From His Heart

Speaker 1

We usually know when wrong is wrong, but do we also know when right is wrong? Here's Pastor Jeff Shreve.

Speaker 2

Proverbs 14:12, Proverbs 16:25. It's the same verse. It says, there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death. It seems right, but it's not right.

And we have to see what does God say? Because truth and what is right is not what you think, it's not what you feel, it's not what you want it to be. It is what God says.

Speaker 1

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death. Are you doing what is right in your own eyes or what is right in God's eyes? This is from His Heart with Pastor Jeff Shreve.

Thank you for joining us for part one of the last message in Pastor Jeff Shreve's new 10 lesson series called Before There Were the Cost of Compromise. This series is our thank you gift for your support this month of any amount from His Heart, all 10 lessons covering the Book of Judges on a USB flash drive, CDs, DVDs, or MP3 download. You can find out more when you go to promisheart.org.

Now, in today's lesson, Pastor Jeff shares how important it is to make sure our lives align with the word of God and not with the word of the world around us. So open your Bible to the Book of Judges, chapter 21 for the message when right is wrong.

Speaker 2

Judges is summed up in the last two verses of Judges chapter 21. It says in verse 24, the sons of Israel departed from there at that time, every man to his tribe and family, and each one of them went out from there to his inheritance. In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Very key, very telling about the Book of Judges. There's no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. They did what was pleasing. They did what seemed good to them.

You know, the last message we had on Judges was on Samson. Samson was the last judge in the Book of Judges. But Judges 17:21 is more of an appendix. It's not chronologically telling the story. It's basically telling what life was like after the death of Joshua and his contemporaries because they all followed the Lord, but after Joshua, the people did not follow the Lord. So Judges 17:21 is covering a period of time probably right before Othniel, who was the first judge. And it's a time of terrible apostasy. The people fell away from the Lord.

Some of the most horrific things that you read, Judges chapter 19 is considered by many to be one of the most horrific chapters in the Bible. That just gives you a picture of what human depravity looks like. And so what we read in these chapters 17 through 21, we read about idolatry, we read about theft, we read about gang rape, we read about homosexuality, we read about murder, we read about dismemberment as a Levite is going to cut his concubine in 12 pieces and send each piece to the tribes of Israel. We read about the civil war as Israel came against the tribe of Benjamin and almost obliterated the tribe of Benjamin.

And all that happened, as the scripture says in 1st Corinthians 10, it happened as an example to us that we shouldn't crave evil things, that we need to learn from the failures of the people who have gone before us. They did what was right in their own eyes. Well, here's the question for you and me. Are you? Am I doing what is right in our own eyes, or are we doing what is right in God's eyes? I've entitled this message "When Right is Wrong." When you do right in your own eyes, but not in God's eyes, hey, your right is wrong.

Proverbs 14:12 and Proverbs 16:25, it's the same verse. It says, there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death. It seems right, but it's not right. And we have to see what does God say? Because truth and what is right is not what you think, it's not what you feel, it's not what you want it to be. It is what God says.

And so Judges chapter 21, verses 24 and 25, kind of give us a summation of the whole book. We're going to look at an overview, like a 30,000-foot overview of the passages of scripture that are given. I want to share with you three insights from Judges 17 through 21. There's no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Insight number one, we must never lose sight of our King. Now, four times in Judges, beginning in chapter 17, repeated in chapter 18, repeated in chapter 19, and repeated at the very last verse of the book, there was no king in Israel. No king. Little K. We call this series "Before There Were Kings." It's a period from about 1350 to 1050, about 300, 350 years, give or take. Right in there. The period of the Judges. There was no king, little K. The kingdom didn't start until Samuel ordained Saul to be king, and the people chose Saul to be their king. That happened in 1050 AD. There's no king, little K. But there...

Speaker 3

Was a king, Big K. And the.

Speaker 2

King of Israel was God. And so we need to make sure that we never lose sight of our king. You know, the Bible says, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith. We need to keep our eyes fixed on him. Look away from everything else and keep your eyes on him.

Now this is what the scripture says in First Samuel, because we go from Samson to the next judge, Samuel, to the end of the judgeship, and it becomes a monarchy with Saul. It says in 1st Samuel, chapter 8, the people said, "Behold, you have grown old, Samuel, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations." But the thing was displeasing in the sight of Samuel when they said, "Give us a king to judge us." And Samuel prayed to the Lord. The Lord said to Samuel, "Listen to the voice of the people in regard to all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them." You can just hear the hurt in God's voice: "They've rejected me. They don't want me to be king. They want to have a king like all the other nations. They want to be like everybody else. And I have called them as my own possession to be different, to be salt and light in the world, to be holy as I myself am holy." They lost sight of who the king was, who the real king was. You and I must not do that.

