Sunday Sermon - The Destructive Power Of Soft Men examines Israel's failure to drive out Canaanites due to post-war apathy, linking this to modern "soft men" like Joe Biden who prioritize inclusion over truth. The speaker argues that severing biblical masculinity from physical labor creates societal decay, predicting angry young men will reject effeminacy amid economic hardship. He condemns political ambiguity as arrogance and asserts that only righteous, strong older men can harness youth's anger, urging a revival to break the cycle of pity leading to idolatry and restore a fighting chance for future generations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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God's Part in Righteousness00:13:13
Amen.
This morning we continue with our series through the book of Joshua.
If you were with us last week, I gave a little bit of the 30,000 foot view and some of the broader context.
The plan was to deal with the first 11 chapters of the book that all have to do with the conquest of Canaan.
And so we see Joshua at the helm of Israel being used of the Lord to conquer all the pagan, wicked Canaanite tribes, to put them to the edge of the sword, to death, and in the case of some, to drive them out.
And so we've finished Joshua chapter 1 through 11.
That's the conquest, all the different battles that occur with Israel in Canaan.
And then the next few chapters, several chapters in fact, deal with the allotments of land as specific apportioned inheritances for each of the tribes of Israel.
And so all scripture is God breathed and inspired and useful.
And so I believe that these chapters are important.
So you can read them.
And should read them.
But I'm not going to be skipping these chapters to give you something that's extra biblical.
We're skipping a few chapters of Scripture so that we can teach other Scripture.
So we're not going to be spending months through the apportioning of land inheritances for each of the tribes of Israel.
But it is valuable, and I encourage you to study it on your own time.
Today, we're actually going to conclude our series through the book of Joshua by looking at chapter 23.
Some of Joshua's final words, his farewell address to Israel right before his death.
And I'm going to be taking a sneak peek at Judges, which is the next book, and what happens after Joshua dies so that we can see the result of this is what God brought about.
God gave strength to Israel to conquer her adversaries.
They did inhabit the land as God promised.
Everything that God said through Moses and through Joshua was fulfilled.
God was faithful.
And then we'll skip forward to Joshua, Judges, rather, to be able to briefly look and say, okay, so God did his part.
He did all these things.
What was the final result?
Spoiler alert.
It was not good.
God was faithful.
Israel was faithless.
Israel is the premier case study in the Old Testament.
Old covenant Israel, according to the flesh, is the premier case study of not the faithfulness of men, but rather the grace of God.
That is what Israel is used to do again and again, is to display.
God's grace in the midst of man's faithlessness, not his faithfulness.
And so we'll see that today, the result, but I also want us to see a little bit of the progression of how is it that Israel fell?
How could it be possible to have Yahweh as your God and for him to be so incredibly faithful and to fulfill everything that he said and to supernaturally go before you, to be the Lord of battle, to fight all your adversaries on your behalf?
To deliver to you a good land flowing with milk and honey, to sustain you in the wilderness with manna from heaven, to part the Red Sea, and then to part the Jordan, and to do all these great and glorious things, to be exceedingly kind and gracious, and yet for that people to fall away.
How is that even possible?
And so I want us to look at the progression of sin.
I believe that there is practical application as it pertains to individuals, as it pertains to you and I, as New Testament Christians.
How is it?
That we could fall away, right?
To not just pick on Israel.
The reality is that you and I, God has been good and kind and faithful and strong for us, and we still sin.
We still rebel against Him.
At least I'll speak for myself.
I do.
I know you guys probably don't, but I do.
I still rebel against the Lord, despite all of His kindness.
So I want us to look at the personal, individual application of the goodness and faithfulness of God, and yet the ways that we squander His grace.
But then I also want to draw out, I believe, a corporate application.
For nations, that we see that Israel, not just as individual people, but individual people, if there's enough of them, that makes up a society.
It makes up a body politic, and that Israel as a whole, as a nation, fell from grace.
They fell from what God had given to them as his good gift.
They squandered that and forfeited God's goodness, God's kindness.
But it didn't happen in a moment, it didn't happen overnight.
There is a progression, is what I'm saying, both at the individual level.
For you and I, even as New Testament individual Christians and at a societal level, corporately, there is a progression of sin.
And so that's where we'll probably spend the most of our time today, recognizing the progression of sin, the steps that come along the way, so that we can be alert, that we can be watchful, that we can look for these things and say, wait a second, I know this path and I know where it leads, so that we don't get halfway down the path.
Of sin that leads to death, and then determine, oh, maybe I should turn around or maybe I should pick another course, but that we would be able to recognize the progression of sin at the start so that we can make no provisions for the flesh, as John Owen would say.
Starting to see and recognize the correlation between sins of omission that always lend towards sins of commission, meaning there are certain things that.
That are sinful not because we do something that God has forbidden, that we actually commit a sin, we do something wicked, but often what first starts out before doing something wicked, it often begins as us neglecting to do something that is righteous.
That would be a sin of omission.
You're omitting something.
So there's the good that you should do, that you ought to do, that you neglect, that lends towards the evil that you should not do, that's forbidden, that now you're engaged in.
And these are the things that we see.
In this case study of Israel, Israel is a wonderful example for us to recognize no, don't do that.
No, don't do that.
Yes, engage in this righteousness.
Yes, be very active.
You see, in Israel, there are good kings.
They're few and far between, but there are good kings.
And some of them are good kings in the sense that they restore the temple or they restore certain altars to worship good altars, to worship Yahweh.
They call the people to repentance.
They call the people to righteousness.
And that's one degree of a righteous king.
And there are some of those in Israel throughout the Old Testament.
They are the minority report, these good kings.
But then there are great kings in Israel that are exceedingly rare.
And there's only a couple.
You can count them on one hand.
David would be an example of this, but also would be Josiah.
And the difference from good to great in this instance, the good kings that would call the people to righteousness and to worship.
Of Yahweh versus great kings like Josiah.
Is that Josiah would say, Let's worship the Lord and reinstate right worship in Israel, and principled pluralism is demonic.
And he would tear down all the altars that were raised to false gods.
He didn't just build the right altars and call the people to right worship, but he would take out his hammer in the proverbial sense and smash the Baals, smash the Asherah poles, smash idolatry, and all that, which would.
Be present only to lure the hearts of Israel away from the true God.
So I want us to look at Israel.
I want us to look at the fulfillment of God's promise, which is explicitly in our text today Joshua 23, his farewell address, and how the Lord fulfilled and made good on everything that he promised to Israel.
