Allen Jackson - Overcoming Evil and Serving God - Part 1
We began a study in a previous session on the general theme of overcoming evil. And I wanna continue it in this session. You know, I really wanted to be wedded with the idea that we overcome evil for the purpose of serving God. That our greatest service to God is not yielding to evil. It's not being religious. It's not changing our vocabulary, our beverage list, our dress code, the way that we serve God is we overcome evil. It's the biblical assignment. Don't be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good. We don't overcome evil with anger or hate or violence or belligerence or stubbornness. It takes God. He is the only one who's good.
So if you think you're gonna overcome evil with social justice apart from God, you're deceived. God is the only source of justice. But it's our assignment. And there's a great deal of confusion in the church today about this. A great deal of consternation, a great desire to be applauded by a secular culture. The gospel is offensive. Jesus warned us about this. He told us we would have to choose him above everything else. That our relationship with him would have to be primary above all the other relationships of our lives. And we see how difficult that is because we live in a season of unprecedented capitulation on behalf of the people of God. It's been decades and decades since we've seen the kind of falling away that we're walking through right now.
I don't say that with any joy or glee, the response is in what do you do? Well, I think a fundamental beginning point comes back to the Word of God, and I wanna reiterate an invitation that I've given to you many, many times and God willing, I'm gonna give to you many, many more. And that's to read your Bibles on a daily systematic basis. Not randomly, not the verse of the day, not where does my Bible open and my finger fall. Not God, give me a promise that encourages me today. But the purposeful, intentional, systematic reading of your Bible. It doesn't mean that every day will be an emotional event or that you'll hear the halls of heaven thunder with a directive portion for you. It's a reflection of respect. It's the embracing of a discipline. It's the pursuit of God.
And he said, "If you seek me, you'll find me". In fact, in Hebrews, he says, he rewards those who diligently seek him. And I don't know a better way to build that habit into your life than the routine, systematic reading of your Bible. We've been doing it together as a congregation now for several years. I'm not submitting to you that we have the best plan or the right plan or the most correct plan. We simply have a plan. So that with about a 15 or 20 minute commitment a day, you can read through your Bible from the table of contents to the maps over the course of a year. And I believe there's a value in reading it together.
That would be my suggestion and being, if you're in the community here, to do it with us, because when you get together with your small group or if you have dinner with some friends, we're reading the same portions, then it's easy to incorporate what you're reading in your Bible into the conversations you have in your normal life. And if you're not in the habit of doing that, I question the authenticity of your faith. Forgive me. But the things that really matter to you, they leak into all your conversations. They affect all of your decisions. And if we have proposed that Jesus is Lord of our lives and Lord of all that we are and all that we're doing and all that we're becoming, then that aspect of our lives just inescapably leaks into every conversation we have.
And that daily Bible reading helps with that. I brought you a verse. It's Joshua 1:8. Right now, if you're doing the reading with us, we're working through the book of Joshua, which means we're headed for Judges. And my real goal in this session and the next is to try to give you a bit of perspective on Joshua and Judges. The books go together. They're companion pieces and the larger history of the story of the Jewish people on our way to a new covenant. And the better we understand Joshua and Judges, the better we'll understand the redemptive work of Jesus. So I was just gonna, it's a little bit of the doldrums. If you do the Bible reading, we just slogged our way through the books of Moses and Leviticus.
You know, I'm not even sure God's read Leviticus since he wrote it. I'm kidding. But some of it can get just a touch dry, and then you get to Joshua and Judges and it's like the lights come up and the drama gets big again. We're back in the Hollywood scenes that they make movies about. But understanding what's happening is helpful. In Joshua 1:8, he gives us a little clue into the importance of God's Word. He says, "Don't let this book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. And then you'll be prosperous and successful. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go".
We'll see this again in a moment. We're gonna look at it in a larger context. Joshua is beginning his assignment, and the commission that he's been given is to not let this word depart from his mouth. Now, if you haven't thought about it consciously, I would submit to you the great duty of your life is the pursuit of Almighty God. I'm not talking about your day job. We can be butchers, bakers, or candlestick makers. But the assignment of our life is the pursuit, the forwarding of the purposes of God with our little brief journey under the sun. Everything else is secondary to that. What you accumulate, the awards you're given, the acknowledgments that come to you.
