We Won’t Survive Without This…
People—who are born in-between revivals or moves of God in their lifetime—are what I call a “Judges 2:10 generation.”
Look at this passage:
“The people served the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the Lord had done for Israel.… 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…” (Judges 2:7, 10–11 NIV).
It is evident from this passage of Scripture that true faith in God cannot be transferred from one generation to another. Each generation must believe for their own move of God. Such a move will not manifest until the hunger those young people spoke to me about in the restaurant that day is converted to faith that they can believe it can happen in their time.
This is the cry in Psalm 85:6: “Will you not revive us again…?”
It is a call for God to manifest Himself anew and cause His people to come alive once again. It is fascinating to me that in 1 Chronicles 12, David listed his fighting forces and weaponry. Included in that list were the sons of Issachar, “who understood the times and knew what [God’s people] should do” (v. 32 NIV). One of the great catalysts to any move of God is an initial group who discerns the times and seasons and knows what to do to revive and shift God’s people.
Revival is a rediscovery of eternal truths, which are then converted into new terminology, interpretations, and methods for a new generation. The key to transition from possibility is for a new generation “to be what they hunger to see.” Such a hunger is a need or desire for something. It is an intense craving that one is willing to sacrifice for in and through one’s life (Strong’s G3983). The generation that followed Joshua still had all the hierarchy and practices in place, just without the power of God. They still had priests and leaders, but they knew nothing about the power of God. The “Judges 2:10 generation” had been reduced to ineptness and impotence, because each of them had been reduced to doing “that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; 21:25 KJV).
Similarly, in our own day, people say that truth is relative.
Relativism is the belief that all truth is relative to each individual’s perspective. Truth is completely subjective. In other words, that might be true for you, but it is not true for me… So every person does what is right in their own eyes. We have lost all focus on objective truth, or absolute truth. We have displaced eternal truth. The original word for “truth” in the New Testament is what is true in any manner under consideration (Strong’s G225). It is congruent and integrous, which means it is in agreement with itself and in harmony with all other truth. In other words, relativism is not biblical truth. In fact, it contradicts the very definition of truth itself.
When relativism invades the Church (and it has), every person does what is right in their own eyes, and this moves people away from God’s ways of doing things and eradicates the manifestation of God’s power. It is easier to say that the days of miracles are past, or at least that miracles are restricted, than to pay the price to resurrect them. In the gap of these times, culture seeks to replace God’s standards with its own. Like Israel, once again, they were doing evil in the eyes of the Lord (Judges 3:1; Judges 6:1; Judges 13:1).
These are the issues Gideon would have to face, a few chapters later in Judges:
When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”
“Sir,” Gideon replied, “if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? And where are all the miracles our ancestors told us about…?” (Judges 6:12–13 NLT)
Gideon wanted to know that if God was for them, where were all the miracles they had heard about all their lives, and why did evil seem to be triumphing over them? Look around you today. Eternal truths are being replaced by cultural norms that do not support them and that call the Word of God outmoded and outdated. The results are an eroding morality, a decaying drug culture, and a faltering economy. People are calling good bad, and bad good (Isaiah 5:20)! It has become easier to say that God’s ways and miracles are a thing of the past than it is to contend or pay the price for them. (All around us we can see the rise of abortion, the sexualization of our youth culture, political hatred, terrorism, “cancel culture,” the rise of universalism, and evil rampant in the world.) This is not a call for Christians to enter into hate, but to speak the truth in love… endorsed by God’s signs and wonders.
In the beginning of a new era, we must ask ourselves the same questions. If God is with us, where are the miracles we have heard so much about, and why has the chaos we are experiencing in America befallen us? Why have some of our leaders fallen? Where is God’s provision? Why are there so few miracles performed in our midst? Where is the zeal of God that is missing in so many of our Spirit-filled churches? Why is evil on the rise?
Notice that the Angel of the Lord did not come to Gideon and say, “Of course, there are questions. That is because the days of miracles are past!”
Quite the contrary, He responded to Gideon’s hunger by showing him a touch of the miraculous (Judges 6:19–22; Judges 6:36–40). Similarly, it is God’s intent in this hour for those who can discern the times and seasons to experience His touch to carry it to others (1 Chronicles 12:32; Ecclesiastes 8:5). The difficulty in such discernment comes in the period of transition, that time that comes at the closing of one era of God’s move and just before the beginning of the next move.
During this period, there is a changing of the guard, and new leadership emerges on the scene. It can be a time when both the Church and the general public can see the shortcomings of powerlessness and sometimes the shortcomings of their leaders. It is a time when faithful older leaders can mentor new and emerging leaders with eternal perspectives for their new expression. Transition periods are times of confusion about what is really going on. They are “Judges 2:10 times.”
