Living with the True God I: Overview of Judges

Why Judges Matters for the Western Evangelical Church

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm John Snyder and with me is Teddy James. And we're going to be talking about the book of Judges. In particular a study that we put together a couple of years back and we thought that we would reintroduce you to it if you're not familiar with it because the themes from the book of Judges are just so particularly helpful for the Western Evangelical Church today.

How do we live with a living God in light of who He is and how do we deal with our own souls and how do we respond as corporate churches to this God when we find ourselves living during a season of spiritual drift perhaps we would say in the big picture.

There's been a movement away from the Lord. We find God responding in His loving discipline. What is the appropriate response from His people? And so Judges has a great deal to.

Say about that. Teddy, before we get into that, I do, if you're watching this, it might feel a little bit nostalgic since we're filming in your office where the podcast really started. The first several episodes, first probably year, year and a half, were shot in here.

So John, you want to tell them why we're shooting here instead of in our normal studio. Because my books are better looking than your books. That is true. Most of my books are your books.

To be fair. I know. I have to go find them occasionally. But yeah, well we're filming a series that we'll put on online on the leadership, the kind of leader God trusts with leadership, with shepherding His people.

And so we're filming that in this room. And so instead of running our cameras back and forth, we're back here.

Yeah. So obviously the video is gonna look a little different. The audio is gonna sound a little different. So we're gonna make it as good as we can. You know, have a little grace toward that. So John, because we're talking about Judges and we're talking about the study that we've put out, it is a different study than what we were previously known for.

Because we were known for the Beholder God studies. That's why I came to Mediagratia. I went through the first Beholder God study. Was so impacted by it, we started coming to the church. And that ultimately in the Lord's kindness led to me working for Mediagratia.

But Judges is very, very different. So how and why and how kind of did we make that.

The Mini-Series Format and Why Judges Was Chosen

Change? Yeah, the format for the study with Judges, and this is the the book that goes with that. The format is very similar to the Beholder God studies, the first and the second. But it's smaller. So we have reduced the size of the workbook.

We've reduced the the number of weeks. It's the the mini-series or the mini studies in this series are meant to be from six to eight weeks. They can be done as an individual, but they can also be done as small groups in a church or a family or you know a Christian school.

And they have the video element like the Beholder God. So the sermon is watched first and then the workbook is where everyone is able to go after the sermon to go back to the Scriptures and and seek out what God is saying there in the Bible for themselves.

Then they come together and are able to discuss that the next week. The sermons, the video element is a little different than Beholder God because we don't travel around the world and we don't have interviews with other ministers or missionaries.

So it is a mini study. It's smaller in size and scope and that allows us to do more of those. The larger studies like Beholder God tend to take two to two and a half years to put together from beginning to end.

So we wanted to do some studies that we felt were necessary and timely, but ones that wouldn't take two to three years. I remember when we first started.

Talking about this, doing these smaller studies, and it was during COVID as well when travel was not an option. We wanted to continue putting out helpful resources for the church, for families. As we were discussing what the format would look like and how things would go about, it did not take you long to say we're gonna do Judges.

I don't remember why you picked Judges though.

I think Judges is a book because of the strangeness of the book. It's a series of historical narratives. How the Lord dealt with His people from the entrance into the Promised Land. Then you have a few centuries history before Samuel and then of course the Kings saw David.

So the period of Judges. Judges are political, military, and spiritual leaders all packed into one. They were men that God raised up. One woman, Deborah, who was a judge alongside with a military leader, Barak.

So there are people that God raised up at a time when Israel was hitting spiritual bottom and they cried out to the Lord. God used the judge or the spiritual, political, military leader to turn the heart of the nation back to God but also to deliver the nation from the political adversaries.

The nations around them that were at that point by God's own doing ruling over His people. Judges though has so much to say about the character of God and about the nature of our relationship with a covenant-keeping God.

There is much in Judges that is easily misunderstood and therefore misapplied or because of the difficulty of some of the accounts, oftentimes we might just miss it altogether. Just kind of say, well I don't really understand the book.