I'm happy for all of those things. They're wonderful. I'm not trying to avoid them or dismiss them, but they're not the goal because you're not gonna take those with you. The only thing that will traverse that journey from time into eternity with you is your character and what you have done on behalf of the kingdom of God. So this notion of investing in God's Word, you see, if you don't know the Word of God, you won't know the character of God. You may be able to say, "Well, this is what we believe at World Outreach," but that's not the test. Or you may say, "Well, this is how my family believes".
Well, good for you, but unless you're a part of the Trinity, that's not really gonna be the deciding vote. And we have all of these deflections and kind of excuses and ways that we've kind of imagined that we give ourselves an exit ramp from accountability. And I want, with all due respect, they're just false. You need to know the Word of God so you can know the character of God and it will help. It won't remove you from the arena, but it will help to insulate you from a season of tremendous deception. And Jesus cautioned us that that deception would grow worse and worse as we approach the end of the age.
You know, for the most part, I understand we don't know history. Wasn't that important to us. We tend to be more forward focused. At least when I was in the educational system, the people that taught us history really didn't wanna be in the classroom. Often they were repurposed coaches, and they didn't wanna be with us any more than we wanted to be with them. And so we kind of had a d'etat. You don't teach, we won't learn, but we won't embarrass one another. And because of that, we've attached very little value to history in general, but there are times and places where I think it helps a great deal. And for you and I to have access to the Bible, the Word of God, has been a very sacrificial journey throughout the history of the people of God.
And we've arrived at this point where the Bible is just almost, for us at the moment, it's so easily available that we argue about which translation to read. You understand there's a tremendous degree of pettiness in that. I mean, there are differences in the translations. I will readily admit that. There are some that I think are stronger and some that are not. But the best translation of the Bible is the one you will read. And we shouldn't imagine because the Bible is so available to us that we can quibble about which translation is best that we should treat it casually. It's available to us digitally.
With a few key strokes now, you can get to original languages and meanings. It makes it much easier to manipulate as well. And I assure you they're manipulating the text. It's important that you know your Bible. But the history of that journey, I thought it was worth just a moment or two. I've been to Bethlehem, dozens and dozens and dozens of times. And one of the oldest churches in the land of Israel was sponsored by Constantine, the Roman Emperor who turned the Roman Empire to Christianity, Constantine. His mother visited the land of Israel and she sanctioned, commissioned three churches, one of which was the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It's where Jesus was born. And beneath at least that traditional site, there's a series of caves and it's where Jerome lived for almost 30 years of his life. He had been the secretary to the Pope.
Now, I don't want to offer a dialogue on the Catholic church. I know there's great emotions all across that spectrum. Let it suffice to say there have been some wonderful contributions to this journey of our faith by the Catholic church and there have been some very dark chapters that would mirror our own personal journeys. So let it be said that in the late 4th century, Jerome spent 30 years of his life translating the scripture into Latin, which would have been the lingua franca, the language of what was left of the Roman Empire to make it more available to a broader group of people. He translated it from the original language of scripture, Hebrew and Greek. And he did it very sacrificially. I've stood in those caves. Three minutes in those spaces is enough for me. I can't imagine 30 years of my life.
Now, if we step forward about 1000 years in the late 14th century, a man by the name of John Wycliffe translated those Latin scriptures into English because there had been changes in society and culture, and there was a need for the Bible to be, again, in the language of the common people so that it was more accessible to a broader group of people. Wycliffe did it largely to challenge the growing privilege and power of the Catholic church, which had morphed far beyond religious services and become the most powerful and potent political influence in a good portion of the world at that time. And they plunged into many expressions of ungodliness and wickedness. And he wanted the people to once again know the character of God.
So he began to translate the Bible into English, making the Bible available to a far greater group of people. And for his efforts, he was burned at the stake in 1384. You may not know him, but he was really, by many historians, church historians, acknowledged as the first of the reformers. His message was very similar to the message Luther would deliver, Martin Luther would deliver some 200 years later. But it doesn't stop there. We could go on and on. But William Tyndall, I'll give you one more. He, too, translated the Bible into English. By the time he did that in the 16th century, the printing press had emerged.
