Testing Faith; Biblical Leaders
Judges 3:1–6
Judges Lesson #015
May 18, 2021
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, again we thank You that we have the privilege to come together this evening to reflect upon Your Word and for God the Holy Spirit to remind us of things we know, and to teach us new things.
“Father, we pray for this world in which we live. We are ambassadors from your heavenly court to this world, and we are to represent You and to proclaim the good news of the gospel. And we have lived in a nation that has honored You and has understood that we are grounded and founded upon a Judeo-Christian worldview. Yet that foundation is crumbling because of the rejection of Your Word and rejection of truth.
“We see this reflected in many, many different circumstances of nations taken down through history, but especially during this time period of the Judges that we are studying. We pray that we might learn some principles that are encouraging and strengthening as we study our way through this Book.
“And Father, too at this time, we continue to pray for Israel. We pray for those who are missionaries in Israel. We pray for a number of different organizations that are filled with Messianic Jewish missionaries who are giving the gospel to those with whom they serve in the IDF, the IAF, and in other branches, And Father, we are also praying for those who are just witnessing to their neighbors and to those in the Jewish community there that they would be given opportunities and that they would be able to clearly express the truth of the gospel. And Father, we pray for the peace of Jerusalem. And we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Slide 2
We are back in Judges. Tonight, we’re going to finish up where we were covering last time, the importance of testing of our faith, and then we’re going to spend most of the second half of the class tonight setting an Old Testament framework on biblical leadership. That’s important to make that distinction, because a lot of people want to jump to the New Testament when they’re in the Old Testament.
They didn’t know anything about the New Testament back then, so we’re going to spend a little time looking at those things. We’ll learn a few things we can apply to leadership and the selection of leaders even in our time.
Slide 3
We are looking at this summary section in Judges, Judges 1:1–3:6 is your overview introduction where we learn that the theme of Judges is going to focus on the fact that the nation is going to fall from spiritual victory to spiritual defeat. And they’re going to be transformed by their negative volition, their rejection of God, their rejection of truth. Literally, it’s more than rejection; it is that they abandoned God.
The language of the text is extremely strong. They abandoned God, and they compromised, and the result is the nation is defeated. Then it just goes through these cycles, deteriorating cycles.
Each cycle is worse than the one before. Each leader is less competent than the one before. And we see a picture of how over a period of about 300 years, a culture is transformed as they become completely influenced by the pagan culture around them, and that’s exactly what we have seen in our country.
When you step back, and you look on the broad sweep of history. In the last 500 years since couple of years ago in 2017, we had the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. So we’ve had 500 years. And we saw what was built on that foundation. That really reached its crowning glory in the founding documents of the United States, and we see it also in the Christian civilization that is spread by the British Empire in the 19th century.
Now that doesn’t mean that they did everything right. Nobody’s claiming that. But they were building, and as each decade went by, as each century went by, there was vast improvement.
Then the seeds of destruction were laid starting in the late 1500s and early 1600s in what was the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the first, shall we say, the first little shoots of green growth that came out of the soil of the Renaissance. And in the Renaissance and then in the Enlightenment you see those who are not subordinate to the authority of Scripture moving to expand and develop their understanding of the authority of the human mind and building an autonomous system to understand reality apart from revelation.
That reaches its full flowering of the Enlightenment by the end of the 19th century and then it collapses. It’s bankrupt. Man cannot find the answers to the profound questions of life apart from revelation. The profound questions of life are where did we come from? Where we going? What is our purpose? Is there life after death? And if there is life after death, how do we make sure that we end up in the best place possible?
Those are the profound questions. And when you attempt to answer them apart from revelation, than it just breeds paganism, and it puts a culture back into slavery.
Most of us didn’t even know what postmodernism was until about thirty years ago. Some people had read the terminology in relation maybe to architecture or art, if they were paying attention somewhat earlier than that, but looking back on it, we turned that corner from modernism to postmodernism at the beginning of the 20th century starting in 1900. And now postmodernism is going bankrupt, and its stepchild is social justice theory—that’s the technical term—social justice theory for this new worldview that comes from the writings of the people on that side of the issue.
So that is what is taking over, and it’s absolute chaos, and it is really a worldview that has all of its affinities with Marxism, and none of them with biblical truth. We have turned that corner. This is not anything new since we have different labels now, but we’ve gone through the same kinds of cycles over and over again in civilization ever since the time before the Flood. It got so evil, so horrible, that God had to destroy every human being other than the immediate family of Noah.
It happened again in a horrible way at the Tower of Babel. God judged it by scattering the people with languages, and it happened in different civilizations numerous times before Christ and after Christ. It’s not going to end until the Lord comes back, because God is demonstrating something to all of humanity and to the angels, that independence from God, no matter how moral or ethical or high sounding the value system, it always leads to chaos and destruction and death, no matter what else is going on. It is all to demonstrate the sinfulness and the corruption of sin.
