We're going to read from Judges chapter 2 continuing our series in Judges
so judges 2 and
from verse 6
When Joshua dismissed the people the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land and
The people serve the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who I live Joshua
Who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel and
And Joshua the son of none the servant of the Lord died at the age of 110 years and
They buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance and Timnaf Harris in the hill country of Ephraim
North of the mountain of Fgas 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 bails and
They abandoned the Lord the God of the 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 bails and the asterisks
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 that 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 hoared 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 and bowing down to them
They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways
So that 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 and 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
Now these are the generations that the Lord left to test Israel by them
That is all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars in Canaan
It was only in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war
To teach war to those who had not known it before these are the nations the five lords of the philistines
And all the Canaanites and the Sidionians and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon from Mount Balherman
As far as Lebo Hamath
They were for the testing of Israel to know whether Israel would obey the commandments of the Lord
Which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses
So 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
And this is God's word
Good evening. It's great to be with you and to get to spend some time sharing God's word together
With you from the book of Judges chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, please keep it open
On that page some page 201 of the church Bibles
I'm just going to read the first five verses of chapter 2 as well
It's really important to set up the the verses that we read
That Lewis read for us
Now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochum
And he said I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers
I said I will never break my covenant with you
And you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land
You shall break down their altars
But you have not obeyed my voice
What is this you have done?
So now I say I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides
And their gods shall be a snare to you
As soon as the angel of the Lord spoke these words to all the people of Israel the people lifted up their voices and wept
And they called the name of that place
Bochum which in Hebrew means weepers people who are crying
And they sacrificed there to the Lord
And after that then we have the reading that we had earlier with the death of Joshua and then the Lord raising up judges
Last week Tom Muir was here and he preached on chapter one of judges
And if you were here, so refresh your memory if you weren't here, this is a one minute
Summary of a really important part of his sermon
And so he spoke about how strange the world of judges is to us
It's full of really odd characters
People that can be quite hard to relate to if you just step into the book if you open it for the first time
A lot of the people that the book sets up as heroes are actually
When you read their stories are deeply flawed characters really strange people really odd heroes
And the book has lots of people who are constantly lots of peoples who are at war with each other across their different groups
It's the story of people trying to take over the land that other people already live in
And where you have people converting to different religions choosing entirely different ways of life
And the story is like a pendulum of extremes that never seems to settle anywhere in the middle
And there's all kinds of intermarriage. There's lots of violence in the book of judges
And that can make the book seem really difficult to make sense of for a lot of people in our culture
If you were to pick up the Bible for the first time in your life
If you'd never read it before
And you open it that judges chapter one
And that's really difficult because of what I was just sketching out there borrowing from tom last week
But also because a lot of people in our culture
Haven't read the Bible before they have very little
Knowledge of it or experience of it and very little sense from the Bible itself of how the Bible is to be read
How do you make sense of a book like this?
And I think that's difficult because in our culture there are a lot of people you're going to put them into two groups
In group one, there are a lot of people who haven't read the Bible
But assume that when they do
It's going to be like opening up a mindfulness app
But it's an ancient book and what you expect to find there is something that'll give you really
Good vibes that'll put you at ease like a kind of pillow of affirmation
That will give you an instant sense of inner peace and it's there to give you that kind of feeling
Other people though assume that the Bible
They might not have read it much
It's a book of commands of things to do
And it's a book about stories where everything that happens is affirmed by the Bible and you're meant to copy what you find literally on every page
And with that assumption
Well, let's say with both of these assumptions group one opens the Bible at the book of judges and it's not really like opening an
A wellness app to give you those feelings
And group two opens the book of judges and it's full of
Of a lot of really difficult stuff to process
And is this really what you want to copy and why would the Bible affirm all of these people doing all of these things?
But
Neither group then well
If that's how you begin reading the book of judges will get very far before giving up because why is the Bible like this?
Why is there a book like this in the Bible?
