Bravery or Lethargy

Let's go to Judges chapter 5 and listen to it from a woman as she shares something of the burden that she felt in her day for the extension of the kingdom. In a day when men were not numerous in terms of leadership, a lady came along and enhanced the standing of her sects as she cried throughout Israel to men to come along and take up the task of working in the kingdom. Judges 5 is actually a song, it was sung by the Hebrews antiphonally, that means in differing verses for the men and for the women.

It's really a historical ode, so it encapsulates some of the history of Israel and it's sung out quite clearly as the people concerned have reference to what God has done amongst them. On that day Deborah and Barak, son of Abinoam, sang this song, when the princes in Israel take the lead, when the people willingly offer themselves, praise the Lord, hear this you kings, listen you rulers, I will sing to the Lord, I will sing, I will make music to the Lord, the God of Israel, O Lord, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the land of Edom, the earth shook, the heavens poured, the clouds poured down water, the mountains quaked before the Lord, the one of Sinai, before the Lord, the God of Israel. In the days of Shangar, son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the roads were abandoned, travellers took to winding paths, village life in Israel ceased, the Hebrew is village life in Israel died, died, until I Deborah arose, arose a mother in Israel, when they chose new gods war came to the city gates, and not a shield or spear was seen among 40,000 in Israel, my heart is with Israel's princes, with the willing volunteers among the people, praise the Lord.

You who ride on white donkeys, sitting on your saddle blankets, and you who walk along the road, consider the voice of the singers at the watering places, they recite the righteous acts of the Lord, the righteous acts of His warriors in Israel. Then the people of the Lord went down to the city gates, wake up, wake up Deborah, wake up, wake up, break out in song, arise O Barak, take captive your captives O son of Abinoam. Then the men who were left came down to the nobles, the people of the Lord, came to me with the mighty, some came from Ephraim, whose roots were in Amalekach, Benjamin was with the people who followed you, from Machir, that's the city, captains came down, from Zebulun, another city, those who bear a commander's staff, the princes of Issachar, a tribe were with Deborah, yes Issachar was with Barak, rushing after him into the valley.

In the districts of Reuben, there was much searching of heart, why did you stay among the camp fires to hear the whistling for the flocks? In the districts of Reuben, there was much searching of heart, Gilead stayed beyond the Jordan and Dan, why did he linger by the ships, Asher remained on the coast and stayed in his coves, the people of Zebulun risked their very lives, so did Naphtali on the heights of the field. Kings came, they fought, the kings of Canaan fought at Tanach by the waters of Megiddo, but they carried off no silver, no plunder, from the heavens the stars fought, from their courses they fought against Caesarea, the river Kishon swept them away, the age old river, the river Kishon, march on my soul, be strong. Then thundered the horse's hoofs, galloping, galloping go his mighty steeds, Kurs Medos, another city, said the angel of the Lord, curse its people bitterly, because they did not come to help the Lord, to help the Lord against the mighty.

Most blessed of women be Jeho, the wife of Heber the Kenite, most blessed of tent dwelling women, he, that is the leader of the cruel forces against Israel, he asked for water and she gave him milk, in a bowl fit for nobles she brought him curdled milk, her hand reached for the tent peg, her right hand for the workman's hammer, she struck Caesarea, she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple, at her feet he sank, he fell, there he lay, at her feet he sank, he fell, where he sank, there he fell, dead. Through the window appeared Caesarea's mother, behind the lattice she cried out, why is his chariot so long in coming, why is the clatter of his chariots delayed, the wisest of her ladies answer her, indeed she keeps saying to herself, are they not finding and dividing the spoils, a girl or two for each man, colourful garments as plunder for Caesarea, colourful garments embroidered, highly embroidered garments for my neck, all this is plunder, so may all your enemies perish, O Lord, but may they who love you be like the sun, when it rises in its strength, then the land had peace for forty years. Here ends the reading of this wholly inspired passage from God's inerrant Word.

