Sermon Tone Analysis

This year I am preaching through the entire Bible.

We went slowly through the book of Genesis, because it sets the stage for the rest of the Bible.

As a matter of fact, the first five books of the Bible, written by Moses, called the Pentateuch are considered the foundation that the rest of the Bible is built on, so it’s important to have a grasp of those books.

Maybe next year, we can try and work slowly through Deuteronomy since it is such a pivotal book.

But today we have some catching up to do.

Last week was Easter, the week before we didn’t have service because of the weather and next week is homecoming.

So today we have a lot to cover.

Let’s open up in prayer.

Today I’m going to cover Joshua and Judges as one main topic.

Judgment.

God judges sin, he always has, and he always will.

It’s something that people don’t like to hear or think about, so they really don’t like the books of Joshua and Judges, because we see God bringing his judgment against large numbers of people, and it doesn’t make us feel good inside.

It bothers us.

It makes us cringe.

And I think that’s a good thing.

We shouldn’t feel good about people being punished and suffering, that would mean that we have something wrong with us.

It means we are made in God’s image, and are like Him.

He too doesn’t feel good about judging people, but He does the right thing, even when it’s hard.

How many people like super hero movies?

How many people like Police shows, whether it’s reality tv or not, where you follow the officers around and they are always facing danger?

How many like novels where there is a hero and a villain, or many?

Who do you find yourself rooting for?

The hero, or the villain?

Who do you want to win in the end and have things turn out their way?

What makes a villain a villain?

Their actions.

And their actions can be described by what word?

Evil.

Sin.

The Bible is God’s revelation of Himself to us.

God is without sin is He not?

Don’t you find it interesting that almost every page of the Bible addresses sin?

Not God’s sin, of course, but our sin.

the first two chapters of Genesis describe a sinless world, let me show them to you.

Can you see these pages?

This is how much of the Bible is devoted to the world that we live in before sin entered the picture.

The last two chapters of the Bible describe when God will create a new world without sin.

Do you see these pages.

Now even these last two chapters still talk about sin.

Adam and Eve, they sinned in the garden and were judged by God by being kicked out of the garden, and the man and woman now having to labor in pain.

Cain did not rule over sin and killed his brother Abel and was judged by God by being banished from His presence.

Then the whole world went into a downward spiral of sin so bad that God judged the entire world through the flood in the days of Noah, but He spared the most blameless man on earth and his family.

What does blameless mean?

It means he lived a life without sinning to the best of his ability, obviously not perfectly, but better than anyone else on earth, and that’s saying something.

But what happened after he got out of the ark.

He sinned.

Even the best of us can’t be perfect, we still sin.

After Noah God called Abraham to go to a land that He would show him and that He would give him the land and make him into a great nation in order to point all the nations to Himself.

And what did Abraham do over and over again?

Sin.

Within three months of God promising Abraham that he would have a son with his wife Sarah and that through her God would give him offspring that would form a nation as numerous as the stars in the sky, Abraham gave Sarah to a king because he was afraid that the king would kill him.

He gave his wife away.

His son Isaac fell into the same sins, Jacob constantly sinned, destroying his family, just like his father Isaac, and then we get to Joseph.

Now he was about a good a role model as we could ask for.

We need people like Joseph in the Bible to show us how we should live and what to do in the hard times in life, but even he was bitter and vengeful towards his brothers, throwing them in jail, one of them he kept in jail for two years, because he did not forgive them for what they had done to him.

Eventually after the two years, he finally broke down and forgave them, but throughout Joseph’s life we see constant sinfulness.

The sinfulness of his brothers, of Potiphar’s wife, and of Joseph himself.

Then we see the sinfulness of Pharaoh and of Moses.

Pharaoh killed countless male Hebrew babies, Moses killed an Egyptian, and we see God judge Pharaoh, Egypt and all of their false gods.

Then God saves the Israelites by judging Pharaoh’s army, and then the Israelites themselves become the ones who constantly rebel against God, and we see God constantly judging the sins of the Israelites.

He sends plagues against them, 3,000 are killed after they worship the golden calf, he sends snakes against them, and finally he doesn’t allow them to enter the promised land, they have to wander in the desert 40 years until that whole generation passes away.

He even judges Moses’ sin by not allowing him to enter the promised land either.

And that brings us to the books of Joshua and Judges.

Joshua begins with the next generation being allowed to enter the promised land with Joshua as their new leader and not Moses.

The book of Joshua is full of bloodshed.

God brought the nation of Israel into the land of promise and ordered them to kill everyone who lived there.

In my mind it was all about the nation of Israel and these people that lived there were just innocent people who happened to be living in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But that’s not what God said.

God had promised that land to Abraham 400 years earlier, but He didn’t give the land to him then.

Why not?

He told us.

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God said, I am going to judge the Amorites, and all the inhabitants who live here with the sword, but I’m not going to do it for another 400 years, because their sinfulness has not yet reached the point that I am willing to do that yet.

You see God was being patient, and longsuffering with the Amorites, even though he knew that they would not repent and turn back to Him, He still waited 400 years until their sinfulness got to the point where He would finally judge them.

And when he finally did decide to allow Israel to cross over the Jordan, He made it very clear to them, that it wasn’t because of their own righteousness that God was judging these people with sword, but it was because of their sinfulness that He was judging them.

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You see, God had no desire for the Israelites to begin a campaign of world domination.

He set boundaries for them, and that was as far as they were allowed to go.

They were to judge the nations within those boundaries, and they were to stop.

They were to then get along with their neighbors and point the whole world to Him.

God picked the nations that he would judge because of their sin, and He waited hundreds of years until their sinfulness had gotten so bad that God felt that their punishment was deserved in relation to their sin.

And you need to remember that was hundreds of years of people crying out for help from the people who were committing crimes that was not answered because of His patience.

There are always two people involved in crimes.

The perpetrator, and the victim.

God’s patience with the sins of the perpetrators, was at the same time a delay in justice for the victims.

So to say that God is too loving to judge those who do evil, is to say that God is too loving to defend and rescue those who are suffering at the hands of evildoers.

You can’t have it both ways.

And after the conquest of Canaan, we get to the book of Judges.

Once Israel moved into Canaan and killed many of the people groups living there, but not all of them, they were a leaderless nation.

Now God was supposed to be their king, and He would have been, if they would have just submitted to Him as their king, but they didn’t.

They did not obey God and we see the same story from them that we have been seeing throughout the entire Bible so far.

They sinned, sinned, and sinned some more.

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When I read judges, I always thought judges, like judges today.

Someone you would take a case to who would decide the outcome.

But that’s not what these judges were.

These were warriors that God raised up to “judge” other nations through battle.

These were people that God used to bring his judgment against those who were oppressing Israel.

This is probably one of Israel’s worst periods in their history.

There was constant killing of each other and worship of false gods.

They completely abandoned God and obeying Him.

And the book of Judges ends with this verse.

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The last verse in the book gives the theme of the entire book.