But I also want us to look beyond the text into Judges, namely chapter 2, and see after God fulfilled all these good things.
How does Israel respond?
How does Israel steward the grace of God?
Or more specifically, how do they fail to steward the grace of God?
And then how does that apply to us in the ways that we fail to properly respond to God's kindness and goodness, this great salvation?
How do we, as the author to the Hebrews says, neglect such a great salvation that's been given to us as individual New Testament Christians, but then also applying it in a political, social, cultural context?
How do nations, or in our case, a republic, or what was supposed to be a republic, how do we collectively at a corporate level, how do we also squander the grace of God through sins of omission that lend towards sins of commission?
And how do we see that culturally in a relevant and applicable sense today?
So, with all that being said, let's go ahead and stand for the reading of God's word.
Again, our text is going to be Joshua 23.
And again, this is going to be the final sermon in this series through the book of Joshua.
Our next book of the Bible, Lord willing, is the book of Ezra.
And I've told you a few times, but some of you I recognize are new faces today, and so that you might be aware of the plan.
The book of Joshua is going into the land initially to conquer it, to inhabit it.
But then Ezra is going back into the land.
After God has brought about his promises, Israel is then faithless to steward God's kindness.
Israel is then taken into exile, removed from the land under judgment by God because of their sin, but then they're sent back.
To re inhabit the land, to rebuild the ruins.
And so I think all this is applicable for us at this time.
You see that, you know, in the case of America, that we've gone into the land, inhabited the land, and set up a Christian nation for all intents and purposes.
The covenanters, the founders, the pilgrims, it was a Christian nation.
It is, I would argue, a Christian nation currently under God's judgment because of our apostasy.
And the judgment, I believe, will be more severe, not less, because of our founding.
Because of that Christian origin.
But now, if we have any hope at all, in many ways, Joshua kind of sets for us the framework, but Ezra will be even more applicable, more relevant for us, because it has to do with rebuilding the ruins after faithlessness has torn apart the foundations.
And so that's the plan and the reason for Joshua and Ezra.
All that being said, the final thing, and then I'll read the text, is that because a lot of this is political and it's cultural, Deals with societies and deals with history and all these things.
I think it's incredibly important because within evangelicalism as a whole, I think that this has been neglected in preaching.
There's very little political application, very little even cultural application.
That said, I struggle with this, and so you can always pray for me, and I welcome your prayers, but I want to do a good job balancing between okay, evangelicalism as a whole is weak in this regard.
And so I want to bolster up where evangelicalism is weak, things that have been neglected, like political application, political theology.
Protestants don't have it.
We had it, we don't anymore.
You talk about it, and immediately you're going to be criticized by evangelicals.
They're going to say, just preach the gospel, and that's it.
So, I want to bolster where, on the whole, Protestants have been weak, especially in our time.
And yet, at the same time, you, as an individual local church that I've been charged to shepherd as a local pastor, I don't want us to just be providing the resources in this area that the church as a whole is lacking, but then all you get is political theology.
So, all that being said, I may, I'm going to pray about this and talk to Connor about this, but I may put in a few weeks' break in between Joshua and Ezra so that we don't just go from take the land, retake the land, and a whole year, you guys are like, that was great political theology, but it's been a year since I've heard something about parenting.
And so I want to probably pause and spend a few weeks with just, I don't know, maybe like a mini series that you could call Gospel Bangers or something like that, where we just do some of that.
A Break Between Joshua and Ezra00:03:26
For a little while, just good for us locally, our soul.
And then, sure, we'll go back into Ezra.
So, all that being said, again, our text is Joshua 23.
The Bible says this A long time afterward, when the Lord had given rest to Israel from all their surrounding enemies, and Joshua was old and well advanced in years, Joshua summoned all Israel, its elders and heads, its judges and officers, and said to them, I am now old and well advanced in years, and you have seen all that the Lord your God has done to all these nations.
For your sake, for it is the Lord your God who has fought for you.
Behold, I have allotted to you as an inheritance for your tribes those nations that remain, along with all the nations that I have already cut off, from the Jordan to the great sea in the west.
The Lord your God will push them back before you and drive them out of your sight, and you shall possess their land, just as the Lord your God promised you.
Therefore, be very strong to keep and to do.
All that is written in the book of the law of Moses, turning aside from it neither to the right hand nor to the left, that you may not mix with these nations remaining among you, or make mention of the names of their gods, or swear by them, or serve them, or bow down to them.
But you shall cling to the Lord your God, just as you have done to this day.
For the Lord has driven out before you great and strong nations, and as for you, no man has been able to stand before you to this day.
One man of you puts to flight a thousand, since it is the Lord your God who fights for you, just as he promised you.
Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.
For if you turn back and cling to the remnant of these nations remaining among you and make marriages with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know for certain that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you, but they shall be a snare and a trap for you.
A whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes until you perish from off this good ground that the Lord your God has given you.
And now I am about to go the way of all the earth and know in your hearts and souls, all of you, that not one word has failed of all the good things that the Lord your God promised concerning you.
All have come to pass for you, not one of them has failed.
But just as all the good things, Things that the Lord your God promised concerning you have been fulfilled for you, so the Lord will bring upon you all the evil things until he has destroyed you from off this good land that the Lord your God has given you.
If you transgress the covenant of the Lord your God, which he commanded you, and go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and you shall perish quickly from off the good land that he has given you.
This is the word of the Lord.
All right, please be seated.
Let's go ahead and dive in.
The first thing that I've written in your notes is this we're going to deal with the results of Israel's victory.
Satan as the Strong Man00:12:08
The results of Israel's victory.
God was with them in battle, the Lord fought for them.
The first 11 chapters that we spent months going through in the book of Joshua details all the individual battles in this conquest of Canaan.
God was faithful, the Lord fought for Israel.
He fulfilled all that he promised through Moses and through Joshua.
Israel indeed inhabited the promised land.
They took the land, they took every square inch of the land.
But one of the things that we immediately see from the text is that they did not, at least at this point, drive out every single one of their adversaries from the land.
Many of their adversaries were put to death.
And what's significant for us to recognize is that the kings of these people.
Pagan Canaanite tribes, they were destroyed.
They were put to death.
And there are some cases where individual tribes, every single person, man, woman, and child, was put to death.
Jericho would be an example of this.
Spare Rahab and her household because of a gospel covenant made with Israel.
But every single inhabitant, other than Rahab and her household in Jericho, was put to death.
But this is not the case with each of the cities, each of the tribes in Canaan.
Some of them are wiped out entirely, others are driven out of the land entirely.
