Sermons
JUDGES
Text: Judges 2: 11-15 NIV
THE BRUISED HEEL
Seven hundred years after God’s promise to Abraham, the people of God are in their own land, God is present in the tabernacle, the Mosaic covenant provides boundaries in their relationship with The Lord, and a sacrificial system is in place for the forgiveness of sins. The people were truly blessed by God. But there is still a problem.
Adam may have struck the head of the serpent on the way out of Eden, but that serpent strikes his heel again and again. Humanity is inherently flawed, falling back into sin repeatedly.
THE CYCLE OF SIN
There is a pattern into which the hebrews fall—a pattern that goes around and around like someone caught inside a dryer—one that seems difficult if not impossible for them to escape. We can talk about this cycle in four turns:
1. First is idolatry—the sin of forgetting The Lord and dishonoring him by sacrificing to idols. Why they ever do it is a mystery to us, but it is their weakened heel. God wants Israel to be faithful to him, but they prove unfaithful again and again.
2. Second is oppression. There is a real cost to their disobedience. When the people forget the Lord, God removes His hand of protection from the people and allows surrounding nations to defeat and subdue them. God uses pagan peoples to correct his own people.
3. Next comes repentance. In the midst of their pain and oppression, the people, humbled by suffering, cry out to God for help. They turn back to God, confessing their own fault, and ask that God not forget them, even though they have forgot God.
4. Israel is delivered. Because God keeps his covenants, God raises up judges who accomplish their deliverance: Othniel delivers them from the Mesopotamians, Ehud from the Moabites, Deborah from Canaanites, Gideon from the Midianites, Jephtha from the Ammorites, and Samson from the Philistines. (One other, Orkin, from the Termites). In all cases, it is The Lord—not the human judge—who accomplishes the deliverance. The judges are all very flawed human beings.
Six times Israel goes through this cycle, never learning its lesson. It leads us to another question, which is: What made idolatry so attractive?
THE LURE OF IDOLS
Question: What made serving the Ba’als so attractive?
They had been delivered from Egypt, fed in the wilderness, disciplined, led into a promised land and prospered with victory. Again and again, God proved his faithfulness by keeping every promise—so how on earth could any Hebrew be tempted to forget God and disrespect God by making sacrifices to false, foreign gods?
We need to understand the players. Ba’al means “lord”—more accurately “possessor” or “owner”—which is close to what lord means. Remember that in ancient semitic languages there were no vowels, so Be-el and Bel are the same as Ba’al. Ba’al wasn’t a single, universal god the way we think of God. Most Ba’als were attached to specific regions or even specific pieces of property and land. hence the proper names of places which have "Baal" as the first element, such as Baal-hazor, Baal-hermon, Baal-meon, Baal-perazim, Baal-shalisha, Baal-tamar, and Baal-zephon. You are probably familiar with the name Be-elzebub, which means “Lord of the flies,” which is also one of the Ba’als.
In general, the Ba’als were providers of fertility. They gave the land its power to produce crops, and here is the first attraction. Remember, prior to entering Canaan, the Hebrew people have been nomads, shepherds, and not farmers. As they settle in Canaan, they learn the ways of farming from the Canaanites. For the Canaanites, making sacrifices to the Ba’al of their own farm would have been every bit as normal as planting, watering, and weeding. It’s just the way things were done. The Hebrews had to learn how to farm the land, so they picked up the ways of the Canaanites in doing so.
Aside from Ba’al, there was a female counterpart, as their usually is in pagan fertility cults. Her name was Ashtarte, or Asherah, or Ishtar, depending on your region. As Ba’als represented the fertile seed, the Asherah’s represented the fertility of the soil. Getting the two of them together was necessary for rain, quality crops, protection from blights, and guaranteeing a full harvest. So part of the attraction of the Hebrews to Ba’al worship was simply to succeed in farming. They trusted less in the Lord and more in Ba’al and Asherah to produce a harvest. Profit became more important than faithfulness, which continues to be a temptation.
But there is more: the desire for success alone isn’t adequate to explain the outright offense and dismissal of The Lord in their lives. There had to be another hook, another alluring trap to Ba’al worship, and there was.
A basic of Ba’al worship involved getting Ba’al and Asherah to mate. If they mated, spring and a good harvest would come. These little gods needed constant encouragement to stay linked, so a religious practice of sacred sensuality drove the religion day in and day out. Temple prostitution was the norm, and the purpose of human sexuality was as a means to control the gods. So, the modest Hebrews were now encouraged to forget about The Lord and get busy…getting busy… so that Ba’al and Asherah would produce crops.
