JUDGMENT DAY (Judges 1:22-2:5)
INTRODUCTION:
Last Sunday we looked at the opening verses of Judges and it seemed that even after the death of Joshua the nation got off to a great start. Joshua’s legacy and the influence that he had had on the people of Israel as their leader had carried beyond his death. In those first verses we see them inquiring of God as to who should lead them in the fight against the Canaanites and then we see them working together, the tribes of Judah and Simeon coming together to carry out God’s command to them. Last week we saw how God gave the land into their hand, Judah and Simeon had victory after victory and we looked at two incidents in those verses where God’s blessings were evident as these two tribes carried out God’s command. They experienced God’s blessings at both a national level and a personal level. But near the end of the chapter, at some verses we did not look at specifically, there is some indication that not everything was going according to plan. In verse 19 we read that Judah could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had iron chariots. Then in verse 21 we read, “But the sons of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem; so the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.” (Judges 1:21, NASB95)[1] These defeats possibly were not complete disasters, but they most certainly should have served as warning signs that something was amiss. If the LORD was with the men of Judah, why were the chariots of the Canaanites such a problem? Why after Jerusalem was conquered did the Benjaminites allow the Jebusites to stay there, why did they not drive them out? We need to probe a little deeper to answer these and other questions to discover the real reason of what went wrong and to understand and learn from it for our own benefit. The deeper probing that is needed is found in the rest of chapter 1. Then the full revelation of the underlying causes comes in the first five verses of chapter 2. Let’s pray and then get into our passage for this morning.
--PRAY--
SCRIPTURE:
Turn in your Bibles this morning to Judges 1:22-2:5 our passage for this morning. Please, if you are able, stand in honor of the reading of God’s Word.
Judge 1:22-2:5,
“Likewise the house of Joseph went up against Bethel, and the Lord was with them. The house of Joseph spied out Bethel (now the name of the city was formerly Luz). The spies saw a man coming out of the city and they said to him, ‘Please show us the entrance to the city and we will treat you kindly.’ So he showed them the entrance to the city, and they struck the city with the edge of the sword, but they let the man and all his family go free. The man went into the land of the Hittites and built a city and named it Luz which is its name to this day. But Manasseh did not take possession of Beth-shean and its villages, or Taanach and its villages, or the inhabitants of Dor and its villages, or the inhabitants of Ibleam and its villages, or the inhabitants of Megiddo and its villages; so the Canaanites persisted in living in that land. It came about when Israel became strong, that they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but they did not drive them out completely. Ephraim did not drive out the Canaanites who were living in Gezer; so the Canaanites lived in Gezer among them. Zebulun did not drive out the inhabitants of Kitron, or the inhabitants of Nahalol; so the Canaanites lived among them and became subject to forced labor. Asher did not drive out the inhabitants of Acco, or the inhabitants of Sidon, or of Ahlab, or of Achzib, or of Helbah, or of Aphik, or of Rehob. So the Asherites lived among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land; for they did not drive them out. Naphtali did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh, or the inhabitants of Beth-anath, but lived among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land; and the inhabitants of Beth-shemesh and Beth-anath became forced labor for them. Then the Amorites forced the sons of Dan into the hill country, for they did not allow them to come down to the valley; yet the Amorites persisted in living in Mount Heres, in Aijalon and in Shaalbim; but when the power of the house of Joseph grew strong, they became forced labor. The border of the Amorites ran from the ascent of Akrabbim, from Sela and upward. Now the angel of the Lord came up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said, ‘I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land which I have sworn to your fathers; and I said, “I will never break My covenant with you, and as for you, you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall tear down their altars.” But you have not obeyed Me; what is this you have done? Therefore I also said, “I will not drive them out before you; but they will become as thorns in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you.”’ When the angel of the Lord spoke these words to all the sons of Israel, the people lifted up their voices and wept. So they named that place Bochim; and there they sacrificed to the Lord.” (Judges 1:22–2:5, NASB95)[2]
VICTORY AT BETHEL? (Judges 1:22-26)
As we come to verse 22 of this first chapter the focus shifts from Judah and Simeon to the house of Joseph. The house of Joseph would include the two tribes that came from his two sons, the tribe of Manasseh and the tribe of Ephraim. All seems well at first as these two tribes have joined together to fight the Canaanites. The house of Joseph goes up first to Bethel, a strategic place, as well as an important place in the history of the nation of Israel. This is where Jacob had seen his vision of the ladder or staircase from heaven to earth with the angels of God ascending and descending and where God had promised to be with Jacob and bring him back to this land. Jacob had set up a pillar here and anointed it with oil and called it “Bethel” which means “the house of God.” When Jacob returned to Israel he and his family came and worshiped the LORD at this place. It was also strategically located on the north-south trade route with the east-west trade route from the Mediterranean to the Jordon intersecting here at Bethel. Because of this it was an important city to control. Verse 22 tells us that the LORD was with the house of Joseph, and they are as successful as Judah and Simeon had been. But what follows makes one wonder just how real this achievement is as we read what happens in the following verses. Something has changed and there are too many negatives to ignore them. The negatives begin to dominate and take over the rest of the chapter.
