Gooding, David: 2 - Leading God's Nation

So let's now begin by looking at a few slides that will help to get on our minds the general contents of the book of Judges. Is that legible? Can you... You can see it, can you? Righty ho. Uh, this is a simple table of contents. Uh, there are two introductions. For the moment, you needn't worry about them. And at the end, there are two epilogues. On our next, uh, fortnight today, God willing, we may have find the time to, uh, deal with them, why there are two introductions and why there are two epilogues. For the moment, we concentrate on the, uh, captivities and the deliverances. You'll notice the constant repetition at the beginning of each section. Chapter three verse seven, for instance, and the children of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. Three twelve, and the children of Israel again did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. And so four one and six one and eight thirty three and ten six and thirteen one. The constant monotonous repetition. The people of Israel did that which evil, it was evil in the sight of the Lord. And then, on each occasion, of course, the deliverer that God raised up. Othniel, Ehud, and then three deliverers, Deborah, the prophetess, Barak, the military leader, and Jael, who delivered the coup de grâce, uh, to the, uh, commander in chief of the Canaanites by putting a tent peg through his brain. Then Gideon. Then a woman, Othebez. Then Jephthah. And finally, Samson. It's good to list them and to get to know them, gentlemen, just like you know the names of your uncles and some of you your grandfathers. It's good to know these prominent deliverers. Let's look at another table of contents that will, uh, invite us to think. About the relationship between them. You'll see here down this column the two introductions. One after the death of Joshua, first introduction, and then two when Joshua had sent the people away, the second introduction. You'll notice in passing how they are worded. Look at this first introduction. It begins by the question, who shall go up first against the Canaanites? And God said, Judah. That, uh, uh, first introduction ends when there came a man of God and rebuked the tribes for their compromises, uh, with the pagans, and there is mention of the covenant. The place is called Bochim because there, under the powerful message of the man of God, the people were reduced to repentance and to weeping. At the end of the book, the final, uh, episode, epilogue, Benjamin's immorality, the question is raised, who shall go up first against Benjamin? And in the course of that story, we read of the place Bethel and the Ark of the Covenant, and the people reduced to weeping. The second introduction, when Joshua had sent the people away, and what follows is the record of their intermittent idolatry. That is, from time to time they went over to idolatry. And then, as we read in our first session, they were brought to repentance by a judge, and God delivered them, and all went well as long as the judge lived, but after the judge died, then another batch of idolatry would break out, what I called intermittent idolatry. If you look at this, the first of the epilogues, it is also about idolatry, but I'm afraid it's no longer intermittent. It is institutionalized idolatry. And what I mean by that is the story, how that the Danites, being given a piece of territory as their inheritance in the south of the land, felt that wasn't enough, so they went up north, and in process they took a Levite, and he had var- uh, various gods, silver gods and whatnot, and, uh, uh, they es- they went up north, they defeated a tribe of the Canaanites at a place called Laish. Well, Joshua had done that kind of thing. He had defeated Canaanites. When he did that, he established the worship of Jehovah. But these Danites, when they went up north, they defeated the, the Canaanites, the people of Laish, and if you please, they set up an idolatrous shrine, just as bad as the Canaanites. Wow. And they thought they were doing well because they had a Levite for their priest in charge of this idolatrous shrine with its idolatrous idol. Institutionalized idolatry. I say no more about that now, but you might, uh, uh, begin to get a clue that these stories are not just these things happen to happen, so we put them down. There is a connection between the two introductions and the true epilogues. But we are being concerned now particularly with the, um, uh, judges, the deliverers. And we start here at the bottom with Othniel, and we're going upwards, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, the woman of Thebes, Jephthah, and Samson. Because when you look at them, you will again see that it is not a haphazard collection. We read from the second introduction that what happened was this, and I repeat it, the people compromised with the pagan religions, and eventually the pagans came to dominate them and to tyrannize over them. In their distress, they cried to the Lord. The Lord raised them up a deliverer, brought the people to repentance, back to