Judges 2: The S(p)in Cycle Audio Transcript
Judges: Scandalous Saviors
02 – THE SPIN CYCLE – Ryan Aufenkamp
Intro
It’s so good to just think about the fact that not only has Christ justified us, but we are invited to a spot at the table. Christ has made us, if we are in him, a son or daughter. And just marvel at that for a moment this morning, that you, if you’re in Christ, have a seat at his kingly table.
He is preparing a place for you. This is good news. It’s good news as well that our father who is in heaven does not leave us to guess about his character.
He doesn’t leave us to guess about who he is, but he has revealed himself to us in his scriptures. And so if you have your Bible, go ahead, get it out, open it up, turn over to Judges chapter two. If you are new or just joining us, we just started into the book of Judges.
We spent the last couple of months in the book of Joshua. And last weekend, Toby gave us kind of the introduction into the book of Judges, which essentially is the first introduction. But there are two introductions in the book of Judges, which is pretty awesome.
The Spin Cycle
So he did an introduction and then I get to do an introduction this morning. We’re going to cover Judges two, verse six through three, verse six. To get us into it, let me just tell you a little bit about our family dog, Porter.
Any of you dog people? All right. Some of you are dog people. That’s great. Toby confessed last night. He is not a dog person. It’s OK. You can bring that up with him later. Right. I mean, like, look at this guy. You can’t not love him. So this is Porter.
This is him like seven years ago. So I showed you the cutest moment of Porter. He, you know, seven years ago, we got him. He’s still cute, but this is like this is adorable. He looks like a stuffed animal. And in his adorableness also came a reign of terror.
Emily and I got him in about four weeks into getting our puppy. We were like, what have we done? This is awful. One of one of the reasons that he was a terror is because he was a fiend about stealing articles of clothing.
In particular, socks. If we left socks on the ground, Porter would find them. And it was his mission to eat as many socks as possible. And as you probably are well aware, a dog ingesting a sock, it’s not going to go well, right? Like it’s either going to come out one end or it’s going to get stuck and they’re going to have to have massive surgery in order to to remove said sock.
And so this was the cycle that Emily and I were in for a number of months. It felt like our dog would find a random sock around the house and and he would run away with it. And we would chase furiously after him, screaming things like, you’re going to kill yourself.
What are you doing? Right. And he thought it was this awesome, fun game because we would chase him as he would run away with the sock. And then he would try to eat it as fast as humanly possible or as fast as dogly possible. Here’s the crazy thing about this.
So, you know, if he would ingest a sock, I Googled, like, how do you get a sock out of a dog? The strange things that we Google, right? And and so it turns out like some hydrogen peroxide. And so, you know, we were on this cycle of rinse and repeat. Our dog would eat a sock and we would pry his jaws open and pour hydrogen peroxide down his throat.
And and then he would regurgitate said sock. And here’s the kicker. If we didn’t get to his his vomit fast enough, he would eat it again.
It’s terrible, right? And this is like this is when I like finally understood the proverb, Proverbs 26, 11. Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly. Right. Yeah. So you don’t need to set up a meeting with Toby later. It’s yeah, it’s fine.
Porter is a great illustration, though. Porter is a great illustration. He he was a slave to his obsession with socks. He he didn’t know that it would kill him. Right. We were like Chase. We were like, dude, this is going to kill you if you continue to to follow your own course of actions and follow your own path.
But he was a slave to it. He loved eating socks. Right. And much like us, we as human beings are born into sin and we are slaves to it.
And we might not realize that right at the outset when we’re chasing our sin, it seems like a really great thing. Right. And that’s that’s the trick or the the the trap of sin. Sin is so enticing to chase after and to follow. And it promises or falsely promises good things or pleasure or riches or whatever.
Sin, ultimately, it doesn’t feel like slavery. It feels like freedom. But that’s the trap. Sin is a prison with no walls. It is a jail without guards. It is a cage that you cannot see. And in Judges chapter two, we will see what slavery to sin looks like firsthand as we look at the next generations of the Israelites that come after the Joshua generation.