The success at Bethel was not only important because of its strategic position on the trade routes or because of its importance in the history of the nation but by taking this city it opened the whole northern hill country as far as the Jezreel valley to possible occupation by both tribes of the house of Joseph. Reading the account of the taking of Bethel, the description of how it was taken shows a great deal of military skill. Spies are sent out to spy out the city, see where the weaknesses of the city’s defenses were located, if any. While they are spying out the city, they see a man come out of the city and the spies approach him and offer to spare his life if he will show them how to get into the city. With his help the men of Manasseh and Ephraim get into the city and attack it taking the city’s defenders by surprise. We are told that they struck the city with the edge of the sword, but true to their promise, the man who had helped them and his family are spared. As I read this event it makes me think of the taking of Jericho and the sparing of the prostitute Rahab and her family because she helped the spies (Joshua 6). But there is a difference here, this story has a totally different ending then what happened with Rahab. The author of Judges informed us that the pre-Israelite name of Bethel was Luz, and we are told that the man who was spared took his family and moved north to the land of the Hittites (possibly Syria) and builds a new city and names it Luz as a memorial to the old city. We are not told if he did this as penance for what he had done, or in defiance of his city being destroyed or simply to memorialize where he lived formerly. What is clear is that this man, unlike Rahab, does not become an Israelite. He remains a citizen of Luz and as such he is a Canaanite at heart. He moves to a safe distance, but he does not just disappear. The city he builds is close enough that future generations of Israelites know about Luz and why it is there. We are told by the author that Luz is its name to this day, at least to the day when the book of Judges was written. In other words, it is not just a man and his family that have survived, but also Canaanite culture in a very tangible way, a city. Luz, therefore, was not so much conquered as it was moved. The end result is that two cities, one Israelite and one Canaanite exist side by side, so to speak. This victory at Bethel, then is really no victory at all. The question must be asked, why did thing turn out this way if “the LORD was with them” as we are told in verse 22? What went wrong? The answer is not clear at this point. We must keep moving on because only as we move forward will the answer reveal itself.
COMPROMISE AND DEFEAT (Judges 1:27-36)
This next set of verses is very depressing as it summarizes the circumstances of the individual northern tribes, beginning with Manasseh down through Dan. The portrait that is painted for us by the author is not a nice one. We read of some small successes, when Israel grew stronger and put the Canaanites to forced labor, but that was not true success because that was not what God had commanded them to do. But beginning in verse 27, most of the passage is on a negative note. Israel’s position in the land of promise quickly deteriorates. The Canaanites hold out in certain areas and because of this they end up living among the Israelites, then the Israelites live among the Canaanites and finally we are told that the Amorites do not allow the tribe of Dan into the coastal valley but pushes them up into the hill country to live denying them most of their inheritance. What began with a kind of victory in Bethel ends with a humiliating defeat and a general situation that can at best be described as a standoff. We find Israel living in a land that they have not been able to take complete control of. Again, the question hangs in the air, what went wrong? If God was with them, what accounts for their failure?
This time we are given a little more information that offers us a bit of an explanation. Notice what is said concerning each tribe in this section, it does not say that they could not drive out the Canaanites, but instead says that they did not drive out the Canaanites. Manasseh did not drive them out, nor did Ephraim, nor Zebulun, Asher did not drive them out, nor did Naphtali. This phrase “did not” implies choice, in other words they chose not to drive them out, they are responsible for their decision. Is it possible that this compromise with the enemy was a yielding to what Israel saw as a reality? Even Judah, the tribe designated as the leader by God had not been able to drive out the Canaanites in the valley because they had iron chariots. In other words, the Canaanites had superior equipment, military equipment that gave them an advantage on low, flat territory. Maybe the tribes did not drive them out in some areas because of their military power, thinking it is better to settle for what can be achieved than suffer heavy losses trying to do the impossible. What happened to the tribe of Dan being pushed back into the hill country seems to affirm that the decision of the other tribes to compromise was right. Those questions still hang there in the air, if God was with them, why should iron chariots matter? Why is compromise necessary? We still do not have the real cause of Israel’s failure. But we are about to as the Angel of the LORD comes up from Gilgal.
