Joshua: 1-Series Overview Audio Transcript
Joshua: Pursuit of the Promise
01-SERIES-OVERVIEW – Ryan Aufenkamp
John Newton
Oh, that’s so good. If you would get out a Bible and turn over to the book of Joshua, Joshua chapter 1. That song, Amazing Grace, it’s probably one of the most recognizable, if not the most recognizable hymn written within the last two, three centuries.
How many of you would consider Amazing Grace your favorite hymn? I mean, that’s an unfair question, right? But yes, awesome. How many of you would say that you’ve known the song Amazing Grace since you were like five or six years old? Okay, yeah. So most of you, that song is incredible.
It was written by John Newton. Do any of you know the story of John Newton, the story behind Amazing Grace? A couple of you. If you already know the story, I’m going to tell it again, so just hang on with me. John Newton, it’s actually a really, really incredible story.
John Newton, born in 1725, he was raised by a devout Christian mother and catechized into the Christian faith, and so knew all of the foundations of the faith growing up. His mother died when he was about six years old, and so the rest of his childhood and into adulthood, he was raised by his father, who was not a Christian.
He worked out on the seas, and so because his father worked on the seas, he himself became someone who worked in the maritime industry. And in that time, in the 18th century, if you worked on the seas, you just basically lived a life of debauchery. That was just essentially how people that worked on ships lived.
And especially in the 18th century, this is right in at the heart of the Atlantic slave trade. And so John Newton went on in his 20s to start captaining a slave ship. He himself fell into all sorts of debauchery. He completely left his Christian roots and Christian faith behind, and you could say that his slow drift on the seas turned him into an unrecognizable man.
In 1748, his ship was caught in a tumultuous storm, a storm so big that he actually recounts one of his crew members, he was going up to the top deck, one of his crew members got washed out to sea as one of the waves hit, and it was the first time since his childhood that he got down on his knees and just cried out to God for mercy. And the Lord miraculously brought him and that ship through that storm.
And this was sort of the thing that opened the door in his life to come back to the Christian faith. He would go on to spend six more years captaining slave ships. He did all sorts of atrocious things in his lifetime, had atrocious things done to him.
And in 1754, he had a debilitating stroke around the age of 30. And you could say that this stroke actually saved his life because the stroke made it such that he could no longer captain these ships. He was forced to work on the shores. And over the next years, he was forced to work on the shores, and he worked as somebody who would look at the tides coming in.
He started to study theology, and eventually he became convinced of the God of the Bible. And 20 years later, he was a prominent pastor, and he wrote probably one of the most influential pieces of literature that started the British abolitionist movement.
He started to recant and repent of his involvement in the African slave trade. He wrote this pamphlet titled Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, and he became a leading mentor to others such as William Wilberforce later in his life. When we sing of this life of this man, John Newton, and he says that he was a wretch, he actually was a wretch.
His life was completely messed up. He was involved in some of the worst crimes against humanity that have ever happened in the history of the world, and yet God used a crooked stick to make a straight line. That is the story of amazing grace. Amen? Amen.
Series Intro
So cool. And the reason that I share that story is because it correlates really well with the continued story of the Israelite people in the Old Testament. The story of the Israelite people is a story of amazing grace who, apart from the amazing grace of God, would have a very different end to their own story.
Today marks a new journey for us as a church through a new sermon series we’re really excited to kick off through the books of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. For those of you that have been here any length of time, you know that we spent a year and then some in the Torah.
We started that in the start of 2023, and we finished it this last April. And in the Torah, we follow the Israelites and their origin story from this man named Abraham. In Genesis 12, God shows up to really this random guy named Abraham, and he makes incredible promises to him that his offspring are going to one day number the stars, and that God is going to bless all people through this one family.
And we find that this family is the Israelite people as we follow the patriarchs through Genesis. And we get through Genesis, and we move into Exodus through Deuteronomy, where we follow the Israelites under the leadership of Moses.
Right? And one of the things about the Torah is that at the very end of it, the book of Deuteronomy, the last chapter that we ended on, is kind of like the penultimate moment. It’s the climax of the whole story in which the Israelites are set to step foot into the land that God had promised.
