Judges 2:6-3:8

[0:00] I'm... Given that there is a burden of extra children, I'm going to try to be quite strict on the 45 minute...

[0:18] ! Not that the children are a burden, but that... It's a quilted ball. Right. Not that the children are a burden, but those looking after the children and the general structure of the building might suffer with.

[0:34] So... So... Um... Okay.

[0:48] Okay. So... We've got everybody apart from...

[1:00] Sorry. Good luck to you. You are, Dr. Sabrina's going to say hi. Is she?

[1:12] Yeah. I'd like to... Because of all the three. No, it's a good idea. I'd rather be ancient to see the results.

[1:24] How old is your room? Er... 13 and 11, but for the day, so he's 9. Yeah. Yeah. That's the same as Sabrina's and...

[1:36] Yeah. Oh, isn't it? Yeah, I don't suppose I can support you and I can't... LAUGHTER Er...

[1:48] Er... Sorry, no. He's the only one. No. No. No. No. No.

[1:59] No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Please, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if we say or those looking after them so here we go 45 minutes hopefully so we're in judges chapter 2 and joe took you up to the end of verse 5 so we're starting in verse 6 this morning and let's just pray for a moment father this book is a challenging book to study for all sorts of reasons and i just pray that we would be sharp enough in our minds to take the lessons from it for today for ourselves it's very easy with this book to point at others and say well that's what they're doing now when in fact we've got to look at ourselves and take the plank out of our own eye too so i just pray lord that you'll bring it alive to us and make it applicable for our lives today in jesus name amen so um joe did a cracking job last week um i'm going to do a bit of a preamble and then try to carry on from where he left off um so just the the preamble is this the the period of judges bridges the gap between joshua and the monarchies so after judges they went into having kings up to that point after joshua died they had this period of the judges the famous statement from judges coming at the end that says they finished up doing what was right in their own eyes um it's thought to have been written by samuel but we don't know for sure um judges the hebrew is shafat or shafim in hebrew shafim being the plural we're not judges as we know them they're not people who just sit in court with a gavel and pass sentence although it seems from the word that they must have done some of that too but what they were was uh military leaders and if you like national deliverers they delivered the nation from trouble from enemies um and led led the nation through military conquests um there are 12 judges listed in the book and um i'm just going to go to the next slide there are 12 judges listed in the book and the ones in the ones in bold type capitals are what our scholars often refer to as the major judges and the other ones are often referred to as the minor judges um i always struggle with that kind of delineation of you know like they talk about minor and major prophets and things like that and uh the ones that they consider the major judges are the ones that had more writing about them and it doesn't necessarily mean that god valued them any less um it's worth noting that uh the list does not contain samuel who was demarked as a judge but his name doesn't appear in the book of judges samuel's sons were also said to be judges um and uh eli who was actually a priest but in i think it's first samuel 4 verse 18 he is he at the point of his death he's recorded as a judge

[6:02] so all of these people in reality although there are 12 listed in the book of judges there were probably about 14 15 maybe 16 i don't know it's it's not a an exhaustive list um so there's a preamble and what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn that screen off because it's easy to get lost in reading that rather than it is no that's all right i'll do it from i'll just i'll just go i'll just go like that see i'm tech savvy me um so um this book covers roughly 300 years of history some scholars say 400 but they didn't done joe's calculation from last week that shows it was about 400 minus uh the early kings and a few bits and pieces roughly 300 years 280 something like that um and the judges occasionally bought by their leadership a period of peace and when you think that at least one of those periods of peace was 80 years um it was a pretty frenetic time of being at peace with god being at odds with god being at peace with god being at odds with god um and one of the things we learn as we go through is that there was uh all of the judges had some showing of weakness um they had great strengths but they also had weaknesses and um the early leaders that joe spoke about last week also showed weakness but it seems that as time went on the weaknesses became much more pronounced and much more to the four and the strengths went to the back so you've what we had from joe's study last week was um leaders who made conquest but then compromised on the fulfillment of the command that god had given them so they didn't get rid of the people from the land they didn't they weren't it's a strange word to use but they weren't merciless enough in their in their carrying out of god's command and so um we had that king i've forgotten his name eglon was it um who instead of putting him to death they chopped his thumbs and toes off and basically uh adonai bezek that's right um but instead of doing what god said which was to put him to death they kept him alive and they did to him what was effectively in those days very much a pagan thing to remove limbs and to butcher people and maim people and things like that it wasn't god's way at all and so you had in that first chapter evidence of sort of apathetic obedience they would obey till they got control and then they didn't finish the job and so they never got full control um and they they finished up for example um they burned the city of jerusalem which in those days would have been known as jabus they burned that city but we later read that the jebusites were still living in jerusalem so they didn't get rid of them they didn't they didn't pursue it to the extent that god had said so what you had there was the beginnings of what we're going to read about this morning where it then takes a step further into iniquity and i i thought a good title for this series might be um um what would it be it would be humanity divinity and um iniquity because because it

