Lecture 8: Rest in the Land, the Spiral of Judges, and No King in Israel

The lecture, section by section

1. Rest in the land

   Joshua announces the land promises fulfilled in an initial way, and with them a deeper theme: rest. The rest of the seventh creation day comes to roost in the land, in God's presence, in the place God gives his people.

2. The LORD wins the victories

   Joshua's battles preach grace, sovereignty, and power. As strategy, marching around a fortified city for a week would be laughable; as theology it is the whole point. The victory is the LORD's, battle after battle, and Israel receives what it could never take.

3. The commander of the LORD's army

   Before Jericho, Joshua meets a man with a drawn sword and asks the natural question: are you for us or for our enemies? Neither, he answers; I have come as commander of the LORD's army. Joshua falls on his face, and is told, like Moses, to remove his sandals. The LORD leads his own war. Schreiner turns it pastorally: leaders are servants, and the reminder lands exactly where pride enters, at the top.

4. Obedience still matters

   Grace does not retire obedience. Israel must be circumcised, bearing the covenant sign, before taking the land; Achan's sin turns victory into rout; and the book closes in covenant renewal at Shechem.

5. Optimism, with clouds

   Joshua is the Bible's most optimistic book, and it will not let the reader relax. Not all the inhabitants are driven out, and at the covenant renewal Joshua tells the people, of all things: you are not able to serve the LORD. At the summit of triumph, a dark and clarifying word.

6. Every promise kept, and yet

   Joshua 21 is the audit: the LORD gave all the land he swore, gave rest on every side, and not one word of all his good promises failed. From the author's standpoint the land promise is fulfilled. And yet: Canaanites remain, and the blessing is not yet worldwide. Fulfilled, Schreiner says, but not the complete fullness: yes, and more to come.

7. Judges: Israel needs a king

   What is Judges about? Israel spiraling downward, progressively deteriorating, and thereby crying out on every page for the king promised in Genesis 49 and Numbers 24. Schreiner is struck that some scholars deny the kingship theme; he finds it written across the whole book. Judges opens on an optimistic note and, in his phrase, crashes with a thud.

8. Living among becomes living like

   Israel failed to drive out the Canaanites, and the pattern followed: live among the Canaanites long enough and you begin to live like them. Schreiner presses it home: secular thinking invades churches the same way, and he names his chosen example plainly, a divorce culture in which believers divorce and remarry apart from biblical grounds and congregations say nothing. Canaanite thinking, inside the camp.

9. A generation that did not know the LORD

   Judges 2 records the quiet catastrophe beneath all the loud ones: a generation arose that knew neither the LORD nor the works he had done for Israel. The baton of faith was not passed, and passing it is the task set before every generation since, one household and one child at a time. Israel was in the land, but not in the LORD.

10. The cycle and the unlikely saviors

    So the cycle turns: Israel disobeys, a foreign power oppresses, the people cry out, and the LORD raises a deliverer. The word judge here means savior and ruler far more than magistrate, and the deliverers are deliberately unlikely: left-handed Ehud, Deborah a woman in a man's world, fearful Gideon. God delivers through instruments no one would choose, so no one mistakes whose the deliverance is.

11. Samson: the nation in one man

    Samson is Israel's story compressed into a single life: supernatural in origin, set apart from the womb, given a holy vocation, and forever chasing what he was made to refuse. Israel falls for foreign gods the way Samson falls for foreign women, as Barry Webb puts it. And yet the LORD does not abandon him, which is the message of the whole book. Hebrews counts Samson among the faithful, and the narrative agrees: his hair begins to grow again, his strength was always the LORD's and never the hair's, and he dies calling on God in faith. As God did not abandon Samson, he did not abandon Israel.

12. No king in Israel

    Four times the narrator tolls his refrain, and with it he ends the book: in those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did whatever seemed right to him. Repetition at the joints and at the close is how narrative preaches. The final chapters show what the refrain means: Dan destroys a peaceful town in defiance of Deuteronomy 20, the idolatrous young Levite turns out to be Moses' own great-grandson, and the outrage at Gibeah retells Sodom inside Israel. Hundreds of years on, the offspring hold the land and cannot even hold themselves. The problem now has a name: no king.

13. Ruth, and a word on the order of the canon

    Turning to Ruth, Schreiner pauses over canon order. Some fine biblical theologians argue the Hebrew ordering of the books is the interpretive key; with Brevard Childs, he judges the manuscript evidence too varied to fix one order, so both the Hebrew and the familiar order are legitimate for biblical theology. Ruth proves the point by teaching in either seat: after Proverbs, she is the noble woman of Proverbs 31 embodied; after Judges, she is the bright spot in a dark age, and the signal that the king is coming.

1. Joshua was reminded before his greatest victory that he was servant, not sovereign. Where in your responsibilities, home, work, or church, do you most need the commander's answer: neither?

2. Live among the Canaanites long enough and you begin to live like them. Where has the surrounding culture's thinking quietly become normal in your household, and what would repentance look like there?

3. A whole generation arose that did not know the LORD or his works. What, concretely, are you doing this month so that the next generation in your house knows both?