Breaking Badly 2: The Book of Judges

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Speaker 1: So welcome back to Breaking Badly, our journey through one of the darkest and most honest books in the Bible, the Book of Judges. Last episode, the first episode the series, we talked about something surprising. The tragedy of Judges is not simply that Israel worship idols. It's that they stop seeking God. They stopped going to the place where God commanded them to meet him Shiloh. Instead. The book repeats one haunting phrase, everyone did what was right in his own eyes. And that right in his own eyes didn't include actually going to meet with God. That's just so telling of human nature, of my entrenched human nature. And of course they did what was right in their own eyes. We so desperately need to see the face of at least one person who is irrationally crazy about us, that we will do anything, even things we know are stupid. You only have one person who really is irrationally crazy about you, humanly speaking, and that's God. But when was the last time you actually felt it? A week ago, a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago. Has that become normalized for you? Well, same for Israel. And once that happened, everything else began to just unravel. But today we run into something even harder, because before we can even get to the stories of the judges, we have to confront one of the most troubling commands in the entire Bible. It's the command to destroy the Canaanites. Welcome to Gospel Rant Podcast and Doctor Bill Sinored YouTube channel. I'm your host, Doctor Bill Sinyard. We are free wherever you get good podcasts, of course on YouTube as well, so please subscribe. As always, one of the fastest ways you can help us grow is by leaving your comments below, and thank you sincerely for that, also for making Gospel Rant Podcast one of the top ten percent in the world. You for listening every week. We hope that it helps regularly to hear about God's love for the unlovable and loved and lovely and worthy and likely and hurting. And that's all of us on any given day. If we were just a little bit honest, none of us deserves God's love. I want to get right into this. After a brief worde from our sponsors, we'll be right back. This episode is really about a blind spot, a massive blind spot, the kind of blind spot that makes people stumble when they read the Old Testament and ask is the God of the Old Testament different from the God of the New Testament, Because in the early chapters of Israel's story, God commands Israel to enter the land of Canaan and dispossess the people who live there. Dispossess it's a virtual genocide. The land itself is actually quite small, roughly the size of modern New Jersey to give you an idea, But the events that happen there will share the entire history of redemption for the entire world. Write the larger story. To understand what is happening, we need to zoom out. The books from Deuteronomy through Kings form a single story. Scholars call it the Deuteronomistic history. These books emphasize several key themes. First, Israel's ultimate king will come from the tribe of Judah, from the line of David. Second, Israel must be cautious about foreign alliances and influence. Third, Israel is to obey God completely. Fourth, they must destroy all the idols, and fifth they must worship God in the place and manner he chooses. Today, we're going to focus on the third theme. Do what God says to do well. It sounds simple until God asks you to do something that seems outrageous. When Israel returns to the land of Canaan after the Exodus, this situation looked impossible. Remember, centuries earlier, the family of Jacob had left the land during a famine and gone down to Egypt. But they never asked God whether they should go. They simply did what seemed right. Now, more than four hundred years later, they're returning. But during those centuries the land did not set empty. Powerful nations moved in, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, Parasites, Havevites, Jebusites, seven nations stronger and more established than Israel. And they're in the land. They have all of the strategic advantages and maybe some moral advantages. Right, Israel left, these people took it over, and God commands Israel to drive them out. Yeah. In Deuteronomy seven, the language becomes very stark. Israel is told to caremn them, destroy them completely, vote them to destruction is what the word means completely. Well, doesn't that raise a serious question? I mean, how are we Christians today supposed to understand that command? And wonder why how God could do that? All? Right? Three things that it is not. Before we try to understand what the command is, it helps to clarify what it is not. First, this is not racial cleansing. The Bible never portrays one ethnic group as superior to another. Every human being is made in the image of God. The issue in Canaan was not race, It was allegiance. Throughout Israel's story, there are many non Israelites who become faithful followers of Yahweh Rahab. The Canaan ied Caleb, one of Israel's most faithful leaders, and even entire tribes of Israel had foreign ancestry. The issue was never ethnicity, it was loyalty to God. Second, this was not imperial expansion. If Israel had wanted prime real estate, they could have taken Egypt. Egypt was fertile, rich, easy to defend. Canaan none of those things. It was difficult to reign, semi arid, and constantly vulnerable to attack. Israel's land forced them to depend on God for rain and survival. That was the benefit of the land of Canaan. The land of Israel was you had to depend on God for survival, for rain, for water, for all of that stuff. This was not a land grab that was very strategic for Israel. And Third, this was not a righteous nation conquering an evil nation. Boy, I hear that a lot. It's not that Israel was deeply flawed. In fact, the most disturbing aspect of the conquest is that God uses a unfaithful people as his instrument of judgment. I'll say it again, Really, the most stunning aspect of this is that God uses an unrighteous people as the instrument for his righteousness. Israel was not chosen because of its righteousness. Israel was chosen because of God's faithfulness, God's promises. Israel was the instrument, all right? So what was it? The command to harem the Canaanites can be understood in three ways. One, it was judgment. The Canaanite religious system was extraordinarily brutal, dehumanizing, and degrading. Its worship practices included ritual prostitution and even child sacrifice. The gods themselves that they worship were portrayed as violent, sexually exploiting, morally corrupt, and the people became like the gods they worshiped. The Bible presents this moment as a specific act of the divine judgment in history not a template for future wars. Right, you can't leverage this to say we need to kill all the Canaanites today. I mean, it's not a template for future wars. It's not a general permission for religious violence at all. A specific moment directed by God for a specific time. This is a result of his courtroom. The same God who judged the world in the flood, the same God who judged Egypt and the plagues, the same God who judges the Senate the cross. God is not only loving, he is also in parallel with loving. He is just second. And we can see it as a redemption plan. There's another layer to the story. The conquest of Canaan was also part of God's larger redemption plan for the world. Throughout scripture, God repeatedly selects a people and places them in a strategic location to bless the names. Canaan is also that it's on two major north south trade routes. This is where everything crossed the world at the time. That in this region, larger region. If you control that land, you control those those arteries. Yep. So throughout scripture, God repeatedly selects the people in place in order to bless the nations, So Adam in the garden, knowing they arek Abraham and Canaan, and now Israel in the land. From this small strip of territory, God intends to launch a movement that will ultimately reach every tribe, language, and nation, including by the way, the Heights relative descendants of the Heites. But there's an enemy who knows the plan, and that enemy also knows how easily human beings are drawn towards destructive forms of worship, which is exactly what happened in Judges. Israel is going to quickly abandon Yahweh chase after the gods of Canaan. They're going to begin to look just like the Canaanites. Okay, back to Harem. See, even after all the explanation that I just gave you, it's still crazy uncomfortable because this command still feels troubling. Real people lived in those cities, women, children, families, and no explanation fully removes that tension, which leads me to this final point. Understanding this moment ultimately requires faith, not blind denial, no sugarcoating, no colored glasses, but heaven sourced trust in the character of God. The Bible insists that God is perfectly, just, perfectly good, far more good than we're comfortable of fully understanding or capable of understanding. It doesn't mean every question disappears. It doesn't. It just doesn't. But it does mean we recognize the limit of our perspective. We only see fragments of history. God sees the whole story, and there's one final thing that changes everything. The greatest act of judgment in history didn't follow the Canaanites. No, it fell on Jesus See at the Cross, The innocent son of God was devoted to destruction on behalf of sinners, the ultimate trem and out of that act came the greatest redemption the world has ever known, resurrection forgiveness. Do life, so listen. If God can bring salvation out of the worst injustice in history, the execution of his own son, then it's possible that his goodness extends far beyond what we can currently see, and that includes the heights. We don't know ultimately what God does with them, do we? He's the God of the living and the dead. Just saying this is a lot we don't know. Our greatest blind spot is not that God might be unjust. Our greatest blind spot is that we have a real heart time accepting how good He actually is. The more difficult question, I think, is this not just that God judged the heights, but that God didn't judge Israel.

