I Will Deliver You No More

Israel goes back to serving idols, and when oppression comes, the people cry out to God in repentance. This time, however, God answers differently. He reminds them, one deliverance after another, of how he rescued them from Egypt and from the Amorites, the Ammonites and the Philistines, and then tells them to go and ask the gods they have chosen to save them.

Israel sought God only when they needed him, and when peace returned they forsook him again, over and over. The judges, too, were divided: some left the people a true faith, while others, through their wealth and their many children, made the people envy the world. Depending on what their leader set before them, the people turned now toward God, now toward idols.

A believer who lives for self alone can never be happy, and those who turn away from God again and again may at last come to the place where he no longer answers. Yet God does not forget faithfulness offered from the heart, even for a short while; he remembers it. The sermon closes by saying that the faithful must put away grumbling, greed and self-righteousness, humble themselves, and become people who give themselves in sacrifice.