I sometimes think that when you read the song of Deborah, it's like the register in a classroom in a morning, when teacher comes and, you know, she ticks off all the various pupils who are there, and occasionally teacher will not only just take the register, but towards the end of term she will fill out a report and she will say, could do better, could do worse, has improved from last term, utterly disgraceful, why don't your parents do something about you, or so forth. And when you come to the book of Judges and you light to the fifth chapter particularly, you find that this lady who is involved in writing what is I've called a poetical ode history of Israel, recent history, she makes reference to various of the twelve tribes and indicates how they have performed during a national crisis when from Philistia, that's the western coast of the promised land, came in a force which to Israel were like the Nazis in the 1930s and threatened their very livelihood. Now when there was need for the Israelites to stand together to repulse the army, some were very quick in responding, others were not.

And what happened, it was quite incredible really. There was need as you will gather in the fourth chapter for someone to be a sort of Churchill of that day. And there wasn't a man, but there was a woman who is referred to in this poem as a mother in Israel.

She came and she led the forces. She warned the men that if she did this then it would be a disgrace for them later on. And at the end of the conquest as they were able to push back their enemies, Deborah wrote this poem which became part of the liturgy, part of the worship of Israel from that time onwards.

And she calls the register and she refers to the various twelve tribes and some of the individual cities and she marks them in terms of their commitment to or their disinterest in the battle when it was at its highest. The fact that things were in a rough state is indicated by the seventh verse where I give you a more literalistic translation. Village life in Israel died, died until I Deborah arose, arose a mother in Israel.

And Deborah who had known the aflatus, the descent of the spirit upon her, making her a prophetess, quickening her for this unusual but not quite unique ministry as a woman in the Old Testament. She summarizes all that has happened in terms of God's sovereign help and the contribution towards the purposes of God given in measure or not given at all by some of the tribes. Now, it seems to me that there are other instances in Scripture where you get the historian doing more or less the same thing.

For example, in the book of Nehemiah, you find there in the third and fourth chapters as the Israelites come back to Jerusalem, Nehemiah has marshaled a task force to rebuild the walls. And he goes down the list of people who are willing, people who were prepared to commit themselves, but there were one or two exceptions, those who were not prepared to put their hands to the task. And so you get the register in Nehemiah three and four called of Israel at that particular time.

And when you move into the New Testament, you find when the Apostle Paul is writing to the Romans at the end of his epistle, again he calls a register and he makes reference to people like Priscilla and Aquila and Apponitus and Androniacus and Junius and so on and so forth and he indicates what they did in terms of the advance of the kingdom. When you go to Philippians, you find that at the beginning of the fourth chapter, he highlights two women who are not particularly helpful in the church in Philippi. They are singled out.

When he writes to the Colossians, he does exactly the same thing in the last chapter. And when the Apostle John is writing his epistles, in the second epistle that he pens, he makes reference to a man called Diotrephus, who far from enhancing the kingdom in those days was a perishing nuisance. John doesn't use that terminology, but I have the right to express it like that because that's more or less what John is saying about that man.

So here is my challenge. If we were to call the register in Worthing Tabernacle, if we could bring back from the early centuries of biblical history in Old Testament times this mother in Israel, what would she have to say about you? What would she have to say about me and our commitment to pushing back the enemies of God and taking this world for Jesus? I reckon that the report would probably be as disparate, as variable, as was this particular chapter when she congratulates, for example, the princes of Issachar, when she is very complimentary towards the tribe of Benjamin, and when she alights on the tribe of Reuben in the fifteenth and sixteenth verses and says, after the war effort in the districts of Reuben there was much searching of heart, why did you stay among the campfires to hear the whistling for the flocks, and in a haunting way the singers echo the chorus again, in the districts of Reuben there was much searching of heart. Remember, this is written into a psalm, so to speak, that is going to be antiphonally chanted time after time after time, the strengths of the tribes and the weaknesses of the tribes.