That’s what we see in the Book of Judges. It is teaching us about how corrupting and destructive sin is.
Slide 3
So we go through these divisions. The introduction— we’re about to finish that tonight—it summarizes what is going to take place in the rest of the Book. From Judges 3:7–16:31, we see the paganization of the leadership. That’s why I’m going to take some time to talk about what God has said about leadership prior to this. Then we will have these two appendices at the end of the Book, which demonstrate that when a culture collapses and it is collapsing into paganism, it affects every stratum of society. It doesn’t just affect the leadership; it affects the people. It affects the priesthood. It affects everybody.
When we get into this kind of a situation or when any culture gets into this kind of a situation and circumstance, it’s just a mess and everybody is impacted. The leaders that we have I think are flawed. Some are deeply flawed. But they’re all flawed, much more so than we had seen in the past. And that is because they are the product of the same culture.
That’s the same thing we’re going to see as we get into an analysis of the leaders during the period of the Judges—that is they are all flawed. As we progress, we’re going to see that they’re more deeply flawed. And there are some significant consequences because of that. So that’s where we are finishing up the introduction of the first six verses or so of Judges 3.
Slide 4
Just to remind you, in Judges 3:1–4 that now that Israel has compromised and they have failed, God is going to use that to bring discipline upon them. And it is also designed to test them in the future. He says [Judges 3:1], “Now these are the nations which the Lord left, that He might test Israel by them …” The word for test is the word nasah, which is used thirty-six times in the Old Testament and three times in Judges, all in this location. Then Judges 3:4 says, “And they were left, that He might test Israel by them, to know whether they would obey the commandments of the Lord, which He had commanded their fathers by the hand of Moses.”
Slide 5
So last time we went through ten different tests in ten different points. But we examined out of the tenth point, the test that God brought into the life of Abraham. And just to quickly summarize what we’ve learned about testing:
Point one, testing is designed to evaluate faith. It is to evaluate our faith. We get that out of James 1:2–4. It is designed to evaluate faith, to develop faith, and to recall us to a walk with the Lord if we have not been walking with the Lord, or to bring divine discipline.
So, there are really four purposes there: one to evaluate our faith. And the second is to develop faith, because as we’re tested, if we respond biblically to the test, then our faith is going to be strengthened, and we will endure, and our faith will be strengthened, and that will lead to spiritual maturity. So, the test evaluates that faith and demonstrates what’s there. It develops our faith.
If we’re not walking with the Lord, and we hit these tests, they’re design to get our attention, and some of us need to be whacked up the side of the head with a 2×4 every now and then just to get our attention. It is to bring us back to a walk with the Lord. And sometimes it is to bring divine discipline upon us.
Second point. God will leave the Canaanites there in the land to test them, so that they will learn to respond correctly in war. For example, we read in Judges 3:2 that this was only so that the generations of the children of Israel might be taught to know war. At least those who had not formerly known it, that they were going to need to learn how to fight their enemies.
They’re going to need to learn how to trust God in the midst of the war, in the midst of the cherem war that God had called Israel to carry out. He has never rescinded His command to kill and destroy all of the Canaanites. But He has said He’s not going to remove them all because they were left there to test them and to teach the next generation how to fight.
Ultimately in Scripture that means to teach them to depend upon the Lord, to learn how to pray and express their petitions to the Lord and to force them to do this even though this isn’t their inclination.
Third point. Tests are always to determine if we will obey God. That’s just boiling it all down to the basics. The test is designed to determine: Are you going to obey God or not? Are you going to do what the Scripture says or not? That’s what it is. Every situation, every time we have a volitional choice it is to see:
How are we going to respond to somebody who cuts us off in traffic?
How are we going to respond to a health situation?
How are we going to respond to a financial situation?
How are we going to respond to getting flooded out of our house or something like that?
How are we going to respond to just having a bad day, and a lot of things don’t go the way we want them to go?
How do we respond to these things?
We need to do it the way God says to do it, or we do it from the power of our sin nature. So, the test is always to determine if we will walk with the Lord or not.
Fourth point. Tests are designed to develop our faith, to learn to trust God, and to grow spiritually. That’s the focal point.
Fifth point. These tribes that surround them want to wipe them off the face of the Earth: the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Girgashites, all the others, the stalactites and stalagmites want to wipe them off the face of the Earth. Some things don’t change.
Right now, we have a very similar situation from Hamas and the Arabs. They’re not Palestinians; there’s no such thing as a Palestinian. This is a bogus term. The term Palestine was forced upon this area of the Middle East by the emperor Hadrian, who was so frustrated with the rebellious Jews there. Hadrian came along after Jerusalem had been destroyed, the temple had been destroyed in AD 70, and you had a second Jewish rebellion that took place between about AD 133 and 135. There were about 700,000 or 800,000 Jews that were killed in that rebellion.