So now we're no longer just hand-copying scripture. The printing press gave us the ability to print copies that could truly make it something distributed to a much broader group of people. If you could read, you could have access to scripture. And for Tyndall's efforts, he was strangled to death. And then just to be sure they've been effective, they burned his body at the stake. That was 1536. And there was so much hatred in his efforts and his desire and his intent to let the common people have access to the Word of God that the church very aggressively sought to find all the copies, and to the best of our knowledge, there are only two copies of Tyndall's translation still in existence.
See, the Word of God has not come to us cleanly and neatly and easily. So our indifference towards it, our ambivalence, the fact that we're too busy, our lives are too crowded. There's things we wanna do and movies we wanna watch and places we wanna go and trips to be taken is an expression of indifference towards the Lord that is almost unforgivable against the context of the history of the people of faith.
So I'm inviting you to is a few minutes today to say, "God, I'd like to know you better. I don't even know what that means, but I'd like to know you better". You see, unless men and women were willing to challenge the status quo to face the threats of civil and religious authority, we would not have Bibles to read. It's really a relatively new idea that the Christian faith is only pursued for a few minutes on the weekend in some special place. And it has no implications outside of those gatherings. The notion that our faith is practiced in the safety of a sanctuary is a matter of polite etiquette and the observance of music that is pleasing to our personal taste is farcical.
Our faith is lived out on the muddy fields of human struggle where we're asked to confront evil, to grapple with our own inconsistencies, and to dare to believe that Almighty God is involved with us. Tragically, we have accepted the seductive potion of a timid faith, a cowering church, and social kindness. The gospel, be very clear on this, is a call to radical transformation of life. And if you'll allow me, I don't believe you should even imagine yourself a Christian if you practice ungodliness. There is a hope of change for any repentant person, but there is no hope for those who choose stubborn indifference to the lordship of Jesus.
And we have perverted the gospel into a sloppy agape. And I believe God in his great mercy and kindness is beginning to awaken us. And I think reminders from the history of the church, the sacrifices that have been made are important. Without the voice of scripture, there are many things we simply do not know. We wouldn't understand the sanctity of human life and why it's wrong to kill our babies. Without the Word of God, we wouldn't understand that marriage was biblically defined by God himself between a man and a woman. Without the insight of scripture, we wouldn't know the significance of truth. We would have no way of discerning or defining sexual morality or immorality. Without the scripture, we would have no hope beyond time.
We would be completely abandoned to the pursuit of hedonism; eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you may die. Without the council of scripture, we'd be totally unprepared to meet our Creator, and it's an appointment we all hold. So I wanna step into Joshua and Judges with you. If you haven't been doing the daily Bible reading, this would be a good week to begin. We're in the middle of the book of Joshua. Come on in. You won't know how to pronounce every name. Neither do I. In fact, I give you permission to make it up. You won't understand everything you read. Every time you get an update on your phone on the software and it gives you six pages of micro print.
How many of you read every word of that? Understand it fully and totally? Diagram the sentences, break them apart to be sure there's no interrelations that you missed? Nah, you just check, "I accept," and keep on going. And you know, when it comes to the Bible and the authority of scripture in our lives, so often we go, "Well, you know, I just, if I can't explain it". Oh, stop. Read your Bible. Joshua and Judges. Joshua and Judges. Let's work on a bit of a timeline for a minute. The Bible is confusing, 66 books. They're all pushed together. They're not arranged chronologically. There's a whole host of different authors. There's different styles of literature, there's history and poetry, there's prophecy.
I mean, it truly is. It's not a simple book to unpack or understand, but I don't believe God intends for his truth to be easily understood. He said he's the rewarder of those who diligently seek him, not the casual inquirer. All the best things in life are on the other side of difficult. But I can help a little bit with just the general timeline of where Joshua and judges fit in relation to Noah or Isaiah or King David or the Apostle Paul. The book of Genesis closes, it's the first book in the Bible. It concludes with Joseph and his extended family all moving to Egypt. There's a famine in the Middle East, and because of Joseph, there's food in Egypt.
And Genesis concludes with Joseph and his family in Egypt. The next book of the Bible is Exodus. It's the second book and it's an important point on the timeline. Exodus opens and says a pharaoh arose who did not know Joseph and he was threatened by the Hebrew people, they were flourishing, and so they were made slaves. And we're told for generation upon generation upon generation, the Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph's extended family as they grew were slaves in Egypt.
