Clough Judges Lesson 3

Judges 2:1 – 3:6

We will finish the introduction of this book which consists of the first two chapters and in it we will look forward instead of looking backward. Judges 1 looks back to the time of Joshua, to connect this book with the previous book in the canon. Judges 2 looks forward to the end of the desert period. On a timeline it would something like this; here’s 1440 the time of the Exodus, you have the entrance into the land, you have the wars for seven years, and after this you have the time of the Judges. I am not going into the chronology of the book of Judges; some other time we will deal with chronology. The book of Judges has one of the most difficult problems in chronology in all the Bible and I’m not getting involved with that at the moment. Just say this goes from the time of Joshua on down to the time of Saul. So we have this time interval called the period of the Judges. No centralized government, perfect freedom, an amphictyony or an organization of tribes around a central shrine.

As I have shown the great thing about the period of the Judges is that it is a lesson in political history. A lesson which many of the political conservatives and liberals in America of the 1970s still have not learned, therefore Judges is very contemporary. Because the book of Judges shows you why it was necessary to have centralized power and why, as one of the great ironies of history, the one nation that had almost the perfect system of government, that had the most freedom of any nation on earth, threw it in the ash can. How they threw away a perfect system of functioning government, perfect freedom, and as I say, the most free government probably that the world has ever seen, including that of the Constitution of the United States. It was a tremendous system and yet this book is a book of the devastation, gradual decay and erosion of this most perfect free political system and the spiritual causes will become very clear. And it’s these spiritual causes that you must consider when you deal with the problem of the social gospel, when you deal with the problem of the church involved in social action and all the other great questions.

I was happy to see an article in yesterday’s paper in which Louis Cassels in which he summarized the great schism that separates the churches today and for the first time in my reading of the modern religious editors this man finally puts the finger on the issue and he said that the real issue between the conservative and the liberal churches and Christians has nothing whatever to do with liberal social action versus no social action. Social action is a farce; social action is just a red flag issue; it has nothing to do with the real issue. And Louis Cassels pointed out the real issue that is being fought between the conservatives and liberals is whether God has spoken literally in history, and that, he said, is as deep as the Grand Canyon and it splits and it continues to split Christian from Christian, church from church, and will always do so because out of this issue comes everything else, not the issue of social action, not the issue of the form of one denomination or the form of another denomination. If you have think that the great issues are whether you are to be baptized by sprinkling or immersion and you think that’s the great key issue of church history, you’re mistaken, it has nothing to do with the great key issue. The great key issue today that’s being fought, however you accept baptism, whatever your denominational preference or non-preference, the issue today is whether God has spoken in history. If He has, then such and such follows, if He has not then such and follows and you cannot mix the two. There will always be a split over this problem.

In Judges 2 we have the overview of this Judge’s period. Whereas Judges 1 dealt with the time immediately after the death of Joshua in that next generation when the tribes moved out to conquer what remained of their allotment. Remember he operated by tribal allotment. On a map it looks something like this; there were three great enclaves of Canaanite occupation. The first enclave is the so-called Philistine pentapolis. Who the Philistines are is a great mystery in history. It appears that the Philistines are somehow, though it is not clear how, related to the so-called sea peoples who invaded the northern Egyptian areas and many scholars connect the later Philistines, not the earlier, but the later Philistine immigrations to the nation Israel as remnants of the Trojan Wars of which Homer wrote. So out of The Iliad and The Odyssey you have these people fleeing from the Trojan Wars and they scatter all over the place and one of the later waves of the Philistines may have been these people. Whatever it was, the Philistines tended to be influenced by Greek armor, so therefore they had the Greek weapon system.

So you have the Philistines occupying this enclave and they had chariots and this was the great military weapon superiority in the day. Israel did not have chariots for some 400 years; very interesting, they were about four centuries behind in their military technology but the amazing thing is what they were able to do with what they had. Why? Because God gave the victory. You had the Philistines with their chariots, they were able to have long range reconnaissance against moving hordes of infantry which the Israelis did not and they were able to flank them and so on. And for this reason the offense stopped right around this boundary and left this enclave. Now the Israelites had raids down here where they’d burn the cities but they’d immediately pull back into the highlands, into the rough areas where the chariot forces could not operate. So you have this first enclave. Now this enclave is still there by the end of this first generation, they still have not driven the enclave out.

A second enclave starts about here and extends all along the coastline and these are the Sidoneze or they are called the Tyreneze or Sidoneze or what you know as the Phoenicians; in other words, the Canaanites. The Phoenicians, later on in history are driven from the eastern end of the Mediterranean, they go west and they found a city by the name of Carthage. And this is why we have been able to understand a lot about these Canaanites religions and so on, from studying the Carthaginians, and the Carthaginians in their fight with the Romans, remember Hannibal and so on, the Carthaginians were the people who still sacrificed human beings as late as the time of the Romans. So there is a measure of what kind of religion was being developed along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

Then we have a third enclave that begins here that extends north and northeast and this is in the area of what we would call Syria. And this is completely blocked, so much blocked that later on the tribe of Dan is going to be driven out from an area here, and their whole tribe bodily is going to migrate north up into this region, just north of the Sea of Galilee. The tribe of Dan is to be remembered because they are the first ones into apostasy; they are the only tribe of Israel not listed in the book of Revelation. So we have a lot of movements of people in this period but the key thing to notice is that the Jews have not driven out from their allotment…remember this land is all allotted, God gave it to them. But they have not driven these people forth by the time we end Judges 1.

In Judges 2 we have a tremendous introduction. Judges 2:1-5 introduce the message of doom. Again I warn you about reading Hebrew narrative. You must read it logically and not chronologically as the liberal tries to do and then explain all the differences, the JEDP. The narrative is to be read logically. We learned that last time in working with the first chapter. Tonight we’re going to learn something else and that is that the Hebrew narrative starts with the general and moves to the specific. So you’ll generally have an opening statement and then you move to the specific. This, by the way, is why Genesis 1:1 is a title of the entire chapter, all the way to Genesis 2:3, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” That includes everything, the angels, everything that He created on up to and including the third verse of the second chapter. This is a title, a general statement, and then the rest of it are the details.

