24 - An Undeserved Leader [B]

An Undeserved Leader
Judges 2021
Judges Lesson #024
August 3, 2021
Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

 Opening Prayer

“Our Father, we are so thankful that You are our rock, our fortress, You are our strong tower, our shield; You are our deliverer. As we look around us and see all of the insanity that is taking place, not just in our nation but around the world, how Isaiah critiqued Judah of his time, that they were calling good evil and evil good, worshiping everything other than You. And in Scripture, we know that whatever we worship other than You gets traced back to Satan. Father, we know that we live in the devil’s world and that our protection is in the armor that is described in Ephesians 6, and above all we are to be immersed in Your Word and have Your Word in us.

“And Father, the distractions that are there for so many people that just takes such focus and determination today to rightly order our priorities and structure our time, and to take care of the details of life without letting it distract from our walk with You.

“So Father, we pray that You might strengthen us by means of the Holy Spirit in our daily walk and that we might consistently have our desire for Your Word to increase that we might know You and know the power of Your grace. Help us to understand what we teach tonight that we might be more discerning living in the devil’s world. And we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”

Slide 2

Open your Bibles with me to Judges 3:7. Tonight, believe it or not, we should get a little more into Othniel, and we need to just review a few things for those who may be coming into the study rather late. Judges is a book that focuses on moral relativism, and how it destroys a nation. That Israel goes from a nation that is focused on God, victorious spiritually and therefore militarily in the conquest of Canaan and then falling apart gradually over the next generation as they turn away from the Lord, abandon Him, forget Him as we’ve been studying.

And then go so far as to worship the Baals and the Asherah. And we are as prone to that today as they were then. In a lot of ways as I go through Judges, I see a lot of close parallels with our nation, more so than I think I’ve seen before.

As I’ve said before, the first time I taught Judges, I was a third-year student at Dallas Seminary and got selected to teach it at an adult lay institute class. I look back on that, and I was just barely getting my feet wet pastoring and teaching, and there’s so much here, so much more is available in helping with the study. But the parallels with our nation are just profound.

Slide 3

So we see how all aspects of a civilization, all aspects of a culture, all aspects of a nation, of a people are corrupted and destroyed when a nation, a people, a culture turn away from God, abandon Him, and what goes into the vacuum, and when God is removed, it creates a vacuum in the soul, and whatever gets sucked into that, whatever takes God’s place, is just an idol.

It may not be an idol made of wood or metal or whatever; it is an idol of the mind. It is something abstract; it may have something to do with the lust patterns of the soul, the desire that will give us what only God can give us, but we certainly fall prey to idolatry in our culture.

Paul says a couple of times, once in Corinthians and once in Colossians, covetousness is idolatry. The basic issue is summarized in the first two chapters and into the third chapter, that they have an incomplete obedience; they compromise, go along to get along. That leads to failure spiritually, which leads to failures economically, politically, militarily, and they’re just cohabiting with the pagans and the idols and the demonism of the Canaanites.

That leads God to be true to His covenant with Israel, and He’s going to take them through the various stages of divine discipline as outlined in Leviticus 26. It affects the leadership. Leaders are the product of the culture. Sometimes God is gracious and gives us a leader we don’t deserve. But in looking at the history of this nation over the last one hundred years or so, mostly we’ve gotten the leaders we deserve. And we probably deserve much worse because of the way we have rejected God. And so we’re going through that.

We’re starting with the first judge, Othniel who is the best, and they are organized in a descending order. Then we get into the paganization of the priests where we see a lot of parallels with evangelical leaders today, the so-called evangelical leaders.

I subscribe to a couple of e-mail notifications that report on things that are going on, and it’s just nauseating, every single day to realize how many false teachers are out there, and the garbage that is taught in churches with tens of thousands of people who think they are somehow learning about Christianity, and the deceptions of the devil are just amazing.

Then, we see the condemnation of the people. We are all guilty. We have all fallen and are part of this.

Slide 4

So we started with Othniel a couple of weeks ago, and we see the divine indictment in Judges 3:7, where the writer says, “So the children of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord—and then evil is defined in the last clause—They forgot the Lord their God and served the Baals and the Asheroth.” They forgot and they served. When it says they forgot, it means they disregarded God. They didn’t take Him into account. They just said, “God’s just not important,” and the next thing you know, they are looking for a god.

As we know from Deuteronomy 28, these false gods are really energized by demons who are behind them. And the other thing that we learn about evil is that evil comes because there is an absolute standard which is the absolute character of God, His righteousness, and His justice and so they willfully neglect Him, they ignore Him, and when they do that, it’s just amazing.

We see this every day now: people call good evil and evil good, and they have no sense of the irrationality of the statements that they are making and how they are self-contradictory and how they are just completely out of touch with reality.

