Starting Well

A.N.: I preached this as a sermon on the 2nd February 2014, on the passage Judges 1:1-2:5. This blog post is not word-for-word exactly what I said in front of the congregation.

Since the government scrapped January exams, I've had to sit mocks for all of my subjects in class instead. There's a phenomenon known to my friends and I surrounding exams, particularly your handwriting during exams. At the start of the exam, your handwriting is neat and legible, but by the time you reach the end of the exam and time has started to run out, you start to panic more and your handwriting becomes worse and worse until it might as well have been chiselled into a piece of rock for all that you can make out what it says.

This kind of flow from good to awful is what is going on in this passage of Judges. The Israelites are entering the Promised Land, and in order to live there they must first drive out the people who are already living there. They start of in this mission well, going from strength to strength - but by the end of Judges 1, it has turned sour, and their victories are becoming few and far between.

This siege of the Promised Land was first ordered by God in Deuteronomy, when God gives the Israelites clear instructions about how they are to drive out the people living there already in order to settle themselves. In Deuteronomy (Chapter 7, verse 2), God tells the Israelites that they must not make treaties or collaborate with those living in the land already in any way. Yet the Israelites do not obey God's instruction: instead, they disobey Him three times, and because of this, they begin to fail in their mission.

At the start of Judges, the Israelites are doing well. The tribe of Judah make about 15 victories during the initial 20 verses of this chapter. However, after this, they begin to lose battles, beginning with the battle against those who live in the valleys. The text is very clear in pointing out that the Israelites' adversaries in the valleys have iron chariots, and that this is a key factor in their defeat. At this time, the Israelites' weapons technology is still in the Bronze Age, so it is most likely that they fear their rivals with 'iron chariots'. After all, if you were waging war with bows and arrows against an army which had sub-machine guns, you would probably be forgiven for being a little fearful.

Yet it is this fear that shows the first cracks in the Israelites' wholehearted faith in God. A vicar once said in a sermon that the opposite of faith is not unbelief; the opposite of faith is fear. If the Israelites are scared, then they are not putting their faith fully in God, and they are not trusting in Him to give them victory - and so they are defeated. Faith can ensure victory even when all the odds are stacked against you, as David proved when he went up against Goliath. The Israelites did not put their trust fully in God, and this led to their defeat.

The second way that the Israelites disobey God's instruction is by not driving the people out completely. God has instructed that no one who was living in the land when they entered was to remain living there after they had settled, yet this is not what happened. After verse 20, the chapter begins chronicling the battles of the other tribes of Israel, who were not as successful as the tribe of Judah. In many cases, these tribes did not drive the people out completely, but rather pressed them into manual labour, or slavery. Thus, they did not obey God fully, and instead allowed those whom God had instructed them to drive out, to live among them instead.

The third and final way that the Israelites disobeyed God's instruction was to make a treaty with a Canaanite, or one who was living in the land already. This, however, is not the first time that the Israelites have collaborated with someone they should have been driving out. In Joshua, when the Israelites orchestrate the fall of Jericho, they are helped by the prostitute, Rahab, who hides two Israelite spies and aids them in escaping the guards. Yet there is a key difference between Rahab and the Canaanite in Judges, and that is that Rahab approached the Israelites, whereas the Canaanite was approached by the Israelites. In Joshua, it was the case that Rahab made a treaty with the Israelites, while in Judges, the Israelites made a treaty with the Canaanite. Thus, Rahab is called righteous in James (Chapter 2, verse 25), whereas the Canaanite in Judges is not even named. Rahab threw her lot in with the Israelites; the Canaanite merely accepted an offer of freedom.

At the start of Chapter 2, we see the Israelites made aware of the reason for their defeats, at which point they begin to repent. It is this act which sets the tone for the rest of the Book of Judges: the Israelites disobey God, they are punished (usually by a foreign power overthrowing or invading them), they realise their sin, they repent, they are restored, and then they forget about God, go back to disobedience, and the cycle starts again.

There is a tendency among Christians to take the Old Testament with a pinch of salt; Jesus has fulfilled the Old Testament, and therefore it is only necessary as background knowledge, and is not directly important for our lives. Yet this cycle we see in Judges is not one that has been broken; it is one that we are all in today.

Last year, I sat a history mock, and when I got to my lesson that morning, I didn't feel quite ready for it. I had revised, but suddenly, in the face of the exam itself, I began to panic and wonder if I had done enough. In order to help calm my nerves, I stood outside the classroom door and began to pray, asking God to help me calm down, to focus, and to trust in the work that I had done. A few minutes before my history teacher arrived to let us into the classroom, I realised that this was the first time I had prayed in a while; in fact, I hadn't prayed at all since the last time I was in a mess and had to seek reassurance. It was at this point that I realised that I was stuck in this cycle, just as much as the Israelites were all those years ago.

The cycle seems never-ending, but it will end one day, and we have to trust that that day is coming. It's not easy, but no one ever said that it would be; as long as we can hold on, we can trust that the cycle will be broken.

We have started well. But now we must continue.