Judges 2:1-5 is a title or it is an opening statement, it gives you the general principles, then the rest of the chapter, verses 6 and following develop, explain and interpret this principle so the first five verses are an announcement of doom by the angel of the Lord. To understand the announcement of doom you have to go back and understand the covenant. Here is the Abrahamic Covenant; the Abrahamic Covenant promised three things, it promised a land, it promised a nation and it promised a worldwide blessing. These three things are the sovereign promise of God to the nation Israel. The Abrahamic Covenant answers in your life to predestination in Christ. The Abrahamic Covenant answers to the Christian concept of the fact that we are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ. In other words, this is a sovereign unconditional covenant. We indicate this by a circle and we say that in that circle we have the work of the Father, we have the work of the Son, we have the work of the Holy Spirit. This work is a totality and cannot be divided up. You can’t cut this circle up like a piece of pie; that circle is all one, and when God starts with fore-knowledge He must end up with glorification.

When God promises Israel the land in Genesis 12:1 that promise must be valid on down through the rest of the Bible. God’s sovereign promises may be held in abeyance but they never are negated by any force within history; NOTHING within history can ever reverse a sovereign promise of God. And so if you as a believer lack stability in your life and you would like to be a stronger believer and you would like to have a greater impact for Jesus Christ, I suggest that you do one thing to start with and that is to understand what the sovereign promises are to you. If you will understand and grasp what God has sovereignly chosen for you in history and what He has given you, blessing you with the predestinated with Christ, sharing His destiny for all eternity, that He has provided for discipline in time so that you might be in shape for eternity, that He has provided Jesus Christ as your intercessor before the throne of grace to constantly present His blood, as it were, as a judgment and an atonement for you sin so that no matter what sin you commit you are completely secure at all times.

If you will understand the Holy Spirit is actively engaged in intercessory ministry to trim up the rough edges in your life and all these things are going on 24 hours a day, nothing stops them, no matter what the crisis, no matter if you forget or not, this goes on. And if you can grasp this as the foundation of your Christian life you will not wind up in the funny farm with a lot of Christians who crack up because they think of their salvation as conditional; conditioned on what they are going to do the next moment, conditioned on whether they can hold onto the cliff by their fingernails, conditioned whether they can hold onto salvation if they can earn so many brownie points per day to keep saved, and all the rest of it. That puts stress on the believer which he was never designed to take. The Christian life at the primary level is relaxing in the sovereign promise of God. Now that’s not inactivity. That means your foundation for action lies in God’s sovereign promises. That is the Abrahamic Covenant.

Now the Abrahamic Covenant is amplified. The land clause is amplified in Deuteronomy 30-31 in what theologians call the Palestinian Covenant, but basically it’s nothing more than an amplification of one clause of the Abrahamic Covenant, therefore I do not list this as a separate covenant, it’s just part of the Abrahamic Covenant. The continuation of the nation is amplified and explained by the Davidic Covenant in which in 2 Samuel 7 you have the kingship or the royal line of the nation explained and how there will always be a throne of David, no matter what happens there will always be a king ready. It doesn’t say in 2 Samuel someone will always sit on the throne, watch the language. It says there will always be a king ready to sit on the throne, and this is very important because if Christ is not Messiah then 2 Samuel 7 has already been violated, since the Jewish genealogical listings were destroyed by Titus’ army in 70 AD, it now means there is no list of proof of royalty to the throne, and therefore if Christ wasn’t it then the Jew has no way of vindicating his king ever, ever again. And so 2 Samuel is to be accepted literally points to Jesus’ Messiahship. And then the third clause of the Abrahamic Covenant, the fact that there will be a worldwide blessing pouring out to all the Gentile nations through Christ, through Israel, is explained in the New Covenant of Jeremiah 31, covered in Ezekiel 36 and other passages.

So we have this unconditioned Abrahamic Covenant. But the thing you have to be careful of and ever so careful of because it’s very apparent that the people in this generation were not careful of this. What you have to be very careful is that it says a nation coming out of the loins of Abraham and it doesn’t necessarily mean every Jew coming out from the loins of Abraham. As we have seen in Romans 9 all Israel is not Israel. Now the reason why some Jews got the idea was from another kind of covenant, called the Mosaic Covenant or what I call the treaty, the Law treaty. This is a conditional covenant. What is a conditional versus an unconditional covenant? Here you have the Mosaic treaty and over here you have the Abrahamic treaty. What is the difference?

The difference is that the Abrahamic treaty announces God’s sovereign purpose. The Mosaic treaty does not do this; the Mosaic treaty simply says if you do this, then this will follow; if you obey then blessing, if you disobey then cursing. And so often we’ve diagramed the Mosaic treaty like this: it starts out with the fact that if you obey, and this is explained in Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28 for the details, but the Mosaic Covenant says that if you are obedient as a national entity, then Israel, you will have economic prosperity. If you obey as a national entity then you will have military victory. If you obey and are obedient to the king spiritually and religiously and theologically then you will have the fact that you will be a blessing to the world and you will occupy your land. So these are four conditions…conditions. They are not sovereignly guaranteed. Israel is never sovereignly guaranteed a military victory; she is never guaranteed an economic prosperity; she is never guaranteed that she will be a blessing to the world at any moment. She is never guaranteed that she will occupy the land that is rightfully hers. None of these are guaranteed by the Mosaic Covenant, they are only put in an “if” clause, if you obey then these things follow.