[10:03] brings together those three things there is the humanity of the failure of failing to carry through on what god has instructed and therefore suffering loss because of it and then over time those losses becoming acceptable and then as it becomes acceptable we get worse at it and we accept more and more and more depravity and in the end god has to save us from ourselves um because we get ourselves in such a pickle um and and so as we get more into iniquity we then need the divinity or to to bail us out of the iniquity we've got ourselves into um one last thing before we get into this morning's text is that um there's quite a lot of principle established in the bible that god uses weakness to show his strength and so it's not really surprising that the judges themselves were in various ways weak because uh if they weren't weak if they were the sort of um i don't know sylvester stallone type people who just they wage war themselves they get all the glory for what happens but it's quite a well established thing in scripture that god takes the weak and he shows false his shows forth his strength and brings about his glory because the man he chose to do it couldn't possibly have done it um and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go through them uh in great detail or stop and read them because we've got quite a bit to get through uh but in 2 corinthians 12 verses 9 and 10 paul speaks of god's power being perfected in weakness uh in first corinthians 1 verse 25 that tells us that god's weakness is stronger than the strength of men um so you know what what we would be striving to achieve he can just achieve with a word his weakness is stronger than the strength of men uh 2 timothy 1 verse 7 tells us that uh that it is god who takes us from fear and gives us love power and a sound mind it's the influence of god on us that makes us less fearful and less weak and it's only the influence of god that gives us a sound mind um and i think it was a it's a lovely bit of psalm psalm psalm 73 verse 26 tells us that when our hearts are failing he is the strength of our hearts so in in all respects what we read through judges is the conquest of god not the conquest of these men um so let's let's read what we're going to do this morning and i'm going to have to refer to various bits prior to it as we go through so let's read from joshua 2 verse 6 and we're going to go all the way through to chapter 3 verse 8 when joshua had dismissed the people the sons of israel went each to his inheritance to possess the land the people served the lord all the days of joshua and all the days of the elders who survived joshua who had seen all the great works of the lord which he had done for israel then joshua the son of nun the servant of the lord died at the age of 110 and they buried him in the territory of his inheritance in timnath heres in the hill country of ephraim north of mount gash all that generation also were gathered to their fathers and 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 and served the bars and they forsook the

