First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, Mississippi Evening Service

Please turn with me in your Bibles to the Old Testament book of Judges, Judges chapter 8. This summer on Sunday nights we’re in a sermon series in the book of Judges, and tonight we are looking at the conclusion of the narrative of Gideon. It’s a sad story; it’s a tragic story, this pathology of decline. It’s an all too familiar story, and so we’ll be considering Judges chapter 8, verses 22 to 35. 

Judges chapter 7 is about weakness, and the truth is, whether we feel it or not, we are all weak. All of us. We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that money and training and status will get the results that we desire. But that’s not how God works, is it? Instead, God works through unlikely men and women, unlikely boys and girls, to accomplish unlikely purposes in unlikely ways. And He does that so that He may demonstrate His own power, His own strength, and that He receives the glory that is due to His name. And we’ll see God working in those very same ways in the story of Judges chapter 7, the story of Gideon, as he goes up against the Midianites. And we’ll consider two points from this passage as we study tonight. We’ll consider the weakness that pursues and the strength that prevails. 

Well we’re carrying on in the book of Judges tonight as we’ve been marching through it all of these Sunday nights lately and we’ve come up to, as Wiley mentioned, chapter 6, which is the story of the call of Gideon. And it’s a little bit of a longer reading tonight, so I just want to dive right into the text. So I’m going to pray and then we’ll read verses 1 to 27 in Judges chapter 6. 

And tonight, we’re going to look at Judges chapters 4 and 5 and I want to do it in two acts. So first, act one, Judges 4, which gives us the narrative; it gives us what everyone could see. And then act two, we will look briefly at Judges chapter 5, which gives us the song. And it tells us that more was happening than anyone could see, that more was happening than meets the eye. “The Stars Fought From Heaven.” Another way to say this - act one, we will look at the great story and act two, we will look at how through this great story we learn something about how to read our own stories. And so act one and act two. 

There is some graphic and potentially offensive material in Judges chapter 3, but do you know what is the most offensive part of this chapter? The most offensive part of this chapter is sin. It is Israel’s turning away from God and turning to idolatry and doing evil in the sight of the Lord. All sin is repulsive, it is ugly, and it deserves God’s anger and discipline. And that’s exactly what we find in this chapter in the book of Judges. But we also find good news. We also find good news about God’s deliverance and good news about God’s gift of rest. 

What we just read, commentators typically call the cycle of the Judges, and this pattern, it’s a pattern or a cycle that makes Judges really easy to outline. First, in the book of Judges there’s always peace in the land, peace in Canaan, and then the Israelites sin against God through idolatry and God judges them and gives them over to those sins and they are oppressed by a foreign nation, a different people group. But then God unexpectedly comes in and sends a judge, a rescuer to save them. There’s a brief peace in the land again and then it starts over. 

So we’re looking tonight at a half-hearted people and a whole-hearted God. And because starting a sermon series in the book of Judges is kind of like picking up The Chronicles of Narnia halfway through. It’s like starting to watch the “Star Wars” movies in the middle of the story. You start reading or you start watching and you think, “How in the world did we get here? What is going on in this story?” Because that’s the case, we’ll consider first the place of Judges in the story of the Bible. And so how did we get here? So first, the context, the historical context of the book of Judges. Second, a half-hearted people. And then third, a whole-hearted God. 

We’re going to look in our Bibles tonight at Jeremiah chapter 9, and we’re going to look at verses 23 and 24 together tonight. And when I was in my teens, I had a couple of different jobs, but whether it was packing bolts and screws or selling shoes, the thing that nobody really wanted to do was to take inventory, was to take a count of the things that we already had. Taking inventory is time consuming. It’s tedious. And it doesn’t seem to accomplish anything tangible. It would be easier to stay busy doing anything else other than taking inventory. But taking inventory is very important; it’s essential for running a good business.

So I want to come back to Proverbs tonight and look again, because we didn’t cover in that series something that’s treated pretty regularly and specifically throughout the book, and that’s that Proverbs over and over again talks about the human heart, and specifically talks about the heart in the condition, or the fact that the heart is broken; that we have broken hearts. We’ll talk about the human heart, it's importance, why it breaks, the cure, and seeking a wise heart.