There was no King

If you have your Bible with you this morning, I hope you do, I want you to turn to the book of
Judges to chapter 17, which is where we're going to start this morning. We are coming today to the
end of a series that we started back in May. You might remember that when we started this series in
Judges, I told you that there are three sections in the book of Judges. There is a prologue that
explains where the nation of Israel is at the time that this book is beginning.
book covers a 400-year history of the nation of Israel. So it starts with a prologue,
and that's chapters 1 and 2 and a little of chapter 3. And then from the middle of chapter 3 until
the end of chapter 16, we get the stories of a dozen judges. And some of those stories are longer
stories. Like Gideon's story is longer, Samson's story is longer, Deborah's story is a longer one.
Some of them are short stories, like maybe a verse or two. We've got one verse about Shamgar,
one verse about Tola. So there are short and long stories with these dozen judges.
I just have to say, by the way, I'm so thankful. for the men who took us through this middle
section of Judges over the last nine weeks. Thankful for Cole and Kendall and Rick Tartar and Trey
Tyler and Michael Cantrell. And we are blessed as a church to have godly men like these who love
His Word. And I just want you to take a minute and thank them for how they have served us this
summer.
And this morning we're going to cover the final section in the book of Judges. We're going to look
at the epilogue. five chapters in one sermon. I don't know that I've ever done five chapters in one
sermon in my life, but if the prologue sets the stage for what the nation was like at the beginning
of this 400-year period, the epilogue shows you how far the nation of Israel has come.
In fact, I want to show you where... things were before Judges begins.
I know we've got five chapters to cover this morning, and that's a lot, but I want to go back and
look at an extended passage that we find in chapter 24 of Joshua. So turn back from Judges 17,
back a few pages to Joshua 24, and I want us to read and see where the nation of Israel was before
the time of the Judges. Let me pray for our time in God's Word this morning.
Father, we need you now to come and open our eyes, open the eyes of our heart so that we can see
you clearly revealed through your Word. Draw near to us as we come to your Word.
Give us ears to hear, hearts to obey, and clear our minds so that we hear clearly what your Spirit
would say to us through your Word. We ask it in your name. Amen. I'm going to ask you to stand as
we read God's word together. If you would, this is the word of God for the people of God. Joshua
24, beginning at verse 11. This is what the Bible says. This is God speaking through Joshua to the
people and reminding them of their history. Verse 11 says, And you went over the Jordan and came to
Jericho, and the leaders of Jericho fought against you. Also the Amorites,
the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
And God says, I gave them into your hand, and I sent the hornet before you,
which drove them out before you, the two kings of the Amorites. It was not by your sword or by your
bow. I gave you a land on which you had not labored, cities that you had not built,
and you dwell in them. You eat the fruit of vineyards and olive orchards that you did not plant.
Now, therefore, fear, it says the Lord, I'm going to say Yahweh just so we know,
that's when you read a capital the Lord in your Bible, that's the Hebrew Yahweh. Now,
therefore, fear Yahweh and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness.
Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the river and in Egypt and serve Yahweh.
And if it is evil in your eyes to serve Yahweh, choose this day whom you will serve,
whether the gods of your fathers in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in
whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, Joshua says, we will serve Yahweh.
Then the people answered, far be it from us that we should forsake Yahweh and serve other gods.
For it is Yahweh, our God, who brought us and our fathers up from the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery, who did these great signs in our sight and preserved us in all the way
that we went and among all the peoples through whom we passed. And Yahweh drove out before us all
the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore, we also will serve Yahweh,
for he is our God. But Joshua said to the people, You're not able to serve Yahweh,
for He's a holy God. He's a jealous God. He will not forgive your transgressions or your sins.
If you forsake Yahweh and serve foreign gods, then He will turn and do you harm and consume you
after having done you good. All the people said to Joshua, No, but we will serve Yahweh.
Then Joshua said to the people, You are witnesses against yourself that you have chosen Yahweh to
serve Him. And they said, We are witnesses. Then put away the foreign gods that are among you,
and incline your heart to Yahweh, the God of Israel. And the people said to Joshua,
Yahweh, our God, we will serve, and his voice we will obey.
Amen. May God bless this reading of his word. You may be seated. The grass withers, the flower
fades. The word of our God will stand forever. So that's where God's people were at the end of the
book of Joshua, just before Joshua dies. Where are they now, 400 years later, after the time of the
judges? Well, we can sum it up in one verse, which I told you when we started is the theme verse.
of the book of Judges. It's the very last verse in the book of Judges.