And right when we got to that penultimate moment, we ended the series. Right? It’s almost like, hopefully you all have had this experience. I had this experience growing up. When you’re reading a really good book, you know, in your room, think back to your like childhood or young adult years or teenage years with me.
You’re reading a really good book, and you’ve got the light on, and it’s late at night, and your mom bursts into the room and is like, “What are you doing? You’re still up? Turn the lights off and go to bed.” But the next chapter is the one that you need to get to.
Right? That resolves the climax of the story. And I feel like that’s what we did as pastors to you all. We’re that mom that turned the lights off.
Friends, we’re going to turn the light back on. We’re going to finish. We’re going to resolve the story. In Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, this story is of the Israelites, the second generation of Israelites, crossing into the promised land and all that ensues afterwards.
Just a side note as well, this will complete our preaching series through most all of the historical narratives in the Old Testament. We, actually Toby preached a sermon series through Samuel and Kings back in 2016 called Searching for a King. So we did that, and that was a phenomenal series.
And so if you have interest in that, go back and listen to it. But this will sort of complete all of the historical narratives aside from First and Second Chronicles. Like I said, Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, they are the story of amazing grace. God saving wretched sinners despite themselves and their heinous actions.
And their actions, we’ll see in the book of Judges, are heinous. My goal this morning is just simply to give us an overview to hopefully whet our appetites a little bit for what we’ll see in these historical narratives. So I’m just going to give us some framework for how these books are structured, and then a couple of the key high-level highlights from each of the books of Joshua, Judges, and Ruth.
Joshua 1:1-5
If you have strength to stand, would you stand with me in honor of God’s word? Let’s read Joshua 1, 1 through 5, as the story continues. I’m reading from the ESV.
Joshua 1.
After the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua, the son of Nun, Moses’s assistant, Moses my servant is dead. Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people into the land that I’m giving to them, to the people of Israel.
Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon, I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses. From the wilderness and this Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites to the Great Sea, toward the going down of the sun, shall be your territory.
No man should be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I was with Moses, so I will be with you.
I will not leave you or forsake you.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for these incredible narratives that show us your deep and unending love for your people. Lord, thank you that that promise that you make to Joshua, that you will be with him and you will go before him.
Lord, you make to us as well, that you will be with us and you will go before us. We just looked at that in the Promises of God series. Thank you for all of those fresh reminders of who you are and what you have promised to your people. Thank you for the ways that we see your promises fleshed out in these texts.
Lord, I pray this morning you would give us just an appetite for more of you as we jump into this series. Lord, help us to to see Jesus in these texts. Lord, help us to get excited about the things that you will show us over the next nine months. In Jesus’ name we pray.
Amen. Amen.
Go ahead and have a seat.
Joshua: Pursuing the Promise
At the outset here, I also want to say our year of Torah, it was more like 15 months of Torah. We are committed this time to fitting Joshua, Judges, and Ruth into nine months. I promise it won’t be like another three months after that that we finally end the series.
So yes, we’ll start with the book of Joshua, which is all about God’s people pursuing the promise that God has made all the way back in Genesis chapter 12, that the promised land would be theirs. The book of Joshua is centered on the idea of conquest.
First, that God would go before his people, and that his people would conquer the land of Canaan, and they would divide it among themselves. And he, like I said, promised that already. But second, and more importantly, this book is about God’s conquest of human hearts.
God is going to conquer the hearts of his people through the book of Joshua. And we’ll see that as he goes ahead of his people into battle, and he wins incredible victories on their behalf. I just want to give us a brief snapshot really quick of how this book is structured.
I was really helped as I was reading this week by a professor and theologian named Stephen Dempster, and he outlines that the book of Joshua is centered around four key words. So there are four major sections in the book of Joshua, and there are four sections broken up by these four key words.
In the Hebrew, the first word in chapters 1 through 5 that’s repeated 28 times is the Hebrew word avar. Say that with me. Avar. Right? And it means to pass over. If you go through and just look at how many times the Israelites are commanded by God to pass over the land or pass through the land, that’s the same word, 28 times in that first five chapters.
Right? So that chapter is about entering the land. The second section, chapter 5 through chapter 12, is about taking the land. And that word take is used 13 times. In the Hebrew, that word is lakach. Say that with me. Lakach. Yes, like you’re clearing your throat.