Judges is not
Chicken soup for the soul, but it's also not 12 rules for life
But of course that's not how the Bible itself works. It's not how it's to be read. It's not how we're to make sense of a book like judges
So the way that kori introduced the series of sermons that you're doing just now in st. columbus and sunday nights on judges was the title
The gospel according to judges
Okay, and that's a great title
You know if you're if that phrase rings
A true every rings familiar to you
You're thinking of the gospel according to Luke the gospel according to Matthew and you're thinking of these stories directly in the new
Testament about Jesus, but this is the gospel in the old testament in
This book that's really difficult for a lot of people to read and to get into at the beginning
But it is actually in the Bible the gospel the gospel according to judges
and here's
What I mean by that
The Bible is one great story
From Genesis to Revelation from beginning to end
The Bible tells one huge overarching story
But when you start to zoom in on all the different things that make up that story
You see that the story is made up of tiny versions of itself repeated over and over
Imagine you see a big portrait of a face
And the closer you get to it you see that it's a mosaic and it's actually full of tiny pictures of the same face
The Bible is like that, but it's one big story made up of repetitions of itself that start off really small
And as the repetitions go on they get bigger and bigger they expand
They start to get fleshed out
until
God takes on human flesh
And what the meaning of the story is is crystallized in the person of Jesus Christ
So here's how this works the Bible begins with God in the beginning God
God creates our world this universe. He creates human beings
And their starting point is this perfect relationship with him
And with themselves and with one another and with their universe
But then
those humans rebel
And they ruin the relationship with God with themselves with one another
with their world
And then immediately we have the story that gets repeated over and over being told for the first time
in a promise from God to that first woman Eve
That one day one of her offspring will come one of her descendants
And he will undo
Everything that they have put out of joints everything that they have undone in God's world
So this offspring will come
And that's the this this tiny bear promise that they get but that is the story that's going to be repeated throughout the Bible
Expanding and expanding as the story gets retold
And it gets retold in
The book of judges it gets retold in the exodus it gets retold in the 40 years in the wilderness
It gets retold in the the temple it gets retold in the sacrifices
It gets retold in the prophets until one day the story is told definitively because that promised offspring comes
And that is Jesus who enters the story
As God who becomes human who takes a human nature the word is made flesh and eve's
offspring
Is actually her creator
The author who writes himself into the story
Now here's what to give you one mental image to think about this. Okay, that'll take us into judges
And it's from a theologian who lived in the second century. He was from north Africa. His name was tertulian
And he was a pagan roman who became a christian and if you've never heard of him
I'm confident that you all regularly use words that he invented like old testament new testament
Trinity so he was that guy. He was a wordsmith
And one of um one of his most helpful creative terms in talking about the old testament and what I was just saying about how it's one story being repeated over and over
is
That the old testament is full of what he called rehearsals
of the gospel
Okay, so the gospel gets rehearsed over and over and over until it all happens for real
The old testament is full of rehearsals of the incarnation of jesus. It's full of rehearsals of the ultimate story
In all the ways that that story gets retold over and over and over
And the mind blowing thing that tertulian said about these rehearsals is who directs the rehearsal
It's actually jesus himself
He's the one who coordinates them. He's the one who orchestrates them and he does that the rehearsals are there for our benefits
They're there to prepare the world for what's going to happen when jesus entered definitively
So when we're talking about the gospel
according to judges
What we're looking to see really is what kind of a rehearsal
Of his entrance into the world is jesus orchestrating
In that world as strange as that world seems to us and for those people
And of course he was doing that in a world that was unimaginably different to our own
And the ancient world was a really violent place
Resources were scarce
People lived with all kinds of precarity
They did not know how to imagine religion as a sort of private choice that you have
Within your own life in your next door neighbor might make completely different private choices and you can all just live in that live
That wasn't the world that they knew how to imagine
And so in all of those fronts think about it like this
If people from the time of the book of judges could read a book that was set in our culture in edinbrun 2024
It would be as unimaginably weird to them as their world seems to us
And actually they would be deeply suspicious of you
Because of the kind of diversity that you live with the kind of live and let live attitude
That would make no sense because their world was so much more about the group than the individual and our culture is the inverse
So they would they would actually find us really suspicious
They would wonder how can you trust these people? What do they live for beyond themselves?
This kind of hyper individualized society and they would really struggle to imagine us just like we struggle to imagine them
But that is the world that these people were born into
In history and God was pursuing them in that world Jesus was rehearsing the gospel in their world for them
So how does he do that in judges too?