Now you say, where are you getting at this evening? Well, let me introduce another thought, which is a typical element in my preaching, then I will try and link it together. When the Lord Jesus comes back, what will your reaction be? Let me have another run at that. When the Lord Jesus comes back, could it possibly be the case that amongst the joy, the happiness, the worship, which will be part, it goes without saying, of your reactions, there will be a sense of shame and embarrassment? What did you do in the war, daddy? You remember the cartoon? You remember the poster? When England and Scotland and Ireland and Wales, when the British Isles were in trouble in the 1930s, what did you do, dad? What did you do, mom? In the 1990s, with the challenge of an unreached world, what did you do? In terms of taking this message of salvation to others who were ignorant of it, what did you do in the area of the three Ps, you people in Worthing Tabernacle? The personnel, the prayer, the pounds, what did you do? And could the response be, there were those who gave of their all.

There were those like Benjamin who risked life and limb. There were those who had got their priorities fully in order, who spent time on their knees, who gave of their finance, who helped to make it possible, if not for them to go, for others to go, who in their native locality in Worthing were busy gossiping the gospel, distributing tracts, communicating in some way, directly or indirectly. When the war effort was at its height, they did what they could.

And a mother in Israel, spiritual Israel, at the end of time gets up and sings to the great praise of the God of heaven, her thankfulness for the fidelity of people in this church in terms of wanting to enhance the gospel. There is an American theologian by the name of G. Eldon Ladd. He has written many books on eschatology.

That means the doctrine of the last things. And he says that the most important verse in the whole of the New Testament in regard to evangelism and the second coming of Christ is the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew's gospel and the fourteenth scripture found therein. This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come.

More literally translated, this gospel of the kingdom will be preached to every people group as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come. What is he saying? The day will dawn in history when it will have been the achievement of the church to take the good news of Jesus Christ to every major language group in the world. And when that happens, without wanting to put a specific date on it, but in that era the Lord Jesus will come back.

Do the initials WB2000 mean anything to you? It has nothing to do with the Barcelona, the games in Barcelona. Some years ago it was my privilege to address a broadcaster's conference held in Southeast Asia. It was held in Singapore and stemming from that conference was an even wider one which was chaired some two or three years afterwards.

Men and women of great ability and influence committed to the gospel of Jesus got together before the turn of this century and they made a commission or made a challenge to one another and responded positively to it. And that was to ensure that the gospel of Christ was carried in the ether, in the atmosphere, through the medium of radio, so that by the end of the century the whole world would be blanketed with the gospel and every major language group would be serviced with a gospel program. Now it's a goal, it's not an achievement, but they're moving towards the achievement.

We are living in some of the most exciting days from a missionary perspective that there have ever been. If someone had come into this pulpit just five years ago and predicted that what happened, what has happened in the USSR would take place, you would have thought that the man should be carried off to Graylingwell and be treated kindly but firmly. The whole political theatre in Asia has changed to the extent that when M. V. Doulos, which has recently completed a very successful tour in Korea, set sail towards the old USSR from Vladivostok, that eastern port on the Russian coastline, comes a request for 50,000 Bibles.

There is more opportunity in these old Soviet republics for gospel proclamation than it is possible for the church in the West to rise to and fulfill. It was not that long ago when the bamboo curtain was lifted and we peered through the cracks and discovered that in the most populous country in the world, without any missionary agency whatsoever, the church in China had grown at such a phenomenal rate that it almost makes the Acts of the Apostles seem a fairly tame story by comparison with what has been happening in the last decade or so in China. Indeed, when my good friend Rodney Kingston was with me in China some years back, he was in on an event when two Chinese pastors were having a fairly strong argument, the one with the other, as to whether the last man raised from the dead had been dead three days or four days.

And when one of them was asked, would you like to have lived in the days of the Acts of the Apostles, he said, no, the question was why not, and he said, well, not much happened then. Did you not know, has it not been told you that in the Muslim world there have been more people converted to Christ in the last ten years than probably the whole period from the Christian so-called wars, the Crusades, in the Middle East? Have you not heard that in some parts of Muslim Africa, more often than not by theophany, that means vision and supernatural extraordinary experiences, men and women have been alerted to the Gospel of Christ. Sometimes they've gone through the Holy Koran and they've read there the imperfect account of Jesus, and their minds have been activated, their curiosity has been stimulated.