Hadrian was so angry about it. One of the things that started it was that he started building a Roman city in the heart of what had been Jerusalem. And he called it Aelia Capitolina. Aelia was the family name for Hadrian’s family. Capitolina was referring to the city. And he imposed that name on it.
Then after the war, instead of calling it Israel, he called its Syro-Palestine. It was sort of a play on words because Palestine sounded like Philistine, and the Philistines were great sea peoples. The word also had the idea possibly of being related to a Greek word for a wrestler. And of course, Jacob was the one who wrestled with God, so it’s a pun. The Greeks love puns, and so that’s where that term came from. That name was imposed upon that land.
And up until Yasser Arafat, the founder of the PLO, started co-opting that term in the mid-1960s, it had always referred to the Jewish homeland and to the Jews. In fact, during World War II, there was a Palestinian brigade in the British Army, and it was all Jews. So, in fact, the number of Arabs that lived in Israel or lived in that area in the 19th century was minimal.
In fact, in almost every decade there were travelers, French travelers, German travelers, American travelers. Mark Twain’s quote is one of the most famous, that goes into it, and they talk about how barren it is, how empty it is, how there are very few people that are living in the land.
What happened toward the end of the 19th century was as Jews were starting to get out of Russia and other areas where there was antisemitism, the Ottomans wanted people to work. So you have this dynamic going on where the Jews are going back to the land. They were reclaiming the land very slowly. It was arduous work, and they were not farmers or land workers. They were mostly cobblers and bankers and financiers, and they had other trades.
When they started to drain the swamps and turn some of the land into profitable agricultural land, the Ottomans wanted workers. This is a self-destructive policy of nations. Let’s bring in immigrants to do the hard labor. And so, they brought in Moslems.
Remember the Ottomans had invaded into southeastern Europe, and so you have some of the territories in the Balkans that are Moslem now, and so they were bringing in Serbians and Bosnians and others from that area. They were bringing in Egyptians. They were bringing in Greeks. They were bringing in Turks. They were bringing in all kinds of people from these other areas because they didn’t have an indigenous population that would do labor.
So, they were bringing them in and that’s the background for those who are living in Israel today. The Arab Muslim population there is not pure Arab today; they are a mix from all these other groups that brought them in to labor. Those people hate Israel, the Jews, and want to get them out just like the enemies that God left in the time of the judges. So, this is going to test them.
Slide 6
We looked last time at the whole issue of temptation and testing. Down at the tenth point, as I said a minute ago, we looked or started to look at illustrations of God’s testing in Israel in the Old Testament. The first example was that of Abraham. God decided to test Abraham in Genesis 22:1 and test him by doing something that was completely out of character for God, to see if Abraham would still trust Him. He told Abraham he wanted him to take Isaac, his son, the promised seed, and take him to Mount Moriah, which is where the temple mount exists today. And to take him there and to put him on an altar and sacrifice him.
Abraham is going to trust Him, because all these tests that we talked about last time were related to those promises God made to Abraham: I’m going to give you a seed and I’m going to give you this land. So, things came along that challenged whether Abraham would get the land or ever have a son. It was all a test to see if Abraham would truly trust God, and so Abraham didn’t bat an eye. He said, “yes sir, yes sir, three bags full,” and he took off for Mount Moriah with Isaac.
Isaac was probably about in his 20s or 30s. But when he got there, Isaac looked around and said, well, where’s the sacrifice? We didn’t bring a lamb with us. And by that point, he’s beginning to get the picture. Abraham explained it to him, tied him to the altar and pulled out his sacrificial knife and was inches from cutting Isaac’s throat when Gods stayed his hand.
Abraham passed the test, and the New Testament tells us that Abraham knew that if he killed Isaac, God would bring him back from the dead because God had told him that he would be the one who through whom the seed promise would be given.
That’s the great example of faith for us. Faith is when the Word of God is more real to us than our emotions, than our experiences, than our opinions, and the opinions of all the people around us. Faith is depending upon God because God said it.
Slide 7
According to Hebrews 11:10, Abraham understood that he was looking for something in the future, “the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”
Slide 8
The next time we have an example of God testing Israel is in Exodus 15:25 where we read “Then, he—that’s Moses—cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree; and he threw it into the waters, and the waters became sweet. There He made for them a statute and a regulation, and there He tested them.” That is, God tested Israel.
So, let’s turn to Exodus 15. We’re going to walk through two or three chapters here in Exodus. For God is going to test the exodus generation, those who came out from Egypt, to see if they are going to obey Him. So, let’s just sort of work our way through these.