Either skim through it quickly or skip it and move to something that you feel more comfortable with. But that would be a dangerous thing because Judges has things to show us about God that God thinks we need.

So we do need them. And the things that it shows us can be terrifying but they are also life-giving if we will apply them in our own day.

Reading Judges as God-Centered History, Not Hero Stories

Just thinking of how there are many, many wrong ways of reading the book of Judges, of even studying the book of Judges. I remember growing up as a kid, I think probably as in most cases, I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church and we had our Sunday school felt board on the wall and there were pictures of muscular Samson.

These figures in my mind were almost comic book characters. They were heroes. As I read them today, as I'm teaching them to my kids, as I'm studying them personally, I realize there's a lot of moral failure that was kind of skimmed over and really there is the temptation of reading Judges almost like a comic book.

So how is it that we read it properly, especially when we see these really morally outrageous things of men that are heroes. I mean they're even included in Hebrews. So how do we.

Kind of marry that? It's a good question. It's easy to read narratives that seem to be focused on. So we have a portion of Israel's history but the focus is particularly not just on Israel but on the judge that God raises up.

So a Gideon, a Samson. And we see these individuals as the center of the entire narrative. And so this is the most important person in the historical account and that would be wrong. It is the person that the Bible speaks a lot about but the great actor, the protagonist in this historical narrative is God.

And God is raising up an individual and God is directing the individual and God is hearing the cries of his people and God is responding to their sin and as well as to their repentance. And God is not only ruling over Israel, God is ruling over the nations around Israel.

Either, as we see in Judges, God handing the nations over to Israel. In other words, giving Israel victory over those nations. Or handing Israel over to their old enemies. So that by the misery of living under the power of a foreign people and worshiping their foreign gods, Israel would step back and say, what have we done?

Why have we traded the living God for a block of wood that's carved and covered in gold or, you know, silver chains? A rock that we've been told is a God and this God will, you know, bless our crops. This God will give us children.

This God will protect us from disease. And so embracing that emptiness of idolatry, they feel that. Not just in the complete impotence of an idol but God hands them over to those idol worshipers that live all around them and they see that living for something other than God is a very different matter.

But we so often, in our day, we look at them almost with a contempt of how could you? When you've got, you know, you have the Judges who speak the Word of God, you know, thus saith the Lord. You have, you know, not far removed, you know, the stories of your grandparents or maybe great-grandparents of, you know, Moses walking across the dried Red Sea, the destruction of Egypt, all of these different things.

And I think that we tend to look at them and think, how could you serve an idol when you're so close to the activity of God? But we do the exact same thing. I mean, in the New Testament, we have the miraculous work of Christ in salvation and yet we so easily turn to idols, maybe not made of wood and stone but made of, you know, all the things that the world has to offer.

Idolatry, Divine Jealousy, and Loving Discipline

Yeah, idolatry is, it is a terrible, tempting lie that comes up in every generation. John had to warn at the end of his first epistle in the New Testament, keep yourselves from idols. You know, there's no mention in John's letter or in the book of Acts that these young churches, John pastors in Ephesus for a while, there's no mention that the Ephesian Christians were gathering idols in their back rooms.

So we certainly think that that probably is a warning, though it would include the cultural idols of the day, which could be manifested in stone and metal and wood, but would also include the idols of the heart.

Calvin warned, you know, 1 ,500 years later that the human heart was a. And the reason that idols are always attractive, I think we have the combination of the fact that we're creatures. We're not self-sufficient.

We were created by a creator. There's someone far above us that made us and that we daily need. But we're also sinful creatures and we're not convinced that that creator is the best for us. And so we would like a form of that creator, someone like the creator, someone who could supply our needs and even our desires, but one that wouldn't interfere with our autonomy.

I want to rule my life, but I would like a God at the end of a chain that I pull that chain and He comes running and He asks me, what do you want? And He does it for me. So an idol is an adjusted version of God that always is devoted to me.

And I think that one of the fears that I have, particularly of our culture and our generation, is that there is an endless number of idols to be tried. And so when you find, oh, this idol didn't work, well, maybe this one over here will.