And here's what it says, Judges 21-25. In those days, there was no king in Israel.
Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
From Yahweh we will serve, we will forsake other gods, to in those days there's no king.
Everybody's doing what is right in his own eyes. And these five chapters that we're going to look
at this morning at the end of the book of Judges, this epilogue gives us a clear picture of what
happens to a nation, to a people, to a person when they live life doing what is right in their own
eyes with no king. The writer of Judges here in the epilogue gives us two stories from the history
of Israel during the time of Judges to illustrate what happens when there's no ruler governing the
human heart and the people end up doing what seems right to them. And here's what we'll see as we
look at these two stories this morning. We'll see that when there is no king, here's what happens.
First, people will turn from worshiping the true God to idolatry.
grave consequences. When you turn from worshiping Yahweh to idols,
there are grave consequences. Secondly, we will see people turning from holiness and righteousness
to gross immorality. And they do it progressively one step at a time,
down, down, down, down. And then finally, we'll see from these passages,
people turning from walking in obedience to God to pragmatism. Instead of seeking God and saying,
Lord, direct our steps. How should we go? What should we do? They turn to their own wisdom and do
what seems right to them.
And that's what things wind up looking like when everybody does what is right in his own eyes.
When that's the path you're on, when you pick that as your path, I'm going to do what seems right
to me, these will be the consequences. And this book illustrates it.
Now, obviously, we're not going to read all five chapters this morning, but I do want to read the
start of chapter 17 together with you to set the stage. Because the first of the two stories that
are in the epilogue take up chapters 17 and 18. It's the story of a man named Micah,
the Levite he hires to be his personal priest. about the tribe of Dan the Danites who hired that
priest away from Micah offering him money bribing him and then went and committed an atrocity
That's the story. It starts in Judges 17 verse 1. Follow along as I read it.
There was a man of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Micah.
Now this is not the Micah who writes the book of Micah later on. It's just another guy named Micah.
Verse 2. And he said to his mother, The eleven hundred pieces of silver that were taken from you,
about which you uttered a curse, and also spoke it in my ears, behold,
the silver is with me. I took it. So Micah's mom had a big sum of money,
1,100 pieces of silver. We don't know exactly how much money that was, but it was a lot of money.
We know this because later on in this chapter, when Micah hires the priest, he says,
I will pay you 10 pieces of silver a year and give you a new set of clothes. And the priest says,
deal. So 10 pieces of silver is enough for the priest to live on for a year.
Micah's mom has 1,100 pieces of silver. She's well off. Micah saw that. He said,
I'd like that. He takes it from his mom without her knowing. He steals the money. She finds it's
missing, and she just says, my money is gone. God, will you curse whoever took this money?
Micah's standing there, and he goes, whoops. That's not what I was expecting. And something in him
makes him think, I'm in trouble. I don't want to be under a curse of God. So he goes to his mom.
He goes, Mom. I took the money. I've got it right here. He's confessing.
There's apparent repentance here. And she forgives him. She says,
blessed be my son by the Lord, by Yahweh. Now,
so far, so good. Micah sold the money. That's bad. But he confessed and repented. That's good.
And his mother calls out to Yahweh and says, would you bless my son? We're starting off good.
Look what happens next. Then, verse 3, he, Micah, restored the 1,100 pieces of silver to his
mother, and his mother said, I dedicate the silver to the Lord from my hand for my son to make a
carved image and a metal image. Wait, what? An idol?
Have you heard of the second commandment? The one that says you shall make no graven images?
You shall not have idols. The same person that this woman just asked Yahweh to bless is now saying,
let's make an idol.
So when he restored the money to his mother, his mother gave him 200 of the 1100.
She's keeping a nice chunk. But 200 is a big sum. Says, go to the silversmith. Have it made into a
carved image, a metal image. And it was in the house of Micah. Came back home and said,
Mom, we've got these idols that we can worship here at our house. Verse 5 says, The man Micah had a
shrine. He made an ephod and household gods and ordained one of his sons to become the priest.
Now look, the idol was bad enough, but now he says, I'm going to make one of my sons a priest.
