preached from George's one today. I found an article in the New York Times in 2004, written by Mr. Howard French. The history teacher maintained a blistering pace, clicking from one frame quickly to the next during a lecture on China's relations from 1929 to 1939 with the world at large. Getting to the meat of the lesson, the teacher said, Japan decided to pursue its own longtime desire for a continental empire and attacked China. The presentation lingered on a famous 1937 picture of an aerial bombing that occurred in the country. A visit to a Chinese high school classroom and examination of several of the widely most used textbooks reveal a mishmash of historical detail that often provide a deeply distorted view of the recent past. Chinese students believe that their country never fought the war aggressively, only in self-defense. Similarly, many believe that Japan was largely defeated by China itself and not by the United States. Most textbooks will read that the fundamental reason for the victory is that the Communist Party became the uniting core that brought the nation together. No one learns that perhaps 30 million people died from famine because of the catastrophic decisions made in the 1950s in the Great Leap Forward. The closer history gets to the present, the more political it becomes, said Chen Minghua. Things after the founding of the Republic, we only require students to know basic facts like what happened and in what year. We don't study why. An editor of a history magazine in Xi'an said, What we present to children are less controversial facts, which are easier to explain. Ah, no, that's not what she said. She said, going very deeply into the history of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and some features of the liberation is forbidden. History is still used as a political tool, and at the high school level, we must follow the doctrine. History writing is selective. If you're going to write your own personal memoirs, what would you write? Would it lay out all your dirty laundry? Describe your hidden weakness? Or would it highlight the most glowing and wonderful aspects of your life? Would certain events be glossed over? Would other events be elaborated? What we have in the book of Judges is a history of the people of God. A theological history. And this history is certainly not bare-bones facts. but it is history, nonetheless. What is contained in the book of Judges is the most raw, real, and gritty aspects of the life, development, and downward freefall of the people of God after the Exodus. Standing in the background to all of this is God Himself, and He leaves us this record with all of its highs and lows so that we might know where we come from, learn from our fathers, understand something of ourselves, and point us to something better. I'll be preaching out of Judges for the remainder of my time at TIFF. The reason for this is Chia told me that I was not allowed to preach from Minor Prophets anymore. She was going to revolt. She didn't want to hear about Habakkuk or Nahum or anything anymore. So I decided, since I like the Old Testament, I will find something in there that is more acceptable. And she agreed to Judges. where we will go today is an introduction. We will go over the book. We'll start from chapter 1, verse 1. Judges opens this way. It opens with a reflection on the past. It says, after the death of Joshua. The author here wants us to remember where we've been. For those unfamiliar with the biblical history, a good time to answer the question of where have we been. The story of this Israelite people that we will discuss in the book of Judges starts with a man called Abraham. He was called by God to leave his home, to go somewhere that God would show him. The Lord promised that He would bless him with many descendants and that someday these descendants would make up a great nation. These people would possess a special land and that land that they were going to possess was now being shown to Abraham. In this land, this group of people be God's chosen, and through them all the nations of the earth will be blessed." This is told to us in Genesis 11 and following. The children and grandchildren of Abraham eventually end up in Egypt. It's there that we encounter the person of Moses. Moses was a descendant of Abraham, one who grew up in the kingdom of Egypt's house. The Egyptians, as a people, had initially welcomed the Israelites, but the Israelites prospered too much. They became to numerous, and because of a threat to national security, the king of Egypt decided to subject them to slavery to keep them in line. Moses sees this growing up, but because of various reasons is forced to flee Egypt and ends up settling after many years in the land of Midian, far away. It is from this country that God will call Moses. He will command him to return to Egypt and become the leader of the Israelite people. Moses is to return to Egypt and free his enslaved brothers and sisters and lead them into the land that God had originally promised many centuries ago. God had established a plan to make a special people, to place them in a special land, all for the sake of redeeming the world that had fallen into sin and needed saving from itself. Joshua is the successor of Moses because Moses dies. Joshua is