The Generation That Did Not Know | Sunday, January 28, 2024

So the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great works which the LORD had done for Israel... When all that generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after them who did not know the LORD nor the work which He had done for Israel. Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served the Baals; and they forsook the LORD God of their fathers... (Judges 2:7–12)

When a people forgets the God who built their world, the slide into a dumpster fire is not sudden—it is a cycle written down for our instruction.

A New Series for Such a Time as This

We are beginning a new series today, and the fire on the screen and the words "dumpster fire" in your bulletin have something to do with it. I'll explain shortly. We've been studying through Old Testament books for several years—Deuteronomy beginning in 2020, then Joshua, which we finished at the end of last year. Now we come to the book that follows Joshua: the Book of Judges. My aim today is to introduce this book and ask why Judges, and why for such a time as this.

A year ago I attended a doctoral seminar at Southern Seminary focused on the Christian engaging a countercultural world. I quickly realized that almost everyone else in the room lives in a deeply red state, and their experience of interacting with people in their community, church, neighborhood, and family is different from mine. We live in the bluest of blue states. If you've been a Christian in California for any length of time, you've had to interact with people who don't see the world as you do.

Living in a Post-Christian World

You know you live in a post-Christian, countercultural world if you have ever lost a friendship over your Christian worldview, ever felt the temptation to self-censor at work or school, or ever wrestled with how to share your opinion diplomatically for fear of losing a friend, a contract, or a grade. If you've felt that, you realize you are an outsider to the culture in which you live.

This is the reality for Christians on the West Coast, the East Coast, in much of Europe, the United Kingdom, and Canada. But many people in the rest of our country have only recently begun to realize how challenging it is, as they look at what is happening in the culture. If you've lived in California for any length of time, you already have some sense of what it means to be in the world but not of the world.

In John 17, Jesus prays not only for His disciples but for those who would believe through their word—that's you.

I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one... Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth. (John 17:14–17)

How many of us would have wished He had simply prayed, "Get them saved and take them straight to heaven"? But He didn't. He prayed that God, by His Spirit and through His word, would set us apart and guard us as a light shining in a dark place, because He was leaving us in a world that hates us.

Have We Reached "Peak Woke"?

At that seminar a year ago we discussed critical theory, LGBTQ+ issues, the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and the debates around gender and sexuality. I asked the group: do you think we've reached the high-water mark of this flood of chaos—what some call "peak woke"? The consensus was, "We hope so."

A couple weeks ago I was back in the same room with the same professor and many of the same people, and I asked again. After the past twelve months—Target, Bud Light, the shift within Disney, the layoffs across news media—many said, "Yeah, we think we have." I told them I'm from the future, and I hope they're right. I hope the floodwaters are subsiding and we'll see a return to rationality. But I'm not sure we have.

That raises deeper questions. What if we haven't seen the high-water mark? What is causing this? And if we can identify the cause, is there anything that can be done to move the needle in the opposite direction?

A Worldview Being Gutted

I'll confess these questions cause me to lose sleep. I am deeply concerned that the judeo-Christian worldview that formed the Western world is being gutted—gutted by a different worldview that is caustic, toxic, and cancerous. The worldview that built this world made this nation the envy of the world. It is the reason so many people are trying to get here. My own father's family came here from Naples, Italy in the early twentieth century, because there is something about this place that is different—a light shining in a dark place.

This worldview has been a net benefit to the rest of the world for the better part of the last five hundred years, and you can verify that with even a shallow study of history. What is hard for us to imagine is that it could all fall apart very quickly. It seems normal to us—but if you study history, you'll discover that what we enjoy is not normal in human history.

The Bible Contains the Answers

The Apostle Paul, writing about the Old Testament, said these things happened to the children of Israel as examples for us, "upon whom the ends of the age have come." Whatever else "the ends of the age" means, it at least means there are times when the world changes significantly—and we are watching it change. Paul adds, "Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall." He calls Christians to humility, because there is a way we can arrogantly say, "Look what we've achieved," right before a slide begins.

Point one: the Bible contains answers and solutions to our biggest questions and problems. Our culture tells us our biggest problems are climate change, inflation, interest rates, immigration, racism, diversity, equity, inclusion—or who wins the 2024 election. I hate to break it to you, but when we open the Scriptures we discover our biggest problem is sin. All of those other things are downstream effects of sin.

