admitted it. That’s the key thing, but they didn’t realize it for a long time because it happened so slowly.
And that’s what we see in the book of Judges at first here. If we look at the Israelites, no one’s going to mistake the Israelites at any point of being, “Wow, look at these faithful people that just always listen to what God says,” at least if you read more than a few verses, right? Because they keep messing up. But under the leadership of Joshua, they come into the land, and they come into the land largely doing what God has called them to do. And when they don’t do what God’s called them to do, they’re quick to try to rectify it. The book of Judges says, though, that doesn’t last. And it doesn’t last because of a little series of compromises very slowly that eventually lead to the all at once of judgment and being estranged from God and not really being able to enjoy a relationship with the Lord anymore because they’re so far from him.
Why would they be tempted to do that? They’ve been given the promised land. They’ve been taken out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. All this is going so well. Why? Why would they cut corners? I think the simple answer is the very same one that struck Domino’s. Success is what causes us to cut corners because you think, “I’m doing so well, I don’t need to be as careful anymore,” or “I can be a little more successful.” And we can see that as the Israelites go into the land because it feels like everything’s going well for them. I mean, think about it.
One of the most powerful entities known to humanity up to that point, the Egyptian army, can’t stop them. They’re out in the wilderness and various groups want to attack them. That can’t stop them. A bunch of venomous snakes come after them by their own unfaithfulness, mind you, but it comes after them. And what happens? Well, most of them survive. Why? Because God’s provided for them. So then they arrive at the land of Canaan and they go in on dry land and they conquer Jericho in spectacular fashion. If all this happened, they have success.
In that success, it becomes tempting to believe your own hype, to believe that somehow you’re the reason for the success, and that the things that you’ve been called to do on the way to that success aren’t really necessary anymore. As much as we like to say this is an Israelite problem, it’s a human problem. And if you’ve ever been successful at anything, you’ve probably felt that temptation, and all of us have been successful. You might say, “Well, Tim, I’m never successful.” All of us have done something well. And you know what happens when we’ve done something well? We think, “I did that pretty well.” And that’s the point where we’re in danger of becoming unfaithful.
That’s what our series is going to be taking us into over the next few weeks. Where are those places where we become unfaithful? So let’s go ahead and pray that God would help us, not just to see the foibles of these people long ago. Look at these stupid people long ago that couldn’t get things right, but to see how were those people. Will you pray with me, please?
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Would you help us to hear your word and to have it applied to our hearts? Would you help us to see those places where we depart little by little, we cut corners, we miss out on doing what you’ve called us to do, miss out on the joy of serving you and following you. Lord, would you help us, we pray this night. We ask this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Here’s the challenge in all that, because it doesn’t seem to make sense. I mean, if God’s helping us and doing it God’s way is what leads to success, then why do we do otherwise? Well, the reason we do otherwise is because at first we ride on that success and the corner cutting appears to work. Let’s take a look at verses one to seven, Judges chapter one, if you want to turn there with me.
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?” And 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 may fight against the Canaanites and I likewise will go with you into the territory allotted to you.” So Simeon went with him.
And Judah went up and the Lord gave the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hands, and they defeated 10,000 of them at Bezek. And they found Adonai Bezek at Bezek and fought against him and defeated the Canaanites and the Perizzites. Adonai Bezek fled, but they pursued him and caught him and cut off his thumbs and his big toes. And Adonai Bezek said, “Seventy kings with their thumbs and their big toes cut off used to pick up scraps under my table and as I have done so, God has repaid me.” And they brought him to Jerusalem and he died there.
So we start with Joshua’s death and that’s one big challenge and one that we all should be thinking about. It’s very hard for faithfulness to be relayed over generations. If you look at any point in history, you might see a time where there’s a revival and people turn to the Lord and it’s so hard to carry on to that next generation. And we see that here.
It’s a good warning to all of us that we need to be constantly thinking, how do we relay it both the truth of God’s word and faithfulness to God’s word? How do we relay that to both those who are spiritually younger than us and physically younger than us? Right? Because all of us have a role in that and it’s never too soon to start thinking about that.
If you’re young or old or somewhere in between, all of us have people who look up to us in some way and you know what we need to be doing? We need to be relaying this to them. And you can see even when you have someone very faithful like Joshua, Joshua is a great example, right? Joshua is not the sort of person that we’re going to spend the next few minutes beating up on and saying, look, if only Joshua had done a better job. That’s not the point at all. Joshua did a good job in as much as possible, it would seem, but it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s really, really hard to pass along, even when you have some pretty good follow-up leaders.