We’re not going to go through verse by verse for every chapter, but we’re going to hit the high points. It’s important to turn to Exodus 15:1. The context is that in Exodus 14, God parted the waters of the Red Sea, and that the entire nation of Israel, two to three million of them, are coming across the dried bed of the Red Sea. It’s not just a miracle of parting the waters; it’s a miracle of drying out the soil underneath so that they could walk across and not get wet, not get stuck in the mud, or anything of that nature. This parting must have been extremely wide because to get that many people across it might have been as wide as maybe a half a mile or maybe a mile. I don’t know. I haven’t done that mathematics on it, but to get that many people across in a relatively short amount of time it would have to be quite wide.
So, they made it across and then then God had a pillar of fire behind them that held back the Egyptian army. Then the Egyptians came after them, but once they got into the trap, that is into the middle of the Red Sea with the walls of water on each side, then God collapsed the water and the Egyptian army, their chariot corps, everything was destroyed, all of their top military leaders, everything is gone.
I don’t know if Pharaoh went. There’s a point at which the text says that Pharaoh did this, Pharaoh and his army, Pharaoh and his army, and then, all of a sudden it just says, “his army.” That’s when they start pursuing them through the Red Sea. There’s one place in the psalms that mentions Pharaoh going into the Red Sea. It could be poetic, and it could be just talking about Pharaoh as the representative of his army. There’s no indication of a pharaoh being wiped out like that, dying like that in in the record that we know of in Egyptian history right now, but it’s not necessary.
What happened in that event with those ten plagues, absolutely destroyed the infrastructure. Even if you define the infrastructure the way our current president is defining the infrastructure, because that includes everything that you can possibly imagine. It was all wiped out by these plagues. We don’t see Egypt mentioned again as a power for 500 years in the Old Testament. As a result of that, Israel has seen this incredible victory.
At the end of the chapter, Exodus 14:31, we read, “Thus Israel saw the great work which the Lord had done in Egypt; so, the people feared the Lord, and believed the Lord and his servant Moses.” That’s an important phrase to pay attention to. They feared the Lord. The way this is structured it seems like believing the Lord is a consequence of fearing the Lord. We will come back to that later.
So, they feared the Lord. That means more than that. It’s not being afraid; it is recognizing the authority of God, respecting it, and recognizing that when God speaks, you have to ask “how high?” on the way up. You’re completely oriented to His authority. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last long.
But what happens in Exodus 15 down to the passage that we’re looking at, which is down in Exodus 15:22, that whole section from Exodus 15:1–21, is a song of praise to God for delivering them. So they are at the emotional high point. Can you imagine how they must have felt as they stand there watching God destroy the enemy? They are more excited than any group of fans watching their home team win the Super Bowl. They were just beside themselves, and they have this great victory celebration for the Lord.
Slide 9
Then in this section, it starts off where Moses says [Exodus 15:1], “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider He has thrown into the sea!” Then he says [Exodus 15:2], “The Lord is my strength and my song,—that’s what I wanted to focus on; there’s a recognition that God is our strength, and then because He is their strength, they will sing this song of praise to God—and He has become my salvation.” Now that’s not salvation for eternity. That’s deliverance from what appeared to be certain death. And if not death, then slavery.
Slide 10
In Exodus 15:11 and 12, as part of the song, Moses says, “Who is like You, O Lord, among the gods?” Among the elohim. Remember our study when we talked about the angelic revolt that this term elohim is a generic term for “gods,” and it is applied to the angels and the fallen angels, because all of the angels are called “the sons of elohim, bene ha elohim, or bene elohim, or bene elim, but it is always related that way.
And then we looked at several psalms. They pointed out that this council of the angels that still meets in Heaven that we’ve seen in Job 1, Job 2, and other psalms, and that the angels are referred to as the elohim.
These are the ones, according to Deuteronomy 32, the fallen angels are the ones that impersonate the gods of the heathens. I showed you a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost a couple of weeks ago where he had the theological insight to name the fallen angels the names of all the pagan deities of Moloch and Asherah and Baal, and all of these.
So, I wanted to point this out in this psalm; Moses is saying [Exodus 15:11], “Who is like You, O Lord, among the gods [among all of the angels]?”—because they are not other gods as God is. He’s unique. Yahweh Elohim is unique. He is the Creator-God of all the angels. It says [Exodus 15:11], “Who is like You, glorious in holiness,—in Your uniqueness, in Your distinctiveness; that’s what holy means—fearful in praises, doing wonders?” [Exodus 15:12], “You stretched out Your right hand; the earth swallowed them.”
