Please turn with me. Our scripture reading today comes from Judges chapter 2, beginning at verse 16.
Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them. Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they whored after other gods and bowed down to them. They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the Commandments of the Lord, and they did not do so.
Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge, for the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning and because of those who afflicted and oppressed them. But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them and bowing down to them. They did not drop any of their practices or their stubborn ways.
So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he said, “Because this people have transgressed my Covenant that I commanded their fathers and have not obeyed my voice, I will no longer drive out before them any of the Nations that Joshua left when he died in order to test Israel by them, whether they will take care to walk in the way of the Lord as their fathers did or not.’
So the Lord left those Nations, not driving them out quickly, and he did not give them into the hand of Joshua. Now these are the Nations that the Lord left to test Israel by them, that is, all in Israel who had not experienced all the wars in Canaan. It was only in order that the generations of the people of Israel might know war, to teach war to those who had not known it before.
These are the Nations: the five Lords of the Philistines and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians and the Hivites who lived on Mount Lebanon from Mount Baal Hermon as far as Libo Hamath. They were for the testing of Israel to know whether Israel would obey the Commandments of the Lord which he commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses.
So the people of Israel lived among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And their daughters they took to themselves for wives and they gave their own daughters to their sons, and they served their other gods.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Lord, we are regularly reminded and convicted by Your Word of the sins of our fathers and the sins of ourselves—the sins that we repeat over and over again. Help us to trust your promises, to remain faithful and obedient to what you command us. Keep us separate and apart, and safe and free from the influences of those who we dwell among, resting in your Providence, the Assurance of your grace, and trusting in your faithfulness for all of our lives and for our Eternal future. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We have now reached the end of the preamble and prologue to the Book of Judges. After looking at the sin and disobedience of the Israelites that led to the Lord’s condemnation, judgment, and discipline, we now turn to the application of divine discipline, the wise and purpose of his loving discipline.
After the death of Joshua and after the death of the generation who witnessed the power of the Lord, the Israelites again did that which is evil in the sight of the Lord. They provoked the Lord to anger leading to his discipline. The people were then afflicted and oppressed by the many different pagan peoples whom they had allowed to remain with them in the land against the Lord’s expressed command. But then the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them. Praise God, the Lord is merciful because he provides his chosen people with a savior.
Yet they did not listen to their judges. They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the Commandments of the Lord, and they did not do so. Sound familiar? Same old story, repeating yet again. Was not the Galatian church, after they first came to faith in Jesus Christ and accepted salvation as his free gift of grace, quick to turn aside from the gospel that the Apostle Paul preached towards the practical idolatry of religion—a dependence upon their own works and fraud obedience instead of God’s grace?
Did they not choose obedience as their means to earn salvation rather than obeying the Lord in love as a response to the salvation that they had already been given as an undeserved gift?
Or might we swing in the opposite direction today, where some people believe that obedience to God’s law is entirely unnecessary? Because if the grace of Jesus Christ covers all of our sins, then it may not matter at all what we do or do not do, allowing for us to continue in licentiousness and unrepentant sinfulness without having transformed, sanctified lives?
The Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, saves us in grace by faith and trust in him in order to do the good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. But Jesus also said, ‘If you love me, you will keep my Commandments.’ So both obedience and good works matter for our response to the sovereign Lord’s saving mercy and are not the cause or reason for his grace.
Whenever the Lord raised up judges with them, the Lord was with the judge and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. And since Jesus, the great judge, has been raised from the dead and is glorified and is presently enthroned in heaven, possessing all authority, ruling Heaven and Earth, we are confident that his people will be preserved until his return on the great day of salvation.
But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers, going after other gods, serving them and bowing down to them. Just like the Galatians went astray after Paul left them and also like the Corinthians who went astray after Paul left them, each group doing things and accepting things which were worse than the things that they had done before they found faith in Christ. Again, there is nothing new under the sun, and the present continues to echo the past.
So it’s no wonder that the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel because even after they were saved by the judges, the lives of the people did not change. Clearly, they were not repentant, since not only did they keep on doing the same wicked things that had gotten them into trouble in the first place, they did even worse things, compounding their sinfulness.
‘Because this people have transgressed my Covenant that I commanded their fathers and have not obeyed my voice, I will no longer drive out before them any of the Nations that Joshua left when he died in order to test Israel by them whether they will take care to walk in the way of the Lord as their fathers did or not.’
We hear the words of the Angel of the Lord being repeated. But now we learn why God allowed the Canaanites to remain among the Israelites. They were left there to test Israel to see if the Israelites would remain faithful and obedient to the Lord in his law. The Lord was giving Israel a chance to obey him, just as he had given to Adam and Eve.
