The Justice and the Grace of God
Judges 3:7, 9
Judges Lesson #021
July 13, 2021
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Father, as we look at the world around us, we see just absolute chaos. We see people calling good bad and calling evil good. And we see all kinds of idolatry. We see all kinds of gross sin. We see man sitting on his own throne of self-deification, and we just can’t imagine how it could get much worse, but it has, and it will.
“And we read through Judges, and we read through Isaiah, and we read through Kings and read through Jeremiah, and we see that this is the pattern of man’s sinfulness, the pattern of his corruption, the pattern of his rebellion against You. Throughout all of these centuries since Adam sinned, we know You are in control working out Your purpose.
“Part of our responsibility, and the test for us is to trust You day in and day out, and not give in to worry, fear, panic, all the other things that can come along, and just resting in You, realizing we have been given everything we need to fulfill Your purpose for our lives, and that we can rely upon You to sustain us no matter what happens whether it involves blessing and that which involves prosperity, or whether it involves the blessing of suffering on behalf of our faith as we have seen so many Christians over the years suffer even to the point of death.
“Father, we pray that whatever comes, we can be fortified in our soul with Your Word that surrounds us and protects us. Give us the mental focus we need to face whatever situation we have in life and help us as we study Judges to understand the dynamics of what went on at that time as well as how similar dynamics are going on at this time. And we pray that you would help us to see what is happening. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Slide 2
Alright, open your Bibles to Judges 3. We’re going to look at Judges 3:7–8, but I’m going to guess that we won’t quite get into much of verse 8. Tonight, what we’re focusing on coming off of the previous lesson is on the justice and the grace of God. Now it’s been about three weeks since we last met, and I’m sure that if I called on somebody, they could stand up and give me at least fifteen minutes of good information on what I covered the last time, right? I don’t know if I could have done that.
In fact, I was texting with another pastor yesterday, and we were talking about how wonderful it is to have the Internet because he had given a presentation on a Friday morning to a pastors’ group about three weeks ago, and he texted me and he said, where’s the video for that so that I can figure out where I stopped?
So, I thank God for the Internet because every time can I go back, and I listen to about the last 15 minutes of the previous lesson so that I can get my head back into what I was teaching and what I was thinking the last time.
Slide 3
In the last lesson, we were looking at some issues related to the lack of emphasis on Israel’s repentance in the various formula statements related to Israel crying out to the Lord. As we looked at those various passages, we didn’t see but one passage where repentance was mentioned.
Just so we remember where we are, there’s three divisions in Judges. The first part is the introduction which gives us the overview and the cycles of judgment talking about how they had incomplete obedience. They compromised leading to spiritual failure and the cycles of discipline. Each cycle is worse than the time before as they go from being a somewhat spiritually focused nation to a nation that is absolutely as bad, if not worse, than the Canaanites around them.
That’s from Judges 1:1–3:6. We’re at the beginning of the next section with the first judge, Othniel, where we see the decline of the nation because a leader is the product of his culture.
Sometimes people say, well we get the leader we deserve. Well, we get the leader that comes out of our culture, and when the culture is an immoral, morally relatively culture that has bought into it all matter of liberal psychologized emotional versions of Christianity, then it’s going to be difficult to find a leader that doesn’t come out of that same cesspool of Christianity because that’s where we are today.
The Lord said that we were in the world, but we were not supposed to be of the world. Ever since then, we’ve gotten it backwards. We think we’re of the world and we’re going to roll around in the muck in the world. The church has had more of the world in it than not over the centuries.
That’s what we ended up looking at last time as we looked at that cry of distress. In in the Book of Judges, it only once mentions repentance, but even that was a superficial sort of a lip service type of repentance. Most of the time, it just wasn’t even mentioned.
Slide 4
We’ve looked at other passages that talked about it, and we basically saw that God is not restoring them or delivering them because they have repented; He is restoring them because He is a compassionate God and a gracious God. He delivers us and rescues us and sustains us even when we’re at our worst, and we really don’t deserve it at all, and that’s the basic lesson. The Grace of God is so emphasized.
Slide 5
So, we see that there’s this part of the formula of the Israelites crying to the Lord. This is the word za‘aq, which is that technical term. It really has the idea of a loud outcry or scream of distress. I gave you a lengthy quote on it from Leon Wood’s article on it in The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, where he said it’s the cry from a disturbed heart. It is when you are in emotional, psychological, physical misery, and you just don’t know how you can live another second.
Slide 6
Hoyt says that “The word describes a loud and agonized cry from someone in acute distress, a cry that comes from a ‘disturbed heart.’ ” Quoting Leon Wood, “This word is used also in a legal context when a person does not receive his due justice under the law, and so he cries out to God.”
I like to include that because in this world that talks about social justice, which isn’t what you think it is unless you are educated, then it is what you said that it is, but most people, think social justice is just giving everybody a fair shake. That isn’t what it means. It means that you don’t give anybody who is successful a fair shake because you take away everything that they work for and earned and give it to those who don’t deserve it. That is what they are describing as a fair shake.
