The Freedom of Obedience

Prayer

Gradual Rejection of the King

So I want to begin this morning by reminding us of the “rinse and repeat cycle” that we see over and over again in the book of Judges - and which we’ll see this morning in the story we’re going to look at in Judges 3. In Judges, the Israelites now occupy the land that used to belong to the Canaanites, land that God had long promised to give them, the land that is modern-day Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. However, they didn’t drive the other nations out entirely, so those other nations are still in the land.

Cycle is this - it begins with sin, the Israelites do evil in the eyes of the Lord, abandoning him in favor of the gods of the neighboring nations. From this God punishes them, using these same nations to oppress the Israelites. Out of that suffering they cry out to God for rescue.

So we move from sin to oppression to repentance and the next aspect of the cycle is deliverance - God raises up a judge, a leader, to save his people. At that point the Israelites live in peace, in faithfulness to God through the lifetime of that judge - at which point they start moving again into sin, and the cycle begins anew. Rinse and repeat.

Now the book of Judges actually points to the primary reason why this is happening - and this is central to what we want to talk about this morning. Four times in the book of Judges we find this phrase - “In those days Israel had no king.” Twice the we find the full phrase - “In those days Israel had no king, everyone did as they saw fit.”

Now here’s the part that gets a little tricky, I want to lay this out carefully - so the primary problem is everyone doing as they saw sit, in other words, what they want - self rule. I’m going to live like I wanna live.

Eventually the Israelites blame this problem on the fact that they don’t have a king like all the other nations - so they cry out to God for a king. Which God acquiesces to, warning them that it’s not going to be the panacea they think it will. All that plays out in 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings, which we’ll cover later.

But here’s the essential part that I want to point us to - at its heart, its a rejection of God. Listen to this, this comes from I Samuel 8:6-7, after the Israelites had begged for a king. But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.

God’s plan, his intention, was that he himself would be their king - they didn’t need a human king since they were to be obedient to them, he would lead them. They had the King of Kings, the Lord himself. The book of Judges is about their refusal to surrender to him, to obey. That’s what fuels the cycle, and if you remember, as we talked about last week, it gets worse and worse you make your way through the book of Judges.

So, that’s the underlying issue in the book of Judges, the continual rejection of God as their king. This brings us to our story this morning, Judges 3:12-30...Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and because they did this evil the Lord gave Eglon king of Moab power over Israel. 13 Getting the Ammonites and Amalekites to join him, Eglon came and attacked Israel, and they took possession of the City of Palms. 14 The Israelites were subject to Eglon king of Moab for eighteen years. 15 Again the Israelites cried out to the Lord, and he gave them a deliverer—Ehud, a left-handed man, the son of Gera the Benjamite. The Israelites sent him with tribute to Eglon king of Moab. 16 Now Ehud had made a double-edged sword about a cubit long, which he strapped to his right thigh under his clothing. 17 He presented the tribute to Eglon king of Moab, who was a very fat man. 18 After Ehud had presented the tribute, he sent on their way those who had carried it. 19 But on reaching the stone images near Gilgal he himself went back to Eglon and said, “Your Majesty, I have a secret message for you.” The king said to his attendants, “Leave us!” And they all left. 20 Ehud then approached him while he was sitting alone in the upper room of his palace and said, “I have a message from God for you.” As the king rose from his seat, 21 Ehud reached with his left hand, drew the sword from his right thigh and plunged it into the king’s belly. 22 Even the handle sank in after the blade, and his bowels discharged. Ehud did not pull the sword out, and the fat closed in over it. 23 Then Ehud went out to the porch; he shut the doors of the upper room behind him and locked them. 24 After he had gone, the servants came and found the doors of the upper room locked. They said, “He must be relieving himself in the inner room of the palace.” 25 They waited to the point of embarrassment, but when he did not open the doors of the room, they took a key and unlocked them. There they saw their lord fallen to the floor, dead. 26 While they waited, Ehud got away. He passed by the stone images and escaped to Seirah. 27 When he arrived there, he blew a trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites went down with him from the hills, with him leading them. 28 “Follow me,” he ordered, “for the Lord has given Moab, your enemy, into your hands.” So they followed him down and took possession of the fords of the Jordan that led to Moab; they allowed no one to cross over. 29 At that time they struck down about ten thousand Moabites, all vigorous and strong; not one escaped. 30 That day Moab was made subject to Israel, and the land had peace for eighty years.

Story begins with the cycle - again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. So God raises up a Moabite king by the name of Eglon, with the help of the Ammonites and Amalekites, to oppress Israel. After eighteen years of being subject to Eglon, they cry out to the Lord and he raises up a deliverer, a man by the name of Ehud, who is described as a left-handed man.

