All the books in the Bible, I think Judges is one of those that contain some of the best, if also some of the most perplexing stories. Certainly when my two sons were very young, we would have family prayers in the evening and read the Bible together. Sometimes we would ask them, what would you like us to read tonight? And if there was something good on the television and they wanted the the prayer time to be relatively short. They typically went to Psalm 23 or Psalm 100 because they knew that they could be dispatched very, very swiftly. But if it was a little bit more leisurely, they always asked for Judges Chapter 3, the story of Ehud. You will remember, of course, the story contains an immensely and ridiculously fat person. It describes a disembowelment and it involves reference to lavatories. three factors that I think are a winning combination with small boys, but also a taste of what the Book of Judges is like. It's a very sort of earthy, violent, gruesome in many places book. And that I think is one of the reasons why it's been comparatively neglected in the church. I wonder this morning how many churches, even across the face of the earth, are engaged in a study of the Book of Judges. Book of Judges carries with it, from a modern perspective, huge problems. We live at the end, well, we start of a new century, but in the last hundred years, if you were to look at the last hundred years of human history, and were to ask yourself, what is it that most marks the last hundred years off from all other eras of history? There are various answers you could give, developments of technology, television, etc, etc. But on the darker side, probably the thing that marks the 20th century off from any previous century has been the extent of genocide and ethnic cleansing, as we call it, that has gone on. The century virtually started with ethnic cleansing. The English were doing it in South Africa. You move on through the century, you find that the Turks are doing it in Armenia. Most infamously, of course, the Germans are doing it all over Europe. trying to clean Europe of its Jewish and its Gypsy populations. You go to the Far East, the rape of Nanking. And even as we come to the end of the 20th century, terrible ethnic massacres in Africa and even in Europe. And the Book of Judges, of course, is a section of the Bible where the Lord God himself appears to sanction. ethnic cleansing and genocide. Even those who take the Bible text very, very seriously, those of us who look at these books and say, well, we have to believe that God is good and we have to believe the picture of God that is painted for us in the biblical texts. Even those of us have most confidence in those two positions, surely struggle sometimes when we look of what goes on in the book of Judges. And as you move on through the book, of course, it isn't just genocide that's the problem. One of the difficulties in preaching on the book of Judges is Hebrews chapter 11. In working through the book of Judges at Cornerstone over the last year until he called a new pastor and I was struck on occasion how it would be so much easier to preach on the passage in Judges if Hebrews 11 didn't exist. because Hebrews 11 lists all these great heroes of the faith, Samson, Jephthah and company. When you go back and look at the details of what they did in the book of Judges, it's difficult to square with the being held up as these great examples of faith. Jephthah makes this rash of Al, puts his own daughter to the sword, Samson, Samson can't even go into some of the things that Samson did really in polite company. I don't want to precipitate embarrassing conversations between you and your youngest children over the lunch table. That's the strange thing about the Book of Judges. It doesn't really conform to modern expectations and it seems to stand in some tension, if you like, with what is said elsewhere in Scripture. Well clearly I can't deal with all of these problems this morning. But I want to start by reflecting on a couple of themes, really, in Judges, Chapter 1. Judges, Chapter 1, on the services, is very straightforward. It's an account of the campaigns of conquest that go on in the Promised Land. And it shows us also the first signs of religious and moral weakness, which will bear catastrophic fruit in the future of Israel. And there are a number of elements to this. And I want to look at three things, particularly this morning. I want us to reflect for a moment upon the terrifying holiness of God and the demands that makes upon his people. I want to think about the compromised response, one might say compromised responses, that we already see coming from the people of Israel in this chapter. And I want to look at the one example in this chapter. if not perhaps in the whole book of Judges, of what one might say is an uncompromised response. One of the most neglected, because it occurs in just a couple of verses, but also I think one of the most beautiful stories in the whole of Scripture. And that is the story of how Caleb finds a husband for his daughter. So first of all then, the terrifying holiness of God If you don't have a grasp of the terrifying holiness of God, you'll never understand what's going on in the book of Judges. When the people of Israel come into the land, the Lord God has given them specific commands. One of them is, you must clear the land before you of all men, women and children. And that is a terrifying, distasteful, awful thing for modern ears to hear. The only way I think we can point to a solution of the moral problem in this is to hold in mind the terrifying holiness of God on the one hand, and the nature of the people who are dwelling in the land on the other. Throughout the Old Testament, God is presented as terrifying. We live