OUR SIN CYCLE
The sin cycle of Israel can be said to work for us individually as well. When our lives fail to reflect the new life in Christ, we find ourselves lost in behaviors and attitudes that express our distance—rather than union—with Christ. Remember, sin is that distance—anything that creates or encourages distance—between us and our Lord.
Lent is the time to be mindful of how that sin and distancing functions in our life. It is a time for self-examination in order that we intentionally renounce the things that keep God’s love at arm’s length.
We may not be guilty of idolatry in an explicit sense—I’m sure no one here has ever sacrificed a bull to Ba’al—but we can do idolatrous things nonetheless. Our idols are the things of value which compete for our ultimate loyalties and service. They can include our love of country, which can lapse into nationalism; love of money is a classic idol, as is the longing for personal glory through achievement or social climbing. We become of aware of our idolatries through the voice of conscience, which may lead you to say things like:
• “I’m chasing the wrong thing right now.”
• “I have mixed up priorities.”
• “I have an addition or an addictive personality and it has captured me.”
- •“I keep mistreating other people.”
Any of these are indication that sin is clearly in evidence. No surprises there.
For conscientious Christians, to become aware of our sin is part of spiritual health, part of the work of the Holy Spirit.
When sin is our addiction, we can feel beat up and helpless for its power in our lives. Sin’s oppression can lead to depression. We know things are going too far when we hear ourselves saying things like:
• “My relationship with God has been affected.”
• “I am destroying my relationships with others.”
• “It is affecting or will affect my physical and emotional health.
- •“It is affecting or will affect me financially.”
The way forward is repentance, which is a radical claim of personal responsibility for one’s own sin and misery. Hear that? The authentic disciple refuses to blame anyone or anything else for her sin. Not parents, nor society, nor race, nor gender, nor politics, nor even the Devil—the repentant heart takes full ownership for sin. Only then is one’s whole self in the repentance.
And the good news is that God’s grace is available to us immediately. We have total assurance of God’s perfect and complete forgiveness because Christ has already borne the cost, carried the shame, and been raised from sin and death to a new life which he freely offers us.
God’s forgiveness is not even dependent upon our repentance, but as he has forgiven all things in Christ, he comes to us like the father of the prodigal, running with grace offered to us before the words of repentance are even our of our lips.
For many Christians, the sin cycle itself could be like an addiction—a mad dependency which enslaved Christians rather than providing them access to the liberation of God’s grace.
ESCAPING THE SICKLY SPINS
Remember merry-go-rounds? Parks and playgrounds used to be thick with them. Were they fun? Not if there were bigger kids around. I can remember hanging on to cold metal for dear life as the world spun around at about 180 miles per hour, closing my eyes and praying I would neither barf nor get flung off. If you survived, you staggered away dizzy and feeling like you had been gut-punched, perhaps bruised by the “support” bars.
Yeah, the sin cycle is like this. The bigger reveal to the story is that in our own hands, there is no escaping the sin cycle; it is for us exactly like a cruel merry-go-round. There is nothing in humankind to either soften the spin nor mitigate the injury. Unless there be another code altogether—one that can get us off and above the merry-go-round altogether—we are going to be slaves to the sickly spins.
Praise God that through Jesus Christ we have Grace—and a new footing altogether! †
WANDERING
NUMBERS 14: 1-4
1That night all the members of the community raised their voices and wept aloud. 2 All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, “If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this wilderness! 3 Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?” 4 And they said to each other, “We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.”
A LONG ENGAGEMENT
Last week we talked about the relationship between The Lord and Israel being a marriage; actually, it is more like an ancient betrothal. In antiquity, the betrothal or engagement was the moment significant vows were exchanged and in full effect until the wedding and marriage feast, which could be months later. During that time, the couple is considered married—or as good as—and the vows are already in effect. The promises are made but the fulfillment is still off ahead in the future. So it is with Israel, which has been snatched away from their “Father” Pharaoh, rescued from the evils of Egyptian paganism, and now make their way toward their new, promised home.
