If you'd open your Bibles to Judges chapter 2, because of the length of the text, we're going to look at it as we go down through it. And before we begin our journey through it, we're going to bow in prayer. There are three people having serious medical procedures tomorrow, Joanne Van Till, Jim Lenfield, and Jim Berry. So we're going to include them in the prayer. And then we've been praying for Tim's Uncle Don, and he passed away. So we're going to include the family in our prayer. So will you join with me, please, in prayer? Our Father, we bow before Thee tonight. You are a sovereign God. You are a God who is a comforting God. You're a God who's able to give peace in the midst of dark valleys, peace that's beyond human comprehension. We want to pray for this situation with Tim's family. Lord, it's too late to pray anymore for him, but we can pray that you can minister in a very profound way to the family who are left behind. We ask that your Holy Spirit would be at work in the minds and hearts of those who do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, that through this crisis that they're experiencing, that you would draw them to faith in your Son. We're grateful that you're a God, Lord, who is willing to walk through us when we go through dark, troubled times. And we realize, Lord, that three of our dear members are about to experience some pretty intimidating obstacles tomorrow. We pray that thou would grant them just great serenity. May they have a sense of thy calm and a sense of thy peace. We pray that for Joanne and her medical procedures. We pray that for Jim Lenfield and his and Jim Barry and his. We pray you bring them all safely through it so that we might enjoy fellowship once again with each person. We want to thank you tonight for this great book of Judges. We pray that you will use it to minister to our minds and hearts in a very real and personal way. And for that, we will give thee the thanks as well. In Jesus' name, amen. On several occasions, when I've been looking for certain theological books that I want to get for my library, I drive to Grand Rapids, Michigan and make my rounds to the theological book publishers that I've known for years. And almost inevitably, when I go to Grand Rapids, I'll drive by that old Calvin College campus on Franklin Street. That's the school where I spent so many years studying at the Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music. The curriculum of that school when I was there was put together by John Miles, who basically got his curriculum from Louis Perry Chafer when he was in Dallas Theological Seminary. Mr. Miles loved Dr. Chafer, and he told me shortly before he died that he was one of the people he was looking forward to seeing when he got to heaven. Mr. Miles, of course, was my very dear friend. When Mr. Miles retired as president of the school in 1986, two new presidents arose who did not embrace the same philosophy that God had so richly blessed. Neither one of them had to trust God for the buildings that that school was housed in like Mr. Miles did because the buildings were already there. Neither one of them had to stand for the word of God or its doctrines because that stand was already in place. All those two actually needed to do. was to follow through and embrace the philosophy that God had blessed. All they had to do was stick to the guns of what that school was designed to do, but neither did it. They started toying with the idea that they were going to drift away from about the dynamic blessings of God. They wanted to bring in more secular courses. They decided they wanted to become more of a secular accredited university. And in just seven years span of time the school was gone. A school that at one time had trained thousands of men and women for ministry was ruined by a second and third president who didn't follow the example of a man like John Miles. That same kind of thing happened in Israel's history. It happened several times in the book of Judges. When this book begins, Joshua is basically signing off the scene. He'd been alive. He was focused on believing God. He was focused on taking Israel into that promised land. And when he was doing that, God was blessing that nation. They were experiencing wonderful things. But as soon as Joshua was gone, things went downhill fast. People started toying with the new novel ideas about living in the land and enemies. Some of the people said, well, it won't matter if we compromise just a little bit. Let's just see if we can get along with all these people who are living in the land here with us. They didn't obey God like Joshua did. And as Gary Enrig said in his commentary, the second generation experience became a secondhand experience. When you come to Judges chapter 2, you come to a pretty simple thesis to see. When God's people who've been focused on understanding and applying God's word leave, those who are left behind need to maintain that same focus if they want great blessings of God. Or if they don't do that, they will see those blessings removed and they'll find themselves in a disaster. It has been observed by many people that the greatest battle that you and I will ever face will be the battle with ourselves. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to Israel, at times Israel was its own worst enemy, at times we are our own worst enemy. There are some children of God who are more drawn to the goals, the lust, the philosophies of the world than they are to God. If they keep that focus, it's going to cost them. God is a very gracious God. He gives His people plenty of time to make adjustments. If His people are willing to humble themselves and confess their sin and do honest business with Him, He'll give them victory. But if they don't respond to him, he'll shut things down. That's true nationally, ecclesiastically, and individually. There's a cycle that you'll see develop in chapter 2, and we'll see it over and over again in the book of Judges. The people disobey, then they get the divine displeasure of God. That puts them in depressing despair situations, and then God delivers them. It's a pattern that goes over and over again. Now when we come to the second chapter of Judges, there are eight parts to this that I want you to see. First of all, God rebukes his people for not obeying his word. Notice with me verse 1 of chapter 2. Now the angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim and he said, I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land which I've sworn to your fathers and I said I will never break my covenant with you. And as for you, you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land. You shall tear down their alders, but you have not obeyed me. What is this you have done? Therefore, I also said, I will not drive them out before you, but they will become as thorns in your sides, and their gods will be a snare to you. When the angel of the Lord spoke these words to all the sons of Israel, the people lifted up their voices and wept. So they named the place Bochim, and there they sacrificed to the Lord. When the chapter opens, it doesn't open with God coming to his people after the victories of chapter 1 and praising them. He doesn't come to Israel and start patting them on the back and say, boy, you had a few good victories there. It opens up with the angel of the Lord addressing Israel, and you'll notice that whoever this person is, it's one of the members of the Godhead. Because the personal pronouns prove that. In verse 1, you'll notice that four times he uses the pronoun I. I am the one that brought you out of Egypt. I am the one who's sworn to your fathers. I'm the one who made the covenant with you. I'm the one who said these things. When you look at verse 2, he uses the pronoun me. As for you, you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land, but you've not obeyed me. So whoever this person is, it's a member of the Godhead. Now, the one who made the covenant with Israel was God. The one who did all of these things described in these verses is God. So some member of the Godhead is, in fact, this angel of the Lord. And this person, who is none other than Jesus Christ, is the member of the Godhead who's appearing in human form before he was born at his incarnation. This is called a theophany. Now the first thing that the angel of the Lord does is he makes a move from Gilgal to Bokeen. Gilgal is mentioned some 38 times in the Old Testament. It was a great place. It was the place where God appeared to Joshua, told him that he was going to go before him, told him, I'm going to give you victory in this land. It was a place where it stood out for the glory of God. It became a place that was a memorial, a victory place, a place of blessing. But Bokim is a word that means place of weeping. By virtue of the fact that the text opens by mentioning these two proper nouns, the names of these two places are important because they inform us that if we're willing to obey God, God will lead us to victory and blessing. But if we're not willing to obey God, he will lead us to depression and weeping. God makes it clear, I'll not break my covenant with my people, but I can break my people. You disobey me, you pursue disobedience, and I can make your life a miserable wreck. In Judges 2, 1-2, the angel of the Lord comes to God's people. He informs them, look, I'm the one who led you out of Egypt. I'm the one who brought you into this promised land. I'm the one who told you I'd never break a covenant with you. I'm the one who told you get these enemies and get their idols out of the land. I'm the one who said don't make any covenant deals with these Canaanites. I'm the one who told you to tear down the altars. We live in a world that promotes toleration of anything, even if it's contrary to the word of God. Now you and I do not live in a dispensation in this church age where we have the authority to physically destroy things like Israel had. and a minister just got in trouble just because he pushed somebody. He didn't have that authority to do that in this dispensation, and he shouldn't have done it anyway. The fact of the matter is, we are living in a time when we need to, in many ways, leave vengeance to the Lord. But the principle is true. We still need to be obeying God, and there ought to be things that we are willing to eliminate from our lives, and at times, there are things we need to be willing to eliminate from our church. It was Jesus Christ who addressed the church of Thyatira in Revelation chapter 2 and he said, I've given you time as a church to deal with this stuff and you're not dealing with it. Now you get rid of it right now or else I'll come and start doing some serious negative things to you. God in his word wants us obeying him. And these people of Israel thought more of their own purposes than they did God's. So God says in verse 2, you have not obeyed me. Well, they could have said to him, well, now just a minute. We had a few little victories over there in chapter 1. God says, you haven't obeyed me. What I told you to do was go into that land and you get that evil cancer out of that land. I told you that you are to go in that land, you're to drive those people out, you're to smash their idols and smash their religious temples, and you're still fooling around with them. Chapter 1 is nothing more than a catalog of failure to do what God wanted them to do. They actually went from tolerating the enemy to making covenant deals with the enemy. And in verse 3, God says, I'm not going to drive out your enemies. And he hasn't to this day. Those enemies still today are a thorn and snare to the nation Israel. They still dominate most of the land. God says, OK, you want to compromise? You don't want to obey me? I'm still your God. But you have some major consequences because you want to compromise my word. And whenever a believer chooses to compromise the word of God, they will reap what they sow. And when the people heard this, and here's this angel of the Lord telling them that, the people, verse 4, lifted up their voices and wept. They had some emotional