[14:07] lord the god of their fathers who had brought them out of the land of egypt and followed other gods from among the gods of the prophet of the peoples who were around them and bowed themselves down to them thus they provoked the lord to anger so they forsook the lord and served baal and the ashtaroth the anger of the lord burned against israel he gave them into the hands of the plunderers who plundered them and he sold them into the hands of their enemies around them so that they could no longer stand before their enemies wherever they went the hand of the lord was against them for evil as the lord had spoken and as the lord had sworn to them so that they were severely distressed then the lord raised up judges who had delivered them from the hands of those who plundered them yet they did not listen to their judges for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed themselves down to them which and bowed themselves down to them they turned aside quickly from the way in which their fathers had walked in obeying the commandments of the lord they did not do as their fathers when the lord raised up judges for them the lord was with the judge and delivered them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge for the lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who repressed and afflicted them and it came about when the judge died that they would turn back and act more corruptly than their fathers in following other gods to serve them and bow down to them they did not abandon their practices all their stubborn ways so the anger of the lord burned against israel and he said because of because this nation has transgressed my covenant which i commanded their fathers and has not listened to my voice i also will no longer drive out before them any of the nations which joshua left when he died in order to test israel by them whether they will keep the way of the lord to walk in it as their fathers did or not so the lord allowed those nations to remain not driving them out quickly and he did not give them into the hand of joshua now i will admit i became a bit confused because joshua we've read about the death of joshua at the end of joshua and we've read about the death of joshua in chapter one and we just returned to the death of joshua now and i can only put this down to uh hebrew the hebrew habit of writing about something more than once using one writing to bring a certain level of detail and using the second writing to bring a greater level of detail like we find in genesis one and two where we've got the whole of creation gone through uh in chapter one and then we go through it all again with a particular emphasis on man and woman the creation of man and woman uh in chapter two and this is still this is still part of the introduction to the book of judges because uh the first chapter was obviously an introduction but they were going over some of the same ground again in chapter two in fact i think they put the chapter break in a silly place but they're more scholarly than me so i'll let them off um so going back to verse six we're back at the death of joshua and when he had dismissed the people the sons of israel went each to his inheritance to possess the land we saw some of that in the last chapter where um judah first of all went out and possessed chunks of the land and we saw caleb going out and possessing chunks of the land but there was this incompleteness about it where they they weren't in the habit apart from caleb everybody else seems to have held back from actually doing exactly what the lord had said

[18:09] they'd gone so far but not far enough um but the purpose that they had been sent into the land at the point of joshua's death was to take their territory they'd each been allotted to territory and told go and take it go and possess it um and part of the possessing it was to leave uh to leave no one alive first of all and secondly to certainly not intermarry with them there was a command to not mix with them not not intermarry with them um and then in verse seven we get this description of exactly what we're talking about the people served the lord all the days of joshua all the days of the elders who survived joshua who had seen the great work the lord uh the great work of the lord which he had done for israel um and then joshua died verse eight um at the age of 110 uh and they buried him in the territory of his inheritance now verse nine is interesting that's very very very brief aside here when they say he was buried in the in the territory of his inheritance in timlath heres in the hill country north of ephraim north of mount gash this all speaks of an accurate historic account people who disparage the bible you can't put detail like that in if it's not true because everybody would say that's not true this uh mount gash doesn't exist and this uh so my smaller side is this when you get little detail like that which is fairly meaningless to us but historically it's very meaningful for the integrity of scripture verse 10 um all that generation which were gathered to their fathers so this speaks of all the people who saw what god did have now gone verse 10 brings us to that point um and this other generation after them who did not know the lord nor yet the work which he had done for israel so we've got this new generation that's different that doesn't have the same knowledge but at the same and hasn't witnessed the work of the lord and it seems that this generation work how many times have we heard people say well if i saw a miracle i believe um people who witness what god does are at least likely to follow god while that witness is still there and if you think about it that's more or less what happened in the early church we had jesus and the apostles the apostles were going around the place and there were healings taking place and various miracles taking place and in paul's case the dead was raised at least once and peter also i believe uh did the same and so we've got this uh this generation that are seeing the work of god and seeing the people of god doing the work of god and the faith is strong as soon as they've gone to the last apostle went right at the end of the first century about 96 ad something like that from the end of the first century onwards we have a steady decline and we have the um compromise coming in with the um allegorists um there are people writing books against the allegorists who are trying to allegorize scriptures that formerly had been taken as as read um you you've got the um the rise of roman catholicism the pre-roman catholic sort of stuff with constantine various um priesthoods entering the church that weren't christian and so you've got a level of compromise once that generation that saw what god