the Lord, and all went well un- as long as the deliverer lived. When he died, the people very often went back to their compromises and got themselves into trouble again. But then we, uh, we learned that each time it happened, it didn't just go round in circles. Each turn of the wheel, they went worse than they were before. And we shall find it now if we look at this set of deliverers. Here is Othniel. He's the first deliverer. The enemy was the Mesopotamians, king of Mesopotamia. And we shall, when we come round to it, see that the secret of his success was his wife. She had been the stimulus that got him going as a warrior to start with. She was the daughter of Caleb. And Caleb was a ma- past master at chasing giants off his inheritance. And at one stage, he pointed to a certain city, Kirath Yarrim, and he lay out the challenge, whoever takes this city, I give him my daughter to wife. Her name was Aksar the daughter. And the chap called Othniel had a look at the city, and it was full of giants. But then he had a look at the daughter and said, ha ha, ha ha, you'll see. And found the courage to face all the giants. Yeah. And uh, uh, went up and captured the city and drove off the giants. And uh, uh, Caleb gave him his daughter to wife and gave them that bit of the inheritance, you see. Because this part of the inheritance was J- uh, Caleb's. He was the leader of that tribe in that area, yeah? But the story says how it was a rather dry kind of a patch. And Access, AXA one day said to, uh, uh, Austin, obviously, like wise do, you know. Ha. Don't ask how I know. But, uh, she said, my dear, this is no good. A, a, a, a, a dry bit of ground like this that your, your dad has given us. It's useless, you see. It's no water, and you can't grow anything, turnips, no vegetables, or not tomatoes or anything. It's no use. We want more than this. And the next time your dad comes, you'll have to tell him. Go on, you tell him. Mm. And the next time Papa came, that was Caleb. Well, she couldn't wait, the dear soul couldn't. She blurted it out. We want more than this. This is the, the, what you've given us is too dry. We want the upper and nether springs to get some irrigation going on the land. And Caleb gave her her request. She was the stimulus for good, mercifully, behind Othniel. You You look. look at the last deliverer. He was a man of faith, for Hebrews chapter eleven, and I read it to you. The Holy Spirit tells us he was a man of faith, so I shall have to be careful what I say about Samson. He came to a bad end, didn't he? And the secret of his failure? Well, I suppose that's the right word to use, I don't know, his wives, I thought. That's the right description of them. For on this occasion, the trouble was, as we shall find as we look in a moment or two to the text, the trouble was, where did they begin to go astray? They married the girls of the other nations. And God raised up Othniel to deliver his people. Why do you think, if the trouble was that the people had become enamored of the, uh, girls of the other nations and had married them contrary to the command of Moses, and got themselves in trouble. Why did God choose Othniel as their deliverer? If the trouble had been unrestrained affection, the people marrying the Danianite women. Why did God use him? Anybody got a clue? Yes, because, oh, you nearly said he had the right kind of wife. His wife, godly daughter of godly Caleb was the impetus behind a man to go in for his inheritance and to fight the giants in the first place. And when it comes to Samson, Samson, if you please, was a deliverer, and it was a man of faith. But his weak point was this, he married Philistine girls and was guilty of the very sin which was the people's trouble to start with, and nobody saw it was anything wrong. Curious that, isn't it? It's curious when now at length the deliverer himself is guilty of the sin that was the cause of the basic trouble to start with. Righto. Forgive that little sermon, but that to just begin to make the point. What was the trouble? What was the qualification of the deliverer? And what were the tactics? What was the nature of the enemy, and so forth? The principle that things went wrong, and then God raised up a deliverer and saved them, and it went all right while the deliverer lived, and when he died, things didn't simply go bad again, but get they were worse than they were before. We see it now if we compare the last with the first. But look at this one. Ehud. The enemy this time are not Mesopotamians, they were Moabites. And one of the tactics, only one of them, but I single it out here, one of the tactics that was used was to take the fords of Jordan. That is the place where the river could be crossed because there were stepping stones across the fords of Jordan. Jordan could be dangerous if you didn't know where to cross it. They took the Fords of Jordan, and as the enemy came streaming out of, um, uh, Jericho to go back home, because Moabite territory was really the other side of Jordan, but they had come across the river, had the Moabites and captured, uh, and