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! †