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Speaker 2: That way.

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Speaker 1: They were hardly Jesus lookalikes me to personalize. And the crazy thing is not that some people go to hell don't go to heaven. It's that I'm going to heaven. It's inexplicable that I'm loved by this God with all the love in the universe. It's just can't figure it. But there it is. Faith, This heaven sourced faith that comes from God not for my reason, makes me see that goodness even when events don't make immediate sense. Heaven source faith makes me trust that God will ultimately make all things right.

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Speaker 2: Including that Haram hear me, including that Haram somehow beyond my ability to imagine or even attempt.

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Speaker 1: To explain, because it's troubling. Heaven sourced faith makes me experience His love for me, which again is it's something I didn't deserve or earn, and He gave it to me. It's the same category the Bible says He's going to wipe away every tear that includes the heights, that justice and mercy will both be perfectly satisfied even for the heights. I can't explain how or why or how I can't I come a couple of sentences. I'm done. But I'm learning about God and his justice and his love, and He's expressed it most powerfully on the Cross. And I can't understand the cross either. It's too good. All right, what's next? I'll tell you after this brief word from our sponsors. As I said in the last in the first of the series, they've got a new coming out. Good Enough Parent is gonna be part of a series Good Enough Parent, Good Enough Christian, good Enough Prayer. The first one is good Enough Parent because parenting is ridiculously hard. Too often Christian parents feel like they're messing things up, doing a poor job, ruining your kids. So I pulled together eighteen biblical neuroscientifically and formed very doable tips that can help no shame, no lecturing, bottom mind parents. If you are feeling the love of God for the unlovable, love the unlovely and worthy, the unlikely, the hurting, particularly shamed and frustrated parents, You parents who didn't have good parentings, yourself, your child is going to notice the difference full stop. Yep. So check it out. Get copies to your church, your Bible study, book club, neighborhood. The will thank you. Next time, we're going to be looking at the opening prologue of Judgment, where the unraveling begins. We will see once again what happens when God's people begin to do what is right in their own eyes. Thanks for listening to Breaking Badly. Get the word out of this podcast. We'll see you next time. Take heart, Child of God.