taken Jericho and rebuilt it and so forth. Now, with their king defeated, they were hurrying back to escape, wanting to cross Jordan to go back to Moabite territory. Ehud took the fords of Jordan. And of course, it's like Horatio took the bridge, if you've ever heard of Horatio. Perhaps you don't, you don't get taught those profound things nowadays in school. But, uh, as they came across, he stationed his men at the fords, you see, and picked them up one by one as they came across. That was the tactic. And the people that they killed were the enemy. When we come to a man called Jephthah, man of faith, brought a great victory, he was, uh, dealing with, uh, not Mesopotamians nor Moabites, but with Ammonites. And one of the tactics he, uh, adopted was like, uh, like, uh, Ehud did. He took the fords of Jordan and killed the folks as they came across. Unfortunately, the people he killed were not enemies, they were his brethren. Wow. Uh, because they had a dispute, you see, and Jephthah got impatient with them. And so as they came across Jordan, men of Ephraim, he said, say Sibylith. But they couldn't pronounce it properly. And whereas one group said Shibboleth, the other said Sibylith. Well, they meant the same thing, but it was a different way of pronouncing it. But he used the pronunciation to indicate what tribe they were. Where did they come from? When he found out they were Ephraimites, he killed them. Things aren't too hot, are they? When the deliverer starts killing his brethren instead of the enemy. But he was a deliverer, and we mustn't forget it, because the New Testament, the Holy Spirit in the New Testament raises him up as an example of a man of faith. This deliverance here, they were not Mesopotamians or Moabites, they were Canaanites, a very different kettle of fish Canaanites. The final, uh, coup de grâce was administered by a woman called Jael. You notice that these three, Debora, Bedrak, and Jael, two are women. But the final victory was achieved when the commander in chief of the Canaanite forces, Sisera, ran off, got off his chariot and ran for his life and came to the tent, uh, of Heber the Genu- uh, Canaanite, and his wife Jael was there. And, uh, it's a long story, which will come to it one day. She got him going off for his afternoon siesta, uh, covered him with a blanket or something, and when he was a snoring, she came with the tent peg and put it through his brain. We go back to this one for a moment. He killed the king of the Merbites, did Ehud, with a dagger through his belly. This fellow was killed through his brain. And we shall find when we come to it, the difference, of course, is significant. Yes, but look over here for a moment. The enemy was a certain Abimelech. He was killed likewise by a woman, a woman of Thebez. Situation was that the Bimalech was besieging a certain city of Israel, and here was this woman with a millstone, milling out the grain to make flour to feed her family. And here was this, uh, uh, Bimalech chap out to destroy a city of Israel. She couldn't put up with his nonsense anymore. He, as a commander, uh, as he coming to besiege the city and attack it, came very near the wall, and she saw her opportunity. She was milling the thing, and she took one of the millstones, heaved it over the wall. Do you know it happened to light on his head? Smashed his skull in. That was the end of his thinking for a while. The skull crushed with a millstone. See the similarities, gentlemen? But I have to point out to you a very sad thing. That the man that was last killed, he was commander of an army. He was meant to be a deliverer. He was an Israel. He was the son, in fact, of Gideon. And when Gideon died, he, by various practices, succeeded his father, established himself as the ruler over that particular tribe. And he's meant to be one in the succession of deliverers, if you please. So now the very deliverer, son of of Gideon, is the trouble. By his ambitions and tyrannies over the people of God. And has to be dealt with, and was dealt with by a simple good woman of Thebes, who stopped all his nonsense by, uh, crushing his skull. Hm? You'll see, I hope you begin to see, what chapter two is telling us to expect. That as the wheel went round, it not merely went round, but each time it went worse. The midpoint was Gideon, very famous man of faith. Uh, the enemy, notice how each time the enemy is different. The enemy this time is not Mesopotamians, not Moabites, not Canaanites, but Midianites. He was the man whose tactics were to take just the three hundred men, you may remember, that God had allowed him at night, and they had torches, and they had them in earthen vessels. And as they surrounded the camp at night, they broke the vessels, and the torches were flaming, of course. And they cried, the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. And as the Midianite, uh, troops wa- woke up in their tents in the middle of the night and saw the lights, as you know, as you see a, a car approaching in the, in the blackness of a night, night, and it's got its headlights on, you can't see what's