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| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) |
JUDGES 19
(Reading: Hebrews 12:14-28; Judges 19)
When God Doesn’t Rule
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ…
This is a terrible tale!
And that it happened in the Church!
Yes - that’s what the Old Testament nation of Israel was meant to be.
So, how come?
What had got into these people that they were like this?
Which madness had made them so irrational?
But, fellow believer, doesn’t asking these questions also bring out other occasions of similar devastation?
Probably nothing on this scale of things.
Still, I’m sure we can all recall instances of quite deep-seated and damaging sin.
Didn’t we wonder then how it came about?
You know, if God’s grace doesn’t take hold then all the evil around will join to make us hate.
And especially we’ll hate God’s grace in its clearest form!
You see then that they don’t see!
This is a blindness - spiritual blindness.
These people have failed to see and realise the way of the Lord.
And that’s why it’s very, very dark in our text.
I’m reminded of the story of the Emperor with no clothes.
Perhaps you remember that children’s story.
Everyone in the capital city of that country were deceived into believing that only the foolish and ignorant could not see that the Emperor was wearing the very latest in the most expensive and finest clothes.
They were of such a high quality that for them to say they couldn’t realise that made them look like real idiots!
And, anyway, if everyone else believed these invisible clothes were the very best they must be!
Then out came the Emperor – wearing only his underwear!
Someone had tricked him.
But no one was saying.
They all believed the lie.
It took a little boy to tell it like it really was.
And in Judges 19 it’s the Levite who addresses the whole of Israel with the shame of what has happened.
He blows the whistle on their whole depravity!
But let’s see, first of all, how this Levite also shared in this terrible guilt.
Congregation, we note, in the first place, that, THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE COVENANT GOD IS DISGRACED.
You see, at first we might warm to this Levite.
We believe he should have the freedom to move about in safety.
It looks good that he travels a long way to be reconciled to his concubine.
And at the end of this chapter he’s the one who protests so strongly about the wrong of what has happened.
Yet, he had not done what he should have done!
For when we reflect upon the task of the Levites it was especially to serve from certain set-apart cities and continually remind the covenant people of the Law.
They were also closely tied to the worship centre in Shiloh, where the tabernacle was.
So their special calling from the Lord was to always be there to call his people to him.
After all, he had promised to bless them, if they remained obedient to his pattern for the land.
And the fulfilment of that blessing would see them with a king!
Yet, where was this Levite to be found?
Well, certainly not performing his duty in a Levitical city!
This guy was a real wanderer.
And on one of these travels he had picked up this woman.
If I sounded derogatory, that was on purpose.
You see, he had a wife.
But that doesn’t stop him chasing his mistress from the north of the country, where he lived, to the south, where she had gone back to her family.
And then, once having caught up with her, for three days they’re celebrating their renewed relationship together, flirting with sin in a carefree way.
They’re acting as though there was nothing wrong with their relationship.
Even her Dad enjoyed it so much, he insisted they stay a fourth day also.
The fifth day he still wanted them to stay, and so they weren’t able to get away until late in the afternoon.
Congregation, we rightly ask, “Where is the obedience in any of this?”
“How is the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus being brought out in this priest?”
Well might we ask.
The Priesthood was here disgraced.
This was far from being that copy and shadow of what’s in heaven!
But the same disregard for God’s priesthood is also found elsewhere.
This moral decline in the church has deep roots, and its results are bursting forth like weeds after the rain!
You see, this Levite and his mistress eventually get going.
And though they cannot travel far, because of the lateness of the hour, he is still wise enough to avoid Jerusalem.
Jerusalem which then was in the hands of another nation - the pagan Jebusites.
This was all before David captured it and made it his capital.
Mind you, in the end the Levite would have probably been better off staying in Jerusalem.
But, despite his own wicked actions, he thought he could trust others in the church.
What do we find, though?
It’s exactly because he was a Levite that no-one took him in.
That’s how much the service of the Lord was already despised in Gibeah, a city of the tribe of Benjamin.
Not only were the basic laws of hospitality completely ignored but any special calling in the covenant had long gone as well!
In the end, it was an old man, from the same part of Israel he was from – the north - who took them in for the night.
And the story gets worse.
This town, in those strong words of Romans 1 verse 18, had suppressed the truth by their wickedness.
They who had been brought up in the covenant despised it with the same venomous bitterness found in Esau.