Now watch this because this whole announcement in Judges 2:1-5 has to do with already a modification of the Mosaic Covenant. So this is positive volition, they’re obedient. Now suppose they’re disobedient. Here’s what God says, in place of economic you will have economic collapse, the money system of the nation will be destroyed, outlined in Isaiah 1. In place of military victory you will have military defeat. In place of blessing you will be a cursing. And passages in the Old Testament say that Israel will be such a cursing that the cruel Assyrians will walk in and wonder what happened to this land, and the prophets are portraying this, and they are using the Assyrians deliberately because an Assyrian military tactic, one of their tactics was staking a person down, taking a knife and skinning him alive; they were some of the most cruel people who ever lived in the ancient world. And this is how the Assyrian war machine would move and the prophets picture the Assyrians as walking in and absolutely aghast at what God has done, and they say who has done this. In other words, the cruelty by which God deals with His nation is more cruel than the cruelty that the Assyrians dish out to the rest of the Gentiles. They will be amazed. And the occupation of the land, they will be thrown out. So these are the either/or conditions given on a conditional basis to the nation Israel.

In Judges 2:1-5 a very crucial statement is made and you must pick this up because this is one of those great marker chapters that divide part of the Old Testament from that which follows. This is a great crucial event in the history of the Old Testament and it’s going to change the language of the Old Testament. After this certain things are going to be true that were never true before and before this there are going to be certain things mentioned that are never mentioned again. Let’s read the first five verses;

Judges 2:1-5, “And an angel of the LORD came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said, I made you to go up out of Egypt, and have brought you unto the land which I swore unto your fathers; and I said, I will never break my covenant with you. [2] And ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars: but ye have not obeyed my voice: why have ye done this? [3] Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them” in the Hebrew this is an absolute negation meaning I will never drive them “out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you. [4] And it came to pass, when the angel of the LORD spoke these words unto all the children of Israel, that the people lifted up their voice, and [wept]” literally screamed. [5] “And they called the name of that place Bochim: and they sacrificed there unto the LORD.”

This is a horrible moment in the history of the nation. This angel is announcing a modification in the Mosaic Covenant that begins here and extends for the rest of the dispensation of the Law. The modification that he is introducing here is that they will never occupy the whole land again. That’s the modification. In other words, here you have blessing and no matter how much the nation is going to be on positive volition from here on out they have lost something that is irretrievable. They will never occupy the total land again as long as they are ruled by the Mosaic Covenant. Now when Christ comes again and you have the Second Advent it reverses because the Law is thrown out. But while the Law is in operation…now they just lost half of the blessing. They’re going to be able to occupy some of the land but God announces here I am never going to clear out these enclaves so all these areas will never be driven out as God had originally promised to Joshua. And thus this marks a very monumental chapter in the progress of the Old Testament because from this point forward there will never be an appeal again to drive out the Canaanites in holy war. Up to this point it was considered part of the believer’s duty to engage in war and this is why Joshua and the last of Deuteronomy and the first of Judges are very important in our day.

We have the peaceniks and the people who think it’s immoral for the Christian to shoot and so on, the Christian doesn’t engage in war. And it is the people that engage in war that always preserve freedom. So we have the situation back in the Old Testament where believers had as their duty to kill. And up until this point, the second chapter of Judges, they were to be good soldiers, which meant, translated into common language, they were to be good killers.

Now after this point the prophets never again called for a holy war. You’ll never find the language in Isaiah; you will never find Hosea calling for a holy war; you will never find Amos calling for a holy war, never Daniel. Isn’t that interesting, none of the great prophets ever called for a holy war again. You have to understand this because the liberals will say oh, it’s an evolution of their religion that lets them drop out the holy war and they’ve evolved to a higher morality that drops war as an instrument of the advancement of the faith and so on. And that’s not true at all. These verses in Judges 2:1-5 are the reason why war is never again advocated. You must understand this. It has nothing to do with an evolution of a higher morality in the Old Testament. None at all. It has to do with the sovereign declaration by this angel whom we will now study, the angel of Jehovah.

Who is the angel of Jehovah? The angel of Jehovah is Jesus Christ; the angel of Jehovah, you notice in verse 1 says it he “came from Gilgal,” now why do you suppose that statement’s there. “The angel of the LORD came up from Gilgal,” when was the last time the angel interviewed the armies of Israel? It was found back to Joshua 5 you’ll see the place where Jesus Christ took command of the Israelite army. I always like this passage because this passage and Revelation shows you that gentle Jesus that holds the sheep and pats little children on the head is not always like that, and here you have Christ cast as a military commander.

Joshua 5:13, “And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho,” here’s the situation, they have crossed the Jordan. Jericho is one of the strongholds that must be conquered if they are to hold the plain. Jericho has geographical advantage in that it’s on a height of land and Jericho must be taken if they are to hold their position here against the Canaanite forces. And Joshua, in verse 13, is doing some reconnaissance, he’s walking around the city of Jericho by night, and you wonder how can the military commander walk around alone at night. Well the answer is that in the previous chapter the Lord has so put the terror of the army of Israel into the hearts of the people of Jericho that they ran, collected everything they could, went inside the walls of Jericho and locked everything up. So there’s not a Canaanite around. So Joshua is free to walk around, inspect, and so on. And so that’s what he’s doing here one night.

And then it says in verse 13, “….he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand; and Joshua went to him, and said to him, Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” Tremendous bravery of this man at this age. Remember how old he is, and he sees this magnificent soldier standing in the way with a drawn weapon, and Joshua challenges him, are you on our side or theirs. And then in Joshua 5:14, “And he said, No, but as commander” literally, “as the commander of the army of the LORD am I now come.” And that means that right at this point you have this mysterious figure that so often appears in the Old Testament. Usually in your King James you’ll see it “angel of the LORD,” with capital L-O-R-D, because this word in the old King James is Jehovah or Yahweh. This is the angel of the LORD or the angel of Jehovah or the angel of Yahweh, whichever way you wish to say it.

In verse 14, “And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him,” he immediately recognizes who he’s talking to, “And Joshua fell on his face and worshiped, and said unto him, What saith my lord unto his servant?” See, Joshua is the commander in chief from the human point of view of this whole army and yet he has just met someone on the road that says I am the commander in chief of this army, so you have two commanders in chief. But notice they don’t fight, one of them acquiesces to the other.