behind it. Ha. And so it was with Gideon and co. They got the torches alight and held them out in front. The dear old Midianites couldn't see who it was, how many there were, whether there were three or 4 or three or four thousand. Good tactic, that was. You'll see. Uh, so, um, uh, he overcame them. Tactics again. You'll notice the different assortment of c- tactics. Uh, many more beside when we come down to detail. But we shall find that, um, Gideon was a high point, and yet it was a sorry low point in the stories. Now I want to notice another thing in general, and I say it to alert us what to look for. As we study the captivities, We shall notice that each of the captivities involves the denial of a certain first principle of Israel's existence. In other words, the sin of Israel that led to the captivity was not some minor thing, for none of us is perfect. We should observe that each time here the captivity involved a denial of a basic first principle of the nation's existence. The first captivity was to the king of Mesopotamia, Aram Nachareim. Aram of the two rivers, Euphrates and the Tigris. He was king in Haran, which is north Mes- Mesopotamia, not the Ur of Chaldees right down in the south, where Abraham originally came from, but Haram in the north of Mesopotamia. And we'll look at the geography later on. It was the place from which Abram eventually launched forth after his father was dead, and launched forth into Canaan. So, the first captivity was to the king of the country from which Abraham came out and entered the land. You say, what's the good of being in the land then, if they're now under the king from whose country Abram came out in the first place? Get out of the land, this place Mesopotamia, said God to Abram, to the land that I will give you. Well, they're in the land that God had given them, but now back under bondage to the king of the country from which Abram came out. When we come round to consider it, we shall have to ask ourselves the question, what was it, what experience was it that brought Abram out of that country? Well, the people of Israel had long since forgotten it, perhaps, and had gone back under that king. Second captivity to the king of Moab, who took Jericho, called it the city of the palm trees, and obviously restored it, if not in on exactly the same mound as before, but in that general area. Lived in this city, called it the city of palm trees. The very first city that Israel had destroyed in order to enter Canaan. Now they've gone on long bit further now, all over the country, marvelous victories, but gentlemen, what is the point of making further victories if the enemy has come in behind you and now captures the very first city that you once destroyed. The third captivity was to a certain Jabin, king of the Canaanites. And in the actual description given us in the text, the phrase is used that he mightily oppressed Israel. Mightily oppressed. They were tough boys, the Canaanites. They weren't like the flabby Moabites. Old Aegon, king of the, king of Moab, you know, he was a big fat fellow, walks somewhat like this, you'll see. Talk about flabby. And he was killed through his strong point, which was his belly. Not so the Canaanites. They tended to live up north. Some of their engineering, civil engineering works have survived to this very present day. If you're in Israel, do go and look at the big thing at Gibeon or Megiddo or Hazor. Tremendous civil engineers they were. Incredible what they did with the tools that they had in those days. And they had, uh, nine hundred chariots of iron, my boy. Phew. We're quite industrialized in those far off days, with all the techniques that they had to develop to get the old metal and then to make the chariots. Wow. They were tough boys, they were. The very most advanced technological inventors and all that kind of thing. And they mightily oppressed the children of Israel. Yes, just of course like Pharaoh did... when they had been in Egypt. For pharaohs were past masters of technology, were they not? Absolute brilliant. But they had reduced Israel to slaves in their brick kilns. With no permission to go and have a, a, a keep a holy feast to the Lord. Mightily oppressed them. Now Israel had been delivered from Egypt and were in Canaan, in their inheritance, if you please. The king of Canaan had, um, was mightily oppressing them. What's the point of being in the land, gentlemen, delivered from Egypt, if the evil king has got you mightily oppressed, just like Pharaoh did? The fourth captivity was to the Midianites. Now, the Midianites came up like locusts, they did really, for number. They rode on camels, if you please, most of them. They were nomads. They didn't live anywhere in particular, lived in the desert, nomads, but they were very good riders of camels. Now Israel was in the, in the Canaan. You know what? Canaan I, Canaan was a land flowing with milk and honey, gentlemen. Marvelous. Oh, gorgeous, flowing with milk and honey. The Midianites came, they waited till harvest, you see, and just as it was harvest time, they came up like the