Judges 2:6-19
So if you have strength to stand this morning, would you stand with me in honor of God’s word? We’re going to read Judges chapter two, verses six through 19. I’m reading from the ESV. When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went to his inheritance to take possession of the land.
And the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel. And Joshua, the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years.
And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-Heras, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the Mount of Gash. And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers. And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.
And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them.
And they bowed down to them. And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord and they served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. And he gave them over to plunders who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies so they could no longer withstand their enemies.
Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm. As the Lord had warned and as the Lord had sworn to them, and they were in terrible distress. Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them.
Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they whored after other gods and bowed down to them. They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the commandments of the Lord, and they did not do so.
Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge. And he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them. But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them, bowing down to them.
They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for gathering of your people this morning. Thank you for your church. Thank you that you’ve brought all of us here to open your word. And Lord, we are so grateful that your word reveals your character and it reveals to us the depths of our own sinfulness.
Lord, we’re so grateful that these things are here to learn from and glean from.
Lord, I pray that this morning you would help us to see the cycle that the Israelites are going through here. This cycle where they keep going back to their own sin. And Lord, that it would be a warning for us. Lord, I pray that we would walk out of here at the end of this morning clinging to you and your promises.
And we pray that in Jesus’ name. Amen. Go ahead and have a seat.
Context
So, like I said, last week we covered Judges chapter one, in which Toby kind of preached the first introduction of the book of Judges, which is essentially a bridge text. It is essentially the ending of the book of Joshua.
And it sort of gets us into the problem of the book of Judges. And as Toby stated last week, the problem in Judges is that if the Israelites are like a car and they’re going down the highway, they have nobody in the driver’s seat.
Nobody in the driver’s seat. Nobody in the driver’s seat. Nobody is taking the steering wheel. There’s no leader who is leading them anymore. And so pretty quickly, they’re all in the back seat and the steering wheel is veering into oncoming traffic, right?
As we jump into Judges chapter two, we’re actually getting another introduction to the book. And this introduction is actually a summary of the whole book. The book of Judges encapsulates 450 years of Israelite history. And that 450 years is all summarized in chapter two.
This is the cycle that the Judges, or that the Israelites are going through over and over again that we’ll see throughout the book. It’s a spin cycle of sorts. In college, I learned something about spin cycles.
One of the worst parts about living in the dorm rooms in college was that our entire dorm shared about four washing machines and four dryers. I put this picture up here in part so that you would know that at one point in my life, I did have short hair.
It happened. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. The applause. Good. Okay. I can’t wait till I actually cut it. Like, I think there’s going to be a standing ovation. It’ll be good. So up to this point, you know, like this is a picture of when my parents dropped me off at college.
I went to Western Washington University up in Bellingham. And I was just, you know, I was a child in so many ways. I had really never done my own laundry. Like my lovely mother had done my laundry most all of my life.
And so living in the dorms, 50 or more people were sharing four washing machines and four dryers. And let me tell you, laundry was like war. You had to stake out your claim on the washing machines. And basically you would wait until a cycle was finished.
And then you wouldn’t wait for the person to come and take their laundry out of the washing machine. You would basically open it up right when the cycle was done, take their laundry and throw it on the dryer so that you could throw your laundry in there.
Otherwise you’d be waiting all day. Otherwise you’d be waiting all day or somebody else would take your spot, right? And I grabbed a lot of articles of clothing that I wish I never would have grabbed because of that. But here’s the thing. I learned in college something about washing machines.
I was very concerned with simply making sure that my laundry took the least amount of time as possible.
And so I spent some time trying to figure out like what is the fastest cycle on the washing machine? And it turns out that the fastest cycle on the washing machine is the spin cycle. So for like a month, I washed my clothes like every week. I was doing great, but I washed it on the spin cycle.
And after a month, I started realizing like my clothes are not clean. Why is this? Friends, the spin cycle doesn’t actually wash your clothes. I don’t know if you knew that, but I didn’t. And so I was just throwing my clothes in the washing machine and they were getting wet and then they were just spinning dry.
