Today in the Navigators Bible reading plan, we read Mark 5, verses 24-34. And we meet there a woman with a 12-year illness, 12 years diseased, 12 years bleeding, 12 years embarrassed, 12 years anemic, 12 years from doctor to doctor to doctor, 12 years of false cures, 12 years that depleted her entire life savings. And then, after 12 years, Jesus walks by within arms reach. Imagine for a moment you were in control of everything. If you were in sovereign control over this world, over every disease, every pain, every war, how long would it take you to fix her and fix every other broken thing in this world? A couple days, a week at most, so we often wonder why does the sovereign God take 12 years to heal a suffering woman? Or hundreds of years to fix greater problems as we read in the long story of the Old Testament, watching centuries of rulers and judges and kings, some good, some of them rotten, and then the long exile and the enduring long disappointments for God's people. Today on Aspessor John, long sorrows set the stage. We get there from reading the book of Judges together and in Julius' question, who lives just outside of Philadelphia, Pastor John, in reading the book of Judges and in rereading your book Providence, I noticed that you wrote this powerful insight, quote, reading the book of Judges is like having the insanity of sin rubbed in your face while God returns again and again with mercy, which was repeatedly forgotten, end quote. Wow. That text is starred and underlined and highlighted in my book, but I've been thinking specifically of Judges 2 verses 11 to 23, where we see the tragic consequences of Israel's repeated cycle of disobedience and idolatry and compromise with sin. The people of Israel continually sinned, which led to oppression by surrounding nations. Why do you think God allows such long cycles of sorrow to occur when his people compromise with sin? How should this long pattern challenge us to pursue holiness and avoid spiritual complacency in our own relationship with God today? This is a difficult question. In fact, I think it's probably an impossible question to answer, namely, why did God take as long as he took to do what he did in any given period of history, not just the judges? And the reason it's difficult, if not impossible, is because there's no clear correlation in human behavior between quantity of time and the effect of that time on people. For example, if you want to discipline your child by making him stay in his room as a consequence of speaking harshly with his sister, how long should he stay in the room? And there simply is no clear answer anywhere among humans to the question, what amount of time correlates with a particular degree of guilt or a change of behavior? It's just of the nature of things that the elapse of time, whether we're talking about centuries or hours, never has a clear definite correlation in our minds, our minds, our human minds, between the quantity of time and the nature of the effect of the time going by. And if it's difficult to know about the correlation between time and effect at the human level, how much more difficult would it be for us to make judgments about God's decisions to take a century or a thousand years to do something when we might have done it in 10 years? How should we make that judgment? So that's my disclaimer at the beginning here for why I don't think it's possible to give a very definite answer to the question why God would decrease such long cycles of sin and judgment, say, in the period of the judges. But let me say two or three things that might shed some light on the length of redemptive history in its various phases. Let's focus on God's dealing with Israel. From the time that God chose Abraham, or Abram, to the time of the coming of Jesus, was about 2000 years. That's a long time. That included 200 years of the patriarchal era, rounding off these numbers, about 400 years of sojourning in Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness, 400 years with the judges, 100 years of United Kingdom under Saul and David and Solomon, about 400 years of divided kingdom, 70 years in exile in Babylon and then another 400 years or so after the Old Testament closes until Jesus. At every point we could ask why that amount of time? And I've already said why I don't think that question can be answered with any precision, but I think we can say at least three things to get at the issue. One, in 2 Peter 3.8 it says, with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. So we should never imagine God passing through time as slowly as we do. His judgments therefore about how long things should be done or be made from a very unique standpoint. The second observation is that it's clear, for example, in the book of Judges that the main point is that when there's no righteous king in the land, people do what's right in their own eyes and that winds up with a prevalence of great wickedness in the land. So the point of the book of Judges is that human beings are incurably sinful and need a savior and that life on earth becomes unlivable where there are no restraints on sin and God has chosen two ways to make that clear during the period of Judges. One is to describe the depth and horror of the evil that comes out of people's hearts like chopping a concubine in pieces and the other is to describe how long this goes on through Allsneel, Ehud, Shamgar, Deborah, Gideon, Abimelech, Tola, Jair, Jephthah, Ibn Zan, Ilan, Abdon, Samson, four centuries. In other words, the measure of sin's horror and the measure of sin's duration combine to underline the terrible condition of the human heart. We may not know why God chose 400 years, as opposed to 300 or 500 or whatever, but we can know that it was both the horror of it and the length of it that made the point. Human beings are inveterately sinful and need a savior. No passage of time is going to make them better. We need a savior, a savior that is far better than any of the Judges. And the third thing we can say with regard to the 2000 years of Israel's history is that Israel was becoming a lesson book for how to understand the nature of God, the nature of redemption, the way that the Messiah Jesus would in fact come and be that redemption. The way the history of Israel unfolds introduces the reality of the covenant, the reality of law, the reality of God's revealed will in that law, the reality of substitution, in a blood sacrifice, the reality of a priesthood, a kingship, the crucial role of prophecy and the word of God. All those realities that we meet and learn about over time in the history of Israel are essential in the New Testament for understanding the nature and work of Jesus Christ. We may not know why God took the precise amount of time he took, but we can see what he was doing in redemptive history in the Old Testament to prepare for the fullest understanding of the nature and the work of Christ in the New Testament, because it's all understood in the light of what the history of Israel was revealing and teaching about God and his plan for salvation. And I think one lesson, at least, that God intends for us to see in this history of redemption is the depth and the ugliness of sin, the seriousness of God's judgment, the amazing grace that turns up again and again and again. Oh my goodness, my wife and I are reading Hosea right now, and we just read chapter 2 last night, the horrors of hordom prostitution against God, and he just says, I'm going to woo you back. You almost want to cry at the kindness of God revealed in the book of Hosea, and it's all pointing to Galatians 4-4. When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who are under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. That's it. That's where it's all going. Reading the book of Judges is like having the insanity of sin rubbed in your face while God returns again and again with mercy. What a great line from the Providence book, page 126. Great book, by the way. You should read it if you haven't. You can download it for free at DesiringGod.org forward slash books right now. Think of Esther John for this reminder, that a long timeline, a long story of mercy, patiently building out the vocabulary that we need about temples and priests and blood sacrifices all to set the stage so we would be ready for when the fullness of time had come to behold our Savior in all of his glory. A long narrative. Sauros set the stage for him. Those are beautiful reflections here, Pastor John. Thank you from a not very beautiful book as we read Judges together in the second half of April. Pretty tough going to read that book. If you're struggling through the Bible and you struggle to see the relevance of it as we plug away in our reading, see the Esther John book on that very question. Isn't the Bible old and irrelevant? That's really one of the core questions that we all have as Bible readers at some point. See pages 19 to 20 in the Esther John book for more from Esther John on that. From the Old Testament to AI, quite a shift next time where artificial intelligence fails. I'm Tony Reiki. See you on Thursday.