And that’s what we see in part that now there’s a new era here because they’ve entered the land, Joshua’s led them, but Joshua has died. What are they going to do next? Say you found a pizza place and then you retire and you hand it off to the next generation. Do they understand what made it a success? Part of what obscures that success is when we’ve been a part of it, but now we’re the one that’s actually going to need to convey it and we cut corners.
You can see that over the last century in the American church, where at times the churches were massively full, right? Let’s drive around this area and look at all the giant churches that can hold 300, 400, 500, 1,000 people and don’t anymore. How do we get there? How do we get to the point where so many fewer people in general go to church now than say 30, 40, 50 years ago? Part of that is it’s very, it’s that challenge. And part of it is not just the relay, but how we cut corners as we go.
Where have we cut corners as Christians in our society? You can see it in little bits if you look where it’s like, well, we don’t really need to be faithful in this way to the Lord anymore. We will be faithful in most ways. And then the next generation says, well, that works. How about we shave off a few more areas? And soon it becomes, well, why are we going at all?
If you think about the book of Judges, it’s sort of a picture over and over again of these sorts of challenges where there are people who understood and then the Lord, they disobey, the Lord rescues them. And there’s a time in which people are following God, but then it’s easier not to. But when there’s success, when the pews are full, when the economy is good, when things are great, it’s really easy to lose sight.
And note here, they’re going into the land, God’s blessing them with the land. They’re getting control of it, generally speaking. So for the most part, it seems pretty good. What’s the problem here? You know, we’re doing, we’re mostly doing what God said. Yeah, sometimes we find something that’s better to do than study his word. But for the most part, we listen.
We’re watching for the telltale signs. There’s a key one here, right here in these first few verses that you can see, and that’s Adonai Bezek, which we might at first, if we’re not paying attention to the rest of the instruction to go into the land, think is actually a picture of success.
And this is one of those challenges of a shortcut that actually doesn’t look like a shortcut. What happens? They capture him and they do what he had done to those whom he’d captured. They cut off his thumbs and his big toes. Why do you do that? To insult him, to make it harder for him to function, but also to make him no longer fit to be a priest-king, which many of the early kings of the land were considered to be both a high priest and a king. Now he’s not worthy to do that. He’s now someone who has a disfigurement that would have been viewed as making him not worthy to represent his people before the gods.
And we’re in a land where they believe there are multiple gods. I think as nice as it sounds when Adonai Bezek says that now the Lord has repaid me, he’s not necessarily saying he’s come to a full and complete conversion and understands who the Lord is. What he’s saying is their God got the best of my gods this time, and now that’s happened to me.
Well, okay, so he’s a pagan, Canaanite, what’s the big deal? The big deal is what they did with him. They weren’t called, they were not called at all to humiliate the kings of the land. They were called to purge the land. That sounds brutal. It does sound brutal, but it’s what God called them to do.
Take a look back in Joshua 10, verse 26, and afterward, Joshua struck them and put them to death, and he hanged them on five trees, and they hung on the trees until evening. We say, look, they became more civil. They didn’t kill the kings. They just cut their fingers off. And if I were one of those kings, surely I would much rather have my fingers cut off and be humiliated than be killed.
Question is, what did God call them to do? And one of the things, and this is something that challenges a lot of people with the Old Testament, but it’s a very narrow command specifically for this one particular mission. When they went into the land, they weren’t to take prisoners. They weren’t to build up domination over the groups in there. They were to kill them. You say, “Well, that sounds savage,” but it’s really a matter of understanding what their particular purpose was.
This was a command God gave only to the Israelites and only at this moment. Why did he do that? He sent them in there to take this land that was for them. He only sent them in once the wickedness of the people of the land had reached a point where it was time for judgment to come upon them.
That’s very clear. Abraham doesn’t get to just move in and move his family there and take it all over and stay there. Israel spent those four centuries in Egypt because it wasn’t time yet. The people weren’t all wicked yet, but now they’ve reached the point where judgment is appropriate and proper, and God sends the people in to be his judgment, but it’s more than judgment. They’re called then to be there and to live in that land as priests, as those who represent the Lord.