Joshua 5:15, “And the captain of the LORD’s host said unto Joshua,” just so there would be no question who he was, notice his instructions to Joshua, “Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so.” That should call to Joshua’s mind another incident when God said that, on the mountain with Moses. Remember Moses, the ground on which you are standing is holy ground, take your shoes off. And so identically He identifies Himself, the parallel of historic reference.

So this is when the Lord came to take charge of the army, and this chapter should continue, there’s no break here, Joshua 6:1 is just a parenthesis, that’s just put in there to explain something. Skip to Joshua 6:2, “And the LORD said unto Joshua,” here’s Jesus Christ in His preincarnate form talking to Joshua, “See, I have given into thine hand Jericho, the king thereof, and the mighty men of valor. [3] And you shall compass the city, all men of war, go around the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days. [4] And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of rams’ horn” and so on. Then in verse 4 and 5 He gives him a list of the strange tactics to use. But I want you to notice that Christ is coming here as the commander of the army and He is the One who leads in the strategy and tactics. He gives this to them.

You say how can you be so sure that the angel of the Lord is Jesus Christ. The deduction is very simple. First we can know that the angel of the Lord is Jehovah, so we make this, the angel of Jehovah is identical to Jehovah. We know this from such passages as Genesis 16:7-13 where the angel of the Lord is worshiped as Jehovah in those words. So His deity is obvious. The second thing is that the angel of Jehovah is distinct from Jehovah and this is shown in such passages as Zechariah 1:12-13 where the angel of Jehovah who was worshiped as Jehovah turns around and talks to Jehovah. So obviously you have two different personalities involved and yet both are called Jehovah, both share the deity, both are worship. And the third point comes from John 1:18 where it says of the Trinity the only seen one is the Second Person. So putting it all together we come to the conclusion the angel of Jehovah is Jesus Christ’s preincarnate appearance.

So this is a most amazing thing. Another time when Jesus Christ showed up on the scene, at the tent when he was going to blast Sodom and Gomorrah, and He took care of five cities and wiped them out. You see the kind of actions that surround Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. You see you’ve got to have this before you come into the New Testament and you have this person and He makes a superstar out of you or something. People who think things like that just have no understanding whatever of the whole Old Testament motif of Messiah and what a person He is.

Now come back to Judges 2. It’s the same angel of Jehovah who took over the command of the army so gloriously. And now he makes this message of doom. At this point Jesus Christ resigned, He hands in His commission and say okay boys, I’ve led you this far, and you have refused to obey my orders, you have refused to do battle with the Canaanites, you have undermined my military policy ever since I took over and I cannot lead you as long as you’re doing this so bye-bye. And so in Judges 2:1-5 Jesus Christ does what the great military men of our nation have had to do in the past, they are trying to lead men in battle and they are undermined from the civilians, undermined from college professors, they are undermined from every other person conceivable in our society. Fortunately they keep slugging it out, thank goodness for our freedom but if they had sense enough to see the futility of it they’d all quit. Here Jesus Christ quits and He announces His resignation. And this is what causes the weeping and the screaming and all the hullabaloo that begins in verse 4-5. Jesus Christ tosses in his commission, He says I’ve had it; I’m not going to command this bunch any more. So we have the end of holy war and it’s a very horrible and very dramatic announcement.

And it’s a warning to believers that Jesus Christ, the man, has a certain militancy and this is one reason why in the book of Revelation, of all the churches interviewed which is the one that causes Christ to puke? It’s the Laodicean church that is neither hot nor cold, and He says I want to puke you right out, you’re just vomit to Me, that’s what Christ’s words are, that’s believers who have no backbone, believers who won’t stand for the issues, believers who care nothing for the Word of God, believers who don’t have the guts to stand for the Word of God against whoever will come. And in God’s sight they’re just vomit; that’s the way Christ pictures believers who have no backbone. And you can see the same attitude He has right here because at this point the believers are settling down to enjoy possessions before they have conquered fully and the principle in Scripture is before you can have joy, peace and power in the Christian life you have to struggle and you have to carve out as it were, from the wilderness of Satan, the land that God has given you and it doesn’t come easy.

This is one reason the picture of carving out of the wilderness I am sure, theologically, though it would be hard to demonstrate in the literature, was probably one of the great driving forces behind the Pilgrims and the Puritans as they came and they literally did that physically. But I’m sure they did it physically because they had already done it ideologically. And this is why Christians are not having impact today, because they are not carving out ideologically in the vast areas of art, music, philosophy, science, history, in these great areas they are refusing to carve out ground and say look, this is the truth, period, and here we stand. But no, we have Christians in the Christian church who can’t even stand up to a few theological loudmouths and so we have whole denominations going down the drain because…not the majority go wrong, just a minority in the power structure and we have people in the pulpits that sit there and we have people in the pews that sit there and both are sitting while the apostates take over and that’s the story of denominations. And they just sit there and give their money and sit there because Aunt Tilda went to the church so I have to go to the church, family tradition you know, and all the rest of it means nothing, you go where you get the Word of God taught, period, wherever it happens to be in your generation.

So again you see this mental attitude that is demanded on the part of believers and in Judges 2:3 he makes this great pronouncement, and the pronouncement is an absolute negation, “I will never dispossess them at all.” Now the word “drive out” means dispossess. In other words, Christ at this point dooms Israel to perpetual misery the rest of this dispensation. No matter how great Israel is going to be in the future, never again will they drive out these people. You say now just a minute, under the kingdoms of Solomon and under the kingdoms of David centuries later isn’t it true that they controlled the areas. Yes, they controlled those areas but they never drove out the population. This is why Solomon later fell, because though Solomon was able to subjugate the areas Solomon never eradicated the areas and there is a difference. It would be like in Vietnam to use a current illustration, we subjugate the VC enclave. Subjugating them means that you control them, but if we were to apply the principle of Old Testament holy war you would go in there and line up the civilian population and machine gun them, every last one who was a communist. That would be holy war and that’s what was done under the command of Joshua with God’s blessing. Now of course we’re not advocating this policy in Vietnam, I’m simply using this as an illustration to get across the point, that’s the difference between subjugating an area where you obtain temporary control and simply eliminating the enemy period, and that is dispossessing it.