Or maybe it'll just distract me just long enough that I can feel at peace even though I don't have peace.

Yeah, and I think that's been the same problem that every generation has faced, of course, with our ability to connect with ideas from around the world in a moment through the internet and all the devices that we have that could carry the internet with us in our pockets and be there in our every spare moment.

It certainly is, in some ways, easier to constantly distract ourselves with the next thing that promises to fix us, you know, spiritual life hacks, how to fix my marriage, my family, my church, my workplace, myself, my nation.

And these are things that seem, perhaps, they look real enough to try if we're not careful. And like you said, they only last long enough. It's as if we pass by the truth because we're chasing after this lie.

But there's always another lie. And there's always that whisper in our ear, you didn't go far enough. You didn't stay long enough. You didn't try enough different things. There's something out there other than God, something that won't require that you lay everything down in devotion to it.

And the idols don't. The idols don't mind sharing people. When we read in the book of Judges and the people of God drift in toward idolatry, we never find that Dagon, for example, or Molech, or any of the idols of those nations.

But Dagon was a Philistine idol. We never find the Philistines coming to the Israelites and the Philistine preachers of the day saying, how can you do this? How can you worship Dagon and the God of Abraham?

Dagon is jealous. Dagon won't have it. The truth is that one of the marks of idols is they're willing to share us with as many other idols and with the living God. The mark of the living God is that he doesn't share with anybody.

And so we find in his jealousy, which is an expression of his peculiar love for his people, he acts. And I think Judges is particularly helpful because of that. When Hebrews says that those that God loves in His family, His children, He disciplines His children.

We don't discipline the next door neighbor's children, you know. We discipline our children. It's not that we don't care about the neighbor's children. We certainly, as Christians, we ought to care about them.

But we don't have the same connection. We don't have the same responsibilities. We don't have the same type of love. But between a parent and their child, we discipline our own child if we care enough about them.

God disciplines His children. And what does that look like? Well, when it's not just an individual, maybe it's many within a church or many churches within a denomination, denominations within a nation, you see a kind of a systemic drift.

Not isolated instances, but there seems to be across the board, something's deeply wrong. We've drifted as a people. How does God lovingly discipline? Well, the book of Judges gives us a lot of those principles.

We see in Judges seven cycles of the people drifting away from the Lord, God entering into discipline with them when they will not pay attention to His Word. And He hands them over to old enemies. They become miserable as they see the consequence of living for self and ignoring God.

And when they become so miserable, they can't stand it anymore. They cry out. And the word in the Hebrew for their cry can be used for a cry of repentance, but it's not always used for a cry of repentance.

There are examples in Scripture where that word is just the cry of misery. And I think that we would be foolish to think that God waits to show mercy to the nation of Israel. In the book of Judges, He waits until every single Jew is repentant.

I imagine in the cry of Israel, there is a portion of that people that breaks its heart because of the sin. And it's not just that we serve the Philistines physically, that they are our physical masters.

It's that we have embraced spiritually their idols, and we have become the slaves spiritually of their idol. And that's really a greater problem than being physically under the boot of a foreign power.

So I'm sure that among those that cried, there were many broken-hearted, repentant believers. But there were probably many that just cried out and complained to God because they were miserable. But whatever the motive, God in His mercy raises up a judge.

That judge then turns, is used by God to turn the nation's heart back toward Him. And that judge is used to lead that nation out from under the military rule of another nation. And then freed from that worship of that idol, freed from the power of another nation, Israel walks with God as long as the judge is alive.

But as soon as the judge dies, and there's each cycle, there's differing gaps, we find that the people eventually begin to drift back toward idolatry. And this cycle happens again. Now the real benefit of this is that you can see God judging, His love acting in judgment, and His love acting in restoration.

You can see the people's carelessness with idolatry, and you can see the people's carefulness in repenting and returning and walking with God. You can see it, you know, one after the next, these seven examples.

And so it's really hard to miss the lessons. In the New Testament, the same exists. The New Covenant doesn't change this pattern. If God's people drift, God in love will send warnings. And if we ignore the warnings, then God will enter into a gracious discipline with us.