The Israelites had the opportunity to do the right thing, but their wicked hearts, their stiff necks, their corrupted sin nature would not permit it. Surely and certainly there were individual Israelites who held true to the faith, who were obedient to God’s covenant, but the Israelite people as a collective whole were not. Thus, everyone together suffered the Lord’s discipline.
In the midst of these trials and times of testing, what does it really mean for us now that the Lord allowed all these idolatrous and wicked nations to remain in the land to test Israel by them? What are we to learn from this, and what does it teach us about God?
Scripture contains many examples of similar testing by the Lord, but we have a firm prohibition against we the people testing God. From Deuteronomy 6:16, it says, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massa.” The prohibition is cynically cited and followed by King Ahaz, despite Isaiah’s urging, leading to the prophecy of the Virgin birth: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear his son and shall call his name Emmanuel.”
The Queen of Sheba came to test Solomon after she had heard of his famous wisdom, to see for herself if he truly was as smart as was reported. What was the reason or purpose for those tests? They were like the testing of precious metals, like gold or silver, or of weapons and armor. They are tested to gauge their quality and purity, the truth that they are what they claim, or they are tested for their effectiveness and their ability to deliver upon their claims that a sword will cut and a shield will deflect a blow.
That is more the sense of how and why the Lord tested his people with the Canaanites, and that is why he still continues to test his people, us, today. After giving the Ten Commandments upon first hearing the voice of God and seeing all the smoke and fire upon the mountain, the Israelites were afraid and trembled. They demanded that Moses speak to the Lord on their behalf for fear of their destruction. But Moses comforted the people saying, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin.”
God tested them so that they would not sin, so that they would be holy and sanctified for fear of him, out of reverence for him, so that they could remain in his presence and not for a desire for their destruction.
Within the Lord’s Prayer, we have a line which reads “and lead us not into temptation,” that is alternatively rendered in some Churches as “save us from the time of trial,” which may be a better interpretation of it. The difficulty with the older traditional use of “temptation” is that the word is not quite used how it once was. Where in the past, the word temptation was used for a trial that required some force of will or effort to oppose, despite our desire to engage—like not eating that second piece of cake or to not eat the fruit from one particular tree in a garden—whereas temptation now is often only understood or interpreted in a negative sense as murder, lying, stealing, adultery, etc., or if some other physical vice like overindulging in chocolate.
We better understand the Lord’s prayer’s petition as us asking for God’s help to persevere us in the face of our trials rather than implying that somehow God tempts us to sin because God does not tempt us to sin nor does he tempt us with sin. Although he will allow his elect to be tempted, tried, and tested, he will also provide us the help we need to overcome those temptations and pass the test.
When Isaac was young, the Lord tested Abraham by commanding that he traveled to Mount Moriah and sacrifice his son. But once the Lord saw Abraham’s willingness to obey, he was stopped from killing his son, and the Lord instead provided them with a perfect lamb to sacrifice instead. That day, Abraham proved his faith in obedience, and the Lord provided an acceptable substitute.
Now, this interpretation of Israel’s testing could be viewed wrongly by some as a challenge to certain reformed doctrines and our understanding of scripture in two ways. First, by implying that apart from God’s express intervention, the Israelites could have somehow passed the test, denying the realities of total depravity and unconditional election. Secondly, by twisting what is further meant.
The totality of scripture clearly teaches that all people are totally depraved, meaning that every person is corrupted and tainted by sin. Not that we are as sinful as we each could possibly be—no one, none of us, is ever able to choose to not ever sin. No one is able to choose God upon their own initiative or by the freedom of their will independently of him to choose God. We’re entirely reliant upon his grace and calling us to himself and giving us the power and desire to respond.
And that desire is what’s key. No worldly human being would ever decide to choose God based solely upon the evidences of observation and his own powers of reason, for the gospel of our crucified Christ is a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. So it must have also been impossible for the Israelites to obey the Lord, remaining faithful to him alone by their own power and will. Thus, apart from God’s help, it is also impossible for any of Israel to pass this test. Only his chosen elective individuals kept their faith and lived obedient lives, persevered by God throughout the trials that all the Israelites faced.
Second, predestination does not equate with predeterminism or just determinism. Predestination is the doctrine that teaches that every person’s eternal final destination is fixed, no matter what we people think we can do to change it. That although all people, all of us, are duly condemned to eternal damnation and hell by our sins and transgressions, some of those people, God’s elect, his chosen, have been chosen by him according to the Lord’s ineffable and good will and good pleasure to be saved, rescued from the just consequences of our sin to be justified and forgiven in Christ Jesus and his sacrifice of atonement on the cross.