That ought to please Yahweh. Where in the world did Micah get the idea that you just make one of
your kids a priest? The Bible has... out instructions for them. The law says priests come from the
tribe of Levi. You don't just appoint your son to be a priest. That's just ignoring God's commands
and saying, we're going to do it our way. We got the idol, going to make one of my kids a priest.
Now, here's the question. How did Micah and his mom wind up thinking that somehow it would be a
good thing for them spiritually? And keep in mind, they're trying to do good things spiritually.
Where did they get the idea that making idols and making one of your kids a priest would please
God? You know where they got that idea? From the Canaanites. That's what they do.
That's what the Canaanites do. They got houses full of idols. They've got their own little shrines
to their own God. They name their sons priests and they go, you know, we got these people,
maybe their ideas aren't so bad. Maybe we ought to bring that into our religion, make our religion
a little more up-to-date, a little more contemporary.
This is a tragic picture of a nation that God's people who are holding onto a vestige of Yahweh but
have become Canaanized in the process. that the influences of Canaan over a 400-year period have
corrupted their understanding of worship.
And this beginning is only the beginning of a tragic story. Of course, you get to verse 6,
it says, In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
Same thing that we saw in the last verse of the book of Judges, which I read to you earlier.
In fact, four times in this epilogue, the writer says,
There was no king in Israel. So we've got it right here in Judges 17, 6. In Judges 18,
1, it starts off, in those days there was no king in Israel. Judges 19 begins, in those days when
there was no king in Israel, and then the last verse again, in those days there was no king in
Israel. So you see, this is the central theme of the epilogue, these five chapters. There is no
king, and that leads to people doing what... sense to them. They become essentially the kings of
their own lives. They don't have a king. I'm the king. Now,
historically, the writer of the book of Judges is writing this history and making this point.
He's writing it during the next season of Israel's history when they're living under the kings.
We don't know if this is during the reign of Saul or during the reign of David or Solomon, but at
the end of the book of Judges, it's preparing us for the next season, which is the season of the
kings. And things get better when David becomes the king. So the writer here is saying,
We're better off as a nation when we have a king than when everyone is doing what's right in their
own eyes. Judges, the time of the judges with no king was a spiritual mess. He's basically saying
we're better off to have a king. That's the history. context for this statement in Judges.
But here's the theological context for this statement in Judges. When a person or a people or a
nation rejects divine authority over them and says we will not have a king over us,
that person or those people or that nation is on a path, they're putting themselves on a path that
leads to moral and spiritual chaos and ultimately leads to destruction. Let me say that again.
When a person or a group of people, or a nation, rejects divine authority and says,
we will not have a king over us. We will be our own king. That person, or those people, or that
nation is putting themselves on a path that will lead to moral and spiritual chaos and ultimately
to their destruction. God made all of us to thrive as a people under his authority and under his
leadership. being in a right relationship with Him, where He is our King and our Lord and our
Father, our Master. We obey. We follow Him. That's when life works.
When you say, I'm going to move out from under His authority, that's when life starts to go
sideways. And that's what the nation of Israel has done in the book of Judges.
When you turn away from God's authority, You turn away from his word or his ways and do what is
right in your own eyes? Here's what the Bible says will happen when you do that. There is a way,
Proverbs says, that seems right to a man, but its end is what?
The way to death. As a nation, let me just say here,
as a nation right now, our nation, the nation in which we live, we have put ourselves on this path.
We are on a path to destruction. As a nation, we live in a nation,
in a country that is dominated by men and women who either reject God completely or who give lip
service to God but live functionally under their own authority. The majority of people in this
country are either outright rejecting God or they are giving lip service to the man upstairs but
they are living life as functionally the lords of their own lives.
And when that's the path that a nation puts itself on, it's a path leads to destruction.
And I hate to say it, but it's the path we're on right now. And the only hope we have to avoid the
destruction that is at the end of this road is for God to do a spiritually, a revival in our land,
in the hearts and minds of men and women to bring them back to him. Here's the good news. He does
that.
God... transforms lives. We've heard about it already this morning, right? And we should be praying
and we should be seeking for God to do that work first in us if we need to be revived,
but then in our land that we would see men and women coming to faith and turning their lives
around. Unless God... moves his hand in our land to bring revival, we are on a path that will lead
to death.
Let me put this on a personal level. Unless God is your king, your lord, your master, unless you
have submitted yourself to him, surrendered yourself to him, you are on a path that leads to
personal destruction. You are on a path that will lead to judgment and eternal torment.