sand on the seashore for multitude and, uh, gobbled up all the crops and left the Israelites starving. What's the good judgment of being in the land flowing with milk and honey, if the Midianites have reduced you to starvation? Mm-hmm. I nearly was tempted to say, what's the good of being in an assembly if all sorts of circumstances have arisen that have impoverished this as the assembly, there is no food, but nothing but strife. So we come to Abimelech. He should have been a judge and a deliverer. What use of a deliverer who acts the tyrants and kills all his brethren so that he may be boss? He was an Old Testament equivalent of Master Diotrephes, of whom John writes in one of his epistles. Absolutely tyrannizing over the believers. Says John, I shall deal with him when I come. Then, of course, there was, um, uh, Jephthah, and we saw earlier how he took the fjords of Jordan against his Israelite brethren, and treated his brother Israelites as though were they were enemies and slaughtered them. The enemy in the time of Samson were not Mesopotamians, nor Moabites, nor Canaanites, nor Midianites. They were Philistines. Philistines are very interesting people. They were the sea peoples. They were not Semitic. They would have come perhaps from Crete. They came in ships, and they occupied the coastal area down south, Gaza and so forth, Gath. And sometimes they came, uh, inland as far as Shiloh, you remember, they were at Shiloh, uh, and attacked, uh, Eli and company. In the time of David, Philistines were the chief enemy. David had to struggle against the Philistines. Indeed, Goliath, in the famous story of David and Goliath, Goliath was a Philistine. So the Philistines were in the land, and curiously enough, eventually they came to give their name to the land, and the land was called by many people Palestine. Right down to my youth, the land was still called Palestine, which is the land of the Philistines. Yes? Odd, isn't it? It's now called Israel, but, uh, in those past days and right up to the nineteen forties it was called Palestine, the land of the Philistines, and was known in the ancient world as the land of the Philistines, you see. Now Now, the the Holy Holy Sp- Spirit himself... uh, uses terms of the various enemies. The one he uses about the Philistines constantly is the uncircumcised Philistines. Well, you say all nations were, uh, uh, except Israel, were uncircumcised. No, that's not true. Many of the Semitic nations were circumcised, only it didn't mean the same thing for them as it meant for Israel. But the Philistines, not being Semitic but Indo-European, presumably, were uncircumcised. Now, circumcision for Israel was the sign of physical descent from Abraham, marked them out as Abraham's physical seed. Circumcision was the sign of the covenant that God had made with Abram and with his seed, amongst other things, to give them the land. Philistines were uncircumcised. They were not members of the covenant of, of God, between God and Israel. Strangers to it completely. And yet they came to conquer the land and bring Israel into subjection. God raised up Samson, and yes, he certainly made life uncomfortable for Philistines and slaughtered some of them from time to time and killed more in his death than he did in his life. He was a man of faith. The Holy Spirit so includes him in the men of faith, which is a merciful, uh, merciful act of the Holy Spirit, isn't it, to call Samson a man of faith. I hope if the Holy Spirit ever comes round to citing me in the annals of God's registers, he will have the same compassion on me as he had on Samson. I wouldn't have called Samson a man of faith, would you? Well, he had a certain weakness. The distinctive mark between Philistines and Israelites was the Philistines were uncircumcised. They were not members of the covenant that God had made with Abram and his seed. Yet Samson went and married the girls. You don't overcome an enemy whose daughters you have married. He certainly disturbed them, tried to make the distinction between the Philistines and the true Israelites. But when he died, Israel was still under the heel of the Philistines as much as they had been when he started. We've already noticed the Danites. They went up north and destroyed the city of Laish. Oh yes, that's what Joshua did. He went through the, the land with the Israelite armies and destroyed the cities, headquarters of the kings. But having done that, got Joshua, uh, and his people were meant to establish the worship of the one true God, Yahweh. The Danites went up north, destroyed the Canaanite city, rebuilt the thing and called it Dan, and installed idolatry, straight, pure, simple, systematic idolatry. Sorry business that, wasn't it? One trembles to think... the so-called missionaries that have gone out to pagan nations in the name of Christ... and established idolatry. You go to Malaysia, the believers there will tell you how that the Malaysians find it very difficult to know the difference between the goddess of mercy and the Virgin Mary, and are inclined to pray to both. They don't see any