You can either guarantee equal opportunity or you can guarantee equal results. Guaranteeing equal opportunity is called equality. In the language of today, guaranteeing equal results is called equity. And equity is evil. It is sinful because you have to steal from those who have earned and worked and been diligent and give it to those who, for whatever reason, have not.
So that’s the problem. Social justice is Marxist justice; it is not biblical justice. It doesn’t conform to the righteousness of God.
Slide 7
But we looked at a few verses. For example, the Israelites cried out, when they were under the oppression and the slavery in Egypt. [Exodus 2:23]
Slide 8
We also saw that in one passage it talks about or gives an example of them confessing in Judges 10:10, which is really a pretty pathetic example because they’re sort of giving lip service, and God calls their bluff. Judges 10:10, “And the children Israel cried out to the Lord, saying, ‘We have sinned against You because we have both forsaken our God and served the Baals.’ ”
That is a true statement, but it wasn’t one that they were—I hate using the word “sincere”, but they sort of had their fingers crossed behind their back—repentant. Repentance means turning away from that which is evil and turning toward God. The Hebrew word is the word shuv. The best example that we have for understanding its meaning is in Deuteronomy 30.
After describing the stages of divine discipline that Israel will go through, even to the max when they are taken out of their land that God has given them, and he says that in the future, Moses writes, “When you turn to the Lord, He will restore you from all the lands where He has scattered you.” That word “turn” is the word shuv.
Now one form of the verb is teshuvah and in modern Hebrew, they’ll refer to that, and that is genuine turning to God and turning away, but it’s not turning with your fingers crossed behind your back. So, God says, they sinned and forsook God and serve the Baals.
Slide 9
The Holy Spirit writes Judges 10:12, “Also the Sidonians and Amalekites and Maonites oppressed you; and you cried out to Me, and I delivered you from their hand.” Notice how it is this focus on crying out, and I delivered you, but it’s not correlated to the statement of apparent confession.
Slide 10
Judges 10:13, “You have forsaken Me and served other gods. Therefore, I will deliver you no more.” This is God calling their bluff. He’s had it; you’ve heard me say this before. We confess our sins, and we say, “Lord, I was inpatient today, and I feel really bad about it and I’m not going to be impatient again.” And God says, “Don’t try to pull that on Me. I’m omniscient. I know that you’re going to be impatient 7,334,895 more times this year. Because God is omniscient, He knows that we can’t pull off these promises that come from this emotional remorse. We’re to admit our sin, and He forgives us and cleanses us, but when we are in the shape of Israel and it’s a pseudo confession, then God calls our bluff. Judges 10:13, “You have forsaken Me and served other gods. Therefore, I will deliver you no more.”
Slide 11
Judges 10:14, “‘Go and cry out to the gods which you’ve chosen; Let them deliver you in your time of distress.’ ” God can get really sarcastic at times. He probably originated the idea of sarcasm.
Judges 10:15, “And the children of Israel said to the Lord, ‘We have sinned!—now they know they’re in real trouble—Do to us whatever seems best to You; only deliver us this day, we pray.’ ”
Judges 10:16, “So they put away—now see they’re turning; they’re not just confessing; they’re turning back to God; so they put away—the foreign gods from among them and served Yahweh. And His soul could no longer endure the misery of Israel.”
Slide 12
There’s an interesting passage over in Samuel that we looked at, and this is because this passage seems to suggest that at each of these times there was repentance. The statement comes down in 1 Samuel 12:8. We read in 1 Samuel 12:7–8, “ ‘Now therefore, stand still that I may reason with you before the Lord.—This is Samuel speaking—concerning all the righteous acts of the Lord which He did to you and your fathers. When Jacob had gone into Egypt, and your fathers cried out to the Lord, then the Lord sent Moses and Aaron, who brought your fathers out of Egypt and made them do well in this place.’ ”
Now that crying out was not the result of their sin. They weren’t there because of sin, and they weren’t oppressed in slavery because of sin, but they were crying out because they were in a miserable situation.
Slide 13
1 Samuel 12:9 says, “And when they forgot the Lord their God,—that’s in the period of the judges—He sold them into the hand of Sisera, the commander of the army of Hazor, into the hand of the Philistines, and into the hand of the king of Moab; and they fought against them.” 1 Samuel 12:10, “Then they cried out to the Lord, and said, ‘We have sinned, because we have forsaken the Lord, and served the Baals and Ashtoreths; but now deliver us from the hand of our enemies, and we shall serve You.’ ”
That seems to be a quote from the 10th chapter, but the example is listed in verse 9. And the individuals listed in verse 11 are broad spectrum, so it just seems to suggest that at all of these times there was this turning to God. But it didn’t last long, and that is because of two reasons.
Reason number one is they have not been baptized into Jesus Christ. The baptism by the Holy Spirit, which breaks the power of sin. And therefore, they’re in worse shape than we are in. We act like we’re still in that kind of a slavery, but they were still enslaved to their sin nature.
