The “Here Comes The
Judge!” Series #1
"OTHNIEL"
TEXT: Judges
2:10, 20-3:11
INTRO: An old
saying goes like this: "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat
it." So often this is
thought of in terms of nations or historically important people who lived many
years ago ... but it is also true with our own lives and our short
history!
How many of you have trouble keeping up
with maintenance around your home or job?
Why do we bother with maintenance? BECAUSE, decay and destruction will set
in without up-keep!
Spiritual passion cannot just be taken
for granted, it needs constant maintenance or we will fall into spiritual decay
and this will take a toll on our lives, our families, and our
nation!
ILLUS: When men
stop worshipping God, they promptly start worshipping man, with disastrous
results. -- George Orwell in the Observer (1945), Christianity Today,
Vol. 33, no. 15.
(1. Faith that is only historical lacks
passion and perspective and results in cold dead
orthodoxy!
(2. Faith that is only focused on the present
becomes nothing more than existentialism ... whatever feels good for the moment,
do it!
(3. Faith that is only future oriented can be
fanciful and sensational!
Faith MUST BE ROOTED in
all time elements to be healthy, alive, and productive!
One of the lessons of Othniel is that
one person with the Spirit of God in his/her life can turn a nation
around!
PROP.
SENT: The Scriptures teach us that
spiritual decay sets in when we neglect an active pursuit of our faith ... faith
that is rooted in history, experienced in the present and confident in the
future!
I. EXTREME FORGETFULNESS! Judges 2:10,
20-3:6
A. Blindness
Judges
2:10
1. When
a. A whole new generation had grown up
without any knowledge or history of God’s work in their lives. They had no concept of God or His
faithful work.
b. How about us? While it is important to establish a
home, a job, good educational opportunities, etc. it is far more important to
establish an eternal legacy; what are you leaving behind? What about your children's faith and
eternal soul? What about this next
generation?
c. We must give the next generation
more than temporary skills for this life ... they need eternal qualities of
faith!
d. It is tragic to think that a
generation who experienced such powerful miracles from God failed to transmit
all that experience and knowledge to the next generation. YET … it is
happening in our own day!
2. The blind neglect of transferring
God's touch from the previous generation was now unfolding in their children ...
with no
passion or perspective for the God of their fathers their passions were placed
elsewhere ... in the pursuits of
self and temporal matters! This
is our post-modern culture today also!
a. The result was decay ... spiritual,
moral, and national! Our world
today mocks what it doesn’t even know!
ILLUS: A bold
unbeliever was lecturing a group on the folly of religious faith in general and
the Christian faith in particular.
At the close of the presentation the speaker invited people to propound
any questions they might have. In
the audience was the town drunkard, who had been converted to Christ. In response to the invitation the
converted alcoholic came up front, took out an orange, peeled it, and ate it
without comment.
The speaker asked if he had a
question for him. After downing the
last segment of orange the convert turned to the infidel and asked, "Was the
orange I just ate sweet or sour?"
Angrily, the speaker replied, "You idiot, how can I know whether it was
sweet or sour when I never tasted it?"
To this the converted drunkard retorted, "And how can you know anything
about Christ if you have not tried Him?" -- James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton:
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc, 1988) p. 190.
b. They adopted the ways and mentality
of the world ... married into ungodly relationships and lived out an ungodly
lifestyles!
B. Burden
Judges
2:20-3:6
1. Because of this God allowed them to experience life
without His help!
a. Freedom from God means this
too!
b. But even in this God was being a
loving God ... for He knew this would create such a burden to them that they
would seek Him again when the burden got too great!
ILLUS: They say
there are not atheists in foxholes. It's amazing how religious and how
spiritual we get under pressure in a moment of bargaining. -- John A Huffman, Jr., "Equipped to Face the Two Biggest
Fears in the World," Preaching Today, Tape No. 72.
c. God is patient with us out of His
love, but we could save ourselves great pain if we could learn to obey up front
rather than through the losses later!
2. To
3. It would be a testing time for this
new generation, to see whether they would return to God or go their own
way.
a. Each
generation must face their own testing time ... you can't get to
heaven because you were related to someone who might!
b. Faith is not faith without
tests ... it does not operate in a vacuum!