So I've got two points
The first is that God is faithful
And the people are not we are not and the second is the kind of judge
Who saves us of what is the truth
We are not and the second is the kind of judge who saves us so God is faithful and we're not
Now the reason I read verses one to five there
Is that they give us this key idea that help us unlock the whole of the book of judges
This idea that God is faithful to his people the people are not faithful to him
But the way that God deals with that is that he gives them a leader
Who is a good leader and who mediates between them and him?
So the backstory to this to the book of judges is
Joshua and the story of the exodus from Egypt
So Joshua
If you don't know the story
He was Moses assistant and Moses was the guy who led the Israelites out of Egypt where they'd been slaves
for hundreds of years, but after
Moses dies
Joshua then led leads the Israelites to the promised land, but when they get there
Joshua makes this dramatic speech so it's on the page just before this literally in the church Bible
Joshua makes a dramatic speech when they're just about at the promised land
When he tells them that the peoples who already live in this land worship lots of different gods
And those gods define their lives and as you enter this land, you must choose whom you will serve
Okay, and so maybe you know this line from the Bible as for me in my house
We will serve the Lord. This is where that gets said the original place where that gets said
So they're about to enter this promised land full of all of these
Peoples who worship all of these other gods and the question that Joshua gives them as they're just about to cross into that promised land is
Whom will you serve?
Who will you make ultimate in your life? Will it be the Lord the one true God?
Or will it be Bale or Maloch or Ashtara?
Will you focus your life on God or on these idols?
Now you may be thinking when you hear this
Well, you know, that's nice ancient history of the Bronze Age in Canaan
But I don't know anyone who has a shrine of Maloch or of Bale or an Asherapole
in their house
For me, this is really detached and it's meaningless. I don't know anyone who worships these gods
See, this is this is totally irrelevant
But think about this
Do you know who the New Testament calls the true and greater Joshua?
It's Jesus right same name even Yeshua and the Lord saves
Jesus said exactly the same thing in fact a bigger better thing
than Joshua said when they're about to cross into the promised land and he says
Who will you serve? Will it be the Lord or will it be Maloch or Bale?
Well, Jesus said you cannot serve God and money
Choose who you'll serve
Maybe nobody you know worships Maloch or Bale
Do you know people who believe that money makes the world go round?
I do
So
Joshua's question is contextualized
It's how you address the specific ways that idols are packaged and presented
If you live in Bronze Age Canaan
For us the same idols are still there. They're just packaged differently and they were we're more subtle than they were
They called their idols gods. Maybe we don't but we treat them like that
So Joshua's question is still the same question for us
We although we can package it differently choose whom you will serve
So that's the backstory they're about to enter the promised land
He tells them this choose whom you will serve and the people say
We will serve the Lord
Because as boldly as that and we will be faithful to him
And Joshua tells them
No, you won't
You will fail
And your hearts will wander you'll go astray
And at the very beginning of Joshua of judges too, that's what Joshua tells them
Okay, so it's a recap of what you have at the end of Joshua
He God tells them I have been faithful to you, but you have not been faithful to me and in response they weep
They they break down in tears and I'll talk a little bit later on about why they do that and why there's good news for people in that situation
So God tells them he's faithful to them and they're not faithful to him. So what does it mean to say that God is faithful here?
He wants to be their God
exclusively
um, he wants to be the one whose standards of goodness and truth and beauty
Order their lives and his commitment to them is exclusive. He is saying in effect. I want to be your God
I want to be loyal to you. I created you
I want I want to redeem you. I want to hear you. I want to answer your prayers
I want to be the one who gives your life its dignity and
um, it's
Its purpose and I want you to know that and live within it
So that's God's side of this
But the people God says have not been faithful to him. So what does that mean? So in verse
In verse two
There are two things that God says he doesn't want them to do and they do both of these things
One is to make covenants with pagans and the other is to take part
in their religions
To illustrate just how how weird our world would be to them. Just like their world is so strange to us
imagine
You're about to sign a contract. I don't know you're a student and you're about to rent your flat for the coming year
and
Your landlord is a hindu and you both sign the contract and your landlord says at the end of it
To make this contract valid. We are both going to make an offering to
Vishnu
In scotland you would think what like I don't need to do that to sign a contract that seems odd and an overreach
I imagine you like you're about to
Sell something you're about to sell your bike to someone
And you say okay just before the money changes hands. I'd like it if we could both recite the apostles creed
And the person's probably gonna say what?