And let me just say, this Surrender to God can't just be a lip service acknowledgement that,
oh yes, I believe Jesus is Lord and I will follow him. It has to be true in your life.
It has to be actual surrender. Now, we wrestle with that, right?
Because nobody is perfectly surrendered and we kick against that. But your heart has to be inclined
in the direction of surrender. And when you stumble, you have to get back up and resubmit yourself
to God. In order for you to be on the right path, is that what your life looks like right now?
Is Jesus actually the king of your life, whom you follow? Or more often,
are you doing what seems right in your own eyes?
This book we've been studying all summer is a cautionary tale. It's here to tell us life does not
go well when there is no king, when you're doing what seems right in your own eyes.
And the good news is we have a king. He is a gracious, merciful, forgiving king who gave his son to
come and live a perfect life, to die in our place, to rise again so that we can know new life and
be with him forever. He is a king who does not turn away to any who will come and bow to him.
He will not cast you out, as we just sang this morning. You name him as your Lord and Savior.
You pledge yourself to follow him. And he embraces you, not just as a citizen in his kingdom,
but as a son or daughter of the king. Is that you?
Have you done that? Do you keep doing that day after day? Resubmitting yourself?
As Matt talked about, re-repenting?
As you ponder that, let me go back to this story of Micah. the first of the two stories in the
epilogue of Judges. So chapter 17, Micah appoints his son to be the household priest.
He sets up the shrine with the household temples. And then there's this wandering Levite coming
through the land. He's from Bethlehem. And Micah goes to him thinking, maybe I'll gain more favor
with God if instead of my son being the priest, I've got an actual Levite in my house who is our
priest. He knows enough to know, Levites are how it ought to be. I just appointed my son because
there was no Levite around. Pragmatism. So he talks to the Levite and says,
you want to come live in my house and be the household priest for us and run my shrines and you be
the intermediary between us and God. Priest says, what's it pay? He says, 10 pieces of silver and a
new set of clothes. Priest says, sounds good to me.
So, by the way, priest for hire. That's another sign of how corrupt things have gotten in Israel,
that this priest will say, yeah, I'll come manage your idols and be your priest.
You see what a hodgepodge is going on here. There is some kind of loyalty to Yahweh still there in
the country, some kind of devotion, but it's so misguided. Micah is a picture of a people in the
time of Judges whose worship, as I said, has been thoroughly Canaanized, mixed with the practices
of the Canaanites.
Judaism has been corrupted by Canaanism, and they are Canaanized, which, by the way,
should cause us to ask, in what way has our faith been shaped by,
polluted by, the culture around us? In what way are we taking our cues from the culture and
importing that into our spiritual lives instead of taking our cues from God's Word and walking in
obedience to that?
Chapter 18, the scene shifts away from Micah and this Levitical priest in his house. Chapter 18,
the tribe of Dan is out looking for a home. Now, they had land that had been assigned to them.
but they looked at the land and they looked at the Canaanites who were in the land and they said, I
don't think we can beat them. Okay. God had told them, I will give you the land, but they're scared
of the Canaanites. So rather than taking the land that God had promised them, they're out looking
for another place that they can live. They're scouting around. There's this search party, this
invading party of about 600 men who come in to Micah's city and they meet.
the Levite, who's working for Micah. And they say, can we ask you a question? You're a priest.
He says, sure. They said, we're thinking about invading this land. Should we do it?
The priest says, God's favor will be with you. In fact, verse 6 of chapter 18, go in peace.
The journey on which you go is under the eye of the Lord, he says. So they head out to this city,
the city of Laish. prosperous and quiet city, and they think,
we'll just conquer the people here and take their land. And we'll have a place where our tribe,
our Benjamite tribe, or the Danite tribe can live. So as they prepare to leave Micah's home and to
invade Laish, they say, you know what, if we're going to try to win this battle, we should take
some of Micah's idols with us. They steal some of his idols. They steal the ephod. And they go to
the priest and they say, if we pay you more, will you come with us and be our priest? You'd be
better off being a priest over a whole tribe, not just one house. And the priest says, sure, I'll
take more money and go with you. So they go in and invade and conquer the peaceful city of Laish.
These are their brothers and their sisters. They go in and run them out, kill them, take over the
city, set up Micah's idols in that city, and have this Levitical priest who is there.
These two chapters are here to say, do you see how bad it's gotten?
Brothers fighting against brothers, idol worship, murder.