[22:10] did had gone you've got a level of compromise crept in that grew and grew and grew and is still growing in my view today even though we have seen periods of revival and we've seen the reformation and we've seen various various various bits and pieces where territory has been taken back but the overall progression is towards apostasy which of course is what we're told to expect in the end times so i think history is repeating itself and it's one of the reasons i believe judges was put in the bible to teach us where this is going to go if we don't buck up that if we continue to compromise eventually we'll finish up um doing what's right in our own eyes and that's what we have a lot of today um so just to touch on um i think it was where joe finished last week god has visited these people uh at the end of chapter one and he's visited them with what i'm sorry it's at the beginning of chapter two um he's visited them in verse one it says now the angel of the world came up from gilgal to bohem um gilgal was where god spoke to joshua and where god spoke to his people and he went to gilgal uh if he had gone to gilgal they wouldn't have been there listening he went to bohem because that's where they had gone and i think it's important to realize that god was not content to leave them in their sin but he pursued them to bohem they weren't at gilgal he went after them to bohem and when he got to bohem he spoke to them there and because of the use of the first person here i brought you out of the land of egypt and led you to the land which i have sworn to your fathers and said i will never break my covenant with you this makes this a christophany this is an appearance an old testament appearance of the lord jesus christ to speak to his people um and this is where he gave them the instructions as for you you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land you shall tear down their altars but you have not obeyed me what is this that you have done and therefore i will not drive them out before you and they will become as thorns in your sides so what we've now got in chapter two i believe is a continuation of this where the people that they have not been thorough have not driven out have not taken the land have not possessed it properly are now thorns in their sides where they keep cropping up in fact i think you pointed out last week joe that they reach a point where instead of allowing some of these nations to live with them they finish up living with these nations uh the the the priority is flipped and they're no longer allowing them to live within them but they're being forced to live within the nation of their enemies which is that you know the um the long-term progression of such folly and such sin um why would why would jesus do this why would he pursue them to bohem to talk to them again and say what is this that you've done well because the son the father loves he disciplines we read that from the writings of paul part of the discipline of the lord is that he comes after you like we do with our own children when we know they're doing wrong things we go after them and we endeavor to correct them and so it's evidence not of god being

[26:17] an oppressor but of god caring and loving for his children because he pursues them to try to bring them to repentance um and one of the ways that he does that and we see it uh we see it explained to us in romans one is that if you continually do things that are against god and you won't listen and we're clearly from reading this we have a group of people that won't listen they're not listening to god and they're not listening to the judges one of the things that god does according to romans 18 is to give you over to what you have chosen and basically said okay you will now enjoy if enjoy is the right word what you have chosen to do and when you come out the other end of that you'll be crying and bohim by the way means weeping the place of weeping you will get to the point where you're crying to be redeemed from what you've chosen it would be nice to be able to sit here and say that's in the past and we do it differently now and i think we i think we're away away from that so joshua was set up these tribes to inherit or to possess the inheritance that they've been allocated um i need to get back to judges two um joshua has been buried verse verse 10 we got to didn't we um the old generation is gone the new generation is coming forward who don't know the lord didn't witness his um his acts and then something changes because as joe said last week you you don't often in judges and you certainly don't see it in chapter one you don't see the jews accused of evil no way does god it doesn't say in that chapter and they did evil in the sight of the lord and there was therefore judgment and you don't see that very much in judges at all but where you do see it is in chapter 11 then the sons of israel did evil in the sight of the lord and served the baals um and i'm going to deal with a chunk here because to be honest there isn't a lot of point in dissecting it into small bits they forsook the lord the god of their fathers who had brought them out of the land of egypt and followed other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around them and bowed themselves down to them and thus they provoked the lord to anger so they forsook the lord and served baal and the ashtorel broadly speaking the baals were male pagan deities the ashtorel were female pagan deities and in order to serve the baals and the ashtorel you had to involve yourself in human sacrifice almost always child sacrifice and you had to involve yourself in temple prostitution so um on a superficial reading of this you could think well why did god get really mad about this where he hadn't got so mad about other things well the reason is i mean we have god who is the creator of man and who is the creator of the family um and they've gone to worship pagan gods which aren't even really gods at all they're figments of someone's imagination you know they are idols that are fashioned by the hands of men and they they have no power not only are they worshiping that which has no power but in order to achieve the worship they're burning their children and they are committing fornication two things which undermine the creation of man and the creation of the family so these these

