Gooding, David: 3 - Introduction to Judges

A very good morning to you, and may the grace of our Lord Jesus be with every one of you. It is very encouraging to me to see that some of you have survived the rigors of the earlier part of this week and have come back for more with considerable perseverance and determination and ability to absorb a great deal of pain. It's good to see you, therefore. Just a word in your ear, we shall not be having, uh, for this series, uh, open discussions. In the first series, we had open discussions on certain doctrinal and theological matters that related to the book of Joshua, and those open discussions of those matters helped us to put the book of Joshua and its teachings in true theological and doctrinal context. That will not be so necessary with the book of Judges, and anyway, we're going to be hard pressed for time to get through even a major portion of the book of Judges in the time allotted, uh, to us. We should be concentrating on the major judges of this book. So just a little word of explanation that some of you may need. When they are referred to as judges, they were not quite judges in our modern sense of that term. They were great moral and spiritual reformers, and they judged Israel by rebuking their sins and bringing them back to God's revealed word through the law of Moses. But not only did they do that, but they were military leaders and led the people in campaigns against their sundry aggressors and captors. And so, as as well as being judges in the sense of of uh uh moral and spiritual reformers, a great deal of the time in in the narrative of judges is taken up with their military uh exploits. The Book of Judges has various uses for us who come in these last days. Let's just list some of the uses, uh, that it may serve, uh, uh, uh, what it served for Israel and, uh, what it may serve for us. Now, as you have just heard, steps will be taken to provide you with printouts of these, uh, overhead projector films. If you cannot read them where you are, uh, you are allowed to come and take the seats at the front that are unbooked. They are more expensive, of course, naturally, these seats here at the front, which is why a lot of people aren't there, and uh, uh, nonetheless, you are welcome to come if there are any vacant spots. The Book of Judges, of course, served purposes for Israel long before there were any Christians on the face of the earth. Lessons from history for subsequent Israeli generations, therefore. God's redemptive ways in past history enabled future generations in Israel to learn, how did we get here exactly? Secondly, Secondly. it would inspire in them a sense of their debt to past saviors, deliverers, heroes, judges, men and women of faith. And as we think of that, and it's a, a, a, a, a ministry for Israel, it reminds us, of course, that it is no bad thing for us to know not merely the men record- men recorded in the New Testament, but the great men and women of faith in the many succeeding generations, to whom we owe a tremendous debt, even if we sometimes we forget them. And in the fourth place, it served Israel of sundry generations as warning examples of the consequences of departure from God's word. History for them, as history for us, teaches lessons. What happens when people, when tribes, when nations depart from God's word. The kind of bondages and oppressions and distresses that they get themselves into. And then these narratives served Israel as encouraging examples of God's salvation and restoration. You can read, for instance, examples of that in Psalm eighty three verses nine to eighteen. History for them was written for their learning and for their encouragement. Hence you will find that Isaiah in his prophecy, chapter ten and verse twenty six, takes examples and comparisons from the time of the book of Judges, and uses it as an analogy and illustration of the great restoration, deliverance from Assyria, and restoration for the ten tribes of Israel. Just as God delivered Israel of the past in the slaughter of Midian at the Rock of Oreb. Next, the narratives of the Book of Judges seem to have acted as a manual of military warfare for subsequent generations. For instance, this we can cite at any rate, on occasion, Joab, David's commander of the forces in the field, had occasion to send a message to David that one of his captains, a certain Uriah, had been killed in battle. And Joab said to the messenger, as he dispatched him to David, if when you go, uh, uh, uh, to David and tell him what's happened, we made an attack on the city and the people came out and slaughtered some of us. If David gets angry, as he may well do, and say, why did you take the men so near the city? Don't you remember what happened to Abimelech when he besieged the city of Thebes and came to near the wall, and a housewife who happened to be the other side of the wall, milling her family's grits, of course, I ate grits in those days. Amen. And she had had enough of Abimelech's nonsense and got hold of one of the millstones and heaved it over the wall, and it happened to fall on, by design, the head of Abimelech and dispatched him. And Joab is afraid that King David will cite this instance from the book of Judges as a false military tactic that Joab ought to have known