And then I’d throw them in the dryer. And this is essentially what the Israelites are doing over and over again. They’re throwing themselves in the spin cycle, but they’re not actually ever getting clean, right?
This is what we see in and throughout the book of Judges. And this morning, we’re just going to highlight the five parts of the spin cycle that we’ll see over and over again that we’re introduced to here in chapter two. The spin cycle is set up for us starting in verse 10.
- Sin
It says, there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. And the first portion of the spin cycle for this next generation starts with sin. Continues verse 11 through 13, the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals.
And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed down to them.
And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals in Ashtaroth. I was reading this and lamenting it and just asking the question, why? Why did the Israelites abandon God? And like, why did they walk away from him? That word abandoned is used twice here in this text.
They abandoned him and went after these other gods. And maybe part of the reason we could blame it on their fathers, right? Maybe their fathers didn’t teach them well enough about the things of God. That is likely, maybe that’s the case. But the text indicates not that the Israelites, this next generation, it’s not that they didn’t know of God.
They knew of God. They didn’t know God. They didn’t have a relationship with him. They didn’t actually know him intimately, right? And that word abandoned, you can’t abandon something that you didn’t already have. They had the Lord and they gave him up.
That’s what that word means. The picture I get in my head is, you know, we’ve got toddlers at home. And so whenever we’re crossing the street, we grab tight to their hands, right? And our two-year-old Lucy, she just really doesn’t like to be told what to do.
And so we grab her hand and she just like, is trying whatever she can to wriggle free, right? But there’s cars that are going by, you know, where you’re walking in the parking lot and we’re saying like, it’s not safe for you to walk on your own.
And she is just trying to wrench her hands free from us. That’s the picture I get of the Israelites. They are wrenching their hands free from the Lord. And they’re abandoning him and they’re going their own way. And I think there’s another critical piece that we need to see here.
It’s not just that they abandoned God, but they pursue other gods. They went after them. They chased them. There’s a critical piece of theology for us here about sin. Oftentimes we can get caught up in thinking that when we are in sin, that we’ve simply stumbled into it, or it’s, you know, something that we fell into.
And the Bible uses those words, right? Sin is not like a pothole or a crack on the sidewalk that we might just stumble over.
Sin is always something when we’re trapped in it, when we’re caught in it, it’s always something that we pursue. Sin is not just something that is stumbled into. Deep down, sin is always something that we have pursued. The scriptures never give excuse to someone who just happened to fall into sin.
And the question remains for us, why did the Israelites pursue this? Why was it so enticing to them? How could it possibly have been better than having and holding onto God? And I wanna just help us to enter in to the ancient near Eastern context for a minute.
The people of Israel, they left the Lord, they abandoned him to serve the Baals and the Ashtoreth. And we saw last week in chapter one that pretty much every single tribe is listed.
And as they’re going and trying to complete the conquest, they leave the Canaanites in the land, they don’t complete it. And so they have Canaanites in their midst, and these Canaanites, they’re worshiping their pagan gods, Baal and Ashtoreth, right? So this is happening in their midst, and this worship to Baal and Ashtoreth, without getting too detailed, the gods Baal and Ashtoreth, they were partners.
One was male and one was female. And the belief in ancient near Eastern culture was that the way that these gods were worshiped, or the way that these gods spread their blessing is through coming together in union. Baal and Ashtoreth would come together in union, and when they did, blessing would flow over the land.
And so the way that these gods were worshiped is that there were temples set up, and there were priestesses there. And men would come in and they would worship by coming into union with the priestesses of Ashtoreth. And they believed that if they came into union with these priestesses, then Baal and Ashtoreth would then come into union themselves, and they would spread their blessing.
And they could be coerced by these acts. The Israelites, they saw, one, these are gods that we can coerce. We can’t coerce our god, but we can coerce these gods. And two, the way that we coerce them is pleasurable to us. And so they pursued their own pleasure, and it was to their demise and their doom.
The Israelites pursued it. They didn’t stumble into it. They saw it, and they saw that it was good, and they took it, and they abandoned their god in the process. And their pursuit of sin leads to the next portion of this spin cycle, verses 14 through 15.
