You cannot safely ignore God — and if you settle long enough, you produce a generation that decides to try.
Central Image
The whiff — a leg swinging through air with no contact, just the sound of it. Israel had the ball, had the moment, and came up empty.
The Turn
The sermon exposes the assumption that making amicable peace with the people around you is just pragmatic survival — and shows it is precisely the mechanism by which the next generation never knows the Lord at all.
Outline
The Punting Story
Toby opens with a sixth-grade football game — not a punter, pressed into service, high adrenaline, and a complete whiff. The ball untouched; Toby flat on his back; the crowd watching. The first instinct: excuses. Pre-excusing yourself, blaming the linemen, the real punter who bailed, the coach who sent you out there. But only one foot was supposed to hit that ball. When we whiff it publicly, we reach for excuses. Israel reached for excuses for 300 years.
The Window God Gave Israel
God engineered something remarkable: the Bronze Age Collapse. Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt — all in crisis simultaneously. The Canaanites were writing desperate letters to Pharaoh; Pharaoh couldn't answer. God cleared the field so a nation of former slaves could walk in and build something — institutions, government, a civilization. They had the window. They drank their thumb for three hundred years instead.
Chapter 1: From Judah to Dan
The book opens with "who shall go up?" — Joshua is gone, and now the tribes have to figure out how to do this themselves. Judah goes first and does it right. Caleb, the Kenizzite — the grafted-in outsider, related to Moses's father-in-law — is the ideal figure in the whole book. The irony: it's not about blood. It never was. Faith, not lineage. But as you move through the tribes, the story degrades. By the time you reach Dan, they're not just failing to drive the Canaanites out — the Canaanites are oppressing them. The trajectory is visible before the angel says a word.
The Angel of the Lord's Charge (Judges 2:1–5)
God didn't just want the land cleared militarily. He wanted the altars torn down and no covenants made with the people of the land. Israel did neither. They subdued people, then enslaved them instead of driving them out. They made treaties. They let the altars stand. And the angel makes the theological point that Israel kept missing: there is no such thing as a truce with the devil. When God's people are strong, the devil talks about harmony. When the devil is strong, he doesn't talk at all — he starts eating. Israel chose to believe the harmony talk. They will spend the next three centuries paying for it.
The Three Whiffs
1. They settled for incomplete conquest — got tired, stopped fighting.
2. They failed to remain faithful to God alone — covenants with pagans, altars left standing, gods mixed in.
3. They failed to pass on the faith — "there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord."
The third one is the catastrophic one. Deuteronomy's Shema doesn't stop at "love the Lord your God with all your heart." The next line is the engine: teach them diligently to your children, talk of them when you sit, when you walk, when you lie down, when you rise. Bind them on your hand, between your eyes, on your doorposts. The faith has to be visible in how you actually live — not just spoken. Israel didn't do it. A generation arose that had no idea who God was or what he had done.
Fathers, Boredom, and the Whiff That Costs the Next Generation
Father's Day application, direct: surveys consistently show that if dad doesn't come to church, the kids — especially boys — don't stay as adults. If dad comes, they're far more likely to stick, even when mom doesn't. Toby doesn't have a sophisticated theology of this; he just notes that ignoring it is butting your head into a brick wall.
Then the boredom argument: men have a lower tolerance for it. Boring church doesn't just fail to engage people — it teaches them something. It teaches them that God is irrelevant, that he can be safely ignored. And teaching people God can be safely ignored is a sin. It's worse than being wrong. Wrong can be corrected. Boring just keeps communicating that nothing here matters.
Toby's Dad
He closes with this: his father was not a Christian when Toby was growing up. But every single time his dad screwed up and knew it, he came to Toby and sincerely apologized. Every time. That one thing — the admission, the sincerity, the modeling of "I don't get it all right and I know it" — Toby says he doesn't have words for what it meant in his life. You don't have to be a superhero. You teach, you train, you mean it, you're kind. Don't be mean and expect your kids to want the God you claim to serve. God does the rest. But not doing those things is asking for it.
The Landing
Stop making excuses for where you've settled, own the whiff, and get back in the fight — especially the fight to pass it on.
Questions to Think About
- Toby opened with the punting story — swung hard, whiffed it completely, landed flat on his back in front of everyone. What's your version of that?
- God gave Israel a specific window — the Bronze Age Collapse — when all the regional powers were in simultaneous crisis. What did Israel actually do with that time?
- The angel of the Lord in chapter 2 doesn't just charge Israel with losing battles. What are the specific failures he names, and what makes them different from just not finishing the war?
- Toby said Israel's biggest whiff wasn't a military defeat — it was that a whole generation arose "who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel." Where in your own life have you settled in a way that could cost someone downstream their faith?
- Where have you made peace with the devil — not abandoned the faith outright, but quietly coexisted with something you know you shouldn't?
- Israel's window eventually closed when the next generation never knew the Lord at all. Is there a generation in your orbit you've already lost to that — and if so, what does that mean for what you do now?
- Toby named three whiffs: incomplete conquest, covenants with pagans, failed transmission. Which of those is this church most at risk of right now?
- The Shema's application in Deuteronomy is that the faith should be visible in how you live — when you sit, walk, lie down, rise. Name one person in the next generation and one specific thing you can do this week to make that visible to them.