And at times, our indifference, our deafness, and our numbness to God requires that that gracious discipline brings us to a miserable place, and we cry out. But when we cry out, God is merciful, and He delivers us in repentance from our spiritual slavery, and also delivers us from the consequences of that at times.

When you see in the New Testament, you think, well, I don't see that cycle in the New Testament. Well, where did the New Testament begin? It was a low point. Israel is, for the most part, far from God, misunderstanding the law, misunderstanding the Messiah and what He would come to do.

And God sends His Son, and Christ, of course, through His ministry, is turning people back. And through His death and resurrection and ascension, we see in the New Testament, you know, there are many who embrace Christ, and it's like the high point.

It's like, you know, it's like the picture of the people turning back, and many have turned back to the Lord, and not just in Israel, but across the Roman Empire. You read the book of Acts, and while there is a lot of opposition to the gospel, there is a lot of good news as we see the people embrace Christ.

And so it's a high point, but by the time you reach the book of Revelation, let's say, you know, that it's 80 years, 70, 80, 90, however many years from the birth of Christ. So the New Testament covers under a century, and in the book of Revelation, you begin to see that the people of God, in those seven letters, many of those churches are beginning to become careless, and they're warned.

So we can see that cycle. It started at a low point. The people hit bottom. God sends His Son, and the church is walking with Him, and if they're not careful, they begin to drift again. Judges gives us seven examples, one after the next, so that you cannot miss the fundamental principles.

So I think that, in one way, you can read the book of Judges, and it can be a thoroughly discouraging book, because it does show how prone we are to idolatry, how prone we are to wandering away from God, even in His kindness, which I think, you know, for the believer, when we have, we know what it is to be rescued from our sin, and yet, when we do fall back into sin, we feel the grievousness of that, because we're no longer sinning in blindness, but now we're sinning in light.

But it is also such a sweet book, because of what you've just talked about, because God is kind, is gracious, and does discipline those He.

The Downward Spiral of Judges and the Judges’ Own Failures

Loves. Yes, and in the book of Judges, there is a progression. It's not just that the people drift, and God is merciful. The people drift, and God is merciful. So it's not like a merry-go-round, spinning around and around, sadly, the people repeating the same mistakes as their forefathers did, and God, amazingly, repeating mercy.

It's not a merry-go-round. It's like a spiral staircase down. It's a whirlpool. Sin, when repeatedly embraced, God does forgive us, because of His great mercy that He has shown us in Christ, but that does not mean the consequences remain equal.

It's as if Israel, in this book, each time they drift from God, and God is merciful, and the next generation chooses, again, to be careless, and God is merciful, and the next generation, again, chooses idolatry, knowing what's happened before.

And in their amazing ignorance, willful ignorance, and choosing the emptiness of idolatry, again, each cycle that we see, there is a general trend downward. And so, at the beginning of the book, the restoration of a people is a wonderful picture of God's mercy.

At the end of the book, there's still mercy, but it's as if the people don't come up to where they were. Even, and especially, I think this is seen, not in the behavior of the pagan nations around them, and the cruelty, or the length of time that they're under their power, but especially, we see this downward trend in the leaders themselves that are Jews, that are, some of them are the judges.

So, you know, you see some dark spots at the, let's take Gideon, at the end of the life of Gideon, so faithful, destroys the idol that his dad is the head preacher of the false worship center in his town.

So, there's a giant idol out there, right in front of the church, you know, his dad is the priest of that idol. God calls the son of the idol priest in that nation, he calls that man's son, to lead his people away from idolatry.

So, Gideon, at night, grabs some friends, they destroy that idol. At the end of Gideon's life, there's just these couple of verses, he's so faithful. We want to make you a king, Gideon says, no, we have a king, it's God.

We want to give you all these riches from the wars, you know, against the Midianites, no, but I'll take, you know, a portion, and he takes a portion, and part of that, he uses to make a golden ephod, which is part of a priest's garment, and he makes this, this part of the priest's garment that hangs, you know, over the priest's neck, he makes this ephod, and he turns it into an idol, and his family begins to worship it, and God, and the town begins to worship it, and God, and the whole nation, the Bible says, of Israel is affected by that drift.