difference, do the pagans. Or you think of the situation in countries like Mexico, where, uh, uh, the old native, um, superstitions and practices have been simply welded on to a form of Christendom. So it was with the Danites. And when in subsequent centuries, people like Jeroboam came along, and then Ahab, king of Israel, Dan became the center of idolatry. Well, Jeroboam built a high place there. You can still go if you go to, uh, Israel, you can go and see Dan if you like, and Laish for that matter. They've uncovered the gate at Laish. It's a very good thing to look at. But, uh, Jeroboam established a high place there, as idolatrous as it could be, and Ahab enlarged it. Denial of the very, uh, purpose of the, um, entry into Canaan by Joshua and the nation. And the final story, uh, here on this list, the story of the all-tribal assembly. So let me just describe to you what the all-tribal assembly was. In the days of the judges, there was no king. Israel remained in its tribes. But they did have a central tabernacle. They all believed in the one true God. It was a matter of principle and faith with them. That they, um, uh, were ruled by God. It was, in technical terms, a theocracy. There was no king. There were the elders of the tribes. There were the priests and the Levites in the tabernacle. But no king. Each tribe responsible direct to God, to be ruled by God. You'll see, it was a theocracy. But there had to be what is now called an all-tribal assembly to be responsible for certain regulations, uh, when, uh, the tribes traveled, individuals from each tribe traveled from one place to another place, do you see? So if a chappy from the south, where Judah was, uh, happened, his business called him, and he had to go north to Ephraim or to, uh, Benjamin's territory or Reuben's territory, then there had to be certain regulations securing the safety of travelers, and the safety, eh, and the rules of entertaining people. Now that was not true only of Israel, but is true of many ancient societies. Uh, the Greeks had a similar system. If, um, you had a visitor to your country, and he came from a different part of the country, so you entertained him and you took him home because there weren't any hotels, you took him home. Then if he corrupted your wife or ran away with her, what then? Who's responsible for dealing with that? And so the Greeks, uh, thought of Zeus, their chief god, who was Zeus Xenios. He was the god of strangers. Do you see? He was supposed to avenge any such misconduct on the part of a stranger. So when Paris from Troy, according to the Greek legend, came and stayed with Menelaus in Greece, two princes they were, you see. But Paris of Troy ran off with Menelaus's wife. Hence, so the story goes. The Trojan War, do you see? Now, there was an all-tribal assembly in Israel that met to decide certain things to regulate the, uh, intercourse between the various tribes and to see that that all ran as it should run. You meet them in chapter one. The all-tribal assembly waited on God and said, who shall now go up first against the Canaanites? Here was the army composed of all the tribes. Joshua was now dead. Now they got different commanders. Now had come the time when each tribe would peel off and go off into its inheritance. That was a situation that couldn't be allowed to happen just, uh, spontaneously, each in his own way. Uh, militarily, it could have been very dangerous. So the all-tribal assembly waited on God and eventually made the decision who would go first. And the Lord said, uh, Judah shall go first. All Israel, that's the whole all tribal assembly. When you come to the end of the book, you meet the all tribal assembly again. Because there had been a Levite, he'd been on his journeys, and on his way back, it was getting near nightfall, and he would have gone aside to a Canaanite city to get a hotel room for his himself and his wife, but they thought it better to go not to a pagan city where the morals were very bad. They thought it better to go to a city of Benjamin, so they went to a city of Benjamin. Wow. And the moral behavior of the city of Benjamin, uh, of the city of Benjamin was more like the behavior of the men of Sodom. Worse immorality than you might have expected amongst in a pagan town, committed by Benjamites, if you please. And when that became known, it was such a scandal that they felt it had to be dealt with, and it was the all-tribal assembly that was called to deal with it. The sorry thing is, that in attempting to discipline Benjamin for breaking the sanctities of hospitality and sex, the all-tribal assembly itself broke the sanctities of oath and innocent blood, which it was its own res- its responsibility to protect. So that the discipline became worse than the original trouble. Gentlemen, discipline, even in Christian churches, is a very important thing, isn't it? The neglect of it can have very serious troubles, as you see from one Corinthians chapter five. But the misuse of discipline can be horrific. And On these these ma- matters, we do need to adhere carefully to scripture and watch the