Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2490
“Then the five men departed, and came to Laish, and saw the people that were there, how they dwelt carelessly, after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure; and there was no magistrate in the land, that might put them to shame in anything; and they were far from the Sidonians, and hadno business with any man…And they took the things which Micah had made, and the price at which he had, and came to Laish, to a people that were quiet and secure: and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and burned the city with fire. And there was no deliverer, because it was far from Sidon, and they hadno business with any man.” Judges 18:7,27,28.
I HAVE for this evening’s discourse what some of you may consider to be rather an amazing text. Let me, therefore, begin by briefly stating the circumstances surrounding it.
The tribe of Dan found its portion to be rather too small, so the people held a council to decide what was to be done. They resolved to send a small body of men to spy out the land—these spies came, in due time, to a place called Laish, which they found to be inhabited by certain people who dwelt there carelessly, in supposed security, “after the manner of the Sidonians.” They were attacked without any notice and the tribe of Dan took their territory and added it to their own. I do not, in the least degree, commend the action of these people. What I have to do with the narrative is to use it for the purpose of drawing from it lessons suited to the present time.
I suppose that these people, who were living at Laish, were originally a colony of Sidonians, and they had settled in a very fat, fertile valley—according to the tenth verse, a place where there was no lack of anything. They did not care to trade with others, they were not at all an enterprising or busy people. Finding every luxury growing out of their own soil, they had no care to do business with any other men whatever. They kept no guard or watch, for, although they knew that, in common with all the other inhabitants of the land of Canaan, they had been doomed to fall by the sword of Israel, yet the Israelites had been very slow in conquering the country. Many years had passed since Joshua had died. Many judges had come and gone and they had never been troubled. Therefore they rested in perfect ease, neither drilling themselves, nor exercising any warlike arts, but feeling altogether secure, living luxuriously in a fools’ paradise. It was so, for, all of a sudden, these Danites, giving them no notice whatever, fell upon them, cut them up, root and branch, burned their city and took the land for themselves.
I am not going into the moral of this business—how far Dan is to be blamed. I am simply going to use this incident as the picture of a very common condition which is to be found among the sons of men—which condition is a very dangerous and false one, and will end, unless the Grace of God prevents it, in the destruction of those who are thus carnally secure.
I. First, let us notice THE CONDITION OF CARNAL SECURITY INTO WHICH CHRISTIANS SOMETIMES FALL.
If they fall into such a condition as that, they may rest assured that it is one of great danger. Let me describe it to you. Here is a man who is a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. In times long gone by he struggled hard to get his feet upon the Rock of Ages and, at last, he obtained a firm footing and there he stood in blessed security. For some time, perhaps even for years, he has been free from all doubts and fears—and also free from all internal struggles and conflicts. He almost thinks that the devil is dead, or, if not, that the devil in him is dead, that sin has become so broken and bruised in his nature that it will never rise again, or cause him trouble! He rejoices and continues to rejoice, but it may be that in
the course of time the dry rot of self-satisfaction will begin to show itself. The man would not say, with the Pharisee, that he thanks God he is not as other men, but there is something of that sort of feeling within his heart. He entered into full assurance of faith at the first, but that full assurance has begun to rust into confidence in self. And now, no longer emptied from vessel to vessel, his sin remains in him. No longer tossed upon the waves, he makes little or no progress towards the heavenly haven—his ship’s keel upon the ocean is still amidst a calm, but the fear is that the calm will grow into stagnation—and the stagnation into corruption. God save the man to whom a calm, itself, becomes more dangerous than a tempest! I think you must know some people of that kind. Perhaps if some of you look in the mirror, you may see at least one person of that sort! The Sidonians mentioned in our text had no dread of warfare, or the sound of the trumpet, or the crash of arms—and self-confident professors are in much the same condition.