But then, others, you have the soldiers and the chiefs of war, and you have the king in particular, that they are put to death.
But certain citizens of this particular Canaanite tribe, this particular Canaanite kingdom, the citizens are allowed to continue living and living in the land, inhabitants in the land.
So, when Joshua deals out allotments of land in Canaan to each of the tribes of Israel, respectively, one of the assignments to each individual tribe of Israel.
Is that they need to finish the job.
That the job is not completely done, that there's still work to be finished.
Now, the death blow to the pagan Canaanite tribes has already been delivered by the Lord through Joshua.
And so, if you were with us last Lord's Day, I liken this to Jesus that Jesus is the better Joshua, right?
Yeshua, deliverer, that Jesus is the ultimate Joshua, that Joshua is one of many Old Testament types.
That is a symbol of the antitype, that is the actual substance, who is Christ.
So Joshua is a type, an example, a symbol of Jesus.
Jesus is the better, ultimate Joshua.
And Jesus does for us what we see Joshua do for Israel, Jesus does for the church, and Jesus does it in the final spiritual eternal sense, what Joshua does in the physical sense for Israel.
Joshua, for Israel, he goes into the land empowered by God and he cuts off the head of the snake.
When it comes to the wicked pagan Canaanite tribes, he crushes their kings.
In fact, there's one instance that we saw where Joshua faces five Canaanite kingdoms all at once.
They unite.
Against Gibeon.
Gibeon has a covenant with Israel.
Joshua comes to their defense and Joshua seals up these kings.
They're taken captured and they're sealed up in a tomb alive.
They go into this cave.
They roll big stones in front of the mouth of the cave while the rest of Israel is running down all of their fighting men, all the soldiers, and putting them to the edge of the sword, putting them to death.
When they finish all of that in the battle, they then circle back to the caves, remove the stones.
Joshua has his men.
Take these five kings out, lay them on their backs, and then he has his chief men of war come and take turns putting their feet on the necks of these kings.
And so, my point is Joshua, like Christ, as a type of Christ, he cuts off the head of the snake.
He allows for Israel to step on the neck of the kings.
What Joshua does not do, and it's not necessarily a failure on Joshua's part, But what Joshua does not do is he doesn't wipe out each and every single individual of the pagan Canaanite tribes in the land of promise.
He gives the land, he conquers the kings, he chops off the head of the snake, and then he gives the land to each of the various tribes.
And each of these tribes has a responsibility, a duty before God to finish the war, to finish the battle, right?
The sting of death has been removed.
But there's still work to be done.
The head of the snake has been severed, but there are still people that need to be conquered.
And that's where Joshua leaves it in chapter 23.
That's the result of this victory there are still wicked inhabitants in the land, but the full force of their strength against Israel has been neutralized.
So there's still work to be done.
There still may be casualties and sacrifices that Israel has to make.
Israel may still have some of their own men die in battle, but the victory is secure.
And this is what Christ has done in the ultimate sense through his life, death, resurrection, and glorious ascension.
Jesus, as the better Joshua, he's cut the head off of the snake.
That Jesus has bound the strong man.
It's one of the parables that he tells.
He's bound the strong man so that we, his people, the church, can go as true Israel.
We can go and plunder the house, the house being this world.
That we see in the scripture this great cosmic battle between the archangel Michael and Lucifer, the devil, and those angels, fallen angels who chose to rebel with him against God.
And Michael cast down Lucifer, he cast him down out of heaven.
And the Bible says, But woe to you, O earth, for the devil has come down to you.
And so the devil was, in a sense, he was steward of this physical cosmos, of the world.
God is still sovereign.
The devil is still a created being underneath the autonomous sovereignty and liberty of God as the only autonomously free being in all the universe.
So the devil is still on a leash, as I preached last week, but he did have stewardship, dominion over the world.
Why?
Because God set up Adam as his viceroy, as his steward, his manager over the earth.
And Adam forfeited that to Satan through his sin.
And so Lucifer became a steward, having a certain degree of dominion over the world.
This is why, when Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness and he offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, this was not an empty offer.
This was real.
When Jesus says, or Satan rather says to Jesus, I'll give you all the kingdoms of the world if you'll simply bow down and worship me.
Satan is promising to Jesus something that he actually had possession over.
And Jesus' answer, unlike the modern evangelical today, is not, well, I don't care for the kingdoms of this world because I'm apolitical.
That's not how he responds.
Jesus says, I don't want you.
This is paraphrasing Jesus, but this is the proper interpretation.
He says, I don't want you to give me the kingdoms of the world, not because I'm not interested in earthly kingdoms, but because I don't want them given to me.
I will take them.
To have you give them to me by idolatry and sin, but rather I worship God alone.
I am perfectly righteous.
I've come to fulfill all righteousness.
And by my sinless life, my substitutionary death, and my victorious resurrection, I will take the kingdoms of this earth.
I don't need you to give them to me.
So you have God.
God gives stewardship to Adam of the world, the house being the world, the earth.
And then Adam forfeits his dominion, his stewardship to Satan.
Satan then has dominion over the earth.
He is the strong man.
But Jesus comes and he binds the strong man by his life, death, and resurrection.
We now, as the New Testament church, as spiritual Israel, our job is not to take out Satan.
Our job is to plunder the house because Satan has already been tied up in the basement.
Jesus did that.
And that's the same situation that we see in the book of Joshua.
Joshua, as a type of Christ, Jesus, Joshua goes and he cuts the head off the snake.
He takes all the strong men, all the kings of these pagan tribes, and many of their fighting men, and he puts them to death.
But Israel still has work to do to finish the job.
Each of the various tribes in their land that's allotted to them.
So too, Jesus has bound the strong man in his earthly ministry 2,000 years ago.
But the church still has work to do.
We're now going and following up.
Jesus has given to us, rendered the great, significant victory.
The pivotal battle in the war has already been won.
But that doesn't mean the war is over.
It's a guarantee at this point, it's a foregone conclusion, but we're not called to simply sit on our hands.
There's work to be done.
And by God's grace, the church, because of Christ, the church will succeed where Israel failed.
Joshua took out the kings of Canaan, Israel was called to finish the job, they did not.
Jesus has taken out the strong man.
Satan bound him.
He's not cast in the lake of fire yet, but he is significantly bound.
Jesus has bound the strong man, and the church is called to plunder the house, and the church will.
That doesn't mean we're doing a perfect job in each moment, each century throughout history, but by God's grace, the church will succeed in the way that Israel ultimately failed.
