consequences

Our midweek lunch-time services started again yesterday.

It always does my heart good to see the folk who come out.

It's mainly they're folk who are, well, 'up in years' as they say, a lot of whom can't really make it to worship on Sundays - 10.30am is too early and 6.30pm is too late, and an hour or more is too long. So they're glad of this midweek oasis. A half hour service in the middle of the day, with a chance for a meal thereafter.

There are also some younger ones, too. And again, in the case of some, it's because for them a Sunday just doesn't work. That they make the effort to be in at this service of worship really gladdens my heart and lifts me no end.

We feasted today on a passage early in the book of Judges which really goes right to the heart of where things went wrong for the people of Israel once they'd finally settled in Canaan.

If you know the book of Judges at all, you'll appreciate that it makes for some fairly uncomfortable reading. A lot of it is ugly, distasteful stuff. An illustrated commentary on what things start to look like when a people (like Israel) have no king and "everyone did as he saw fit."

It's uncomfortably close to the bone of our our own contemporary land.

The early part of the book of Judges reveals where the root problem lay.

"After that whole generation [Joshua and his contemporaries] had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel." (Ju.2.10).

That's to say, a generation grew up which was marked by an ignoring of God and an ignorance of Scripture.

The older generation here today are a dying breed. They were taught the Scriptures at school, were generally fed some biblical truth in the home through their childhood years, and would have, almost without exception, had a Sunday School education as well each week.

The end result is at least some residual awareness of biblical truth, at least some basic knowledge of the central truths which the Lord has set before us in his Word, at least some sense of what it is the Lord has done for us in Christ.

But, as I say, that generation is a dying breed. One by one they're being 'gathered to their fathers'. They're dying off.

And new generations are now rising up, and it's alarming to see just how ignorant most of them are of biblical truth, and how patently absent is any real sense of a living encounter with Christ.

For all their often vaunted 'spirituality', they simply don't know God.

Indeed, that very spirituality is akin to the route the Israelites took when their lack of a knowledge of God, and their ignorance of all that he'd done, saw them sucked into all of the self-centred, self-indulgent, self-fulfilling, self-expressing 'spirituality' of the Baals and the Ashteroth all around.

In the absence of that knowledge of the living Lord, a people soon end up as Israel did just doing as each sees fit. They do their own thing. Anything goes. Whatever floats your boat....

In regard to your worship and morals as much as anywhere else.

Which is pretty much where we're at today. In the last few chapters of Judges (which, I should warn you, you'd be wise not to read before the 9 o'clock threshold - and even then with the caution that these chapters contain images which some 'viewers' may find distressing).

The root of the problem is many long chapters before. Back there in Judges 2.

And it's that which the last of the judges, the towering figure of Samuel, begins to address. Going up and down the land in his day, teaching the Word of God.

There's a pressing need for the same sort of thing in our land today.

Not the 'chic' and so-called 'revisionist' line, which re-interprets Scripture into something wholly opposite to what's declared, and turns out to be little more than the modernised (and still so very self-indulgent) Baal worship.

But the clear, bold, faithful teaching of the Scriptures as our forbears and their forbears sought to do. Standing against the tide of the current trends, and applying the truths of the Scriptures to every area of life.

Not 'chic'. Not popular. Not easy.

But the truth of God. And the only solid ground on which to build our lives and that of our society.

Judges shows what happens when the line which the 'revisionists' adopt takes hold. It doesn't make pretty reading.

Only when a Samuel comes along can all the sordid chaos in society be remedied and changed. If we knew our Scriptures, and knew what the Lord had done in the past, we'd see that very clearly.

And we'd know where our priorities must lie.