I remember on one occasion flying on air Egypt and the plane wasn't very full, and a lovely stewardess came and sat down beside me. She was going back to Cairo. We started to talk, and I told her I was a Christian pastor in response to her questions.

And she said to me, tell me, what did happen to Jesus? I happened to have a little booklet about the death and the resurrection of Christ, and I explained to her simply that the Koran had got it wrong. Jesus actually was crucified, but on the third day he was raised from the dead. Her eyes started to glow, her interest increased, as for the first time somebody was setting the story right.

She'd heard a little, she'd read the inadequate presentation from the Koran, and her excitement knew no bounds. As she met up with someone who could tell her, it could have been anyone else, the fact that it was me got nothing to do with the story at all. This is happening not just once, not just twice, but in dozens of circumstances around the Middle East.

Do you not know that the prophetic scriptures in the Psalms speak not only of Israel returning to the Lord, but also the sons of Ishmael? Cush, which is one of the places in the Old Testament which we identify in the Middle East with Saddam Hussein and the area that he controls, is predicted in terms of prophetic scripture of yielding to the claims of Jesus Christ. Before the return of Jesus, there has got to be a penetration of the Islamic world, so the sons of Ishmael in large numbers shall come to the Christ of God. If you say that's impossible, fifty years ago they were saying that of China, ten years ago we'd have said that of the Soviet Union.

We live in unprecedented days of opportunity for gospel expansion and for the propagation of the glorious message through every conceivable media to tell that Jesus Christ is Lord. And the most exciting thing in the world is to watch people get enthused with the gospel and declaring it to others, believing it to be the power of God unto salvation and the most important message to be communicated in our world today. When you see the problems in Somalia and Yugoslavia, do you ever stop and ask yourself, what is behind this? Can it conceivably be that this is just some man-caused disaster or some natural phenomenon that has caused the problem? No.

It seems to me that at that level you only get a little bit of an answer to the basic question, but it seems to me that deeper below the surface there is an answer that has to come out, that in our world there are evil forces that are concerned to promote a position of genocide because they do not like the possibility of God being glorified through men and women. When you read of the New Testament and its understanding of the worldview, it says we wrestle not against rulers in this world, but against spiritual principalities and powers. That means to say that the mind of Satan, the purposes of Satan, the emissaries of Satan are endeavoring to stop the propagation of the gospel of Christ and to take as many people into an eternity without Him as possible, but over against these evil forces which cause men and women to behave in such an awful fashion as in Somalia where they stop the food getting through to those poor African babies and those wretched elderly people.

In Yugoslavia where you can see a beautiful woman take a bottle, bash the bottle and create a jagged edge and then disembowel a man and do it with no feeling at all, when you ask yourself what is propelling the woman to do such an action, is that the only answer is she is under the power of the evil one. But there is a force that is greater than that power which can offset the influence of evil in our world today and it is the gospel of Christ and that is the reason why men and women like ourselves who know the gospel should be endeavoring to have that gospel communicated as quickly as possible in order to bring the King back. Because there are situations in our world which are never going to redress themselves, however good the intention of the United Nations might be.

We should pray for our politicians, we should pray for relief organizations and all the good work that men and women of benevolent intent endeavor to do, but basically we are up against something that is much more powerful than the UN can ever cope with. We are up against the forces of evil and the only power in the world to offset those forces of evil is the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and the authority of his finished work on the cross and therefore he leaves the charge with every Christian person, not only to be evangelical in terms of what they believe but to be evangelistic in their outreach to other people. So I bring you back to the song of Deborah.

You see it's a beautiful song, it's a haunting song, it's one of the most wonderful primitive hymns that you get in the Old Testament and there's a positive note which needed the drums, which needed the cymbals, which needed all the Hebrew Philharmonic Orchestra to be able to set aright as they sing the praise of those who have been used by God such as the tribes of Benjamin and what have you to offset the enemies of Israel in days of old. But how disgraceful was it for Reuben? No wonder there was much searching of heart. No wonder Reuben and the tribes people represented by that name hung their heads in shame.