The pain and misunderstanding in a time of transition can change our perspective. The “Judges 2:10 generation” can misinterpret the pain in transition and lose a fresh perspective of what God is doing. In the time of the Judges, they grew confused and lethargic. In transition times, people can become confused, not totally cognizant of everything around them, and their perspective changes. Many times, people lose their hope for revival. The Church slumbers into survival mode. Survival becomes a thief of revival. As long as we are only trying to survive, we lose our perspective to revive.
Revival, the Answer to Survival
It is these periods of transition that validate the need for revival to the discerning heart. Revival most often takes place in times of moral darkness and national discouragement. Often such occurrences take place when the Church has lost its way. Charles Finney once said, “The fact is, Christians are more to be blamed than sinners are for not being converted.”
The Church has the responsibility to recognize the times and seasons in order to properly receive the flow of the Holy Spirit. Revival occurs when a generation recognizes its impotence, sin, and lethargy, and it realizes that it is God’s time to do something about it.
I often see writers of revival say, “Revival is sovereign.” While I agree with the statement, I do not agree with the premise. These authors often use the word “sovereign” to mean that God has a special time that He alone knows for a move of God, and we must discover it. Sovereignty is taught as God controlling everything and that we are simply going along for the ride. I believe this is an aberration of New Covenant theology and is a faith killer. This word sovereign means “supreme, having supreme rank or power, independent of other powers, or highest excellence.” None of this means that God controls everything. If He did, He is making a mess of things! In revival, we are not waiting on God; God is waiting on us. In the New Covenant, Jesus’ finished work has given us an open heaven to respond to in faith (John 19:30; Ephesians 1:2–3; 2 Peter 1:3; Ephesians 1:17–18). Revival takes place when people collectively recognize it. It is our job to recognize what God has done and how He is expressing it in the moment.
In 2 Chronicles 15:2–4, we see this principle active in King Asa. The prophet said, “Listen to me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin. The Lord is with you when you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you. For a long time, Israel was without the true God, without a priest to teach and without the law [the Word]. But in their distress they turned to the LORD, the God of Israel, and sought him, and he was found by them” (NIV). Notice, God’s people had been a long time without the Lord, but the prophet said, “The Lord is with you, when you are with Him.” When we reengage God’s Kingdom principles collectively, revival takes place. Asa and the people repented (changed their thinking to God’s ways). They destroyed the idolatry of their day. They repaired the altar of the Lord, and in verse 9, we read that when the people saw the Lord was with Asa, they followed him. God restored His favor to His people. The people had suddenly realized that God’s glorious presence was gone from their midst, and they responded by flowing into God’s new season through repentance.
A similar resurgence and revival is found for God’s people in the lives of Jehoiada (2 Chronicles 23–24), Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:1–7), Josiah (2 Kings 22–23), Zerubbabel (Ezra 5–6), Ezra (Ezra 10:1), Daniel (Daniel 9–10), and John the Baptist (Luke 3). The key is to discern the times and seasons as these men did. What season is God leading us into? What expression of His Kingdom principles is He expressing? Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem because its citizens did not recognize the season of the Lord: “The time of thy visitation” (Luke 19:44 KJV). It is entirely possible to be in the middle of God’s move, the very move we hunger for, and still miss it. I once heard Bob DeWeese, a former associate evangelist to Oral Roberts, say to me, “The people who most longed for the move of the Spirit in 1947 were among those who rejected it when it came.”
Hosea was speaking as a mouthpiece of God when he said, “Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.… He will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth” (Hosea 6:1–3 NIV).
While he was using Old Covenant vernacular, in these verses Hosea was speaking of a three-day “period.” In the first “day,” God’s people were humbled (restored to the view and opinion of God). On the second “day,” he spoke of a revival that would revitalize God’s people. Finally, in the third “day,” God’s people were restored to live in His abiding presence. In this passage, Hosea revealed a pattern of God’s thinking in revival. He implores us to come back again to God’s view and opinion…His ways and ideas. He revives, rekindles, and revitalizes His people with His Word and conspicuous presence. Lastly, He reestablishes us in His Kingdom ways of life and abiding presence.
Even above and beyond the meaning for the people of his day, Hosea prophesied what is referred to as the coming of a “former”- and “latter”-day rain combined. The former rain was an outpouring after the autumn harvest that prepared the ground for plowing and planting. It would revive and refresh the earth. The latter rain would come in spring and summer to cause the crops to ripen and mature for harvest. The former rain revived, refreshed, and fertilizes. The latter rain brought the soil to its fruition. The latter rain was said to be seven times greater than the early rain. If indeed we experience the former and the latter rain together, it will be a revival to touch the world.
