Fellowship Around the Table
Great conversations about life, faith, and the Bible from Fellowship Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma (www.fbctulsa.org).
Fellowship Around the Table
The Book of Judges: Faith & Leadership w/ Eric Johnson (Part 1 of 9)
Join us and FBC member Eric Johnson as we uncover the profound lessons hidden within these often overlooked biblical narratives. Inspired by his father's captivating storytelling and a friend's heartfelt encouragement, Eric shares his journey of renewed faith through the lens of Judges, a book that sits intriguingly between the conquest of the Promised Land in Joshua and the rise of the monarchy with King Saul.
Journey with us through the early challenges faced by the Israelites as they grapple with idolatry and divine judgment in the conquest of Canaan detailed in Joshua. We reflect on the moral dilemmas modern readers encounter when interpreting these ancient events. Through Eric's insights, we celebrate God's unwavering faithfulness in fulfilling His promises and delve into the complex role of judges. From the solemn warnings of Joshua’s farewell speeches to the multifaceted leadership of the judges, we paint a vivid picture of this pivotal era in biblical history.
You are listening to Fellowship Around the Table. Welcome back to Fellowship Around the Table, where we endeavor to have great conversations about life, faith and the Bible, and today Around the Table I have FBC member Eric Johnson. Hi Eric, glad you're here.
Speaker 2:Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:And today we are going to have a conversation about the Bible, specifically one of our favorite books, the Book of Judges.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:You love this book.
Speaker 2:I do.
Speaker 1:This book kind of represents a point where you had like a real revival in your faith, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so kind of the backstory there. Our mutual friend Rick Griffith revival in your faith, right? Yeah, so kind of the backstory there. Our mutual friend Rick Griffith and I had been meeting for lunch once a month for a while and he challenged me to get back into the Bible, which I hadn't been in a long time. He just told me okay, pick a book and we'll meet up again next month and we'll discuss it. So I was thinking about what I wanted to go through and my dad, who's been on the podcast several times. So if anyone's a regular listener or attends FBC or attends half of the churches in Tulsa.
Speaker 1:Probably you're familiar with my dad.
Speaker 2:He kind of has an unconventional take on teaching some of the reasonably well-known but not super well-known Bible stories Right, he likes to get into them and kind of approach them from a different angle, and so my thought was all right, I really like how he does that, and so I'd like to get into a book that has a lot of stories in it for free, like, as opposed to reading just Ruth, which has one story in it, you can read a book that has like 15 stories in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I jumped into Judges and I hadn't thought about the book of Judges in at least a decade at that point. I assume that's not unrepresentative of the American church as a whole.
Speaker 1:I'm sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really enjoyed getting into it. And so, after I read the book of Judges, the next book I read was Judges again.
Speaker 1:And it has some wild stories in it.
Speaker 2:It does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some well-known characters, but I don't know how many people really take a deep dive into this book. It's just incredible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, characters definitely applies in multiple senses there too, right?
Speaker 1:Let's jump in. Tell me about this book, where we're at, in kind, of the history of the Old Testament and the Israelites.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we are at the point where Israel is in the promised land. Okay, the book before judges is the book of Joshua and that's the story of them conquering the promised land and we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail here in a bit. But they're in the promised land and they're just recently settled. At the beginning of the book, basically the the end of Joshua is kind of the end of the conquest and handing things off to the next generation, and judges picks things up right after that. So it's essentially the first groups that have been born in the promised land or grew up there, and we'll see how they do in terms of maintaining their faith in God and relationship with him as we go along.
Speaker 1:This book kind of fills that gap between coming into the land and getting closer to the time of the Kings, when Saul becomes king.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yeah. There's a line that's repeated over and over again toward the end of the book, that is, in those days Israel had no king.
Speaker 1:Israel had no king. Yeah, At this point you have the 12 tribes. They're still fairly tribal. They're going to settle out in land. That's laid out in Joshua, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where they settle and they settle in those tribes.