The second reason is because they weren’t all that concerned about turning to God and away from all of the temptations of the false religions. So that passage does indicate that there is at least a superficial repentance a lot of the time.
Slide 14
Then we went to Nehemiah 9:26, “Nevertheless, they were disobedient—Nehemiah is teaching the Israelites, rehearsing their history, and talking about the time of the Judges—and rebelled against You, cast Your law behind their backs and killed Your prophets who testified against them to turn them to Yourself; And they worked great provocations.” Nehemiah 9:27, “Therefore you delivered them into the hand of their enemies, who oppressed them; And in the time of their trouble, when they cried to You, You heard from heaven; And according to Your abundant mercies”—in the sincerity of their confession You gave them deliverers who saved them from the hand of their enemies. Does it say that? No, it’s all the grace of God. And I think that is one of the most important issues.
Slide 15
As we go to Nehemiah 9:28, it ends with, “You, heard from heaven, and many times You delivered them according to your mercies.” It’s the mercy of God, and that’s what we must fall on all the time, day in and day out. It is all about God’s grace. So, even when we try to manipulate God with our superficial remorse, God can see right through it.
Slide 16
This brings us to our first judge. Our first judge is Othniel, and he is the first judge of the six major judges, and the six cycles in Judges. About him nothing negative is said. He is represented as the archetype of the spiritual hero in Israel. There is nothing negative said about him. He’s a hero. He’s a military hero.
Because he conquered Debir, he was rewarded with Caleb’s daughter in marriage, and because of his military prowess, which was based on his trust in God for the victory, God worked through him as a judge. So, he’s presented in a very positive light. His wife, Achsah, is also presented in a very positive light, and it is against that standard that we evaluate all of the other judges.
Now I want to remind you that when we look at this book, this is editorialized history. God can do that. When you read and I read a lot of history, it’s also editorialized, but they’re not necessarily coming from divine viewpoint. In fact, they’re coming right out of the pit of hell in a lot of modern cases. But this is God picking and choosing these specific episodes that will fit the narrative. That is His narrative, and His narrative is the only story.
See that’s the big word: narratives. The big word in postmodernism. Everybody has this overarching narrative of this overarching story, but the Bible says there’s only one, and that’s the one that starts in Genesis 1 and ends in Revelation 22. So, God picks the details in each one of these judges because He’s making a point; He’s trying to teach some spiritual principles, and so we have to understand that as we go from one to the other, they get progressively worse. And He’s teaching various principles through that.
Another thing we ought to recognize as we look at the way God uses Israel as sort of a representative analogy. This really starts with the conquest in the Book of Joshua and goes through the Book of Judges, that if you look at the gift, the free grace gift of the Land, that is analogous to the free grace gift of salvation, and when the Israelites crossed the Jordan into the Land, that is analogous to salvation.
They have trusted God for the Land, and they are going to accept that gift, but that gift does not come without problems. The Land will never be taken from them, just as our eternal salvation will never be taken from us, but they have a struggle in front of them, and they must learn to trust God in the battles. It is only then that they can grow to a spiritual maturity, and the same is true for us.
When they took the Land, the first thing they did was they took out the major strongholds of paganism. They took out Jericho. They took out Ai; they took out a southern confederacy. Then they took out Hebron. Then they took out a northern confederacy.
This is analogous to the fact that when you and I are first saved, there are some strongholds, fortresses of human viewpoint in our souls that we need to take out, and they’re pretty obvious that they run contrary to the Bible. So it’s not much of a battle to take out most of those big issues right away, and they’re taken care of and they’re disposed of. But then there’s a lot of little Canaanite towns, and Canaanite villages that all have to be conquered.
That’s what happens in Judges 1; they failed. They began to compromise. They got tired of the battle. God has a zero-tolerance policy for human viewpoint, just as He had a zero-tolerance policy for the Canaanites. And yet we get really comfortable with some of our sin and some of the sinful ways in which we try to find happiness and make life work and find meaning in life.
So rather than continuing to take no prisoners in terms of our assault on the human viewpoint in our souls, we decide to let some of them live because we rather like them, and we want to get along with them.
Therein lies the problem for the rest of our lives because we continually battle with those particular human viewpoint enemies. We are to take every thought captive for Christ. Most of us get saying, “OK, take every—we’ll work with the first 25%; that’s pretty good. That’s better than most people, so I’ll take out 25% and enjoy the other 75%.”
This is what typically happens in our lives. We’re just following this pattern. So, there’s sort of an overarching analogy to the spiritual life in looking at how they have failed to take out the strongholds, every single stronghold. They did not take every Canaanite captive and kill him, and we don’t take every thought captive, but we are to pursue that objective.
Slide 17
Othniel was the first judge, and I want to begin by looking at the first verse. The first verse is a verse that is repeated six times basically [in the Book of Judges], almost word for word as God indicts the Israelites for their apostasy. In Judges 3:7 we read, “And so the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they forgot the Lord their God, and served the Baals and the Asheroth.”