In Judges 2:3 it means an end to the policy of dispossession. From this point forward any policy will be subjugation but not dispossession. And you see this reflected in the rest of the history of the Old Testament. Now this is one reason why the liberal view of Judges is wrong, because if this is a late book how you match this with the later prophecies that we know are later where there’s no reference whatever to holy war, and yet they claim that the whole book of Joshua is a late thing, that they just dreamed up this concept of holy war way on down in history, but you read later on in Jewish history the holy is never there; where did this idea of holy war come in a late time, it didn’t come in a late time, it was there earlier, and it was dropped out right here. Here is the end of holy war. Now this verse, verses 1-5 actually happened at the end of the book of Judges; in other words, chronologically these five verses should be at the end of this book. They are stuck in here to show you where this book is going to go. Things are going to get so bad that these first five verses, we don’t know exactly when this meeting was, all the congregation had gathered around but we don’t even know where Bochim is, apparently it’s somewhere near Bethel but we’re not sure. But sometime the people had a meeting after these centuries of apostasy, and finally at some point, whether this is under Samuel, we don’t know, but at some point a meeting was made and this happened.

Judges 2:5, “And they called the name of that place Bochim:” Let’s look at this so you understand why. The word for “cry” or “weep” in verse 4 is bacah and when you put this verb, bacah in a participial form you have bochim, you see the “c” and the “h,” Bochim, the “im” ending is the plural masculine ending, and so you put an “o,” this a vowel, it signals that this is a participial form so you have bochim. It comes from this verb to cry, to weep, and literally bochim means the weepers, and it’s ironic that this place is called the weepers because we know from subsequent history that these people had no intention whatever of reforming.

Verses 4 and 5 present you with a phony repentance, and if you understand what I mean by a phony repentance you will understand why I have often said from this pulpit we do not go in for all the emotion. I have seen a lot of emotional things in fundamentalist circles; I have seen emotional services where all the young people, would you like to dedicate your life, you come down the aisle, and you look five years later, those young people, are they out on the mission field. They are not, because all you’re stimulating is emotion and you’re stimulating emotions and it may be pouring out of emotions and someone might say oh look at that, we had a great blessing night, we had 500 young people come down the aisle to dedicate their lives to Jesus Christ and they were crying and there were tears and we had all this great emotion, just like you have here in Judges 2:4-5, it means absolutely nothing. Verses 4 and 5 they wept about it—didn’t do anything about it, nothing whatever.

So you have a whole population that goes through ecstatics, goes through emotion, cry and weep and carry on and it is nothing but a superficial emotion; has nothing whatever to do with the depth of their heart, nothing whatever. And so you must always distinguish in your mind between the emotions that are surface and the real spiritual changes that are down deep. The emotional changes, there may be emotional signs of a deep repentance, there may be that, but you cannot judge from the external. There might be ten thousands reasons why they’re crying, only one of which might be that they had a genuine spiritual experience. So you cannot judge on the basis of external emotions.

Now in Judges 2:6 and following it looks like we have a contradiction again. See why I keep telling you that you must approach this logically and not chronologically because in verse 6 it’s going back to Joshua. So here’s an outline. The first five verses deal with the announcement. From 2:6 on through the end of the chapter, verse 23, you are going to have a narration of the events that led up to these five verses. In other words, the writer presents you with the five verses; that’s the big point. Now he is going to narrate history for you to see how this came about. So we have an analysis of what happened, what caused all this, what led to Bochim. So he begins with verses 6 on down to verse 10.

Judges 2:6 “And when Joshua had let the people go, the children of Israel went every man unto his inheritance to possess the land.” Now when did Joshua let all the people go? This is the covenant renewal ceremony at Shechem. Turn to Joshua 24:1 and you recall here, verse 1 was when Joshua, just before he died, made the covenant renewable for the next generation. “And Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and called for the elders of Israel, and for their heads, and for their judges, and for their officers; and they presented themselves before God.” So we have a gathering of the nation. Now in verses 2-13 Joshua addresses, this is one of the great addresses before this man dies; a magnificent address, a great address of this great leader and soldier before he went to be with the Lord. In verses 2-13 he reviews history. Isn’t that magnificent, his last words are a review of history. Why emphasis on history? Because that is the location of God’s work and that is the location where you find your apologetic evidences.

In Joshua 24:2, “And Joshua said unto all the people, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Your fathers dwell on the other side of the river,” that’s the Tigris-Euphrates, “Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor; and they served other gods. [3] And I took your father, Abraham, from the other side of the river,” he goes back to Genesis 12, he reviews all the history. In verse 6, he’s dealing with their sojourn in Egypt; in verse 8, “I brought you into the land of the Amorites, who dwelt on the other side of the Jordan,” and then verse 11, “And ye went over the Jordan, and came unto Jericho, and the men of Jericho fought against you,” he takes you back through the holy wars of his generation, on to verse 13, “And I,” the Lord says, quoting by Joshua, “And I have given you a land for which you did not labor,” see, there’s grace, “things which you did not build,” grace again, “and you dwell in them; of the vineyards and olive yards which you planted not do ye eat.” Grace. You did not deserve it, this was not given by your work, I blessed you with these things in grace.

