Let me open in prayer while you're turning to Judges 2. Father, we thank you for the wonderful blessing it is to worship you, understanding that what we're doing temporarily here on earth we will be doing throughout eternity around your throne. We thank you for your son and what he has done for us as we come to the sermon reflecting on his sacrifice that we just celebrated through the elements of communion. Give us hearts of enthusiastic praise and anticipation about what you want to say to us. I pray you'd help me to rightly divide your word. I've been praying this week for the message that you want your people to hear about your word and what it's like when it's absent or rare from a nation or from people's lives and the application it has for the vision of our church and even for our homes and marriages and for our children. Give us a great appreciation for the scriptures and what they do for us, what they restrain, the vision they should give us. Help me, Lord, to speak these things accurately and let this be a time that your people can develop a greater thankfulness for Christ and for the scriptures and how they sanctify us and cleanse us and should shape our lives and help us to learn from Israel's example when they weren't being shaped by scripture and how dark and confusing that season was for them. And thank you for this time, Lord. Pray that you could be pleased with it. Help us to be focused on you and not anything else we have going on in our lives at this time. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. The title of this morning's sermon is When the Word of the Lord was Rare. When the Word of the Lord was Rare. Last week I shared that we were going to be talking about the vision for our church. I expected to do that when I started pastoring every few years, and it's been a little over seven years. I thought we'd probably do it every two or three years, and so we're definitely due to discuss the vision of our church again. And we began by considering that very dramatic change that takes place between two books of the Bible. I told you last week that the Old Testament, the historical books in particular, you can largely read them as one book with each book picking up where the previous book left off, almost where each of those books are chapters of a larger book about the history of the nation of Israel, almost like Israel's biography, which is really to say Christ's biography since he came from Israel. But there's a very stark contrast between two of the books, Joshua and Judges, that's noticeable. And that's because Joshua is largely a book of Israel's victories. They move from victory to victory to victory. And then Judges is largely a book of defeats. It's a cycle of defeats. And so when you look and see Israel go from success to failure so dramatically, I think we should ask why that happened and try to learn from it. And I told you the answer is contained in verses 7 through 12, mostly in verses 7 through 12 of Judges 2. Go ahead and look back at those verses with me, and let's briefly read through them again. So verse 7, it says, the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and they served the Lord all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua. These are the people who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. So these are the people that had been delivered from Egypt, who had walked through the Red Sea, seen the walls of water on each side, seen the plagues that were unleashed on Egypt when they were protected from them in Goshen, experienced the victories over the enemies, you know, Sion and Og, when they're traveling through the wilderness. And so this generation knew the Lord and the things that he had done personally. They died when Joshua and Moses obviously died earlier as well. They didn't have these great men of the faith that have been leading them for all these years. And this new generation comes up who didn't have these experiences. And so verse eight says, Joshua, the son of Nun, he dies at the age of 110 years. They bury him. That's what verse nine is about. And then verse 10, notice this. All that generation were gathered to their fathers, and there was another generation after them, and this generation did not know the Lord and did not know the work that He had done for Israel and the people of Israel, so now they moved from victory to defeat. The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and they served the Baals." And so you can see Israel's unfaithfulness begin soon after Joshua's death. And I want you to understand how that happened, or I really want you to be able to appreciate how dramatic and pivotal of a moment this is in Israel's history by kind of considering their history up to this point. So I was saying that the historical books largely read as one book. When you come to the end of Genesis, you're starting to see the beginnings of the nation of Israel, where these 70 people go into Egypt under Joseph's leadership. Those 70 people begin to multiply exponentially and become millions of people, so that Egypt served almost as this womb for Israel to grow as a nation. Then they're birthed out of Egypt as a nation, and they find themselves, even before they're birthed out of Egypt, They really did find themselves, even in Egypt, under the strong leadership of Moses. He takes them out of Egypt, leads them for 40 years, right up to the border of the Promised Land, at which point he can't enter, and that mantle of leadership is passed to Joshua, where he then leads them through the land in these victories against the Canaanites for 25 years. So for all of Israel's life as a nation, they have always been under very strong leadership. This is their first time without having a human, a man, to look to leadership, to provide for them, and to guide them. And so it is a very interesting moment for them. And then this is what I would ask, what was supposed to happen? when they're without this earthly leader? Who is supposed to be in charge? Who's supposed to rule them or be their king at this time? And the answer is God. They were supposed to transition from being under Moses and then Joshua to being under God. They were to look to him as their king. You don't have to turn there, and you don't even really know that in the book of Joshua or Judges, but you learn that when you reach the book of 1 Samuel. So here's what happened. After the days of the judges, which was three and a half century, 340 years of spiritual darkness were coming to an end, the nation of Israel begins asking for a king, and it displeased. We're told that, you know, not to infer that it displeased Samuel. Samuel says that it displeased him when the people asked for a king, and so he takes us to the Lord in prayer, and then listen to how God responds to him. First Samuel 8 verse 7. The Lord said to Samuel, obey the voice of the people and all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. So it was clear and God had given, it was clear that God expected or desired to be their king, but they rejected him, they wanted this earthly king instead. But when Joshua died, so we know God was supposed to be their king, that's my reason for mentioning this in Sama, but if we back up three centuries earlier with