Title: Rev
Author: Willem
Last saved by: Andrew Nugteren

WEEPING AND WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH; GET REAL
Judges 2   1 John 3:18

INTRODUCTION

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, In his first letter, the apostle John said to those to whom he was writing:  “Let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and in truth." That is a very common theme in the Bible. We come across it again and again. What the Lord wants from us, is not tears. He wants repentance that is true repentance. "Love covers a multitude of sins." That Is good, because we are passing lightly over someone else's sin against us. Tears cover up a multitude of sins often. That is bad, because we are passing lightly over our own sins against God. 

I am sure you have all noticed it. Sometimes at funerals or other sad events, often those who weep and wail most are not necessarily those who loved most. Now sometimes of course, people's grief is uncontrollable at funerals and that is not necessarily wrong.  Sometimes it can be out of sheer despair. We should have pity and we should pray for those people. But sometimes that almost over-the-top grief that you see in all sorts of situations might be a guilty conscience, because that person did not love the dead or watch over the injured child or whatever it was, as they ought to have and they know it. 

Sometimes it is simply sentimentalism, and sentimentalism is not love. 
Now it is true that love is not merely right actions without feelings of affection in the heart. But neither is love mere feelings of affection in the heart that do not result in right actions. Love hurts, they say. It’s true. And love works. 

In our text this morning, we see Israel giving expression to repentance over sin with a great outpouring of grief. When the angel of the Lord spoke to the people, they lifted up their voices and they wept. There was more noise there that day than you hear at a Jewish or Maori or Italian funeral. How remorseful the people were! And there in Bochim, on the spot, immediately, they sacrificed to the Lord and how devout they were. And they said, "We must never forget this. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember." So they set up their, "Lest we forget," just like we do on ANZAC Day. And they named the place Bochim. It means weeping.

But remorse is not repentance. Devoutness is not devotedness and nor is sentimentalism and a long memory love, necessarily. We are not very far into the chapter and we read, for example, that ”there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel. And the sons of Israel had done evil in the sight of the Lord, and served the Baals." Or we go on and we read that "the Lord raised up Judges who delivered them from the hands of those who had plundered them. But it came about that when the Judge died, that they would turn back, and act more corruptly than their fathers." And they would "follow other gods to serve them and bow down to them, they did not abandon their practices and their stubborn ways."  

Over and over again throughout the book the cycle repeats itself. The people forsake the Lord; the Lord brings them into servitude to their enemies; the people cry out, "Lord save us," which He does and then they promptly fall straight back into sin again. And with each successive fall it is deeper.  

Congregation what the Lord wants from us is not tears, and certainly not mere words. What the Lord wants from us is that we get real. That we love Him "in deed and in truth."  For first of all, we are dealing with a God who is a God who keeps covenant. 

1.	OUR GOD IS A GOD WHO KEEPS COVENANT
When God comes to speak to them about their disobedience – that you read about in chapter 1 and of which we have read several repeats in chapter 2, He says: “I've brought you up out of the land of Egypt and led you into a land which I have sworn to your fathers and I said, I will never break my covenant with you. And I have not." 

Way back in Genesis chapter 12 and Genesis chapter 17 He promised to Abraham "I will give you and your descendants this land, and I will make you a great nation in it." He had done that by now. In Genesis chapter 15, he said, “Now you are going down to the land Egypt Abraham – not you personally, but your grandson Jacob. But I will bring you and your descendants out of Egypt." He had done that. And God had repeated this promise many times and in different ways, and he had done it. When Joshua dismissed the people, we read, "the sons of Israel went each to his own inheritance to posses the land."  Why, even in this very action of calling Israel to book right now, God was keeping his covenant. In Leviticus chapter 26, God had said that even when they sin so badly that He had had to send them into exile somewhere, he said, "I will not forget you. I will come to you."

Well these are only early days in Israel’s history as a nation as yet. They have not sinned so badly that he has thrown them out of the land, yet He still remembers them. The angel came up from Gilgal to Bochim and spoke to them. Now who is this angel? Well, someone suggested that he was a prophet and others have said that, well, maybe he is Phineas, the high priest. 