The application of Hebrews 12 comes so true here.
For there in verse 16 we read, “See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son.”
Believers, these ones had sold out!
For the thrill of the moment, that brief and fleeting pleasure, they threw out the wealth of the nation.
Their minds had become depraved.
They did what ought not to be done!
This is down in the gutter with Sodom! (Gen.19)
So their lives had become filled with doing whatever they can to deny God.
And usually that comes in quite unobtrusively.
But here it’s shown for the evil it truly is!
And if you think you can see these wicked actions in the way our community has become, you’re spot on!
Any society, once having tasted the goodness of the Lord - even just by its political and judicial framework - and then turning away, deteriorates rapidly.
The slippery slide effect is true.
That’s not a convenient phrase from traditionalists!
It’s simply describing the Lord’s curse upon those who reject his ways.
They are being punished.
But so are we all!
For unless we make that strong stand otherwise, the humanistic flow soon has us in its wave.
Because think about who’s suffering most under this increasingly godless regime!
Each time an abortion is performed for other than life-saving reasons, who is affected?
Who isn’t helped by the legalisation of prostitution?
And with euthanasia becoming another optional extra, who dies?
Why - aren’t they the ones who’ve suffered under godlessness?
Aren’t they the poor?
Aren’t they the very ones the law especially looks after?
We have our second aspect to the text.
From where THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE COVENANT GOD IS DISGRACED we see next, THE HELPLESS THEMSELVES ARE DISMISSED!
For who are those helpless ones burned as sacrifices to Moloch, in a later time of Old Testament degradation?
That was an equally depraved time when babies – yes, babies! - were consumed by flames!
The Levite breaks every rule in the Book to look after himself!
And especially he breaks the command about loving your neighbour as yourself.
For who is sacrificed upon the altar of his own ego?
You guessed it - the helpless one is the concubine!
Verse 28 really spells this out!
There’s no true love there!
Congregation, God won’t keep us despite ourselves.
He who has given us that structure of love we desperately need, did that exactly because of the faith that makes us all one.
Take away faith, and you pull the carpet on which the whole family furniture is standing!
Despite the cries of the world, true justice doesn’t come because of the will of the people.
It’s there because of the will of God!
And it’s this very will - his Word - which faith brings to the fore.
As it was his Word which brought forth faith, so now that faith continues to grow in it.
A proper justice comes with its foundation based in heaven itself.
That’s when his will is done on earth as it is in heaven, to use the words of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 verse 10.
It’s certainly not from us, for then we could never be sure where we stand.
Isn’t that what’s shown in the religions of men?
There is no assurance – no true peace - in any of them.
And that there is order found to some degree in pagan nations confirms what we know in God’s Word.
For it’s there despite us!
It is a true gift.
What Gibeah shows us is the true nature of mankind.
Their demand in verse 22 exposes us all!
In faith we know that.
And it’s in faith that we also grow in realising this.
That’s when we are ever so keen that the Word which has freed and guides us should also liberate our neighbour.
This is what the Lord says in Isaiah chapter 1, following the command to defend and fight for the helpless.
We read there, in the verses 18 and 19, “‘Come now let’s reason together,’ says the LORD.
“‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.
“‘If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best from the land; but if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword.’”
The king is coming.
And even when he has physically come in Israel, yet there was still a looking to the spiritual King - the Messiah.
God’s grace would come to the faithful.
That’s the Gospel news to us all.
And it’s the message we, in turn, have to live out in our lives.
Preach Christ and him crucified.
Because that’s what you do when you obey his laws.
That’s what you do when you look after those who are least able to look after themselves!
Then he’s reigning for sure.
Because then your heart becomes his throne.
You see, the most devastating thing about the situation of our text is the beginning of the first verse, “In those days, when there was no king in Israel…”
And let’s not think that having a physical king was going to solve this terrible moral morass because it’s the fact that spiritually they had no king which matters most of all!
We see this later on in their history when they get their first king, Saul.
But he’s their king - the good-looking and tall king - not the Lord’s king.
And the Lord used Saul to expose this same weak link in the people.
They made him like one of the kings they liked to have - one like the pagan nations around them.
Judges 19 tells us of the fermenting effect of the Canaanites left in the land.
There are still those Jebusites holding out in Jerusalem, as there were others elsewhere.
The Promised Land is far from being the Lord’s.
And so we come to the third aspect to the text.