But Gideon makes it, all the way to the end, faithful, and there is that one stain. Samson, we go down a few more cycles, Samson, raised by parents who do exactly what God says, so as to raise him in a very rare, unusual way that sets him, that marks him out.

This is God's chosen instrument to deliver us, this time from the Philistines. Okay, as soon as Samson becomes a young adult, the first thing we hear from him is that he, because of the beauty of a Philistine woman, he wants to marry her, he doesn't care that she worships an idol, and when his parents plead with him and say, isn't there a beautiful woman among our own people that worships the true God, that you could fall in love with her instead of a woman who worships an idol, and Samson says, she looks good in my sight, which in the Hebrew is a very obvious play on, against, a contrast.

You either live by what God sees as good, what's good in God's eyes, or you live by what you think is good in your eyes, and that's a repeated thing through the whole book. The people did what was right in their own sight, and so what we're seeing, even in Samson, God's chosen leader, that he is living by the same principles to a great degree that the idolatrous Jews are living by.

He does what's right in his own sight, and God still is merciful. In fact, he raises up Samson and delivers Israel from the Philistines, even though there is no mention of a cry going up to God. It's as if Israel has been in this place so many times, they don't even notice how bad it is.

They've quit noticing how miserable it is to live for an idol and to live under the power of a foreign country. God does not wait for the cry, but for his own namesake, he rescues his people, and he uses this selfish young man.

There are terrible consequences to Samson for his sin, but it does not overrule the mercy of God.

God Works Through Human Sin Without Being the Author of Sin

Which, and even in that, it brings up so many questions, you know, because it does say that God was looking for an opportunity to wage war with the Philistines, right? And there's so many things that, one, you do cover them in the study, but two, I think we will want to hit these in the podcast, and I know that we're running out of time.

We need to wrap it up. So that could be an episode for next week, where we spend some time focusing in on that. Yeah, I think it would be nice.

To hit some high points from judges, because there are just so many that.

Are so particularly helpful. And this has been more of just a really just a flyover.

Yeah, how do we see God at work? You know, where do we see decline in spiritual leaders? How can God use wicked, imperfect men when he is so pure? Is God impure or, you know, by association? When the Bible says Samson looked at that girl and said, I want her, and I don't care what church she goes to.

You know, I don't care what temple she worships at. I don't care who she worships. She looks good, and so I want her. You know, and Samson's parents are so brokenhearted. Surely they felt, what a waste.

All those years of careful raising, and as soon as he's able, as a young adult, to make his own choices, he runs as far from the Lord as possible. How do we view this? Was it all for nothing? And yet, you mentioned, the Scripture says, they did not understand that God intended to use even Samson's selfish choices to create a fight between Israel and the Philistines.

So they would no longer be okay to live under a pagan ruler and embrace the pagan idols. So God works all things for good, for ultimate good, when it comes to those who love him, for those that are in that relationship, that covenant relationship with him through Christ.

Paul does not say in Romans 8, all things are good, or God only uses good things. God rules over and through and in the midst of even sinful choices without being the one who entices people to sin, because he cannot be enticed to sin.

James says he does not entice others to sin, but he has the right to use the enemy's carefully laid plans and his deceit in the lives of humans, he can use even the enemy's plans to bring about ultimate good.

Of course, the cross is the clearest picture of that. Men who agreed in the miscarriage of justice to crucify an innocent man were actually, in doing that wickedness, they were doing what God would use as the great act of our rescue, that the Son would be the sacrifice, the lamb for our sins.

And we can talk about that more next week. Judges is a unique book for us to study. I think Judges is also one of the most significant books for the modern evangelical church. When we come to the book of Judges, we admit that it sounds strange to our ears sometimes.

There are a lot of events there that confuse us. There are other events that morally alarm us. So we want to come at this book in a way that guarantees that, by the grace of God, we really will learn the things that God means for us to learn, and our lives will be responsive to God in a way that they ought to be.

So that, having studied the book of Judges, we come out of this study more like Christ, a clearer picture of our God than when we entered it.