When we look at this, what we see is God is going to bring discipline upon them. And that discipline that He will bring upon them is identified and spelled out as five different stages of divine discipline because they, as you read them, you will notice there’s a lot of overlap and a lot of similarity with some of them. In some of them, there’s a military defeat. In the next one, the enemy comes in and has the citizens put them up in their houses, and then in the next one they just wipe everybody out. So, you all have all of these similar things.
Slide 18
In the first stage of divine discipline in Leviticus 26:16 we read, “I also will do this to you:—what He said in Leviticus 26:14–15 is if you disobey Me, I also will do this to you—I will even appoint terror over you.” That is a mental attitude, a sense of panic and fear because the economy is collapsing, because you don’t know if the grocery store supply chain is working and if you will have food or water tomorrow, or that the water systems will work, and you will have flushable toilets, or whether you will be able to find a toilet paper at Costco in the next three months, or paper towels or all of the other things about which people were panicking, especially not being able to find 9 millimeter because you weren’t preparing, so you shot up the last box down at the range and now you’re in trouble. So, this is the fear and panic. What will I do now?
Leviticus 26:16 says, “I will appoint terror over you, wasting disease and fever, which will consume the eyes and cause sorrow of heart.” That deals with plagues and pandemics.
Then you shall sow your seed in vain. Now if you are a farmer and in some parts of our country right now it is so hot. I’ve mentioned this before, in this Hebrew class I’m in on Tuesday mornings. There’s a pastor from Calgary and they’ve been having triple digit temperatures up there. That’s farmland. The sun is burning up their crops. Our crops are drowning. We’re getting so much rain.
Leviticus 26:16, So “you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.” That tells us that you may sow them, you may grow your crops, but then by the time it comes to harvest them, the enemy is in control, and they will harvest. And that’s what happens during the time of Gideon against the Midianites.
But God says [Leviticus 26:17], “I will set My face against you,—which is an idiom for the fact that I am not going to listen to you at all—and you shall be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you shall reign over you, and you shall flee when no one pursues you.” That’s because you’re panicky and scared and listening to all the rumors on Facebook and Twitter. So that’s the first stage of divine discipline. There are four more stages, and the whole section from, as in Leviticus 26:14–39.
Slide 19
Judges 3:7 goes on to say, “the Sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Now that again is a bit of an anthropomorphism. An anthropomorphism is when a human form such as eye, ears, nose, fingers are attributed to God. In this case sight. You have other passages that the eyes of the Lord go to and fro over the whole Earth. These are anthropomorphisms, and they relate to the knowledge. God’s omniscient and He sees everything. He doesn’t miss anything. He doesn’t miss a thought.
Judges 3:7, “The sons of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” This refers also to His absolute righteousness. That’s the standard of His character. He is perfect righteousness. He is the One who defines right and wrong because He is of a pure and perfect essence; in Him is light, the Apostle John writes in 1 John, and in Him there is no darkness at all. See 1 John 1:5.
So His sight reflects also to His standard. He is the standard. It exists outside of the realm of human experience. It relates to morality, to the ultimate standard for morality and values and standards. It doesn’t come because everybody else agrees that this ought to be a good thing.
It doesn’t come because people have reasoned and tight logical arguments that something is right and something is wrong. It doesn’t come because it feels so good, it ought to be right. How could God keep me from this when it just feels so right? I think there was a song written that way back in the 1960s or 70s. All of that is nothing but pure human viewpoint.
God’s standard is the only standard, and He’s revealed that to us in His Word. The divine indictment is that they did evil according to the standard of God’s perfect character, His perfect righteousness. That’s the first thing they did.
Slide 20
The second thing is that they forgot the Lord their God. This is the Hebrew word shkhch, which means to not just forget, not just to absentmindedly misplace your glasses or your wallet or your keys or something like that. This is to willfully, volitionally, intentionally ignore God. That is the main idea. It is an intentional and insidious act where God is removed from having anything to do with our lives.
It is parallel to a word that we saw back in Judges 2:11 where it says that they forsook God, which is a bit of an antiquated word, but it really means they abandoned God, so they abandoned God. They forget God. They are two sides of the same coin. It is a volitional act wherein they are intentionally, self-consciously and responsibly choosing the fertility worship of Baal and Asherah, because it just feels a whole lot better than going to the tabernacle. It’s a lot more fun.
They intentionally choose Baal and Asherah over God who is their Lord, who has rescued them, delivered them, redeemed them from Egypt. He’s performed all of these miracles, but by now everyone who knew anything about those miracles, had any sort of empirical relationship with those miracles, is gone. All of the fathers, all of that generation with Joshua are now gone.
So, now they are intentionally abandoning this Lord who has entered into a contract, a covenant with them, and that is an act of treason against the Lord, against Yahweh, and it’s punishable by these stages of discipline, which are listed at the end of Leviticus and at the end of Deuteronomy.
Because these documents are organized like a standard contract of the second millennium BC, which had certain ways in which it was structured, a certain format and ended with a section that said: “Well, if you obey Me, then I’m going to do all these wonderful things for you, but if you don’t, then this is what I’m going to do. I’m really going to spank you.” So that is the outline of the five stages of discipline.