I think that the evidence of that, if we think about it, is what we read in the media because the media is reporting certain things as true that are false. Some people on both sides of the aisle are repeating things as true that are false, motivated by many different things, so that it’s hard to tell what is accurate anymore. I think every one of us has realized and commented on that to one degree or another. That is what happens, as I developed in the last couple of lessons, when we live in a world of postmodernism.

Slide 5

Michel Foucault is one of the architects of the postmodern worldview, and he makes a statement that “history is fiction.” That is so logical if you start with their presuppositions that there are no absolutes. And if there are no absolutes, there’s no truth: “You have your truth; I have my truth. Everybody has their own truth.”

Because there’s no external standard by which to evaluate anybody’s truth, then contradictory things are both true, and you have to accept that as being both true. So history then is no longer what God designed it to be, and that is a tool for teaching what is right and what is wrong, teaching the consequences of rebellion against God, teaching what happens when nations rebel against God, teaching positive morality, which is how the Puritans understood it in the early centuries in the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century in this nation, and how they understood that that morality had to be passed on and accepted by the next generation; otherwise, the culture would begin to erode from the from the inside.

So when you look, as we did a couple of weeks ago, at the progression from the time of the Puritans down through the weakening of that biblical authority in our nation until we get into the modern period starting in the early 1800s, and then the post-modern period starting about one hundred years ago, we see that we have followed a logical deterioration and a logical corruption. So, we need to understand some things about this.

Slide 8

I pointed out a few things in the last couple of lessons, and so I had three principles. I just want to review these tonight and then give you a practical application of this, which I ran across in my studies and reading this last week.

First of all, since there are so many different opinions and views of history, there must not be any historical truth. That’s foundational. I talked about this a couple of times back. I said that we hear this saying a lot. I’ve heard it for forty years, that the victors write history, and we all go, “Yeah, I guess that’s right,” because we see a kernel of truth there, and in every lie, there is a kernel of truth.

But what that assumes is we can’t really know what happened because the victors have kept it from us, and that’s just a boldfaced lie. We have access to more information written by more people, defeated, conquerors, oppressors, whatever you want to call them. We have most of it, and we know what happens, and we have the objective facts to look at. And so this is just a falsehood that we can’t know historical truth. We can know certain things that are factually accurate.

We know there was a man named George Washington, that he was from Virginia and that he became the first President of the United States. People back then wrote a lot of things about their lives and they had diaries, and they wrote a lot of letters. As a result of that, we have a tremendous amount of factual information about George Washington, and about many, many others.

So, we can actually know. They may have different accounts of different things and different perspectives, but then you look at other things that are written by other people, and you can get to the right evidence. But there are people today who want to make up history because the facts for them have become irrelevant because once you reject the idea that there is historical truth then you get into trouble.

Slide 9

Our second principle that I told you about is that there are so many events that the historian just imputes his own values and judgment into every historical analysis. And the claim is, so we have to deconstruct those values. If you are an honest historian with a degree of integrity, even if you do not have all of the available information in 1600 or 1400 that you have today, you’re attempting to write the truth and not write propaganda. A statement like this and belief like this just you’re saying, well, that’s what everybody did all through the centuries is write their propaganda and doesn’t have anything to do with what really happened. That is such a skeptical view of history and of mankind.

Slide 10

The third point is that for them, facts and data are boring, uninteresting, and irrelevant, especially if they don’t fit the agenda that drives them, and it doesn’t give them the information to fit the narrative they want to promote. So they just make it up as they go along.

As most of you know, this is a commercial for Chafer Seminary, I’m going to be teaching the second half of Church History this coming semester, so I’m burying myself in a lot of very interesting, informative things. It’s amazing how many issues in the 1600s to early 1800s are so controversial today and are so foundational to the battles, the arguments, the political debates that are going on today.

The leftists, the extreme leftists, seem to be winning the day. They have captured the media, as we’ve all observed. They have captured the media, most of the media. They have captured education. Most schools are dominated by far leftists, especially in the liberal arts.

I learned this when I went to university back in the 1970s. I was always concerned that you would meet your greatest attacks against Christianity from science because, of course, there’s always the narrative: It’s the science versus the Bible; evolution versus Creation. But in most science classes, in most biology classes, you don’t really get into those meta-narrative issues that relate to Creation and relate to evolution.

Now there are some who are evolutionists who think that it’s much more important to everything that they do than it really is. Then I’m always reminded about Jeremy Thomas. Jeremy is now pastor of Spokane Bible Church up in Washington State. When Jeremy got out of his undergraduate work, he had applied to go to medical school at Texas Tech. He went for an interview, and a man who interviewed him for admissions came right out and told him, because you believe in Creation, you will not be accepted into medical school because to study viruses, to study bacteria, to study all these things, you have to believe in evolution. And since you don’t believe in evolution, you can’t be a good scientist and so you can’t be a good doctor. That is exactly straight up what he was told.

