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As the book of Joshua ends, things are looking up. God has delivered the enemies of Israel into its hands. The war for the land is over in principle. All that is left is a little mopping up; the Canaanites’ power has been broken. And so, as the book of Judges begins, the children of Israel look out over the Promised Land as lords of all they survey. And what they see is a land teeming with now docile, defeated, and frightened enemies. These enemies had cried out for mercy—and Israel showed it to them, in defiance of the very God of mercy who had brought the victory.
The generation that followed Joshua failed to follow his faith. Joshua believed God, even when God told him that a little marching and a little shouting would bring down the wall of Jericho. Joshua believed God when He removed the stain of Achan from the camp. Joshua believed God when God told him, “See, I have delivered the land into your hand.” But the next generation did not believe God when He told them to drive their enemies fully from the land. They were wiser than He. Why, wouldn’t it be better, now that they had the upper hand, to seek to influence the heathen? Wouldn’t it be more prudent to use their labor for building the kingdom? Why bother risking the blood of their compatriots when the land was already theirs in principle? Surely God could see the wisdom in making peace when Israel held all the cards.
Judges is a curious book, a seemingly endless cycle of disobedience-oppression-repentance-deliverance. The cycle rolled, however, because of the path laid out in the opening verses of the book. The disobedience began with Israel’s failure to drive out the Canaanites. And every oppression that the children of Israel experienced was at the hands of the very people they failed to drive out. God will not be mocked, and neither will His wisdom be shown to be foolish.
This cycle does not end with the book of Judges. It continues through the history of Israel and of the church. Even today, we keep committing the same sin: failure to believe God. We are too easily satisfied. God delivers us, and we grow content and at ease. We let our guard down, thinking ourselves unassailable—until we are overrun by assailants. We reach positions of power and cut deals with those over whom we rule—only to discover too soon that our positions have switched. We keep our enemies around to tote our water—and soon we find ourselves with that burden.
When the evangelical church fought the good fight for the inerrancy of Scripture, it did well. It drove out those who would deny that God had spoken. Outside the mainline churches, one now would be hard-pressed to find any pastor who openly would deny the inerrancy of the Word. But the battle is far from over. There are still heathen in the camp, those who would say that the Bible is without error, but that it teaches that God does not know the future. There are those who speak of the inerrancy of Scripture on the one hand but write off huge portions of it as culturally bound on the other. There are those who affirm that Scripture is trustworthy, but who prefer to trust their own subjective experience of experiencing God for direction and guidance. There are those who claim to believe the Bible is the Word of God, but say it teaches that we need only name it and claim it to get what we desire. There are those who insist that the Bible is without error—and that their corporate understanding of it is likewise without error. There are those who affirm that the Bible is God-breathed, but deny that God breathed the breath of life into Adam on the sixth day.
Our calling is not only to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, but to believe the Bible. We are called to faith, to believe God. We ought not to be satisfied with our own spiritual growth because we think the new man has the upper hand. We cannot conclude that we have arrived because we have reached an understanding of the Reformed faith, that the battle for our own sanctification has come to an end. We need to drive out every wrong conviction, every wicked habit, every wayward affection. We need to stop being so easily satisfied, else we will soon find ourselves on the wrong end of the power struggle.
Such is a call to battle, a call to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. It does matter what we believe about how God controls the future, what His law yet requires of us, how He is to be worshiped, how sufficient His Word is, how He uses His church, and how He made His world. Every error in our thinking and in our doing is a potential oppressor and a potential cause of the judgment of God, and it needs to be expelled from our lives.
But all along the way, throughout the battle, we must likewise believe this—that the battle belongs to the Lord. He will deliver us from our own evil, just as surely as He has delivered us from His avenging wrath. We must rest in His wisdom, in His power. Our great Judge is not a Nazirite, but a Nazarene. Our great Judge did not drink with His hand at Mount Gilead; He drank the bitterest cup on Golgatha. Our great Judge has redeemed us not for a time, until we grow at ease in Babylon, but forever, until we rest eternally in the New Jerusalem.