Joshua's death, now they're not looking to God as king, they don't have Moses over them, they don't have Joshua over them, so they have no real strong leadership. And you could say, well, what about the judges? Didn't the judges themselves serve as leaders or rulers of the nation? I would discourage you from viewing the judges that way. If I had to think of just one word to summarize them, I would call them deliverers more than anything, more than rulers or leaders or kings, because the judges were these individuals who were basically raised up out of relative obscurity to provide the nation of Israel with victory over some enemy that was persecuting them. And then that judge seemed to fall back into obscurity after providing that deliverance. But that's all that they really did. They didn't have any sort of dynasty or continuing legacy or anything like that. They were more military, militaristic individuals than anything else. They were not people that sat on a throne or ruled and reigned like a king or led the people like Moses or Joshua. And so this is the question I want to ask you. When the people are not following Moses and they're not following Joshua and they're not looking to God for leadership, who is in charge? Or another way to say it might be, who's in charge when nobody's in charge? Someone said the devil. You could say basically everyone's in charge, in a sense. This is what it looks like when everyone has their own highest authority. This is what it looks like when there's no regard for leadership or authority, there's no regard for order or for structure. They don't have Moses, they don't have Joshua, they don't look to God, and so everyone just does what they think is right. They are their own highest authority. And this brings us to lesson one. Israel moved from victory to defeat because they did part for what was right in their own eyes. They moved from victory to defeat because they did part for what was right in their own eyes. Turn to the right to Judges 17. We're gonna go through some verses and I wanna read them quickly so that you hear the repetition and pick up on the theme. If we start discussing them too in depth, then you won't catch the repetition that I desire for you to see established. So look at Judges 17, verse six. It says, in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Look at chapter 18, verse one. In those days there was no king in Israel. Look at chapter 19, verse 1, in those days when there was no king in Israel. And then the last verse of the book, chapter 21, verse 25. In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Now, it's an odd statement that there's no king in Israel. It's true in one sense and it's not true in another sense. It's true in that there wasn't a king in Israel because Israel wasn't recognizing a king, but it's not true to say that there wasn't a king at all. There was definitely a king and we know that from 1st Samuel 8 when that king, capital K king, spoke up about being rejected by man, right? So just because Israel isn't recognizing God as king doesn't mean that there's not a king. It just means that there's not a king in Israel at this time. But he's still sitting on his throne. He's still ruling and reigning. He just happens to be during this season rejected by ungodly man or the ungodly nation of Israel. And that's why the nation of Israel during this season Looked as terrible as they did the days of the judges those three and a half centuries were some of Israel's darkest days Let me give you a brief understanding of the book here Those 340 years the record of their history is in the first 16 books of the book of Judges The last five chapters of the book of Judges, 17 through 21, serve more as an appendix for the book of Judges. And in those last five chapters, 17 to 21, they discuss two different accounts or stories that are sort of plucked up out of the history of the Judges and set down as examples for us of what it looks like when man does what is right in his own eyes. Let me say that one more time. So the first 16 books give the history of those three and a half centuries of the Judges. And then chapter 17 through 21 record these two accounts that are picked up out of the book of Judges and set down as examples for us of what it looks like when man does what is right in his own eyes. So when you get to the end of Judges, those two stories that are recorded there, they didn't even occur toward the end of the, it seems like they probably did not occur toward the end of the history of the judges. At least one of them seemed to occur very early during the days of the judges. But they're put for us to be able to look and understand that this is what it looks like when man does what is right in his own eyes. Now, here's why I'm telling you that. If you're familiar with those five chapters or those two accounts at the end of the book, they are some of the most confusing and bizarre. They contain some of the wickedest verses that you'll read in all of Scripture. Some of the most bizarre and confusing teaching that you will ever encounter is found in those five books. There's a reason that many pastors don't want to teach On the end of the book of Judges, let me give you an example. If I was to teach on David committing adultery and then having Uriah murdered, it wouldn't be a challenging thing to teach. We can easily condemn what David did. We understand why he did it. We know it was wicked. We can say that he looked, he lusted, he gave himself over to sin. We can say it was wrong, but we can also very easily explain how it happened. The difficulty associated with teaching the end of the book of Judges is as a Bible teacher, you're kind of doing this. this is what they did, I can't really tell you why they did that, I can't tell you why that's the choice that they made, I can't tell you why that looked right to them, I can't tell you why they did this with this woman, or there's this woman that did this with her son, I can't tell you why her son did this, or why this tribe kidnapped this priest, or why they hid in the bushes and jumped out and kidnapped these women, or why they almost wiped out the tribe of Benjamin, and you're kind of looking, and as a Bible teacher, you wanna be able to explain what you're reading And you just can't do that with those five chapters. So many Bible teachers just stay away from them completely, which I think is a little unfortunate. Now, here's why I'm telling you that. Those dark, bizarre, confusing, wicked chapters are characterized by that phrase that we just read four times, that there's no king in Israel. Everyone is doing what is right in their own eyes. And so what's my point? My point is this. When God is not king, when man is king, or when man does what is right in his own eyes, what do you end up with? Bizarre, confusing, disaster, wicked, insanity, unexplainable behavior. You end up with those five chapters. You end up with accounts that look like that. And here's what's absolutely shocking about all of this. It doesn't say that everyone was doing what they knew was wrong. If it said that, it would actually make a lot more sense. The shocking part is that it says everyone was doing what they thought was right. They were engaging in all