First Comes Love.....

By John Stallings

……..Thou hast left thy first love….. Rev.2:4

America is indeed the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet & we’re certainly better off than most nations. But scratch the surface, get to the dark underbelly of life in the year of 2009 & what do you see?

Our present spiritual state gives us little to be proud of in God’s eyes. I can’t help but feel sad because of the open, blatant, rampant sin that exists. Its everywhere you look.…in government, in our schools, in the vulgar & profane language, on radio & television, in movies, magazines & in most all of media.

People are bending over backwards to see that God is outlawed from all aspects of our lives. We can’t have Him in our schools; we can’t have Him in our courts, or any public settings. We are frowned upon if we mention God or Jesus except in the barest, slightest whisper & then only in the privacy of our homes. Merry Christmas isn’t “politically correct” & happy holidays is the accepted greeting in many quarters.It’s reminiscent of Jesus’ prediction-

-- And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.—Matt.24:12

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

For the answer we can go to the front or back of the Bible. Let’s first go close to the front of the Bible, to the book of Judges.

The last verse in the book of Judges is…..In those days there was no king in Israel & every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

I’m not asking this to put you on the spot, but how much do you know about the book of Judges? Most Christians know very little about the book. I would guess that what most of us know about in this book are the stories of Gideon & Samson. Ask yourself how long it’s been since you heard a sermon [other than Samson & Gideon] from the book of Judges.

The reason we know so little about Judges is it’s not an enjoyable read. Judges is a hard book about hard times showing sin in all its repulsiveness. What makes it even more uncomfortable for us is the fact that it mainly deals with wickedness among the people of God. Because God only has one church, His Body, in a very real way the mess in Judges is the mess in our spiritual family tree.

The book of Judges makes not the slightest attempt at cosmetics. It openly & candidly portrays ungodliness among the people of God. We can’t read Judges without being implicated because we too have been unfaithful & unholy. We too have been disobedient & have compromised & can grieve the Holy Spirit therefore reading this book pricks our conscience. Maybe that’s why Judges is neglected.

Just think of how differently the people of God looked a generation earlier than they look in the book of Judges. In Joshua’s time the people followed him in entering into the Promised Land & one enemy after another fell before the army of God. It was a time of unprecedented conquest & privilege. God’s people in those days weren’t perfect but everything pointed to a new era of godliness in Canaan. As soon as Joshua & his generation dies, the people became wicked…….another generation grew up who knew neither God nor what He had done for Israel.

Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord & served Baalim…..Judges 2:10-11

The book of Judges spans a long period of time, about 350 years---from Joshua to Samuel—or a quarter of the Old Testament history. This sheer volume of time is another reason we ignore so much divine revelation at our loss.

We don’t know who wrote Judges but Jewish tradition claims Samuel as the author. It had to be someone who could look back over the whole pre-kingdom period because of the repeated statement—“Israel had no king,” meaning it was written around 1000 B.C, about the time of Saul or David’s early years, in the days of Samuel.

JUDGES TEACHES US GOD’S PEOPLE NEED A LEADER.

Sheep are lost without a Shepherd. Joshua provided great leadership but when he died the tribes became disunited & individuals started to live as they pleased. The leadership of the judges over the next three to four centuries was temporary & partial & as soon as the judges died, the old wickedness started again. Even the best of kings all failed at some point but the whole of the Old Testament is preparing us for the righteous king who was to come, Jesus Christ.

He alone is the Messianic king, the Judge-deliverer, the ultimate Savior, & the Lord of the church. Israel has some glory days. They were led by the likes of Moses, Abraham, Joshua & Samuel but look how low they sank. Reading the book of Judges causes us to ask ourselves where we are now spiritually. We should make sure we’re not living off victories from the past or victories our ancestors had but we should ask ourselves if we have an up-to-date experience with God.

THE LAST THREE CHAPTERS TELL A GRUESOME TALE.

Chapters 19-21 of Judges tell the horrific story of a man who carved up the body of his concubine, a live-in lover into twelve pieces sending the grisly parcels throughout the whole land, one piece to each tribe. The result was civil war, eleven tribes of Israel against one tribe, Benjamin.