But after looking at everything and reading about this angel of Jehovah who appears every now and again in the book of Genesis, and in other places, it seems more likely to me that he is the angel of the covenant, the Lord Jesus Christ himself. For the angel, himself says, “I brought you up, out of the land of Egypt.” Now this angel appears a couple of other times in the book of Judges. He appears to Gideon and to Samson. Or rather, to Samson’s parents. On that occasion he just appeared, he spoke to them, and then he vanished. 

That does not happen here. Here we read that he comes up the road from Gilgal to Bochim. Maybe the Ark of the covenant was brought up from Gilgal, where it was first put down in the new land after coming over the Jordan and destroying Jericho. Maybe the Ark was then brought from Gilgal up to Bochim, which was near Bethel, or seems to have been, at any rate. And the angel of the Lord of course came up with the Ark of the covenant. But back there in Gilgal, just across the Jordan, near Jericho, Joshua had renewed the covenant with the people. And before he had crossed the Jordan, a man, a captain of the host of the Lord, appeared to Joshua. You can read about that in Joshua chapters 5 and 6. He promised he will give Joshua success against Jericho and of course he did. Well now, that same angel of Jehovah has come to see why the people have not been completely obedient; and why they had not completely driven out the Canaanites, why they had been afraid to take them on, just because they had chariots. Hadn’t he given Jericho into their hands with a complete destruction?  “I said I will never break my covenant, so I haven’t.”  “I said I will never let you go; so here I am.”  

He called them to this obedience through Joshua but they didn’t listen to a dying man. So now the living God comes to them in person. It reminds us of an occasion in the New Testament, doesn’t it?  Matthew chapter 21, where Jesus tells the parable of the vineyard. And he says, "I’ve sent my prophets and more prophets and you have killed them all. Now I will send my Son.  Perhaps they’ll listen to him."  

Congregation, the God we are dealing with, or rather, the God who is dealing with us, is a God who keeps covenant. He is a God who keeps his word. And he is therefore, secondly a

2.	GOD WHO CALLS US TO KEEP COVENANT ALSO
Essentially, the covenant was that God would give Israel the land and all its blessings and protect them from whomever. And for Israel, they were not to intermarry with the Canaanites, they were not to make any covenant with them. In fact, they were to exterminate the Canaanites completely. That was a special judgement from God. But they have not kept it. They allowed the Canaanite religion to be practiced in their homeland and soon enough we find them intermarrying with them.  

And it all began when they made that covenant with that man from the city of Luz to gain a temporary advantage. Now they gave it a nice name of course; and it was all for a good reason; sure, to advance the kingdom! “Tell us how we could get into the city and we will treat you kindly," they said. It’s only one man. The word kindly means, loyally. That is the word we use about covenant relations. One is loyal to one's husband or wife, or one's country, or one's family or one's church or one's God. But when we covenant with unbelievers, we hold God’s covenant in contempt.  

Now of course our situation is different. We are not called to exterminate Canaanites. God will do that himself when the Lord Jesus comes again.  
Our situation is, in a certain sense, quite different. For we are called to live in the world with the Canaanites, as it were, as Israel was not. But we are also told very clearly that we are not to be of the world even though we live in it.  And in this sense, in the sense of avoiding all sin, or all covenant-like entanglements with the world that will compromise our standing in Christ, or bring the world into our lives, or our families or the life of the church, the principle still remains. So the apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 6, “Do not be bound together with unbelievers, for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness? What fellowship has light with darkness? What harmony has Christ with Belial? What has a believer in common with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?”  "We are the temples of the living God, so, as God says, 'I will dwell in them and walk among them, I will be their God and they shall be my people.  Therefore come out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord, do not touch what is unclean, and I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me,' says the Almighty."  

Well now, God says, "I’d sworn that I will never break my covenant with you, and I also said that if you do, I will not drive the Canaanites out from before you. But I will leave some of them to be continual thorns in your side to test you." In other words, "I have sworn I will give you the land, wholly and completely. But I did not swear to you that I will give it to you wholly if you are disobedient. What is this you have done?" God says, "What does this do to my covenant with you? where does this leave you and me? where do we go from here?"  And so they wept, full of remorse.