Ehud is sent to pay the demanded tribute to Eglon, but he brings a surprise as well - a double-edged sword that’s about 18 inches long - and here’s the key aspect. Because he’s left-handed, he straps it to his right thigh - where it goes undiscovered. He brings the tribute to Eglon, and begins to make his way back home. But he stops on the way, goes back to Eglon and tells him he has a message. Most likely, Eglon thinks Ehud is bringing him an oracle from God, a divine message about a future victory, divine favor.

So he lets Ehud in so the two of them are in this upper room together - Ehud goes to give him the message from God. It’s not the message Eglon is expecting. Ehud draws out the sword and plunges it into Eglon’s very large belly - where we get the vivid description of that sword going in. Ehud sneaks out by the way of the porch, but not before shutting and locking the doors.

Then we get this comical scene where Eglon’s servants think he’s in the bathroom and they wait an embarrassingly long time only to discover he is dead. All this gives Ehud a chance to escape, where he gathers up Israelites to defeat the Moabites, at which point the script flips, instead of Israel being subject to Moab, Moab is now subject to Israel. And the people experience peace for eighty years.

At which point, the cycle begins again, Joshua 4:1, Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, now that Ehud was dead.

Embracing Obedience of the King

Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Again and again. This is the great challenges, the great difficulty - to not do evil, but to do good. To obey him, full and wholeheartedly. Because this is the underlying issue of book of Judges, the Israelites’ constant rejection of God as king, as the one they are to obey, I want to see how it helps us to understand what it means for us to follow Jesus. To live in obedience to Jesus, to follow what he teaches us. To love the Lord our God with all of our heart and all of our mind and all of our soul and all of our strength. Today - just to focus on the idea of how essential it is for us to be people who have given ourselves our to obeying the Lord our God, above everything else. Full forever life starts here.

And I want to do that in two ways - one, to talk about one of the reasons - perhaps the primary reason - this is so difficult, why it’s such a great challenge (fact that Israelites again did evil in the eyes of the Lord).

Second, why it’s worth it. Why pursuing greater and greater obedience, the whole of our lives, is worth committing ourselves to. And it has everything to do with freedom. True freedom.

The great challenge is that we are immersed in a world mired by sin - ourselves included, and so we are constantly swimming upstream. We are always fighting our sinful nature, deeply ingrained sinful behaviors. And we are always trying to live in a way that is so counter to so much of the culture around us. This was the Israelites great testing - God left them in the midst of the nations they didn’t kick out (last week), and slowly and surely, they would eventually end up embracing their gods, their behaviors.

I heard this quote recently, it’s so good: The world makes sin look normal and holiness weird. The world makes sin look normal and holiness weird. The world flips God’s wisdom, his good, upside down. Wrong becomes right and right becomes wrong. And we can see the normalization of sin happening in front of our eyes.

One of the most obvious examples is our culture’s move into greater and greater sexual deviancy. On the whole, we (our nation, our cultural standards) had embraced that sexual activity was within the confines of the marriage covenant relationship between a man and a woman. God’s design for sexual intimacy, basis of family, children born to man and woman married to each other. And this, like all God’s commands, is for our good.

But over the decades we’ve experienced the sexual revolution - we normalized sex outside the marriage relationship, to the point that a significant number of children are now born out of wedlock (close to half). Same sex relationships. The current push today is toward polyamorous relationships, open marriages. There have been a number of articles in major news outlets highlighting examples of polyamory, extolling the virtues of it. Articles trying to normalize it - look, regular folks are doing this, your co-workers, neighbors - and why shouldn’t they?

Probably the most disturbing one is sexualization of children - change of language from pedophile to minor-attracted person. One poignant example is the recent Queer Fam Pride Jam held in Chicago, sponsored by city. Let me just describe some of the activities happening there - one area was a tent filled with parents and their young children, where the kids could get a “drag makeover” by drag queens, men dressed in spandex outfits and large frizzy wigs. Or the stage where drag performers danced for children (again, in spandex), one dancing suggestively while a child gave them a dollar bill. This is the world making sin look normal and holiness weird.

Just to be clear, this normalization of sin looks different at different times in history and in different places. I remember hearing a story about a town in the South that was wrestling with the idea of desegregation. They held a town hall meeting, and several folks stood up encouraging the town to resist the efforts. It was at that time that one of the pastors who’d served a local Baptist church there for many years went to front to speaker.

The crowd quieted to hear what the beloved pastor would say. He looked around the crowd and declared that he had preached the gospel for 30 years at his church. With sadness he noted that he had hoped it had taken deeper effect in the lives of his congregants, but clearly it had not. It was a prophetic moment speaking against the fact that racism, that terrible sin, had become normal, and far too many of his church members had embraced it. They were not willing to be “weird”.