reaction. They started to cry. We're talking here about real tears. We're talking here about a real emotional outburst. In fact, they named the place Boquim, which means weeping ones. They're crying. They're weeping. But they don't change. There's your problem. Oh, they're emotional. about what they've done wrong, but they don't stop doing the wrong. Before we move on in the text, I want to give us five applications from these five verses. First of all, half-hearted obedience will leave you depressed and weeping. The most miserable Christians you'll ever meet are Christians who totally refuse to yield their whole life to the Lord. Some of the most depressing people you'll ever be around are people who refuse to totally yield their life to the Lord. They don't end up happy. They can't. God won't let them. Secondly, some believers are always emotional. Some believers are always weeping, always sorry, but they don't change. One commentator said you could actually call this book of Judges the book of weeping because they're always weeping, but they never deal with the issue. Thirdly, it's possible to persist in disobeying God to the point where He says, fine, I'll let you be dominated by this problem for the rest of your life. You can cry and you can weep and you can be sorry for this all you want. I'm not going to rid the problem from you because you're still fooling around with it. Fourthly, we must take steps to eliminate enemies or we'll miss the blessings of God. Look, when the Spirit of God convicts us with the Word of God, we must make changes in life. We must change our course of action. And if we do that, God will change His treatment of us. And fifthly, even when God's people have made a mess of things, God is still in a covenant relationship with His people. He said to His people, I am still in that covenant relationship with you. Which brings us to the second part, Joshua dies and he's the one who really had obeyed God's word. You'll notice verse 6, when Joshua had dismissed the people, the sons of Israel went each to his inheritance to possess the land. The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who survived Joshua, who had seen all the great work of the Lord, which he had done for Israel. Then Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110, and they buried him in the territory of his inheritance in Timnath Haretz. In the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gahash, all that generation also were gathered to their fathers, and there arose another generation after them, who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel. That's unbelievable. Joshua was a great man of God. I mean, he had led Israel to big things. He had led them into that promised land and into the blessings of God. Joshua was a fearless soldier. Joshua was a great organizer, a dynamic leader. He was a skilled administrator. But the thing that made Joshua so powerful, the thing that made him stand out above everybody else, was his love for the Word of God and his willingness to obey it. And according to verse 7, when Joshua was alive, all Israel wanted to serve the Lord. He made an impact on people. He made an impact on his elders and the people of Israel. We who are people of God ought to do that. We who are the people of God ought to be out there in the world influencing others. We ought to be making an impact in our homes, in our neighborhood, at our job. People ought to look at us and say, man, there's something about that. When we go on trips, or we travel, or we go into restaurants, or we go to any social setting, we should make an impact on others. We ought to be an influence for the glory of God. Joshua was that. But according to verses 8 and 9, he died at the age of 110. He's buried within the boundaries of their own inheritance. And what that means is, these people could have gone and seen his tomb. And they could have taken a trip and say, that's where Joshua's buried. And you know what that guy did for God? He led us right into this land. We took a lot of territory under his leadership. But according to verse 10, there arose another generation, and they didn't even know about him. They didn't even remember any of the great things God had done. As Gary Phillips in his commentary said, that generation snubbed God. How is that possible? How is it possible in such a short period of time to spiritually become so pathetic? It starts by drifting away from the word. You drift away from what the word of God says and then you start just doing a little bit of compromising. You don't really fully obey God. You're not real serious about the scriptures. You take your blessings for granted. You settle for the status quo experience. You become complacent and you end in a disaster. That's how it happened. Joshua is a man who proves that if you're one man or one woman and you dedicate yourself to understanding and applying the Word of God, you can make a major difference in the lives of many people. And by the way, there's something else that Joshua says to you and me that we don't want to overlook. When a godly man or godly woman dies, we lose something big. And don't forget that. When some godly man or godly woman dies, we just lost a powerful witness. Another one has just disappeared. And the further away we move in time from their disappearance, if we're not careful, the weaker we can become. That's what happened to Israel when Joshua died. Which brings us to the third part. God's people forsook God and did evil in His sight. Notice verse 11. Then the sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt and followed other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed themselves down to them. Thus they provoked the Lord to anger. So they forsook the Lord and served Baal and Ashtoreth. Not only did God's people forget Joshua, they forsook God. If it's not bad enough to forget Joshua, they actually forsook God, which means they deserted God. The people abandoned their commitment to God. They abandoned their commitment to the Word. This was the God who had done