In Sinai, they receive what we might call the prenup—the prenuptial agreements from The Lord—a contract proffered by God through Moses articulated in the ten commandments. These are the terms of agreement for the relationship, the coming marriage. Israel, like that bride whisked away from her father, is between two homes: one, the land of Goshen, where they were enslaved; and two, their new home, the Promised Land from God. What we hear is that Israel seems confused over which home they should be happy to seek. They spend a lot of time and energy griping, and although they are loved, cared for, and provided for by The Lord, they express homesickness for Egypt, forgetting the miseries of slavery they left behind.
It said that the journey is the destination, but when the journey is wandering around in the desert, it may be difficult not to dwell on the glories of the past rather than the promises of the future.
WANDERING
Why did Israel spend forty years wandering in the wilderness? Because none of the men were willing to ask directions [rimshot]. Were they lost? It depends whom you ask.
My family took long trips in our 1968 Pontiac Bonneville station wagon. My father was an engineer and enjoyed maps, which means he always had brilliant shortcuts to try. The problem is, they were neither brilliant nor, as it turns out, shortcuts.
“Are we lost?” I would ask as an impatient 14-year-old. “We’re lost, aren’t we?” Silence.
We have to imagine the people of Israel in the same mode:
“Does Moses have any idea whatsoever where we’re going?”
“I think we’re lost—we’d be better off just going back to Egypt.”
“He clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing; who put him in charge, anyway?”
So Israel, as petulant as road-weary teenagers, rolls its eyes and frowns while pitilessly criticizing the food and accommodations. If there had been any joy at being rescued from slavery it was now as gone and forgotten as the iPhone 1. Israel has become a teeming throng of grumpy cats, and just as hard to herd toward the Promised Land.
GRUMBLING
The text says—not once but many times—that the people “grumbled” against Moses. Other translations used “murmured.” A contemporary version could rightly use words I am not at liberty to use here or elsewhere. The people were miffed, ticked, incensed, and collectively frustrated.
The Hebrew word for all of this is LUN:
to stay, abide in, to lodge, to dwell, to continue, to remain, to tarry, to murmur, obstinate, complain, grudge, gripe, moan, etc.
Isn’t it interesting that the same word for grumbling means to “stay put”? Israel grumbled because they are stuck where they are.
Perhaps this is a lesson of adulthood and maturity, but have you ever noticed that when you are in an unfortunate situation how complaining doesn’t seem to fix anything? In fact, one of the most effective ways of increasing one’s misery is to call attention to it again and again. By doing so, it is possible to turn a mere annoyance into an outright plague. No wonder the Israelites were so miserable.
No problem is so bad that extreme negativity can’t make it worse. You may co-workers or relatives who bring the point home for you. Grouse, Gripe, grumble, moan, mope, and kvetch—it seems some folks absolutely live to find fault and call it into prominence.
No Exit, a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, features three people eternally locked into a hotel room. That’s it—that is their Hell—and Hell it is when there is no kindness, forgiveness, or grace. Reading the play in high school, I wanted yell at the characters: “Just shut up! Be nice! Be good to each other and the room could as easily be a kind of Heaven.” We can indeed be our own worst problem and our own source of eternal unhappiness.
wilderness of sin
The Lord provided the Law not only as the means for a relationship between himself and Israel, but also for Israel’s own good and flourishing. To practice the Law is to have a path toward righteousness, which means wholeness and contentment—joy.
What is revealed is humankind’s slavery to sin. What we call Sinai was known to the ancients as the wilderness of Sin. Our word “sin” comes from the geographical word Sinai. Consider the implications. One who sins—a sinner—is simply someone who is wandering in the wilderness of Sin [Sinai].
To SIN is to be LOST,
WANDERING,
not knowing the WAY;
not knowing how or WHOM to follow.
We speak of sinners as those who are lost, so we also rightly speak of salvation as being found. A lost sheep doesn’t find itself, it must be found by a shepherd who knows which we it ought to be going.
In the 70s there was a popular bumper sticker among Christians of a certain stripe. It said: “I FOUND IT.” The problem with this was at least two-fold. First, the Christian faith isn’t something that sinners find in their own strength. We do not find God, but we, lost sheep that we are, are found by God. God is the finder, not us. 2. The sticker comes off proud if not arrogant. The “I” of “I found it” rings out with self-congratulations and personal glory—things that have never been part of orthodox Christianity.
The only thing the lost can hope to find is the awareness that they are lost—even this is the work of the Holy Spirit who convinces the world of its sin (John 16:8).
The hope for the lost is the hope of being found, of hearing the Shepherd’s voice calling them by name. This is where faith begins, not in our own noble seekings.