And that's the correlation between the two.
So here's the result of Israel's victory.
The result is their compromise.
God brings about a great victory for Israel, and then Israel takes this grace and allows it to cause them to become licentious and lawless and apathetic.
Maybe you've heard, I think it was Cotton Mather, or maybe it was his son or father, Increase Mather, but he said that faithfulness produced blessing or prosperity, but the daughter devoured the mother.
Have you heard that phrase before?
Faithfulness.
Produced, it gave birth to prosperity and blessing.
But the daughter devoured the mother.
The blessing produced by faithfulness, ultimately, that blessing then caused people to stop being faithful because they already had what they wanted.
They took it for granted.
They became apathetic.
They became lethargic.
They compromised.
They became licentious.
All these different things.
I mean, that's one of the chief warnings that we find in the New Testament again and again from the Apostle Paul.
Don't allow grace.
To become a license for sin.
So, this is a principle that we find throughout the whole of Scripture.
God's grace through Joshua cutting off the kings of Canaan, and then Israel takes it for granted.
And they take prisoners where they should have given no quarter.
They make compromises and treaties where they should have continued and finished the conquest, right?
And in the same way, even New Testament Christians, you and I, we continue to sin in part because we've allowed grace to become a license for sin.
I'm no longer under law, I'm under grace.
And so, It doesn't matter.
I can sin and God still loves me, and so I have no motivation for obedience, which is terrible.
Hard Men for Difficult Times00:07:46
Terrible.
Now, the motivation for obedience is that Christ died for us.
He died for us.
We're motivated now from grace.
Grace is supposed to be the wind in our sails.
Grace is not the excuse to disobey.
It's supposed to be for the Christian the chief motive to launch us and fuel us and push us into further obedience because God is gracious.
How could I?
Deny him?
How could I betray him?
And so, this is the big theme from the book of Joshua.
And that's what we're going to see now the result of Israel's victory lending towards their licentiousness, their compromise, and taking the goodness of God for granted.
I've written this Israel had just finished a long and tiring conquest of the land of Canaan.
They appear to have silently determined that they were now done with war, they had witnessed the barbarism.
Of the authoritarian leaders of Canaan.
And now their own leader, Joshua, was dead, going the way of all the earth.
That is, he was going to die.
In Joshua's absence, a poisonous potion of fatigue, right?
There's a sense in which Israel is tired.
That's understandable.
Apathy, that's less understandable.
And a misguided pity.
I'm going to come back to this one.
We don't think of that.
We think of, I'm tired and also maybe a bit lazy.
Fatigue and apathy.
But I also think there's an element of pity, misguided, unbiblical, sinful pity for Israel's enemies.
So a potion, poisonous potion of fatigue, apathy, and misguided pity for Israel's enemies was brewed, set in.
The post war sentiment, you might say.
I think that's fair, right?
Israel just got done with this long war that was arguably a year long, maybe longer, but at least multiple months, several months.
For several months, they have been at war, going up against many of these adversaries that were superior to them.
The tribe of AI would probably be the only exception.
Uh, AI had a total population of 12,000, about 3,000, you know, fighting men, and so Israel was larger and stronger than they were.
But in all the other cases, it seems as though Israel is outnumbered, um, more they're at least uh inferior in regards to their weaponry, their tech, right?
Other guys have chariots, they have horses, and Israel, you know, doesn't.
They have more primitive uh weapons of war, they don't have the resources uh that some of their opponents have, and so in all these cases.
Israel is outmanned, outnumbered.
The Lord, again, supernaturally fights for them.
And so they're granted victory.
But still, it's understandable that Israel is tired.
That after months and months of war, Israel says, we'd kind of like to be done with war for a while.
We would like to rest.
And so that's easy, I think, for us to see.
Okay, there's apathy.
Okay, there's fatigue.
But there's also pity.
There's pity.
And we'll get to that in a moment.
So it's this post war sentiment.
Israel just got done fighting all these battles.
I mean, and they were fighting against giants and they were fighting against barbaric people, right?
They're not just fighting against kingdoms that, you know, well, you know, there's some good things about the Canaanites and some good things about Israel, and it's just a fight over land.
No, the Canaanites that Israel is going up and facing are horrible, horrible people.
They're performing human sacrifices.
Some of them are filleting their enemies alive and hanging skins on the walls.
They are a barbaric, vicious.
Vicious people practicing necromancy, practicing divination.
They're a pagan, wicked, heinous, sinister, barbaric people.
And so Israel had seen certain atrocities.
I don't know, maybe some of them got PTSD.
They're like, we're done.
We got the land.
The immediate threat has been neutralized.
The kings have been taken out.
Most of the men of war have been taken out.
And yeah, there's still some inhabitants here, but we're done.
We're done.
We're taking a break.
The post war sentiment took root in Israel.
It has been said, and I want to deal with this saying for a little bit.
You've probably heard it, but I want to break it down.
Hard times create hard men.
Hard men create soft times.
Soft times create soft men.
And soft men create hard times.
I'll say it again.
Hard times, difficult times, times of trial and tribulation, that's used as the furnace to forge hard men.
Hard times.
Make hard men because you have to be a hard man, or you're done, you're defeated, you're eradicated.
In difficult times, hard men are created to rise to the various challenges.
So, hard times create hard men, but here's the problem hard men ultimately face the challenges, they overcome those challenges, and create good times, soft times.
Right?
War creates warriors.
But warriors end wars.
And ending wars creates peace, and peace creates Americans.
What we've got today.
Right?
100% soy diet.
Weak, limp wristed, effeminate.
And that's what you get.
Right?
Faithfulness produces, it gives birth to blessing.
It's a prosperity, but the daughter devoured the mother.
And that's what we see in Israel.
And I mean, it's uncanny.
The correlation, that's what we see today.
It's incredibly applicable and relevant.
So hard times create hard men, hard men create soft times because they vanquish the difficulties and challenges.
But then soft times create soft men, and soft men create hard times.
That's one of the lessons that I feel like we're learning right now.
Well, that was way too hopeful.
I assume for a second that we might be learning a lesson.
That's one of the lessons that's happening right now.
I don't know if anybody's learning it, but one of the lessons that's happening right now.
So let me just give here's an example Trump, Biden.
It's like, well, he's mean.
His Twitter account.
And so a whole bunch of women voted for Biden.
And what we're discovering over these past three years is it turns out that nice men.
Can actually rack up a higher death toll than mean men.
That soft men can actually do more devastation than hard men.
Did you know that?
Hitler, bad.