That's the first story. The second story, chapter 19 through 21, is about a different Levite,
another priest. This Levite had a concubine. A concubine is a woman who he's not officially married
to. but she's his property and he treats her like she's his wife. And they have a parting of the
ways and the concubine leaves and goes back to her father's house in Bethlehem to live there. And
the Levite... After a while, starts to miss her and wants to go patch things up with her and bring
her back home. So he goes down to Bethlehem, meets with her father, says, I want to bring your
daughter back home with me. The father says, well, stay here for a night with us. And he stays
there for a night. Actually, he stays there for a number of nights.
Part of what the subtext here is, they're twice in chapter 19 where it says, so he stayed and ate
and they made their hearts merry. Well, you know what that means, right? So he stayed up and got
drunk. And the next morning, they wake up and he's hungover and dad says,
probably not a good day for you to go. Why don't you stay another day? So this pattern repeats
itself where they're just staying up at night and get drunk. He's hungover the next morning. He
just stays around. Finally, he says, no, I got to go. He packs up his wife or his concubine and
they leave and head home. And they've journeyed for a day. And they come, we're going to need a
place to stay tonight. And over here is Jebus, which is ancient Jerusalem,
which is now occupied by the Jebusites. So it's the people of God are not here.
And there's another city that's ahead. And it's the city of Gibeah.
And it's a Jewish city. So this Levite and his concubine say, we'd be better off trying to find
refuge among our brothers. than we would in that Jebusite city.
So we're going to go past Jebus and go to Gibeah. So they wind up in Gibeah thinking they will be
safer, and they are wrong. They come into Gibeah, they go to the center of the city. This is what
you did as a traveler. You'd come into the center of the city, and people were to meet you there,
and someone is to show you hospitality. That's how the nation works. God has told you to be
hospitable people. So somebody needs a place to stay tonight. You and your concubine need a place
to stay. This older man says, you can come stay at my house. And so they come stay at his house.
And what happens when they get to his house is a repeat of what happened in Genesis in the city of
Sodom. The same story. Men surround the house. They pound on the door and they say,
send out that Levite. They say, no. They say, you send out that Levite, we're going to tear your
house down. And so they say, we're not sending out the Levite. Here's the concubine.
She goes out, and the whole night she is abused and violated by these men.
And the next morning, when the Levite gets up and opens the door, he finds her on the doorstep,
dead.
The Levite scoops up her body and begins to take her home.
And when he gets home, He takes her body and he dismembers the corpse and he sends a dozen body
pieces to the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel, one to each tribe,
saying, look what these people did to my concubine. We need to invade for their wickedness.
He's calling them to come to war against Gibeah. That's chapter 19. Chapter 20, the people of God
and the other tribes are horrified by what has happened in Gibeah. They come together,
they go to the leaders of the tribe of Benjamin, and they say, these are your people. Send out the
guilty men of Gibeah so there can be justice. And the tribe of Benjamin refuses to send out the
guilty men, and a civil war ensues between the 11 tribes and their brothers who are of the tribe of
Benjamin. The armies of Benjamin fight hard against this force. For a couple of days,
finally, the leaders of the other 11 tribes, they go to the Lord and say, Oh, Lord, give the people
of Benjamin into your hand. And they attack and destroy not only the city,
but they destroy the tribe of Benjamin with only 600 men left. All the women,
children, and other men have been put to death. So Benjamin is no more.
There are just 600 men, which leaves a dilemma. for the other 11 tribes.
They get to the end of the fighting. They go, we're about to wipe out one of the 12 tribes. We
can't do that. We need to keep the 12 tribes. We need to repopulate Benjamin, but they don't have
any wives. What do we do? Well, they said there's this other city and they didn't send anybody to
come fight with us. So they go in and they pillage that city and they kidnap 400 women to come be
the wives. for 600 of the Benjamites. But that doesn't work,
because you've got 600 men, you've got 400 women, you've got to do something. So they go, we need
200 more women. Well, okay, up in Shiloh, they have this little festival that they do, and the
women come out and dance. We're going to invade and just kidnap the women in the middle of their
dance, and we'll get 200 more women that way. And that's what they do, we'll get 200 more women. So
that now Benjamin has... There are people, just imagine, you're one of the women in Shiloh who's
going out, you're a young woman, you're out there dancing for the festival, and the soldiers come
in and kidnap you and take you away, you never see your family again, and you're now down here and
say, you're now the wife of this man who's a Benjamite. That's what's going on here.