When the war was over, when victory had been achieved, when a woman led the forces of God to conquer and conquest, Reuben had no representation whatsoever in the victorious battle, therefore she could not, he could not share in the wonder of victory. So, when our blessed Lord returns, Godspeed that day, what will be your emotion? What will be your reaction? Somebody couple a song that's almost as plaintive as the song of Deborah, though much shorter. Speaking of the return of Christ and beholding him by and by when I look in his face, face that was marred, brow that was scarred, by and by when I look on his face I'll wish I'd given him more, more, far, far more, more of my life than I ever gave before.

By and by when I look on his face I'll wish I had given him more. Does that make you feel uncomfortable? In one sense I hope it does because if it does then there's hope. You see, you have still some weeks, months, years in your life span to invest in the kingdom.

Deborah in effect was asking the Israelites to have had their priorities sorted and to put into a right order. Was it as important for Dan to look after his ships, verse 17, as what it was to send representatives into the army? Was it right for Asher to remain on the coast with the beautiful houses and homes there when by contrast the people of Zebulon, verse 18, risked their very lives and so did Naphtali on the heights of the field? Why is it within the kingdom of God today that we have got so many people, a small percentage, breaking themselves when there is a large percentage who are uncommitted at the level to which they could realistically be committed? Sometimes I think of the tab that were 500 strong, are nearly 600. We're all willing people, some willing to work, others willing to let the others work, but we're willing.

But my friends, my humor aside, what I ask you in the name of the Lord is to look into your priorities, to see areas where perhaps there is deficiency. Now the problem with a message like this is the sensitive go away crushed and the insensitive still go away. You may well be doing all that you can.

God bless you. Thank God for the little lady who led George Verver to Christ and spent the remaining years of her life praying for him. I thank God for every remembrance of my old secretary, Dorothy Fares, who could never have come in a pulpit like this, but whose last words to me when I visited her shortly before God called her home, without her death aid, therefore she spoke in volumes that were unnecessary in her hospital bed, much to the embarrassment and the enjoyment, the embarrassment of the patients, the enjoyment of myself.

Tell them about Jesus, Tony. Tell them about Jesus. First time, last time she ever called me by my Christian name, then she went to be with the Lord, doing what she could.

Some of you are doing that, some of you are giving what you can, you're praying as much as you can. I don't want you to go out with a guilt trip, but there are some who are not. You could be doing more.

Some of you who should be sweating it out, trying to make sense of Arabic, to take the gospel to the Arab. Some of you should be alongside the Hansons in Pakistan. Some of you should be down there in Bolivia with Anne Christian.

Some of you should be more in the heart of things at the tab, so that those who are overworked might have a lessening of their load. But let this be written upon your memory, that there was a day when the preacher tried to tell you that the song of Deborah can be transferred from the Old Testament to the New Testament era, giving its applause and its congratulations to those who have done more than was expected of them, and bringing embarrassment to those who at the moment of desperate need warm themselves by the campfire, listen to the music of the flute, and the bleating of the sheep. May it be that if you are really convinced that the death of Jesus on Calvary's cross was the payment for your sin and bringing you, therefore, eternal salvation, that you will make a priority of ensuring that directly or indirectly that message is communicated to as many people as you can possibly reach.

For when the people's groups have been informed of the gospel, the King will come back. Let's pray. We've been talking about a military theme.

There's a little song which speaks of the kingship of Jesus, his sovereignty. We're going to hear it played and then sing it in a moment. Reign in me, precious Lord, reign in me.

As you hear it, just prayerfully commit your own life to the Lord God afresh. Sovereign Lord, reign in me, reign in me. Sovereign Lord, reign in me.

570. Let's stand and sing. Reign in me.

Sovereign Lord, reign in me. Sovereign Lord, reign in me. The ladies sing.

Your kingdom come. Establishment of your throne. Reign in me.