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When it comes to the crunch

Judges 3:5 - 12

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 13 Nov, 2005

EVERY CHRISTIAN must have a faith that stands by itself; every Christian must have a faith to stand with others for God.

The book of Judges tells of a nation in an enormously hostile environment. It speaks a clear message to us about our situation. Our world is hostile to the Gospel. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t interested in spirituality, Far from it. The number of e-mails people send me with a spiritual message is extraordinary. But the message is rarely Christian. God is in there, but not Christ; grace is not balanced with justice. But we are seduced by beautiful production, and miss the reality of what is being said.

Nevertheless, the world is hostile to Christianity.

Archbishop Jensen, in the first of his Boyer lectures, speaks of a recent book suggesting a way forward for Australian society, and this book looks for a basis for Australian values. It suggests the Eureka Stockade and Gallipoli as stories about Australian values. It does not mention Christianity and its input, yet it quotes people like Abraham Lincoln. The quotes from these famous people are loaded with Biblical quotations, that they used as Biblical quotations, and their hearers knew to be Biblical quotations -- yet there is no suggestion anywhere in this book that the Bible has anything to do with Australian society.

We dream that a secular nation must consist of none but secular people!

Israel in Canaan risked losing its unique outlook, and becoming conformed to the anti-God attitudes of its surroundings.

A PEOPLE AT RISK

Israel was under attack. It wasn’t a violent attack, but it was a serious as if the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Perizzites and so on had decided to destroy every Israelite man, woman and child. Instead of using swords, they used marriage and religion and community values.

In the first place, the Israelites were being drawn into the culture and society of those who lived around them.

There are some people, including some Christians, who attack multiculturalism, who want everyone to conform to an Anglo-celtic ideal.

I think that multiculturalism is a great thing, perhaps needing fine tuning, but essentially good for our society. And, in fact, the nations surrounding the Israelites were not practicing multiculturalism. They were doing what they could to get the Israelites to conform to the pagan societies Israel lived in.

In Lebanon and Egypt, you find the results of this kind of thing. Did you know that there are Phoenicians in Lebanon, and Egyptians in Egypt?

I have spoken to Lebanese people who flatly deny that the Phoenicians still exist. But I have met many Phoenicians. Most of them are Catholics or Orthodox. They represent a people who lived in the land before the Arabs arrived.

It’s the same with the Egyptians. Most are Coptic Christians.

But these ancient people are strangers in their own lands.

That was where Israel was heading: assimilation or annihilation.

One major evidence was intermarriage. As we read, the Israelites were giving their daughters to the pagans to marry, and their sons were marrying pagan women.

II Cor 6:14 states quite clearly,

Don’t be yoked together with unbelievers ...what fellowship can light have with darkness?

Clearly, this doesn’t only refer to marriage, but it primarily refers to marriage.

So often, a Christian woman marries a pagan man, and then discover that jer husband does not share that most basic of values with her -- her faith.

She might not lose her faith, but she will lose her joy.

Don’t fool yourself. It also applies to men, but more so to women, because more women are Christians.

And if you are unequally yoked, there’s a good chance you’ll lose your children to paganism.

That was what happened to Israel.

Then there was the drift to pagan gods.

The Bible mentions two: Ba’al and Asherah. Ba’al is depicted as a strong man, with a crown, holding a handful of lightning. He was conceived of as a god of storms, rain and of good crops.

Asherah was a female god, whose emblem was a pole stuck in the ground. She was a fertility idol, and additional carving of the pole indicated female qualities. Asherah was a goddess of animal and human fertility.

It wasn’t hard for the Israelites to think, “Our God rides on the Storm, he gives good crops and increases our herds. Why not worship him under the forms of Ba’al and Asherah?”

So first they added Ba’alist and Asherahist ideas to the worship of the LORD. Then they just took the next logical step and worshipped Ba’al and Asherah.

Israel might have claimed to worship the Lord of Hosts, but they had slipped into the paganism of their neighbours, and their families were turning pagan, and their values had become pagan.

They were indistinguishable from their surrounding society.

If salt has lost its savour, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, but to be thrown out and trampled by men. -- Matt 5:13

PAGAN BELIEVERS

I believe that one of the biggest problems that we face as Christians is that we are sliding into the posture of pagan believers.

Noam Chomsky is one of the greatest thinkers of the last 50 years. Some years ago, he wrote a book called, The Manufacture of Consent. In it he says that we, in the West, are more effectively brainwashed than people ever were under Russian Communism. In Russia, because people knew they were being manipulated and oppressed, and they struggled against it. But in the West we don’t even see what is happening.

Did you realise that the changes we are seeing in Australian society are the same changes Mussolini introduced in Fascist Italy? Union power broken, resources handed to those in power at the expense of those who produce, wages being forced down, civil liberties being removed because of an external threat?