SHEPHERDS WHO LEAD
Because the people are lost—irretrievably lost in their own power—God sends his own prophet to rescue his chosen people:
- 1. God sends his people a Shepherd.
- 2. God speaks face-to-face with him.
- 3. He fasts for 40 days.
- 4. He rescues the people from slavery.
- 5. He leads his sheep to a Promised Land.
- 6. He feeds them the bread from heaven.
- 7. He delivers the Law from the mountain.
Did you think I was talking about Moses?
You know who The Story is about, right?
Listen—do you know his voice? Does he call your name? Do you hear him speaking to the longings of your soul? Shall we follow?
COVENANT
Exodus 20: 1-19
MARRIAGE AND WEDDINGS
A man and woman wish to be together for the rest of their lives. As the music plays, the people gather in their best clothes and celebrate their union as bride and groom. In the service, as witnesses look on, they face each other, join their right hands and exchange their promises to each other as husband and wife. The promises are worded many ways but the intent is the same: “to forsake all others,” “to have none other before Thee,” “to be a loving and faithful wife, loving and faithful husband.” Then they exchange rings as signs of their promise in God’s name. They are pronounced married and then there is a great, joyful feast and everybody lives happily ever after.
The image of marriage runs throughout Scripture as a metaphor for God’s relationship to his chosen people, so keep the idea of marriage near and at hand as we engage the text.
GOD WANTS TO DWELL WITH HIS PEOPLE
God desires to be with his people, but there are some built-in obstacles.
1. God is holy. People are not holy; they are far from holy. Humankind fell with Adam and Eve, and the relational distance created by that fall is what we call sin. All humanity suffers that great distance from God and we’ve become so accustomed to our distance that to draw close to God would destroy us. The ancients knew this: if they were to see God’s glory, they would die. If our eyes of our souls saw God, our souls would be irresistably drawn up and out of us in order to be with God, and the body would fall down lifeless.
We think of God’s holiness as goodness, but we forget that we are so comfortable in a sinful environment—so at home with our distance from God—that although we think we want to be near God, the actual experience may not be comforting. It may be terrifying. It is fully possible that in our fallen state, God’s goodness so utterly good that we couldn’t bear it.
2. Our sin is God repellent. Yes, we think we’re quite wonderful, but sin cannot be tolerated in God’s presence. Our sin is like deadly radioactivity and we are unfit to be in God’s presence.
There’s a Hebrew word—tamei—that is always translated to the English as “unclean.” We’ll hear it a lot as Moses receives instructions on what the Israelites must do in order to have God’s presence among them. The problem is that unclean isn’t exactly what tamei means. For something to be tamei, it is repellent to God—it pushes him away and makes his nearness impossible. Since it wasn’t at all about hygiene—and I need to emphasize this—we might think of it as radioactive. To all appearances, nothing looks wrong with Fukushima Daiichi or Chernobyl, but we know that radiation is still very high there. We cannot go there, we cannot dwell there—the place to us is intolerable, toxic, tamei.
3. God is omnipresent. We get this, but the ancients did not. God is everywhere and in all places, but the Israelites came from a world where deities were localized and contained in temples. Even once they came to understand and believe in God’s omnipresence, they still needed the comfort of knowing God was with them in a specific and local way. This not only confirmed their chosen status as God’s people, but it reassured them that as God resided nearby he would be readily available in times of need. We understand this well and may feel the same way, and it is another reason idolatry is so attractive. We’d like to capture and encapsulate God’s power and presence into a temple, a relic, a talisman, or souvenir. In order for Israel to be reached, they have to be met; and this is exactly what God provides to have happen.
Given these obstacles, God has to lay down some guidelines for the people if he is going to dwell in their tabernacle.
THE MOSAIC COVENANT
The commandments of God are not given simply to make people happier or to ensure domestic tranquility. The rules given by God are not a clever strategy for guaranteeing cultural survival. We diminish them in thinking of them in that way. They may in fact be good for us, but they are not given to us for our personal health or flourishing—that is a fringe benefit. The commandments’ chief purpose is to provide a way for holy God to be in relationship with fallen humanity. They are rules of the relationship like a prenuptial agreement. They determine the boundaries and qualities in order that the relationship take place and continue ahead.
They are very much like wedding vows, as we’ll see as we look at them.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
1. You shall have no other gods.
As in a marriage, wherein a man and a woman vow to each other to “forsake all others,” here is a definition of faithfulness. In a world of polygamists, this was the first step toward serious monotheism.