So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies so they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm, as the Lord had warned.
- Oppression
And as the Lord had sworn to them, they were in terrible distress. The sin of the people of Israel leads to oppression. You might read verses 14 and 15, and you might have the question or ask, like, is God really this vindictive? Like, he sold them into the hands of their enemies.
Whenever they went out, his hand was against them. Right, is that really how it is? They gave God up, and so he just is gonna give them over, just like that. We could read this and think, man, it didn’t take much for God to go to these extremes, God and his anger against sin, but there are two critical things that I wanna point out about God here, two things that are important that we see about God’s anger and his wrath towards sin.
First and foremost, his anger against the sin of his people is not a rampaging, vindictive, cruel anger. It’s not an anger in which he flies off the handle. God’s anger is a faithful anger. You might be thinking, like, what does that even mean? What is a faithful anger?
Can anger be faithful? His anger is faithful because while it might seem like God is flying off the handle, he’s actually not.
In his anger, he is actually staying his hand. He is simply giving them the very consequence that he warned them of. He said back in Deuteronomy 28, 15, and 25, this whole book was written down, this book of Moses for the people and passed down from generation to generation.
We saw at the end of Deuteronomy, this list of blessings and curses, right? In some of the curses, Deuteronomy 28, Moses says, but if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God, or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then shall these curses come upon you.
The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them. In his anger towards sin, God remains faithful to do exactly what he promised to do and no more.
One of the things that I find most significant is that God’s discipline towards sin is simply to give his people over to the very thing that they chose instead of him. Their consequence for sin is simply him giving them over to what they’ve chosen. And we see in Romans chapter one, Paul speaks this very same idea about the wrath of God against sin in Romans 1, 24 through 25.
Paul says of God’s wrath against sin, therefore God gave them up, that is sinners who chose other gods over him, he gave them up in the loss of their hearts to impurity, to dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.
God in his anger towards sin, he is consistent and he is faithful. He’s faithful to do what he said that he would do. The second thing that I believe we learn about God and his wrath towards sin here is that his anger towards sin actually reveals the depth of his love for his people.
And if God did not love his people, their unfaithfulness would not have moved the needle. And yet what their unfaithfulness does is it kindles the fire, right? His anger is kindled, which literally means that his anger grew hot when they pursued these other gods.
Right, and I would just posit that God’s love burns for his people. His love burns for his people and when they leave him, his love for them is revealed and how angry he gets over their choice to leave him.
It is his anger that reveals just how much he loves them. God’s anger and the oppression of his people by the sin they’ve chosen, it leads to the next portion of the spin cycle, which is groaning. Get the second half of verse 18. It says, the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them.
- Groaning
The oppression and the consequences of their own sin, it leads them, the Israelites, to groan, to verbalize their agony to the Lord, to cry out to him for mercy. There are only three places in the Hebrew scriptures where this particular word groaning is used.
And the only other two places are in the book of Exodus. You can think back to Exodus chapter two.
When was the last time that he heard his people groaning? It was when they were enslaved, when they were under the rule of Pharaoh. We find in this text, just like we found in Exodus chapter two, that when God’s people groan, when they cry out for mercy, God is there listening to their cries.
Even if they have gone astray and wayward, God has inclined his ear and he is waiting for them to cry out for mercy. He is not just fuming in anger towards their sin. He has not just given them up and said, I’m done with you. He is waiting for them to come back.
Again, I think of a kid, maybe an older kid than a toddler, maybe a nine or a 10 year old.
Maybe I think of this because I was that kid when I was growing up that my parents told me, like I was a kid that just loved to jump off of stuff. My parents kind of remember that. But like if there was like a 10 foot tall play structure, I was like, I’d look at it and be like, wow, I wonder if what would happen if I jumped off this thing.
And my parents would give me the right warnings of like, hey, if you jump off of a 10 foot tall structure, you’re going to hurt yourself, right? Or maybe the scenario is that you’re trying to teach your kid, hey, do not touch the stove, right? Because even if the stove is off, if you get comfortable touching the stove and it’s on one time, you are gonna sear your hand.