about and not repeated the military mistake. So in that instance, as in probably in a good many more, the extended narrative of military actions in the Book of Judges will have served later generations as a manual of military warfare. And therefore, it was an encouragement to them to learn to fight. In fact, we shall find, when we briefly look at the second introduction to the book, that God says there that he left many of the nations in the land and hadn't driven them out, so that the second and third and subsequent generations after Joshua should learn how to fight. The trouble with the second and third and fourth generations after Joshua is that they got things too easily. Whereas under Joshua, the people had to fight. And in the next generation, in order to go into their inheritances, they often had to fight. With the third and fourth and fifth generation, they got a lot of benefits which they didn't have to fight for. And when people don't have to fight for things, they don't s- measure them with the same value. So it was an encouragement, it explicitly says, for the people to fight. For us... who live in this great day, Hebrews chapter eleven cites some of the heroes from the book of Judges as part of that cloud of witnesses that we should listen to in as we run our race, our long distance race, looking off onto Jesus. We're surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. The word witness in English, of course, has two or three different meanings. It can mean eyewitnesses. Did you witness the accident that took place yesterday on that main road? Were you an eyewitness? The Greek word used in Hebrews is not the word for eyewitness. Greek has a word for eyewitness and uses it when it wants to. It is not the word for eyewitness. It is witness in the other sense that these bear witness to us. They, so to speak, send their message to us. They bid us listen to what they did, and what faith it required of them, and what tactics they had to adopt, to be an example to us and a stimulus to us to get on with our fight and learn to fight the good fight of the faith. It comes to us also, as it did to ancient Israel, as practical warnings against idolatry and departure from God's word. We may think that in a modern society not given to bowing down to idols of wooden- wood and stone, we are beyond the temptation to idolatry. But idolatry is not merely loving things more than loving God, it is that, but idolatry is trusting in things rather than in God. The last words of John's first epistle to us all is, this is the true God and eternal life. My little children, keep yourselves from idols. It is therefore, is the book of Judges, can be for us a lesson in spiritual warfare. We must immediately make the distinction. The warfare that they engaged in, in the book of Judges was carnal warfare with sword and spear. We as Christians are strictly forbidden. Amen. To use such violence, either to protect our Lord and his kingdom. Amen. Or to promote it. Amen. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. At our Lord's trial before Pilate, Pilate conducted two private interviews with him, and asked him in the first one, are you a king? Christ inquired whether this was Pilate's own question, or had somebody else put the terms in his head. And the reason for it was, uh, was straightforward. If Pilate had taken on board the accusation of the Jewish authorities, who said that Jesus was claiming to be king, then Pilate would have understood the term king in a political sense. In which case, when he asked our Lord, are you a king, our Lord must have said, no, of course I'm not a king in that sense. But if this were merely Pilate's own question, are you some kind of a king? Then, of course, our Lord's reply would be, yes, indeed I am a king. To distinguish things in Pilate's mind, our Lord said, if my kingdom were of this world, my disciples, now do watch your Greek translation, if you don't mind, my disciples would have been fighting that I should not be delivered to the Jews. Our Lord was referring to what happened in the garden. When the arresting party came to seize him, and one of his disciples, with great courage but folly, drew a sword and attempted to defend our Lord, cut off a man's ear. And our Lord rebuked him forthwith and immediately, and healed the man whose ear had been cut off. It is that that our Lord is referring to when he discusses with Pilate. If my kingdom had been of this world, my disciples would have fought so that I should not be delivered. Now notice the fir- the f- the phrase, delivered to the Jews. It was a predominantly Jewish squad of soldiers that came to arrest him. He made no attempt to resist and rebuked his apostle for attempting to resist by the violence of a sword. On the other hand, the Jews had gone to Pilate and asked for a squad of Roman soldiers to accompany them. And Pilate had given them a squad of Roman soldiers under Achiliac, a senior officer. And doubtless the Jewish authorities had asked for it because, according to what they alleged, our Lord was a leader of a political band of insurgents. So the senior Roman officer was present and would have known and heard and seen that the accusation of the Jewish authorities was quite false. Christ was not leading a band of armed