5: “America’s Secular Age”

 SCRIPTURE: Judges 2:1-3, 6-12, 16-17, 21:25

INTRO:

In the days after Moses and the days when Joshua was too old to lead, Israel was led by Judah in their continuing conquest of the promised land of Canaan.  Each tribe was to conquer the section allotted to them.  However, the mission was never completed.  Canaanites were allowed to remain.  Judges 2:1-3 tells us:

        ¹Now the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim.  And he said, “I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers.  I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, ²and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their alters.’  But you have not obeyed my voice.  What is this you have done?  ³So now I say, I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.”

We have seen this judgment carried out, haven’t we?  Who are the thorns in Israel’s side today?  Is it not the Arabs who worship false gods?  Is it not Allah whose Dome of the Rock sits on the very site of Solomon’s temple?

Picking up the Judges record in verse 6, we read:

        ⁶When Joshua dismissed the people, the people of Israel went each to his inheritance to take possession of the land.  ⁷And 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 work that the Lord had done for Israel.  ⁸And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110 years.  ⁹And they buried him within the boundaries of his inheritance in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of the mountain of Gaash.  ¹⁰And all that generation also were gathered to their fathers.  And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.

        ¹¹And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals.  ¹²And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt.  They went after other gods, from among the peoples who were around them and bowed down to them…

Then, in verses 16-17, Scripture says, “Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them.  Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they whored after other gods and bowed down to them.  They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the commandments of the Lord, and they did not do so.”

At the close of the period of the judges, the last verse of the scriptural record says: “In those days there was no king in Israel.  Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

The children of Israel didn’t obey the Lord.  As a result, they haven’t really had a land of their own.  To this day, they must share the land with their enemies and tolerate their paganism.  They violated the condition for making the Holy Land their own.

I submit to you today that what happened with Israel is very similar to America’s history.  Now, I’m not suggesting that America is God’s chosen nation in modern history and that we should have exterminated the native Americans who lived here before us.  I’m just saying that, like Israel of that day, America has, to a great extent, abandoned God, and there has arisen a generation – the millennials – that, by and large, does not know God and how He has blessed us as a nation in the past.  America has entered a “secular” age.