4. God would use this process to teach
them the skills they had missed from the failure of their fathers to teach them
God's ways! IF their earthly
fathers had failed to teach them – their Heavenly father would have to do
it.
a. There is hope in this, if your
earthly father fails to teach you God's ways your heavenly Father will take
over.
b. Much agony and pain however could
have been avoided had the previous generation succeeded in teaching them these
truths!
c. God's
love for His people would supersede the failure of the previous
generation ... even if it involved a greater burden for the
new!
d. The end product of the burden when
it produced righteousness would be worth it all!
II. EXTREME FREEDOM Judges
3:7-8
A. Boredom Judges
3:7
1. This generation had never known the
desert, hardships, lack of homes ... they only knew the “
a. Their passions therefore were
misdirected to other places ... false gods and idols!
b. Misguided passions often yield rotten
fruit!
2. They slowly but surely decayed as a
society ... and as individuals!
a. Having no historical perspective on
God ... they felt free to do whatever they had the passion to do! “The Israelites
did evil in the eyes of the LORD; they forgot the LORD their God and
served the Baals and the Asherahs.”
(Underline for
emphasis – mine)
ILLUS: The puzzle
is why so many people live so badly.
Not so wickedly but so inanely. Not so cruelly but so stupidly. There's little to admire and less to
imitate in the people who are prominent in our culture. We have celebrities but not saints. Famous entertainers amuse a nation of
bored insomniacs. Infamous
criminals act out the aggressions of timid conformists. Petulant and spoiled athletes play games
vicariously for lazy and apathetic spectators. Aimless and bored, people amuse
themselves with trivia and trash.
Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets
headlines. -- Eugene Peterson, "Run With the Horses," quoted by Howard
Hendricks, "Beyond the Bottom Line," Preaching Today, Tape No.
101.
b. Nothing was steering them ... this
extreme form of freedom plus boredom became a prescription for wanton
sin!
B. Bondage
Judges
3:8
1. The irony of “extreme freedom” is that it produces the
opposite of freedom ... instead of freedom it creates
bondage!
a. Imagine if we had extreme freedom
in our country ... you could do anything you want, there would be no
laws!
b. Anarchy would set in ... decay and
destruction would run wild and everyone would find a life of bondage, driven to
fear and thus a loss of freedom.
c. We are free in
d. We
cannot be free spiritually or morally by ignoring God's spiritual and moral laws
... if we do we will find ourselves in bondage! Playing around with God’s laws and
constantly ignoring God’s warnings will only prove a disaster in
time!
ILLUS: The Winter
1991 issue of the
There were two electrical
engineers in the control room that night, and the best thing that could be said
for what they were doing is they were "playing around" with the machine. They were performing what the Soviets
later described as an unauthorized experiment. They were trying to see how long a
turbine would "free wheel" when they took the power off
it.
Now, taking the power off that
kind of a nuclear reactor is a difficult, dangerous thing to do, because these
reactors are very unstable in their lower ranges. In order to get the reactor down to that
kind of power, where they could perform the test they were interested in
performing, they had to override manually six separate computer-driven alarm
systems.
One by one the computers would
come up and say, "Stop! Dangerous!
Go no further!" And one by
one, rather than shutting off the experiment, they shut off the alarms and kept
going. You know the results:
nuclear fallout that was recorded all around the world, from the largest
industrial accident ever to occur in the world.
The instructions and warnings in
Scripture are just as clear. We
ignore them at our own peril, and tragically, at the peril of innocent
others. -- Tom Tripp in Fresh Illustrations for Preaching &
Teaching (Baker), from the editors of Leadership.
2. We should learn from this principle
for every issue of our day ... like freedom of the
press:
a. Some would have us believe that we
should allow all expressions of pornography and violence as “freedom of
speech.”
b. This is not freedom however; this
form of extreme freedom will produce a generation of morally undisciplined and
angry corrupt adults! They will be
in bondage and so will the society created from this extreme form of
freedom!
c. Perhaps the very decay of marriages
today is the evidence!
3. God's love was His solution ... He
let them experience their bondage until they cried out for His help once
again!
a. This was not abandonment ...
it was patient LOVE!
b. Sometimes love must be tough to
produce healthy fruit!
c. Removing all consequences from
acts are not always a loving thing to do!
d. God's ear would be ready to hear
the moment they turned to Him. He
was ready to help them but they had to want it!