There are a lot of people, there are a lot of Christians who have been told that over the years. Steve Austin, who got his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, wrote numerous articles for Creation magazines and journals during his time in undergraduate and graduate school under a pseudonym because if it had been published under his real name, he would have been eliminated from the program. Fellowships would have dried up, scholarships, research grants, all those kinds of things would have just evaporated.

I had a song leader at a church in Irving back in the late 1980s who was getting his undergraduate degree in paleontology at SMU, and he said that if anybody even gets a hint that I’m a creationist, I’m dead. I won’t ever get into any graduate school; I won’t be recommended for it.

So we have to recognize that this is a problem for schools in science, but the evilest areas are in this in the so-called social sciences in liberal arts. The greatest assault I heard in my undergraduate courses were in English, literature, and in sociology, psychology, history. There’s more propaganda that is communicated in those courses, than in the science courses. They are extremely dangerous, and parents need to really prepare their children for those kinds of attacks. That’s where we are.

Slide 12

One of the attacks that is coming across today that is at the center of a number of battles is a project called The 1619 Project. Two years ago on August 8, 2019, the New York Times published a special issue to introduce their new The 1619 Project, and this began with a full media and advertising blitz, including a one-hundred-page New York Times Magazine article, a sixteen-page newsprint section in the New York Times, with the attention-grabbing headline that “We’ve got to tell the unvarnished truth.”

Slide 13

This is it. “We’ve got to tell the unvarnished truth.” This is part of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, created by a woman named Nikole Hannah-Jones, who for this, received a Pulitzer Prize, and it’s also produced by the New York Times.

You need to be alerted to some reality however unpleasant it may be. They had a commercial for this, and this is how it started off. I’ve got the picture [not included in slides] here at this location that is off of Virginia Beach in Virginia, and you just see this vast open water and it’s gray, so it looks depressing. All of this is designed by the slickest advertising people that you can find in New York, and it’s all designed to evoke a lot of certain kinds of emotions rather than being driven by content. But that’s our society; we want to drive people’s emotions but with music and with images rather than content.

It starts off: “In August of 1619 a ship appeared on this horizon near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400^th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”

I want you to watch that word; they don’t believe in truth the way they massage truth; they are postmodern. But notice they use that because it catches people who still think that’s a valid concept. If you haven’t noticed lately—I’ve seen this probably twenty or thirty times now in various articles—where our current era is referred to as the post-truth culture. We have left truth behind, but the postmodern still wanted to use it.

So it goes on and there are other things, and there are these various papers that they published, and so one of them is an essay entitled or where it starts off: “If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start at the plantation.” Here you have pictures of a Greek home like a plantation home. “For hundreds of years, enslaved people were bought and sold in America.”

So you have a picture here of a statue today. Most of the sites of this trade are forgotten. And it is a picture of a place where there was a slave market. So then it goes on to say, “America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding that some people deserve more power than others.”

Within the postmodern grid, if there’s no truth, if there’s no integrity, what matters is power. That’s the ultimate platinum standard, power, so they impute that to others, and so that’s what they’re saying. Some people deserve more power than others. So then, it just gives you a little taste you can search for more things and find other things to learn about, and you should. So, this is this new origin story.

Slide 14

Well, there’s a new book out that came out last year that is entitled: “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project by Peter Wood, and there’s his picture and the cover of the book. I’ve been reading that. It’s a book that has 13 chapters; his end notes—and some of you will like this—it has an index, so you can find your way around in it, and he does a good job.

He is not just telling you what his position is. He gives the history of this 1619 Project, explains its background, who the key people are with what their academic credentials are, and then he gives you the history of how it unfolded in the New York Times,  and the fact that there were at least five—there were many more than that—but five main historians who wrote letters to the New York Times offering honest, objective critique of The 1619 Project.

What’s notable is that all five of these scholars are winners of national and international awards for their scholarship. They have specialized for thirty, forty, or fifty years in the study of the period of the American War for Independence and slavery issues in the colonies and in the Early American Republic, and they are all very, very liberal. They have not held back in their statements about what has been published in The 1619 Project, but let’s learn a little bit about what The 1619 Project says about itself.

Slide 15

Jake Silverstein, who is the New York Times editor in chief, says that, “The goal of The 1619 Project and major initiative from the New York Times that this issue of the magazine inaugurates is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.” Now you ought to be asking yourself, what does he mean by reframing American history?

He goes on to say, “Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Now this is important. The word “reframe” sounds more palatable than “rewrite” because that is what they’re doing; they are rewriting history. It is historical revisionism.