Stalin.
There are different kinds of tyrants, is what I'm saying.
And think about this as it pertains to tyrants.
Particularly political, civil tyrants, that would be civil leaders in positions of civil authority.
Soft Men Create Devastation00:05:52
It's not a coincidence that Jesus says, in the case of John the Baptist, right, he was a voice crying out in the wilderness.
He was a hard man, right?
That guy, his diet was not soy, it was locusts, right?
You want to toughen up men, right?
That guy, he's eating locusts in the desert and wearing camel skin.
And Jesus literally says that.
He says, What did you go out into the desert to see?
A man dressed in soft clothes?
Now, notice the next thing that Jesus says, and I don't think this is a coincidence.
He says, if you want to find a malakos, an effeminate man, and just for the record, effeminate, real quick, let me clarify this because people, Christians, don't get this.
Effeminate is an insult, but feminine is not.
So the difference between feminine, just this disclaimer matters, there's a dynamic difference between feminine and effeminate.
Feminine is when a woman who's actually feminine embodies who God's called her to be.
That's great.
Femininity is wonderful.
We celebrate that.
Effeminacy is when a man is doing woman face.
Effeminacy is Dylan Mulvaney.
But femininity is my wife back there holding our son, listening to the preached word as a domestic woman who loves her vocation.
There are a lot of people that are really concerned about my wife, but by God's grace, she's not concerned.
She actually likes it.
She actually likes being a mom, believe it or not.
Crazy, I know.
So, do you see the difference?
Femininity, good.
That's a woman being a woman.
Effeminacy, bad.
That's a man LARPing as a woman.
That's the difference.
And Jesus addresses this, and he uses that Greek word that lends, or that's where we get this word, effeminacy.
There's other texts as well.
But he says, What did you go into the desert to see?
Right?
John the Baptist, the prophet, you went to go and see a man, a man's man, a hard man.
Right?
You went to go and hear his sermons.
Okay, these are not Andy Stanley sermons.
This is not Joel Osteen.
You went to hear John the Baptist sermons, you're going to get some good old time religion.
You were going to get some fire, some brimstone, right?
Like Jonathan Edwards, his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, right?
Where they actually found claw marks on the back of the pews after he finished preaching that sermon because people were sitting so terrified that they were clawing onto the pew in front of them for dear life, afraid.
He's talking about, you know, you're like a spider hanging from a single Thread barely hanging on, and underneath you is the jaws of hell.
I mean, that's how people used to preach.
And that's how John the Baptist preached.
The axe is at the root of the tree.
Who warned you, brood of vipers, to turn from the wrath of God?
Like, people would show up to his preaching, he'd be like, Wait a second, you're not supposed to be here.
You're the very person.
It's like a pull-up washer sermon, you know, people are clapping.
He's like, I'm talking about you.
I don't know why you're clapping.
I remember a Valentine's card.
Somebody did this.
I thought it was hilarious.
It was roses are red, violets are blue.
I don't know why you're clapping.
I'm talking about you.
Beautiful, romantic card.
But preaching like that, that kind of preaching, that's how John the Baptist was.
So Jesus said, Would you go into the wilderness, the desert, to see?
Not a soft man wearing soft clothing.
And here's the point.
I don't think it's a coincidence.
He says, If you wanted to see that, where do you go?
To the desert?
No, Jesus specifically says if you wanted to find a soft man wearing soft clothes, where would you go?
A palace.
Where would you go?
Washington, D.C.
The White House.
Congress.
The courthouse.
You want to find a soft man?
Where do you look?
Politics.
Civil leaders.
Softest men you could ever find.
Most of them aren't even men at this point.
I mean, we've replaced half of them with women.
And then the other half are also women, but of a different kind.
And that's Jesus, for the record.
Jesus says soft men gravitate towards palaces.
They gravitate towards, if you want to find a soft man, don't look to the preacher.
Now, we've got plenty of soft men in pulpits today, too, sadly.
But in the words of Jesus, don't look to the prophet, look to the president.
That's where you'll find them if you want to find a soft man.
Hard times create hard men.
Hard men create soft times, better times, times of peace.
And then these soft times create soft men.
And then, soft men, due to their softness, their effeminacy, their weakness, they create hard times.
Israel is struggling with what I would consider to be the post war mentality, the post war sentiment.
We did this.
We did this war thing.
We did the conquest.
We're done.
We're done with it.
We've seen atrocities.
We saw the barbarians of Canaan.
I mean, they were even giants.
What we saw is some of them were cannibalistic.
Hard Times Forge Hard Men00:04:54
God, we're done.
We fought the barbarians.
And we want, and sure, some of their children are still alive and could grow up.
But we've got time.
Well, we don't need to run them down.
We don't need to finish the job.
We're tired.
We're a little bit lazy, apathetic, and I do think this is an element.
And well, we just we're merciful, right?
DEI man, Israel's you know, DEI policy, diversity, equity, inclusion.
We're cutting edge for our time, Yahweh.
We, I mean, we want to, you know, you're a God of mercy, and we want to be merciful too.
And so, we're going to tolerate, we're going to include.
We're going to carve out space.
We're going to have a neutral public square.
Seems Christ like, compassionate, and principled pluralism, Yahweh.
Classical liberalism, Yahweh.
Just a little bit of polytheism, just a sprinkle, just a sprinkle of idolatry, but out of kindness.
And at the end of the day, you know, it's the thought that counts.
It's the intention, it's the motive, as long as our hearts are in the right place.
So, yes, apathy.
Yeah, maybe a little PTSD.
Yeah, fatigue, tired, but also pity.
And in biblical terms, that word pity can go either way.
There are times that the Bible says that God pitied Israel, and it's righteous.
So, there is a righteous form of pity, there's a righteous kind of pity, a compassion.
A compassion that is genuinely compassionate.
But there is also a type of pity that is wicked, that is misguided, that's perverted.
It is tweaked and twisted.
It's pity where there should not be pity.
And the Bible talks about this.
Think of Deuteronomy, Old Testament law.
It talks about when it comes to dealing out justice, your eye shall not pity.
Right?
You should not show favoritism to the rich.
And this is re.
Hashed out by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, also by the book of James.
Somebody comes in with fine clothing, not necessarily soft, it could be soft, but fine, rich clothing.
You can discern this is a person of status, a person of prestige, and you say, hey, come and sit in this nice seat.
And then somebody dressed in shabby clothing comes in, oh, you sit on the floor by my feet.
So you are not to show partiality in regards to favoring the rich.
But that's not the only way the principle applies.
