I tell that story, not just to give you a laugh, but because the focus and background to our thinking in this chapter is the frailty of our nature; and I think we need to keep very much in our minds the beginning of that Collect.

In beginning this meditation on the life of Gideon, it seems inevitable that we start where Gideon's history starts, with Israel and the back-ground it gives to Gideon, who was called by God to be the saviour of Israel in his time. In fact one of the Judges. So we are going to look at Judges 6, verses 1 to 10, which is our reading for this study.

Certainly the frailty of our human nature comes through very much in the Old Testament and the history of the Jews. We see it also in the Gospels. For example in the familiar parable of the Tenants in Mark 12:1-12. Jesus told this to bring the Jews to see themselves as God saw them. What strikes me is how patient God was with their frailty over the history of the Old Testament. So many prophets were sent by God. They were treated so badly, and in such a cavalier fashion, yet each time God sent some more. Then at last he sent his Son.

Notice how this chapter starts - Judges chapter 6:1 - "Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord." These words are constantly repeated throughout the Old Testament, and represent the essence of the frailty of human nature. This frailty always seems to be there, and is seen very much concerning the kings later on. We are told constantly - such and such a king did evil in the sight of the Lord. Here we are told that the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord.

Notice in passing that evil is in relationship with God. The Israelites don't simply do wrong. They don't simply sin against a neighbour. They sin against God. In fact in all sin we always sin against God, and with regard to God.

The result was that for seven years God gave them into the hands of the Midianites. Now notice again in passing. I just pass over these things, but I think they are worth noticing. Although the Midianites were the agents of the affliction, it was in fact God who was the originator of the afflictions, and God tempered the affliction for seven years, to bring Israel at that time to understand what they were doing, before he sent a saviour.

Midian's power, and this is true of all powers on earth, was under the permissive will of God. If you read on as we continue in this study, you will see that the afflictions were very hard to bear, but they were the result of the way Israel had gone. We have a saying in our culture, that the root of all evil is money; or when we correct it we say that the love of money is the root of all evil. We are going to see in this study that the root of all evil is not actually money. God's diagnosis of the root of all evil is given to us in verse 10, which is what we are going to consider in this chapter.

God said, " I said to you, 'I am the Lord your God', do not worship the gods of the Amorites in whose land you live, but you have not listened to me". The root of all evil is turning away from God to other gods.

Firstly, this is the root commandment of God. For when the Lord says, "I am the Lord your God, do not worship the Gods of the Amorites in whose land you live", he is only repeating what he said to the Israelites, that is in Exodus 20, "I am the Lord your God, you will have none other Gods but me. You shall not make to your self any graven image, or the likeness of anything that is heaven above, or the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me".

It is also repeated in the summary of the law, which Jesus gave - "Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength - this is the first and great commandment".

This is the root commandment. And the root of all evil is when we turn away from this root commandment. We may say, as we read this, that the gods of the Amorites have no relevance for us. Who were the gods of the Amorites? We have no clue. It is not important who the gods of the Amorites were. In our society today there are gods in plenty. Sometimes they are concrete. Sometimes they can be given names. We have New Age and we have the Occult, and we have Materialism, and we have Philosophies and so on. But much more likely the gods people have are parodies of the true God, which they have conjured up in their minds. And so we have fallen short in the same sense in which the Israelites did. We are following the gods of our imagining; the gods in our society today, or the gods which our society cause us to run after.

If we keep this command to love the Lord our God and only worship him. If we keep that, the rest follows. If we do not keep this, all the rest does, in fact, fade away. We look out on the history of our country, and we see the movements of God in the past history of our country, and we see this pattern working out. There was great moral degradation, godlessness and atheism, in our country before the Evangelical Revival. If any of you have time to get hold of a biography of John Newton, for instance, before he was converted, it will illustrate this. He was about the most blasphemous atheist you could possibly come across. On one of his majesty's ships - he was a midshipman - the captain got rid of him very very fast, because he was such a bad influence on other members of the crew and led so many other people astray in all sorts of different ways. The captain got rid of him, even though he was not particularly a Christian himself.

Then the Evangelical Revival came. There followed, as people loved God and worshipped only him, the result that the morals of the country then improved. In the Victorian Era, the God who was worshipped was not the true God, and the spiritual life began to fade, although the morals were still intact. But since then, because at that time people began to turn away from the true God, the moral tone of our country has declined to where we are today.

The moral law, you see, cannot stand in isolation. It cannot stand alone. It is from God, and must be seen in relationship to God. What the moral law is doing is expressing the character of God. The character and way of God. It expresses how God has created the world. It is the principles by which creation operates. It is part of that image which God has put within us. And it is only as we see the moral law in our relationship to God that we see it rightly. Those people who say that we can have a sort of moral standard without God are really talking through their hats. You cannot have it, for as soon as you get rid of God, morality flies out of the window.

All sin is actually breaking of the root commandment. The sin of Adam and Eve was covetousness. They coveted something they had not got. In actual fact it was a rejection of God, and choosing Satan rather than God. And so St.John in his writing says, "If we love God, we keep his commandments".

As we look at this passage in the light of these words of the Lord, we see the tendency of the human heart to worship false gods. "'Do not worship the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.' But you have not listened to me". This is God's complaint. I don't think that the Israelites just said deliberately, we don't want what God is telling us, we want something else. It just happened. The thing was that the Amorites were all around, and were so much in front of their eyes, and therefore a forceful influence on their lives. On the other hand God seemed to be invisible. Isn't that the problem. The frailty of our human nature. It goes after the most dominant influence, and no argument of the mind has any strength to prevent this.