It is not any different than Aaron pointing to the golden calf and saying this is the god that brought you up out of Egypt, or Jeroboam pointing to the two golden calves he had made several hundred years later and saying that these are the gods who brought you out of Egypt, or any of the other lies that were told by the kings in Israel and some of the kings in Judah in order to reinforce an alternate narrative.

Whenever you take God out of the picture and you reject what is told in the Bible historically, you have to come up with a historical revision. You have to come up with a false narrative.

Wood explains: “The 1619 Project is, in other words, an all-out effort to replace traditional conceptions of American history with a history refracted through the lens of black identity politics.”

There’s a parallel to this. I could say that higher criticism of the Old Testament is, in other words, an all-out effort to replace the traditional, literal interpretation of the Bible with a history refracted through the lens of the enlightenment and human autonomy. That’s what happened with the enlightenment, and that’s what’s happening here. It just we see more and more examples of rejection of truth.

Slide 16

He goes on to say, “The 1619 Project calls for replacing that traditional account with one that makes the black experience primary—and not just for black Americans, but for all Americans.” He explains that there are several key points that they use to support their claim. They say number one: Americans have grossly misunderstood the origins and nature of American society, and that slavery is the pivotal institution in American history—not Christianity, not the Judeo-Christian worldview.

It isn’t that they just sort of misunderstood; they grossly misunderstood. In other words, everything that we learned for several generations going back to the founding era was lies and distorted propaganda. That’s their basic claim.

Second, they say American history began with the arrival of slaves in Virginia in August 1619. Now Wood does a great job of demonstrating that they know the names of these slaves. They don’t know what happened to all of them, but they know what happened to several of them. There were no laws allowing slavery. Chattel slavery didn’t come into existence in the Colonies for another fifty years or maybe thirty years, but they did have what they recognized was indentured servitude. And indentured servitude was for seven years, and then you had worked off your indebtedness, and that’s what happened to the ones that they can track, is that they basically became indentured servants.

It goes on to say, the third point is, that the primary purpose for declaring independence from Britain—and this is a huge thing; this is one of their major points—the reason they declared independence from Britain in 1776 was to preserve American slavery from the danger of Britain’s outlawing it. They just keep saying it over and over again, because if you generate the big lie and say it often enough and over and over again, people will believe it.

What Wood does in this book is he goes to several of the key historians who have critiqued this whole narrative, and he gives their credentials and all the awards that they have received. One is Sean Wilentz, who was the chaired professor—that means he has a has a name on his endowed chair, which is quite an honor—he’s a chaired professor of the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University; he’s the author in 2018 of a book entitled No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. He was awarded the 2006 Brant Bancroft Prize for his book, The Rise of American Democracy, Jefferson to Lincoln, and he gave a lecture critiquing The 1619 Project three months after it came out, and it was published in the New York Review of Books.

In his lecture he said, he says a lot of this, but just one example after talking about an example of a statement made in The 1619 Project, he said this portion of The 1619 Project is simply untrue.

Another authority that Wood cites—he goes to all five of these guys—and he talks about the eminent professor of history at Brown University, Gordon Wood—I have one of his early books on the history of the founding of the nation—and Wood was invited to participate and to present his critique on the World Socialist website. He’s not a socialist, but the Socialists have rejected The 1619 Project.

So all these critiques from top notch, recognized early American history scholars have virtually been ignored by the New York Times, and that so postmodern because, “well, that’s their truth. This is our truth, and our narrative is going to win over your narrative, and we’re just going to ignore you.” Postmodernists just make up their own truth.

Wood makes the point in his introduction that the goal of this behind the New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones is to make this 1619 Project the integral defining part of the core curriculum for history and social studies in every school in America in order to change America’s understanding of itself, to reshape everything American schoolchildren are taught about their country, and to teach them to be ashamed of their own country and indeed to hate their own country and its history, and then to transform this nation into another kind of nation. This, of course, fits with the agenda of critical race theory.

So you’re probably asking at this point, what does this have to do with Othniel and Cushan-Rishathaim? But as I’ve been pointing out in the last couple of weeks, to reject God and replace Him with false gods is to deny history and indeed to hate history. And we have to understand how that is happening in our own time. So this is just an illustration of that.

I may deal with more details of this later on, but what is interesting is how a large number, much larger than just these five, have been cited who wrote the New York Times. Many, many others have just thrashed the New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones for all the blatant lies and falsehoods that are used to support their thesis, even those who are leftist.

Slide 17

What I want to use this for is to show how this really points out an illustration of how postmodernism has grabbed this nation. He explains in the book that even though a large number of historians and critics have demonstrated critical flaws based on the New York Times ignoring or denying clear facts, he then says this is the result of quote, “the rise of academic postmodernism.” He writes, “This is the idea that almost everything is a matter of interpretation.” Have you heard this before? I’m not making this stuff up.

