Sermon Tone Analysis

Judges 2:10

/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.

(NASB)/

I want to say right at the start this morning that I understand the awkwardness of having me in the pulpit.

I’m an intern.

A student.

I’m not paid by the church, and I’m not an ordained pastor, so me getting up here can seem a bit like show-and-tell.

Let me get up there and see if I can act and talk like a preacher.

I’ll be honest with you; this internship has been a real challenge.

The only way I can characterize this internship is by calling it “mandatory selfish selflessness.”

In a sense, I’m in this internship for me, to get experience and learn from the pastors here and try to confirm and understand my calling.

In a sense this internship is for me.

But in order to be successful I have to be totally selfless in my efforts.

After all, my calling and my gift is not for me.

My gifting is for you, because you are the church.

In the same way your gifts are for me.

What I want to say right from the beginning is that although this may seem a little like show-and-tell, I want to use my gifts in the way they’re intended, which is to build up the Church, to bless you and impact your lives.

I get up here and open the Scriptures, God-willing, to see a change in your lives.

I only have a short time here, but I truly want to see God change and bless you.

I hope you believe that.

The other thing I want to say is that it is a privilege I do not deserve, and I feel like if you really knew me you’d probably kick me off the stage and never invite me back, but as Paul said, “by the grace of God I am what I am,” and all I can do is be grateful to God for what He has made me, and we should all be thankful for what God has made us, a people called to be set apart for His glory.

None of us deserve this.

But how does that work, being a people called to be set apart for His glory?

What does that mean?

How does God make us holy?

Why does God make us holy?

Or better yet, what is required of us as God is making us holy?

What role do we play?

What this morning’s message is about is our role in God’s effort in making us holy in every part of our lives, public and private, at work and at home, in church and in our families.

What does the Bible say about how to “do” family?

Last week Bob read from Deuteronomy 6, in which Moses urges the people of Israel to teach their children the Word and ways of God and to never forget that it was Him who saved them from slavery.

What we’re going to see this morning is the results of that not happening, which is recorded in Judges Chapter 2, which will show us what we are responsible for in the process of God making us holy, and what our conduct both public and private is supposed to look like in the efforts of raising up the next generation of Christians.

Overview of the period of the Judges.

God had sworn by covenant to give the land of Canaan to Israel as a possession and to bless them and multiply them as a nation.

This required the people following God in occupying the land, and driving out its inhabitants.

The end of the book of Joshua shows the land only partially occupied, with several nations still left to be driven out.

God had not allowed Israel to drive those nations out because of their disobedience.

Failure to maintain separation from sin ultimately leads to degeneration, and incomplete obedience leaves behind the seeds of disaster.

The purpose of the book of Judges is to show the insufficient nature of human effort in salvation.

The main thematic statement about the period of Judges is recorded twice in the book, “There was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

This phrase is a look forward to the days of the nation being united under one godly ruler, which would be David who is symbolic of the Messiah.

Human leadership and human effort will always fail, but the leadership and effort of God will always succeed.

Our deliverance from sin cannot be done by our own effort, so we must rely on God’s deliverance.

Salvation is by grace through faith, not by or through any type of human effort, and is only found in Christ.

Our passage in Chapter 2 picks up just before the book of Joshua ends...Canaan is only partially occupied, Joshua is at the end of his life, and he leads the people in a covenant renewal, during which the Angel of the Lord makes an appearance and gives His explanation for why Israel has not experience full victory over the remaining nations.

I’m going to read now from 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 have 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; but you shall tear down their altars.’

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 that place Bochim; and there they sacrificed to the LORD.

/

/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 one hundred and ten.

And they buried him in the territory of his inheritance in Timnath-Heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash./

/All that generation also were gathered to their fathers; and there arose another generation who did not know the LORD, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel./

It should be pointed out first of all that God did not cause Israel to fall into sin, but simply withheld victory from them.

Israel was to seek God, forsaking everything else, and when they stopped doing that they became vulnerable and open to influence from outsiders.

In response, God gave them over to those influences, allowing them to fall into subjection to them.

As I just said, incomplete obedience leaves the seeds of disaster and ultimately leads to degeneration.

This degeneration is seen throughout history all the way back to this period, and is still seen even today.

It’s a fundamental pattern of human behavior that, as we will see, cannot be successfully battled by human effort.

It must be given over to God for the victory.

An interesting way to see the truth of this principle is found in comparing the Jews with the Hittites, one of the people groups who originally lived in Canaan.

The Hittites experienced a similar degeneration of their society, realizing the cause was a lack of centralized leadership.

About a century or two before the period of Judges, one of their kings wrote a proclamation which reviewed their history and established a clear law of succession to the throne to avoid civil war and chaos, two of the same problems Israel faced during this period of Judges.

During World War II the Swiss theologian Karl Barth was once asked why he believed in God, to which he replied, “Because of the Jews.”

“What do you mean, because of the Jews,” they asked.

He replied, “Show me a Hittite in New York City.”

The point is that human effort is always unsuccessful to fix a problem only God can fix, which is sin.

Vs. 6.

In this scene of covenant renewal led by Joshua just before his death, what is said of Israel is that they wept, which is what Bochim means, “weeping ones” or “the weepers.”

However, what it does not say they did was repent.

Crying out in mourning over the realization of sin is only part of it.

Only a partial return to the Lord took place here.

Joshua dismisses the people from this ceremony, and they all go and head out toward the land they were each given as their inherited portion of the land so they could continue the process of inhabiting Canaan.

So far so good.

Verse 6 tells us what the people intended to do.

Verses 7-10 tells us what actually happened.

Vs. 7. We see three generations depicted in this passage.

The first generation is mentioned in verse 1, the generation Moses led out of Egypt.

The first generation was not allowed to enter the Promised Land due to their unbelief.

They wandered the desert for 40 years until they all passed away.

The second generation is Joshua’s.

This was the generation of the conquest, the ones Moses addressed in Deuteronomy and Joshua led across the Jordan into the Promised Land.

This second generation served God all the days Joshua was around, and then all the days the elders who outlived him were around.

Moses’ generation, had seen the Red Sea part, they had heard the voice of God spoken at Mt. Sinai, they had seen God appear before them in a pillars of fire and smoke, and He had led them through the wilderness and fed them from heaven and watered them from a rock.

The second generation didn’t really get that experience, but they had seen God do miraculous things in the conquest; they had seen the walls of Jericho torn down without ever touching them.

They had seen time literally stand still to increase the daylight hours, giving them victory in battle.

This generation should not have been able to defeat anybody in Canaan, but they had witnessed God first-hand as a mighty warrior, going before them “as a consuming fire,” as it says in Deuteronomy 9, so that they would know that He alone is salvation.

These two generations were blessed to see what they saw.

They had an amazing privilege to get to see God perform these wonders.

This is a privilege the third generation didn’t have.

The third generation didn’t get this experience.

They had heard about it from their parents, no doubt, but they didn’t see it first-hand.

This is going to be part of the problem.

Vs. 10.

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.

This is probably the most tragic verse in the entire Bible, the record of an entire generation of Israel who did not know God.