But tears and words can be cheap, congregation, and remorse is not repentance. The God we are dealing with, or rather, the God who is dealing with us, is a God who keeps covenant. He keeps his word. He is a God, therefore, who calls us to keep covenant also. And he is, therefore, thirdly, a

3.	GOD WHO CALLS US TO KEEP COVENANT IN TRUTH
Congregation, sin is dangerous and it has consequences that sometimes last for a very long time. Now the Lord is very gracious. And he forgives at the first sign of genuine repentance. You see that in the rest of the chapter. How often God raised up a deliverer whenever the people cried out to him under their oppression. 

Now certainly weeping and bringing sacrifice are very good signs of repentance. But feelings of remorse can be so fleeting. And they can sometimes easily amount to "mere trampling in my courts," Isaiah chapter 1.  Repentance means turning around and going in the other direction. 

If we find sin in our lives, congregation, we have got to determine to root it out, not just cry over it, however genuine we think our tears might be. For when we are not real with God, we merely lay the foundation of an ever down-ward spiral.  

And the end of it is the sort of thing that we find in the last chapters of this book. That horrible story of the rape of the Levite's concubine, and the near extermination of the tribe of Benjamin. Sins that we do not fully and properly deal with come back to haunt us. Think about David. Because of that sin with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband, the sword never left his house.  Think about how alcoholism eats into the harmony of a home, and gambling at the family finances. Or it can work in other ways. Perhaps you’ve seen it sometimes, where a father has been unnecessarily and therefore sinfully harsh disciplining his older, his earlier children, and it’s produced in them a rebellion against their parents. And the father sees that but in over reaction, he doesn’t discipline the younger children at all. So they go astray for the opposite reason. That happened with another of David’s sons, Adonijah, of whom we read that David never crossed him.  It can happen in the Church too. Where Churches use discipline unjustly and then in later years you never see them use it at all when it is patently called for.

So now almost anything goes. This is a very sad principle of life, congregation. Jeremiah 2 says, “Your own wickedness will correct you and your apostasies will reprove you.” Or in Romans chapter 1, “They receive in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” 

"Let us not love the Lord in word, or in tongue, but in deed and in truth." For the God with whom we have to do is a God who never breaks his covenant.  From our side also let us keep it and let us keep it in reality. So let us examine ourselves and let us determine by God’s grace to root out every sin of which we are aware.  

CONCLUSION
Yet even with all this warning congregation, we cannot help but see again what we saw last week; that the root of this whole problem was that the generations after those that knew Joshua and had seen the works that God had done with their own eyes did not know the Lord, or the works that he had done for them. 

It is true that prosperity makes us lax, prosperity turns people’s hearts from the Lord often. So sometimes we think what the western world needs today is to be driven to the bottom of the pig trough, like the prodigal son, to make us turn to the Lord. And the Lord does work like that sometimes. He did it with Israel with the exile into Babylon. Yet that does not always do a permanent work. That does not always do a deeply spiritual work. Over and over again we see a cycle: the people forsake the Lord, the Lord oppresses them with their enemies, the people cry out and the Lord sends a judge to save them.  And yet we are told explicitly that at times they did not listen to the judges.  And at other times as soon as the judge died they would turn back and sin worse than they did in the first place.  

What is the answer? The Lord wants us to love Him in deed and in truth. Yes, he wants to see our tears and he wants to receive our worship. But then He wants to see us seriously working against the sin and developing obedience in our lives, and that can never merely be a matter of formal deeds. We must come to know that covenant that God made with Israel, that He made it personally with each one of us and it was personally renewed with each one us at our baptism. And then we need to know that the work that the Lord did for his people, which is pictured to us in our baptism, even though it was done on the cross at Calvary 2000 years ago, is a work that was done for each one of us.

So we must know the Lord. We must know him personally as our own God. Public worship, as important as it is, can never be enough for the true believer. It certainly wasn't enough for the Lord Jesus Christ. So we need to be worshipping and communing and fellowshipping with God in our own room, where we get to know him as our own God.

People of God, are we seeking truly to reform and mould our lives according to the word of God? out of a heart that is truly in love with God? and that fellowships with God? May that be true for every one of us. 		Amen.
        Rev. John Rogers, Reformed Church of the North Shore, 29^th April, 2001