Determinism is the idea that since God decrees all things, we humans have no freedom of will or personal autonomy—the idea that all things happen because they must happen in such a particular way because that is how we are programmed or forced to go. However, we’re not mindless robots who cannot choose for ourselves; we do possess free will, but it’s a will that is free to choose only within the limits of our bondage to sin.
The Lord God is the first cause, the author and originator of all things. God alone ordains and decrees all that has ever been and all that ever will be. Yet he allows and directs all things to occur through secondary causes, the natural consequences of his initial creation and by whatever results from our sin-corrupted wills and choices.
The Westminster Confession of Faith teaches us that from all eternity and by the completely wise and holy purpose of his own will, God has freely and unchangeably ordained whatever happens. This ordainment does not mean, however, that God is the author of sin; he is not. That he represses the will of his created beings or that he takes away the freedom or contingency of secondary causes. Rather, the will of created beings and the freedom and contingency of secondary causes are established by him, meaning that although God has decreed all things that shall ever happen, they will still naturally happen through the freedom, the will, and the choices of created beings, especially people.
God does not micromanage creation even as he sustains it. God merely said, ‘Make it so,’ and he then allows everything to happen. He does not instruct us or force us to do something against our will or desire.
Even though the Lord decreed and knew that his chosen people Israel would fail their testing, just as they already had so many times before, he still gave them ample opportunity to try, even if they did not have the ability to achieve it. Why? Because the Lord is patient and long-suffering. He allows his chosen people to be tested to put his character on display for all the world and for all future history to witness and then give him the glory. This testing can only strengthen us.
Why is the Lord so patient and long-suffering? Because his mercy, his patience, his kindness towards humanity is intended to lead people to repentance, not destruction. But only his elect will respond positively. He loves his children so much that he allows us to suffer in our self-imposed misery so that when we finally reach our breaking point, when we finally reach the point of our surrender, when we finally despair and acknowledge that we cannot manage any of this on our own, and then turn to him crying out in faith—that then his mercy will be displayed by our salvation. And so that then forevermore we will only ever rely upon him instead of our feeble efforts.
So, if no one is capable of remaining faithful and obeying God by their own power, if these generations of Israelites were not able to pass the Lord’s test and walk in the way of the Lord as their fathers did, then what hope does any person have? Especially since the nations of the wicked, the citizens of Satan’s realm, continue to live among God’s people to this day?
And their daughters they took to themselves for wives, and their own daughters they gave to their sons, and they served their gods. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; they forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Asherah.
See, the Israelites intermingled with the Canaanites, becoming just like them. Just as the people of Shechem had hoped that if their prince married Jacob’s daughter Dinah, then by their union Jacob’s property would become theirs. So too, the differences between the Israelites and the Canaanites became indistinguishable and inseparable. Slowly they became like red Kool-Aid, which, when added to a pitcher of water, cannot be separated out again.
So too, the sin and idolatry of the Canaanites infused the people of Israel, dissolving into every part of their culture, touching every person, tainting and corrupting every part of their life. The Israelites became corrupted by their tolerance of Canaanite wickedness, just as every human has inherited a sinful nature corrupted by Adam’s sin. The ancient Israelites failed the Lord’s test, and so they were disciplined. They needed divine help and forgiveness; they needed rescue; they needed a Savior, and so do we.
Those whom Jesus calls need him, especially after we’ve been saved, because the Lord continues to test his elect people as a means for our sanctification. The prophet Malachi describes the future appearance of God, perhaps even describing the person of the Holy Spirit by his work, saying, ‘For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord.’
So it is through God’s testing that we are being refined and strengthened in our faith. Like a silversmith, he refines their precious metal, burning away and removing all impurity. If the process of refining silver is slow, it is a long, time-consuming, and laborious process. It’s much more than simply melting down the raw ore and then filtering it. Great heat is applied to the ore until it becomes a molten slag.
Then other things get added into the slurry, different materials and different compounds—things which attract and attach to the undesired elements, letting them be drawn out as detritus for disposal. As the ore is refined, the pure metal will separate, sinking to the bottom while the impurities will rise up to the surface where they can be scraped off and removed. This process is repeated again and again until finally all that remains is 99.9 percent pure silver.
Because our human efforts cannot remove all impurity, that is what the Lord has been doing with his people ever since the beginning. Adam and Eve were created and called very good, but when they were tested in the garden, possessing an unbound free will that included the ability to choose to not sin, they allowed sin to enter into their hearts, corrupting them and us.