[30:18] things are dear to the heart of god and are and would provoke god to extreme anger um and so in verse 14 that's what you read the anger of the lord burned against israel and he gave them into the hands of plunderers plunderers uh the word means to plunder or to spoil or to ruin he gave them into he gave them into the hands of those who would plunder them or ruin them and he sold them into the hands of their enemies around them so that they could no longer stand up before their enemies certainly um when when sharon and i throughout our lives have dealt with people who've come from the occult and there's a tendency to think child sacrifice is a thing of the past well child sacrifice still goes on in the occult but people who've messed with the occult even at a superficial level their lives are normally going to hell on skids they are completely um wayward completely um consumed by all of this stuff and getting them to walk a path of righteousness is really really difficult so to this day this still has an effect when people um when you get into occult stuff you come across the names of various baals and of course there are quite a few baals uh named in the bible purpose of today is not to go through them except one which is um baal zebub which is one that jesus was accused of being possessed by in matthew chapter 12 when he cast out the dumb spirit oh he's doing what he's not doing this by the holy spirit is doing it by the spirit of baal zebub the baals were around in jesus's day i say they were around they've never been around in the true sense but they were still present in the minds of the people yeah um verse 15 wherever they went the hand of the lord was against them for evil this is the people who god was sustaining who god was providing for um and what this what this whole introduction is doing it's introducing a principle the principle was the hand of the lord is behind his people but there comes a point where the hand of the lord goes against his people and the thing that is key the thing that is more likely than anything else to bring the hand of the lord against his people is idolatry um as the lord has sworn to them so that they were severely distressed there is method in god's plan in that the purpose of abandoning them and the purpose of setting himself against them was to make them distressed so that they would turn back to him it's um it's not a study for today but in deuteronomy there's a passage on the five cycles of judgment and it kind of goes like this it's um if you do not repent i will do x to you and then if you do not repent i will do y to you and then if you do not repent i and god steps up the distress to till he reaches the point where you will repent and the furthest part of that process of calling to repentance involves cannibalism and the like so you know god is prepared to get you so distressed that you finish up eating your own tribe and your own kids if necessary to bring you to repentance that's not because he's callous that's because he cares because he wants you

[34:19] in the kingdom of god he wants you in heaven and he wants to be able to express love to you but if you will not listen what he then has to do is make the fact that you won't listen cause you so much distress that in the end you come running back you know like the kid that falls over in the street my daddy i've hurt myself um and so in verse 16 then they were severely distressed there were 16 then the lord raised up judges who delivered them from the hands of those who plundered them and there is this principle that god raises up or god allows his people to be beaten by their enemies to the point where they become distressed so they turn back to him and then god judges those enemies that were violent against god's people um and that happens a lot through the whole scripture so you would think you know we became severely distressed we cried out to the lord so the lord raised up judges and we go oh thank you lord and we would listen yet they did not listen to their judges for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed themselves down to them they turned aside quickly from the way in which their fathers had walked in obeying the commandments of the lord they did not do as their fathers and by their fathers i'm presuming that they meant the likes of joshua because as you get further generations away from the first generation um the righteous group of forefathers would have been joshua's generation that's only my presumption but um that's the way i read it joshua's generation that's only my presumption but um yeah joshua and caleb um when the lord raised up judges for them the lord was with the judge and delivered them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge for the lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed and afflicted them so the lord is moved to pity sets up a judge and during the life of that judge once again the people can see god's doing great things again it's all based on eyesight you know if i see it i'll believe it they see god doing great things through the hand of the judge and quite often that judge will there will then be a period of peace the next one we're going to read about next week is eight years i think oh no they spent eight years in servitude um 40 years it might have been but there is this period of time when that judge lives where they remain in peace with the lord but when they as soon as that judge dies they stop seeing god at work and they immediately go back to false gods um so verse 19 that came back when the judge died they would turn back and act more corruptly than their fathers in following other gods to serve them and bow down to them they did not abandon their practices or their stubborn ways it suggests that each time the judge died they carried on worse than they were before that judge was set in place um for god's people to get i i i it's difficult to put into words that reflect the magnitude of this in our day but this was heinous stuff when you have a god who's delivered you when you think of the story prior to joshua the coming through the red sea the joshua conquests up to the point of joshua's death god has shown himself to be true to then go off after gods that aren't even gods that require you to

