Gods and Generals

Order of Service

• Call to Worship — Psalm 104
• Psalm — Psalm 104 (Trinity Psalter Hymnal)
• Prayer of Invocation
• Heidelberg Catechism Reading — Questions & Answers 12–15
• Hymn — How Marvelous, How Wise, How Great (#437)
• Pastoral Prayer
• Sermon
• Benediction

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Sermon Title: Gods and Generals

Scripture: Judges 1:27–3:6

I. The Danger of Not Keeping the Word of the Lord

A. Historical backdrop: Exodus 23 and Deuteronomy 7 command Israel to drive out the Canaanites completely and make no covenant with them B. Judges 1:27–36 records tribe after tribe failing to drive out the inhabitants

1. The repeated refrain "did not drive out" indicts every northern tribe
2. A declining trajectory: Canaanites living among Israel (Judges 1:29) shifts to Israel living among the Canaanites (Judges 1:33)

C. The angel of the Lord at Bochim charges the people with covenant-breaking (Judges 2:1–2): "You have not obeyed my voice" D. This sin is not unique to Israel — it echoes the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden

1. At its root all sin is lawlessness — living as a law unto oneself
2. Paul identifies the same struggle in the believer: Romans 7 — "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing"

E. The Book of Judges ultimately points beyond the human judges to the Judge and King — the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the second Adam, Christ

1. What was right in his own eyes was always perfectly aligned with the Father's will
2. He kept the law all the way to death on a cross, fully rescuing his people from their lawbreaking
3. In Christ we find both the means of salvation and the model for growth in obedience

II. The Danger of Not Keeping the World Out of Ourselves

A. The Lord warned in Exodus 23: let the peoples dwell among you and their gods will become a snare to you — because God knows what is in man's heart B. When Israel failed to keep God's word, the world inevitably got into them

1. Baal was a storm and fertility god; syncretistic worship was tempting in lean harvest years — an apparently practical compromise
2. Judges 2:10–11: a generation arose that did not know the Lord, and Israel served the Baals
3. Judges 2:19: with each cycle the people became more corrupt than their fathers — what Dale Ralph Davis calls "generational degeneration"

C. Application to the New Testament church

1. The configuration differs from Theocratic Israel — the people of God are spread broadly as salt throughout the earth, not concentrated in a nation-state
2. The danger, however, is the same wherever God's people are found
3. A. R. Fausset: "Our high calling is to be in the world, not of the world. It is not our being in the world that ruins us, but our suffering the world to be in us — just as ships sink not by being in the water but by the water getting into them."
4. Jesus' prayer in John 17: not that the Father would take believers out of the world, but that he would protect them from the evil one (John 17:15)
5. Worldliness is not neutralized by Christian labeling on entertainment or media — the guard must remain up regardless
6. The call is to enjoy the genuine good of God's creation wisely while guarding heart, mind, eyes, ears, and tongue from the empty and deceitful ways of the world