And they thought, well, we can get an edge on this one particular king by making him no longer fit to be a priest. He won’t have his thumbs and he won’t have his big toes and people won’t accept him as a priest. What they were missing was the fact they were supposed to purify the land of all the wickedness, and they were supposed to be there as a holy people doing God’s work without anyone in the land that opposed the Lord. And it wasn’t about somehow humiliating those who didn’t follow the Lord, but actually having one place on earth where you could look and just see the pure worship of God so the others could look at that and see what God was doing in that space, and they would know who the Lord was and they would come to know him.
Joshua kept the command. The armies had been taken out by the five kings that intended to kill the Israelites. Instead, they had had triumph. God had given it to them, just as we see success here, but he followed the command.
Now they soften it. It’s so tempting to do it. We see this over and over again just in this first chapter. If we go forward, for example, to verse 17, Judah went with Simeon, his brother, and they defeated the Canaanites who inhabited Zephath and devoted it to destruction, so the name of the city was called Hormah.
Judah also captured Gaza with his territory and Ashkelon with his territory and Ekron with his territory. Judah seems to be doing well, right? They go in, they take the land, they follow the command. This is a land that God’s judgment is coming upon. They take that judgment and they take the land. Isn’t that great? Someone gets it, right? Judah got it.
But we see over and over again that is the exception. For example, the Benjamites, they don’t have a story of cutting off anyone’s thumbs. They just go into the place that’s ultimately called Jerusalem and they settle there and they say, “You know, there’s all these other people around, we don’t really want to fight them. How about we just live with them?” And so they move in and they settle with the Jebusites because it seems as though they really just didn’t bother to do anything.
So we have direct active disobedience, like what they did with the king and cutting off his thumbs. And then we have more apathetic disobedience. And both those seem to work, right? Benjamin gets to settle with the people of the land and they get to settle peacefully and they get to go about their lives. Some of these other places are taken hold of largely and the people there are humiliated. But over and over again, we see these failures.
And for example, we saw an earlier failure in Joshua 15, where Judah tried to take Jerusalem and failed. That particular spot becomes a story over and over a failure and it’s not until David takes it long thereafter, centuries after, that it actually becomes the city that’s the capital of God’s people where the temple will be built. Likewise Asher, what do they do? They do just like the Benjamites. In verse 32, we see that they just move in too.
But the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the people of Judah could not drive out. So the Jebusites dwell with the people of Judah at Jerusalem to this day. Over and over again, we see this refrain of the people’s just settling.
So they come into the land with delicious pizza. It’s steaming hot. The sauce is perfect. The pepperoni is perfect. The cheese is perfect. Everything’s perfect. And by the time they start to have some success and they’ve opened up new franchise stores and stuff, you know what happens? The testimony pizza of Israel starts to taste like cardboard.
One of the really interesting cases is a city called Luz, which ultimately is known as Bethel. Verse 23: The house of Joseph scouted out Bethel. Now the name of the city was formerly Luz. And the spies saw a man coming out of the city and they said, “Please show us the way into the city and we will deal kindly with you.” And he showed them the way into the city and they struck the city with the edge of the sword, but they let the man and all his family go. And the man went to the land of the Hittites and built a city and called its name Luz. That is its name to this day.
Notice here, something really interesting. You may say, well, that sounds familiar. We saw that story in Joshua, right? They arrive at Jericho. Who do they run into in Jericho? Famous person who is in the line of the Messiah. They run into Rahab and you have that amazing story where she recognizes spies and hides them and allows them to survive. And in exchange, when the walls fall and the attack happens, she and her family are not harmed.
But notice what happens. She recognized who the Lord was and actually becomes a part of the story of the Messiah. We see something very different here. They don’t go in and see someone who’s willing to help them in a time where they’re vulnerable and actually recognizes what the Lord’s doing and wants to be a part of what the Lord’s doing. They go in, they find someone and say, “You know, how about you work with us and we can take this place.” Nevermind that God’s enabled them to take all kinds of places already. They say, well, what if we make a deal instead?
So they, without talking to the Lord and without seeing any sense from this man or his family, they actually want anything to do with the Lord, let them go. And what do they do? They establish another site that’s ultimately false worship. Bethel itself feels sort of marred by this. It’s the first place where the tabernacle gets a permanent home, the place where people are worshiping the Lord in the land of Israel, but it will ultimately be a place of idolatry in the land. And I think it goes all the way back to its founding here as an Israelite city, that they didn’t really care about what the Lord was saying.