Sometimes I think people think I make this up because you don’t run into it every day that you know about. This is the idea that almost everything is a matter of interpretation, and few things or nothing at all, can be resolved by discovering the facts of the matter.

What did I say in that third point? Facts don’t matter, and that’s their view. You can’t resolve anything by discovering the fact, so who cares? “A thoroughgoing postmodernist insists that there are no facts, but just ‘facts,’ that is, claims that are accepted as true for a while.” See, if the fact doesn’t have objective reality because there’s no objective reality in postmodernism, it’s only a fact, because that’s what’s been accepted as true for a while, and now we’re accepting something else.

So he writes, “But any such fact is really just someone’s assertion, and someone else could assert a different ‘fact’ that would be just as good.” And so that’s what the New York Times is doing; they’re just asserting a different fact, and it’s just as good.

Slide 18

He goes on to say, “Postmodernism has another facet that is also relevant to The 1619 Project: postmodernism favors the stories told by the ‘oppressed.’ It divides society into two parts, the privileged and those whom the privileged exploit.”

Have you heard that somewhere? What is that indicative of? Does the name Karl Marx mean anything to you? This is inherent in Marxism. So it just fits with these other things that are going on today. He says, “Among the privileges the privileged people enjoy is to tell their own version of history as though it were the absolute truth of what happened in the past.”

This is what he is saying postmodernists do with telling history; they’re saying, “Well, that’s just what the privileged people wrote, the privileged people get to write … Have you heard that? Have I said anything about that? That’s just another way of saying that the winners write history, and the losers don’t.

So that tells you, what did I say two weeks ago? This is just another form of Marxism to make that kind of claim. And that’s been accepted. It’s those kinds of bromides that come into our culture that people begin to accept as truth. This is how the devil just sneaks in and confuses people and takes over.

He goes on to say that “Americans have not embraced postmodernism in its most aggressive form, but it has seeped into popular culture. When people say, ‘You have your truth and I have mine,’ they are acting like good postmodernists and this sort of argument, by sheer assertion, has gained tremendous ground through social media where no one stands as the final arbiter between established truth, mere opinion, and outright fabrication.”

One mistake I made was listening to someone who encouraged me to have a Facebook page because it gave us a platform to dialogue with others on the truth. But what happens—and there are all these different groups that are out there; there’s a dispensational study group, there’s this and that, a rapture, a pre-tribulation rapture study group—Tommy has nothing to do with it—but somebody creates this forum for discussion, but it’s a very democratized platform, and by that I mean that everybody is just there by their first and last name, and nobody knows what kind of credentials anybody else has.

So everybody’s opinion is equal, and you have people making the wildest claims. I would try to have a discussion with somebody, and they don’t know how to have an academic, objective, respectful conversation with somebody they disagree with, and so you’re just dismissed. Or somebody says this, or somebody says that. It’s a worthless, fruitless place to carry on any kind of intelligent conversation.

I learned that very quickly after getting on and quit being a part or even looking at any of those platforms. No self-respecting Bible student, pastor or scholar should have anything to do with those platforms; they’re insane. And that’s what’s happened, is it just creates arguments. There’s no way to work anything through, and so it is just sheer assertion of superiority or fact wins the day. How postmodern can you get? Doesn’t have anything to do with truth or any kinds of arguments.

Slide 19

So Peter Wood says, “From the vantage point of being unfairly disadvantaged”—this is talking about those: You have the advantaged to write the history and the disadvantaged; their claim is from the vantage point of being unfairly disadvantage—“they have insight into the lies and self-serving stories told by their oppressors. These insights are necessarily fragmented because the rich and powerful control the main opportunities to build grand and comprehensive accounts of the past.”

And you think that’s true? Sure is, and that’s what’s happening today, but the rich and powerful are leftist and anti-American. In many, many cases, and I’m not talking about the guy who runs a multi-million-dollar corporation in Houston, Texas; I’m talking about the people who have enormous control in internationally connected corporations that are telling governments what to do because they’re bigger than most governments. So anyway, that’s what is going on.

Slides 20 and 21

I want to close this part out by saying that let’s just be reminded what the Bible says about truth and lies because what this is just lies.

Slide 22

First of all, we have to remember that behind all false philosophies, all false narratives, all false religions, and all historical revisionism, is Satan. He is ultimately behind all of this. We live in a universe that has an unseen, invisible dimension that influences and provides causation in history, both from God in His providential direction and Satan in his assault on those who are following God. So we have to recognize we live in a universe that is in the midst of this unseen angelic revolt that is going on around us.