I'D LIKE TO TELL YOU A STORY BUT PLEASE FASTEN YOUR SAFETY BELTS!!!


A man & his concubine were traveling toward the city of Jerusalem. It wasn’t such a good plan for it to them was a foreign city. People in those days took a chance going among folk who weren’t their own kind. They stopped at Gibeah, a Benjamite city where they should have been safe.

This night will go down in history as one of the bleakest nights a person’s worst nightmares could conjure up & has to be one of the most terrible stories ever told.

The couple stopped in the city square as was the custom then, in hopes someone would see them & invite them to spend the night with them. If you saw someone in the city square with no place to stay it was common courtesy to invite them back to your place.

People passed by & looked them over but nobody invited them to their house. Finally an old man comes by on his way home from working the fields & invites them to his home.

What happen next is so sickening I can hardly bring myself to write it. You may say, “This is so terrible I don’t want to know any more.” But somehow we need to know, & Israel did too.

The small group was relaxing in the house when a noise was heard outside. They soon realized it was a mob of locals who then started knocking on the door & shouting. They had seen the couple but they weren’t interested in the woman, they demanded the man.

The old man was having none of this so he went outside & rebuked them. This is hard to understand but it was a custom of that day, that the old man had an obligation to the male guest to protect him as best he could. So the old man offered his daughter & the visiting concubine to the men to have sex with.

The mob got more & more demanding & unruly so finally the visiting man took his concubine to the door & threw her out to the ravenous mob. Now hear this; the visiting man who’d thrown his concubine outside went to bed & went to sleep while the blood & sex thirsty mob gang-raped & abused his concubine all night until the sun came up the next morning.When he awoke he went to the door & saw his concubine lying at the door.

We don’t know if she’s dead or alive at this point [I’d sure like to know] but the man puts her on his donkey & goes home. When he gets home, he gets a knife & mutilates his concubine’s body. He actually cuts her in twelve pieces & sends part of her body to all twelves tribes of Israel.

To be honest, the man didn’t have to do any of this. He didn’t have to of his own free will turn his concubine over to the mob & he certainly didn’t have to cut her up & send pieces of her all over the countryside.I’ve always thought Sodom was a low point in Scripture. You can’t get much lower than Sodom but at least at that time the angels intervened & saved Lot & his family. But now, the people of Israel had become Sodom.

Nothing like this had ever happened in Israel & I’m pretty sure it’s never happened since. This is about as terrible as things can possibly get. Sorry, there’s more. When everyone received the part of the girl’s body it shocked them as it should have. Now at least the girl is going to get some “justice.”If you remember Natalie Holloway who died a few years ago, probably at the hands of some oversexed spoiled kids in Aruba, it doesn’t seem like there’ll ever be justice for she & her family.

It’s as though Israel woke up when they got the news, suddenly they roused themselves & said, “What’s going on here? There’s something rotten in Denmark” [Israel.]

ISRAEL ASKED,--WHAT CAN WE DO??

Call me crazy but I believe America is experiencing some horror at the present time but nothing compared to what it will be in a few more months if we don't experience national revival.

This is precisely the question we should be asking in America at the present time if we ever expect to see her again as we have known her.

As I see it, the only thing the current presidency can point to in their six month reign is turning an economic downturn into a financial abyss that will doubtless pass 10 trillion dollars all the while traveling the world telling them--"We no longer call ourselves a Christian nation," & showing his ignorance with his clueless treatment of foreign dignitaries.

Yes, we need to hit our knees in America & quickly.The "Czars" Obama's appointing are nothing less than to do an "end-run" around scrutiny & accountability & if we look close enough we'll see it as tyranny. The one sprig of new grass springing up [ other than the one where we're finally seeing Obama as a shallow, egotistical amateur in over his head] that I see is that Americans are becoming increasingly disenchanted with this "show biz" approach that looks eerily like Mickey Rooney & Judy Garland saying one hot summer, "Hey, I've got an idea, let's put on a "garage play."