political insurrectionists. And when one of them tried to use a sword, he rebuked him. And son of God though he was, allowed the arresting party to arrest him without resistance. The senior Roman officer would have reported it to Pilate, of course. So when our Lord said to Pilate, if my dis- if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting that I should not be delivered to the Jews. Pilate already knew that Christ was telling the truth. As it is, says Christ, my kingdom is not from hence. You are a king then? Yes, I am a king. What kind of a king? For this cause was I bur- born, and for this reason came I into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth. You cannot convince somebody of the truth simply by threatening him with a sword. To be convinced of the truth, you must be free of external coercion. Christendom lived to see a sad caricature of all this. When Constantine supposedly converted to Christianity, put the sign on of the cross on his ensigns, and in the sign of the cross, slaughtered many. British kings, as European kings, were converted by some early people called missionaries. The king, being convinced that perhaps the Christian God was the real one, would line up his citizens. They had the chance to be baptized. If they didn't get baptized, they were executed. It is a remarkably quick way to make convert. It is a disaster. And the association of the name of Christ and the gospel as Christian military campaigns is to this very present day a sad stumbling block in the men- in the way of many that are not Christians. And suppose that Christianity is ultimately a form of political violence. We must therefore make that distinction when we say that judges can serve us as in how to fight. Because while our weapons are different, we are exhorted, as Paul exhorts Timothy, to engage in the good, the fair, the beautiful warfare. Write these things so that thou mayest engage and fight a good battle. We wrestle not against principality, against, uh, uh, uh, flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and the world rulers of this darkness. They are still very real entities in our modern world. And we war against other kinds of sinful tendencies and attitudes. So that these, uh, lessons in the book of Joshua and book of Judges shall give us certain exercises, practical exercises. As we consider, uh, the round of history. What happened is, after Joshua's death, that the people had then to go into their own tribal inheritances. And as we saw last week, those areas and the cities in them had been captured by Joshua, their inhabitants put to death, no attempt had been made in Joshua's time to occupy those cities until a very late time, the camp of Israel was still down in Gilgal, and after the sundry military campaigns throughout the land, destroying the kings and in that sense taking the cities, Joshua and his armies, making no attempt to inhabit those cities, returned to base camp at Gilgal. It was only when all the kings had been executed and put down, that then Joshua gave permission for the tribes to begin to enter the territories assigned to them. And so naturally they went to different parts. And when they went, they found that the local inhabitants that had managed to escape Joshua's armies had often returned to those cities. Because Joshua's campaign lasted a very long time, as the text itself tells us. So now to go back to the cities in their particular territory and inhabit them, the tribes very often found they had to fight. They did so with various success, as is told us in the first introduction to the Book of Judges. But now, of course, if you can picture it in your mind's eye. Now it was not a case of the united armies of Israel all going together to any particular city. Now the tribes were divided, and this tribe went over here, and that tribe went over there, and fought their way into the cities that had been assigned to them, and began to settle down. We're told that sometimes they were able to expel the Canaanites. On other cases, they were not able to expel them. The best they could do was to turn them into servants and slaves. They couldn't expel them, and so forth and so on. The consequence was that in later years, some of the tribes at different times compromised with the Canaanite tribes. They started to intermarry with those tribes, which they had been strictly forbidden to do. And often intermarriage led on to compromise with the religious rituals of those pagan nations, and the tribes, Israelite tribes, became perverted. As a result of that, often enough, in the course of the years, the local Canaanite powers got the upper hand and oppressed the Israelites in their area, sometimes as long as forty years. And then when they cried to the Lord, says the Book of Judges, the Lord eventually would raise up a deliverer in that area. And that deliverer would judge the people, bring them back to God's word, fight their battles, and set them free, and continue, in that sense, to reform and judge the tribes now under his care, according to the law of Moses. And all went well, very often, until that judge died, and then the cycle would be repeated. We notice, therefore, a matter of some historical importance, that now we are not talking about enslaveries, oppressions involving