In Deuteronomy 32:17, Moses is talking about the Canaanite people and said they sacrificed to demons, not to God. Wait a minute, they weren’t Satan worshippers; they were just worshipping a wooden idol. Well, there’s a power behind that wooden idol, and that’s Satan, Baal.

Remember, I read that section awhile back from Paradise Lost where we saw that John Milton, who was a very well-trained theologian, understood theology, understood the Old Testament, and he names all the demons with the names of the gods and goddesses of the various mythological pantheons. So that’s what Moses is saying here: [Deuteronomy 32:17] “They sacrificed to demons, not to God, to gods they did not know, to new gods, new arrivals that you fathers did not fear.”

Paul says the same thing. In fact, he’s quoting or alluding to this passage in the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 10:20, he says, “Rather than the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrificed to demons and not to God.” But I would imagine that if you talk to any Greek going up to the area around the Parthenon in Athens, there you have so many different temples, that’s what Paul observed when he was there. And before he got into his speech at the sermon at Mars Hill, that they had all these gods and goddesses that they worshipped. If you asked them, “Are you worshipping demons? They’d say, “No we’re not; these are gods and goddesses; these are real.” But they were demons.

Slide 23

Second, we have to remember that Satan is the father of lies. In John 8:44, Jesus is in another hostile altercation with the Pharisees, and He then, in the kindest, most gentle, most loving way possible tells them: [John 8:44] “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.” He is saying that is what’s true of the Pharisees. That is not the loving Jesus, meek and mild. That is the Lord of the Universe standing up for the truth.

Slide 24

In 2 Corinthians 11:13–15, Paul is talking about false teachers, and he says: “For such people are false apostles, deceitful workers disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.” They’re performing signs and wonders that may be actual and genuine. In the Tribulation, the Antichrist is going to perform false wonders. He’s going to heal people. He’s going to give sight to the blind. He’s going to perform miracles under the power of Satan. So just because somebody is performing so-called miracles, don’t just dismiss it as if it’s just some kind of magic trick. It may be a fraud, but there may be a demonic element to it.

In 2 Corinthians 11:14, Paul says, “And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” I remember the first time I read that in my Bible as I was reading through, how much that impacted me. You can hear some Sunday School teachers talk about this all the time, but to read it and think about it and realize that Satan masquerades as a great Christian, and that you have to be careful, is an eye-opening reality.

2 Corinthians 11:15, “Therefore it is not surprising his servants—that’s the demons—also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will correspond to their actions.”

Slide 25

The third thing we need to remember is that Satan is the ruler of this world and the god of this age. He rules the cosmos. He is the god of this time period. He rules the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. In John 12:31, Jesus says, “Now is the judgment of this world;—this would be right before He goes to the Cross—now the ruler of this world will be cast out.” That’s Satan.

Now he’s still alive and well on planet Earth because he’s not defeated until Jesus returns the second time, but he lost his case at the Cross. Now he’s just fighting a rearguard action until he is completely defeated. In John 14:30, here he’s again called the ruler of this world by Jesus.

Slide 26

In John 16:11, he is called the ruler of this world. Of all the titles Satan has, this is the one that is repeated the most. In 2 Corinthians 4:4, Paul writes, “whose minds the god of this age has blinded who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.”

Slide 27

The fourth point—and this may apply to a number of people who have been listening to me or listening to this at this point—there are too many Christians who have one foot in the world and one foot on their Bible, and they want to get along because they just don’t want to ruffle too many feathers. They don’t want to lose their job. They don’t want to have a confrontation with family members.

What we have to understand, what the Scripture says is “friendship”—the word in the Greek means a fondness for something, and in this case it’s the world. It is the fondness for the thinking, the opinions, and the values of the world.

James says that is enmity, that is hostility, toward God. Fondness for the things of the world, and that’s not talking about certain activities or sports or going to movies or going out to nice restaurants or things of that nature, that’s talking about the values, the opinions, the thinking, the insides of the people who are not informed at all by divine viewpoint.

James 4:4 says, “Adulterers …! Do you not know—and the adultery there isn’t physical, sexual adultery; it is unfaithfulness to go to God. Those who have abandoned God just like the Jews in the Old Testament. How many times has God called them adulterers all through the Old Testament—spiritual adulterers—because they violated the covenant, and they went into other gods and goddesses—Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”

The bottom line is, do you want to be a friend of God, or do you want to be a friend of Satan? Those are the options. Don’t kid yourself with anything else. We only have one of two options to choose. Our sin nature is always pressuring us to be a friend of the world.

Slide 28

Point five. The only solution for the believer is Romans 12:2: “And do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind—that’s to be transformed by the renovation of your thinking—that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

I have translated and paraphrased it this way: “Do not be pressed into the mold of the thinking, the values, the opinions and attractions of the world’s way of thinking and living but keep on being totally renovated in the thinking in your soul that you may be living proof that God’s will is good, well, pleasing and complete.”

