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Judges 2:10-19
If you’ve ever taken little kids to a playground, or watched children playing, inevitably you’ll see them play tag. When they play this game they’ll usually chase each other in circles. And sometimes the object they’re running around isn’t very large. As you sit there and watch them chase each other round and round, you begin to wonder why the one who is “it” doesn’t simply just stop and turn around? If they did, they’d easily be able to tag the other child. But they don’t, no one does. Instead they just keep running in circles.
For those observing from the outside, the solution is so easy. But the kids in the game miss the obvious. This situation is a bit like the pattern of life the Israelites fall into in the book of Judges, they enter the cycle of sin.
Judges 2:10-11 (NIV) After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals.
Judges 2:14 (NIV) In his anger against Israel the Lord gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them. He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist.
Judges 2:16 (NIV) Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hands of these raiders.
We are extremely fortunate to live on what I call this side of the cross. Why…well because even though humanity can still fall into that same trap, even though humanity can still fall into a cycle of sin, we have a Savior who has broken the power of cancelled sin.
Romans 8:1-4 (NIV) Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Here is an easier way to remember this. Christ deals with Sin in two ways, through His death and resurrection. First He canceled the debt owed to Sin – that pound of flesh owed in what I call a legalistic spiritual law. And second, He canceled the power Sin has in our lives. That is His resurrection has given us the power, because the Holy Spirit – or the Spirit of Christ lives in us and through us – can indeed obliterate the addictive nature to continue sinning repeatedly.
In her book Discovering Christian Holiness: The Heart of Wesleyan-Holiness Theology. © 2010 Diane Leclerc and Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City. She writes:
“When this faith is activated and grace is given, we are saved, both in our being saved from the guilt of sin and in our beginning the process whereby God breaks the power of sin.” (p. 176)
We do not have to repeat history, we do not have to follow the Israelites in the times of the Judges. We can live free from the power of sin in our lives.