of this wickedness, and believe it or not, they actually thought it was the right thing to do. Like that mother who deals with her son who robs her, and then she turns around and she rewards him. Or when they're trying to kidnap the women to return them as wives for the Benjamites, or they think they're punishing the tribe of Benjamin, they almost destroy them completely. I mean, it's just, they were, in this very bizarre way, trying to do what they thought was best, but that was the best that they could come up with when they were the moral compass for their actions. That was the very best they could do when they were acting completely independently of God. And this is why I really think the lesson from the book of Judges is so important. When man does what's right in his eyes, he's often doing what is evil in God's eyes. When man is doing what's right in his eyes, he's not only doing what's confusing or bizarre or weird or wicked, he's doing what is downright evil in God's eyes. And so another way to say it would be this. When man has his own moral compass, it becomes abundantly clear that man needs a different moral compass. The man cannot direct himself. He cannot determine what is righteous. He cannot determine what is best. I'll share a story with you from my life that I think about when reading the book of Judges. When I was in the military, we used to do an amount of land navigation. And so there will be a large wooded area, you know, miles across, and they'll put out all of these points that you're supposed to go find, and some of the points are correct and some of the points are incorrect. But all the points look the same, so when you reach one of these points, you don't know whether you've reached the point you're supposed to reach or you've reached the wrong point. And so you're given this map. And then you're also given this compass, and you hold this compass in front of you, like, I mean, I don't want to bore you with all details, but you'll appreciate the point hopefully in a second. You've got this compass, and you're holding it in front of you like this, and then you're walking the direction you're supposed to go, this many, you know, could be this many miles, or this many hundreds of yards, or even thousands of yards to reach this point. And something you learn early on, well, hopefully you learn this early on, save yourself a lot of trouble. If you're off even a little, I mean, you're off a degree. You're off two degrees. You would not believe how far you end up removed from the point that you're aiming at or that you think that you're heading toward. You can end up so far from the destination that you're trying to reach simply because you're off just this little amount, because the journey is so long. You're walking in that direction so far that when you finally get there, you could be hundreds or thousands of feet away from where you intended to go. And so here's what doesn't matter when you're walking. It doesn't matter that you were trying really hard. It doesn't matter that you put forth your best effort. It doesn't matter that you were being very sincere. It doesn't matter that you got up that day and you pressed your uniform and shined your boots and you got all the stuff you're supposed to have. It doesn't matter that you've done all these other things right. It only matters that you didn't end up where you were supposed to go. And here's what's interesting. I can remember this happening one time. You don't know you went the wrong way until you reach the evaluator. Because you put all these points down on the scorecard and then you take the scorecard and you bring it to this evaluator and you watch them because they're doing hundreds of cadets in a row and you're in line and you're kind of waiting. I remember being in line, I'm waiting to turn in my card to this evaluator and I'm watching him grade these other cadets and mark their points wrong. And maybe because I'm prideful, I'm looking and I'm like, well, when I get up there, I'm not going to miss any of them. And so I turn in my scorecard, and this gentleman starts marking some of my points wrong. I didn't know I was wrong until that point. I'd been convinced that all my points were right. In fact, I was so prideful, I almost wanted to tell him that I think he was grading it incorrectly, because I was, yeah. Now, I didn't, which is why I did end up getting to become an officer, because I'm sure if I had corrected that gentleman, that might have delayed my commissioning. I was that convinced that I had found the points that I was supposed to find and in what direction that I was supposed to go that when he marked me wrong, I thought the fault was with him. So I had been trying hard, I had done my best, but all that mattered is that I didn't end up where I was supposed to go. So if you were to reach your evaluator and you turn in your points and he marks them wrong, you just imagine a cadet or a soldier that says something like this, I was being very sincere. You need to appreciate this. You should recognize that I was trying very hard. I walked for a long time. I walked quite a distance to reach these points. I was convinced I was going the right way. I had no idea that I was so far off. He's not going to care, is he? Nobody cares about that. And you listen to that and it makes so much sense, you can almost wonder why I'm sharing it. And I'm sharing it because I believe that the same people that makes sense to do not apply that same logic to their relationships with God. They are convinced that if they just try hard enough, religiously speaking, if they are sincere enough, if they believe intensely enough that they are going the right direction, then it's not even going to matter if they're going the wrong direction. As long as they believe enough, then it's not even going to matter that they ended up at the wrong point when they finally get to the evaluator that day. And it does not work that way, folks. It just doesn't work that way. God has given us his word because he expects us to follow it. And there's not a lot of latitude for us not to do that. We don't get to make things up. We don't get to disagree with the things that we don't like. We don't get to say, well, I'll take this, but I won't take that. I mean, you look at the sincerity of some people. One of the things that occurred to me was, you ever see the Jews at the Wailing Wall? Could you imagine individuals that look more sincere than them? I mean, it is heartbreaking to see those people who have rejected Christ still longing for their Messiah. Have you ever seen videos of Muslims crying out for Allah? I can't imagine individuals who are more sincere than them. I can't imagine greater effort that's put forth than some of them. I mean, think of monks, people that won't speak for years because they think this makes them more righteous, or people that used to abuse themselves physically because they were convinced that this allowed them to be closer to God or made them more righteous. People that believe these things so sincerely, they will subject themselves to the worst punishments, even bordering on, you know, torture what they'll go through at the efforts. I mean, absolutely convinced that what they're doing is right. Many