motivations of our hearts, don't we? I'm sorry if all this appears to be very gloomy, but you'll grant me this, I didn't write Judges. That you must grant me. Do you see? I'm trying to point out some of the general principles so that we can look for them as we go through the, uh, Judges, and not be content, therefore, to say, ah, well, that's the book of deliverance, and and, uh, as long as we can faith God will use us as deliverer, well, so he will. But we shall need now to learn how to diagnose the enemy and get our diagnoses right. You see, Midianites are not Moabites, and Moabites are not Canaanites. And what is the difference? We shall need to recognize the enemy. As Paul would say to the Corinthians, now look here, you're acting a bit stupidly. You see, we are not ignorant of what Satan is thinking. The way you're carrying on now, in the way you're disciplining this brother, you're in danger of falling into the very trap that Satan has laid. We are not ignorant of his devices, his thoughts. We have to become more skilled in exact diagnosis of the enemy, so to speak, in particular occasions. And then, having noticed that, pray God that we may have the qualifications so that God may use us in our day and generation as deliverers in these particular situations. And thirdly, of course, the question of tactics. The tactics involved in these deliv- by these deliverers were all of them different, because the enemy was different. And matching the tactics to the enemy would be very important, wouldn't it? Mm-hmm. Witness the difference between Galatians and the Epistle to Hebrews that we were talking about earlier. How to adopt the right tactics according to the particular enemy. And then the question of basic principles of the existence of the holy nation, so to speak, the people of God. We've all come short in many things, and we need above all compassion. Because ourselves, we need compassion. We all come short. We have to learn to distinguish between what are absolutely basic principles upon which there is to be no compromise, and things wherein we all offend and must be considerate one of another and compassionate. We need to get our proportions right, therefore, in assessing wrongdoing. Wrongdoing. Right, hope that for a, um, beginning and for a summary, uh, and I hope I've got it across. That the book of Judges is not just a collection of odd stories, very suitable to be told to infants in the Sunday school, but they are that marvelous stories, you see, particularly if told the right way round. But it is a book of military discipline, and was so used in Israel. One final observation on that part. In the days of King David, long after the book of Judges, you'll see, King David was down in Jerusalem, where he shouldn't have been. His commander in chief, Joab, was up fighting certain, uh, uh, enemies, do you see? And, uh, they were besieging a city. And David, as you remember, had committed a grievous sin with Bathsheba. And finally, to try and get out of this, uh, evil reputation, he sent her husband, a man called Uriah, to Joab with a sealed letter. And the letter, when Joab opened it, was to the effect that he was to put the man Uriah in the forefront of the troops, in a place where he knew the enemy would come out of the city to attack, so as to almost guarantee that Uriah would get slaughtered. And Jo- uh, Joab did it, and Jariah was slaughtered, and Joab had to send a messenger, uh, uh, to David to tell him of what had happened, to see. And he had to confess to Joab that the enemy had come out of the city and slaughtered a lot of the troops, to see. David wouldn't like to hear that. And, uh, Joab, uh, told the messenger, now look, if when you tell the king that the enemy troops came out of the city and slaughtered many of the men, our men, if the king gets angry and said, why on earth did you take the men so near the city walls, Joab? Don't you remember what happened to Abimelech at the city of Thebes, how he went too near the wall one day, and a woman inside heaved a, a millstone over the walls and cracked his skull. Don't you remember that? You'll see the book of Judges and its stories had become a handbook of military, a manual for, for commanders. They ought to have remembered it and learned, now we're besieging the city, but now don't go too near because you remember what happened. A handbook of military strategy, you see. And said Joab, if the king gets angry and say- says that, why did you go so near the city, Joab, you stupid fool? Don't you remember what happened to Abimelech? Then say to the king, your servant Uriah is also dead. Well, you know the story. But the book of Judges can be for us a military handbook. Help us to diagnose the enemy. Help us to see what qualifications are needed to face them successfully. Tells us about tactics to be used, and how to distinguish basic principles from matters of indifference. Anyway, that is how I conceive of it, and in our sessions this afternoon, and in a fortnight's time, God willing, we'll look at the individual stories of the captivities and the deliverers.