In order to turn their back on God and to ignore the miracles that happened, they have to go through a psychological process fueled by arrogance. They are going to delude themselves. They are so self-absorbed that they go into the next stage as part of the arrogance cycle and they are into self-deception and self-delusion and self-justification, and they do this individually and they do this nationally.
You’re sitting there, and I know you’re thinking you’re saying, how can they do that? Well, just turn on CNN and watch. We have a live example every 24-hour news cycle, seven days a week. You see people in self-delusion and self-deception and just riding on their “arrogance motorcycles” all over the country.
So, a culture that is going to have freedom is going to have a strong, historical awareness. We talked about that a couple of lessons back. But if you are into self-delusion, and you have rejected that there are absolutes that exist outside of us and exist apart from the culture, then, in order to do what you want to do in rebellion, you have to go through such psychological gymnastics to redefine reality that you basically become excessively neurotic if not psychotic. So, you can’t tell right from wrong. You can’t tell a boy from a girl, and you can’t tell which restroom you ought to go to anymore, because you’re just so confused.
Romans 1:18–21, you are suppressing truth in unrighteousness, and sooner or later this has horrible, horrible consequences. We studied this that history is important because that’s the stage in which God operates. He built the stage—this timeline of history—and He oversees it and history is truly His story.
So, if you are the devil, and you want to destroy man’s ability to have hope and meaning and purpose, then you tempt mankind with all kinds of temptations that appeal to his lust patterns of his soul, and you enable him to think that history has no significance and no meaning, and everything is just by time and chance. That’s where Darwin comes into all of this.
Once Darwin enters in and you enter billions and billions and billions of centuries, then what you end up with is absolutely the impossibility of knowing what has happened because for the last 6,000 years, maybe there are historical records, but beyond that, there’s no knowledge, so we have no idea what’s going on. There’s no anchor for our soul. There’s no anchor for our beliefs, and the result is that we are left just twisting and turning in the winds of chance.
Liberal theology had its roots really in the Garden of Eden, but for historical purposes, it had its modern roots in the Enlightenment coming out of the Reformation as a reaction to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. So, the divine viewpoint response to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was the Protestant Reformation. But those who were hostile to God, turned to the Enlightenment.
Just because you had people like Descartes and others who were Jesuit priests, doesn’t mean that they were all that religious. So liberal theology, by the time you get to the late 1600s and into the early 1700s, begins to lay its evil foundation. It has built the soil bed of this new wicked agricultural land that they are going to farm and produce the wicked seed of rebellion against God.
So, they rejected that history, and then they began to sow the seeds of doubt. How do we know Adam really existed? We have no other documents that really attest to that, so if there aren’t any other witnesses, then Adam probably didn’t exist. There wasn’t a worldwide Flood. The Earth is much older than that, and all of this just happened by the standard processes of time.
By the end of the 1700s, they have pretty much laid the foundations for their attack on the historicity of Genesis 1–11, and the historicity of the Gospels, so by the time you make it 100 years further, by the time you get to 1900, they’ve just about devastated Protestant Christianity in Europe, and European Protestant liberalism is now trying to bring in a utopic kingdom apart from the biblical Christ.
In fact, because they have rejected biblical history and objective history, you have people like Schweitzer who wrote a significant book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus. They are still looking for Him. They haven’t found Him yet. As far as they are concerned, He’s not in the Bible; that’s just myth and legend. The historical Jesus is somewhere out there, but we can’t find Him. And so, this lays the foundation.
If there’s no objective history, and there’s no real God who works in history, and there’s no real historical Jesus, then it’s all up to us. So, we’re free to do whatever it is that we want to do. Once they destroy historical reality, they have destroyed objectivity, and they have converted Christianity into nothing more than a psychologized internal, subjective religion that is grounded on feelings and not thought, and not based on an objective, historical event where Christ died on the Cross for our sins, and you can go there in the land of Israel, and you can go to the very location and even see what’s left of a ledge and a wall of the tomb where the resurrection took place.
But that’s not it; in the modern subjective eyes’ world of evangelicalism, all you have to do is to invite Jesus into your heart, and He’ll solve all your problems. You’ll hear testimonies like my life was a train wreck, and then I invited Jesus into my life and now everything is absolutely wonderful. And so, you’ve lost any sense of reality and history.
You then come to the beginning of the 21st century, and we have a good example of where things are today in terms of history. On August 18, 2019, which will be coming up on its two-year anniversary in another month, the New York Times Magazine announced a new project called The 1619 Project. Some of you have heard of this, others of you are blissfully ignorant of this.
But the target of this is to destroy your children and grandchildren and to destroy your country. What The 1619 Project does is to argue that American history did not begin July 4, 1776, but American history was given birth in 1619, when a slave ship brought African slaves to a colony in Virginia, and when those slaves came off the ship, that is what will define America for the next 400 years. And this is something that is just absolutely absurd.
Their goals are, they say, “Doing so—that is changing the birth of America—requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story that we tell ourselves.” See, that’s postmodernism. It’s all about the story.