And that's how the story ends. Benjamin is repopulated. The end.
Who are the heroes in what we just read? Who are the people of valor?
Who are the people of dignity? Who are the virtuous,
godly people in this story? Micah? No. The Levites? No. The 12 tribes who came to avenge the murder
of the concubine and ended up pillaging cities and kidnapping young women? No. I mean,
imagine for a second being a young woman at that festival. These stories are here at the close of
this book to show us what happens when people are left to their own devices. They have no king
ruling over them, restraining their evil impulses. So that brings us back to the observations I
made when we started. When you have no king and your religion has become canonized,
here's what happens.
You become... You move from worshiping the true God to worshiping idols.
Now, this is because you've left God as your authority and because you have taken on the Canaanite
practices. It's just become a part of the way you live. And by the way, let me just say, if we were
looking at the modern day practices that are a part of our culture that have invaded...
our way of thinking in the church, the culture we live in. How has our church been polluted?
How has Christianity been polluted by the modern culture? I would say we live in a culture that is
dominated by individualism, the rights of the individual, and Christianity calls us to live
collectively as a community. We live as brothers and sisters, not as individuals.
We share what we have. We care for one another. The culture calls us to isolate,
to be private. There's also consumerism in our culture that finds its way into the church.
The culture has trained us to think that we should have it our way, that you rule.
I mean, I watch these Burger King commercials, right? You rule. I go, no, don't tell me that.
When I rule, when there is no king in the land, it's going to go wrong. But consumerism,
we're trained to think that we should have infinite choice and that we should be able to pick
exactly what fits us. And we shouldn't have to sacrifice. Do you know how many different kinds of
shampoo there are at Walmart?
I checked. Every Walmart has between 300 and 500 different kinds of shampoo.
And if you want to shop online, there are more than a thousand different kinds of shampoo
available. You know, the Pantene company, just one maker of shampoos,
they have created more than 180 different kinds of shampoo, Pantene.
Why? Because we're consumers and we want it exactly our way.
We want things tailor-made for us. That's the cultural way of thinking. You come to the church and
you say, well, I want it exactly the way it fits me. I want the music to fit the way I like the
music to come. We ask ourselves at the end of the service, we go, was I pleased with how the
service went today? Rather than saying, was God honored by what happened in the service today?
That's consumerism. What about materialism? We live in a highly materialistic culture. We have more
money and stuff than our parents ever dreamed of. And the issue here is...
we are driven to think, I need more. I want more. I'll be happier if I have more. We have made the
pursuit of money and stuff a higher priority than serving God. That's how we become canonized in
our thinking. I could go on, but you see how this works. You can do this yourself. How has the
philosophy of the world, the ways of the culture, how is it pressed into your thinking about how
you worship and serve God? These denominators...
These Jews had become Canaanized. There are whole denominations that name the name of Christ today
that have abandoned a biblical view of Christianity and adopted a culturally acceptable view of
Christianity. Whole denominations that have become Canaanized. And these last chapters of Judges
are telling us, if you have no king ruling over you, this is what happens. So as I said,
you turn to idolatry. And that has grave consequences. We saw that with Micah and his family and
with the Danites. They give lip service to Yahweh, but they adopt a Canaanite way of thinking.
They have the idols, they have a priest for hire, and they have, by the way, a superstitious
approach to their faith. They see God superstitiously.
And this can enter into our thinking as well. Do you know anybody who wears, I may be picking on
you, anybody who wears a St. Christopher medal? Okay. St. Christopher is the patron saint of the
traveler. So people will wear these medals saying, I want protection while I'm traveling.
Now, I've actually, just truth be told, I've worn this cross around my neck since I was 20.
50 years now that I've had this cross that I wear. And I bought it when I'd first become a
Christian because I thought, I need something to remind me that I'm a Christian. I just need
something around my neck to remind me this is who you are. I didn't wear it thinking this is my
protection device. If I'm wearing the cross, then I, you know, it wasn't a superpower. It was just
there to remind me. And there are some people who may wear whatever religious symbol that they wear
just to provoke their thinking. It's not a good luck charm. It's just there to remind them of what
they are. But I'm just saying there are a lot of people today practicing a superstitious idolatry
in how they approach God. And it could be you. If you've ever had the thought,
you wake up and something is not going right today and you're thinking, oh, this is God punishing
me because I didn't have my quiet time yesterday. That's superstitious thinking.