God told Israel to worship only him, but they found themselves tending to follow the heathen gods all around them. Humanity finds it almost impossible to be atheistic. Some try, but at the heart they still find it difficult to expel the reality of God. We find also within us that we need to worship something. We need to give ourselves to something, and if we do not give it to God, we give it to something else. We can't live without the idea of God in some form. But because of this frailty of our nature; this corruption of our nature; we tend to go after gods which fit what our natures are like. We make God, as it were, to fit our fancy. If we don't actually worship some concrete thing, or some philosophy, we tend to make God in our own image. A god that fits the way which we see life, and which is the way we want to live, and which is in tune with our frail corrupt wisdom.

When God does in fact reveal himself, we revolt. We do not like what we see. But we must have a god, so we make him, we fashion or change him, so he fits the pattern which is acceptable to us. This is a very subtle thing. It is easy enough to speak like this and say, "Yes, yes, that is true, that is what we do. We do make God in our own image", but actually in our lives this subtlety is exposed, for we take no heed of what we are really doing, and deceive ourselves by believing we are not actually making God in our own image. Take, for instance, Biblical criticism, and Biblical scholarship, which has been the pattern of our religious life in this country for the last 100 years. Where has it come from. Whence comes the idea that this interpretation cannot stand; and that we must in fact water it down, or change it, in some way. Where comes those attitudes that say "somehow we cannot accept that attitude or teaching of the Bible. It doesn't seem right. We have matured. It was alright for the people of that age, but for us now we cannot accept that. We are wiser and more mature." Where does that all come from?

When we really face it, it is our human wisdom, our supposed maturity, saying we cannot accept God as he really is, and as he has revealed himself to be. And so we, as it were, mold the revelation so it fits in some way into what we would prefer.

But this is so subtle that we feel, in actual fact, that we are improving things. We feel that we are better than our forebears, and better than the Bible.

The Bible does portray things that we find difficult. And it is true that we often do not understand it clearly. Or certainly that we have not got the whole composite view of revelation, because we cannot know the Bible as we should. But we don't face or accept this. Take the parable of the Tenants again which we considered earlier. We find ourselves forgetting about the first part, and we latch on to "what will that king do". "He will come and he will kill those wicked husbandmen, and take away the vineyard and give it to someone else." And so we conjure up a picture of a wrathful, and strong God, who puts down, and crushes, and has no forgiveness or compassion, or anything, and Satan likes to have it so.

But when we see the whole parable together and we really meditate upon it, what compassion, what patience, what wonder of love there is in the first part, sending so many of his servants and allowing them to be treated in such an awful way. As we go through the Judges, God comes back to Israel, and comes back to Israel, and comes back again to Israel, and provides saviours. The provision of Gideon as a deliverer is pure divine grace and mercy.

The frailty of the human heart will go after a false god if it can. This is what the Israelites did. And we need to understand from this, and learn from this tendency that we have, and pray earnestly to God that we may be kept to worship the one true and only God as he has revealed himself in his Word.

Lastly, there is something which is not actually in our text, but is implied there as we know the Bible, and that is "the importance of God's instructions to Israel", which were behind this command. When God gave this command he also gave instructions how it may be best kept.

What God did was not only to instruct the Israelites to worship only him alone, but he instructed them to be ruthless in the extermination of idols. What this meant, and this I do find for myself most difficult, was that Israel is told to actually cast out, reject and kill all those in the land to which they came. They were actually to exterminate them all.

Our minds revolt at such action. But if you go to the beginning of Judges you will find then, in the first chapter, as the Israelites carried on the possession of the promised land, that the Israelites didn't actually get rid of all the people in the land. This was their trouble, and caused them to fall, because of the frailty of their nature. Instead they used the people, used them as we see, for instance, at the beginning of the middle of verse thirty - "but they did subject them to forced labour", who remained among them, "nor did Asher drive out those living in Acco or Sidon or Ahlab or Aczib or Helbah or Aphek or Rehob". Then again in verse 33, "Neither did Naphtali drive out those living in Beth Shemesh or Beth Anath", and so on. Then in chapter two and verse one we find "the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bokim - the angel of the Lord is always the Lord Jesus Christ in his pre-incarnate appearances - and said, "I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into a land that I swore to give your forefathers. I said, 'I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land, but you shall break down their altars.' Yet you have disobeyed me. Why have you done this? Now therefore I tell you that I will not drive them out before you; they will be thorns in your sides and their gods will be a snare to you."

What God was saying, and this is what we need to take to heart, is that in this ruthlessness was the guard against the frailty of our nature. For if these things are before our physical eyes they are a snare to us, for there are all sorts of things which our natures like in these things. When we meet people it is very difficult to stand and say that this is what the true God says, because we do not want to offend or we do not want an adverse reaction. We do not want human rejection. And this is the problem. This is why it is best to cut such relationships out of our lives, or at least limit them.

The trouble is, you see, our hearts are treacherous, and that if we flirt with other gods in any form, or come near their influence, we will fall. And this is what our Church of England has been doing in so many different ways. And so, in all sorts of different ways, the truth is being eroded. And if we try to bring together all the various teachings and views within our Church of England and we put them together, then the God we have is not the God of God's Word.

Having said that, let us not imagine that the other denominations are any better. They are not. Even those who look down their noses upon the Churches of England as apostate churches, the Baptist and Brethren, and such; they have the same problem. It is not something that we have alone. It is, as it were, more obvious with the Church of England, because the Church of England put together, is larger, perhaps, than all the Nonconformist churches put together. And we are, as it were, in the public eye, and the clergy are always good for a laugh and some derision. It is a funny thing that in film and drama, Catholic priests are always super blokes, and the Anglican clergy are always buffoons. It is how it is painted. So the Church of England does come under this parody. But the problem is still there. If we actually flirt with that which is not the true God, then we turn away from the true God; and in turning away from the true God, we turn to evil.