the leader who would take the people into their new land. Moses got them to the edge, but he could not go into it with them. The book of Joshua deals with the taking of the land that they were promised in a very aggressive military fashion. Many question at this point, why did the Israelites get to go and take a land that was not theirs? I think there are two answers to that question. First, no land inherently belongs to anyone. All land is created by God. The Canaanites either took it from someone else before or moved there from somewhere else and decided to stay. As I said, God is the creator of all land and it all belongs to Him. He allows renters on it for a time, but the land never becomes inherently anyone's. Secondly, the Canaanites, the people who were living in this land, were in no way peaceful. They were not quiet farmers. minding their own business. Deuteronomy 9, Leviticus 18 describe these Canaanite peoples as exceedingly wicked. So the taking of the land was just as much an act of divine justice as it was a fulfilling of the promise of God to the Israelites. The conquest of the land by Joshua was a just act done by a just God over the unjust. It also established new people in the land This land was to serve as a city on a hill, a beacon for the nations. Israel was supposed to completely conquer this land, and this is what Joshua begins to do, but Joshua, as with Moses, dies before the job is done. This is where Judges picks up the story. Once again, Judges 1.1 reads, after the death of Joshua, the people inquired of the Lord, who shall go up first to fight against the Canaanites. As was just said, by the time Joshua had died, the Israelites had not completely gotten rid of the Canaanites. They had not been removed from the land. And the tribes of Israel were left to themselves to finish the job. But without Joshua, they are left without a leader. Why wasn't another leader picked? Unfortunately, I don't know. But, as we will see throughout the book, the Israelites left to themselves are a sinful people, incapable of following the Lord's command. Time and time again, they will fall into sin and eventual punishment because of this. Judges, chapter 2, verses 1-4 makes this explicit. The angel of the Lord said, I brought you up from the land of Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to your fathers. I said I will never break my covenant with you. I'll make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land. You shall break down their altars, but you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you have done? So now I will say, I will not drive out the Canaanites before you, but their God shall be a snare to you." Because of sin, because of failure to fulfill the Lord's command, Israel will never finish the job that Moses and Joshua had started. The land will never be theirs completely. They will never be the people that God wants them to be. This is the reality of disobedience to the Lord's command. Have you ever thought about that? We confess that our God is loving and forgiving, but do you ever step back and contemplate the consequences of your sin? God does punish sin, and there are lasting effects from it. Paul discusses the reality of punishment, even for the children of God. Israel, experience this. In what ways do you? In what ways do I? How do we as a church suffer the consequences of our sin? This is a fearful thing. It should cause us to step back and think. In the verses we just read, the Israelites ask the question of who will go up first to fight. They ask of the Lord this question, but to many it seems like a strange question. If they are in fact a nation, if they are one people, why don't they just go up and fight? Why do they ask the question, who shall go up first to fight? Well, Israel is a nation, they are a people, but even more so, They exist as a confederation, a group of family clans united by common history, by worship of Yahweh, by common language. Although recognizing each other as brothers and sisters, however, nonetheless, retain a high level of distinction from one another. The clans exist separate from one another. Now, I don't necessarily know if this tribal separation was what Israel was supposed to look like. I am led to believe that it was not because of the great trouble this will cause throughout the book of Judges and even later on. Israel's ethnic distinctions from one another will bring them down. Israel was called to be a holy people, a united nation of holy priests to Yahweh. Why did they still hold on to their family distinctions? As with other things that occur to the Israelites, we can ask this of ourselves in the church today. When was the last time you worshipped with people outside of the PCA? When was the last time you went to a Bible study with members of the local Baptist congregation? When was the last time you fellowshiped with Christians found outside of 10th Presbyterian Church? There is a secret which I'll let you in on. There are Christians even outside of 10th Presbyterian Church. Find them. You live a life in which you believe you are united to a worldwide family, connected to a global body of Christ. As we continue on, by way of introduction, we can ask about the judge title itself. We can ask questions about who are the judges? What