Slide 29

The sixth point is that the Bible claims to be the truth. Jesus prayed in John 17:17 to the Father: “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.” It is God’s Word, because it is absolute truth, that sets us apart unto the service of God by knowing it and living and conforming our lives and our thinking to it. In John 8:32, Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Every idiot unbeliever has put that on the philosophy department or religion department or the front gate at some university, thinking the truth is, whatever it is that they vomit out from their lecterns. But the truth contextually is the Word of God. It is the Word of God that sets us free.

It sets us free from sin and spiritual death, and it sets us free because we’re forgiven of sin on a daily basis; it sets us free because we’re no longer in bondage to our sin nature, and it sets us free eternally because we will be resurrected to a new life without the corruption of sin.

Slide 30

Those passages all talked about the written Word. Jesus claimed to be the living Word, the living truth. In John 14:6, He said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by Me.”

And last (point seven), the conclusion is that the denial of the existence of truth is in itself self- contradictory. If you say there is no truth, the question is, “Well, is that true?” If you say it’s true, then you just refuted what you just said that there is no truth. But that’s how they live. Once you reject absolute truth, then you’re left awash on the sea of relativity.

In Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice in Wonderland, there is a scene where the Queen asked, Alice: “How old are you?” And Alice says, “I am seven and a half exactly.” “Well,” the Queen says, “you needn’t say exactly; I can believe it without that. Now I’ll give you something to believe. I am just 101 five months and a day.” “Well, I can’t believe that said Alice.” “Can’t you?” The queen said in a pitying tone.

“Try again. Draw a long, breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed, “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.” Oh said the Queen, I dare say you haven’t had much practice; when I was your age, I always did it for one-half an hour every day. Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” She was postmodern. Postmodernists believe almost everything, which is impossible.

Slide 32

So, Judges 3:7, “The children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord. They forgot the Lord their God and enslaved themselves to the Baals and the Asherahs.” We are slaves of sin until we are born again, until we trust in Christ as Savior. We are slaves of sin, and the process of our spiritual growth and maturity is learning to live in light of the freedom that we are given in Christ; that’s what spiritual growth is all about. That’s what gives us the capacity for freedom and a desire for liberty.

Slide 33

The discipline that God pronounced for them, as we’ve seen in Judges 3:8, is that the anger of the Lord is kindled against Israel—very graphic language that is used to describe God’s wrath. Literally, the text says, His nose burned. The burning of the nose is where you get this concept of a fire or heat, and why it says that the anger of the Lord was kindled.

All of this is very figurative language. It is not saying that all of a sudden, God just gets fuming mad and desires to destroy those horrible humans—I’m just going to start throwing lightning bolts at them and messing up their life and getting all angry—God does not get angry. God does not get literally wrathful; this is just a figure of speech called an anthropopathism. ANTHROPOS is the Greek word for human. And PATHOS is the word for “passions.”

So it is attributing to God passions He does not actually possess in order to communicate to human beings this seriousness or significance of God’s plans or His policy. And so that’s the way this address is.

I remember some years ago, a friend of mine, whom I respect highly and usually gets things right, did not, in an article on God and emotion. He tried to make the claim that God had emotions, and I wrote him a short email, and I said that the Hebrew there is, “And God’s nose burned.” That is an anthropomorphism because God doesn’t have a nose.

An anthropomorphism describes a human passion that is attributed to God in order to communicate something about the severity of God’s justice. If you’re going to treat the anthropopathism as literal, you have to treat the anthropomorphism as literal, which means your God has a nose. We never discussed it again. That’s the problem. It is designed to teach the severity of what happens when we violate the justice of God.

God desires for all to be saved as we studied in 2 Peter 3, last week, He desires for all to be saved, and yet His patience grows thin at times, but it takes a long time. It is called the forbearance or the patience of God.

So finally Israel had just violated God’s standards for so long that the text says He sold them into the hands of Cushan-Rishathaim, the king of Mesopotamia, [Judges 3:8] “and the sons of Israel served Cushan-Rishathaim eight years.”

The word for “sold” is that word in the lower left, makhar, which means “to sell.” It’s a word that would often be told of selling someone into slavery, so that the word avad, “Israel served,” would be better translated in terms of enslavement, that God puts them under enslavement to Cushan-Rishathaim.

That was not the king’s real name. That was a title, or it was a nickname of sorts that was given to him. The term of Cushan refers to his ethnicity, that he was a Cushite king, and the other part, Rishathaim, is from the Hebrew word that means wicked, and the im ending is a plural. Hebrew has singulars, doubles, and plurals, so you would use, if you were talking about two things, you would use a double ending. That’s what this is.