In Joshua 24:14-15 Joshua says in light of all this history, Israel, you’ve got three choices before you and in his dying breath Joshua challenges the nation at this great covenant renewal ceremony. And in verses 14-15 he lists three choices the nation has. The first choice we’ll call “Yahweh-ism,” that means the Biblical faith. The second choice is Mesopotamian religion of the fathers. And the third choice is Canaanite religion. Notice something peculiar. Notice he doesn’t deal with military policy. Notice he doesn’t deal with politics. What is he talking about? Spiritual issues. The last words of Joshua to the nation is what is your religious framework. Is it going to be pantheism and polytheism or is it going to be the creatorship of Yahweh-ism. Is it going to be Biblical or is it going to be anti-Biblical, because Joshua is incisive enough to see that this is the issue that determines all issues. So in verses 14-15 the choice of three religions and he says you take your pick, but as he finishes his words in verse 15, “as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” You can go with what you want to but you’re not going to change me, I am going to serve the Lord period.

Now in Joshua 24:16-18 we have a very tragic and very superficial response on the part of the people, “And the people answered and said, God forbid that we should forsake the LORD, to serve other gods.” See, it’s a very quick response, [17] “For the LORD our God, he it is who brought us up and our fathers out of the land of Egypt,” etc. etc. etc. In other words, they quickly align themselves with the Lord but in verses 19 thru the end of the chapter Joshua is quick enough to notice something—this is phony. So in verse 19 he says so, “And Joshua said unto the people, You cannot serve the LORD; for He is an holy God, He is a jealous God, and He will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins.”

Joshua was saying look, you can’t pledge that you’re going to obey the Lord, who do you think you are, you have old sin natures, you are fallen people, you don’t pledge that you’re going to obey God because you can’t. And this completely knocks out all the vow business that goes on in Christian circles, oh I’m going to vow to obey God and if I’m going to do this and do that, I’m going to be obedient for the next three years; that’s ridiculous, that’s stupid. You can’t pledge that you’re going to be obedient to the Lord one minute. And God never asks you to either, because this verse, verses 19 and 20, is the inspired Word of God; this is God speaking through Joshua to the nation. He says look, don’t fool me, you’re not going to serve the Lord. God has absolute standards and you can’t serve Him. Why is Joshua saying this? He wants the people to see the issue of grace. If you are going to serve God it’s going to have to be by God’s enablement; you are going to have to trust in the Lord, you’re going to have to rely on the Lord, you’re going to have to claim His promises, you’re going to have to use the filling of the Holy Spirit, you’re going to have to claim everything that He will give to you. You can’t just brashly say I’m going to obey the Lord. That’s ridiculous, that’s legalism, that’s human works, and Joshua cuts them off here.

After this, you might say a chewing out that he gives the nation, he lets them go, and then we go back to Judges 2:6. “And when Joshua had let the people go, the children of Israel went every man unto his inheritance to possess the land.” Now “to possess the land” describes the actions of Judges 1. In other words, what did that generation do when they left Shechem? What they did is described for you in the first chapter of this book; those were the works that were done. You’ve got to keep this chronologically clean. Judges 1 actually is parallel to Judges 6 and following.

Judges 2:7, “The people served the LORD all the days of Joshua,” and by the way, verse 7 has something tremendous in it, and something that I think spells the answer to a lot of our problems. “The people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders that outlived Joshua,” and notice the characteristic, who had seen all the great works of the LORD, that He did for Israel.” Who had seen these, in other words, both Joshua and the next generation had firsthand evidence that God was working. What do we call that? Empirical evidence. In other words, the empirical evidence was near to them, and they said I can have faith because I’ve got facts and I know that Yahweh works this way, so there’s no problem, I’ve got a base for my faith.

Then in Judges 2:10, “And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.” In other words the empirical evidences of the finished work, if you want to make the parallel, Moses and Joshua finished redemption for the nation in a sense, now not completely but they by and large got the nation going, just like Jesus Christ’s finished work on the cross. Both are works done in space/time history. Both are works that can be observed empirically and as long as these works are fresh in our minds, as long as they are considered reliable evidences the faith of God’s people is unmitigated. But just as soon as these empirical evidences drop from sight or are ignored, or are covered over with myths and fable, what happens to the faith? Boom, it just goes right down the drain. You can’t keep your faith without the empirical evidences.

You can go through all sorts of religious hocus pocus and you can speak 25 different tongues and you can hold hands with everybody and whatever else that goes on in these meetings and you can go to every meeting you want to and read all the cuckoo books, the key to this or something else and that isn’t going to help you one bit until you get one thing straight; your trust must be in Christ, and if you don’t have the confidence that the object of your faith is true, the Christian claim, you can never go too inches in the Christian life. You just sit there and spin your wheels, oh, I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe and that’s all you’re doing, just saying I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe, that’s autohypnosis if you want a kind word for it. That’s all it is, you’re going through emotions and all of this is being substituted for something.

You walk in a Christian bookstore and why do you have 20,000 books of drivel on the shelf? Do you know why? Because Christians in our generation think the way to get more faith is to work themselves up into some sort of emotional frenzy; all you have to do is read these 25 pages and you’ll have the secret to a deeper Christian life. Let’s go to this deeper life conference because they’re really got the secret over there and they trot around from book to conference, from this place to that place, and they don’t catch on to this simple principle laid forth here, and that is as long as you do not have trust in the evidences you’re never going to go two inches in the Christian life. So if you have doubt and you think you have problems with faith may I suggest to you that your problem is in the area of apologetics; you’re not certain if the whole thing is true, that’s your problem. That’s why you don’t do any witnessing, you’re afraid of the non-Christian. You don’t want to stand up to him because you’re afraid he’s going to pull the rug out from under when you open your mouth about Jesus Christ. You’re afraid and why are you afraid? Because you’re not really sure that the object of your trust will stand the test. For heavens put it to the test and stop being afraid. It all goes back to this.

Judges 2:10, “that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them,” and they didn’t know the Lord. They were largely unsaved; they were a group of unbelievers. Why? Because they had no contact with the empirical evidences of their faith. They were working on emotion and emotion didn’t have this. Instead of reviewing history, instead of going back to the fact that it was the Lord that got us over Jordan and it was the Lord that knocked the walls of Jericho down, we won’t bother with, that’s dry history, we don’t bother with that stuff, we’re going to have this Yahweh party and so they go to Yahweh parties. And after 3 or 4 centuries where does it get them? They’ve destroyed the guts right out of the nation is what happened; they were having their sweet little Yahweh party.