None of this is new. We've been told for many decades that there is no such thing as evil, no such thing as sin, no such thing as God—"imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try." Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes:

That which has been is what will be, and that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

About four hundred years before Solomon, Israel experimented with the very same philosophical ideas our culture is experimenting with—and it was written down for us in the Book of Judges. Judges is the story of a people who lost their way, who departed from belief in God and faithfulness to His word, and ended up in a dumpster fire. That's why I'm calling this series Dumpster Fire—because that's what we'll see all year, one chaos after another.

The Generation That Did Not Know

Let's open to Judges chapter 2, which gives us the framing for the whole book. The people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and the elders who outlived him—those who had seen the great works the Lord had done. Joshua died at 110 and was buried in his inheritance. These temporal markers and locations tell us this is history.

Then comes the key verse:

When all that generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after them who did not know the LORD nor the work which He had done for Israel. (Judges 2:10)

The result: they did evil in the sight of the Lord, forsook the God of their fathers, followed and bowed down to other gods, and provoked the Lord to anger. They served Baal and the Asherahs, and God delivered them into the hands of plunderers and enemies, and they were greatly distressed. Later, four times in the book, we read: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

When Moses gathered the people in Deuteronomy, he told them God was to be their king, governing them by His word. But this generation forgot God. There was no king, and everyone did what our culture says today: "Follow your heart." It's bad advice. They did what was right in their own eyes, and it was evil in the sight of the Lord.

God Is the Solution—Or There Is None

Point two: God is the primary solution to our problems. If you depart from Him, you have major problems and no hope. This is the story of the book. Israel serves God while they have a good leader; when that leader dies, they arrogantly say, "Look what we've done," and slide into idolatry. God hands them over to their enemies; at the bottom, they cry out and repent; God raises up a judge who leads them back and to victory; the judge dies—and the cycle begins again, over and over.

God had made this clear through Moses, which means it was entirely avoidable. Have you ever looked back on something and thought, "That was entirely avoidable"? Just before I turned 21, my brother's friend offered me his dirt bike, and my mother said, "I'm going in the house; you're going to end up in the ER." I ended up in the ER that day. She wasn't a prophet—she just understood that you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

The Deuteronomic Principle

Moses taught this 3,400 years ago in Deuteronomy 28—the blessings and the curses. If you follow and obey God, you will be blessed; if you disobey and reject Him, you will be cursed. Theologians call it the deuteronomic principle. The New Testament calls it the law of sowing and reaping. If you plant an orange tree, you don't get apples. Paul says in Galatians that if you sow to the Spirit you reap life, and if you sow to the flesh you reap corruption.

Here's the amazing thing: these principles bring blessing even to those who don't believe in the miraculous. Thomas Jefferson was a deist, not a Christian—and a slave owner—yet he believed the truths of Scripture mattered, and he wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." That idea isn't self-evident at all; it comes from a worldview that says there is a God who created us equal. Together with men who were Bible-believing Christians, they founded a more perfect union on that conviction.

Consider the result. When Jefferson wrote those words, about a billion people lived in the world, and more than 90% lived in absolute poverty. By 2015 the population had grown to 7.4 billion, yet only about 10% lived in absolute poverty. For all of human history until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the whole world lived in absolute poverty—and in two centuries that was turned on its head. How? Solomon answers in Proverbs 14: "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." The Old Testament prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Malachi, Habakkuk—were essentially experts in Deuteronomy. That's why I set out to teach Deuteronomy first: you understand the history and the prophets far better when you grasp it.

The Civilizational Experiment

Since the nineteenth century the Western world has been flirting with godlessness—a civilizational experiment to answer the question, "Can man live without God?" The Enlightenment produced, in the nineteenth century, a scientific revolution, and the most revolutionary idea came through Charles Darwin, who in 1859 published On the Origin of Species, proposing that everything came about by random chance and mutation over billions of years.

Darwin died in 1882. In that same year a German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, published The Gay Science, in which he wrote of a madman who lit a lantern in the morning hours, ran into the marketplace, and cried, "I seek God! I seek God!" The unbelievers laughed at him. Then the madman pierced them with his eyes and said:

"Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?"