[38:23] sacrifice your kids and to commit atrocious adulteries with the temple prostitutes to go through all that in god's eyes wasn't it wasn't a small deal it was utterly heinous um and so each time they abandon their practice what we have in verse 20 is is i think this this study should be called the cycle of sin because there is a cyclical thing goes on they disobey the lord god gives them distress they cry out to the lord god gives them a judge the judge leads them in righteousness the judge dies they immediately return to a worse state than they were before that judge and so it's a a progression of decline rather than progression of righteousness and so verse 20 so the anger of the lord burned against israel and he said because this nation has transgressed my covenant which i commanded their fathers and has not listened to my voice i will also no longer drive out before them any of the nations which joshua left when he died and when we look at next week we will see all the nations that well actually we'll probably touch on it in the moment but we're over the period of the book we're going to see all the nations that they didn't drive out um in order to test israel by them whether they will keep the way of the lord to walk in it as their fathers did or not um so why is god doing this why does god continually give them these nations that are a thorn in their side as we read earlier on it is to test them and the word means to prove them now god doesn't need to prove them it's a bit like adam uh adam at the point of the fall god didn't need to prove anything to himself about adam god knew what was in the heart of adam the whole thing about the fall and the fruit that he wasn't supposed to eat was to test adam's or to show adam what was in his own heart and this is showing the people of israel what's in their own heart i'm going to give you these thorns in the side and when you respond to that you'll know what's in your heart and in every case they were found wanting um in this particular passage of history so it's to test israel in the beginning few verses of chapter three which is what we're now going to go on to it says now these are the nations which the lord left to test israel by them that is all who had not experienced any of the wars of canaan only in order that the generations of the sons of israel might be taught war those who had not experienced it formally so this was supposed to be a teaching experience for the children of god and it was supposed to show them what was in their own hearts it was supposed to test them or prove them these are the nations sorry these nations are the five lords of the philistines and all the canaanites and the sidonians and the hivites or hivites who lived in mount lebanon from mount balherman as far as lebo hamath they were for testing israel to find out if they would obey the commandments of the lord which he had commanded their fathers through moses so there's a historic thing here where god went through it with moses he went through it with joshua

[42:26] and he was still expecting his people to do what moses and joshua did presumably because they knew it even if they knew it only through documentation they knew it because of moses writings and whatever form i don't know whether it would have been word of mouth or written but whatever form joshua had left them would have been instructive to them and so he's testing them to see whether they will follow his commands verse 5 the sons of israel lived among the canaanites the hittites the amorites the perizzites the hivites and the jebusites they took their daughters from themselves for themselves as wife and gave their own daughters to their sons and served their gods the sons of israel did what was evil in the sight of the lord and forgot the lord their god and served the baals and the ashtaroth then the anger of the lord was tingled against israel so that he sold them into the hands of kushan rishathayim king of mesopotamia and the sons of israel served kushan rishathayim eight years so they they effectively were enslaved for eight years because they disobeyed the command of the lord number one they took wives from their enemies number two they gave their daughters to their enemies as wives and the result of and they served the baals and the ashtaroth so they're carrying on with um the child sacrifice and the temple prostitution that basically as debased as they could possibly be and so god's hand goes against them and they're given into slavery for eight years now what occurred to me and i thought the appropriate thing to do at this point would be um to look at points of application and discussion because it's a lot it's a lot of it could be a lot of negative stuff that we've just learned although what we have learned is that there is no limit to which god will not go to draw people back and i think that's the thing i would take from this more than anything that however depraved they get however debased they get god's um impetus is to draw them back in the only way he knows how which is to make them realize that their choices are really wrong and they're going to lead them away from blessing and so i i kind of wrote a list of questions just um do we still engage in child sacrifice not so much not so much not like i know there's a lot of african religions and stuff like that require child sacrifice to to appease the god of the mountain or something um and i suppose in some ways we do like we don't literally kill our children but we do give them over to things i think you know we do give them over to worldly things in order to i don't know get something out of life or you know i mean i i wonder to what extent god looks upon the millions of abortions that we have yeah as child sacrifice yeah because it's what is it it's um i think it's 98 percent of them are non-therapeutic in other words it's just i don't want this child um and the decision is made after the pregnancy not before intercourse took place um and it's an inconvenience and it's just