That’s just the beginning of the list.

Yet large numbers of Australians actually vote for these things.

We just accept what we hear and see and are fed by media and politicians.

Which is exactly what happened to Israel. They had wealthy neighbours, who had the technology and the fine goods, and they envied them, and they emulated them, even if they had to cut off an arm and a leg to be like them.

We read that three things happened to the Israelites:

They did evil, they forgot God and they served Ba’alim and Asheroth.

There is a progression here. People do evil when they lose confidence in the power of God to sustain them or to change their situation.

A woman starts shoplifting. She has a need, she has no confidence that that need will be satisfied, or that she will be able to survive through that need. She may believe that God exists, but she is, as Bruce pointed out, a fool who says in her heart that there is no God -- not in that situation.

A man runs off with his secretary. He is not confident that God can show him a way to change the marriage he has, or to survive it as it is. Hormones and unbelief are a powerful combination.

These people haven’t forgotten God, but they have lost confidence in him.

We read,

The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord.

Using false weights, overcharging, hitting the poor with higher interest rates -- all the kinds of things that the Prophets spoke about 200 or 300 years later -- just seemed to make life so much easier for the Israelites. And the more they did it, the easier it became.

If you have made it a habit to take the easy options, you will know how hard it can be to take the hard option when you really need to.

But once the drift starts, it continues. From losing confidence, they progressed to forgetting, because,

...they forgot the Lord their God.

As the habit of pushing God into the background becomes more ingrained, and as God becomes less a part of our lives, we increasingly forget him.

We meet a crisis and, where once we would pray, now we scheme. We want people blessed, so we look for ways to be nice to them. And the God we once believed in becomes a distant memory, to be dragged out at Christmas and Easter and forgotten at other times.

I found an old friend recently. She was a little younger than I am, and I was fond of her in a little sisterly way.

She married an unbeliever, her children are unbelievers, she occasionally remembers the good times, but there is no clear evidence of an up-to-date faith. It’s very sad!

That is what happened to Israel. They probably still remembered the Passover, but it was just a vestige of a forgotten past.

And that took them to the third failing,

...they served the Ba’alim and the Asheroth.

As G.K. Chesterton said, when people cease to believe in God, it is not that they believe in nothing, but that they will believe anything.

Having abandoned the living God, the Israelites accepted cheap substitutes.

UNBELIEF HAS CONSEQUENCES

One of the things we generally fail to understand is that unbelief has consequences.

We feel we will get away with it.

We read,

The anger of the LORD burned against Israel so that he sold them into the hands of Cushan-Rishathaim, King of Aram Naharaim. The Israelites were his subjects for eight years.

Think about this. That pagan king didn’t appear from nowhere and take the Israelites from their beds into slavery. He grew in strength, and Israel didn’t worry. He threatened their neigbours, but Israel said it was not their concern. He built up armies, but Israel didn’t prepare to resist.

All the way, Israel was enjoying their new status and their new wealth and their new gods -- the gods of king Cushan-Rishathaim. And they were unready when the tyrant fell on them like a jackal on a dying antelope.

It’s the same with Australia. I despair for Australia. Increasingly, we are being delivered into the hands of paganism. The day will come when our enemies will overrun this land, and we will suffer until we cry out to God.

And, as a church, and as individuals, we find ourselves bound and unable to gain God’s fullest blessing, whilever we halt between two opinions.

We either follow God through Christ, or we compromise with the Devil through following the world.

BELIEF IS REWARDED

When Israel did call out to God for help, we see what happened. God raised up Othniel to save them.

I want us to notice something special about him: it says,

The Spirit of the Lord came upon him, so that he became Israel’s judge.

Here was a truly spiritual leader! And he delivered Israel.

When God’s people turn back to their God, he will bless them. It’s so simple.

If my people , who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and forgive their sins and heal their land.

God’s ancient promise to Solomon still holds true.

But the sad conclusion of the passage is this:

So the land had peace for forty years, until Othniel the son of Kenaz died.

Once again, Israel did evil in the eyes of the Lord...

THE BIBLE SPEAKS TO US

The pattern we see is of a nation which constantly drifts away from God and suffers the consequences until God raises up a deliverer for them.

We have a deliverer, Jesus, the one who promised,

I will never leave you or forsake you.

But he wants a people who remain true to himself, a people who hear the voice of the prophet crying,

Come out of her and be separate!

If each of us can’t stand alone for God, then the entire community will lose the witness of Christ, because we will fall one-by-one.

But if we each individually can stand for Christ in the power of his Spirit, then we will remain standing together, and the tribulation will not defeat us.

The faithfulness God seeks from us is not teetotalism or strict Sabbatarianism; he doesn’t judge us by our interpretation of Genesis or our theories about the second coming.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

That was the faithfulness of Jesus; it is what God still wants today. AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)