do they do? We can start with the question of why are judges called judges? and nobody knows the answer to it. This, unfortunately, is a translation problem. The word for judge is the same word we use for the guys who will show up in this book. They are called to lead Israel, but they don't act like judges, and they don't do anything that we in 21st century America would consider judicial. Unfortunately, when going from Old Testament to present day, when going from Hebrew to English, we have a 3,000 plus year language and culture gap. We can't fill it sometimes with an adequate resolution. A nice thing, though, as we go through this book, as we think of the judges, we don't need to understand why they're called judges. The name doesn't mean all that much, so we'll call them judges and we'll think of them in their context. Next, who are the judges? That's a little bit easier to answer. They're a series of men, possibly one woman, called by God to serve as liberators. military leaders for the people of Israel. They are called during times when Israel, having fallen into sin, is allowed by God to once again be enslaved by a group of people. They are not supposed to be kings. They are officially recognized leaders, but only for a group, not for the whole nation. Because of the tribal separation, as we talked about before, one judge will work in one area, and another judge will work in another area. Going through the book of Judges, the military leaders who have been raised up, unfortunately, are not much different than the people. They are people raised up who mimic the sin of the Israelites themselves. The people of Israel are shown to get progressively more wicked over time. They are idolatrous, abandoning the worship of Yahweh. We read that in chapter 2. They will not worship God who had freed them. Instead, they will serve the local Canaanite gods. So, God brings them into the land, but they sin and are enslaved. The Lord will bring up a judge. He will free them, but they will fall back into sin worse than before. God, time after time, will raise up a judge, but each progressive judge is less righteous, less impressive, less exciting than the one before. This is shown to be a downward spiral and it will descend all the way into the bottom so that by the end the people and the judges become so wicked that God allows Israel to enslave itself and no judge is raised up to free them. The reality of sin as illustrated by this book is that it gets progressively worse. Not only are people sinful Not only are you and I sinful, but left to ourselves, we will become completely wretched. So bad to the point that we would, if it were not for God's restraining influence, wipe ourselves out. God's restraining influence is what we call common grace. God will only allow sin to go so far. He will only allow it in the person and in the world, up to a point, so that they could not become as wicked as they could be. The Israelites themselves I said, to be so evil that God desired to wipe them out and make a new people. We find this story told to us in Exodus 32. God restrains his evil through grace and allows his people to live and survive, but it is by grace alone that they are not destroyed. Paul, Peter, they discuss this and they talk about how governments, even wicked governments, are raised up for the sole purpose of restraining the evil that would be possible if you and I were left to ourselves. This, as with other things and judges, causes us to look back. Have you ever woken up and thought, read through your Bible, and thought, been in a conversation, and heard about somebody, and then said to yourself, wow, I'm much better than that fool, I'm much less sinful than blah, blah, blah. I know I have. I do it quite often. God forgive me for it, because there, I've become a Pharisee, and I am sinning, the sin of a wicked man. If God, by grace, did not restrain me, I fear to think what I am capable of. The reality for you and me is no sin is too great for you and I. There is no sin that you and I could not commit that's left to our own devices. We need to understand this as we read through Judges, because as they fell into sin, so can we, if we are not in right relationship with God. Having gotten a general overview, we can turn briefly to three themes that will come up throughout the book which we need to be aware of, which I think we will bring themselves out and become apparent as we study the book. The first one is grace and law. What Judges gives us is different than what we get from the book of Isaiah. It's different from the Psalms. It's different from the letters of Paul. What we get, as said before, is an inspired, theological history of the relationship between Israel and their God. This relationship highlights an interaction between two equally important aspects of that relationship. We see in Judges the back-and-forth between grace and law. God's relationship with Israel is at once both conditional and unconditional. He will not remove His favor, He will not completely abandon His promise, but Israel must live in obedience, and in order to inherit that promise they must fulfill the Lord's commands. We see the back and forth throughout this book of these two interwoven themes. Going back to Adam we can see grace and law at work in the