Slide 22
So, we’ve got to tell ourselves a new story, a new narrative, and that narrative has to start with slavery, because labor is what defines everything. It totally ignores the motivations for the people who came to Jamestown in Virginia, the Pilgrims who came to Massachusetts and many, many others who came here for religious reasons. They came here for religious freedom to practice their faith, and they came here in order to build businesses and in order to make money.
Their literature completely ignores the fact that these blacks who came off the slave ship—there were no laws for slavery at the time—they did not enter into lifetime chattel slavery. What you had, and that included a lot of Anglos, and a lot of Dutch, and a lot of French who didn’t have any money to come over, was that they became indentured servants, and they would work for seven years and pay off their debt. And then they would be free.
In a tremendous book that has been written called 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, Peter Wood documents what had happened to all of those who came then and later and just puts the lie to it there. Their statement on their intent is that The 1619 Project is, in other words, an all-out effort to replace traditional conceptions of American history with a history refracted through the lens of black identity politics. That’s not their words; that’s Peter Wood’s words that it is looking at history through the lens of black identity politics.
Now we have to understand that identity politics is just one of the legs on which critical race theory stands. You have identity politics, you have cultural Marxism, you have the Franklin School, you have various other things such as social justice—all of these basic foundations for the critical race theory and social critical justice. And so that’s what they want to do. They want to completely change history.
Now there’s a saying that I have always had a lot of trouble with. You’ve heard it and probably went, “Oh yeah, I can see where that’s true.” I always heard it and said, I don’t think that’s true; you can’t make a generalized statement like that, that “the winners write history.” What that is really saying is we can’t know what really happened because the winners wrote their propagandized version of it, and we don’t know what happened. So don’t worry about history.
That’s the real intent of that phrase; it is to deny that we can know what had actually happened in history. While it is true that in many cases you have the victors who write their story, you can go back to the times of the Greeks and the Romans, and we have the ones that were defeated who wrote their stories as well.
There’s nothing that happened that we’re completely ignorant of, and people who say that the victors write history, they’re just attacking history. In many cases they don’t even know that’s what they’re doing because they think that this generalization, “Well, I can see where that’s true in some cases, but …”—never fall for those kinds of logical fallacies.
The larger aim of The 1619 Project, Wood says, is to change America’s understanding of itself. Now who’s this guy Peter W. Wood? Well, he is the president of the National Association of Scholars. He was appointed to that office in 2009. He has his PhD in anthropology in 1987 from the University of Rochester, which is extremely liberal. If you take all the liberal schools, it’s extremely liberal, on the extremely liberal end.
He has taught in extremely liberal schools in most of his career, and this National Association of Scholars is a network of scholars and citizens with a commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education. So, The 1619 Project was conceived by the New York Times magazine to rewrite history. This kind of historical revisionism is not new at all, and it has occurred again and again in history because what happens is the victors, sometimes write the history and it’s a lie, and others come along and correct it.
We have an example of that, and I’ve talked about it before, when you have Jeroboam I in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. He recognizes that he’s going to have serious problems if he lets the Israelites in the north go to Jerusalem on the three feast days that are commanded to them in the Pentateuch, and worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, because these guys in the South are now the enemy.
So, he sets up an idol in Bethel and another idol up in Dan. And what does he say? This is the god who brought you out of Egypt. That’s historical revisionism. Actually, Aaron started it when Moses was up on Mount Sinai, and he didn’t come back for 40 days and 40 nights. So, the people convinced him to take all the jewelry, the gold and silver that they had taken out of Egypt, and to melt it down and make a golden calf, and they would worship that. And he said, this is the god who brought you out of Egypt.
Historical revisionism is historical lies, and the people who do it are liars. Don’t call them anything else. I don’t even like calling them historical revisionist; they are liars. They are boldface liars, and they’re teaching this in elementary schools and junior high and high schools to your children and grandchildren, and they’re teaching it in every educational institution—state-funded, taxpayer-funded educational institutions in this state.
And nobody that you’ve elected is doing anything about it, but they’re trying now, thankfully, and there is—I think the governor just signed a bill here in Texas to prohibit teaching critical race theory in the schools.
I heard that the other day, but I thought I’d heard it before, so I’m not absolutely sure if that’s true. Other states have signed prohibitions, but then there are other states that have signed mandatory laws to teach it, which sets us up for a civil war.
So, these are the cultural wars that are all around us, and so this is the battle. This is the same kind of battle that the Israelites were fighting. They had historical revisionism going on all around them, and it was all an attack on God.
Slide 23
Let me just give you a few points on historical revisionism and postmodernism. Now postmodernism, for those of you who have been asleep for the last 40 years, is what follows Modernism. Modernism was what came out of the Enlightenment that man could answer all the deep questions of life on the basis of science. It crashed and burned on the Fields of Flanders in World War I as all those who were seeking a post-Millennial Kingdom brought in by man had that blown away by machine guns and tanks and chlorine gas and all kinds of other things. Postmodernism really began at that time in Europe, but it doesn’t really begin in US until the 1950s to 1960s.