Now in Judges 2:11 and following, this is what happened to the Yahweh party people, in verse 11 and following we have the cycles of this disaster in history and this was a disaster, horrible disaster. In verses 11-13 we have one part of this cycle; in 11-13 we have apostasy. In verses 14-15 we have the chastening. In verses 16-19 we have the deliverance. And in verses 20-23 we have the announcement; it’s parallel to the first five verses. Now this is how history went, it cycled and cycled and cycled here. Let’s read through this.

Judges 2:11 “And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served Baalim:

[12] And they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, which brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the people that were round about them, and bowed themselves unto them, and provoked the LORD to anger. [13] And they forsook the LORD, and served Baal and Ashtaroth. [14] And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he delivered them into the hands of spoilers that spoiled them, and he sold them into the hands of their enemies round about, so that they could not any longer stand before their enemies. [15] Whithersoever they went out, the hand of the LORD was against them for evil, as the LORD had said, and as the LORD had sworn unto them: and they were greatly distressed.”

[16] “Nevertheless the LORD raised up judges, which delivered them out of the hand of those that spoiled them. [17] And yet they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them: they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments of the LORD; but they did not so. [18] And when the LORD raised them up judges, then the LORD was with the judge, and delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge: for it repented the LORD because of their groanings by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them. [19] And it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they returned, and corrupted themselves more than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them, and to bow down unto them; they ceased not from their own doings, nor from their stubborn way.”

[20] “And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel; and he said, Because that this people hath transgressed my covenant which I commanded their fathers, and have not hearkened unto my voice; [21] I also will not henceforth drive out any from before them of the nations which Joshua left when he died: [22] That through them I may test [prove] Israel, whether they will keep the way of the LORD to walk therein, as their fathers did keep it, or not. [23] Therefore the LORD left those nations, without driving them out hastily; neither delivered he them into the hand of Joshua.”

We’ll explain the chronology of verse 23 in a moment but look at the overall cycle. Here you have three steps in the cycle. It was repeated over and over again in this book. There are a number of judges, 12, 13 to 14 depending on how you divide them up, and this cycle goes over and over and over like a cracked record, and these are the three steps of this period. See, this precedes the book logically in the development of the writer but actually this is a summary of the whole book of Judges on down to the last chapter. So here you have the outline of the whole book, it’s just simply a set of these cycles. And notice in verses 11-13 how it all begins. It begins with a religious spiritual apostasy. This is something the modern conservative person who’s concerned with the decay of our country never grasp. Every day comes across my desk appeals to get involved in this and that and the other thing, conduct a campaign against pornographic literature, conduct a campaign against the communists, conduct a campaign against this or that. All of these are unfounded because all of these things are results and not causes. The person who wastes their time involved in these movements and that’s all it is, a waste of time, until we get back to the issue because you can worry about the results of negative volition and all of the human viewpoint and the immorality and everything else down here, and you may not like these things but you can’t do a thing about them.

Now you begin to see something; a lot of conservative politics is grounded on the works system. What they want to do is remove these things they don’t like by their own what? Instead of utilizing the Lord’s methodologies and the Lord’s methodology is evangelism and Bible teaching, that’s how these things are eradicated and there’s no way out, there’s absolutely no way to reverse these because Romans 1 even teaches that some of these things are God’s will, judgment upon the nation and you can’t remove them, there’s no way you can remove them. And if Bible teaching and evangelism aren’t going to remove them nothing will remove them, including all your works. They’re not going to remove them either. So we have a lot of people spending money, thousands and thousands of dollars. When you think of the millions of dollars that have flowed into causes for this, that and the other thing, every kook cause you can imagine to get rid of all of these things, in a way sincerely motivated, nothing wrong with the motives of the people except they’re all mixed up. All these results, the rottenness that we see in our country, you can’t get out by having campaigns to get rid of them; you have to go back to evangelism and Bible teaching. That’s the only way. This is the lesson you’re supposed to learn from Judges 2. The corruption of a national entity or a society starts in the area of the spirit and until that is handled everything else is unredeemable.

You know what happens, I’ve said this to some of my friends; do you know what they always come back with? Well, your method takes too long. And of course my reply is suppose we had the Christian church in 1930 and following, instead of worrying about the communists had engaged in a tremendous aggressive program of evangelism, had gotten a group of scholars to work in every area, art, science, history, music and so on, and had been very aggressive in this area. I am sure that by 1970, only 40 years later, you would begin to see the results in the university, you would begin to see the results in every area where key leaders are making their decisions; but no, wasted time fiddling around with the fruit instead of cutting the roots. You’re shooting at the wrong place; the place to get is the area of the spirit, where men’s hearts are. And if you can’t change them you cannot change the society. So that’s the lesson in verses 11-13.

Verses 14-15, there’s just one thing there that you should note, that the chastening, the means that God uses to chasten, are the nations around about. God does not always use the Canaanites to chasten, for example, you notice later on in this book He uses the Mesopotamians, the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Midianites. None of these people are in the land; they’re all around the land. So you have two groups of nations, one the group of nations that are left inside the land and then you have the second group of nations that are round about the land that God uses as the stick.

Then verses 16-19, we won’t go into those in detail simply because that’s the whole story of Judges, what these judges did. In the first part of Judges is an analysis of the upper class, the leadership class of the Israelite society that consisted of these judges and how these men were the great leaders in their day, and you will notice in a preliminary way in verses 16-19 that their great leadership in times of crisis still did not stem the tide. Don’t you see, you can elect anybody President and it still isn’t going to solve the problem. That’s taught in verses 16-19. This book is tremendously political and has tremendous application in our day, because in verses 16-19 you have these judges and they’re not even elected by the people, God Himself elects them. These are divinely chosen men of the hour and they still cannot stem the tide. So if God’s own men can’t stem the tide how do you ever think you’re going to elect somebody in office that’s going to stem the tide as long as you have corruption. No way you can do it, no way you can to it, it’s a waste of time to try.