in an era where we're really very, very comfortable, I think, as Christians, with the idea of God. Well, if you look in the Old Testament and trace the story through, God is not a comfortable figure to deal with. And if you feel uncomfortable this morning as we read chapter 1 of the Book of Judges, you're getting something of it. God is utterly different to us. He thinks in different ways to the ways we think. And He is an uncomfortable person to do business with because He is holy. in an absolute sense, and therefore makes demands upon people that, from a human perspective, are incomprehensible. But of course, that isn't just an Old Testament idea. You might say, well, of course, that's the Old Testament God, and we know that God fundamentally changes in the New Testament. He becomes much more pleasant, much more akin, if you like, to that, you know, giant man with a white beard who lives in the sky and smiles all the time. That isn't the case, is it? If you look at the book, if you look at the books of the New Testament, God is no less scary in the New Testament in many ways than he is in the Old Testament. How is he described in Hebrews chapter 12? He's described as a consuming fire. He's described as a consuming fire. And when God sends his people into the land, remember who they are. They are his chosen people, they're the apple of his eye. They are to embody, they are to embody in their society, in themselves, God. Not in a literal sense, but they are to demonstrate in the way they live, the exclusiveness and the holiness of the God to whom they belong. Remember of course in this context that when they go into the land, We're not dealing here with sort of peace-loving people. Remember when I was growing up, young people probably never seen this movie, The Time Machine, 1960, Rod Taylor. And it's about this man who travels through time and he goes forward in time and he arrives in this place and he finds himself dwelling amongst this, these beautiful people, the Eloi, they're called. And they're just lovely people. And they live in this land. There's a slight drawback. There's this group called the Morlocks who live underground and they come up and murder the Eloi every now and then. But the Eloi are just these beautiful people living in this land. Everybody gets on with everybody else. Nobody does anything nasty to anyone. You've got to remember, of course, that when the people of Israel go into the land of Cana, they're not coming across Eloi. They're not coming across societies where everybody's nice to each other. If you go back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and see how the dwellers of this land are described, these are people who butcher their own children. These are people who slaughter their own children for their religious practices. These are deeply wicked people. Perhaps if you've ever sat at home at night and watched the news, or watched one of those Dateline programs, and heard about some terrible crime that's been committed, and you thought, wow, when they get older, the person who's done that They should just string him up from the nearest lamppost. And maybe you're not a million miles away from the attitude that was shown towards these people in the first book of Judges, first chapter of Judges. The people of the land were deeply wicked. The Lord was transcendently holy. When the Lord's people enter that land, it's going to be a collision course. And of course, the Lord also knows this, that if the people don't clear the land, they will be pulled down to the level of the people whom they fail to get rid of. And you say, well, it would never happen. These are the people of God. If you've got time this afternoon, read the whole book of Judges. When you get to chapter 19, you'll read there about the brutalization and butchery of a young girl by the people of God. And if you've read your Bible and know it reasonably well, as you read that passage, Alarm bells will start to ring in your mind. You think, I've read a passage a bit like this somewhere else before. Doesn't something like this happen somewhere else in the Bible? Well, yes it does. It happens in the book of Genesis. In Sodom. Where somebody is similarly brutalized and murdered. And the point of the book of Judges is this. By the time you get to the end of the book of Judges, because these people did not clear the land, Sodom is no longer somewhere out there, It's right here. It's right in the middle of the people of God, by Judges chapter 19, because these people failed to obey what the Lord tells them to do. I want to ask you this morning, how frightened are you of God? When was the last time you thought of God as a consuming fire? Yeah, OK, none of us here hopefully believe that he's a big man with a white beard who sits in the sky, but functionally, Is that how we think of it? When was the last time you were frightened not to be in church on a Sunday morning? It'd be an interesting test, wouldn't it? It's a test of how frightened you are of God. When was the last time you were frightened not to be here? Because you realized what an awesome privilege and responsibility coming to church is. Anyway, as we move on then from grasping that the underlying principles, if you like, of the Book of Judges are the transcendent holiness of God, the need for his people to be holy, and the, one might say, the transcendent unholiness of the people who are in the land, we come then to the moving in. to the land. Initially, things start well. We're told, verse 1, that after the death of Joshua, the great general, who'd, of course, been anointed and taken over from Moses, after the death of Joshua, the people of Israel inquired of the Lord. Things start really well. They understand that God is transcendentally holy. They