From the Lord’s priesthood disgraced, to the helpless dismissed, there comes this final and really underlying evil.
You see, congregation, THE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN COMPLETELY DISSUADED.
Something has got into the Church!
It’s mixed them up something awful!
They have become deceived.
Think again of the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’
Those people honestly thought they were seeing the latest in fashion!
They were completely convinced that was the most trendiest thing out!
How clever the devil is.
Through the rot there was in the land - through the Canaanites and their continued evil practices - Satan really tripped up the Church!
Because how else could it have got to this stage?
The stage our text ends with in verse 30.
The stage where everyone seeing one of those twelve cut up parts of the concubine said, “Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt until this day; consider it, take counsel, and speak.”
What, they had to ask others what to do?
They should have known what to do!
But, most of all, this never ought to have happened!
The people of God - those especially chosen to serve him - they should have always been reminding themselves about whose they were.
After all, who brought them out of Egypt?
Who feed them manna and quail in the wilderness?
Who was the One that had never failed to give them exactly what they needed, when they were ready for him?
Yet it was precisely because they weren’t living according to their covenant God’s commands that they became turned around.
At first it seemed only a subtle and small thing.
But as God was ignored more and more then, well, you didn’t need him so much either!
Don’t we know how this kind of separation so quickly snowballs in our own relationships?
We keep apart, and doesn’t it happen that we do become more apart!
“In those days … there was no king in Israel…”
This sums it up to a tee!
Taking it deeper than the outward, external picture of a nation with no leader, here is the Church in such a lawless state that her King is far from ruling in the hearts and the lives of his people.
As another devastating phrase from the book of Judges says, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (17:6; 21:25)
The Church was not a church.
It had become something totally opposite to being the body of the Son of God.
No longer did it move to the directions from her Head - Jesus Christ!
The words of Ephesians 4:16 speak of when Christ is the Head of the Church the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
And while Christ hadn’t yet come in this part of church history, his people still should have been pointing to what he would do.
That’s why there were prophets, priests, and kings.
That’s why he had given the law to Moses.
But this is exactly what wasn’t happening in our text.
The Word of God was a closed book!
And those in the church weren’t doing anything in love.
Life had become what you wanted to do!
Now, the apostle Paul says in 1st Corinthians 10 verse 11, that these things written in the Old Testament are warnings for us.
Even though the fulfilment of the ages has come, he says, be careful that you don’t fall!
You see, dear Christian, this story should have been striking some cords in you!
Weren’t you wondering how much this is like the Church today?
The Messiah whom the Old Testament church should have been keenly looking for - is he any more eagerly wanted today?
And even after he has poured out his Spirit upon the Church - is that making us seek him more?
In fact, of all the many eras in church history isn’t ours one of those closest to this terribly dark pit in Israel’s history?
Rarely has there been such a lack of knowledge of the Word of God!
Rarely has there been such a time when men and women - born again believers by the grace of God himself - have turned to the ultimate arrogance of their own experience!
And sitting back in our own little Reformed-Presbyterian corner - naively believing the Lord will keep our churches - is just what the devil loves.
The worst deception is to make God’s people believe there is no deception!
Anyone who studies the Scriptures will read otherwise.
But is that what we’re doing?
Well may we take other churches to task for ignoring the Bible or twisting it right round but how are we the people of the Book?
Are we the priests, prophets and kings that Israel lacked and which the Church needs even more today!
Because in Christ each of us can now hold the three-fold office.
By his Spirit which now lives in our hearts we have every resource for praying upon Christ’s sacrifice, for proclaiming the good news for the helpless, and for ruling over all the circumstances of our lives.
And it’s all for him!
Friend, when the Lord comes in all his glory will you then be doing your own thing?
Consider it!
Take counsel!
Let him tell you what to do!
Amen.
PRAYER:
Let’s pray…
Lord God, we have heard the warning in your Word.
This story from your Scripture is there to wake us up - to make us think about where we are with you now.
Because we can so easily be distracted from you.
The world is very attractive.
It gives us lots to do and make us feel good doing that.
But that would be the completely wrong reason to do it!
Please, so stir us by your Spirit to keep studying your Word.
Help us in our personal study of your Word.
And make us meet together as much as we can to open up your Word and so be guided by you.
In the Name of the Living Word, Jesus Christ, we pray, Amen.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Rev. Sjirk Bajema, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
(c) Copyright 2021, Rev. Sjirk Bajema
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