JUDGMENT DAY (Judges 2:1-5)
This is the first appearance of the Angel of the LORD in the book of Judges, it will not be His last. His appearance here marks a very special moment in the book of Judges. We read in verse one of chapter two that “the angel of the LORD came up from Gilgal to Bochim.” (Judges 2:1a, NASB95)[3] This phrase “came up” is the same phrase used in chapter one, verse 4 when Judah went up to Bezek, and the same phrase used in verse 22 of chapter one when the house of Joseph went up to Bethel. This going up is the last of a series of “going ups” that have spanned the whole of chapter one as the various tribes have gone up from Gilgal, Israel’s encampment by the river Jordon to take possession of their allotted territories throughout the land of promise. This final going up by the angel of the LORD brings us to the moment when all that has taken place before this is to be reviewed and assessed. In other words, it is judgment day.
Who exactly is this “angel of the LORD”? As I said this is His first appearance in Judges, but it will not be His last. We will see Him again in chapter 5, 6, and 13 but He is always referred to only as the angel of the LORD. The best clues to His identity are in chapters 6 and 13, but we will wait until we get there to look at them. It is enough to say that in this chapter he speaks as if He were God Himself saying, “I brought you up from Egypt… I will never break my covenant with you…” (Judges 2:1b, NASB95)[4] Also, the response of the Israelites as soon as He stops speaking is to offer sacrifices to the LORD. The fact that He comes up from Gilgal, which is near Jericho, suggests that He may be the same one who appeared to Joshua near there and identified Himself as “the commander of the LORD’s army” in Joshua 5:13-15. He is a messenger like no other in the Old Testament, to encounter Him is to encounter God. Theologians call the angel of the LORD a theophany, a pre-incarnation appearance of God. The One who appeared to Joshua at the beginning of Israel’s campaign to occupy Canaan now appears again to review how things have gone and to give His verdict on whether or not His orders have been followed.
The angel of the LORD’s verdict is not positive, there is no joy for those who are being called to account. The word “Bochim” which means “weeping” or “weepers” is another name for Bethel. It is not its real name but what the Israelites came to call it because of what happened there. They will come to Bethel and weep again near the end of the book. This place where God had promised Jacob that He would bring him back and give him the land, this place where the tribes of Joseph had their sort of victory now becomes a place of sorrow and bitter memories because it was here that things began to go wrong and just got worse as time went on.
As we look at the verdict of the Angel of the LORD, and the speech He gives we should note that the key word in all that He says is “covenant.” In verses 1 and 2 He says that He will never break His covenant with them, and that Israel was to make no covenant with the people of the land. How might we define covenant? A covenant is a promise confirmed in a ceremony of some kind, such as a wedding which is a covenant between a man and a woman before God, a promise to be faithful to each other. God had first spoken of His covenant with Israel to Abraham, promising to give the land of Canaan to his descendants and then He acted on that covenant when He brought the Israelites up out of Egypt and into the land. Israel’s responsibilities as the beneficiaries of this covenant were to be faithful to the LORD and to keep His commands. One of those commands was to not make a covenant with the people of Canaan, instead they were to drive them out and break down their altars as we looked in the introduction to this book in Deuteronomy 7. They could not be in two covenants at once—one with the Lord and one with the people of Canaan, and by implication with their gods. To do this would be to break their covenant with God by being unfaithful to Him. The verdict of the Angel of the LORD was this was exactly what the Israelites had done. The LORD had promised never to break His covenant with them, and they had promised the same, but they had not kept their promise. By becoming covenant-makers with the Canaanites, they became covenant-breakers with the LORD who had brought them out of Egypt. This was God’s own analysis of what went wrong and led to the compromise and failure described in Judges 1:22-36.
It all began at Bethel, or Luz as the Canaanites called it. Verse 22 said that the LORD was with the house of Joseph, but instead of trusting Him to give them the victory, they made an agreement with a Canaanite, and from that point on it was all downhill for the Israelites. The angel of the LORD’s verdict said nothing about the iron chariots or the superior might of the Canaanites that defeated the Israelites, nor did He say anything about the Canaanites determination to stay in the land, the angel of the LORD’s verdict as to what went wrong was due to Israel’s unfaithfulness to the LORD. They had made a covenant with the people of the land. Those who are unfaithful to the Lord cannot expect to have His continued presence with them. By their unfaithfulness they forfeited the full possession of what God had promised them. What began with making a covenant with a Canaanite at Bethel ended with bitter weeping there before the Lord that they had betrayed.