understand that he doesn't think in the way that they think. And therefore, they realize they shouldn't just sit back and try to predict how God thinks. He should actually inquire of it. Go to his revelation. Find out how he actually thinks about these things. And the Lord gives them some instructions that they follow. But very, very soon after that, things start to go wrong. And the first thing, the first sign of a flawed response comes with this figure, Adonai Bezek. We're told that they fight against him at Bezik, they defeat him, he flees, they pursue him, they capture him, and they cut off his thumbs and his big toes. That's a pretty cruel punishment. I love to, my hobby is running, I love to go out and run. Chop off my big toes, I'm going to have real problems running. I'm going to be falling over all the time. Big toes are a tiny little thing in some ways. When you think about walking along the streets, absolutely crucial. to being able to function as a human being, you've got a toe. You've got a toe chopped off, you've got a real problem. Hardly to say there could be no worse a punishment I would guess for a teenager these days than having thumbs removed. How are you going to communicate with your friends? You might actually have to talk to them rather than texting them. In my style, I think your thumbs, if evolution turned out to be true, human beings are going to have massive thumbs. in 50 million years time. They chop off this man's thumbs and toes. It's a brutal punishment because it really stops him from functioning in many ways as a human being. He's not going to be able to pick things up and he's not going to be able to walk with any great ease anywhere. And he makes a very interesting comment. He says, 70 kings with their thumbs and their big toes cut off used to pick up scraps under my table. As I have done, so God has repaid me. They brought him to Jerusalem and he died there. fascinating response. As I did to my enemies, so it's been done to me. And it seems by and large that he's kind of saying, you know, fair cop, this is how I acted and now it's, you know, what goes around comes around and I'm on the receiving end at the moment. And there's probably an element of that. It's interesting that the word he uses for God is a fairly generic word, It's not the word that means specifically the Lord, the God of Israel. So we probably don't want to read too much into this in terms of the faith that this man has suddenly got. We might also say, well then this is also surely a good example of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. There's a sort of poetic justice that this man, this tyrant, has been punished in the way that he has been. But I want to suggest to you there's something more sinister going on here. The instructions given to the children of Israel are very specific. You go in and you put everything to the sword. Everybody gets put to the sword. So what do they do? They go in and they capture this man and they cut off his fingers, thumbs and they cut off his toes. What are they doing? Well, he himself tells us they're behaving just like Canaanites. So what do the Canaanites do? So the people of Canaan treat their enemies. Right here, within just a few verses of the start of Book of Judges, the very problem that lies partly in the background of the Lord's instructions that the land should be cleared, rears its ugly head. Sodom's already starting to come to rest among the people of Israel. They're already behaving like the nations around them. I think it's very interesting that the writer of the Book of Judges sticks in this little detail and he doesn't do it to tell us, I don't think, that Adonai Bezek repents of his sins. He does it to underline the fact that the children of Israel are already deviating from the instructions they've received in the direction of the culture, the standards and the values of Canaan. Second compromised responses come at the end of the chapter. While you were sitting there, I'm sure some of you, your eyes were glazing over as this chapter's read. And then the first part is relatively interesting, I guess. And then in the second part, we just have this long litany of so-and-so cleared this bit of land, but he didn't quite get rid of everybody, but he put them to forced labour. It becomes a bit of a shopping list of what the Israelites have done. If you look at verses 27 onwards, I want to suggest something to you. Let's do a little thought experiment here. Let's go back in time. You're with the children of Israel. You're head of one of the tribes. And let's say you march into the territory that the Lord's allotted to you and you do what the Lord has instructed. You put everybody to the sword. You clear the land. There's nothing but you and yours left. at the end of your military operation. You've done what you were told to do. And you put fence posts up along and you set up a fence and one day you're leaning on that fence and you look over into the territory next to you, where the tribe that were allotted the territory right by the side of your territory, where they went in. And it's interesting, there's a difference between your territory and theirs. In your territory, you don't have to till the land. It's hard work. You've arrived in this land, you've got to till the land. If you don't till the land, you'll have no food. If you have no food, you'll starve. You're having to work hard. And you're taking a moment's break and you lean on the fence and you look across into your neighbouring tribe's territory and you see the head of that tribe sitting on his deck. He's drinking a beer and he smiles and waves and indicates to you that he's just kicking back for the afternoon. And all around his property, there are Canaanites tilling the soil. It's