Or maybe a more serious illustration, you’re trying to teach your child about the dangers of the Columbia River, that there is a current.
And if they get out there too far, they will get swept away by it and they might not see it, right? And your child kind of like me when I was a kid, just totally said, yep, that’s great advice, but I’m gonna jump off the play structure anyway. Or I don’t really care, I’m gonna touch the stove anyway.
Or you know what, I’m gonna go swim in the river because I’m gonna do what I wanna do, right? A good parent, when their child’s being swept away by the river and their child is calling out, help me, help, they’re not gonna sit there with their arms folded and say, I told you, you shouldn’t have entered the river.
Rather when their hand is burning hot on the stove, right?
And they’re dealing with that, they’re not gonna just say like, well, deal with it, right? No, a good parent is gonna rush to their aid. They’re waiting for those cries for mercy to come and to take them to the ER or to dive into the river after them.
This is God’s heart towards his people. He has inclined his ear. Yes, he might be angry at them choosing to go their own way, but he is waiting to pour out his compassion on them. That’s what that word move to pity means. He is pouring out compassion.
He has moved to compassion for his people. And how does he pour out his compassion? It’s by doing the same thing he did for his people in Exodus chapter two.
And in Exodus chapter two, they groan and who does God send? Moses. And here in the book of Judges, as his people groan time and time again in slavery to their sin, in slavery to their oppressors, God hears and he sends deliverers. And this is the next portion of the spin cycle.
- Deliverance
Look at verses 16 and 18 and just marvel at this. Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them. In verse 18, whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge.
Friends, this is unfathomable love.
His people abandoned him. And yet when they cry for mercy, God is faithful to raise up deliverers time and time again to send these judges to come and rescue them from their sin. One commentator writes, here is the fundamental miracle of the Bible. That the God who rightly casts us down to the ground should without reason stoop to lift us up.
Church, do you marvel at that this morning? that a God who was abandoned by his own people, who would rightly let them choose their own sin and go their own way and reap the consequences of it, would then turn around and raise up deliverers to bring them out of the hand of their oppressors.
But here’s the the problem in the book of Judges. The problem is that all of the deliverers that God gives to his people, they’re insufficient saviors.
They’re scandalous saviors. We actually see this cycle of Judges and the Judges, we’re gonna look at a couple of Judges next week. Ehud is one of them and he’s sort of morally ambivalent, but as we keep going down the line of Judges they actually get worse and worse and worse.
They’re just as corrupt as the Israelites. They are infected by the same sin that the Israelites are infected by. And in so many cases, these Judges actually lead the Israelites into more sin. And so they might deliver their people for a time, but they’re insufficient saviors.
The whole book of Judges helps us to ask this question, who will be the one that will come and actually deliver the people of God? Who will be the one that God will send to actually bring true deliverance, to bring them out of their slavery to sin? Because as it is, the Judges in these pages, they might bring about peace, but it’s only temporary peace.
- Temporary Peace
That’s the last part of the spin cycle. Verses 18 through 19 again, Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge. And he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them.
But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them and bowing down to them. They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways.
These judges that were raised up and filled with God’s Spirit, they were at best, like we said, scandalous saviors. And as the judges die, so the faithfulness of the people dies. And with it, the peace that they experienced. And thus, the spin cycle starts all over again.
And so, we’re left with all of these questions. Who will be the one that will actually deliver his people? Who will be the one that will deliver the people and bring them peace that lasts? It’s not just temporary. Throughout the book of Judges, we’re going to see this cycle six different times.
Sin, oppression, groaning, deliverance, and then temporary peace. That’s the cycle throughout the whole book. That’s the pattern throughout the whole book that gets repeated over and over and over. And the people continue to just choose to do what is right in their own eyes.
And they move further and further away from the Lord, which leads to verses 20 through 23. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. And he said, because this people have transgressed my covenant that I commanded their fathers, I have not obeyed my voice, I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations that Joshua left when he died, in order to test Israel by them, whether they will take care to walk in the way of the Lord as their fathers did or not.