It’s good. It’s good, right? You feel like your sinuses are clear now. Chapter 13 through 22, that word divide is used 15 times. That word in the Hebrew is halach. Say it with me. Halach. Okay, so you got lakach and halach. Right?
And then the last chapter, the last couple chapters, are Joshua’s final speeches, which use the word to serve 15 times. And that word in Hebrew is avad. Avad. Yes.
So it forms sort of a chiasm, right? With these words. It’s sort of a play on words in the Hebrew. The first section and the last section are all about passing over avar and serving the Lord, right? And in the Hebrew, those words look almost identical.
And then the middle two sections are very similar words as well about the Israelites taking the land and dividing it, lakach and halach. Right? So we don’t read in Hebrew. Some of you might. That would be awesome. Come talk to me if you do. But those are just, yeah, really cool way that the texts are broken up that we kind of miss in our English translations.
So that’s the broad overview of how this book is broken up. Just a couple of main thoughts as we dive into the book of Joshua.
Don’t Pass Over the Passover
First and foremost, The book of Joshua is centered on the people not forgetting. It’s this reminder to the people, don’t pass over the Passover. The first five chapters, like I said, the author of Joshua uses that word avar to pass over 28 times. Why?
Why does he use that word so many times?
What is so important about this word Passover? Well, that word avar is used in Exodus chapter 12. God passes over the Egyptians, right? And so that same word, right, God is passing over in judgment over the Egyptians and over the Israelites in Exodus chapter 12.
And what the first five chapters of Joshua are all about is really a new way that God is illustrating the Passover to his people, right? So all of the themes of the Passover that we saw in Exodus chapter 12 are present in chapters 1 through 5 of Joshua.
We see in chapter 2, right, the spies pass over the Jordan River, and they go into the land of Canaan into Jericho, and they meet who? Rahab, right? Rahab, who is a Canaanite prostitute who’s living in Jericho, and she harbors the spies, right? And what do the spies tell her is, if you place this scarlet cord out your window, or essentially over your house, then God’s judgment will pass over you, right?
And what is the sign that God’s judgment will pass over the people of God in Exodus chapter 12 during the Passover? The scarlet blood of a lamb, right? So this theme is repeated in Joshua chapter 2.
In Joshua chapters 3 and 4, the people of God pass through the Jordan River on dry ground, right? And what is the Passover all about in Exodus? It’s about God’s judgment passing over his people, and his people getting to safety through dry ground through the Red Sea, right?
And so we see this theme repeated. And then, super importantly, in chapter 5, the first thing that the Israelites do as they cross over the Jordan River, they pass over it into the land of Canaan. They stop before they go to the city of Jericho, and they take the Passover, right?
This is the first thing that they do in the land. Why is this so important? Why is God saying, don’t pass over the Passover? It’s important because the Israelites are being used by God in the book of Joshua as a means of divine judgment on the Canaanite people, right?
So God’s divine judgment in the Exodus over Pharaoh, God’s divine judgment is passing over all of the land. And what God is doing in Joshua, he’s using his people as a means of divine judgment over the land of Canaan, but God’s judgment first must pass over the people of God.
So the very first thing that happens in the book of Joshua before the conquest of the land is God’s judgment must pass over his own people, right? First Peter chapter 4 says this, Peter says this to the church that judgment starts with the house of God.
The judgment that’s going to happen in the book of Joshua on the Canaanite people, it’s not just on the Canaanites, it’s also on the Israelites.
And the Passover is a reminder to them that they must have the blood of a spotless, clean lamb over their heads, over their doorposts, so that God’s judgment would pass over them. At the start of the book of Joshua is this reminder for the people of God that before they go and fight all of these battles, that they must be a people who remember that God’s judgment was on them and they were spared by the grace of God, by God setting up a system for them to be cleansed and saved.
And I think it’s so important for us to recognize as well, before we get into this book of Joshua and all of the conquest and whatnot, because it’s not an easy book. Thinking about the Canaanite conquest, it’s important for us to remember that the sign of scarlet over the doorposts, it’s also for the Canaanites, right?
And we see that with Rahab. Right at the start, God is saying that the scarlet sign over a household it’s not just for the people of God, it’s also for anybody who would trust and believe that the blood of the lamb covers their own sins, right? And later this morning, we as New Testament Christians, we don’t practice the Passover in the same way that the Israelites do, but Jesus gave us a way to remember that is much like the Passover that’s called the Lord’s Supper, right?