of them won't be dead but two seconds to learn that they have been going the wrong direction. that that's not where the point is. The point is over here. But they're convinced, oh, if I just believe enough, if I just try hard enough, and there's no room for that. There is no room for that in our relationship to the Lord because he has put it in the Bible for us. That's what we need to follow. That's what we need to hold to. That's what we're expected to believe. That's how we're supposed to order our steps. Now, I wanna ask you this. If we're not following the word of God, what are we following? How do we determine what direction to go? If the Bible is not our compass, what is our compass? What are we using? It's our hearts. It is our hearts. Our hearts become our moral compass. And everyone in this world falls into one of two categories. The Bible is our authority on truth and righteousness and morality and direction, wrong right and wrong, or your heart is. You determine what's right. You determine what's wrong. You determine what's righteous. You determine what's acceptable. You determine what's unacceptable. You determine what's sinful and what is not sinful. And the problem with this is Jeremiah 17, 9 says, the heart is deceitful above all things. It is desperately sick. Who can understand it? Jeremiah 17, nine is describing what the people at the end of the book of Judges were doing. To do what is right in your own eyes is to follow your heart. Those are synonymous. When it says that the people in the days of the judges were doing what was right in their own eyes, they were following their heart. To follow your heart is to do what's right in your own eyes. Absolutely synonymous or equivalent to each other. Now, sometimes you meet people Let's say you meet a young man and he's thinking of marrying some unbelieving woman. And you confront him and you say, maybe you didn't know this, but the Bible would forbid you from doing that. It says that you're not supposed to be unequally yoked. Or you talk to some young woman and she claims to be a Christian and she's decides that she's gonna live with her boyfriend, or you talk to someone and they are convinced that homosexuality isn't sinful, or they think it's acceptable because of these circumstances in their lives for them to murder their baby, or it's okay for them, you know, to get drunk because other people do, but they don't drive when they do, and all the explanations, and when you start to press these people about this, you will regularly hear the same thing from them. Well, I'm just following my heart. I'm just doing what my heart is telling me to do. My heart has not convicted me about this. And you know what? they're telling you the truth. That is the truth. Their heart has not convicted them about that. Their heart has not told them that that's wrong. Their heart has not told them they shouldn't fornicate. Their heart has not told them that they shouldn't get drunk. Their heart tells them to fornicate. Their heart tells them to watch that. Their heart tells them to get drunk. Their heart tells them to marry that person. But that's what you should expect when Jeremiah 17 9 says that the heart is desperately sick. You should tell them that there's probably nothing worse in the entire world for them to follow than their heart. If you understand what God's word says about our hearts, then you will learn pretty quickly that if your heart says to go that way, the best thing you could do is a 180. Listen to this, Matthew 15, 19. Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, and slander. I can't even think of worse things that could be produced in this life, and God says that they come out of our hearts. So can you think of anything worse to follow? And then one of the interesting things when it says the heart is deceitful, we think about deceitfulness or deceivers, and we think in terms of someone deceives someone else or someone is deceived by someone else. Well, what I was reflecting on this past week that surprises me about Jeremiah 17, it doesn't even, you're not being deceived by someone else. You're deceiving yourself. It is your own heart that is deceiving you in choosing to listen and follow your own heart. You are choosing to deceive yourself. And that's what these, if someone says, no, God has told me I can do this. My heart has convinced me I am not convicted about this. I feel peace about that. That's why Jeremiah 17 9 says, beware of your heart deceiving you. These people have allowed their hearts to deceive them and convince them that it's okay to do this. Ecclesiastes 9 3, the hearts of the children of man are full of evil and madness is in their hearts while they live. Genesis 6-5, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Now you listen to that and you say, well, that's before the flood, right? I mean, after the flood and after God wiped the face of the earth clean and cleansed everything from all of the filth, well, then things are gonna be better. So what does God say about man's heart after the flood? Well, I'm glad you asked that. Listen to this. Genesis 8.21, this is after the water has receded and after Noah has offered that sacrifice. God looks down on us, I suppose, you know, smells the smoke, how we say that language in Scripture. And so God responds to this, Genesis 8.21, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. Absolutely no change associated with man's heart. If there was anything in all of human history that you would think could have changed man's heart, wouldn't you think it would have been the flood? I mean, if you put a mic in my face and said, Pastor Scott, tell me one thing, what is the one thing that you would expect would change man's heart? To me, I'd have to say the flood. There has never been anything as dramatic or horrific or catastrophic as that. Go forward 10 chapters, you've got Sodom and Gomorrah. Go forward a few chapters, you've got incest. You've got murder. You've got violence. You've got all the same things that we see today. You've got many of the same things we see before the flood. And so you say, well, what was the point of the flood then? Well, besides showing God's judgment and that he punishes the unrighteous, I think it was to wipe away the demonic influence that was prevalent on the earth in Genesis 6. But it did nothing to change man's heart. And that should make sense if you're a parent, because you can never spank your children hard enough or frequently enough to change their hearts. What I'm trying to say is this. Discipline doesn't change the heart. You discipline to attempt to restrain evil in your children's life, but you don't spank your children enough because you think they're going to become Christians through that. The only thing that can change a heart or allow someone to become a Christian is the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can't spank your children enough and then suddenly they confess Christ as Lord. That's not what happens. And the flood is a great example of that because there's never been a more severe judgment or punishment in all of human history, and it did absolutely nothing. for man's heart. So understand that. We're not disciplining or punishing or spanking our kids