What’s the harm? They got to live there, but they compromised as they did.
Some of the movement of the tribes even leads to nice spoils of war. Take a look at verses 34 and 35. The Amorites pressed the people of Dan into the hill country, for they did not allow them to come back down to the plain. The Amorites persisted in dwelling in Mount Heres, in Eijalon, and in Shalal Bim, but the hand of the house of Joseph rested heavily on them and they became subject to forced labor.
Hey, now we’re talking. Okay. They didn’t let the people go. They didn’t just embarrass them. They actually make them work for them, right? We’ll just enslave them as forced laborers and that will work out, right? Now we’re getting into business. Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? That’s not what God called them to do. They say, well, God called us to come in and purge the land of everything, but isn’t it so much better if we just make the people work for us? Think of all the things we don’t have to do then. We have people we don’t have to even pay. We just make them work. You want to live? You’re working for us. Deal? Deal.
But it wasn’t faithful. Sort of like compromising on the dough seems great when you save so much per pizza, but it tastes bad. It doesn’t seem that important in the moment because we don’t know what we’re actually doing.
Some of the younger members of our family here won’t even probably recognize the name ValueJet. Anyone remember ValueJet? A few of you. I get one hand, two hands. We don’t have a lot of ValueJet remembers here, and for good reason.
ValueJet came out in the early ‘90s, and the idea was they were going to buy the planes that other airlines have retired, so they’d have a cheap fleet of planes, and they’d offer really cheap flights. It sounds pretty good, right? You paint a nice, really happy, smiling jet on the side of the plane, and presto, you have this wonderful, wonderful discount airline, and it seemed to start going pretty well. All they needed to do was keep the costs low continually so that as they went about their business, they could continue to offer these discount flights.
Well, after several years of using these old jets, and using these old jets with also reduced maintenance because they were trying to save money, things started to break. 1995, the federal government actually banned in several departments using ValueJet to shuttle federal employees because they weren’t convinced that it was safe to, but ValueJet continued to fly. It didn’t seem to hurt because they were growing, and going to more cities, and people were saving money, and wasn’t it great, until 1996 when not one, but two ValueJet planes crashed. They were preventable crashes. It was lack of maintenance. They weren’t making sure all the bolts were secure, and weren’t corroding. Over time, these planes that needed attention weren’t getting that attention, and it seemed to work until it didn’t.
That’s sin. When we think about our sin, it seems to work until it doesn’t. Taking the people as forced labor rather than being faithful to the Lord, it seems to not just work. It seems to work really well. Standing branch offices, this is going great, until suddenly they find themselves straying from the Lord and worshiping the other gods, the exact reason why God had given them that very harsh but intentional command to clear the land.
What sins are in my life that are corrosive? What sins are in your life that are corrosive? You know what the world wants us to do? It wants us to look and deem whether sin is important or not on whether it is efficient or not. Certain sins get us ahead. Certain sins cause people to like us. Certain sins are the right response to the sinful world, because if they’re doing it, at least we’ll do it too, and we’ll get ahead. Those sorts of sins seem fine, and you know what? A lot of times it works in the moment.
Is it efficient? Seems like it’s efficient to take a bunch of the idol worshipers in the land and make them work for you, because they’re idol worshipers, and they’re bad, but they’re also useful human bodies that can do things, so you don’t have to do them. It seems like it’s a pretty good deal, but God didn’t send them into the land to ask if it was efficient. God sent them into the land telling them to ask, “Is it good? Am I doing what God’s called me to do?”
Cutting corners bites us. We think back to verses 17 and 18 we looked at a moment ago: “Judah went with Simeon, his brother, and they defeated the Canaanites who inhabited Zephath, and they devoted it to destruction, so the name of the city was called Horma. Judah also captured Gaza and its territory, and Ashkelon with its territory, and Akron with its territory, and the Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country.”
But here’s the part we didn’t look at earlier: He could not drive the inhabitants out of the plains because they had chariots of iron. Here’s the third and perhaps hardest of the different ways we cut corners to overcome, and it ties in with that efficiency, because why do we look for efficiency? Because we think it’s on us. We’re the ones that somehow make things work.
He couldn’t drive out the inhabitants of the land. Why? Because they had iron chariots. What’s the big deal with iron chariots? Iron chariots were like the most effective war machines of the time, so if you think about the scarily efficient drones that are being used in warfare today, or the really sophisticated jets that can swoop in and not be detected and bomb and leave before anyone catches up with them, for that time period, that’s what a chariot was.