so much for them. And not only did they forsake God, but they did evil and they worshiped Baal. In fact, if you could see this in the original Hebrew, the Hebrew text reads, they did the evil in the sight of God. The evil of evils in the sight of God. They fell into the sin of idolatrous worship of Baal, which was filled with sexual immorality. That is the evil of evils in the sight of God. Baal worship, if you read anything about it, was an evil worship. It featured temple prostitution, fertility rites, drunken sexual orgies, homosexuality, snake worship, and even human sacrifices. And according to verse 11, they served all different kinds of Baals. The noun Baal is used 71 times in the Old Testament, 53 times in the singular, 18 times in the plural, and it's used in the plural here. They were involved in all types of Baal worship. They worshipped all different types of idols, and they even worshipped Baal's female counterpart, Ashtaroth, who was the goddess of fertility. These are God's own people. This is the nation God has a covenant relationship with, and they're caught up in idolatry and immorality. And here's the heart of the problem. They're worshiping false God. They're adopting the heathen deities of the Canaanites. As Dr. Leon Wood said, this religion was known for its lewd worship. It had immoral deities, prostitute goddesses, cultic bulls, and serpents. You know, when all is said and done concerning our life, it'll really come down to one or two testimonies that God can give about his own people. Either his testimony will be, you did evil in my sight, and you never did deal with it. You pursued evil. Or his testimony can be, you did right in my sight. You saw my word and you did it. Do you see now why God wanted these people out of this land? Do you see why God said to Israel, get them and get their religion out of there? When you compromise God's word, it always leads to disaster. If we fail to obey the scriptures, we end up doing evil in the sight of the Lord. And there's a warning here for second-generation children. There are many children who come from Christian homes, and they better take a very serious look at this text. Because it is possible for you to grow up in a great Christian home. You're taught wonderful things of God. You're taught to love the Scriptures. You're taught to love the Lord Jesus Christ. You get away from your parents. You start rejecting what you were taught. You can end up doing evil in the sight of God. Israel did. You start dabbling around with that which is immoral, and I guarantee you God will take serious notice of that. You start moving away from what is righteous, and it'll cost you. It cost the people in the Old Testament, and it'll cost them in the New Testament. And that is why God said, flee immorality. Now, you and I live in a world that promotes toleration and acceptance of anything, including that which is contrary to God and His Word. This is where it begins. Don't take the Word of God seriously. Don't think seriously about it. Don't apply it seriously. Don't get involved in being too rigid in accepting it. But ladies and gentlemen, we must make certain that we do not embrace or accept any goal, any objective, any belief of this world that opposes God. Because the moment we begin to do that, it can pull us down fast. How does it happen that a nation that at one time is supposedly God's people, doing things for God, ends up looking like this? It started out when they didn't fully obey God and they said, well, let's just make friends with these people. Let's just let them be our friends. We'll be a friend of the world. That led to them becoming stained by the world. That led to them loving the world. That led to them being conformed by the world. And that led, as Paul would say, to the condemnation like the world. All because they didn't obey God. Which brings us to the fourth part, God's anger burned against his own people. Notice verse 14, the anger of the Lord burned against Israel and he gave them into the hands of the plunders who plundered them and he sold them into the hands of their enemies around them so that they could no longer stand before their enemies. Wherever they went, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil as the Lord had spoken and as the Lord had sworn to them so that they were severely distressed. Look, when God's people turn away from God, God can make your world cave in. Turn away from the Word of God and will of God and He can make your life miserable in a heartbeat. And I want you to clearly understand something about the anger of God. When God's people make God angry, it's not some emotional anger just due to his hurt feelings. Although he does have hurt feelings, I'm convinced of that, but that's not how God's anger operates. He has holy anger that comes right from a righteous God. It is aimed straight at the sin and at the rebellion of his own people. As Gary Enrig said, God and evil cannot coexist. And look what is said here in verse 15. Wherever they went, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil. That's God's doing. God's sovereignty is over everything and everyone. And it didn't matter where these children of Israel went. God used evil people like pawns in his program to make his own people's lives miserable. And there was not a thing that these people of God could do to succeed. He made their lives miserable. Don't kid yourself. You make God angry. Get God angry at his own people, he can hand them over to enemies. You persist in evil, he can cause devastating things to hit. He can devastate his people physically, spiritually, emotionally, financially. He knows how to break them down. You cannot hide from God. You can't run from God. You may think, well, I can live my life in a state of rebellion against God and God will just have life be okay. No, he won't. God will never bless rebellion. You take a child of God who's not interested in obeying the word of God, he can make your life so miserable you'll never smile. There are some, I'm convinced, of God's people who