So the Lord left those nations, not driving them out quickly, and he did not give them into the hand of Joshua. This spin cycle continues and it eventually leads to the book of 1st Samuel, and God actually removes his presence from driving out the Canaanites.
And he leaves the Canaanites there as a test of fidelity for his people. And the sad news in the book of Judges is that, as we see in chapter 3 verses 5 through 6, the people fail the test. The people of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and their daughters they took to themselves for wives, and their own daughters they gave to their sons, and they served their gods.
Ultimately this book, this period of 450 years of the Israelites history, is a sad period. And I fear that, as we’re talking through the book of Judges over the next eight weeks, that this is just gonna be kind of like a dark cloud, a dark tunnel that we’re gonna walk through as a church as we see the effects of sin play out.
Sin has actual power to enslave us
But there are three things that I believe that we’re to take from this book, and to just take from this chapter, and apply, because there are hope, there is hope in these pages. First, I think that it’s critical that we see that the book of Judges tells us that sin has actual power to enslave us.
It demonstrates for us the actual power that sin has to enslave us, and to doom us just to a cycle where we’re like throwing our laundry in a washing machine, and just setting it to the spin cycle over and over again, right? The spin cycle that we’re reading, and we’re gonna read at a high level, might lead us to the questions of like, how in the world are these people continuing to go back to their sin?
God continues to deliver them, and they keep going back to their sin. What it is, is a pointer to us of the human heart. The human heart is wickedly sinful, and it’s so important that we understand that. Because if we don’t understand the depths of the sinfulness of our hearts, then we will not appreciate how incredible it is that God saves us from it.
Psalm 14, two through three, states that the Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there’s any who understand, any who seek God, and all have turned away, all have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one. What that psalm is saying, is that left to our own devices, a hundred out of a hundred times, given the choice between our own sin and choosing the Lord, we will choose our own sin.
You desperately need a Savior
And you might like have questions about that this morning, like there’s no way. Eventually I would choose the Lord. No, the book of Judges actually shows us we will not. What it shows us, is that we desperately need a Savior. We can’t do it ourselves.
We need someone to come. That’s the second thing that I believe this book shows us in and throughout these pages. Here’s the amazing truth for the sinner this morning, is that while it may be that a hundred out of a hundred times we would choose our own sin, God’s mercy and compassion is such that a hundred out of a hundred times when we cry out to Him in our oppression and our groaning, when we cry out to Him for mercy, He is faithful to pour out compassion.
And so while we may be stuck in a spin cycle, the Lord is faithful to incline His ear to us. He is waiting for His people to cry out for mercy. And one of the things that I think is critical that we know about our God and His astounding character, is that He is right now withholding final judgment from all people that more may come to faith and know Him.
2nd Peter 3 verse 9, the Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. Some of us ask the question, especially with all that’s going on in the world today, when will Jesus come back?
Why won’t He stop the pain? Where is He? And 2nd Peter 3 verse 9 gives us an answer that what God is doing is He is patiently waiting for more to cry out to Him. And friends, don’t presume this morning on His patience. If you hear His voice today, call on the name of the Lord.
If that is you, if you’re stuck in a spin cycle this morning, cry out to Him because He has endless compassion and mercy for those who cry to Him. And here is the good news about our God, is He is faithful to pour out compassion and mercy, not through scandalous insufficient saviors, but He has provided a sufficient Savior to save you and I from our sins.
The Savior God provides
Amen. His name, Jesus Christ. As Toby stated last week, this whole book is about God’s means of delivering His people. He’s gonna send someone to wrench them away from their slavery to oppressors. That’s always been God’s plan. A man who is filled with His Spirit, a man of God’s own choosing, and that man is Jesus Christ.
Fully God, fully man. He is the only one sufficient to actually save you from your sins and to pull you out of your slavery to sin. It’s important that you understand the depths of your own sinfulness so that you understand that you actually need saving.
And Jesus is the only one that can actually save you. I love this. When Jesus starts His ministry in Luke chapter 4, He goes to His hometown of Nazareth and He starts teaching in the synagogue there. And He opens up to the scroll of Isaiah and He starts reading it among the teachers there in the synagogue.