It was the war machine of the advanced armies, and Judah says, “We’re not an advanced army, so we look down there in the plains, and up in the hills, we’re pretty good because it’s hard to run chariots up in hilly countryside. We have advantages up there, but you get down to the plains, and those chariots can roar towards us.” And when those chariots roar towards us, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to kill us.
So Judah starts off well. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do, and in this particular moment, they’re not compromising, right? They’re not settling with the pagans and allowing themselves to intermarry and to come to false worship. But something else catches all of them: fear.
Think about back in our call to worship tonight, Psalm 20, verse 7: “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” See, this was the problem for Judah. They looked at, maybe we wouldn’t say what’s efficient, but they looked at what looks like it was actually capable, and they said, “We don’t have chariots of iron. They do. You know what chariots of iron can do? They can butcher us as they’re on those chariots of iron. We don’t want to go against them.”
What God said is, “I want you to ask what’s good, not what looks like it’s good military strategy. What is actually good?” They’re trusting technology, that technology was what was going to bring the victory, and if they thought back to how God had worked throughout this whole story, the walls of Jericho did not fall because Israel had more advanced technology. The land of Canaan in general had not been taken because they had more advanced technology.
Why had it worked to the extent that it had? It worked because the Lord was the one doing the work, and somehow they got in their heads, “You know, when giant walls of mighty fortress cities are ahead of us, the Lord can take those down, but boy, if he runs into those chariots of iron, we’re over.” And so they just say, “You know, God said this land was for us, and we should take this land, but maybe we’ll just leave it alone because this just isn’t going to work.” And these corners they cut, and this fear that they allowed to overtake them, led to an intermixing with the peoples, which was going to ensnare them over and over again.
That’s what we’re going to see in the book of Judges, where they keep deciding to worship the gods of the people of the land that weren’t supposed to be there, so they actually invite more temptation by falling to temptation.
As I mentioned, we see in Luz the beginnings of the false worship that would happen in the Northern Kingdom centuries later, which again lays down that difficulty in passing things down. We’re not seeing immediately that all these people became idol worshipers and following false gods. What we see, though, is that they’re laying the foundation by their compromise so those that would come later would.
The wind leads to Morrison, and we often just can’t see it. It doesn’t seem like it until it’s too late, but it’s a vicious spiral.
A few weeks ago, I saw that Costco had these giant pumpkins. Only eight bucks for just this giant pumpkin. How do you resist a giant pumpkin? I mean, really, I mean, this time of year, just a beautiful giant pumpkin sitting on my porch. Isn’t that great? So I got this giant pumpkin, and it looked beautiful, big and cheerful and just perfect fall color.
That’s exactly what the local squirrel thought, too. He said, “Now we’re talking. I didn’t know Thanksgiving was coming yet, but apparently it’s here.” So I walked out a few days after the pumpkin had arrived, and I see these little spots that aren’t orange anymore. They’re a lighter color because someone had been gnawing on it, and there was just a little spot here and a little spot there, but it wasn’t long before this big, sturdy pumpkin that could have gone for months like that, just sitting there, started to look a little soft and then started to kind of cave in to places.
And the squirrel didn’t finish it. I mean, I think that squirrel would have had to roll into a nice warm place for the winter if he’d eaten this whole pumpkin, but he ate a few little spots, and those few little spots started to let pests and bacteria in, and what did that do? It deteriorated the pumpkin, and the pumpkin collapsed. It was no longer strong at all, this big, substantial pumpkin.
When Israel came into the land, they came into the land as a giant pumpkin, a beautiful pumpkin, and a pumpkin that was supposed to sit there, and as people around the world looked on the porch of Israel, they saw this beautiful pumpkin and saw something beautiful and faithful and wanted it, and wanted to be like it, but in all these different compromises, that pumpkin was getting nibbled here and nibbled there. And you know what started to happen? It didn’t look that bad. What’s the problem? There’s a few little nibbles, but the pumpkin was starting to rot.
If you stopped at this point in the Book of Judges, these first few verses of the Book of Judges, and we just stopped there, it doesn’t look perfect, but you’d say, well, you know, it worked out pretty well, didn’t it? They got the land. They took most of the land. What more could they really ask for? In between, we skipped over it, but there’s some divvying out of the land. I mean, it’s just all really good, right? But the nibbles were starting to happen.