III. EXTREME FAITH Judges 3:
9-11
A. Biography
Judges 3:9
1. God's answer to their cry for help
– He sends them A DELIVERER!
a. Jesus is the ultimate deliverer,
and He is the final answer to anyone who sees their need and calls upon God for
help!
b. God raises up a man, a judge named
OTHNIEL. (His name means “Lion of
God” or "God is Force")
2. Can one person with extreme faith
make a difference? YES!
a. Othniel comes from a godly family
... does that make a difference?
b. Consider this; he is the nephew of
godly Caleb who was one of the 2 spies out of 12 that came back with a good
report!
c. He is from one of the only two
families that didn't die in the wilderness ... his uncle could tell him about
the real adventures of faith in the desert! Joshua and his family was the only other
one that could do this!
d. It is really not surprising that
Othniel becomes the first judge of
3. Don't underestimate the value of
his being a relative of godly Caleb ... it seems to have stayed in the
family!
a. Nothing prepares
your children more for life than you as
parents!
b. Godly relatives can have a
significant impact on our lives!
4. No doubt some of the leadership
capabilities of this young man were promoted by Caleb's influence and the other
members of Caleb's family, even his own father!
ILLUS: The
Scriptures often exhort us to be filled with various godly virtues -- which
means what? How do we know if we
are "full of
goodness"
(Rom.
15:14), for
example? Think a moment about a
water-saturated sponge. If we push
down with our finger even slightly, water runs out onto the table. We immediately know what fills the
interior pockets of the sponge. The
same is true of ourselves. We can
tell what fills us on the inside by what comes out under pressure. -- James S. Hewett, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton:
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc, 1988), p. 320.
a. Unlike many of his fellow
Israelites who married unbelieving wives he married someone related to Caleb and
so established another godly home!
b. In fact we know from 1 Chron. 27:1,15 (“Heldai the Netophathite, from the family of
Othniel…” 1 Chron. 27:15)
that one of his descendants served as a captain in King David's court many years
later ... the practice of a godly line continued!
B.
1. How does one fight the evil of this
world ... Zechariah said it best: "NOT BY MIGHT, NOR BY POWER, BUT BY MY SPIRIT SAYS THE LORD
OF HOSTS."
a. Indeed, before going to war or to
judge, it clearly states, “THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD CAME UPON
HIM!”
b. The
best preparation for battle is the Spirit of God!
ILLUS: Resolved:
that all men should live for the glory of God. Resolved second: That whether others do
or not, I will. --
Jonathan Edwards, Leadership, Vol. 6, no. 1.
2. The term "CUSHAN-RISHATHAIM" can be translated; "DOUBLY WICKED
CUSHAN"... indicating the kind of enemy he would fight! Notice however that Othniel overpowers
this “doubly
wicked Cushan” leader!
a. We are also in a battle today; the
enemy is not people but the corruption that sin brings to people. Even if you think things are “twice” as bad as the previous generation, like
the “doubly
wicked Cushan” of Othniel’s day … being Spirit filled can beat this
challenge!
b. Othniel was victorious in battle
against the enemy ... fighting was not fun or necessarily quick, but it was
necessary!
3. Righteousness overpowered "doubly wicked
Cushan!" It still will
today!
4. 8 years of captivity and bondage
were coming to an end because of one man willing to stand for
God!
a. The only way out of the bondage
of sin is through a deliverer sent from God ... the ultimate judge and victor is Jesus
Christ, He is our deliverer!
b. All God needs today is one person
willing to stand up for Christ and we too can overpower the enemy!
C. Benefits
Judges
3:11
1. Look at the results of obedience
and faith … the "
a. What a testimony of "GRACE ABOUNDING
MUCH MORE OVER SIN."
b. Throughout the lifetime of Othniel
God granted a great peace for
2. Now because of righteousness and
obedience on
ILLUS: Our office
is a ministry of grace and salvation.
It subjects us to great burdens and labors, dangers and temptations, with
little reward or gratitude from the world.
But Christ himself will be our reward if we labor
faithfully. -- Martin Luther,
Leadership, Vol. 9, no. 1.
3. God give us Othniels in this day
and age ... don't be afraid to stand up for God in a society that loves its
false idols.
4. “RIGHTEOUSNESS
EXALTETH A NATION, BUT SIN IS A REPROACH TO ANY PEOPLE!” Proverbs
13:34
CONCLUSION: Anything neglected decays
including our faith! We are called
by God to have a faith rooted in the past, present, and future! Can one person with a vibrant faith make
a difference ... YES! Othniel did
and so can you!