Slide 24
History is the outworking of the plan and purposes of God for human history; therefore, history, because it is God’s story, is objective and the events of history are rationally and cogently discernible. That way we can know history, because history is God’s plan, and God has made us rational creatures who can learn and investigate and study. We can know what actually happened. We may have questions about some things that happened, but we can know with certainty what happened especially in those areas that are addressed by the Word of God, we can know absolutely what happened.
Slide 25
One of the things that that we have to recognize is that as Christians, we believe that God is the Creator of all things, and He stands outside of His creation. This is called the Creator/creature distinction. So, God is the Creator, and I have this dark blue line there, and that separates the Creator from His creation.
In evolution, and going back to its predecessor through most of the ancient world in medieval times, you had what was called a Chain of Being. You can look in a number of different older books and everything goes back to Aristotle and probably before. God or the gods, are at the top and it goes down and man’s a little lower and then plants are a little lower and amoebas are a little lower. They all share in the same essence, so there’s not a distinction between God and everything else. He’s part of that Chain of Being.
But in Christianity, God is the Creator. He stands outside of and apart from His creation. So within the creation, as creatures in His image and likeness, we have reason, we are rational, and we can think through things and investigate things.
That brings in experience or empiricism. And so, reason and empiricism look at scientific data and observations. We study things, whether it’s botany, biology, zoology, geology, we study and we learn, and we write and record, and we build our reservoir of knowledge. We can record the events that happened. So historical events come into play as objects of our reason and our empiricism. And we have feelings and impressions, intuitions, and values; all of these are distinct from the Creator.
Slide 26
But what happens when God is removed? That vacuum must be filled with something below the line. So as Romans 1 says, instead of worshipping the Creator, we worship something in the creation. We worship animals and four-legged beasts, and we worship plants, and we cut down a tree and carve it and shape it into an image of a man, then we bow down and worship it as if it created us.
This is the silliness and the irrationality of what happens when we reject God; we worship the creature rather than the Creator. Now what that means is historical events then become malleable because they’re not tied to an objective reality anymore. So, we can make them mean whatever we want them to mean.
That’s what happens in historical revisionism. That’s what’s happening in the schools. They can just make it up, and they’ll change it in another five years and make up something else. It’s not tied to objectivity, because without the Creator at the top, there’s no objectivity; there’s no anchor for reality.
Slide 27
The second point is that since history is the objective arena within which God operates, to destroy objectivity destroys meaning in history, and to destroy history destroys the objectivity of God.
That’s what the liberals understood back in the late 1600s, and early 1700s, when they’re attacking the historicity of the Bible. They knew that if you eradicate that, God’s going to fall apart. And God fell apart so badly that they finally announced that He was dead back in the early 1960s, because He could no longer stand up in light of the historical criticism of the liberals.
Slide 28
Point three: So, with God and objectivity removed, the vacuum is filled with subjective impressions and feelings created and imposed by man upon creation. See, that’s what most evangelical Christianity is; they’re just worshipping their own emotional ideal of what they think Jesus ought to be. Most evangelical Christians are emotional idolaters. Pastor Thieme called it “emotional revolt of the soul”, and that was just a brilliant phrase. Absolutely brilliant. I can’t think of anything that states it so clearly and precisely: the emotions take over and run everything.
Slide 29
Fourth, by destroying history and objectivity of meaning in history, you destroy man; man no longer has meaning, no longer has purpose, no longer has value. And history is just made-up stories that are myths and legends, and they change from culture to culture. And since every culture is equal—that’s multiculturalism—no culture is better than another, and they are all true. And if they’re all true, then nothing is true because they’re all contradictory. So we don’t know anything except our own feelings and emotions.
Slide 30
Fifth, in postmodernism the big evil is Western Civilization. Why? Because Christianity made Western Civilization. It’s not an attack on Western Civilization; it’s not an attack on Aristotle and Plato. It’s not really an attack on the Visigoths and the Goths, the Ostrogoths and the Lombards and the Teutons and everybody else. It is an attack on what Christians did when they converted all those groups.
Slide 31
The sixth point is that historians locate the ultimate cause of history inside history and not outside history.
One of the courses that I had to take in my doctoral program at Dallas Seminary in Church History was, of course, on historiography, which is the study of all of the different philosophies of history. Only Christianity has something outside of creation, outside of history that oversees history.
People have stolen, borrowed various ideas from Christianity and incorporated those into their systems. Marx did that, others have done that, but they don’t own it. It’s illegitimate to their system. So, historians locate the ultimate cause of history in history. They’ll look for causation in economics.
They will look—now this is a really important point so wake up—they locate causation in economics, in technology, in military skill, in the wisdom of Sun Tzu, and all these other things.
But when we study the cycles in Judges, the Israelites were not defeated because of bad technology, or because of ignorance of military strategy, or because they had a bad economic theory, or didn’t have the right agricultural tools, or all of these other things where people put causation. Those may be intermediate causes, but the ultimate cause, the reason they were unsuccessful is because they disobeyed God.