life of humanity. Adam was created freely and holy by a gracious God who made him in his own image the opportunity to live in divine glory and happiness. Yet he was required to follow the law. He was required to do one thing. do not eat of this tree. This grace and law and themes are also evident in the lives of Christians. If you are a believer in Christ, you know that you are totally and completely a Christian only because of the work of Christ and the work done on your behalf. You have not earned this distinction for yourself. But, we also know that it is our responsibility, it is our duty and command to fulfill the law of God. The command of God is ours to do as well. When we don't, there's punishment, even for us children. It's beyond my ability to reconcile this, to explain it, how do grace and law interact in my life, your life, I don't know, but we will see both of these themes throughout the book. We must think through them on our own. We read of God's rule over his people. God was supposed to be Israel's King and Lord, Judges 8.23. Gideon, one of the better of the less impressive judges, has freed the people and they are about to set him up as a king. He says to the Israelites, I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you, but the Lord will rule over you. This is what was supposed to be. But how would this play out? Unfortunately, Moses knew that someday, even from the beginning, a king would come, that Lord would not have the position that he desired in their lives. He prophesies a king coming in Deuteronomy 17, judges the book itself as we read it in the context of the Old Testament, provides a transition point from pre-monarchy to monarchy. And as we read through the book, we ask, would either of these two systems be everything they were supposed to be, or would they be failures? And very quickly, we learn in Judges, even to the last judge, that both systems would provide a failure. God always desired to be the sole source of rule over his people. He says this in Samuel. are coming upon the death of Samuel another judge and they ask for a king and Samuel doesn't know what to do he asked the Lord is this right should we do this and God responds and says listen to the voice of the people they have rejected me so that I should not rule over them since the day I brought them out of Egypt they have forsaken me this unfortunately continues today with the people of God the church is to have one head alone Christ but how often we lift up other men, other women, to that position of prominence. I'll let you in on a secret, as I said, another secret. I am not the head of the church. Shocking as that may be, neither is Bruce, nor is any other leader that will come about as godly, as wonderful as they might be. Thirdly, a theme in Judges is the need for a Savior. The people of God need a Savior, and not only do they need a Savior, they need a Savior from the Savior. God, as He works through history, will show how dependence on man is bound to fail, because in the end, any leader, all leaders, regardless to his virtue, will die. They will not last forever, and ultimately, they are a sinful wreck, just like you and me. God alone is our hope. We recognize as Christians that Christ is our Savior, but how often we lift other men, as I said earlier. If only Calvin was still alive. If only Hudson Taylor were working here. This is a wrong dependence on man, and it is bound to fail. As we close, I ask one final question about our survey of judges for the day. How as Christians should we read this book of judges? and going through Judges, we need to consider that Judges is not independent of the rest of Scripture. It was written for a purpose. In the end, this book was written to point us to Christ. The Judges, in their position and in their work, were meant to fulfill a role of divine warrior, divine savior, divine leader. But they, in their sinfulness, could not do it. What the people of God need is one man, one true man, the ultimate man, who is able to lead, protect, fight on behalf of, and in the end, cure the people. This could only come about through the divine, the full, divine, human Christ Jesus. Stories and judges as they are accounted to us are done so to point us to a better judge, a better Savior, and to fix us on our ultimate judge, Jesus Christ. Hebrews 12 in the New Testament will describe how we just like our Israelite fathers need a champion to fight our battles for us, one raised up by God and invested with His Spirit in full measure, we need a Savior to secure us, secure our inheritance for us, the one that God has promised, the land that God has promised, one who will protect our faith, one who will not fail as the leaders and judges will. The only one who can do this is Jesus Christ because He is the only one who can save us from ourselves. Hebrews 12 reads, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God on the throne. That is our better judge. Let us pray. Father, thank you for your grace. As we go through judges, I pray that you would Show us Yourself. Show us the lessons that You meant to teach our fathers. Help us to understand our history and help lead us into a better relationship, a more right, a more holy relationship with our true Savior, our true Judge, Christ Jesus the Lord. Amen.