Let me explain this, look back verse 24 of chapter one when the spies first approach the man coming out of Bethel. They tell him if he shows them the way into the city, they will treat him kindly. This phrase translated “treat kindly” sounds innocent enough. The Hebrew word translated “treat kindly” is the word chesed and the Hebrew expression used here is “we will do chesed with you.” This word chesed has to do with making a covenant. To “do chesed” with someone is to enter into a bond with them, to pledge loyalty to them and to do this in a way that compromises your loyalty to God is wrong, however innocent and right it may seem. It is with this in mind that we can understand the rebuke, “What is this that you have done?” This question echoes God’s question to Adam in the garden of Eden. Adam’s feeble excuses, like the pathetic fig leaves he and Eve had put on, only made the truth more apparent. They had disobeyed God who had made them. They had unfaithful to the One to whom they owed everything. They had sinned and they knew it.
Just as Adam and Eve’s sin had terrible consequences, so would Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. The angel of the LORD would no longer drive out the Canaanites before His people. They had already tasted what this was like in chapter one, now they would experience it in full measure. They would not only have to share their inheritance with the inhabitants of the land, but the gods of those peoples would be a snare to them and dispossess them of the integrity they could have had as faithful worshipers of the LORD. The angel of the LORD said, “…they (the Canaanites) will become as thorns in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you.” (Judges 2:3, NASB95)[5] Their covenant with a Canaanite changed everything, not only did they compromise their covenant with God to live among the Canaanites adopting their whole way of life into the Israelite community, including their religion, and this wrong once committed became a plaguing sin that they fell into again and again throughout the period of the judges. The book will tell the sad history of what a harvest of bitter consequences they Israelites reaped from their unfaithfulness to God. So, “Bethel” (the house of God) became “Bochim” (the place of weeping). The weeping Israelites offered sacrifices to the Lord there, but it was too late. Also, the book goes on to reveal that the weeping was not the weeping of repentance, nor were the sacrifices to make atonement for their sin. Their sorrow and weeping were because of the consequences of their sin and not because the wickedness of their sin had convicted them. It was shallow and temporary sorrow that never led them to true repentance.
CONCLUSION:
The situation that we see Israel in at the end of our passage did not come about suddenly. It was the result of a slow process that began with one act of compromise. Instead of trusting in God for the victory, they did that one thing that was inconsistent with being faithful to God even though it sounded reasonable, it was still wrong. This event in the history of Israel should be a warning to us, we each face innumerable temptations in our day, little inconsistencies with being faithful to God, they are very subtle. Under pressure to act “kindly,” to be tolerant we can begin to compromise our commitment to the uniqueness of Christ and the truth of the gospel, especially in the world in which we live today. Truth in our world is relative, tolerance is promoted as a supreme virtue, but it is not, we are being fed a lie. Tolerance, not truth, is relative, whether or not it is good depends on what is being tolerated. To tolerate evil, no matter how good it looks, no matter how reasonable it sounds, to tolerate evil is to make a covenant with the devil. To do this is to be unfaithful to the Lord who saved us and rightly demands and deserves our obedience. When we are unfaithful, we lose strength, we lose vitality, and we lose victory. We find ourselves weak in the face of the enemy. Now our enemy is not flesh and blood like the Canaanites, Paul says in Ephesians 6:12, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12, NASB95)[6] The only way we can face this enemy is by trusting the Lord for the victory.
This passage is also a warning to the church, local churches. Remember the letters to the churches in Revelation. The church of Ephesus did not abandon its first love all at once. The church in Laodicea did not become lukewarm overnight. It was by slow degrees. The shift from faithfulness to compromise could barely be seen at first. For a long time, they were able to ignore the warning signals and just pretend that all was well. Then the word of the risen Lord Jesus Christ came to them through the apostle John and their self-deception was ended. The truth is hard to hear, they were loveless, wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. It was judgment day, and they were exposed just as Israel was before the angel of the LORD. Paul said it this way to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14, NASB95)[7] The world offers infinite opportunities to compromise. Israel’s world was Canaan, with its false gods and fascinating and captivating culture. Ours is the fast-paced, pleasure-seeking, pluralistic, consumer culture in which everything is possible, and nothing forbidden except intolerance. The opportunities to compromise are limitless, and the pressure to do so it immense.
These opportunities and the issues they present will not go away, we must keep our focus on God and never close our ears to the Word of God; or harden our hearts to God’s voice when He speaks to us from His Word. Because in the end it is not to the world which seeks to suck us in that we must answer, but to Jesus Christ the Lord and the Word of God that He has given us that we must answer. For one day we, like Israel, will have to stand before the divine Judge and hear the verdict on how faithful we have been to Him. This is not about our salvation, but about our faithfulness. On that day it will be too late to change what we have done, and there will be no excuse if we have failed Him. Better to be faithful now then to weep then.
[1]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995. (Emphasis mine)
[2]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[3]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[4]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[5]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[6]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[7]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.