BUT LET'S GET BACK TO ISRAEL

Gibeah had no answer for what their citizens had done so all of Israel assembled an army & got their fighting britches on. Keep in mind they were going to war not against a foreign enemy but against one of their own cities. Now a little more pepper gets thrown into the Gumbo because when letters were sent to Gibeah to hand the offenders over, they wouldn’t give them up. Blood is thicker than the right thing, right? Right!

All the Israelites except the Benjamites came together in Mizpah. Several battles were fought, with Israel standing up an army of four-hundred thousand men against Benjamin’s twenty-seven thousand. Israel won & all but 600 of the Benjamites were killed. Justice had been served on the men who did this terrible deed against the innocent concubine.

WHERE DID THINGS GO SO WRONG??

How did Israel get to the point that they were their own worst enemies? Moses had told them they were God’s kingdom of priest’s & they were a holy nation. Was it when they didn’t take the land that the Lord had promised them? Was it when they little by little slid back into the world, eventually becoming just like them?Where did they go wrong? How did God’s people become rotten to the core? Was it the paganism of Gideon, the self-righteousness of Samson, the cowardice of Barak? Was it when they decided that they could be the judge of what was right or wrong?

How do you get to the point in which you don’t show hospitality to your own people, where a Levite throws his concubine to a mob, & we can wipe out an entire tribe?

I don’t know the answer to these questions but I know that several times during the book & at the very last of the book we’re reminded that Israel had no king so people were doing what they thought was right. When you read what was happening in this story you are shocked to realize, this is Israel, God’s people; people who were called to be different from the people around them. Called to be separate & holy, reflecting the character of God.

Moses laid out a path for these people that would lead to blessing but they took a different path. It didn’t look so bad at the time but look where it ultimately took them.

What is the answer? When we read or hear the news now-a-days we say, “This is Judges Stuff.” Will God save us from what we’ve become? The answer for us today is the same answer the people in Judges needed. We need a Savior, a king.

The book of Judges ends on a depressing note. Everyone is doing what is right in their own eyes & God’s people have become rotten to the core. They had sunk as low as you can get.Why was this horrendous story placed last in the book of Judges? Because God wanted to make a point: When God’s people wander from Him, the consequences don’t look bad immediately but if they insist in their rebellion the consequences are worse than we could imagine.

But slowly through Samuel, David, the prophets & ultimately Jesus Christ Himself, God’s light began to penetrate that darkness. The darkness could not extinguish the light God sent into the world.

The end of Judges, the tribe of Benjamin was almost wiped out. Centuries later a descendant of this almost-lost tribe, Saul of Tarsus, became the premier interpreter of the good news of Jesus Christ.

When we disobey & go against God the consequences are horrendous. But God is faithful to keep His word & send a Savior to save His people from their sins.

Lastly, & perhaps the most important thing in this story is the fact that even though the main man threw his concubine to the “wolves,” he did one thing right, [if you can call the mutilating of his concubine right] he sent the pieces of her body to the rest of Israel asking them how they felt about it. Asking them if they felt it needed to be answered with action, & of course it was.

What should we as Christians do when we see our children being spiritually & morally mutilated?

AMERICA MUST AWAKE!

Not only must we stand & be politically active & vote the wrong people out of office & the right ones in, we must also keep it in mind that we need a king & that king is Jesus Christ; a king who was crowned when He hung on the cross,

“This is Jesus, the king of the Jews.”

In His death & resurrection, He breaks the power of sin that entraps us. To not have Jesus as our king is to be like Israel was & do whatever you feel like doing. It would seem today that America has no king & many of its citizens will do whatever they can get away with.

Again, the problem in Judges was that the inhabitants of Israel were God’s people. The message to America today is that we must clean up this mess, return to our first love, stop playing at religion & be real. We must stop worshipping anything else but the God of heaven.

When God was replaced in Israel, all hell broke loose. Such was Israel in the time of Judges & such it will soon become in America because God cannot withhold His judgment if we don’t ;

---return to our First Love.

Blessings,

John