because we think it's going to make them Christians. We're just trying to help them make better decisions in the future. But if we want them to become Christians, it's through preaching Christ to them. Consider these two verses. Proverbs 14.12 and 16.25 says, there is a way that seems right to a man. Now just pause, I know most of you or maybe almost all of you could finish this for me. Let's say you are not familiar with this, the rest of this verse. There is a way that seems right to a man. You would probably expect it to say something like this. There is a way that seems right to a man and it's not always the right way. Or there is a way that seems right to a man, but it doesn't always go the way that he wants. Or there is a way that seems right to a man, and it doesn't always go as well as he would like. That's what I would expect it to say. But it says, there is a way that seems right to a man, but the end of it is death. I mean, that's what's shocking about the book of Judges is it doesn't say that the people were doing what was wrong in their eyes. They were doing what was right. They thought they were doing good. They thought they were being righteous. And there is a way that seems right to a man, and all it does is produce death. That's how misguided our hearts are. That's how bad our moral compasses are. That's how wicked we are, separate from Christ, directing our lives. I mean, could there be anything worse? It's almost like God put the worst possible result of man doing what's right in his eyes. He said, the way that seems right to a man, the end of it is death. He couldn't even come up with something more severe than that. Now I want to share two verses with you from the Sermon on the Mount. Let me explain the symbolism of them so that they make sense. So just keep this in mind. Before I read the verses, here's the symbolism. The eye represents our beliefs. Light represents, as it typically does in Scripture, light represents truth or righteousness, and darkness represents what it typically represents in Scripture, lies and unrighteousness, or lies and sins. One more time, the eye represents our beliefs, light represents truth and righteousness, and darkness represents lies and unrighteousness. Now, with that in mind, Matthew 6.23, or 6.22, The eye is the lamp of the body, or what you believe. So if your eye is healthy, which is to say if what you believe is true, your whole body will be full of light, or your life will be full of righteousness. But if your eye is bad, if what you believe is a lie, your whole body will be full of darkness, or your life will be full of unrighteousness. If then, The light that is in you is darkness, which means if what you believe to be true is a lie, then how great is that darkness? Or how terrible will it be when it is shown that what you have spent your life believing to be true or righteous ended up being a lie or unrighteousness. I mean, one of the extreme examples, individuals piloting planes as they fly into buildings, convinced that this is their fast trip, their quickest way to reach some eternal paradise, and then to die. And in that moment, I mean, how quickly the light that they believed or held to is shown to be eternal darkness, eternal punishment. And that's what this is saying. It's saying if you were to go through your whole life and believe something, because here's what we do. Everything we believe shapes our actions and behaviors and choices, right? Every decision you have ever made was motivated or you came to that decision because of what you believe. And so there is nothing more important than what we believe. There is nothing more important than what we hold to be truth. That is what determines and shapes our lives for us. And imagine someone is living their life convinced that what they believe is true only to find out it's a lie. Imagine atheists. who absolutely, I'm not even sure there's, to be honest, I'm not even really sure based on Romans 1, but because it says they suppress the truth of God, I'm not even sure, and I mean this sincerely, that there are atheists. They're suppressing the truth, they're denying God's existence, but I think deep down, creation itself has revealed to them that there is a creator, but they're suppressing that truth, trying to convince themselves God isn't real because they wanna be their own highest authority, they don't wanna have to submit to him, And they spend their lives believing that lie, and then all of the behavior that is an outworking of that, all the decisions they made, and then have to stand before that God. How terrible is that darkness? How great is that darkness? Now coming back to our account, let me show you how the days of the judges, let me say it like this, let me show you how the days of the judges, or let me show you how the days of man doing what is right in his own eyes, or the days of man following his own heart, come to an end. Turn to 1 Samuel 3. and I can relate to this, I would wake up. on Saturdays as a child, and I would kneel down by the side of my bed, and I'd grab my rosary, and I'd pray through it, and I prayed through it as quickly as I could because I didn't enjoy doing it at all, but I thought this is what a good person would do. So I'd spend all of these Saturday and some Sunday mornings kneeling on the side of my bed. I mean, hundreds or probably thousands of Hail Marys I prayed, something that was terribly sinful to worship Mary like that, but why did I do it? because I was convinced that that was the right thing to do. I was doing what was right in my eyes, and it wasn't until later that the gospel was preached to me and my eyes were open to the truth that that was idolatry. But I didn't understand, they're praying to saints, something's lost. By God's grace, much of that upbringing has been forgotten, but there was a saint to pray for for almost anything. I mean, if you want to get someplace safely, you're going to pray to that saint of safe driving, I guess. Or you can't find something, the saint that's going to help you find this. And you want to sell something, the saint that's going to help you sell stuff. I remember they used to buy statues for these saints, bury them in the backyard so people could sell their homes, things like that. And so there's all these saints. My parents did that. When they wanted to sell their house, they bought that saint and buried him. Which saint was it? I wasn't going to say it, but you kind of piped up a little bit. So it was Joseph. You felt bad for burying him back there? Burying St. Joseph? Okay. Okay, I thought that's what you're supposed to do, buy him and bury him there. Oh, okay, okay. I bet that's the thing you kind of listen and we chuckle, but it's sad. It is truly sad because we are convinced at the time that these are the right things to do because this is what our heart, our moral compass is telling us to do. So how can man be delivered? Well, how was man delivered from those dark days, spiritually speaking, of the judges? Look in verse 1, chapter 3, 1 Samuel 3 verse 1. The boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli, and the word of the Lord was rare in those days. There was no frequent vision." This is the young prophet Samuel. This is the prophet Samuel