going to be quite tempting. Oh man, I made a fundamental error, didn't I? When I cleared the land. If I should have put these people to forced labour, then I could be just sitting on my deck, shooting the breeze, drinking beer and soaking up the sunshine. Notice in the book of Judges this. Outward success in this book is never any sure sign of inward fidelity and obedience. Those who obey don't necessarily get the big reward. First chapter judges, the astute guys, the guys whose economy is going to be booming, are the very guys who've compromised in their obedience to the Lord's command. So notice then, in these flawed responses, a couple of things. We see a failure, basic failure to obey. We see the almost immediate incursion of pagan practice. And we see pragmatism. All of them, I think, rooted in a basic failure to understand God's holiness, the adequacy of his word, and the true nature of success. True nature of success is not an outward material thing. It's connected to obedience to the Lord's commands. And I want to suggest to you as a church today, one of the most important things you as a church can be doing. Educating yourself about the holiness of God. Great thing. Somebody was saying to me earlier this week, we're talking about the Reformation. Somebody said, you know, Reformation can be done. And they said, yeah, it's always very difficult to do. It becomes a whole lot easier to undo. Ten years of reforming work can be undone in six months of laziness and taking your eye off the ball. What is one of the ways of preventing that from happening? Having a biblical understanding of the holiness of God. Because if you're worried, you won't take your eye off the ball. So the first thing I want to emphasize today in practical terms is this. Reflect upon the terrifying picture of God that is projected to us from the pages of scripture and bear in mind always that we stand at a point in time where I think Christianity is going to become more not less marginal in society. Bear in mind that the faithfulness of the church is not ultimately judged by whether you've managed to take over Congress for Christ. The faithfulness of church is judged by its faithfulness to the word of God, not by any outward measure of success. That brings me thirdly and finally then to the uncompromised response. There is a rather beautiful scene that is painted for us in the book of Judges and it's to do with Caleb. From there, we're told, verse 11, they went against the habits of Dabir. The name of Dabir was formerly Kiriath Sefer. And Caleb said, he attacks Kiriath Sefer and captures it. I will give him Aksa, my daughter, for a wife. A couple of things we need to say here before we carry on with the story is, again, this is a very different world to the one we live in today. And for many of us, there's a kind of, oh, that's a bit distasteful. He's kind of trading his daughter here. You know, go and do this good stuff for me and you can have my daughter. It sounds a bit, if I would say to one of the, you know, if I had a daughter and say to one of the lads in the neighborhood, you know, if you promise to cut my grass free of charge for the rest of my life, you have one of my daughters in marriage. That would be a highly distasteful and inappropriate thing in society as it exists today. Of course, this is a very different society. Romantic love is not quite so important. It's more akin to, say, royal families, if you like, in the Middle Ages in Europe. Weddings were not contracted on the basis of love or romance. They were contracted on the basis of political convenience in those days. Actually, I think what Caleb is doing here, and the reason why this story is put in, is not only to give us a beautiful story here, but it also sets the benchmark for how women should be treated. against which the rest of the book of Judges just portrays one awful, awful treater of women and abuser of women after another. In this society, what Caleb's actually doing is he's guaranteeing his daughter will marry the best. He's saying, you know, the kind of hero who can bring in this result for me, I'm going to give him my daughter as as his wife. And his daughter would not have been unhappy with that. Because she would have known that her father was getting her the best. Not some layabout. Not some guy who doesn't take the commands of the Lord seriously. She was going to get the best. And I think this is a great deal for Axa as well. One might say, you know, Othniel, he's going to be a He's going to be a superhero. He's going to be a rock star in terms of Israelite society when he comes back from this. And she's going to be his wife. This is a great example of how Caleb, I think, within the context of the society in which he lives, is showing immense respect and concern for his daughter's welfare. And he sets the benchmark for that, which nobody else in the book of Judges will reach. Jephthah puts his daughter to the sword. What a contrast with Caleb, who ensures that his daughter will marry the best. Othniel, of course, goes off and does what? Well, Othniel, the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother, captured him. He does what the Lord has said. He's done what his future father-in-law has asked. He's been perfectly obedient on this score. What a guy. Remember, of course, the irony is he's not really an Israelite. He's a Kenai. He's been sort of grafted in so he doesn't have the pure Israelite blood. But he does it. He's the one person, if you like, in the book of Judges who reads the instructions and goes out and delivers what he should deliver at this particular point. And the result is wonderful. Caleb, it says, gave him Axa, his daughter, for a wife. And having said that Axa's getting a really good deal out of this because