Why do we need to do that to have a contract? But their world was completely different
So to make covenants
It's not just kind of let's ignore one another's differences and sign a piece of paper together. It's let's
Let's make oaths to gods. It's a really religious thing
And god doesn't want them to do that to other gods
And the reason that god doesn't want that okay, here's one way you can think about this that
Living your life under one god
Who relates to you by grace
Is completely different as a life to living under thousands of different gods
Who all want you to do things to keep them happy and you've got to appease every single one of them
Those are two completely different ways to live
utterly different
If you become a canaanite
Polytheist it means that every day you've got to spend your life trying to serve a thousand different masters
You have this huge list of gods as long as your arm
If you want to get pregnant, there's a fertility god you've got to keep happy for your harvest
There's another god for the fruit that grows in your garden. There's a god
There's a whole list of different gods for every part of your physical health
And do you want success in war? Do you want the sun to rise tomorrow?
And do you want good fortune?
Do you want victory over the gods of the other peoples?
And if if you're a pagan canaanite
And everything goes wrong in your life, you know, if it seems like the bottom has completely fallen out of it
You had a nuclear option
The ultimate sacrifice to get the gods on your side
Which was that you go to the god malloch and you offer your children
Who'd be burned to death
As a sacrifice to him. So that's what you would do in ancient Canaan particularly of all the crops failed
Because there's nothing above that that you could say that you could use to say to malloch
I need you. I am my life is over without you. I am nothing without you
And there's nothing more costly than I can give than the children that I've sacrificed to you
And what you see across the Old Testament is that god hates that that this is a thing where god that god calls out
It's what he means in judges too when he says at the very beginning
You might think it's just signing a contract to buy a fields
You might think it's just you know marrying off one of your sons or one of your daughters
But these gods are a snare to you. You give this an inch and it will take a mile
You think you're just staying in the shallow end of the pool, but before you know it
You're in the deep end
You think that it's just lip service to these gods that you don't really believe in
But actually before you know it the it's it's really heavy commitments and the lip service is to the god you say you believe in today
So choose whom you will serve
That's the message as they enter the promised land
And that's what you see as the chapter goes on they go from the shallow end to the deep end really quickly
But before that happens in chapter 2 so verses 6 down to 10
There is a there's a while where things go reasonably well for the Israelites
So they still have their good leader at this point. They have Joshua
And he stands in their place before god and he mediates between god and them
But after Joshua dies, there's still a generation who remember him
And who remember what it was like to have someone who mediates between them and god
They remember what it was like to have this savior figure
But after that generation passes away things change
Dramatically and very quickly so look at verse 10
And all that generation 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
Now if you are
An attentive reader
If you know lots of biblical stories
And you join the dots between them if you hear echoes of stories in other stories from the bible
There's something that's ringing here for you in the background
Something sad and something ironic in this line that there arose another generation who did not know
And the reason for that is that the story of Joshua
Which is the story that is just ending in this verse
Is actually the very end of the story of the Exodus
Because the Exodus is the Exodus from Egypt to the promise of the Bible
Because the Exodus is the Exodus from Egypt to the promised land
It's the story that where if you go right back to the start of that story
It takes you to Exodus chapter one where the Israelites are living peacefully in Egypt and flourishing
And this is before they become slaves
And they live under the protection of a good leader
Joseph
But then what happens?
Joseph dies
And there arises another generation a new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph
And just like that everything changes for them and they end up in slavery
And things take this dramatic turn for the worst
And that happens in the is in Egypt because they end up as slaves in Egypt, but in judges actually it's even worse
Because they're in what's meant to be the promised land
They're not in Egypt
And it's not the Pharaoh the new Pharaoh this pagan king who thinks he's a god who doesn't know the Lord
It's actually the Israelites themselves who don't know the Lord
So there's an echo that goes right back to the start of the book of Exodus here
And the effect that this is meant to have on you when you read it if you know the backstory
Is you're meant to ask
Okay, they left Egypt physically but in their hearts
Um, are they still slaves?