And we’ll talk about that later, but it’s so important for us, church, that we remember that we were saved by the blood of a lamb, just like the Israelites. Church, and this should make us the most humble people on all the earth, a people that know that we could never save ourselves, that God alone by His grace is the thing that has spared us from the judgment of God.
Sanctified Hearts and Sanctified Lands
Second, the book of Joshua is about sanctified hearts and sanctified lands. God is sanctifying the hearts of His people and sanctifying the land that His people will dwell in throughout the book of Joshua. Joshua, in many ways, a new Moses and he’s a pre-figure to Jesus, even in name, right?
Joshua is the Hebrew name of Jesus, right? Yehoshua or Yeshua, which in English is Jesus. And in the book of Joshua, the people are following this pre-figure of Jesus, and Joshua understands the gravity of what God is seeking to do. He’s seeking to make a people who are completely set apart, right?
In Exodus chapter 19, we see the express statement that the law of God is for making a people who will be a priest, who will be a priest to the nations, who will go and be an example to the rest of the nation. So what God is doing in the book of Joshua, He’s sanctifying the hearts of His people such that they would be an example to everybody else.
The real point of the book of Joshua, we’re going to see all sorts of wars and conquests happening in the book of Joshua, the real conquest that’s happening in the book of Joshua is God’s conquest of human hearts. God is seeking to win over the affections of His people throughout this book, and that’s the reason that He goes before them and He asks them to trust Him time and time again.
And after their first battles of Jericho and Ai, in chapter 8 of the book of Joshua, Joshua gathers all of the people and he recites the whole law to them again, right? They’ve just heard it, right? Moses, the whole book of Deuteronomy is about Moses preparing the people to enter the land.
He restated the whole law to them, and then they get into the land and Joshua restates it again, right? Do you think it’s important? Yes. God is seeking to win the battle of affections in the hearts and souls of His people and church throughout the book of Joshua.
We will see many great battles, and I think it’s really important to keep in mind that we shouldn’t just make all of those battles analogous to the battles that we face in life. And I think that’s a really tempting thing to do. Maybe some of that is helpful, but ultimately the battle that is most important in your life, the battle that God is most seeking to win in your life, is the battle for your affections.
Will you still trust Him and love Him when you come up against great enemies or great big boulders in your path, in your life? Will you still love Him and treasure Him and let Him go before you? Will you trust Him such that even when the battles don’t go your way, your affections for Him remain?
That’s the battle that God is seeking to win in and throughout this book is over human hearts.
And I just want to give a brief note as well about the conquest that’s happening in the book of Joshua. There’s all sorts of questions about, is this morally okay, right?
The people in Canaan are being driven out. They’re being killed. They’re being slaughtered by the Israelites, right? And John Nichols, the chaplain at Open House Ministries, he preached a really incredible message during our Torah series from Deuteronomy chapter 7 that addressed a lot of those questions.
I’d really encourage you to go back and listen to that. But I want to just acknowledge that the Canaanite people, they were not an innocent people that were just like in God’s way. These were people who were wicked. They were worshiping idols that they had created.
And in worship of these idols, they were offering child sacrifice repeatedly. They were entering into cult sexual practices and all sorts of things that were abominations to God, right? And so God’s judgment is passing over them throughout the book of Joshua.
And I want us to also recognize that it’s not as though God is holding his people to a different standard than he’s holding the Canaanites to. We see in the book of Joshua that when God’s people fail, he holds them to the same standard.
And we see that in chapter 7, Achan sins. He goes and he grabs some of those idols in the land, and God holds Achan and his sin to the same standard that he holds the Canaanites to. So we’ll wrestle with that more as we look through the series, but I just wanted to state that at the outset that there are big questions that come about when we’re looking at the book of Joshua.
And God is good even through this book and through the conquering that happens in it.
Judges: Scandalous Saviors
Here’s the sad reality about the book of Joshua. It is a triumphant book in which the second generation of Israelites, they go and they take much of the land of Canaan, and they trust God and they follow him.
But we get to the book of Judges, and in Judges chapter 2, all of that conquest, all of the victories that had won, they wind up with this in Judges 2:11-13.