Now, as we think of Jesus, who is called King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and as our God who dwells in unapproachable light, we need to remember the Lord is our king, who died and rose for us. When you remember what the king did for you and for me, you know that before God ever created this world, he could see and know. He knows the end from the beginning. So before he ever created, he knew what was going to happen. He knew that Adam and Eve would sin. He knew that humanity would rebel against him. Revelation 13:8 says that the Lamb of God was slain from the foundations of the world. Before God ever made anything, he knew that he would have to become a man and suffer and bleed and die on a cross and rise again from the dead to redeem humanity. He knew that he would be despised and rejected. He knew that he would be mocked and laughed at and scorned. He knew that the Jews would call him Satan, Beelzebul, saying he cast out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons. He knew that he would be arrested. He knew that he would be beaten. He knew that he would be spit upon. He knew that he would be whipped. He knew that he would be nailed to a tree. He knew all that the Lamb of God was slain before the foundations of the world. Yet he did it anyway. He created everything. He created you. He created me. Even though he knew that he is the king who died and rose again for us.

When Jesus was crucified, it was customary to put the charges above the cross. And here was the charge that Pilate put above the cross of the Lord Jesus: "This is Jesus, the king of the Jews." Remember, the chief priests and religious leaders got upset about that and they said, "Don't say that he's the king of the Jews. Say that he said he was the king of the Jews." And Pilate said, "What I've written, I have written." What was the charge that they brought against Jesus? He was crucified for being the Son of God. He was crucified for being the king of the Jews. He was crucified for being who he was, the king of Israel. This is Jesus, the king of the Jews. Our king died and rose again.

Secondly, our king is the one who lives in us and through us. So Jesus died and he rose again, and he offers salvation to anyone who will come to him in repentance and faith. When we bow our lives and surrender ourselves to Jesus, the king comes to live inside of us and to live his life through us. See, in the Old Testament, God had a temple for his people. They were to come to the temple to worship him, and the Lord dwelt in the temple. During the time of the Judges, it was in Shiloh. But then during the monarchy under Solomon, he was going to build a temple, and the Lord was going to dwell there. The Lord had a temple for his people. But in the New Testament, the Lord has a people for his temple.

1 Corinthians 6:19 says, "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own, for you have been bought with a price? Therefore glorify God in your bodies." The Lord lives inside. Christianity is not religion; it's a relationship with Jesus. Religion is trying to clean yourself up to make yourself respectable and acceptable to God. We can't do that. Christianity is recognizing that you can't do it and saying, "Lord, have mercy on me, Jesus, save me." The Lord comes into our lives to make us right inside, changing our hearts from the inside out. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things passed away; behold, new things have come. So our King died for us. Our King lives in us and wants to live through us. To be filled with the Holy Spirit means that you're living in the power of the Lord, His Spirit living inside of us.

And then thirdly, the King, the Lord, is our King who is coming to rescue us. Matthew 24:44 says, "For the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not think he will." And so, are you ready? Are you ready for what? Are you ready for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ? Because he promises. Our King says, "I'm going to come and rescue you." It is wonderful that we have rescue on the horizon. Philippians 3:20 says, "For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ." In 1 Thessalonians 1, Paul wrote these words: "For they themselves report about us what kind of a reception we had with you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead. That is Jesus Christ, who rescues us from the wrath to come."

Now I believe that the rapture of the Church is the next prophetic event on God's calendar. I believe that it happens before the tribulation period because Jesus rescues us from the wrath to come. The tribulation period, the seven years of tribulation, is God pouring out his wrath on a disobedient, Christ-rejecting world. But before he does that, since we're not destined for wrath (1 Thessalonians 5:9), we are not destined for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He's going to snatch us away. That's what rapture means: to catch away. And he's going to catch away his Church. Are you ready? Because he is coming one day soon.

So we must never lose sight of our King. What happened in the Book of Judges? Well, of course, they didn't have a King, little k, but they lost sight of the King, big K. They weren't living their lives to glorify the King, big K. In general terms, not every single person, obviously Othniel, the good Judge, did that, and some of the others did that. But as a society in general, they weren't doing that.

Second insight: we must continually align our lives with the Word of God. We have to consistently and continually bring ourselves before the Lord and His Word and align our lives with His Word. One of the things that's interesting in the Book of Judges is you don't read, except one time, about the Word of the Lord. It says in Judges 6:8 that the Prophet came and said, "Thus says the Lord." Boom. And this is what the Lord said. We don't read about that very much. We don't read about people in the Book of Judges spending time in the law of Moses. Because they didn't know what the Word said, they easily got off track. They weren't consistently bringing themselves before the word of the Lord.

Now, in the Book of Joshua, it is very, very different. Joshua took over for Moses when the Lord took Moses home. In the Book of Joshua, right off the bat, the Lord sets things up for Joshua and he says this: "This book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success." Hey, Joshua, day and night and night and day, you spend time in the Book. The book of the Law shall not depart from you. You meditate on it, you think about it, and you remind yourself what it says, and you chew the cud, so to speak, as the cow does. That's what the Lord wants us to do as we meditate on His Word.

Then we're careful to do it. As I prayed, we don't want to be forgetful hearers; we want to be effectual doers. Joshua did that, and because Joshua did that, he found success. As you bring yourself before the Lord and His Word, it keeps aligning you and your life to true north. Judges chapter two says this: "After Joshua died and the elders who served along with Joshua died, and all that generation also were gathered to their fathers, there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which he had done for Israel."