So they're not physically there, but they they don't know how to be free
And then what comes after this versus 11 down to 16 is really terrible
So they go from the shallow end to the deep end in one plunge
They abandon the Lord and they're not even subtle about it
Like they're not trying to say well, you know, it's just lip service and we still were really loyal to the Lord
They give up on him entirely and they convert to these other religions. They follow other gods
So verse 13
Reduces it to two things that lure them in
And they went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who are around them and bowed down to them
They abandoned the Lord and served the bales and the ash to Roth
So they gave up on the Lord in pursuit of two other things
The gods that they're that these cultures around them offered them
And the two things were power and sex
And that's what the bales and the ash to Roth represents the bales are a group of gods
If you're a pagan canaanite, these are like the the ideal form of masculinity or the bales
They're they're male gods and the bales lust after this ideal form of sexualized femininity
the ash to Roth
um
Well, Astarte was her name this goddess of fertility this object of male desire
So the Israelites gave up on following the Lord because they become transfixed with how their culture mediates to them
masculinity and femininity power and sex
desire
Of course our culture has its own many many different ways of mediating those things to us as well
So there's at this point there's another echo of something in the Exodus story
Which is that because they've done this
God sells them into the hands of their enemies
Sells them into slavery
And what's really shocking about this again is if you think about this
And you've got the story of the exodus behind it
The very beginning of the story of the exodus like the backstory to the exodus is well, how did Joseph end up in Egypt?
He was sold into slavery by his brothers
So there's this other it's a sad echo
And the Israelites are now slaves again. It's like the exodus from slavery in Egypt never happened
So the way that judges to begins the book of judges is that it's like we're back at the very beginning of the book of exodus
It's like there's a there's a meme that goes around
of a shepherd
Who's trying to pull a sheep
The sheep's head is stuck in this ditch
So love you've seen it and the moment he pulls it out the sheep springs off and jumps and then
Head straight back in the same ditch
Okay, that's the kind of effect that you're meant to have when you read judges one and two if you've read exodus as it comes before
They've gone straight back into the same ditch and it's like the exodus
Well, the question you're meant to have is was the exodus for nothing
Can god save his people at all?
And at this point, you know, if you're reading judges back in ancient israel
Maybe another thing that you're thinking of is again the page before this in the church bibles
What joshua said to the people after he said choose whom you will serve and they say we will serve the lord and joshua says
No, you won't
Do you know what just do you remember what joshua said to them after that?
You will fail him and because he is a holy and jealous god. He will not forgive your sins
so there's something
Something true about god that joshua grasped in that moment, which is that god is a holy and a jealous god
But there's something about god that joshua didn't grasp which is that god is also a gracious god
So he tells them you're going to fail and god will not forgive you and that is why they wept
That's why they called the place bohem the weepers because at this point
You know, they're that sheep that has jumped straight back into the same ditch and it is over
joshua himself told us if we get this wrong once then there's no way back
We were already in the last chance saloon
so they cry
And that's what makes the plot twist at the very end of verse 15 and the start of 16 so amazing
Because and this is also an echo of exodus
They were in terrible distress then the lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them at this point
So it's like in exodus
You know, they're they're groaning in slavery in egypt and god hears their groans and then god sends them someone to save them
So judges too is a rehearsal of the gospel in exactly the same way that the book of exodus is a rehearsal of the gospel
It's the story of god coming to save people who could not save themselves a story of god liberating people from slavery of god
Turning mere existence into the abundance of life
So that was point one point two is going to be a lot shorter really the point two is the conclusion the judge who saves us
When you hear the word judge in our culture, you probably think of you know, someone who sits in a court and
You know who hears cases
A judge in the old testament is not like that
Think instead
Decisive warrior savior
Okay, category of person that we don't really have in our culture. It's another thing that makes the book of judges odd to us
So one of the things that you'll see through judges is that the people are just a mess throughout
They don't really make progress at all
They never get back on track with following god
Obediently they're they're like the sheep that jumps into the ditch every single time more deeply than they did before
And as a spoiler alert, you haven't read the whole of the book of judges. The last line of the book is
Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. So the people are just like obstinately
They run away from god every time and god runs after them every time
And he keeps on being gracious over and over and he raises up judge after judge after judge to save them
And the judges are another part of the weirdness of this book. They are a ragtag
Bunch of saviours say the least the best known probably samson
The strong man who has really obvious evident character flaws. Okay, put it like that. You'll be I guess you'll be hearing about him later
We also have a judge like Gideon who's samson's opposite. He's not naturally brave or courageous
You have women and you have another
Judge who has a really complicated backstory. He's a prostitute son saves the people
But then he makes this rash vow that he then ends up killing his daughter over
The judges are a really odd group
Very ordinary people who each save israel and they're able to do that chapter 2 says because the lord was with them
They are unlikely heroes
Really unlikely saviours
And one of the repeated things that you see in judges is that they save the people of israel with unlikely weapons
So Gideon's army uses jars and trumpets
Shamgar uses an oxgoat
Jail uses a tent peg
Samson has a donkey's jaw bone
So judges is like this case study of the most unlikely saviours whose weapons are the most unlikely weapons
And throughout them God uses these people to just rescue his people
So how is that a rehearsal of the gospel of Jesus Christ?