He quotes from Isaiah. He says, And then down in verse 21, He follows that up by saying, Friends, that is good news this morning. That is our hope in life and death. That is our hope. If you are stuck in the spin cycle, if you feel like you are constantly spinning out, the hope for you this morning is that God doesn’t turn His ear away from you.
He has inclined His ear towards you. And so if you keep running back to the same sins over and over and over, do not think that God is just gonna one day turn away from you and stop up His ears. He is waiting for your cry for mercy. And church, let it be today the day when you call out to Him for mercy and you believe in Jesus Christ again maybe.
And say, you know what?
Okay, I’m gonna cast all of my hope on Jesus Christ. The reality about Jesus is that He not only comes to deliver His people from slavery to sin, but He actually gives them a new heart. That’s what the people need because the people don’t listen to these judges.
They need a new heart. And so what Jesus does is implants His own spirit in believers so that they would listen and obey Him. And maybe you’ve been caught in your sin and you’re just running back to it over and over and over. I am imploring you, believe the truth that when you accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, He has actually given you the means and the power to fight and defeat your sin.
You can do it. That’s hope for us.
Friends, I’ll leave us with this this morning. Worship team, why don’t you come get ready to help us to respond to the Lord. Yes, the book of Judges is deeply troubling because it shows us what it looks like to be enslaved to sin, but it is deeply hopeful because it also points us to the way out.
And the way out is God Himself rescuing us. My hope is that you, if you were a Christian this morning, if you have believed in the name of Jesus, that you would be, you would believe, grateful. And maybe some of you are here and you feel like, well, you know, I’ve never really wrestled with deep and lasting sins in my life.
I’ve never, you know, worshiped the pagan gods Baal or Ashtaroth. I’ve never had anything like that. I grew up in a Christian home, and I’ve, you know, as long as I can remember, I’ve been a person of faith. And my hope for you would be that you would look at your testimony and say, Lord, you are so good for what you’ve saved me from.
If you are a person who has been of faith for a long period of time, this book shows you just how awful it is to be trapped in your sin. And that is what God has saved you from through Jesus Christ. And maybe some of you have a testimony this morning where you went through a spin cycle yourself, and you were addicted and enslaved to your sin, and you know what God has saved you from.
Oh, that you would be grateful this morning for a deliverer who has saved you out of that life. And maybe for some of you, you have never called upon the name of the Lord, and you are here this morning, and I would implore you, no matter how messed up or dirty you may feel, God is inclined his ear, and he is patiently waiting for those who would call upon his name and repent and turn from their sins.
He is waiting to pour out mercy and compassion on you. And so would you, this morning, accept Jesus as Lord and Savior? Would you call out to him? And I promise you won’t be found wanting should you call out to your Savior. And so what I want to do to end is I just want to pray for you.
If that’s you this morning, and you never called upon his name, I want to pray that you would, that the Lord would open your heart to see him, to see him rightly, to see your sin rightly, and to see that you need saving, and to see that God has provided a Savior.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this, this text. Thank you for this book that, that outlines how sin sick we actually are. Lord, and, and these, these pages are hard, but Lord, they point to hope, hope that you are a God that does not just pull back and leave your people, but you enter in time and time again, and you raise up deliverer after deliverer, and you have sent the one great deliverer that is Jesus Christ, who saves us from all of our sins.
And Lord, I pray that if there is anyone here this morning that is not called upon the name of the Lord, that you would help them to do that right here and right now.
That they would call upon the name of, of Jesus, that they would cry out to you, the Lord, for mercy, and that you would, would right now show your compassion and mercy to them. Because in Christ, he has removed our sins as far as east is from west, and that is the hope for sinners, for the unclean, and for the broken.
Lord, would you enter into the hearts of anybody this morning who is not called upon your name, open their eyes, enlighten them by your Spirit. Lord, we pray. Father, we also are just grateful this morning for mercy. We are grateful for a deliverer for Jesus Christ.
Help us to worship him in truth now. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.