Then the madman fell silent, threw his lantern to the ground, and said, "I have come too early. My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of men." Nietzsche's premise was that reason, science, and the Enlightenment had undermined belief in God, and that with God dead, man could joyfully create new values and new meaning. Nietzsche died in 1900 in Germany—and you know what happened in early-twentieth-century Germany, though some deny it.

"Is God Dead?"

Many will say, "Yes, but we course-corrected. We had the Nuremberg trials. Never again. We're enlightened. Look at what we've built." Following World War II, the GIs—galvanized iron, galvanized in the trenches—came home bullish on babies and produced the Baby Boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964. During that time the centers of military, political, economic, scientific, and academic power shifted to the United States. Fifty-one of the top universities in the world are here—and so the philosophical thought of Nietzsche and his progeny moved into American academic institutions.

On April 8, 1966, Time Magazine released a cover story: a bleak black backdrop with red words, "Is God Dead?" The article didn't answer the question so much as poll theologians, philosophers, and the intelligentsia about what the "death of God" means and what happens after God's funeral. I'm not sure we've ever answered that question, but for the better part of the last fifty-eight years we've been running the experiment to see whether man can live without God. How do you think it's going?

A Generation That Did Not Know—Today

"When all that generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after them who did not know the LORD." That's not the Baby Boomers—it's their kids and grandkids, Millennials and Gen Z. A generation has arisen that does not know the Lord nor what He has done for the Western world.

Today nearly one-third of Americans—90 million people—identify as "nones," religiously unaffiliated, perhaps spiritual but not religious. An increasing number are mentally and emotionally unwell. People are self-medicating with alcohol, pornography, and all manner of mind-altering substances to deaden the numbness of nihilism. There is rising confusion about identity and purpose—what many call a meaning crisis—and questions about whether Western values have anything worthwhile to offer beyond empire, colonialism, and patriarchy.

Meanwhile, many religiously affiliated Americans think that if we just elect the right president, everything will be fixed. I'm from the future: wake up. God is the primary solution to our problem. It is a sin problem—not a political, economic, education, immigration, or racism problem. Those are all the products of sin. If you depart from Him, you have major problems and no hope.

How Shall We Then Live?

What would it look like if the Western world unraveled? Just look at history: before the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, most of the world lived in absolute poverty. "We could never go back to that," people say—but either this principle is true or it isn't. I believe it is true. So how should we respond? That's the question Francis Schaeffer asked in 1976: How Should We Then Live? Here are five steps for moving the needle in the opposite direction.

First, renew our minds through Scripture. The Roman world of the first century—pagan, pluralistic—was very much like our post-Christian society, and it's where the gospel turned the world right-side up. Paul wrote:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God... And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. (Romans 12:1–2)

Second, endeavor to be salt and light in a distasteful and dark world. Jesus said:

You are the salt of the earth... You are the light of the world... Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:13–16)

Third, create and grow Christ-centered, countercultural communities of faith. That's a church—not just on Sunday, but as we gather in homes for meals, in growth groups, as the people of God in this community.

Fourth, engage and invest in the lost generation. This isn't an age group; it's everyone who says, "I don't know if I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." Jesus said, "Go and make disciples of all nations." Peter said you are "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light."

Fifth, engage the culture persuasively with the gospel. That word persuasively is key, because it's what American Christians have forgotten over the last forty years. We don't know how to have persuasive conversations with people who disagree with us. We want to shout at them, tell them they're sinners, tell them to repent—but we don't know how to actually engage them. And all the low-hanging fruit of easy converts is gone. You must learn to have a real conversation with someone who votes by blue-state values, who thinks abortion is a fine form of birth control, who thinks you can change your sex on a whim—and help them see it isn't reality, and persuade them toward the truth.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear. (1 Peter 3:15)

Paul wrote to the Colossians to continue earnestly in prayer, to walk in wisdom toward outsiders, redeeming the time, with speech "seasoned with grace, that you may know how to answer each one." God has called you to reach your family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. My calling is to equip you for that work. But there is only one hope for our culture and our world: the gospel of Jesus Christ. It's plan A, and there is no plan B. God help us.

Closing Prayer

Father God, we certainly need Your help. We are living in strange times—weird, and going to get weirder. Lord, help us to redeem the time, for the days are evil, and having done all, to stand. Help us to stand, having put on the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, our feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, taking up the shield of faith with which we will quench the fiery darts of the wicked one, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Help us, Lord, to stand strong and to shine brightly in a dark world. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.