Slide 11
And then we come down to Exodus 15:22, “So Moses brought Israel from the Red Sea; then they went out into the Wilderness of Shur.—as they’re traveling probably south to southeast in the Sinai Peninsula—And they went three days in the wilderness and found no water.” So, they probably had water with them that they were carrying. It doesn’t say they’re going three days without water, but they’re running out of water, and they’ve gone three days and they have not been able to resupply. And 3 million people can drink a lot of water. So you can imagine how thirsty they’re becoming. When people get thirsty, they start grumbling and complaining and griping, and they are putting the pressure on Moses.
They come to an area where the springs are there. There’s water, but it’s bitter water. It’s marah. Marah is the Hebrew word for bitter, and that’s the name they have for the springs. It was probably because of this that that name was attached to these springs. Exodus 15:23 “Now when they came to Marah, they could not drink the waters of Marah, for they were bitter. Therefore the name of it was called Marah.”
Slide 12
Exodus 15:24, “And the people complained against Moses.” Moses is the humblest man in the Bible; that’s what Numbers says. He is humble because he recognizes he’s under the authority of God. He submitted to the authority of God. That’s what humility is. Jesus Christ humbled Himself to the point of death. He was obeying God to go to the Cross.
So, Moses is catching all the flak from everybody. They are blaming him. They are in rebellion against him. And they want to know what they are going to drink. Exodus 15:25: “So he cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree. When he cast that tree into the waters, the waters were made sweet. There He made a statute and an ordinance for them, and there He tested them.” That is, God tested them.
What’s He doing? He’s testing their faith. Do you have faith? Are you going to trust Me above your senses? You’ve come to this place; you’re running out of water. Are you going to trust Me to provide water? You’ve come to an oasis, but the waters are bitter, so are you going to trust me to provide water for You? And they of course failed that test.
Slide 13
In Exodus 15:26 we read, God applying the principle to them, He says, “if you diligently heed the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to his commandments and keep all His statutes,—what does he say? He says, do what’s right. Listen to the commandments. Listen to the teaching. Keep His statutes. Then God will do something.
He says—I will put none of the diseases on you which have brought which I have brought on the Egyptians.” So that’s not talking about every disease to colds, the viruses, the run-of-the-mill things; this is talking about the plagues that God brought on Egypt. Those specific things. I’m not going to put any of those on you which I brought on the Egyptians. Exodus 15:26c, “For I am the Lord who heals you.”
One of the reasons I say that is every now and then, every five or six years, somebody new comes along, discovers the Old Testament, discovers this verse and connects it to the dietary laws and says, “see, if you have a diet that follows the diet of basically what the Jews would eat in the Sinai, then you will be healthy, and you won’t have any diseases”. And everybody gets all excited about it. But they haven’t read the text very well because it doesn’t have anything to do with health. It doesn’t have anything to do with learning how to cook the food properly. That’s always what you get in these books.
I remember one time telling somebody about that about twenty years ago, and they were so excited about some book that came out. And I said, well give it to me; let me read it. I read the forward, and that’s exactly what he was saying. But in Acts 10, God lowers this sheet to Peter, and he says it’s all clean, now you can eat it all. You can eat the scallops, and you can eat the shrimp and the lobster and the crawfish and the pigs and everything else. It’s all clean.
Now God didn’t give him a cookbook. He didn’t give him instructions on how to properly skin and eviscerate all the different animals and how to properly prepare the meat and refrigerate everything else. It had nothing whatsoever to do with its health value. God is making a statement here that if you obey Me, this won’t happen because I’m not going to have to bring disciplining judgment on you for your rebelliousness.
Slide 14
Exodus 15:27–16:1, “Then they came to Elim [the next oasis], where there were twelve wells of water and seventy palm trees; so they camped there by the waters. And they journeyed from Elim,—this is the second test that comes up in Exodus 16—and all the congregation of the children of Israel came to the Wilderness of Sin.” It’s not sin. It’s not the desert where everybody was sinning. It’s the root of the word Sinai. So it was Sin. They come to the wilderness of Sin [Exodus 16:1], “which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they departed from the land of Egypt.”
Slide 15
Exodus 16:2, “Then the whole congregation of the children of Israel complained against Moses.” Moses is catching their negative, bitter, angry attitudes all the time, and now they just say [Exodus16:3], “ ‘Oh, that we died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt.’ ” Why didn’t God just kill us? I mean, they’re really depressed and discouraged and upset. No faith in God at all, but He’s just testing them again. And they said [Exodus 16:3], “ ‘when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’ ”
Slide 16
[Exodus 16:4], “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people should go out and gather day’s portion every day, that I may test them.’ ” Every day there’s a test to trust God to provide their what? Their daily bread. Where do we hear that phrase? Our Lord picks it up in the “Lord’s Prayer”, which is really the Disciples’ Prayer in Matthew 5. “Give us this day our daily bread.” We are to trust God day-by-day to provide for us. But what’s the point? “Whether they will walk in My instruction”, for that’s the purpose of that test, to walk in that instruction.
