We've Seen This Before!

4th Sunday in Lent, 3/14/10
Judges 10:6-16


We’ve Seen This Before!
I. An unfaithful people
II. A faithful God


If a movie is good, I’ll watch it more than once, sometimes even 10 or more times. How about you? I won’t pay to watch a movie more than once, but I’ll watch it more than once on TV. I’m sure you do the same. And why is that? Because in your opinion and mine, it was a good movie. There were parts of it that we thoroughly enjoyed. We loved watching the thriller again and being thrilled once more. We loved watching the comedy again and laughing at the scenes and lines that made us laugh before. Sometimes we’re so familiar with the movie that we can speak the famous lines right along with the actor or actress. What’s more, each time you watch the same movie you probably notice a detail or two that you missed all the previous times you viewed that movie. In other words, you get something new out of it every time you watch it. We don’t mind watching some of the things that we’ve seen before.

But that’s not always true. There are some things we’ve seen that we never want to see again. Talk to battle tested veterans. They’re trying to forget some of the terrible things they’ve seen and never want to see them again. Decades ago I watched as a car full of people pulled out in front of a semi going 55 miles an hour and five people were instantly killed. I never want to see that again. I’ve watched life support being withdrawn from a 6-day-old infant and I pray I never have to see that again.

Judges 10 presents a biblical scene to us this morning that might before unfamiliar to you, but it’s still one we’ve all seen before. The story of God’s dealings with his Old Testament people Israel is one we’ve seen over and over again. And there are parts of it we never want to see again. But there are also parts we hope and pray we’ll see every day of our lives on this earth.

We’ve seen this before! Join me as we take another look at it this morning and what it means for us as God’s people.

Part I.

Are you familiar with Garrison Keillor’s radio show, Prairie Home Companion? For decades it’s been broadcast on public radio each Saturday. On every show he reports the news from Lake Wobegon, a fictional town in Minnesota where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” That characterization brings smiles to our faces, but isn’t that the way people often think about themselves? In fact, psychological studies have been done which confirm that people often think of themselves as above average when they’re really at or below average.

But if there were ever truly a people or a place which we would assume to be a good place with above average people, wouldn’t it be among God’s people of the Old Testament, the Israelites? After all, look at the advantages they had. They had watched as God’s angel of death struck down all the firstborn among the Egyptians. They had watched as God parted the waters of the Red Sea for them. They watched water flow from rocks and manna and quail fall from heaven. They watched the walls of Jericho come tumbling down. They had God’s law inscribed by the finger of God himself. Not only would we think their women were strong, their men good looking and their children to be above average, but we would think all went well for them in their daily lives and in their relationship with the one true God.

But we couldn’t be more wrong. This event in our text takes place between the leadership of Joshua who succeeded Moses and Saul, Israel’s first king. At this point God was serving as the king of Israel. You would think that with God as their King things couldn’t get much better.

But actually things couldn’t get much worse. This 400 year period of Israel’s history known as the time of the judges (who were more like rulers than judges) was nothing other than a downward spiritual spiral that swirled faster and faster to hell as the decades passed by. The lives of God’s people were stained with violence and immorality. Jews committed atrocities against their fellow Jews and thought nothing of it. And they were God’s people?!

But this story before us was nothing new. In fact, in this book of Judges this event marks the 6th apostasy. In other words, this is the sixth time that God had to deal with a nation that had turned completely against him. They were rank heathens.

And the words of our text reveal the sordid details. “They served the Baals and the Ashtoreths, the gods of Aram and the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites and the gods of the Philistines.” Perhaps these names don’t mean much to you. Picture Israel in the middle of the Holy Land. The people I just mentioned lived in every direction around the Israelites. In other words, the Israelites, God’s people, turned their backs on the Lord and embraced the false gods of every nation around them. And it wasn’t pretty. It was filthy ugly. With children present this morning I can’t describe all the sordid things the Israelites did in the name of worship of these false gods.

So what did the Lord think about all this? He leveled the boom of his righteous anger. He said, “You have forsaken me and served other gods, so I will no longer save you. Go and cry out to the gods you have chosen. Let them save you when you are in trouble.” A previous verse spoke of 18 years of oppression at the hands of the Philistines and Ammonites. Things got so bad that the Jews actually cried out to the Lord, but he gave no words of love to the people who were so unfaithful to him.

We’ve seen this before. God’s people being unfaithful to him.

One response to what we’ve seen would be, “How could they act this way after all the Lord had done for them? How ungrateful and spiritually foolish could they be?” But is their foolish history of unfaithfulness to the one true God really so unusual? Is it really so far from our own history? I realize idol worship may not be in our past, but idolatry in the heart certainly is. Can we count how many times we told God to take a back seat in our lives or even shoved him out of our life’s vehicle at least momentarily while we had our fun? Are we more concerned about what others think about us than what God says to us in his word? You don’t have to have an affair with the neighbor’s spouse to be unfaithful to your own and that applies to our relationship with our God as well. We haven’t been completely faithful to him. We’ve seen this before, sadly to say, in ourselves.

Part II.

And what is our God’s response to the unfaithfulness of his people? In this instance, it’s what we wouldn’t expect. It’s his eternal faithfulness.

But if we think about it a little more, we’ve seen this before, even in our own lives. If you are currently raising children or have raised children in the past, you’ve seen this before. And even if you haven’t raised children, think back to your relationship with your parents. As a parent, do you always mete out punishment exactly on your children? As a child, do you recall an instance in which you were expecting your parents to come unglued because of your sinful ways but they didn’t? Some of that may have been due to parents’ inability to carry out discipline correctly in every situation. In other cases, it’s because the heart of a parent is moved by love for a child that doesn’t deserve it.

And that’s what occurs here in our text. We’ve seen this before. “The Israelites said to the Lord, ‘We have sinned. Do with us whatever you think is best, but please rescue us now.’ Then they got rid of the foreign gods among them and served the Lord. And he could bear Israel’s misery no longer.” On the one hand our God is perfectly just and holy. He cannot and he will not tolerate sin. On the other hand he is gracious, loving and forgiving. He is faithful to his promise to forgive.

And so he rescued them. The next verses after our text describe how God raised up another judge to lead them into victory over their enemies and thus end the 18 years of oppression. He accomplished that rescue through a man named Jephthah. That made this the sixth time God rescued them. We’ve seen this before.

And we’ve seen it before in our own lives as well. That’s what this Lenten season is all about. It’s about God’s rescue of a sinful world. The story of Jesus going to Calvary’s cross doesn’t belong with the other great tragedy stories ever written. This was a rescue—the greatest rescue ever undertaken because it involved freeing your soul and mine from eternal punishment in hell. The cross of Christ was not simply a nice gesture on God’s part for you. It was absolutely necessary. Without it, we have no life with God.

We’ve seen this before—a God who is faithful to unfaithful sinners.

And that truth just doesn’t make sense. God is faithful to unfaithful sinners. In fact, he sacrifices his Son on a cross for them. In the eyes of the world that’s foolishness! It’s preposterous! But that’s God’s saving wisdom. You and I by God’s grace have seen that saving wisdom before. By God’s grace we believe it and are rescued. We’ve seen it before. We have an opportunity in the next 3 weeks to see it all over again as Jesus staggers to Calvary’s cross, dies, and then rises again. We’ve seen this before. May we see it over and over again and praise our God for it. Amen.