The people of Israel did what was evil inside of the Lord, and they served the Baals, and they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. And they went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who are around them, and they bowed down to them, and they provoked the Lord to anger, and they abandoned the Lord. And served the Baals and the Ashtoreth.
It’s tragic, right? In their disobedience and apostasy, God gives his people over to the nations who oppress them and ensnare them. The triumph of the Israelites under Joshua lasts only one generation, and then the next generation completely disregards God.
But in the midst of their disobedience, God doesn’t just disregard his people. God doesn’t ever give up on his people and his plan and his purposes. He raises through the book of Judges, as we’ll see, some scandalous figures, scandalous saviors to save his people from their distress.
Just a brief skeleton of the book of Judges. It can be broken up into three sections. First, the introduction to the book of Judges in chapters one through three, all about Israel’s failure to complete the conquest of the land of Canaan.
Chapters three through sixteen, which make up the main body of the book of Judges, which highlight the cycle of sin and oppression that the Israelites go through. And then the ending of the book, seventeen through twenty-one, which are probably some of the most horrifying chapters in all of the scriptures, about Israel’s complete abandonment of the Lord their God.
The main body of the book, chapters three through sixteen, is made up of this cycle that repeats itself six times. So there are twelve judges in total that God raises up, and throughout the book there’s a cycle of six times that the Israelites go through the exact same thing.
You can think of the whole book as essentially a spiral that starts out really big and then it just winds down and down and down. And this cycle that the Israelites go through is that Israel serves the Lord for a time, and then they fall into sin. They start serving the other gods that are among them in the land of Canaan, and they’re oppressed.
God gives them over to their enemies, and then they repent of their sin. They cry out to the Lord, and God raises up a judge to deliver them. And under this deliverance, under this judge, for a time they live in peace. And then the cycle repeats itself again and again and again.
Slow Drifts Lead to Fast Falls
And that’s at a high level what this book is all about. A couple of key takeaways from the book of Judges. First is a critical warning throughout the book that slow drifts lead to fast falls.
In the country of Zimbabwe, there is this massive waterfall called Victoria Falls. Any of you ever seen this before? This is one of the seven wonders of the world, right? This incredible spectacle of a waterfall. And at the top of it, there is this little spot where two months out of the year, you can actually hire a guide company and walk across the precipice of the waterfall and swim in this little pool called Devil’s Pool, which is a really fitting name, right?
And you can be like that guy and go and hang yourself over the edge of the biggest waterfall in the entire world.
How many of you would be down for that? Yeah, okay, like one person, nice. Crazy, just absolutely wild. It’s a fitting name because the river has to be slow enough that you can actually wade through it to get to the edge of it. And in this little pool, the current is slow enough that it won’t bring you over the edge, right?
But you can just stand there and take pictures while you’re hanging over it. And this is exactly where the Israelites were living during the time of the book of Judges. They were simply, they were living in Devil’s Pool on the edge of a giant cliffside, a precipice, right?
As they were flirting with disobedience to God.
We see it in the first couple chapters of the book of Judges that the Israelites, they failed to complete the conquests of the land. And they don’t drive the people completely out. They just decide to start living among the people. It’s as though they look at God’s command and they say, ah, we did it good enough, right?
Like we’re dwelling in the land now. They’re good over there, it’s fine. Like we won’t be tempted by the gods that they’re worshiping. And their little disobedience, right, is like a slow drift. And they’re coming closer and closer and closer to the edge.
And eventually they fall flat on their face.
This happens six times throughout the book. In chapter 3, well actually we read it for the first time in chapter 2, but this phrase is repeated six times throughout the book. The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals.
Their little disobedience to God to completely drive out the Canaanites, it leads to complete apostasy. And when I say complete, I mean it. The ending of this book in chapter 17 through 21, essentially the Israelites become worse than the Canaanites in terms of their moral practices.
They themselves, the picture is that they become a new Sodom and Gomorrah.
That’s how evil and wicked the people become. All because they start slowly drifting. And they start saying, you know, we don’t really have to obey all of God’s commands to a T. And they start compromising and compromising and compromising. And pretty soon they’re looking back upriver and thinking, how in the world did we drift so far down this falls?