Slide 17
Now we’re going to skip over to Deuteronomy 8. Here we get another interpretation via Moses, but it’s from God on what was going on in this situation. So, in Deuteronomy 8:2—we’re going to be in and out of Deuteronomy a couple of times tonight before it’s all over with because Deuteronomy is the background for most of what happens in the rest of the Old Testament.
So, in Deuteronomy 8:1, it begins, “Every commandment which I command you today you must be careful to observe, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers.” Remember Deuteronomy is Moses’ last message to the nation before he is going to go up on Mount Nebo, and God is going to take him. Moses will die on Mount Nebo.
This is his last word and testimony, as it were, to the nation. He is reminding them of everything that God has said. So it’s sort of a summary of the Law, summary of all the things that God has told them. Because after Moses goes up on Mount Nebo and dies, then Joshua is in command, and Joshua is going to take them across the Jordan River, and they’re going to enter into the land of Israel and start taking it away from the Canaanites.
So, he says, if you’re going to go in and you’re going to live and possess the land and enjoy it, you have to observe the Law. Now the land is yours, but you can’t enjoy it unless you’re obedient. That’s the same thing that’s true for all of history. Israel has the title deed to that land by God.
That’s due to the Abrahamic Covenant, which is unconditional. But the Mosaic Covenant said, when you go into the land, these are the rules. And if you don’t follow the rules, I’m going to kick you out of the land until you learn to obey the rules. And then when you walk with Me and depend upon Me, then you will enjoy all the benefits of the land. So it isn’t that God came along and after they rejected Jesus that God took them out of land and said, well, I’m going to give this to somebody else. But that was a distortion of a passage in the Gospels where Christ was saying to that generation, the leaders of that generation, that if you do this, then I will take the land from you and give it to another nation.
Now the church is not another nation. We are not a nation. He was saying he was going to take it away from the nation of Israel at that time and give it to another nation of Israel that comes along later in history. But the purpose Moses talks about in Deuteronomy 8:2 is what happened in those forty years in the wilderness, “And you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you,” —that is, teach you to submit to God’s authority.
How did He do it? By testing them. He humbled them by testing them. That’s how we should understand the participle there [Deuteronomy 8:2], “to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.” So the tests are to determine if they would obey God and trust God and grow spiritually.
Slide 18
In the next few verses Moses says [Deuteronomy 8:3], “So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone.” So, everything that was happening in the wilderness was a testing time. Every day was a testing moment, and God was testing them and teaching them.
The purpose for all these tests was to teach them to depend upon God, and this test was that they needed to learn that “man shall not live by bread alone”. You’ve heard that somewhere before, I think: “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God”.
[Deuteronomy 8:4–5], “Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you.” That word there ‘ana was translated “humble”, it can also be “afflict or oppress,” because what happens to the afflicted or the oppressed is that they learn to submit to God’s authority. So, this helps us understand God’s purpose for testing.
Slide 19
Then one more, in Deuteronomy 13:3, which we will come back to when we get to the end of this lesson tonight, is that he refers to the fact that there are going to be dreamers of dreams and prophets come along, and they’re going to say this, and they’re going to say that, and they’re going to perform miracles, and they’re going to predict the future. It’s going to come true. And they’re going to have signs and wonders. And they’re actually going to heal people.
God says it’s to test you; to see if you’re going to trust Me as opposed to the fact that this person came along and truly healed somebody. We get a lot of people in certain movements that claim to be healing people, and people claim to be healed. One of the mistakes that I think non-charismatic’s make is to say, “Well now, that was just a fake out. You really didn’t get healed.” According to this verse, these fakers are actually going to come along and heal people.
And it’s to test you. Is depending upon God and His Word more real to you than your experience? And so, God says [Deuteronomy 13:3], “you should not listen to the words of that prophet or the dreamer of dreams; for the Lord your God is testing you to find out if you love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul.” Are you willing to trust God even though somebody comes along and actually heals somebody?
Or, let’s put it in the middle of the Tribulation after the two witnesses have been killed and then they come back from the dead. Then you have the Antichrist, and he is killed, and he comes back from the dead. Everybody’s going to say, it must be God’s stamp of approval on this leader. And it’s a test to see if you’re going to follow what the Word of God says, or whether you are going to follow the experience of seeing somebody healed, seeing some miracle, which is validated only by the accuracy of the truth that is taught by that person. The text goes on to say, if that person teaches something that is contrary to the Law of Moses, then you will know that they are a fake, they’re a fraud. They may have actually healed somebody, but they are a fraud because what they say is more important than what they do. So, you must look at that.