all the tribes all at once. These oppressions happened in different places, to different tribes, at different time. And the deliverers, of course, they didn't necess- they didn't normally rule the whole nation, all twelve tribes. They delivered those in their area to which they were sent, became their judge. And the book of Judges will show us such deliverers being raised up in different parts and among different tribes and at different times. We can then use our powers, helped by the Lord, to do a number of things on the stories that are recorded for us. In any one oppression that happened, we can seek to discern, if we can, what the causes of the trouble was. What the causes were. Secondly, Secondly. we can notice in each case what the nature of the enemy was. It was not always the same enemy. And consequently, in the third place, what the nature of the oppression was. And fourthly, we can notice on each occasion, if we're told enough about the topic, to think about the qualifications of the deliverers. Why did God use this man as a deliverer and not somebody else? And was he specially qualified to do this task? And finally, we can ask about the tactics that each deliverer used. The tactics were, of course, notoriously different. With Ehud, when he went against the Moabite forces, and in particular the Moabite king, who happened to be taking his ease in his summer house in the city of palm trees. And he was very fat. And when Ehud went into him, the dramatic story tells us how Ehud announced, I have a message from the Lord to you. Half a minute, said the king, I'll get up here if I can, and struggled with his ponderous weight to get out of the chair. The message turned out to be, in Ehud's hand, a dagger through his belly. Very different was the critical stroke that delivered Israel from the oppression of the, of the kings of the north. They were a hard-headed scientific lot, the then equivalent of the Kennedy Space Center in the USA. But they had chariots of iron, if you please. They'd learned how to smelt it. Chariots, in fact. Their commander in chief, a certain Scissler, was finally dispatched, not by a dagger through his belly, but by a tent peg through his brain. Tactics were different, and we would be unwise to del- to pipe up pipe, uh, to pass them by as merely nice colorful things to var- vary the stories that are told that make each one less monotonous. We shall find they are parts of a very carefully developed strategy and tactics. Well, here are a few overheads just now to, um, begin to remind us of the contents of the book. There are two introductions to the book of Joshua. The first begins in chapter one, verse one. It came to pass after the death of Joshua. And the people, uh, uh, and Joshua had sent the people away. You'll see. After the death of Joshua, the first introduction, the people inquire of the Lord, who shall go up for us? And the Lord replied, the tribe of Judah shall go up first. This is the historical situation. Under Joshua, the army had been united. Nobody was allowed to go off as a splinter group and settle down anywhere. They had to remain as a united army. But after the death of Joshua, of course, they now had to go into their individual inheritances, and that will often mean fighting Canaanites that had come back and reoccupied some of the cities. Now, for a united army to begin to split up into different contingents and go off into different directions in a country that was still potentially hostile, would have been a very tricky maneuver. And the people inquired of the Lord who shall go up first and split off from the main army and go off on its own to tackle the enemies left in its particular territory. So that is the first introduction, and it tells how the tribes went off hither and thither, and how some were successful, drove out the enemy. Some couldn't do it. They tried their hardest to do it and couldn't. Some didn't do it. Whether they tried or not is another thing. It ends with the, uh, man of God, the angel of the Lord, coming and rebuking the nations for the incomplete way in which they had gone about entering into their inheritance and coping with the enemy. We shall not get time at this juncture anyway, or at first, to go into that introduction. The second introduction, beginning in chapter two and verse six. After the announcement at Bochim, a second introduction then, two verse six, Now when Joshua had sent the people away, the children of Israel went every man unto his inheritance to possess the land. A second introduction. It records the compromises, or the successes, in fact, in first, but also the compromises that individual tribes made when they went into their individual inheritances. And it tells how quickly they went astray. And then it says, uh, that the Lord, when they were distressed, raised up judges which saved them out of the hand of those that spoiled them. two verse sixteen. But adds, and yet they hearkened not unto their judges, for they went a whoring after other gods and bowed themselves down unto them. They turned aside quickly out of the way, whereas their father- wherein their fathers had walked, obeying the commandments of the Lord, but they did not so. But now let us notice what will become important for our interpretation of the