The principle applies across the board in both directions.
The Old Testament says, You shall not pity, show favoritism to the rich, but also not pity the poor.
So there is pity that comes from God that we might call mercy.
And it's righteous, it has to do with compassion.
But there's also pity that is sinful and twisted and tweaked, perverse, that is not compassion, but rather it's tolerance of wickedness.
It's tolerance of wickedness.
It's like the difference between sympathy and empathy.
Sympathy comes from the root word compassion.
Compassion lending towards love, a pure, genuine, authentic love.
So, real love is compassion, and compassion, that's where we get sympathy from.
Empathy, however, is not necessarily the same.
And I won't make a big debate out of the words because it depends how you use the word empathy and blah, blah, blah.
But a lot of the ways, I'll at least say this.
A lot of the ways that the word empathy has been used by our culture in the West today is what the Bible would describe as a sinful pity.
It's not sympathy, compassion, genuine love, but rather it's favoritism, it's discrimination.
It's, I'm going to elevate this person not because of anything that's objective or just or fair, but simply because.
I'm going to arbitrate between this person and that because I like this person.
They're poor.
Or they're a minority.
And this person over there, they may be doing the right thing, but it doesn't matter.
This is a woman.
Rejecting Sinful Pity00:13:56
This is a man.
This person's a minority ethnicity.
This person's white.
This person's LGBT, LMNOP, and this person's just traditional family.
It makes me sick.
That's not righteous pity.
That's wicked pity.
And Israel had some of that for their adversaries.
So there's apathy, there's fatigue, and there's a misguided sense of pity.
So they're living now in good times.
The head of the snake has been thoroughly removed, the kings have been cut off, many of the fighting men, but the job is not entirely done.
There's still work for each individual tribe of Israel to do in their specific land that they've received as an inheritance.
There are still inhabitants, wicked inhabitants, that are not to be tolerated under the law of God.
And yet Israel chooses to tolerate them.
Now, as this further applies, I think to our time and our culture today, I've written this.
We are entering a time where there will soon be, I believe.
All right, don't quote.
This is not scripture.
This is not gospel truth.
I'm just giving you my assessment.
They could be wrong, but obviously I think it's right because it's my assessment.
So we are entering a time where it's funny when people say, You know, I think that, you know, people say, you're just giving your opinion, but you're acting like it's right.
That's why it's my opinion.
I think all my opinions are right.
That's why I hold them.
Right?
I mean, who says, all right, this is one of my views, and I'm very committed to this view, and I'm also convinced it's wrong.
Like, all of your opinion, everything you believe, you believe it because you think it's right.
So, anyways, here we go.
So, this is my opinion, which I think is right, which could also not be right, but I think it's right.
Here we go.
We are entering a time where there will soon be a massive crop of young, hard men.
We've had soft men.
I believe that the hard men are coming.
Many of them will be young.
These young, hard men will not follow titles.
I believe that they will care very little for credentials and letters after names.
They will not follow titles, they will only follow courage.
But in their zeal, being young, In their zeal, they pose a threat of destroying all that is good in the world along with the evil.
In their quest to vanquish the evil of the land, they pose the threat of being overly zealous and destroying the good along with it.
So, the key, I believe, the key is for the strength of these young hard men to be harnessed by even harder men, but who possess softer hearts.
The solution is.
The solution to there are hard men tyrants, totalitarian, authoritarian tyrants.
You study history, you've got that type.
They're bad.
And then you've got weak tyrants, soft tyrants.
They're also really bad.
Right?
A hard authoritarian type of totalitarian tyrant, that guy could rack up millions of deaths.
And then you've got soft totalitarian men who can hit 100 million.
The solution, what I'm saying is the solution to an authoritarian spirit is not.
DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The solution to bad hard men is not bad soft men.
The solution to evil hard men is good hard men.
We want men who are even stronger, even harder, hard men with soft hearts.
The solution to both kinds of tyrants, both kinds of evil men, evil hard men, evil soft men, the solution for an evil hard man or an evil soft man.
Is a good man.
A good man.
That's the solution.
Good men.
And good men are not weak.
And part of the problem is that, again, within evangelicalism, as we talk about things like gender, we talk about biblical manhood and biblical womanhood, we have completely severed biblical masculinity from anything that would even come close to resembling physical strength.
How many books?
Have been written over the past few decades about a biblical masculinity has nothing, you know, a biblical, you can be biblically masculine and you're in every way fulfilling God's commands for men, and you also have to ask your wife for help to open the pickle jar.
As though these things are completely separate.
They're not.
They're not.
I have come to learn as a 37 year old man who, where a lot of my professional career has been.
And I've come to realize that there's a deficiency there.
And it does correlate to the goodness and the well being, the health of my soul.
It's not just exterior.
That's a Gnostic idea.
The physical is completely separate from the soul.
Now, there is a connection, there's a correlation with men who work in the dirt being good men.
There is something to be said for hard physical labor that shapes character, not just physical muscles, not just biceps, but it shapes character, virtue.
And there's a sense in which virtue can be lost and squandered and underdeveloped with weak, and I mean physically weak, soft men.
What we've done over the past few decades is completely sever biblical masculinity from anything that any of our.
Predecessors would have thought of when they thought of masculinity.
We've said that masculinity has nothing to do, nothing to do with working with your hands.
It has nothing to do with hunting.
It has nothing to do with being able to change a tire.
It has nothing to do.
And these are things that I've been, as I'm getting older, as I now have a son who's a year old, I'm thinking, and there's certain ways I may be able to include him in my work as a pastor, but a lot of ways that he won't be able to.
And I've been thinking, well, I might need to carve out a little bit of time to start a business, not even to be that profitable or to be a millionaire, but just to do something with my hands a few hours a week that I can include my son in when he gets older.
So it's not just dad's going to go to work and read books, you know, and my hand cramps as I turn one of the pages because I've become, you know, like, no, like, I mean, it's good for dad and it's good for him to get outside and do something.
The solution for evil hard men is good men.
The solution for evil soft men is good men.
But what we've done as a society is we've said, hey, we had some hard men, totalitarian, authoritarian, terrible men.
And so we'll solve it by being soft.
And when I say soft, think inclusion.
And one of the things that we've done in the spirit of inclusion is we've said, we will not tolerate dogmatism.
Anybody who says some kind of dogmatic statement that this is true, it's undeniably true, it's true whether I was ever born or not.
Mark that man, he's a dangerous man.
Anybody who believes in universal truth, transcendent truth, immutable standards, and they would say it publicly and say it with conviction, mark that man, he's a dangerous man.