Slide 20
To wrap up all of that was my eleventh point, which was: Just as God left enemies inside the land to be a source of temptation or testing to Israel, God has left us with our very own little sin nature, which is just as active now as it was before we were saved, to test us to see if we’re going to learn to obey the Lord or not. So, we must deal with that every single day. Just as the Israelites after Judges 2 have to deal with the presence of the Canaanites every single day. So what happens?
Slide 21
In Judges 3:6 we read: “And they took—that is, the Israelites took—their daughters to be their wives—“their daughters” refers to the Canaanites. So they are going to intermarry with the Canaanites; “they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons.” In other words, so the Jews are giving their daughters to marry men who are Canaanites, and their sons are marrying their women. So it’s complete intermarriage, working both ways. This is going to cause the Israelites to completely assimilate to the Canaanites.
The result is what we see in Judges 3:7 where it says, “So the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord.” Now, what did I tell you it means when we read this passage, this type of language in the Old Testament, that so-and-so did evil in the sight of the Lord? About 98% of the time, the next sentence says something about idolatry.
If you were going to define evil, evil is very simple. It is anything that’s related to substituting something for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for obedience to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s what happens in the Garden; Eve listens to the serpent, and she’s obeying the serpent instead of God and that’s evil because that’s idolatry. Because she is worshipping something other than the God of the Bible. So, that’s the core of what evil is.
Evil can manifest itself in morality. It can manifest itself in a lot of religions that focus on good things, and rituals, and giving to the poor, and helping the underprivileged, and feeding the poor, and healing the sick, and all these kinds of wonderful things. But it doesn’t validate their evil theology, which is a rebellion against God. So those are all forms of idolatry. The result is [Judges 3:7], “So the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord. They abandoned the Lord their God, and enslaved themselves to the Baals and the Asherahs.”
Slide 22
This is where we are. One thing we must remember is from Deuteronomy 32:17; whenever we see these false gods mentioned, we have to remember this. These false gods, the word “god” is elohim, but they’re demon gods. They are not just something made from wood, or some image made out of stone or metal. There is a demon behind that. These false gods are demons.
Deuteronomy 32:17 says, “They sacrificed to demons—that’s demon-elohim,—not to God, to gods—elohim—so clearly the text is putting demon and elohim together. They are false gods—to demon elohim they did not know, to new gods—new elohims,—new arrivals that your fathers did not fear.” Always keep that in mind.
This is the spiritual background of what’s happening in Judges, that they are worshipping demonism. Whether it’s overt demonism, which I think is just a camouflage, the church of Satan and everything else. Some of the worst demonism going on in this country is happening by people who have rejected the existence of God, and rejected everything in the Bible, and they are offering a complete alternative to everything that Scripture says. They want to substitute a different worldview.
Slide 23
Now that brings us to the end of the opening section. And we’re going to get started in the next section on leadership. And I’ve got a good bit to cover in terms of leadership, but I’m going to go ahead and start it because Judges 3:7 introduces our first leader. So we must understand a few things about what the Bible teaches about standards for leaders.
Slide 24
What does the Bible teach about standards for leaders? The first point is that the leaders in Judges do not fit the biblical standards for leaders in the Old Testament. That’s an important point, because when you get a culture that is enmeshed in paganism, everybody in every strata in that culture is infected with paganism.
So, the leaders that you get are going to be flawed because they are not going to come out of it following the guidelines for the selection of elders or deacons in 1 Timothy 3 or in Titus 1. They’re not going to be models of integrity. They don’t even fit the model of Exodus 18, which is when Moses selects leaders for Israel. That’s going to be part of the difference that we see going on here.
So, the question that we should ask ourselves is that as we look at this panorama of these judges and how they failed to meet the standards set forth in Scripture, what does that tell us? That’s the question. Why is God telling us this? Why is God telling us all about these people?
If we looked at Jephthah, and we look at Gideon to a large degree, if we look at Jephthah, it’s even worse, and Samson is the worst. Jephthah and Samson don’t have a whole lot said about them that’s positive. Samson has nothing said about him that’s positive. Then you get to Hebrews 11, and they are listed there, not because they are great examples of spiritual maturity; they are there because at some critical point in time in their lives, they trusted God. They had an act of faith.
But God is not putting His stamp of approval on everything about them. He is not elevating them and saying, see you need to go live your life like Samson or you need to go live your life like Jephthah or like Gideon, or Deborah, or Barak. They are not here to give us examples of how we should live. They’re telling us what happened, and they illustrate the failures of a culture that assimilates to paganism. So, this is what God is teaching here. It’s a very negative message in this book. But we need to learn it because we’re living in it. This is where we are today.
Slide 25
So, let’s go back to Exodus 18. I just want to point out a few things in this, and then we’ll come back and look at some other things next time. In Exodus 18, the scenario is that Moses’ father-in-law realizes that Moses is trying to do everything and that he needs to create a team of leaders that can handle a lot of his circumstances and situations without him having to deal with every little problem and every little issue that comes along.