story of the judges. Verse eighteen: and when the Lord raised them up judges, then the Lord was with the judge and saved them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For it repented the Lord because of their groanings, by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them. But it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they turned back. Now notice the next phrase. And dealt more corruptly than their fathers, in following other gods to serve them and to bow down unto them. This is the historian warning us what to expect when we now enter the main body of his work. We shall see cycles repeating themselves. The people compromising with pagan idolatry and intermarrying and so forth, they go downhill, they come under the power and oppression of the pagan nations, they cry to the Lord, and in the end the Lord is merciful and raises up a judge who fights their battles and delivers them and institutes a reformation, and all is well as long as the judge lives, but then the cycle repeats itself. But not only repeats itself, each time the circle goes round, the oppression is deeper. They deal more corruptly than their fathers had done. Let's tuck that under our cap, Juicy, and, uh, we shall notice, uh, what that is referring to as we proceed with the book. So here's the list in front of us, the two introductions. Then we shall consider the main deliverers. There are other deliverers. We shall not have time, uh, to deal with them. We shall be sorely pressed to get through the main deliverers. The children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the deliverer was Othniel, son-in-law to Caleb. And we shall ask, of course, as I say, what was the nature of the oppression? Which king was it, and who was he, and what did he stand for? And what does his oppression mean? And how was Othniel qualified to deliver the people from this particular oppression? Then at three twelve, and the children of Israel again did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. This time the oppressor was Moab, the deliverer was Ehud. After Ehud, there came a minor judge by the name of Shamgar. We shall not have time to consider Shamgar, and when we get home to glory, I shall apologize to him. Then four one, and the children of Israel again did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. There were three deliverers involved. Deborah, the prophetess, Barak, the military leader, and a certain Jael, a woman who dispatched the commander in chief of the enemy's forces. Then we come to Gideon, the children of Israel, that that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the deliverer this time was Gideon. The enemy were the Midianites, a very different kettle of fish from the northern kings from whom Barak had delivered Israel. After Gideon came the rule of Abimelech. He was a son of Gideon, and therefore supposedly is one of the judges. It is the irony of what Abimelech did, that whereas in that list he should be a judge, it was the judge himself that brought the nation into oppression. He certainly was an Old Testament diotrephes who afflicted a Christian church in John's day. The ironic situation is at that time in history, the people of God had to be delivered, not from the pagan enemies, but from a judge of Israel. And were so delivered. By a woman. Of Thebes. Well, the children of Israel did again that which was evil, and this time... it was the, uh, people east of Jordan. Ammonites and things. And the deliverer was Jephthah. And the final story of deliverance, in thirteen one following, the children of Israel did again that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. The enemy were the Philistines on the southeast border of the land, again, a very different people from, say, the Midianites or even the Moabites, a highly cultured people. They weren't, in fact, Semitic, they were Indo-European and probably came from the the Minoan civilization in Crete. The deliverer, if that's the right name to use for him, was Samson. Dear old Samson. The Holy Spirit lists him as a man of faith. I shall have to be very careful what I say about Samson. My courage is that if the Holy Spirit is prepared to regard Samson as a man of faith, he might even regard me as one too. And then at the end of the book, there are two epilogues, not just one. The one is the story of Micah and a Levite and the Danites and their idolatry. The second epilogue is the story of an abuse that arose in Israel, and how the all-tribal assembly in Israel was called in to deal with it, and in their attempt to deal with it, made matters ten thousand times. The failure of the all-tribal assembly. Now, of course, in one sense, the book of Judges is a depressing book. It will tell us in the end of the failure of the judges. It will record also the failure of the Levites. Moving on to Samuel, we shall find a superb judge in the poem of Samuel, but the context will relate for us the failure of the priesthood. And Israel choose a king. And Samuel will tell you about the failure of the king. Books of failure, therefore, of the judges, of the Levites, of the priesthood, and then eventually of the king. It all led on to David, a man after God's own heart. You will say, but that's okay for you as a preacher to say that, defending the Old