But the bigger point is when you're worshiping anything other than the God who has revealed himself
to us in Scripture, when we add something alongside God and worship that side by side with him,
when we reimagine God to fit our thinking, instead of worshiping the God of the Bible?
If you've ever said something like, well, my God is a God who, pardon me,
I don't care about your God. I want to know about the God. If you've ever said something like,
I could never serve a God who, oh, so God has to conform to you before you serve him.
Uh-uh. It's not how this works. You're thinking like a consumer.
You're practicing idolatry. We must always, as individuals and as a local church, align ourselves
with, submit ourselves to the God who is revealed to us in Scripture, the one true God.
We must be on guard against idolatry in our own lives and hearts. And the epilogue of Judges shows
us what happens when we drift into idolatry. Chapter 17 also shows us how that will lead you to the
worst kind of immorality and unrighteousness. That's the second step down. Chapter 17 starts with
stealing mom's money, then a Levite for hire, for sale to the highest bidder. The climax of the
story. is the tribes of Israel invading a peaceful city to take it over by force,
and then you get the Levite and the concubine, and he appears to have a drinking problem, and then
there's the gross immorality among the men of Gibeah, and then there's the vengeance of the Levites
against them, and the armies of Israel killing and kidnapping young women to repopulate Benjamin.
Pretty dark stuff here,
but pretty common in their day, which is the point. It was more common for them to be shaped by the
moral climate of their culture than by what the Bible says was right or wrong. And you know what?
It's more common for us to be shaped by the moral climate of our culture than by what the Bible
says is right or wrong. I'm old enough to remember a time when two unmarried people moved in and
lived together. That was considered sinful. Huh. Today, it's the most common practice among people
who are thinking about getting married. More people who get married have already lived together
than not. I'm old enough to remember when putting yourself first ahead of others was considered
wrong. Now there's a whole section at Barnes & Noble on self-help because caring for self is
number one. I'm old enough to remember when taking the Lord's name in vain was thought to be wrong,
and they wouldn't do it on TV.
I'm old enough to remember when vanity was considered wrong and weak.
Now we have social media where vanity is the theme.
I'm old enough to remember when drunkenness was considered wrong, and now we've got a culture where
getting high in the morning before you go to work is kind of what you do every day.
And I could go on, but the point is, we live in a day where we celebrate what the Bible calls sin,
immorality. And Isaiah speaks to this in Isaiah 5, where he says,
Woe to those who call evil good. and good evil who put darkness for light and light for darkness
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and
shrewd in their own sight woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and valiant men in mixing
strong drink woe means the curse of God is on those people who make these choices what about us in
what ways do we flirt with immorality
In what ways are we going against what the Bible says is true and right and pure and holy and
living like the Canaanites? Third thing I see in the last chapters is this pragmatism. The tribe of
Dan, instead of inhabiting the land God has told them to have it, they say, we're going to pick our
own land and they invade this city. After the civil war with the Benjamites,
instead of saying, Lord, how do we keep from this tribe being annihilated?
They say, I know, we've got a plan. We'll go kidnap girls.
Now listen, it's not wrong to have pragmatic solutions to problems,
but we need to be looking for God's solution to our problems,
not just the ones that make sense to us. Adam and Eve had a pragmatic decision in front of them.
Should we eat or not? Well, the pragmatic said, sure. The tree looks good.
The food looks good. The tree is pretty. Why wouldn't you eat? Looks like the right pragmatic
choice. But it was what God said, no, we don't do that. Pragmatism is not the path.
Obedience is the path. Seeking the Lord, following his ways. These people needed a king.
Actually, they had a king. God was their king. If they had obeyed his commands, they would not have
found themselves in this dark, depraved place that we find themselves at the end of the book of
Judges. So let me wrap all this up for us here.
The point of this book is when you live life, without submitting yourself to a king, following him,
seeking to honor him, you will end up in a bad place. That's true for individuals, for a church,
for a nation.
Remember... Two and a half years ago, April, May of 24, we were going through the book of
Revelation. And there are seven churches that get letters in chapters two and three in the book of
Revelation. And I remember when we were going through that and Jesus was saying, I have this
against you to six of the seven churches. If you wanted to summarize what Jesus had against those
churches, two things, complacency and compromise. Matt talked about complacency in his prayer of
confession this morning. Complacency is being spiritually lazy. It's about taking it easy in your
spiritual life, relaxing. Don't worry about spiritual disciplines. You don't have time to read the
Bible? No big deal. Too tired to go to church this week? Watch it at home or don't watch it at all.