So they were exiled into the furnace of the world, which was no longer Paradise nor as hospitable to them. Then, after a great deal of time had passed, the Lord saw that the whole world had become exceedingly wicked. Sin permeated everyone and everything so much so that the Lord decided to be rid of this sinful humanity, to destroy our sin in the crucible of the flood.
And after the deluge, Noah and his children were the ones left behind, having been refined through Noah’s obedience in building the ark. Abram was also tested by God first when he was called out of his homeland and his father’s house to live as a sojourner in a strange and distant land, and again when he was asked to sacrifice his only begotten son, Isaac. By faith, his trust in the Lord was refined, strengthened, and purified.
Moses was tested when he went before Pharaoh to say, “Let my people go,” as well as when he went before the Israelites still in bondage to say, “Follow me.” Each of these individual saints were still imperfect, sinful, ordinary people just like us. Yet it’s through their encounters with God, especially the divine discipline that they each experienced, that they were sanctified and refined, such that their righteous obedience is remembered above their sin.
During the Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites’ faithfulness of the Lord was tested, but again and again they failed. However, even in failure, lessons in holiness and faith were learned. At Massah and Meribah, they learned that God would always provide them with what they need. At Mount Sinai, they learned that the Lord is God alone, that he is holy, and he will not condone idolatrous worship, even when done in his name.
Traveling through the wilderness to Canaan, they learned that the Lord is their protector and more powerful than any human army. And then once they finally entered the promised land after turning aside in fear and distrust 40 years prior, they learned that he is faithful and that he is the promise keeper.
So what have you learned from God’s discipline in your life? When the Israelites failed their next test of obedience by not driving the wicked Canaanites out, they proved that they still needed further refinement. So the Lord allowed the nations and peoples to remain to serve as the flux through which the impurity of the people’s sinfulness could be removed.
The Canaanite sins were attractive to the sinful hearts of Israel, leading them astray into wickedness and divine judgment over and over again, allowing the impurity to rise to the forefront. And each of the judges was raised up by God to skim the people’s sinfulness off the top of Israel. But the more they skimmed, the more sin reared its evil and ugly heart, and it just kept bubbling its way to the top until everybody did what was right in his own eyes.
Finally, once the crust of impure slag had become so thick and hardened, God now gave them a king after the Lord’s own heart. Instead of a judge, King David obeyed God’s command of holiness and separation for his people by completing the conquest of Canaan, removing that slag. But now, although King David had sinful faults, he was still possessed of pure faith that was tempered with humility and repentance.
His children proved that further refinement of Israel was still necessary. So after the division of the kingdom, two exiles, and one return in restoration, and the occupation of the land and the subjection of Israel by two foreign powers, finally the only perfect and pure, sinless son of David was born—Jesus Christ, God the Son, another Adam— to finish our refining and to claim us and transform us into his shining, spotless, unblemished bride.
Thus, now God’s people, we wait. Now we have God’s Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us, sanctifying us, refining us, purifying us from the inside out. He’s removing all of our impurity and sin as Jesus declares us to be justified before our heavenly Father.
And we are nearing the end of the age and our time of testing is almost over, but not yet. Jesus Christ has come, but so long as we remain in this world, we will never reach perfection or total sinlessness. We will still remain impure apart from God’s cleansing and consuming fire.
Now we live our lives of faith, building upon the foundation laid by the prophets and apostles. Now we do our good works because of this great salvation which Christ has purchased for us. Yes, we’ve been saved from eternity past and by the blood of the Lamb, the silver of our souls is one hundred percent pure. Yet still we must pass through the crucible of testing.
We are no better, nor are we any worse than our forebears in faith. Ever since Adam’s fall, our faith in Christ must be proven, and so every believer will go through the many trials and tribulations of this world as our testing. Although we are not better than the Old Testament saints, we’re still better off because we have received the gift of the Holy Spirit to help us through these times of testing. He is our avenue of escape from temptation dwelling inside us. We are not left alone and by him we are united to Jesus so that we may enjoy peace in him.
Jesus Christ alone has passed the Lord’s test, and he alone has overcome the power and corruption of this world filled with sin. Jesus is the great judge whom the Lord has raised up for his elect. Jesus is the great judge who’s been raised from the dead as the promise for our lives, the hope that we too shall be raised like him in glory, sanctified, obedient, and finally faithful to the one who’s always remained faithful to us.
So thank God for his discipline in your life. Do not quench the Holy Spirit within you, but fan the fires of his refinement in your soul. Become more Christ-like and be purified. Live for his glory. Stop doing that which is evil in his sight. Serve and obey the Lord God Almighty alone forevermore. Amen.