We've seen men like that before.
Now, you have.
Now, the men that you saw like that before, they were hard men, sure, but they weren't good men.
They were hard men on the outside, but they also had hardened hearts.
Now, the solution to evil. Is good.
Not hard or soft, but good.
Masculine men who are hard men, but who are also good men.
Feminine women who pursue femininity in the biblical sense as a virtue that are also good women.
I believe that we are entering a time because this is the cycle of history.
We see it with Israel.
We've seen it over the last 2,000 years of church history.
We've seen it in our nation's history.
That's our history.
Tough times.
There's tough men.
Tough men rise to the challenge.
They make good times.
Produces prosperity.
The prosperity creates soft men.
The soft men let everything go to waste.
Now you're in tough times again.
And I think that in future generations, I think that there's going to be a lot of young men who have very little tolerance for effeminacy.
Very little tolerance.
Because they're going to grow up in a world that wasn't destroyed by a totalitarian type.
But was destroyed by a weak, soft Joe Biden type.
They're angry.
Young men, do you know that?
Young men are angry right now.
They can't buy a house.
And you could.
It's like, oh, well, we had tough times too.
No, no.
It's not the same.
Statistically, it is not the same.
You did have tough times.
The 70s were rough.
Inflation was bad.
I'm aware.
I've done the homework.
It's not the same.
When it comes to wages and cost of living, It's like, well, we had 18%.
Yeah, on your $40,000 house.
It's not the same.
The American dream is virtually impossible today.
It was possible in the 80s.
It's virtually impossible today.
Our children, our young boys, are going to grow up into a world unless God does a miracle where they cannot do what you did.
And I mean in brass tacks, practical, financial ways.
They cannot do what was normative for Americans to be able to do.
And you know what they're going to feel?
Anger.
And they're going to be hard men.
And if all the older men they have to look to are soft men, they won't give them an ear.
They're not going to take counsel or direction from soft men who created the hard times they're now living in.
The only people these young, hard, angry men will listen to will be men who are good men, but even harder men.
There's an illustration.
I heard this story once where there were some young bull elephants, and they relocated the elephants to some kind of, I don't know, some different habitat where, you know, there was fenced in, where people could come and visit and see the elephants.
And the elephants were just, they were young male elephants, young bull elephants, and they were just destroying everything.
They were just going crazy, knocking over trees, hurting and gouging the other animals with their tusks, and they didn't know what to do.
They were trying to train them, they were trying to, To tamp them down, and then eventually they came up with a solution.
They got older bull elephants and they put them in the habitat with them.
And the younger, you know, elephants were doing their stuff, and the older bull elephants were like, uh uh, pipsqueak, cut it out.
And they put those young bull elephants in line.
But here's the thing that would not work with the longhouse, with moms spelled marm, M A R M.
It would not work by taking female elephants.
Now, they needed older male elephants that were in every bit as strong, if not stronger, than the young male elephants, but also had harnessed their strength.
Self control is not weakness, self control is strength harnessed.
But right now, young men, they have strength.
But the problem is they're not listening to older men who even have some wise counsel, but those older men, they're being tuned out because although they have wisdom, in some sense, they don't have strength.
And in fact, some of these older men are the very reason why we're living in the hard times that we live today because they tolerated wickedness.
Like Israel, they tolerated the Asherah poles, they tolerated the Baals, they tolerated all the wicked inhabitants.
They're the ones who allowed evil to flourish and grow on their watch.
So young men aren't interested in what they have to say, they're not interested.
So, what do we need?
We need young, hard men, and we need some righteously indignant, angry men.
We do.
But we need wisdom to go along with the zeal, which means we need older men, and we need those older men to be good men, to be wise men, but also to be strong men.
We don't need them to be guys with PhDs in an ivory tower of seminary that have wisdom and exegesis, but are soft.
The Call to Righteous Anger00:13:02
When it comes to the culture, soft.
When it comes to politics, soft.
Right?
The kind of man, like I've heard it said before, you know, one of my pastor friends, he said, there was a time not that long ago, he said, just a few, five years ago, where people would come to our church and they would say, you know what I love about this church?
I can't tell if this church politically is conservative or liberal.
And he was like, and I took it as a compliment.
I thought that's a sign that we're doing a good job, you know, that we're not biased, you know, and people come and, you know, we're just politics is left out of it.
And people, you know, they can't tell if we're, you know, if we stand up against abortion or not.
We're nailing it just like Jesus.
Jesus wasn't left wing or right wing, you know, third way, middle way, that's the way.
And he's like, I'm now ashamed when I think of that.
How shameful as a leader.
Essentially, what I said is that all of God's truth, this whole book, we won't ever apply it, not beyond these four walls.
In fact, we'll be so ambiguous, so vague, so weak, so inclusive, so tolerant that you won't know if the pastors here vote for Democrats or Republicans or Independents.
You won't have a clue.
That's not a compliment, that's an indictment.
But that represents, I believe, the majority of churches today, not the minority.
That kind of Christianity is on its way out.
And to which I think we should say, Good riddance.
Praise God.
But the new type that comes in its place, here's the question: can we, by the grace of God, break the cycle?
Because I don't want to just play ping pong every 50 to 80 years between weak guys and then hard totalitarian guys.
What you need to break the cycle is good guys, strong but righteous.
Otherwise, we're just going to get another, a new set of problems.
We'll just go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
So, Israel had hard men, it had Joshua, it had Moses.
But then, those hard men did their job, they were successful.
Israel fell on good times, and the good times produced weak men in Israel.
And those weak men tolerated evil in Israel, and the evil rose up.
And we'll have to talk about that another day.
In a nutshell, the pattern is like this the progression of Israel's downfall, whether it be corporately for society as a whole or individually for you as an individual Christian.
The pattern remains the same.
Pity is first on the list.
Pity leads to compromise, compromise leads to idolatry, and idolatry leads to slavery and suicide.
Pity, Matthew Henry, he says, when Israel had got the good land God had promised them, They had no zeal against the wicked inhabitants whom the Lord commanded them to extirpate.
Pretending pity, not a real compassion, but pretending pity, but so merciful is God that no man needs to be in any case more compassionate than him.
There's your problem, brothers and sisters.
Our problem is that for decades in the West, within Christianity, we have pretended pity and we have humored ourselves.
We may not have ever verbalized it or said it out loud, but in our hearts of hearts, we thought that we were more merciful than God.
We thought we were kinder than him, more loving than him.