Testament, but didn't David and his seed fail? Oh, they failed miserably and had to be taken away to Babylon. But all the while, waiting in the courts of heaven, to be the self-evident and only solution to the human problems of the people of God, let alone the world at large, was he who is in himself both prophet, priest, and king, and is the judge of his people now, and shall be the judge of the world hereafter. So does history lead on in its course to the coming of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ. Introductions, I always find, are the very dullest parts of a book. And introductory lectures are even worse. So I will cease now. But, um, I cease with expectations. Because surely by the look of your faces I can judge that I speak to many experts in the book of Judges. And you will have seen how my introduction has omitted things that should be said. So, first of all, now in the quarter of an hour that is at our disposal, who would like to complement, and I don't mean complement, but complement, that is add to, other insights that the Lord has shown you in the book of Judges that would encourage us to go full pelt into its study. Hello there. I just have a question for you. I was wondering if you found Gideon's statement right about in the middle of the book, um, pertinent, uh, related to your last comments of the failure of human good prophecy. There, when they tried to make him king, Gideon, that is, he reminded them, uh, the Lord shall rule over you. I was wondering if that was, if it was pertinent at all. Oh, it's highly pertinent, my good brother, at least as I see it. Highly pertinent. That was the situation in the time of the judges. They had no king. They were a pure theocracy, as it is called. That is, they believed that God was their king, as Gideon expresses it. And they had the central tabernacle at Shiloh, uh, with the, uh, ceremonies, the sacrifices, and the priesthood, but God himself was their king. It is the tendency of, uh, uh, the people of that day to forget it, to abuse it, and then to feel the need of making a king. And the people, as you rightly say, came to Gideon, grateful for the way God had used him to deliver them from the Midianites, and they proposed to make him king. It is to his credit that he said, no, I'll not be your king. God is your king. Well, therein lies one of the big sadnesses of the book. Said Gideon, I will not be your king. But he had a son whose name was Abimelech. My father is king. I wonder who named him that. Mm-hmm. Dr. Gideon says, because there was no king, every man did what was right in his own eyes. That's right, yes. So how do you balance that out with what, what you just said? Oh, well, because it should have been that there being no king, um, they ought to have done what their fathers did, and to go up to the Lord at Shiloh and consult the Lord. You will see Ju- Samuel as a judge doing precisely that, and the Lord of the wor- uh, the word of the Lord was with him. He didn't pretend to be a king. He was a judge, if you like, or and a prophet, and he judged Israel and went in a circuit, but he didn't pretend to be a political king. Uh, and uh, he judged and judged them successfully, brought the word of the Lord to them. Yes? And all Israel knew, says the early chapter of First Samuel, that the Lord was with him and that the Lord had spoken to him and so forth. It was when Samuel's sons became judges and corrupted the judgeship that the people then demanded a king. Yes? Hello there, I know out there somewhere. Oh, we're in the, uh, the introductory portion of the book. Chapter 2 gives us, uh, pretty much the cycle that we find in Judges. Uh, chapter two and verse eleven said, well, starting, I guess, with, uh, verse ten. Since there arose another generation after them that did not know the Lord. In verse eleven. Israel did evil in their sight. Verse 14, the anger of the Lord burns against them. Verse sixteen, the Lord raises up judges to deliver. Verse eighteen, the Lord's with the judge for all his days, uh, and he's moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed. So that's their repentance. And then verse nineteen, when the judge died, they turned back. They do, don't they? This is the cycle, but the interesting thing is that the cycle is not con- cycles that are the same, but each progressive cycle gets worse. It does. And as you mentioned, it goes from the enemies from the outside to the enemies of the inside to total immorality at the end. But the interesting thing is that the repentance is obvious at the beginning, but by the time you get to the bottom of your page, you're hard pressed to find your repentance. You are. You are indeed. Yet God still sends a deliverer. So the question is, how much faith does it take for God to save someone? Mm. Fact is... Yes. You don't see the repentance, yet God sends a deliverer anyway. Mm-hmm. Because he's faithful to his people. Yes. Thank you very much indeed, and I think it's worth, I'll come to you in a moment, so it's worth remembering that when the Lord comes to the seven churches and appears to John, he comes, some people say dressed like a priest. I rather fancy he's dressed like a judge. And, uh, he comes to assess his churches and calls on them, with your words, sir, to repent. We