How Sin Makes Us Vandals

Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life

Tim Keller

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality:christianity, Spirituality, Religion, Religion & Spirituality

4.9 • 16.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The story in Judges 17 is not interesting. It’s a bunch of trivial people doing kind of dumb, weird things. Micah robs his mother, but then he gives the money back. Then his mother cheats God. Then Micah hires a Levite, and then Danites hire the Levite instead. What’s the point? On the one hand, this is terrible storytelling. Why was this incident chosen out of this whole period of history? There’s nobody in this narrative who you care about. They’re shallow and uninteresting. And we’re left completely unprepared for what happens in the following chapters, where there’s rape and civil war and genocide. So why is this here? Every other part of Judges is about God’s salvation. And this passage shows us what we look like without his salvation. In other words, this shows us the nature of sin, and it shows us some things that are very surprising. This tells us 1) what sin does to us, 2) what sin does to God, and 3) how we can be cured of it. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on February 7, 1999. Series: What’s Really Wrong with the World. Scripture: Judges 17:1-13. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Gospel in Life. Some people say the fundamental problem of the world is poverty.
0:09.0	Others say it's bad systems, poor education, or biology. But what if none of these can fully explain the brokenness we see,
0:17.0	both in the headlines and in our own hearts? In today's teaching, Tim Keller looks at how the Bible's teaching on sin gives us a deeply
0:25.1	honest and yet incredibly hopeful view of the world.
0:35.0	Turn to a part of your bulletin where you have the passage on which the scripture is,
0:40.5	a scripture passage of which the teacher is based. And we're starting this week a new series,
0:47.7	and it's on sin. There's nothing more fundamentally relevant and practical than to understand an answer, the answer to the fundamental human question.
0:59.1	What's wrong with us?
1:01.5	If you're trying to raise a family or run a corporation, or if you have political or community involvement, in fact, anything you do in this life, you need to have a working theory of an
1:13.6	answer to that question. What's wrong with us? Why the selfishness, the cruelty, the corruption,
1:21.4	the crime, the racism, the injustice? Why? Where does it come from? Now, the Bible's answer is ancient and it's profound,
1:30.2	and that is sin in the human heart. One of the reasons why it's so widely rejected, I believe,
1:35.9	is actually because what's not understood is that the biblical understanding and doctrine of sin
1:41.5	is multidimensional. All of us understand or remember or think
1:46.5	they understand what the Bible says about sin. We say, yes, we know what the Bible says about sin.
1:51.0	Sin is breaking God's law and therefore we're guilty and condemned. Yes, I know what the Bible says,
1:57.1	but that's only one. In fact, that's the last of the aspects of sin that we're
2:02.8	going to look at in this series. I think one of the reasons why sin as an answer to the
2:08.7	reasons to the problems of our life tends to be widely overlooked by people is because we
2:14.6	don't understand the multidimensionality, how nuanced, how rich,
2:19.3	see, how multi-perspectival the biblical teaching on sin is.
2:24.5	We're going to look at the first of those dimensions today, and we're going to read a passage
	...

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