who anointed Saul and then David, but as a young boy. And when it says, in those days, what days is it referring to? Yes, the days of the judges. So even though we're in the book of Samuel, the book of Samuel contains the end of the days of the judges. So even though we're not in judges, we're actually still in the days of the judges, if you want to say, because we're actually looking at a judge. Who's the last judge? Samuel and his sons are the last judges. Samuel is this transitional figure where he's the last judge along with his sons and he's the first prophet. So he's the first, he occupies both of these offices together. Now, when it says there was no frequent vision, what does that mean? Does that mean, you know, everyone in this day was very boring and they had no ideas, there was no creative people, there was nobody that could come up with a plan? This is kind of how we think about vision or being a visionary person. I'm not a, I will say that I'm not a visionary person. And what that means is I'm not creative. I think I'm pretty boring. I don't come up with a lot of new ideas. I don't like to take risk or chance. I like consistency. I feel like I could do the same thing for the rest of my life and be pretty content with that. But that's not what this is talking about when it mentions vision. When God's word talks about vision, it's used synonymously with God's word. Let me say it one more time. When the Bible talks about vision, it's used synonymously with the word of God or the law of God. And we see that. in this verse. If you look at the second half of the verse, It says, the Word of the Lord was rare, the Word of God was rare in those days, there was no frequent vision. So do we see the relationship there between the Word of God and vision? There was no vision because there was no Word of God. God's Word gives the vision, or God's Word is the vision. There is no vision without it, and this brings us to lesson two. Vision should come from God's Word. Listen to another verse making this point, and I'll give you the context for it. If I had to tell you what I think would probably be the second most spiritually dark time in Israel's history, I would say it was when the Jews found themselves in exile in Babylon. So I don't know that anything competes with the days of judges, but if there was a close second, it would be when the Jews found themselves in exile in Babylon because the temple had been destroyed, The priests are not being priestly, they're not teaching, they're not doing many of the, they're not being able to fulfill their offices. God did provide exilic prophets, Daniel and Ezekiel, but for the most part, this was a dark time in Israel's history because God had removed them from the land because of their idolatry. And so during this spiritually dark time, listen to this verse. Ezekiel 7 verse 36, the people seek a vision from the prophet while the law perishes from the priest and counsel from the elders. They seek a vision from the prophet while the law perishes from the priest and counsel from the elders. So do you see that relationship again? Between vision, when we say the law, we're referring to the Word of God. So the people look for a vision, but they can't find it because the law is perishing or disappearing. And that's because vision comes from God's Word. Without the Word of God, they don't have any vision. Listen to another verse making this point, Proverbs 29, 18. Where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law. One more time, Proverbs 29, 18. Where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law. You probably know that it's common for Proverbs to couple synonyms together, right? And sometimes a proverb will say the same thing in two different ways, or sometimes a proverb will talk about the same thing, but say one truth and then say the opposite of it. So for example, there's no prophetic vision that people cast off restraint, and then it says, but blessed is he who keeps the law, because it's associating prophetic vision with the law, and saying that there's no restraint among the people when there's no vision, which is also the same as saying there is no restraint among the people when there is no law. So when we talk about having vision for our church, what we're doing is we're talking about being governed by or regulated by the Word of God. And I've kind of talked about this recently. We don't build our theology, we don't build our doctrine from silence. So in other words, we don't look at God's Word and do this. This is a terrible thing for elders to do. Well, the Bible doesn't forbid that so we can do it. That's not a very good defense. Instead, what we want to do is we want to say, well, this is what the Bible describes or prescribes. Sometimes the Bible gives us descriptive accounts, and we can build from narratives. I would say it should be trumped by what's prescriptive or commanded, but they can still be very instructive. But we're not going to build our theology and doctrine or our church from silence. Instead, we're going to look at what's taught or preached in God's Word and develop our vision from that. So the nation of Israel, wouldn't do this. The Israelites couldn't come up with their own vision, or you could even say the elders, the Israelites had elders too, the elders of the nation of Israel couldn't come up with their own vision and then say, well, this is our vision for the nation. And similarly, we can't come up with our own vision for the church and then say, this is our vision from the church. Instead, the vision itself must be grounded in God's Word. Now, sometimes a pastor, maybe like in his job description, it'll say that he's the vision caster or he cast the vision for the church, and I don't mind that when someone is described that way, assuming that what they mean by that is this is the individual who's looking at God's Word to determine what should happen for the church. Now, if instead what they mean is this is the guy that sort of makes up on his own what he thinks is best and does that independent of God's Word, then what do you basically have? You have a man who looks like the book of Judges, who's doing what's right in his own eyes, or you have a man who's doing what Jeremiah 17 9 says, and he's following his deceitful heart, right? And so that's what we would hope that they don't mean that someone is coming up with a vision for the church independent of God's word. So we need vision, we need to know where we're going, what we're doing, what we should be focusing on, what our church should look like, and all of that vision should come or must come from scripture. Otherwise, we're just following our hearts. We're just getting together and we're sort of collectively saying, well, this is what we think is best and so this is what we'll do. Now listen to Proverbs 29, 18 one more time. It says, Doesn't this make sense? When there's no prophetic vision, which is to say there's no law of God or word of God, then people are unrestrained, right? There's nothing restraining their actions or their behavior. There's nothing inhibiting them. There's nothing stopping them from acting as wickedly as their hearts would tell them to act. And this is why the end of judges was so bad. The