[46:27] so to me and uh there are people who would argue with this but to me non-therapeutic abortion are we are sacrificing our children on the altar of convenience or um well i think particularly in light that we now have one or two countries particularly because we're saying abortion after life yeah and some of the some of the u.s states are pushing for birth yes i agree with that abortion after life and life begins at conception yes but what we're saying is for instance the lady who's now decided to resign in new zealand is one of it yeah and she was she was pushing for abortion even right up to birth and so would be sturgeon in scoland and so would be trudeau in canada and these three people are closely linked in their politics and abuse and they all have very similar views about where abortion you can actually if somebody is you know they're even saying now if a if a child is born alive we need to make sure for that family that that baby doesn't survive after birth yeah and so no there there are a few states in the u.s.

[47:38] and there are uh certainly a few um kind of out there politicians who are campaigning for the right to terminate a life even after it's born yeah yeah so i don't think we're that different my time is up um that doesn't really have to stop discussion necessarily but maybe the children can come down whenever they and does it like these african states and that um where there is child sacrifice is it because they don't know any better they haven't heard the gospel and it's their culture and until they know what is right what is wrong they'll continue doing it but when it comes to abortion we know what is right and wrong i don't know the answer to that i i think there must be something certainly in the makeup of every mother that is horrified at the idea of sacrificing her there's an innate inbuilt we've made an image of god i can't believe that we don't know that that's wrong and we are persuaded to do it by people who try to persuade us to get into idol worship i don't know the other question i had was do we do we worship idols and i think i think there is room for saying we do that anything can be an idol if you put it above god and that might be that might be the football match it might be the um the posh car um ironically it may also be our children you know can be yeah and it's a difficult one to square that because god would expect you to prioritize your children yeah but but not over him but not over him yeah that's right so it is it is yeah it's just tricky one but yeah it's definitely happiness um any any of us that get into adultery we are we know what god says about adultery so we are making whoever that is we're committing adultery with we're putting them above god and i i tend to think that we need to have a view of idolatry that is a bit broader than getting a statue and worshipping it yeah because i because i think i think the um breadth of temptations and the weirdness i mean the weirdness that's available to people today to kind of suddenly announce that you know you can announce anything you want and it's okay in today's society you know i could i could tell you that i firmly believe i'm a cat and you've now got to treat me as a cat and instead of somebody saying you are barking madre you need treatment what they would say is yes that's okay you can be a cat um so we're in an environment that panders to idolatry yeah and also you know um that we there are people who for example um make nature their idol they're in a wrong way yep and they see nature not in the life of god but in what they have made nature and also mother nature you know mother nature did it not not god designed it and god did it but mother nature did it yeah um something that jumps out to me from the scripture is that we talk about this cycle of sin and repentance and so forth but the evidence is that the judge

[51:40] delivered them from the oppression and who was plundering them there's no evidence that they actually repent and dropped in there no is that we can put our leaders on these pedestals and go oh when the leader's gone that's when we'll fall away but then here there's no evidence that they came away from that they didn't give up these practices except that they did have years of peace but the perfect leader arrives yeah judas who did didn't change no didn't abandon this stuff and actually the truth of the matter is that our hearts want to be more like judas naturally yeah unless we are um uh habitually following the law and attached to the the holy spirit and taking thoughts captive that verse we've kind of talked about it in relation to um is it uh what's the therapy cbt cbt um the bible calls to take thoughts captive and uh i wonder how much of the lgbtq stuff the gender ideology stuff and all that is where people need to be instead of told yes it's okay i know you look like a man but actually if you want to be a woman that's okay rather than say you need to take those thoughts captive and you need what's the rest of that verse we are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the name of god and we are taking every book and we are ready to punish all disobedience whenever your obedience is complete this is talking about tearing down the holy places yes yes which is exactly what they didn't do what happened yeah we need to release those children yeah i hope that was yeah that's interesting yeah thank you bro yeah yeah