You don't have to be such a legalist about this. Prayer? I mean, sure.
I jam in a prayer at lunchtime or, you know, when I'm in trouble,
but otherwise not really. Sign up for a Bible study or be in a small group. I mean,
God, that's so busy. Just don't have time for all this church stuff. What about serving others in
the community or in the church? Well, you know, I try to do something maybe once a year.
But come on, like be in the nursery? Are you kidding? Be a greeter? Help with communion set up?
Help with the video team? I mean, those aren't my spiritual gifts. Too regular.
That's what complacency looks like. No time for God in your life other than coming to church when
you can.
And complacency, here's the real problem with complacency. Complacency just reveals what's in your
heart.
You say you love Jesus and he has first place, but when it comes time, when you look at your
schedule and you look at your checkbook, it's just not true that he has first place.
And complacency is what leads to compromise. Compromise is when you say, I know what God wants from
me. I know what he expects of me. I'm going to go with door number two.
I'm going to follow my heart. I'm going to go with the flow. I was thinking about that statement.
Go with the flow. I don't know if it was my daughter, Amy, or Marianne. Back in the 90s, there was
this t-shirt that one of them had that had a bunch of fish going one way and one fish going the
other way. I found a picture of it. Yeah. I don't know if you ever saw this go with the flow
ancient t-shirt. Somebody in our house had it. But it's the idea that you don't go with the flow.
You go against the flow. And basically, the point of the shirt is Romans 12,
2. Do not be conformed to this world. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind,
that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Are you spiritually complacent? Are you lethargic and lazy? Are you compromising? Are you aware of
areas in your life where you know you shouldn't be living this way, but you just don't care? That's
what led to the downfall in the book of Judges. Complacency and compromise. That's what led to the
downfall of the churches Jesus is addressing 1,500 years later. It's what always leads to
downfall. It's a recurring issue for God's people. Complacency and compromise leads us on the wrong
path. We are prone to wander. to do what is right in our own eyes.
But there's one more important. I'm going to wrap it up with this, I promise. One most important
lesson from the book of Judges that I don't want you to lose sight of here.
God is faithful to these people.
He keeps his covenant. with these wicked, disobedient people,
even when they lapse into compromise and complacency.
We just sang it this morning. He will not cast you out.
Those of you who are here this morning and you're convicted because of your own complacency or
compromise, if you are a child of God, you have a loving Father who will not let you go. He will
discipline you because He loves you, but He will not cast you out. He will keep His covenant that
He makes with you.
People of Israel went from pledging in Joshua 24 their lives to Yahweh,
to Judges 21, doing what is right in their own eyes. But God remained faithful to his promise
throughout the whole thing. They remained his covenant people. He did not throw up his hands and
say, I'm done with you people. If you are a child of God, there's nothing you can do today to stop
being his child.
Do you hear that? Nothing you can do to stop being his child. And the book of Judges is evidence of
that. If you're here this morning and you're not a child of God, you've not surrendered your life
to Him, you've never acknowledged your sin or your need for a Savior, you can do that this morning.
If God is showing you your need, you can surrender to Him.
You can say, God, I need you. I know I've been living a life where I'm doing what seems right in my
own eyes and it's not working. I believe you sent your Son. who lived a perfect life,
who died in my place, who rose again from the dead to give new life. I want new life.
I want you to be my king. I give my life to you. If a prayer like that reflects the desire of your
heart this morning, it's a prayer you can pray right now. Father, we come thankful for the message
of this book in our own lives.
Thankful for how you have spoken to us. Lord, I pray for any here who...
know you and who need to know you, who need to bow their knee,
would you move in their hearts, draw them to yourself today? Open their hearts,
open their minds, open their eyes. Help them see the reality of their sin.
Give them the courage and the faith to call out to you.
And Lord, for each of us, help us to see the areas of complacency and compromise in our own lives.
Help us to see where idolatry or immorality or pragmatism has made its way into our hearts and
lives and polluted our
walk with you.
Lord, we want to walk in a manner worthy of the calling by which we've been called. Strengthen us
to do that this morning, we pray in your name. Amen.