are on medications because they refuse to put God first in their lives. They will not deal with things honestly before the living God. They have no joy, they have no victory, they're on drugs. And when you read these verses, you realize that when God's anger burns against his own people, he can cause their world to cave in completely. When God is angry at his people, they can forfeit his blessings. God says, I will and I can permit my own people to become enslaved and oppressed if they refuse to obey him and his word. It was Warren Wearsby who once said, the sin in our life that we fail to conquer, God will allow to conquer us. And you may be here today, and you may be dominated by some sin, and you have no victory. It's like you're addicted to it. It could be drugs, pills, alcohol, sex, greed, jealousy, temper problems, depression. Well, will you turn to the Lord for help? That's what Israel refused to do. Are you willing to deal honestly before God? Will you turn your life back over to Him? Say, God, here I am. I need your help. Please help me. Please, in your grace, restore me. Which brings us to the fifth part. God in his grace raised up a judge who delivered his people. Verse 16 to me is amazing. Verse 16, then the Lord raised up judges who delivered them from the hands of those who plundered them. Are we reading that right? We just got done reading God's people forsook God. God's people worshipped other gods. God's people bowed down to false gods. God's people were involved in immoral things. God's people were doing things that made God angry. God's people were miserable because they made God angry. And then we come to verse 16 and it says, and God delivered them. That is amazing grace. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a tremendous demonstration of the grace of God. His people's sin make Him angry with His people. When He gets angry with His people, He makes their life absolutely miserable. But as He looks at the pitiable state of His people, who are in a miserable state because He's made them so miserable, His heart is moved to grace. God's people did not deserve to get out of their horrible situations. They had made their own decisions. They had sinned against God. They made decisions that put them in this depressing condition. But God, in His amazing grace, in spite of what they had done, had made a covenant with His people, and He bails them out. I know of a mother and father whose child was miserable because of the choices the child had made. The child found himself in a dire strait, wasn't able to pay rent, wasn't even able to buy food. That's where the child needed to be because of the choices the child made. But in pure grace, in pure grace, These parents bailed the child out. They saw the child in such a state of misery that in pure grace they did something nice for the child. That's what God did for Israel. And that's what God has done for us. You see, there have been times, many times in our lives when God has not given us what we really deserve. If we're honest tonight before the Lord, we'll have to admit there have been many times in our lives where God demonstrated to us amazing grace. And I am convinced that one of the most life-changing experiences that any of us can ever have is to go before the Lord and ask Him to pick up the pieces of our shattered life. I think one of the most wonderful things that touches the heart of God is when His own children come back and say, God, I've made a mess of things. But I'm turning my life over to you. Will you pick the pieces of my shattered life up again? I tell you this from this text. God can and will reverse the miseries brought on you by your own sin. Because where sin abounds, grace abounds more. And if you're a believer and you've made terrible decisions and you find tonight that your world is caved in because of choices you've made and you know you're guilty of making choices that brought you into this mess, you run straight back to your God. You run back to your God and you ask for His help and grace because He stands ready to give you grace. He stands ready to deliver you. Which brings us to the sixth part, God's people wouldn't listen to God's judge or word. Notice verse 17, yet they did not listen to their judges for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed themselves down to them. They turned aside quickly from the way in which their fathers had walked in obeying the commandments of the Lord. They did not do as their fathers. Look at this verse. Think about it in your own life. They didn't learn. God was so gracious to them and then they're right back like a dog returns to its vomit to their old habits. God would graciously forgive and deliver his people and quickly they'd go right back to their old ways. It's like they never learned. They did not say, we need to begin to walk in the ways of God. We need to get back under the scriptures. We need to start understanding God's word and obeying it so we can have the blessings of God. They didn't do that. They went right back to their old habits, just like the dog returns to its vomit. Which brings us to the seventh part, God raised up a judge who delivered his people, but when that judge died, the people went right back to their own rebellion. Verse 18, when the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and delivered them from the hand of their enemies. All the days of the judge for the Lord was moved to pity. by their groaning because of those who oppressed and afflicted them. But it came about when the judge died that they would turn back and act more corruptly than their fathers, and following other gods to serve them and bow down to them. And they did not abandon their practices or their stubborn ways. One commentator said, God is moved to pity by his pathetic covenant people. God raised up judges. God was with those judges. God worked through those judges. You're going to see them come to life in this book of judges. They would cry out to God. God would hear their prayers. And as soon as that judge would come on the