Right? And the book of Judges is this important reminder for us that a slow drift leads eventually to a fast fall. Little compromises in our own lives, they’re not just little to God. Sin always leads to more sin.
Excusing your sin away, it always leads to a fast fall. Right? To live in Devil’s Pool is not a great place to be. Right? And this could be all sorts of little compromises, like harmless, crass jokes that you might make with your friends or your buddies. Right? Harmless in air quotes. Right?
Or things that you think about. You’re like, ah, nobody else knows what’s going on in my mind, so it’s fine. Like, I don’t really need to deal with it.
Things that you do with your eyes. The way that you look at other people. Critical. Right? But we can so often excuse it away, like, ah, you know, I glanced at that person and treated them like an object, but it’s fine. They didn’t notice it. Nobody else noticed it, so I’m good. God cares about those little things.
The things that we watch are so critically important. And I’m not just, you know, trying to be the judge over your life. You’ve got to be the judge over what God said is good and right for you.
But it’s really important, the things that you put through the filter of your eyes are things that actually shape who you are. Right? And if they’re things that are borderline promiscuous or et cetera, et cetera, those things are eventually, they’re going to infect your soul such that if you keep doing them or watching them, pretty soon you’re going to look back and say, how did I get to this place?
I think it’s really important right now in the political climate that we’re in, right, you could easily, especially during this election cycle, get into the habit of political name calling or looking at people on the other side of the aisle or people who have a different worldview than you.
And granted, that worldview might be totally bogus, but you could look at them as subhuman or talk about them in a way that is subhuman, and that is wrong, church. That’s sin against a holy God. Right? It’s important that we recognize that those are little compromises, slow drifts that need proper repentance and turning from.
It’s little bits of disobedience in the book of Judges that lead to a fast fall. Don’t live in Devil’s Pool. That’s the moral.
Fast Falls Call for a Scandalous Savior
But here’s the other good news in the book of Judges is that fast falls, they call for a scandalous Savior, and God always provides a scandalous Savior.
The book of Judges is about more than just the Israelites falling flat. It’s actually about the God who remains faithful as they fall flat. Throughout the book, there are 12 judges who are raised when Israel cries out to God in repentance. God always provides a judge to be raised up to lead his people out of oppression.
It’s kind of funny. Growing up, I don’t know how many of you had this experience, reading the book of Judges maybe as a new Christian, or maybe you’ve even read it recently. I used to think of all of these judges as like, these are really cool characters, right?
These are all pretty cool guys. Maybe there are morals that I should follow from all of these judges that God raised up. Going through school and rereading this book, even just in the past couple of weeks as I’ve been studying the book of Judges, almost all, probably all, of these judges that God raised up are, like, totally morally bankrupt and corrupt.
Every single one of them is pretty much terrible.
Samson being the absolute worst. That guy’s awful, right? There have been some people who are like, hey, are you growing out your hair to be like Samson, guy? No, absolutely not. I want nothing to do with being like Samson. Maybe at the very end of his story, there’s something good and redeeming about the character of Samson.
Think about just a couple of the judges that God raised up. Gideon, right? Gideon is the guy who the Israelites are being oppressed by the Midianites. Gideon is raised up as a judge, and he goes and defeats a whole army of thousands and thousands of men with 300 guys.
It’s like this awesome triumphant story. Then you read later in the story that after his victory, he becomes so prideful that when he walks through this town and they don’t give him credit for winning the victory, he just completely destroys and flattens the town because of his own pride. He murders all of these people. So that’s the story of Gideon.
I won’t even get into Gideon’s son, Abimelech, who kills all of his siblings and is probably the worst king in Israelite history. He’s a self-proclaimed king.
Jephthah is raised up afterward. He’s this wise, strong, prudent guy who goes and seeks diplomacy, unlike the other judges who just seek bloodshed.
But you find out later that he makes an oath to the Lord and says, If you’ll win this battle for us, I’ll offer you human sacrifice. It’s terrible. And then the human sacrifice that he ends up offering is his own daughter. It’s gross. It’s scandalous in the worst way.
And then Samson. He pretty much disregards God in pretty much every conceivable way, and he’s a judge that does what is right in his own eyes. He doesn’t look at God’s judgment for things. He looks at his own judgment for things.