she's marrying the best, what follows after that really indicates that Ophniel has somewhat landed on his feet as well. Occasionally, you know, we all know those men, you meet them. I'm sure some people have probably said this about me myself. You meet the person, you meet the wife and you think, well, wow, that guy really landed on his feet to marry her, didn't he? There's nothing in him that would intrinsically indicate that he should marry somebody, you know, as sane and as good as that. Well, Aksa is like that because listen to what she does. She immediately says to her husband, we need a field, we need some land. Can't build our future just on the basis of the fact that you're a really good superhero who did this thing in the past and I'm now your devoted wife. We need some land. And she urges him to ask her father for a field. And then she kind of takes things into her own hands. She's quite clearly no sort of shrinking violet. She gets off her donkey and she goes to Caleb and he says to her, what do you want? And she says to him, give me a blessing. Since you've set me in the land of the Negev, give me also springs of water. Not enough just to have land, you need water. She's really thinking very astutely, isn't she? about the way that she can bless her family in the future. Don't just give me any old patch of scrub ground and that. I need water to be able to fertilize it and grow stuff on it. I don't know whether Othniel was really just a military man. Maybe he didn't have a sort of domestic sense. It doesn't really matter, because the two of them are going to be a great team, aren't they? Othniel, the obedient military leader. Axa, the wife who's really thinking and planning for the future. I think what we get here, as I've said, is the benchmark for the Book of Judges. This is what it should be like. And the rest of the book is going to be one long commentary on, it isn't really like that at all in Israel. Othniel is this remarkable man, Acts is this wonderful woman, Caleb knows how to treat women in his family. That just doesn't happen in the rest of the book. We have Jephthah, we have Samson, We have these people who brutalized this poor young girl in Judges chapter 19. And I think at this point, Othniel, it's very interesting that he's rewarded with a bride for his obedience. Because it surely carries our minds forward to the way the New Testament picks up bridal imagery so much. Who else is there in Scripture who by an act of perfect obedience wins a bride. It's the Lord Jesus Christ. When you think about it, the New Testament writers very self-consciously used the language of marriage to talk about the relationship between Christ and the Church. And that means that when we go back into the Old Testament and we come across marriage, we're meant to think, well, is there anything here? that bears resemblance with what's going on in the New Testament. Well, I would suggest to you, yes, there is. Othniel is what we might call a type of Christ at this point. The way he behaves foreshadows the way things will happen in the New Testament. Othniel points us towards the great bridegroom, the one whose uncompromising obedience to the Lord and destruction of all of the powers of evil that are arranged against him, wins him a bride. And the practical payoff for us today, then, of course, is this. If Othniel is the type of Christ, then maybe Axa points towards the way the Church should behave. What is the first thing we hear about Axa? What is the way that Axa talks? What do you want, her father says. Well, he wasn't quite as hostile. What do you want, beloved daughter? And she said to him, she says to him what? Give me a blessing. Give me a blessing. And I want to suggest to you as I close today, we have a great God, an amazing Savior, who lived a life of perfect obedience, obeyed when nobody else, not even off me, that obeyed the Lord to the extent that the Lord Jesus Christ did, paid the ultimate price, went down into the depths of the tomb, whatever horrors that may have involved, and rose from the dead again. And his reward was what? He got a bride. And what does that, how should that then shape our reaction to the Lord? Well, what do you pray for? I would suggest to you, you could do a lot worse than to allow your prayers to be modeled on those of AXA. Give me a blessing. Already noted that in other parts of the book of Judges, blessing and obedience doesn't necessarily mean outward prosperity. In the particular context of AXA at this point, it does. But that doesn't mean we should reduce the notion of blessing or even understand it primarily in physical or material terms. That really goes against a whole swathe of biblical teaching. What we should ask is that the Lord will bless us. Bless us with greater knowledge of His Son. Bless us with a greater portion of His Spirit. Bless us with greater joy in Him. And bless us above all by allowing us finish well. Praise God for the greatness of his gospel has come before the Lord in prayer. Oh, Lord God, we do praise you for your indeed a wonderful God. You've reached down to us an amazing condescension in the person of your son, the Lord Jesus Christ, that in the weakness of his human flesh, yet he was obedience even to death upon the cross. And through his obedience has won himself not only the name that is above every name, but also a bride, the Church. And though, Lord, we are conscious that we are far from perfect, we belong to him. Everything that is his is now ours. And we would, O Lord, presume on you and call out and ask that this morning you might bless us, not in material terms, but that you might bless us with a deeper knowledge and love for him and through him, of course, of you yourself. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.