So this is the great challenge for us - to resist where sin has become normal. To commit ourselves to holiness, to greater and greater obedience to Jesus Christ, in all areas of our lives.

I hope it’s obvious that we avoiding sexually immoral behavior as well as being racist - those are givens. But for most of us, it’s in the subtle ways that we are more Americanized than Christianized.

We were talking in our spiritual formation group this past week about the call to follow Jesus, willingness to give up anything and everything in order to do so. And that’s a particular challenge for us here in the U.S. because we love our stuff. We love our comfort. We love our safety. Me included. Now, let me say that none of those things are sinful in and of themselves (to have stuff, nice things, desire security), but when they become priorities, when that’s what we treasure - it becomes sinful. We normalize those things as to what life is all about - me and my personal happiness.

And it’s pretty obvious that the world has normalized sin and made holiness weird when we start taking seriously the holiness that Jesus wants to embrace, what it would mean to take his teachings seriously and put them into practice. Return good for evil. To live mutual submission in relationships (of all sorts) - consider their interest before your own. To not harbor anger against others. To not lust. Or judge others. Practice forgiveness against those who’ve wronged you.

But here’s the wonderful thing about pursuing obedience, committing ourselves to loving the Lord our God, serving him, worshipping him above all else - we live in the way we were designed to live, the way God created us to. And it actually is the most free way to live, which actually seems counter-intuitive.

When we think about freedom, it’s normally in terms of freedom from. Freedom from restriction. I am free to choose. And that is actually one aspect of freedom, and an important one - we cherish that, to be free to choose where we live, who we associate with, to pursue work and activities we enjoy. All that is wonderful.

But there’s a more aspect of freedom to consider, freedom for. And this is particularly essential when it comes to what I call moral freedom. Here’s what I mean. When the Bible talks about freedom, it always speaks about it in terms of our ability to obey God. As some have called, true freedom is the ability to will the good. That we are actually capable of doing the good we want to do. We can will it, enact it.

Because the Bible is absolutely clear that disobeying God always, always, leads to enslavement, to less freedom. The story of Cain and Abel (one brother murdering the other), God’s warning to Abel, Genesis 4:7: If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door, it desires to have you, but you must rule over it. Romans 6:20 - When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. Sin enslaves, we can’t even give ourselves to righteousness.

Probably the most poignant verse comes from Paul expressing how captured, how unfree we are due to sin: Romans 7:18-19, For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

But obedience to God leads to freedom. This principle is reflected over and over again in the Bible. At the University of Texas, where I went to school, on the main tower building at the center of campus, this is inscribed on the building, it comes from John 8:32, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Now, that’s there because it’s an academic institution, the thought is by learning, coming to know what’s true, will free you. But notice what Jesus says immediately before this, John 8:31-32, To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Jesus is crystal clear here, if you hold to my teaching, if you do what I teach you, if you follow me, obey me (what discipleship is all about). Then, and only then, will you know what’s true and good and right - and will experience freedom.

Again, Galatians 5:1, It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. See what it says here, Jesus, through his obedience (by the way, Jesus was the most free person who ever walked the earth because he was fully obedient to God, he could will the good), through his dying on the cross, conquering sin and death, has set us free. He has set us for freedom, so we are able to will the good. So we can actually obey God, fully and freely. Notice the warning - if you don’t, if you don’t stand firm, following Jesus - you’ll be burdened again by yoke of slavery. Because sin always enslaves. It is the very nature of sin. Very nature of obedience to God leads to freedom. When you give yourself fully to obeying God above everything else, that’s when you experience true freedom - because you are living as you were created and designed to live. And Jesus is the one who makes that possible.

Spiritual Disciplines - cultivate the habits, exercises that will help orient you to center your life in the love of Jesus Christ.

A theme verse you pray daily committing yourself to obedience to Jesus Christ - verses like greatest command, Mark 12:30, I will love the Lord my God with all of my heart and all of my soul and all of my mind and all of my strength. Or Matthew 6:33, I will seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Lord’s Prayer, pray of our will toward God). Matthew 16:24, I will deny myself, pick up my cross and follow you, Jesus.

What we do as part of worship every Sunday morning, discipline of confession. Our intentional effort to move into greater obedience of Jesus Christ. Make this a daily practice, every evening, prayerfully review your day guided by the Holy Spirit, confessing what sin might come to mind, giving thanks in ways you lived faithfully.

All this with the goal of living in greater and greater obedience to Jesus Christ, your will aligned to his.