2. You shall have no idols.
The pagan world worshiped idols, which were manmade incarnations of the gods. The Lord tells Israel they are to do things differently. For the first time, God shall be known as God without imagery. God is to be known, served, and worshiped as invisible. No manmade constructions about who God are to be tolerated. People still prefer their made-up ideas about God to God’s self-revelation, which means idolatry is still a major problem, even if it doesn’t resemble the ancient kind.
3. You shall not misuse God’s name.
God reveals himself as one who is not subject to human interpretations or definitions. God is self-defining. God alone names himself. There can be no human naming of God, as if he were subject to our beck and call.
The chief misuse of God’s name in antiquity was as a credit rating. Two ancient Mesopotamians making a business deal would hold right hands, exchange promises, and then exchange gifts in the name of their local deity before the deal was sealed. This is the covenant formula and we still see it in the marriage ceremony. This commandment disallows Israel from using God’s name for the sake of their own credit. Likewise, we should understand this to mean that whenever God’s name is used for secular purposes or personal gain, it is being misused and taken in vain.
4. Honor the Sabbath, keep it holy.
Honoring sabbath holds a special place in Jewish piety because it is the only commandment that is humanly useless, by which I mean that neither the survival of the race nor individual flourishing is guaranteed by its observance. “But wait,” you say, “if we worked seven days a week we’d all burn out and be miserable!” True, but that can be accomplished by relaxing on any day of the week.
The sabbath gives Israel a means of loving God back because the only reason to obey it is obedience per se.
5. Honor your parents.
This may have had less to do with making children obey their parents than it did caring for parents in their old age. Honoring them and defending their welfare and dignity once they grew older was likely the first and chief concern.
6. Do not murder.
Do not murder. Clear?
7. Do no commit adultery.
Do not violate the marriage covenant, just as Israel was not to violate this Mosaic covenant.
8. Do not steal.
Don’t steal.
9. Do not bear false testimony.
While this may have technically referred to perjury and false legal testimony, we can say without distortion that any untruth can be understood as false testimony.
10. Do not covet what others have.
Ask the average American to name the ten commandments and this is the one no one remembers. We tend only to use the word covet when referring to this commandment. I would encourage us to think of this in alignment with the church fathers, who named envy as one of the seven deadly sins. So let’s hear this as Do not envy.
Consider: how would it feel if you envied absolutely no one and nothing? Go ahead—you see nothing anyone else has that you really want, and looking at others, you feel no envy when looking at anyone else’s life.
Pretty good, right? Contentment is pretty close to happiness. Americans in particular do not think of life without envy as a formula for happiness. Count the commercials during the Super Bowl today and consider how many of them are patently designed to invoke and inflame envy? What? You’re satisfied with you life? You shouldn’t be, because you are using a 6-year-old iPhone! Come on! Get with it! If coveting is a sin (and it is), then advertising is one of America’s most possessed industries. It is a peculiar and unusual people who seek to live beyond envy. And it should be us.
STIPULATIONS
These commandments are often thought of as a universal commandment to all human life, but that is not their original intent. Let’s be clear: these commandments are the stipulations in the covenant between The Lord and Israel.
They are necessary because God can’t abide with sin and these stipulations enable a covenant relationship to occur. They are the conditions Israel must observe and obey if The Lord is to remain with them.
They are like marriage vows—or better, the betrothal vows which secure a relationship before it comes to maturity.
These commandments were made for Israel and for the covenant with Moses. I am absolutely certain that not one person here today is living their life by hoping in and adhering to the Mosaic covenant.
WHICH COVENANT?
We don’t need to. The good news of Jesus Christ includes this understanding: that Christ himself did in fact fulfill all the terms of the Mosaic covenant (something Israel could never do), and offers us the receipt of completion as a free gift.
By his sinless life, he clears the high bar that Israel—indeed, all of humankind—could never clear in their own power.
The covenant with Moses is not the Christian covenant. We respect it and acknowledge its holy purposes and value. If we obey, and we should, we do so out of sheer gratitude, not obligation.
Jesus gathered with his disciples at a table much like this one, he lifted the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them saying, “Take, eat. This is my body which is given for you.” And in the same manner he took the cup, blessed it and said to them, “This cup is the NEW COVENANT sealed in my blood for the remission of sins.” We live by the new covenant established by Jesus Christ himself. Its stipulations are simple: “Love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.” This is our covenant. †