Now, you know, the purposes of God can't be fulfilled if they stay slaves in Egypt. So they're gonna leave. That's the Exodus. It means leave. It's the great Exodus from Egypt. And you know the central character of that because Hollywood has helped a great deal. Cecil B. DeMille did it some years back with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner. Every time I see the word Moses, I hear Yul Brynner going, "Moses". Then Disney got involved and they did the "Prince of Egypt" and we got an animated take on it, and whatever generation, we know quite a bit about the book of Exodus because Hollywood liked it. And Moses is kind of the central character, and then Moses walks into Pharaoh and says, "We're gonna have to let these people to go".
Well, Joshua is Moses aide de camp. He's his assistant, if you prefer, his understudy, his apprentice. We meet Joshua in the brick pits of Egypt. He's a slave. He's Moses's helper. So the Exodus takes place and they leave Egypt, and when they get out of Egypt, they have a problem, they have nowhere to go. I mean, they have a Promised Land, but they've never really lived there. They don't have a capital city there. They're dumped into the wilderness, and the season when they're there is the off season and Costco is closed. Sam's isn't open. Publix doesn't take their credit card.
So there's hundreds of thousands of people and there's no food, there's no water, and they're in the Negev desert, one of the most brutal places on the planet. And God sovereignly intervenes with manna, food, and water when it's necessary. And they come to the end of Moses's life and they still haven't made it into the Promised Land. And God taps Joshua, his successor, and he says, "I want you to do what Moses couldn't have". And I've often said, I think it's one of the most difficult job descriptions in the Bible. Who wants to succeed Moses? Dude spent so much time in the presence of God, his face glowed in the dark. He went on a prayer walk and came back with Ten Commandments.
I mean, he was connected. He got the blueprint for the Tabernacle. But God said to Moses, "You can't take the people into the Promised Land". And he said to Joshua, "You will". Intimidating? Just a little. So after the Exodus and the journey through the wilderness, we have the conquest, we have to conquer the Promised Land. That's the book of Joshua. And then the book of Judges is how they lived in the Promised Land. There was no central government, they had 12 tribes. There was no capital city. There was no central authority. When there was a need for a corporate response from the people of God, God would raise up a leader. Those were the judges.
You know them, Samson, Gideon, Barak, Deborah, the last of the judges is Samuel. And the tribal leaders say to Samuel, "We want a king". And we have the beginning of the monarchy. We'll talk more about that when we get a little further into the story. But Joshua and Judges fit right into this window of time between slavery in Egypt and when the kings begin. So they're gonna be ahead of all the prophets that are at the end of your Old Testament. They're before Isaiah and Jeremiah and Habakkuk and Amos the farmer. They're gonna precede the Apostle Paul, but they're after the book of Genesis, so they come after Noah. They come after Cain and Abel. They come after all of those Genesis characters.
Joshua and the book of Judges, they fit right into this period where God's people occupy the land that he gave them and he watches over them. God's intent. So understanding Joshua's journey, I would submit, will help you and me understand ours a bit. He led a very extraordinary life. Joshua begins his life as a slave in Egypt. He has no imagination of anything ever beyond that, no opportunity for that. There's no power to help him. There's no education to help him. There are no resources to help him, but God intervenes. His story concludes with the former slaves of Egypt occupying the Promised Land. And Joshua was the leader of those slaves. High drama. It's a very dramatic life. It's filled with soaring victories. Red Sea parting. Amazing things and impossible difficulties.
I wanna pray with you before we go. You know, I've been a pastor for quite a while now, and God's people consistently undervalue themselves in God's economy. God attaches enormous significance not only to human beings but to his people. We're at the center of his purposes in the earth. Others may not imagine we're necessarily significant or our resources may not suggest it or the influence that our lives reflects. But the Creator of the universe knows you by name. You matter to him and you matter to his purposes in the earth. I wanna pray for you. Let's pray:
Father, I thank you for every person that I've had this time with today, that you have attached tremendous value to them, you have called them by name, you have written a script for their life, and I pray that not one of them would turn loose of your very best for them. In Jesus's name, amen.