So, in Exodus 18:19–20, this is the advice of Jethro, his father-in-law. He says, “Listen to my voice; I will give you counsel, and God will be with you: Stand before God for the people, so that you may bring the difficulties to God.—you are to represent the people to God, and then he begins—And you shall teach them the statutes and the laws, and show them the way in which they must walk and the work they must do.”
That’s Moses’ job description. He represents the people to God, and in that way he’s functioning like a priest and giving instructions on the Law. And then it goes on. In Exodus 18:21 he says, “Moreover, you shall select from all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them to be rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.”
Slide 26
So, you have these four criteria: The first one is they are to be able men. Now the description of this in the Hebrew says a lot more than what we read when we read “able men.” It’s a very strong Hebrew expression. The NET translation translates it as “capable man.” They’re men who know how to get things done. They are men who have accomplished things already in their life. They are not necessarily older men. They’re going to be in the ages of probably 35 to 60. And they are already being recognized as someone with leadership potential as an influential person in the community. They’ve lived life. They’ve had some failures, and they’ve had some successes, and they’ve learned from their failures.
I remember in church where I was a candidate some thirty plus years ago that as I was having a conference call with the leaders in the church, three of these men were all entrepreneurs. One of them who was really sharp, worked with organizations to develop leaders within their organizations. And the second question he asked me was: tell me about your failures. How have you failed and what did you learn? That was a wise question because we learn more from our failures than our successes.
So that’s what they’re looking for is those who have failed. Those who understand the difficulties and the issues that people face in life. They are someone you could go to for advice.
The phrase here is the phrase ’anshi-chayil; anshi means “men” and chayil is often translated something like valor. But it’s often translated someone who’s strong or someone who has power.
Slide 27
Two verses that use it in those ways are 2 Samuel 22:33, and in David’s psalm, he says, “God is my strength and power.” That’s chayil. It has to do with power; somebody who’s a strong, solid leader. Habakkuk 3:19, “The Lord God is my strength.”
So, both of these passages emphasize that chayil, in some sense, comes from God, and He is the One who is our strength. It is a word that is used when it’s describing men, in some contexts, it means they are valiant warriors. They are strong; they are prepared for war, and they are good fighters. You find that in Deuteronomy 3:18; 2 Kings 24:16, and Jeremiah 48:14.
In Exodus 18, in both verses 21 and then later in verse 25 when it simply says Moses chose able men—the same phrase—it means those who are able to lead the people, able to judge. It uses the same word that we find in the Book of Judges. In 1 Kings 1:52 it says it’s someone who is righteous in their behavior. So that’s part of this. He is a man of strength with leadership potential.
Slide 28
Before we close, I just want to talk about the counter part of this. This is really interesting. In doing a word study on this, because many of us are familiar with the praise of the godly woman in Proverbs 31:10. And this is the feminine form of this phrase, and it’s the same phrase; it’s translated a virtuous wife. Now that’s in the New King James, and the concept of virtue for us is a little different from what it was in the 16th or 17th century from when this was translated.
The NET translates it, “Who can find a wife of noble character?” It describes a woman who is extremely capable. She can get things done. She can run the household, handle all the business of the household. If it’s a larger household, she can run the estate.
It has the idea that comes across from, if you go back 500 or 600 years, the late Middle Ages, early modern period, the role of a true aristocrat of integrity where you have the lord of the manor. And lord of the manor oversees the village, and it’s his responsibility to take care of all the villagers. He probably employs most of the villagers. If people are sick, he is going to send people to take care of them. If someone dies, he will visit the family. It looks at the village as the extended family of the nobleman. So this is a lot of that kind of idea.
So, the wife is one who can run the estate and take care of people and provide for people. She is wise and helpful and that is how it is used in Proverbs 31:10 as well as in Proverbs 12:4.
Slide 29
Proverbs 12:4, “An excellent wife—that’s the word “excellent” that’s translated in the New King James version as this word chayil—an excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who causes shame is like rottenness in his bones.” It’s translated in the NET as “A noble wife is the crown of her husband.”
So first of all, this is a man who is capable. He is a man who has integrity. He is a man who knows how to get things done, and he understands the problems and issues that people have. He is able to give them guidance and leadership. So, this is the first qualification of a leader that we see in Deuteronomy 18. We’ll come back to look at the next three next time.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to look at these issues in the Scripture and how they relate to us and our understanding of things. And to be able to apply these blueprints of leadership not only to the time of the Judges to evaluate the leaders in the time of the Judges, but also to evaluate our own lives, our own leadership, and those within our congregation. So, Father, we pray that You would give us guidance, wisdom, and skill in applying these things. In Christ’s name, amen.”