people had cast off restraint because the word of God was, like 1 Samuel 3, one says, there was no prophetic vision. That's why the days of the judges were so bad, because the word was not there restraining the people. They did not have it to tell them, don't do these terrible, wicked things that you're doing that you even bizarrely think are good things to do. They weren't being guided and influenced by the Word of God. It wasn't controlling and preventing them from these things. And this brings us to lesson three. God's Word restrains sin. God's Word restrains sin. And if you ever get in a discussion and someone asks you, is this a sin? Do you think this is wrong? Do you think this is sinful? Do you think this is good? If you respond by saying, well, I think this, You're very close to having an argument of two hearts going back and forth or two people's opinions. So the very best thing you can do when someone asks for your opinion or they say, what do you think, is to quote a chapter and verse to them. Instead of saying, well, I think this, you want to say, well, God's word says this. And if you respond to someone's question with the word of God, well, then they're arguing with the word of God and they're not arguing with you anymore. And it's actually a nice way for you to build a step back. and let God speak for himself through Scripture. But if you say to someone, if someone says, well, what do you think about this? And you say, well, I think this. And then the person says back, well, I think this. Now you're just going back and forth, two opinions, two people's hearts. And then it ends up kind of being prideful and about who's right and wrong. And then it's just about two men talking about what's right. in their own eyes. So instead say, hey, Romans chapter 1 says this about homosexuality, and you don't even have to provide any commentary about it. 1 Corinthians 6 says people that do these things will not inherit the kingdom of God. And then they have to argue with God Himself, and you cannot, and it's a real blessing to not have to get entangled in that. So God's word restrains sin, and I wanna share an interesting example with you. I told you earlier that the nation of Israel was under the leadership of Moses for 40 years, and then the strong leadership of Joshua for 25 years. During those 65 years, there was actually one interesting time when the nation of Israel was without Moses and without Joshua, where Moses and Joshua had both left the nation of Israel. for a short season. Does anyone remember when that was? That's when Moses and Joshua went up on Sinai, and the people were left at the base of the mountain. How well did they behave? Not Moses and Joshua, but the people, right? Why was that so dark for them? because they had lost the godly leadership that was providing the prophetic vision that was sharing God's word with them. So in other words, the people had cast off all restraint. When there's no prophetic vision or no word of God, the people cast off restraint, and that's what happened. Exodus 32, 25, Moses saw that the people were unrestrained, the exact language from Proverbs 29, 18, for Aaron had not restrained them to their shame among their enemies. Their behavior was so bad, they embarrassed themselves. Now you could say, well, they had Aaron. I could be wrong, I'll admit this, although I don't think I am. I could be wrong about this. I don't think that it was ever God's best for Moses to bring Aaron with him. So I never preach, if I was to preach on Exodus 3 and 4, I would never say, oh, look how merciful and compassionate God is being to Moses, letting him bring Aaron with him. This is God finally saying, you know what? You want to argue with me for this long? You want to resist my calling on your life? I've commanded you to go to Egypt this many times? Fine, take your brother. That's what I think happened. And then you say, well, how do you know that? Because it was terrible with his brother. Aaron was a complete disaster in different instances. I suspect that Moses spent many years looking back saying what? I really wish that I had just left my brother at home and obeyed God and went when he told me to go, like when Moses built the golden calf, like when Moses joined his sister Miriam in trying to, you know, what? When Aaron joined Aaron and Moses' sister Miriam to attack Moses' authority, I think there are many times that Moses looked back and regretted that he had been so pushy with God. And so I don't think it's an instance of God's mercy. I think it's an instance of his discipline allowing Aaron to go. And so, and sure enough, when Moses is away from the people, Aaron can't even lead them away from this terrible debauchery they engaged in. And it even says to their shame among their enemies. Why would it say that? Because do you remember when the spies reached Jericho and what did Rahab say? We have heard about you guys. We have heard about what your God has done, the plagues that he had unleashed. They had remembered that over four decades later. Well, what do you think when they're at the base of Mount Sinai and now they're only a few weeks removed from those plagues, from the Red Sea parting, from the Passover when the firstborn is killed. Imagine how that word spread. So God was known, he was shown to the surrounding nations through what he had done to Egypt. And the other thing that was known was that God's people were supposed to be holy. If you follow Yahweh or Jehovah, there is a way that you act, a way that you behave. And when the surrounding nations somehow learned, I guess they'd have been bad enough at the base of Sinai, two or three million people acting like this. It had been so bad that the surrounding nations learned of it, and it was to the Israelites. I mean, here's the thing, and I think we all know this. What does the unbelieving world love more than almost anything else? There is nothing more thrilling for the unbeliever than to see prominent Christians And that's what these surrounding nations saw, was the Hebrews. Oh, the Hebrews, they say they're so holy, and they say they're so good. Look at how they're acting at the base of Sinai. I mean, just embarrass themselves. We wouldn't even act like that, and we're pagans. And so that's what it was like. I mean, they humiliated themselves, and so the point is this. Without prophetic vision or without the word of God, the people become very unrestrained, whether in the wilderness, whether in the promised land, whether in the church. And this is the point of church discipline, to restrain sinful behavior. So guess how God brought the days of the judges to an end? It's a spiritually dark season, and what does God do? It's spiritually dark because the word of God isn't there, the law isn't there. God raises up the first prophet to give the people the word of God. What is every prophet? A mouthpiece for God. When the prophet speaks, God is speaking. And so they've had these three and a half centuries without the word of God, so God says, I will provide a prophet and I will speak to the people and provide them with light that lifts them up out of the spiritual darkness that they have been in for these 340 years. And it delivered them from the problems that plagued them after