scene, they'd start having victory. But when the judge died, they went right back to their old evil habits. In fact, they'd end up worse than before the judge was even raised up. And look carefully, ladies and gentlemen, what is revealed in verse 18. Don't miss this. The Lord was moved to pity by their groaning. God is always moved to grace by the groaning of His people. When you're willing to admit your sin, now we're not talking here about business between you and me. We're talking here about business between me and God and you and God. When you're willing to admit your sin, when you are sickened by your own sin, when you cry out to God because you're so sick of your sin that you want to confess it, you touch the heart of God. He's moved by that. God understands what we are. God saved us in our sin. He'll help us get out of our sin. And when one of his children come to him who's failed, when one of his children come to him who has really done things that have made him sick and says, Oh God, Oh God, I am so sorry. I've sinned. I've done evil. You touch the heart of God and you can actually move God to change his treatment of you from the negative to the positive. which brings us to the eighth part. God's anger did not allow his people to have victory over enemies. Verse 20, so the anger of the Lord burned against Israel and he said, because this nation has transgressed my covenant, which I commanded their fathers and has not listened to my voice, I also will no longer drive out before them any of the nations which Joshua left when he died in order to test Israel by them, whether they will keep the way of the Lord to walk in it as their fathers did or not. So the Lord allowed those nations to remain, not driving them out quickly, and he did not give them into the hand of Joshua. God is immutable in that He does not change, but He's not immobile in that He does move. And if God's people would choose to walk in His way, He will move one way. If God's people choose to walk in their own way, He'll move another way. Now here's what God says, I'm going to run a little test on my people. I'm gonna run a little test. I see there are things that really are in my people's lives who are my people's enemies, and I'm gonna let those things exist there to see whether or not they're real serious about doing business with me. I'm not just gonna take them away automatically. I'll never forget a person who told me one time that they used to be a party person, and when they got saved, the first test that was run on this person is, he said, some of my old friends came around and said, we want you to go to this party. He said, I couldn't believe it. He said, here I am trying to get focused on God. Here come these old cronies wanting him to go to the party. And he said, I made a decision. No, I'm not going. He said, that was a critical decision of life. Because that turned things out for the blessings of God. That's what God does. God says, I'll let my people go through some tests. I'll see whether or not they're serious about obeying me. And if in fact they are, I will fully bless them. What God's going to do with all of us is let us make up our own minds whether we want to be serious about Him and His Word. If you want to self-destruct, if that's what you want to do, if you want to go no higher than you are tonight, if you want to be in your state than you are, then just don't do anything. Just drift along in the same direction that you're moving now. But if you decide, I want to go after all the blessings of God and not miss one of them that I could have had, then you get serious about the scriptures. You start applying them to your life and you will see God do some amazing things. Now I want to conclude this tonight by having us go to the commentary on this section of scripture that was written by the psalmist in Psalm 106. So I'd like you to go over to Psalm 106. This is a commentary on this very section of scripture. Psalm 136, I'm going to read beginning at verse 34. Here's what the scriptures say. They did not destroy the peoples as the Lord commanded them, but they mingled with the nations and learned their practices and served their idols, which became a snare to them. They even sacrificed their sons and daughters to the demons and shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and their daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, and the land was polluted with blood. Thus they became unclean in their practices and played the harlot in their deeds. Therefore, the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people, and he abhorred his inheritance, and he gave them into the hand of the nations. And those who hated them ruled over them. Their enemies also oppressed them, and they were subdued under their power. Many times he would deliver them. They, however, were rebellious in their counsel, and so sank down in their iniquity. Nevertheless, He looked upon their distress when He heard their cry, and He remembered His covenant for their sake, and relented according to the greatness of His lovingkindness. He also made them objects of compassion in the presence of all their captors. Save us, O Lord our God. and gather us from among the nations to give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise. Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel from everlasting even to everlasting and let all the people say amen. Praise the Lord. May we pray. Our Father, we are grateful for your precious word. We are grateful for your amazing, amazing grace. There isn't one of us in this sanctuary tonight who, if you were purely just, would even be alive. We'd all be gone, and we deserve it. But in your grace, you have just permitted us to live You've permitted us to have the scriptures. You've permitted us to grow in our walk with you. You've permitted us to understand wonderful things and to experience many wonderful blessings. We pray that as we would be faithful to you, that you would continue to bless us. As we honor you, we pray you honor us. In Jesus' name, amen.