And by this I’m not implying that Christians shouldn’t be engaged in politics; I’m just simply saying that in the area where you starting putting this first in your life instead of concentrating on evangelism and teaching of the Word of God you’re wrong. Now the Christian has obligations in the area of politics but all too often I know and you know too that in many, many churches you would see people active in politics and spending hours in that but when it came to learning the Word of God or talking to someone about Jesus Christ are they spending hours doing that? They are not. And I’ve seen that happen by the scores in Christian circles. It’s tragic, spend more time working for some politician, working for some office, now that’s not bad, but when that time takes precedence over the time to take in the Word of God and to share Jesus Christ with someone there’s something wrong somewhere with somebody’s priorities. And that’s the lesson of Judges.

Verses 20-23 this is the announcement, you see the whole cycle comes back full tilt, back to the first five verses. Here’s where God blows His stack. [20] “And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and then in verse 21 he makes his fatal announcement, and the message of doom; “I will never drive out any from before them of the nations which Joshua left when he died: Verse 22, “In order that,” purpose clause, “through them I may test Israel,” in other words, God throughout the rest of the nation from this time period which is about 1100 on down to the time 586 BC when they were cast out of the land, during this time interval God is going to test these people with these surrounding nations. You see, this is why all our prophets write in the Old Testament. Who are the prophets writing about? People who have bought the religion of the nations round about. Isn’t that what Hosea’s griping at? Isn’t that what Isaiah’s getting at? Isn’t that what Jeremiah is getting at? This lays the foundation for all the prophets later on who are going to yell and scream at these religions that are coming into the nation from the nations round about.

Now an explanation of verse 2 23; verse 23 is a retroactive explanation. In other words, verse 23, and by the way, there’s a tremendous spiritual lesson here, about God’s sovereignty in history. What verse 23 is teaching, let’s put this on a time scale so we can get it right. Here’s Joshua’s generation, we’ll cut it with a parenthesis, that’s a parenthesis for that in between generation and here’s your Judges generation. Here’s Joshua and here’s Judges. Now you remember that Joshua, when he went across the Jordan everything seemed to be going pretty well. But along through his military campaigns, remember the lightening campaign, the penetration to the center, the penetration to the south that only took one year, but you remember how I explained in the book of Joshua that when he moved his armies north to clean the Canaanites in that northern probe, at that point it took seven years. In other words, the force of this military advance began to slow until finally, and Joshua reached old age, it was very clear that his military campaign had been stalled out. And you remember God said I am slowing down, now He didn’t say I wouldn’t drive out the nations then, He simply said I’m slowing down your advance. So we have here a period of slowdown.

Now a lot of godly men would wonder, why is God slowing us down. Here, later on you have the explanation in verse 23, God is slowing them down here because He knows in two generations there will arise a group who are largely unsaved and will have to be trained and disciplined by these people so He prepares two generations ahead, about 66 years in our terms, ahead of time, preparing for that next apostate generation; by they way, because He loves them…because He loves them, because He wants them to learn of Him. And so two generations ahead He prepares and that explains the slowdown that is never explained in the book of Joshua. That is something that you come to Joshua with, and I didn’t go through it then but you just simply observe this, that the military campaigns started out almost like a blitzkrieg and then finally it just falters. And what was the spiritual cause behind it? Verse 23 is the spiritual cause, it’s retroactive. Verse 23 does not refer to the judgment made now, this is a past action. Why is it past? Because notice, “The LORD left those nations, without driving them out hastily;” in other words, verse 23 isn’t saying He isn’t going to, it’s simply saying He’s slowing down the driving out. So verse 23 is retroactive.

Now very quickly, Judges 3:1-6 finishes this section of Joshua. This is simply a listing, a historical listing of the nations left. Notice verse 1, “These are the nations which the LORD left….” Verse 2, “Only that the generations of the children of Israel might know, to teach them war, at the least to such as before knew nothing thereof.” Now you say what’s the deal here, learning war. Combine verse 2 with verse 4, “And they were left to rove Israel by them, to know whether they would hearken unto the commandments of the LORD, which He commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses.” In other words, He is leaving them in the land to learn a spiritual lesson and the spiritual lesson will be clear from how they encounter these cultures, these foreign cultures. In other words there will be wars and wars and wars the rest of the time; God isn’t saying He’s going to stop the wars. It’s just simply these wars are never going to be totally victorious; they are not going to exterminate the population. There will just be wars to captivate and subjugate, but they will not be wars of elimination.

But these people, notice, have to keep a militant attitude. Do you see that? God goes to all these precautions to produce a militant attitude on the part of His people. Now the old fashioned theologians used to have two words for the Church. One, they said the Church triumphant, and it was the Church in eternity and the other word the old theologians used to say was the Church militant, that’s the church now. The Church is not triumphant yet, that’s the word used for eternity, but now the Church is called the Church militant. Christians must never, never, never, get over the militancy that is required, not in a nasty sense, but in a determined sense that they will not buy the powers of this world.

How is the Christian to express his militant attitude? The Christian is here surrounded by all sorts of ideas; we call them human viewpoint, call them what you will, but ideas that come to him through art, through music, through philosophy, through science, through history, through friends, you’re surrounded with a wealth of human viewpoint that presses in on you on every side. You can’t help but absorb some of it, but if you don’t have an attitude that’s critical constantly, the Word of God remember what is it? It’s a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and spirit, and the joints and marrow, and is a what? Is a critic of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And so the believer today is to have a militant attitude of putting the Word of God in there and constantly test, test, test, test, test, test, every area, testing it by the Word of God. That is what it means to preserve this militant attitude that the nation was called upon to have here.