Joshua's death. To kind of come back to the beginning now, when the Word of God was preached through the prophet Samuel, the light was able to eliminate that darkness, now the people, think back to Judges 2.10, they didn't know the Lord or the things that the Lord had done for Israel. Now they know the Lord, they're hearing from Samuel, they're knowing the things that God has done for Israel. As Samuel preaches the word, the people are becoming holy again. Remember they had stopped remaining holy because they were aligning themselves or developing relationships with the surrounding Canaanites that they did not exterminate completely like they were supposed to. And so Samuel brings the word of God and it rectifies all these problems that had been happening earlier. And it prevented the people from doing what's right in their own eyes because they've got God's word saying, don't do this. And now they know that's not the right thing to do because God's word is saying that is the wrong thing to do. Do this instead and they can do what's right in God's eyes. Now, you can see how terrible it was for Israel to lack vision or God's Word, so I want us to appreciate the great blessing it is for us to have the Word so available to us as we do. We can lose sight of it. We are given so much access to the Word of God, most of our homes have multiple Bibles, that we take it for granted. Listen to these verses, Amos 8, 11, and 12. God said, Behold, the days are coming that I will send a famine on the land. And this is where it gets interesting. Not a famine of bread and not a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. And then listen to what it was like for the people. They shall wander, just confused, from sea to sea, from north to east, running to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it. They just sound lost and crazy. They can't figure out what to do. They can't figure out what's right. They're looking for the Word of God. And what's my point? My point is we will never be in this situation. We will never have to face something like that. We will never have to say, oh, it's so terrible. We're experiencing this drought or this famine from God's Word. We don't know what to do. We don't know what God would say to us. We can't develop a vision for the church. No, we have scripture to tell us how to live, tells us what our marriages should look like, tells us what our family should look like, tells us how to conduct the affairs of the church. And so over the next few weeks as we discuss the vision for WCC, hopefully you'll see that it's one that is drawn from scripture and not one where the elders got together and we said, well, we think this would be best. Or, we think that would be best. Instead, it's, well, this is what God's Word says, so this is the direction we want to walk. This is how we want to go. This is what we think is best for Woodland Christian Church because we think this is what God's Word is saying to do. Now, I want to conclude by taking your minds back to Jeremiah 17, 9, and I was reflecting on something in my home that's been occurring, and it relates to scooters. It relates to scooters. My kids want more scooters, and I think we have a lot of them as it is. So, and they're kind of, did someone else say amen? Yeah. So, I mean, I feel like our garage is filled with scooters. And Katie's like, I'm not sure they're really working that well anymore. Some of the wheels are falling off. I'm like, they can ride a scooter with one wheel. No. So, what I'm like thinking is, can it be fixed? Can this scooter be fixed or we have to get a new one? I was talking to Andrew Chris today and he finally got his van up and going. Apparently, he's a fixer too because he put all this. I was listening to him and I thought I could never do that. I would have to just get a new van. I don't think I could do all that work myself. So, we just want to fix things. We don't want to buy something new. We don't want to have to get something new. We want to take whatever's wrong and then we want to be able to keep working with that and keep dealing with that. And as I was reflecting on this kind of ongoing situation in my family with Katie trying to convince me we need new scooters, and we probably had to bite the bullet and go buy some, that they can't be fixed, I was thinking about Jeremiah 17, 9, because it says, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, and who can understand it? And when I was studying the words desperately sick, it means our hearts can't be fixed. Our hearts can't be fixed. That's what it means. That word, anosh, for desperately sick, two words in English, but one word in the Hebrew, it means five times, nine times it's used, but five times it's translated as incurable. So I'm talking to Katie, I'm like, I think we should just fix these scooters. Well, it's almost like, There are some things we can fix. Our hearts are not one of them. You can't work hard enough on your heart. You can't try hard enough with your heart. You can't put forth enough effort. You can't pay enough money. You cannot invest enough time or energy into your heart to get it to cure it or to heal it. And that's why when you read scripture, what God does is he says, I'm going to give you a new heart. I'm not going to try to fix or cure that one. It's desperately sick. We just can't do anything with it. We need to get rid of it. If you go back to that time I mentioned earlier, where Israel was experiencing this spiritual darkness during the days of Ezekiel when they were in exile, it had been their sick hearts that had gotten them exiled. It had been their idolatry turning to other gods. And so God removed them from the land and listen to what he says to them. Ezekiel 11 19 I'm gonna remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 18, 31, cast away from you all the transgression which you've committed and get yourselves a new heart. Ezekiel 36, 26, I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. So scripture doesn't talk about fixing our hearts because they can't be fixed, they're incurable. What we need is we need new hearts and God is willing to give those to us if we will repent and put our faith in Christ. 2 Corinthians 5, 17, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. Now, if you've never repented of your sins before, if you've never put your faith in Christ, if you've been spending some amount of time trying to fix your heart, you perhaps have been stubborn and believed that it was something you could cure or heal in your own effort, hear what God is saying to you, that He wants to get rid of that heart completely. He wants to give you a new heart. If you've never repented, if you've never repented of your sins and put your faith in Christ to see that happen, or if you have any questions about anything that I shared in this sermon, I'll be up front after service, and I would consider it a privilege to be able to speak with you. Father, we thank you for your word and that it's been made so available to us. I thank you that You're willing to give us new hearts that you do not expect us to fix our old and broken and incurable, desperately sick hearts in our own effort. And God, please forbid us that it would ever be the moral compass.