God says, No tolerance for this.
And we say, No, some tolerance.
Because, God, you're kind of mean.
But we're just trying to be Christ like.
How arrogant is that?
Think about that.
Think about Jesus, for instance.
Think about, here's just one example.
And we'll land the plane here evangelism.
If nothing else has marked American evangelicalism over the past 50 years, I think it would be this.
We have thought that there is a way of somehow being just as faithful without compromise on doctrine, on truth.
That we could be perfectly faithful without compromise on the truth of the message, but somehow in our tone and methods, right?
Message, substance, methods, tactics.
We have humored ourselves to think that without any ounce of compromise on the message, we could somehow, in our methods, be so kind and so nice and so likable that people would respond to the gospel at a greater degree than they did with Jesus.
Now, we don't connect the dots and draw out the unavoidable, inevitable logical conclusion, which is this we think that we're better than Jesus.
That is what pastors in America have thought for 50 years.
They thought they could do a better job than Jesus.
That's what it all goes down to.
That's the quickest way to say it, and it is fair.
I can do a better job than Jesus.
And what I mean by that is, Jesus preached the truth.
Do you know what the result was?
All right, and this is a big spoiler alert, so if you haven't read the story, you're going to be upset with me.
But Jesus preached the truth, and he died.
He was killed.
They hated him.
They hated him.
That was the result.
Faithfulness led towards persecution.
Jesus preached the truth and he was put to death.
We think that we can preach the truth just as true as Jesus ever preached it without an ounce of compromise and yet will be applauded.
Jesus preached the truth and he died, but that's because, and again, no one would verbalize this, but think about the logical implication.
What we're saying is this Jesus preached the truth and he was crucified for it, but that's because Jesus just wasn't really strategic.
But I am.
No, no, no.
If you're not getting some of the treatment from the world that Jesus got, it's not because you're more strategic than Jesus.
It's because you're more compromised than Jesus.
Period.
Jesus preached the truth and he was hated.
I preach the truth and I'm applauded.
That's because you look nothing like him.
And the truth that you preach is not the truth.
Period.
You're not better than Jesus.
You're not.
You pity, but it's not a true pity.
Not pity according to the word of God.
Not the true compassion, the true mercy that God pitied Israel.
No, your pity is pitying where God says, don't.
Your pity is a tolerance of what God hates.
You tolerate evil.
You tolerate that wicked woman, Jezebel.
The one who puts to death my prophets.
Jezebel, the spirit of Jezebel is still alive and well today, and she still kills the prophets, faithful preachers.
And one of the reasons why she's allowed to do what she does is because the evangelical church protects her.
You tolerate that woman Jezebel who puts to death the prophets.
Any preacher that has a little bit of audacity, a little bit of courage, just a little bit of gall, who would stand up and preach what the Bible says about men and women, Jezebel's going to hate him.
And if he even begins to offer a defense, you know who will be the first people to protect her?
Russell Moore, David French.
The gospel coalition, the evangelicals, will protect Jezebel and they'll stand along with her, condemning John the Baptist.
Pity.
Where your eyes should not pity, you pity.
And out of pity comes compromise.
Compromise, idolatry.
And idolatry lends to slavery.
And slavery is always accompanied by suicide.
Israel eventually joined even with the pagan tribes.
In human sacrifice of their own children.
That detestable practice that they swore to themselves that they would never do.
Yeah, we'll pity them.
We're not going to put them all to death.
We're going to be compassionate.
We'll never join them.
Or at least we'll maybe join them in marriage, some of their cousins, but not their worship, not their idolatry.
Okay, some of their idolatry, we'll allow them to have a high place here, high place there.
You know, I'm married to a pagan, so I'll go with her occasionally to worship just to be kind, just to keep the marriage, you know, on good terms.
But I'm never going to, you know, engage in that barbaric act of human sacrifice, and there goes your son into the fire.
In the final analysis, Israel went all that way.
But it all started with multiple pluralism.
It all started with principled pluralism.
It all started with pity.
In the name of pity, in the name of compassion, tolerating what God hates.
And eventually, everything is twisted and perverted and tweaked.
Eventually, you have an entire society that calls good evil and evil good.
And that's where we are today.
And the result is going to be angry, hard, strong young men.
And they need, desperately need, that strength to be harnessed.
But the only ones who will be able to harness that strength will be older men who are better men, wiser men.
Good men, but they won't be listened to unless they're also hard men.
Because soft men created the mess we're in today, and soft men, we're done with that.
But all we'll do at the end of the day is ping pong back and forth unless there is righteous men, unless there is revival, reformation, turning back to God, calling upon Him by name.
That's what we need.
And this is the same thing that we need in our individual lives as it deals with sin.
We're not called to quarantine sin, bind up sin, manage sin.
We're called to mortify it, to take no prisoners, to make no provisions for the flesh, to not commit the sins of omission that lead towards the sins of commission.
It applies at every level.
Israel is a brilliant, profound case study for societies today and for the church, certainly today, and for each of us as individual Christians as we seek to be like Joshua.
To take no prisoners, to be like Josiah, not just calling people to right worship, but tearing down the idols.
So let's do it.
By God's grace, let's do it.
Let's call upon God now to strengthen us toward that end.
Lord, we ask for your help.
We ask for your mercy.
We ask for a righteous pity.
We don't deserve it.
Israel did not deserve your pity.
They chose to compromise, they did not obey what you said.
To do.
It was their fault that the nations were permitted to rise back up and enslave them.
And yet you still had pity on Israel.
Not because of their faithfulness, but because of your kindness.
And Lord, we pray that you would do likewise with us.
You are sovereign.
Whatever you do, we know it will be just.
But we are appealing not to your justice, but to your kindness and mercy.
We pray, Lord, that in the case of Western civilization, In the case of our republic, these United States of America, that rather than making a case study out of us like you did Israel, which you would be perfectly just to do, we cry out for your mercy instead.
We ask, Lord, that you would actually change the hearts of the people, that you would cause us to repent of our sins, that you would cause us to grow in love for righteousness so that we likewise would grow in a righteous hatred of that which is evil, that we would not tolerate it, that we would carve out no provisions for the flesh.
But Lord, we know if you are to do this at a societal level, it must first start with the house of God in our individual hearts and lives, in our homes, with our wives, with our marriages, with our children.
Help us, Lord, to be ruthless in the ways that we fight sin, ruthless in our repentance, ruthless in our sanctification.
We pray that you would do it, Lord, for your glory and for our good, that our children and our children's children, two generations down the line, that they would have.