Well think about it like this
Who would the most surprising
The least likely savior of the world be?
A baby? More unlikely still a baby born to a virgin
A baby born in poverty
Born in a stable
Someone who grows up in a cultural backwater
Someone whose job is carpenter
Someone who gave that up even and then had no place to lay his head
And then he had to go to the hospital
And he had to go to the hospital
Someone who gave that up even and then had no place to lay his head
So voluntarily homeless and itinerant
Someone whose own family did not believe in him
First
Someone who taught values that the people around him thought were utterly bizarre like turn the other cheek
Love your enemies
Someone who ended up being executed by the Romans nailed to a cross
Dying the death of a slave
A common criminal
Someone who lost his last earthly possessions as he hanged there held by nails
When soldiers used dice to gamble over his last piece of clothing
A barbarian
A nobody whose body was lifeless body was sealed in a tomb
One of the things that um the god
God says about himself in the Old Testament in Sam 75 is that he is the judge
Same Hebrew word as judges and judges
And in Sam 75 it's about a world full of unrighteous people
And there God says that he is the judge
Whatever it meant for samson
jail
Gideon off neil
All of these other people
Whatever it meant for them to be judges to be saviors
However, unlikely that seemed of them
God was the definitive version of that
He said he was the judge
But did it ever
Does it ever occur to you
When you look at Jesus Christ
That you are looking at
The judge
That you're looking at the unlikeliest
The most unimaginable of saviors
That you're looking at someone who fulfills
The whole of the book of judges
By he doesn't just fulfill it by being a man whom God was with
Like off neil or Gideon or samson
He fulfills it by being
Immanuel by being God with us
By being the god man by being the
The word who is in flesh
That the most surprising way for God to keep the promise he made to eve
At the very beginning of that biblical story
That the promise that one of her offspring would undo the fall
That God himself did that by taking a human nature
That God did that by becoming one of eve's own descendants
And that he joined divinity
And humanity in one person forever
So that we can know that he will never let us go
That we have this judge who is with us forever
That's good news
That is the gospel
And that helps us I think
It's here in the word of God to help us understand
The gospel was rehearsed for these people in their world
To prepare the world for the Jesus whom we know
By name
And for that reason we're really privileged to live
When we do in history
Not because we're superior to those people in their strange worlds
Our people in thousands of years from now
If the world is still here we'll look back on us and find us utterly bizarre
In many ways
And yet we have this privilege of living on this side of the cross
This side of the fulfillment of all of those rehearsals
Let's pray
Lord our God
We praise you for your gospel
We thank you for your son Jesus Christ
Who's come into our world
Who has become our savior
Who defies all of our expectations
And yet in him
You had planned to bring time together
In all of its fullness to reveal yourself to us
In him
So Lord help us to grow in faith and love and hope
Because of the gospel
The gospel shown to us, rehearsed for us also in the book of Judges
But we praise you that we don't just know of rehearsals
But you've placed us in a time to know that
The one who orchestrated that rehearsal has come into our world
We praise you in his name
Amen