So literally it means “the Cushite of the double evil.” That would refer in some way to a heritage that creates a bit of a problem for understanding this because that would mean that he doesn’t come from this part of the world.

Slide 34

He’s the king of Mesopotamia, and I put this map up here to show one thing. This is Israel here. You have the Sea of Galilee in the north. You have the Dead Sea in the south, the river that runs from north to south is the Jordan River. Israel is on the west side, and you have the trans or across the Jordan area over here, and then to the north you have today, Syria and in the ancient world it was Aram.

But notice, that’s to the northwest of Israel. The circle down at the bottom is Hebron, and just south of Hebron is Debir. Debir is where Othniel and his wife lived, the daughter of Caleb. So liberal scholars say, well, what’s going on here? But what’s going on here? I think it’s fairly easy to explain. And that is that this is a significant location up here, I’m going to broaden the map out here.

Slide 35

This is the area I showed earlier over here. Here’s Israel. Here’s the area modern Iraq. This is Jordan. Modern Iraq is here, and Iran is over here, and so there are two rivers that run through here. And that’s the Tigris and the Euphrates. And so when we look at the description of Cushan-Rishathaim; he’s from Mesopotamia, which is the area of the two rivers, and that’s over in this area. But what’s over in this area, which is not on this map, but is along here on the Euphrates is Babel.

The Bible is always showing these contrasts: the battle between Babel or Babylon and Jerusalem. Babylon is the seat of the rebellion with the Tower of Babel back in Genesis 10, and Jerusalem is the city of God.

It’s interesting that the first oppressor that comes is coming out of that area of Babylon, and he has put together some sort of strong empire because he is able to drive all the way to the southern part of Israel in order to take on, in order that God will bring up a deliverer, Othniel, from the far south.

Liberals would say, we don’t know anybody like that. Well, that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. What we don’t know about ancient history is far greater than what we do know about ancient history. So just the man’s name indicates that his background was probably coming out of Arabia, and in some way got moved to Mesopotamia. There were a lot of movements of people, groups like that, and that as a result he builds a power base, and he’s going to attack into Israel. And he’s going to, as a result of that, enslave the people.

Slide 36

Now, one of the things that we see as a background for understanding a lot that’s going on in Judges is we have to be reminded of the Divine Institutions. The first Divine Institution is that everybody is responsible to God as the Creator. Israel is responsible because they also have a direct covenant with God, and so they, in personal responsibility, have chosen to rebel against God, and as a result, they are coming under divine discipline.

They are also violating the second Divine Institution which is marriage. God established heterosexual, monogamous marriage—one man, one woman—and what was happening in these pagan religions was that they were going up, and it was religious prostitution at the temples. So this is an assault on the integrity of a marriage, and it’s authorized because everybody’s doing it. And that’s allegedly how they would gain prosperity, and this would have a horrible impact on the family.

That’s the bedrock for every civilization, and the problem is that they didn’t have a central government in Israel, and as a result of that, there were problems and there were violations of the theocracy as it was established in in the Mosaic Law. They turned their back on God, who is the Head of the nation. This led to anarchy—spiritual anarchy and political anarchy—in the nation, and it broke down so that God would bring in other nations to control them.

These things fall like dominoes, and once they fall, a nation is going to collapse internally because there’s no order. Either that or a strong person is going to come in and take over, and as a tyrant enforce his version of responsibility.

Slides 37 and 38

So God is going to sell them into the hands of Cushan-Rishathaim, whom they will serve for eight years, And then He is going to bring in a deliverer, which the text interestingly calls a moshia from the same word for messiah, and that is Othniel. He is a moshia, and he will deliver them and that is also a form of that word. Othniel, the son of Kenaz, who is Caleb’s younger brother. And as a result of that, God is going to bring discipline on them. We’re going to stop here, and I’ll come back, and we’ll cover some more things related to this next time.

Closing Prayer

“Father, thank You for the opportunity to look at these things, to see how what we learn and study and think about in Scripture speaks to current events in our own lives and encourages us to understand the importance of knowing Your Word, the importance of absolutes, the importance of communicating those to our children and our grandchildren because that is the only thing that will provide stability in their lives as biblical absolutes.

“We live in such an antinomian and rebellious anarchy today, especially spiritual anarchy, that we pray for so many families, families in this church, families that we’re a part of and the young children and the difficulty, the challenges that they face in educating, training, and equipping their children to live in such a difficult, pagan environment.

“And yet they can do it. We have examples of Daniel. We have examples of Nehemiah. We have examples of Esther, many others who, because they focused upon Your Word, they would rise to great heights and have stability, because of the truth of Your Word, and that’s what gives us stability.

“We pray that we might not lose our desire to know You and to know Your Word, and we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”