Then the sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord. Well, how in the world would you not know what God had done for Israel in giving you the promised land, in taking you out of Egypt with a mighty hand? All the things that happened in the wilderness wanderings, and all the miracles that took place, and how they crossed the Jordan River and God parted the rivers of the Jordan so that they could cross through. How they defeated Jericho and the walls came tumbling down. All the miracles that we read about—how would they not know those things? Well, because they weren't in the Word of God. If you're not spending time in the Word of God, you're not hearing about those things; you're not bringing those things to mind.

They didn't drive out the Canaanites like the Lord told them to do, so they were just surrounded by these pagans who had pagan practices and who had false gods and who worshiped in a way that was very sexualized and sensualized. It just polluted them. So they didn't know. They weren't reading the Word. The priests and the clergy weren't doing a good job teaching the Word.

Here's the truth for you and for me and for all of us: we are prone to wander and we're prone to rationalize our behavior. "There's no king in Israel; each one does what is right in his own eyes." Well, it seems to me this is the right way to go. This sounds good to me. And we're so prone to that. I remember when I first became a Christian, I was talking to my brother, actually, and he had gotten involved in this cult. I didn't really know what a cult was back then; I was just a baby, baby, baby Christian as a senior in high school.

He was going to this cult called the Way, the Way International. I remember asking him about it. We were talking about something related to premarital sex. I said, "Well, what does your group say about that?" I said, "The Bible says that's sin." He goes, "Oh, it's only sin if you don't love that other person. Because if you love that other person, then it's okay." Really? Oh, okay. Well, it just sounds good. It sounds right. It sounds like what I want it to be.

I remember talking to another man. We were discussing the sin of homosexuality. He said, "Homosexuality is not a sin. Love is love." Oh, really? Well, the Bible clearly condemns homosexuality. It says it's sin, but you want it to be what you want it to be. We are prone to wander, as that song by Robert Robinson said: "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; prone to leave the God I love." We're prone to rationalize our behavior and to make it fit in to where it sounds right.

I love what one preacher said about the word rationalize. He said, "Think about that word rationalize. It's telling yourself rational lies." That's what you're doing when you're trying to rationalize your behavior. You're putting lipstick on a pig and saying, "Well, this is acceptable. This is good." No, it is not. We are prone to wander. And so that's why you and I and all of us need to spend time in the Word of God.

We need to have a daily quiet time. What's a quiet time? A quiet time is when you read the Word of God, when you pray, when you spend time with God, when you shut out the things of this world, and it's just you and God. That's a quiet time. We need church time. We need to gather to hear the Word of God taught in Bible study classes, to hear the Word of God preached, to sing his praises, to be with other Christians. That's important. "Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together," the Bible says in Hebrews 10, "as is the habit of some, but encourage one another and all the more as you see the day approaching." What day? The day when the Lord comes to rescue us.

2 Timothy 3:16 says this: "All scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work." The Bible, the Word of God, is profitable for teaching. It tells you what's right. It's profitable for reproof; it tells you what's not right. It's profitable for correction; it tells you how to get right. It's profitable for training in righteousness; it shows you how to stay right. And so we have to spend time in the Word of God and just know that the natural tendency of my life and your life is to veer off of true north.

Speaker 1

You're listening to part one of the message "When Right is Wrong." It's from the 10-lesson series, "Before There Were Kings: The Cost of Compromise."

Now, if we've learned anything today, it is that we must spend time in scripture study. This message is one of ten in this series.

And here he is again with more on this important resource.

Speaker 3

The Book of Judges is a sobering reminder of what happens when people reject God's truth in favor of their own. Now, during the time of the Judges.

Speaker 2

There was no king in Israel.

Speaker 3

Each man did what was right in his own eyes. In this book, we see a continuing cycle of sin and subjugation and suffering that brought desperate cries for mercy and deliverance. Now, in response, God raised up Judges to save his people. These Judges were flawed, yet they were willing leaders who were used to call God's people back to faithfulness.

In my new 10-message series, "Before There Were the Cost of Compromise," I'll unpack the important lessons from Judges, warnings about apathy and the dangers of compromise, and the hope of redemption. You can get your copy in the format of your choice when you call or go online today with a gift of any amount.

The truth of Judges is that when you and I stray from God's way, life unravels. But when we turn back to Him, He is always faithful to redeem us and restore us. I hope you'll get your copy today.

Speaker 1

To get this timely and extensive 10-message series, "Before There Were Kings: The Cost of Compromise," you can make your gift of any amount when you call 866-40-BIBLE (866-40-24253) or go online to fromhisheart.org. Request it by name when you call or go online. The picture of the series is on the homepage, making it easy to find.

God bless you for standing with us to help share the truth in love to a lost and hurting world here on From His Heart. Join us on Friday when we conclude our study of the Book of Judges and share real truth, real love, and real hope from God's heart here on From His Heart.

Speaker 4

There is tree, there is love, there is hope that you always dream Love we can heal every scarlet.

Speaker 1

From His Heart is the Listener supported Broadcast Ministry of Dr. Jeff Shreve speaking the truth in love to a lost and a hurting world. Remember, no matter what, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Find out more@fromisheart.org.