so frequently call upon the unconverted to repent, but repentance is a thing that as churches we need to do constantly. As we review our practice and beliefs and what so, in the light of our Lord's word. Repent. Mm-hmm. Somebody here with a hand up. Yes, yes, there. Um, in Judges, I happen to see a lack of a personal, um, relationship with their God. Mm. And, and the, the people of themselves don't have, even they're, they're doing things in their own eyes, and on top of that, they have no personal relationship to do the things that they're doing. You don't see them going before the Lord, um, at all, um, except in one or two instances. Most of it is that they're not going before their God and saying, we have a problem with this, they they have chariots of iron. We have a problem with this, we can't get them out. What what are we to do? Or Mm-hmm. On the different things that they're, they were supposed to do, I don't see them going back to God. Mm-hmm. And going back to their Lord, or even going back to the Levites to ask them to go to God, Mm. uh, to do anything. Yeah, that's right, sir. That's right. There's no communication on their behalf towards God until, um, they're under the thumb and, and, and feel a whole mess of pain, then they just want the pain to stop. Mm-hmm. They don't want the relationship. Mm-hmm. Thank you for that, and, uh, uh, prompts me to point to one of the things that are said in the introductions. The people, uh, the elders that had known Joshua, and uh, perhaps the next generation, could remember the stirring events that happened under Joshua to all the people. The evident interdeven- interventions of God, the mark- remarkable victories, and so forth and so on. And to have stood and listened to an inspired man, uh, Joshua, exhorting the people. Man through whom God had done spectacular miracles so that all the people should fear him as they feared Moses the rest of his life. And in that sense, not in our modern Christian sense, but they had had a relationship with Joshua and an experience of God through him. But, come the third generation, and the fourth, they didn't know Joshua. And all those stirring events and revivals and victories and battles were ancient history. And there were these charming, you know, they were worshippers of Baal, yes, I know they were, but some of the girls were beautiful. And, and they were farmers like Israel were farmers. They had one or two funny customs, like offering sacrifices to Baal, but were they really so bad as Moses made out? Well, remember, all we're always talking about the past and Joshua. We never knew. We're living in the present. You know, it does happen. I was born, uh, too late. I'm a nineteen twenty five model. I heard from my parents, oh, you should have been alive in the days of Moody and Sankey and and uh Spurgeon and thousands getting converted converted and and uh, marvelous, I was tremendous. tremendous. And the great preachers and expositors we had, marvelous. Do you remember them? No, of course I don't. Oh. And I used to be tempted to say, mm-hmm, what happened to you that you didn't carry it on? That would have been rude, wouldn't it? To my elders. You talk about the great expositors of the word. Where are they now? And why don't you do it? There's something to be said for the third and fourth generations. But on the other hand, all the pity that not knowing their history and the reality of it, and therefore in our day not knowing God's word very well either, they fall into all sorts of modern methods that are idolatrous, as well as practices that are sinful. I I speak speak to my younger brethren present. Would God, God would use these sessions to provoke you even more to become men of God, to deliver God's people in the days ahead before the Lord comes. That's why we shall be considering, not only where the people went wrong, but what were the qualifications of the deliverers? Why them? Was that arbitrary, completely arbitrary? And what about the tactics they used? How do they make sense? And how did you reconnoiter the enemy? So that you may use the appropriate tactic on each enemy. That will take some study, won't it? And if a man were merely going to be an officer in the British Army, he'd better first go to Sandhurst to learn his, uh, trade. And if we're going to be good soldiers of Jesus Christ, listen to Paul instructing Timothy. You'll see not all epistles in the New Testament are written to the church at large. Though the church at large should read all the epistles. But there are three epistles at least, one and two Timothy and one Titus, that are written in the first instance to the younger men that were Paul's fellow workers in his missionary endeavor. What they would need and how they would need to discipline themselves and what they would need to learn and go about preparing themselves to be in their day deliverers and saviors of God's people. You can't st- start too soon, gentlemen, I say to my younger brethren, for life will go rip-roaring by you, and it will be gone before you know where you are. Start young. Sir, I would readily take your question, uh, uh, uh, um, book your place for the next question, but I have to cease because it is eleven forty five. Uh, Ten forty five, I mean, yes. Well, whatever you say.