Even the judges that are more palatable, they eventually die. And the Israelites, they abandon God again.
What does all of this show us? It shows that God, he won’t forsake his people. He’ll use even the most morally corrupt people to rescue his own. God will raise up judges, even scandalous ones, and use them for his good purposes. But second, and I think this is the most important thing that we see in the book of Judges, is that a fast fall, all of these falls from grace of the Israelites, them living on the precipice, them falling over the precipice and worshiping other gods, they call for a far more scandalous Savior than any of the judges that are raised up.
The book of Judges shows us that no man or woman in their sin could ever fully save, that we need a better Savior, one who is far more scandalous, one who would not repay evil for evil, one who would judge according to God’s standard of righteousness, one who would go and the greatest scandal of all time, offer his own perfect life for the lives of his people.
And church, that is the Savior that God has provided for us, that being Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is our scandalous Savior, and the scandal is grace that is poured out on anybody who would accept and believe in him as Savior and Lord. I think that that’s the point of the book of Judges, is to point us to the fact that no man or woman could ever save, no political figure could ever save, no amount of diplomacy could ever save, only Jesus alone can save sinners.
As we just think ahead in the series as well, I just want to say that I’ve never actually heard a series preached on the book of Judges.
Maybe some of you have. It’s probably because it’s one of the most R-rated books in the Bible. There are parts of the book of Judges, Judges chapter 19, that I don’t even think are fit for reading out loud. I told Saturday night that I’m going to have Toby read that chapter.
It’s horrible. It’s a horror scene, right? While we approach looking at the book of Judges with a lot of trepidation, I think it’s actually going to be really good for us. And one of the reasons I think it’s good for us is because we’re going to have to walk through that dark night of the Israelites’ history in order to get to the light at the end of the tunnel, which is the book of Ruth.
Ruth: Oasis in Life’s Chaos
The book of Ruth happens within the time period of the Judges, and it is an oasis in the chaos of the lives of the Israelites. The biblical narrative is, to that point, it’s kind of zoomed out. And then in the book of Ruth, we get this little vignette, this little window of zooming in on the lives of one little family.
And at the end of the book of Judges, you’re left with this big question, is there anybody faithful in the kingdom of God? Does anybody remain who still loves God? And in the book of Ruth, we get a resounding answer that yes, there is. God is still working in the lives of His people. He is still creating people who are faithful.
Just a little brief outline of what the book of Ruth is all about. It’s masterfully crafted. It’s a chiasm. If you start looking for chiasms in the Bible, you just see them everywhere. It’s awesome. And a chiasm is just a device used in literature to sort of, it’s like bookends that sort of point to the main point, which is in the very middle of the book.
So this whole book is about Boaz’s godly character and Ruth’s godly character that are pointed to in the middle.
The book starts in chapter one. We see Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi, and she is completely miserable. She’s lost her whole family. Both of her sons, her husband has died. She has nothing left except for her two daughter-in-laws and she tells them to go back to their own homelands. And she’s just resolved to live the rest of her life mourning over her loss.
And yet Ruth shows loyalty to God and family and says, I’m gonna stay with you and your God, I’m going to serve. Ruth is not even an Israelite. She’s a Moabite woman. And in it, we see that she meets this man that’s part of the family named Boaz, who himself shows this godly character and loyalty to God and family.
And we see Ruth’s character as being godly.
And at the end of the story, what started with misery and loss ends with satisfaction and new life. The biblical authors are masterful at creating narratives like this, stories like this.
And there’s this little epilogue at the end of the story that highlights that the everyday faithfulness of Boaz and Ruth, they point to future blessing for the people of Israel.
Everyday Faithfulness has Eternal Implications
The whole story of Ruth shows us in bold letters that everyday faithfulness to God, it has eternal implications. Everyday faithfulness has eternal implications. Ruth has no reason to stay with her mother-in-law. To do so is likely to become a widow the rest of her life, working for her and her mother-in-law in the fields to get grain and to live.
And her everyday faithfulness is rewarded with a son. And the son, whose name is Obed, we see at the very end of the story, Obed is the father of Jesse, who is the father of King David. It’s incredible. The biblical narrative zooms in on this little family who decides to make hard decisions, right?