The reason they were successful, when they were successful, David whipped Goliath and it had nothing to do with his size, his training, his military skill, his military technology, or anything else. It was God in His omnipotence that guided that stone right into the center of Goliath’s forehead and killed him. The battle is the Lord’s. It is not based on our inabilities.
A couple of comments as we wrap up here. This is a quote by Keith Windschuttle who has written a lot of articles over the years in The New Criterion, which are fascinating. I’ve read some and I just don’t have time to read all the things that I want to read. He’s commenting on a book by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto called Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, and it reveals what has happened in the study of history and how this has permeated society.
Windschuttle quotes him and says: “He sees the old version of the story reflecting not the truth about global influence of Western civilization [You see, that’s because—that’s my note—he presuppositionally rejects the possibility of truth, that is, Armesto rejects the possibility of truth, so he doesn’t see the truth of global influence because he doesn’t believe in truth and what he sees is] but merely the inflated egocentrism of Western commentators. The imagined dominance of the West was ‘later, feebler and briefer than is commonly supposed,’ [That’s quoting Armesto] he claims, and was ‘neither foreordained nor enduring.’ ” He just goes “Pooh!” on Western civilization; it’s nothing.
According to Armesto, the real stability of history is China. Think about it, China. Read about China and where he thinks the most important and lasting business of humanity has been taking place. Noah didn’t know about that in his little prophecy in Genesis 9.
Windschuttle comments further and goes on to say, “The most prominent individual who but strides his historic stage—that’s Armesto’s historic stage—turned out to be those people most of us regarded as the losers and has-beens. For instance, he has several pages about Montezuma, but no mention of Ferdinand and Isabella. He devotes more space to Juan and Eva Peron than to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt combined. He has more pages on Mau Zedong and Joseph Stalin than any other political figures in the book, despite the fact that neither built a communist regime that survived more than one generation beyond his own death.
“Saint Elizabeth of Hungary gets a mention, but Elizabeth I of England gets none. As for Western intellectuals, neither Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, nor Immanuel Kant are discussed at all, neither Mozart, nor Michelangelo make the team. The index does not list the category ‘philosophy’ but does contain 13 pages of references to shamans and shamanism. This sort of historical revisionism tells us more about the deterioration of our own society, our rejection of God, and our denial of absolutes and our inability to think biblically than it does about what went on in the last 1,000 years.”
Slide 33
That brings me to point 7 which says: So we have exchanged a historically active, objective God of the Bible for the emotionally energizing, exciting God of postmodernism. We prefer to feel good rather than to think accurately. We prefer to be entertained rather than to face the challenges of sometimes harsh realities. We prefer to blame others or our environment for our problems rather than accepting responsibility for our decisions.
We prefer to be taken care of rather than take care of ourselves. We prefer to enslave ourselves to politicians who promise power but are not in a position to give the power, rather than to accept the risks of failure that are inherent in true freedom by forgetting the God of history. We become enslaved to the thinking of the cosmic system. That’s what it is when the Bible text says here, they serve the Baals and the Asherah, they enslave themselves to false religions.
Slide 34
Fernand Braudel, who is considered a well-known erudite modern historian, says “Men do not make history, rather, it is history above all that makes men and absolves them of blame.”
I will come back next time and make some further observations about this, but this is heavy stuff, if you haven’t read this kind of stuff before. But we have to think accurately about what is going on in the world around us.
How did it get this way? In simple terms, we got here because we rejected God. But there’s a lot more to that story. And if you’re a parent or a grandparent, then you have to deal with what this kind of garbage is being fed to your children and grandchildren from their friends, from the shows they watch, the music they listen to, the games they play, the teachers who are trained by the educational institutions that elevate these writers to great stature.
If you think coming to Bible class, listening to a message one hour a week is going to counter this, then go swim in the garbage with the rest of the civilization because one hour per week won’t do squat. We’re in a major battle, a major war, and we cannot have an attitude anything less than take no prisoners. We have to win it.
Now, the Lord is going to win it, but we have to do our part, and we may not win this till the Lord comes back. We have no idea. But we have to be engaged, and it starts with what goes on between our own ears and learning this so we can pass it on to our children and our grandchildren because this didn’t just happen; this took 300 years to happen. It’s not going to turn around in one election or two elections, or three elections, or a dozen elections. It’s going to be the battle of the next century if the Lord tarries, so we need to understand these things.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to study. We know that Your grace is good. We know that your Grace rescued Israel again and again when they had superficial repentance, when they were just crossing their fingers behind their back, when they were just saying something, anything just to get out from under the pile of oppression.
“But You, in your grace and goodness, give us so much more than we deserve. And we pray that You would do that in this nation. We are still a nation that supports Israel. We’re still a nation that sends out missionaries. We’re still a nation that supports the teaching of the Gospel, even though that has all reduced and is being reduced in the coming generations. But we do pray that You would intercede.
“And Father, above all, we pray that You would strengthen us in our inner man through God the Holy Spirit and Your Word, and we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”