One of the challenges with unfaithfulness is unfaithfulness doesn’t usually start with a grand scandal. I think that’s what we’re looking for. As long as we don’t see anything big and grand and just utter failure, it’s okay. But unfaithfulness starts with the little problems. Unfaithfulness starts when it seems like, “Oh, a couple of nibbles here and nibbles there aren’t so bad. I can still be a magnificent pumpkin for the Lord. I’ll hold myself together.” Then we start to say, “Well, I feel a little squishy. I wonder what’s going on here.” Where have I nibbled for a shortcut? Where have I invited those nibbles of sin on my life?
We’re going to hear over and over again in our lives, our society calling us to let a few nibbles happen. We see it at work where it seems like the person who allows a little nibbling of compromise, a little unfaithfulness, a little dishonesty, seems to get ahead, and it seems like, well, look, you can actually get a bigger pumpkin. You can have the biggest pumpkin in the neighborhood because when you get ahead, you can do that.
We hear it, of course, in our political environment where over and over again we’re told just compromise here, compromise there. That’s how you win. And you’ll see people say, “We have to win for the Lord. We have to do this.” And so if we compromise so we can win, isn’t that great because we win?
Israelites thought that. We can take the land. And yeah, some of this stuff in the world is kind of scary. So if we have to compromise a little, it’s okay, a little more nibbling. You can zone a whole pumpkin patch if you’re in control of the politics, right? You can have as many pumpkins as you want, but they’re rotting.
Sadly, we even do that in the church at times. We think if we can just, we won’t preach certain things that aren’t popular. One of the things I like about us going through the book of Judges here is that Judges is uncomfortable. And if we’re not spending time in God’s word and passages that we think is kind of uncomfortable, then we’re not actually letting God’s word speak to us at oftentimes the places we need it most.
But we make those compromises and say, “Well, let’s just stick to the passages that we really like spending time in, the ones that feel comfortable, the ones that uplift us.” It’s not uplifting to spend time hearing about how Israel fails. A few more little nibbles there. You know, one of the things that we need is we need to know about the danger of nibbles.
Here’s the thing we don’t want to lose sight of, though. Why do we have this story? Because God was with them. They were looking for all kinds of shortcuts, and the fact that they were God’s people and that God continued to do his work is the reason why we can even hear about how they weren’t listening to the Lord.
God was with them. They were looking for all kinds of shortcuts. How can we get an edge against the people in the plains with iron chariots? How can we make life easier on ourselves? We’ll just have forced labor. How can we just not have a big uproar at all? We’ll just settle with the people. We’ll just compromise in our lifestyle a little bit. How can we do those things?
And God was saying, “Do you want a shortcut to actual righteousness? Do you want a shortcut to genuine success? I’ll give you that shortcut. Listen to me.” Because God knew that they were failures. They had been failures their entire existence, just like we are.
We fail over and over again, but God says, “Just listen to me. Turn to me. Trust in me rather than chariots and horses.” And when you do that, you know what? I’m going to make not worldly success out of you. I’m going to love you, and I’m going to call you my son or my daughter.
God had called these people to be his. God’s called you to be his. All the shortcuts that we think we’re getting ahead of and we’re somehow going to accomplish something great, don’t we realize that the thing that God is giving us is so much greater?
It seems like those shortcuts are so good, but they actually turn out to be long cuts, long cuts away from our God. And the book of Judges is here to remind us of how we do that over and over and over again.
And yes, this book is really a story that happened millennia ago, but it’s telling of the human condition that continues to play out today, but also God’s faithfulness in it. We read the story because he is faithful.
So let’s pray wherever our long cuts are that God would turn us to the only genuine shortcut, shortcut coming to his grace and recognizing that he is the one that does the good work, not us. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we do pray that you would help us, that we would be faithful. Lord, it’s so tempting so often to find some shortcut that seems like it can get us ahead, but Lord, you don’t call us to be people of shortcuts. You call us to be people who listen to you.
Would you help us not to ask if something is efficient or something good strategy or it’s something scary out there, but if it’s something that we’re called to do, good or bad.
And Lord, we are going to fail, but we thank you that you remind us even here in the midst of Israel’s failure that you redeem your people from their failure. Would you help us to turn to you with every place that we fail and to place it before you and to trust in you.
We ask this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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