It’s not easy to live faithful. Especially when the whole of the people around you in the book of Judges, they are wayward and going astray. And this little family decides, no, we are going to serve the Lord. We’re gonna make decisions that honor the Lord and are loyal to our family.
And what does God do with that? He gives them a son.
And that son, from his line is gonna come the savior of the world. Did Ruth and Boaz know that when they had the son? No, of course not. But their everyday faithfulness, it leads to eternal blessing for all people. The church is so important for us to recognize that as the people of God, that our everyday faithfulness to the Lord, it matters.
It matters. It might not feel like it. Man, why should I get up and spend time in the word of God? Why should I come to church weekly? Why should I surround myself by other Christian witnesses? Why should I be a witness to the world? What difference does it make?
The book of Ruth shows us that it could make all the difference. We never know what God is going to use for his good purposes and plans.
Our little decisions every day to be faithful to the Lord? They could lead to God producing fruit in the lives of friends and family or people around us. You never know how the Lord could use your interactions on a day-to-day basis. Everyday faithfulness, it does, it has eternal implications. Let that be an encouragement to you this morning.
Church, I’m more than just a little excited to jump into these texts with you over the next nine months. I think it’s really fitting that we sort of end with the place that we started.
In the book of Joshua, again, after all of the people, they pledge that they are going to follow and serve the Lord, they enter into the land of Canaan, and the first thing they do is they take the Passover as a reminder that God, his judgment has passed over them. Before they’re gonna be used as a judge to the nation of the Canaanites, they themselves are going to be judged. And they’re gonna be judged based on the merit of a sacrificial lamb, not their own.
And church, that is what we get to do this morning. The Lord’s supper is not Passover, but on the night of the Passover, Jesus gives this meal to his disciples. And instead of giving them the Passover lamb that night, he says, take and eat from this bread, which is my body that was broken for you.
And take and drink from this cup, which is my blood poured out for the forgiveness of your sins. He’s saying to his disciples, you must be cleansed by the blood of a perfect spotless lamb. And what Jesus is for the lives of believers is that perfect spotless lamb.
Church, you are a people who were under the judgment of God. And Jesus has taken that judgment for you. And we do this every month as a reminder that we too are under judgment, that we are not better than the people in our world that have not accepted Jesus Christ, that are not Christians. We are not elevated above them. We are just a people who are under the banner of grace.
Communion
And church, we get to offer that banner of grace to the rest of the world. Come and be under the scarlet thread. Come and be under the banner of grace that is the sacrificial lamb of God. And we take this meal as a means of remembrance.
So I’m gonna invite the worship team up and they’re gonna help us to respond in worship by leading us in song.
And in just a moment, outside sections, if you wanna come to the inside aisle and around and grab the communion elements. And middle section here, if you wanna come to your right and around, grab the communion elements. I would just encourage you, we’re gonna take communion individually today in your own timing.
Take a minute to take the communion elements and just ponder the deep love of God for you, his people. That God himself came in the flesh to save you from your sins.
That that is what this table represents is actually the body of Jesus broken on a Roman cross for you and his blood poured out for you. Take a minute to ponder the love of God and confess your sins before a holy God and then take the body and blood of Christ as a means of remembering that you are saved not by your merit, but by grace alone.
I’m gonna pray for us and then the tables will be open.
Father, thank you for the table that is in front of us. Lord, thank you that this is a continuation of what you started back in Exodus chapter 12, passing over not just the land of Egypt, but you passed over the sins of the Israelites.
Lord, and at the Passover meal was a way to commemorate and remember and to teach children and their children’s children and their children’s children what it means to be covered by the blood of a lamb.
And then Jesus, you came and you opened that door for all of Gentiles who would accept and believe in you as the sacrificial lamb of God to come under the one banner of grace.
Lord, thank you that that offer has been extended to us and thank you for that banner of grace by which we are a people who are saved.
Lord, I pray that you would, as we take communion, help us to really ponder the deep love of God for his people and enduring love that continued to raise scandalous saviors until we got to the most scandalous savior of all, Jesus Christ.
You have stayed with your people. You have stayed with us. You are with us right now. And we thank you for Christ.
And it’s in Jesus’ name that we pray, amen, amen.
Church, if you’re a Christian, the tables are open for you. Feel free to come and collect the elements and take them in your own time.