Speaker 2:They were united as a family, but they were still very tribal as well, right, yeah, and that has a big impact on how a lot of the stories play out. We'll kind of see how those intertribal relationships play out as we go through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and would you say this book is loosely chronological.
Speaker 2:In some parts. There are some spots that are definitely not chronological Right, and we'll touch on those as we go through as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's not like a perfect history timeline from Joshua to Samuel, right, but it does tell significant stories that are still more tribal. They're going to be regional stories rather than national stories.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Keep going. Tell me more about this book in the background, in the intro.
Speaker 2:So, to set it up, we should probably just touch a little bit on the Israelites and who they are and why we care about what they're doing. To do that, we kind of jump all the way back to Genesis, Okay, and in Genesis you have a guy named Abraham who I assume most of our listeners are probably familiar with to some extent, and God makes a number of promises to Abraham throughout his life.
Speaker 2:There's probably half a dozen or so covenants that God makes with Abraham, so we're going to touch on one of those here. A lot of them contain similar promises to each other and there's little details that are added in from one to the next, but we're going to go to Genesis 15. So I'll read five and six and, if you'll take 18, through 21. So God is speaking with Abraham here, or Abram as he's known at the time. It says and then he brought him outside and said look toward heaven and number the stars. If you are able to number them. Then he said to him, so shall your offspring be. And he believed the Lord and he counted it to him as righteousness.
Speaker 1:Picking up in verse 18. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying to your offspring, I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, to to the land of the Kenites, the Kinsanites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephiam, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites. Don't check my pronunciation there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my general advice when I'm teaching one of these books in a class is if you're reading something you don't know how to pronounce it, take your best shot. If you're not sure, just look up at me in complete panic and I'll take my best shot instead.
Speaker 1:Say it with confidence.
Speaker 2:None of us know how to say any of these things. We're all just going to and no one's going to judge you for not knowing how to pronounce Girgashites or whatever. That one is All right. So that's kind of the introduction here. So we see that Abram, soon to become Abraham, is promised that his descendants will be numerous and that they will take over the land that he's living in at this time, and that land is currently occupied by a lot of other people. Four to five hundred years later we get into the book of Exodus. Abraham's descendants are now known as the Israelites. So we have Abraham, then Isaac, then Jacob. Jacob was renamed to Israel. He needed a new name.
Speaker 1:He did and was renamed to Israel he needed a new name.
Speaker 2:He did, and his name is great. I love the renaming of we don't have to get too deep into this, but I love the fact that the name that God gave Jacob, that becomes the name of God's chosen people, is fights with God. That's what Israel means. It means fights with God.
Speaker 1:Yes, he did wrestle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, jacob, literally did and he did wrestle. Yeah, jacob literally did, and then we will see his descendants also wrestle with God, over and, over and over again. That's most of the book of Judges. Honestly, is that kind of ongoing battle?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:During Jacob's lifetime he takes his family down to Egypt because there's a famine and Egypt's the only place where there's food and they become more numerous over the next few hundred years and the Egyptians aren't too happy about that and enslave them more numerous over the next few hundred years, and the Egyptians aren't too happy about that and enslave them.
Speaker 2:And eventually God works a variety of miracles in Egypt and brings the Israelites out of Egypt and out of slavery and into freedom and is working them up at this point to the opportunity to take the land that he's promised to Abraham in the past. So again, as you go through Exodus, god is laying out his instructions to the Israelites and he gives them out in bits and pieces and there's a couple of bigger chunks in there, but you get all the way. So Exodus has 40 chapters in it and by the time you get to chapter 34, most of the law has already been laid out, at least as far as the Exodus part of it goes. But there's one little nugget that's working in chapter 34 that we're going to go through here.
Speaker 2:Okay so in 34, starting in verse 10, it says 34. Starting in verse 10, it says and behold, I am making a covenant Before all your people. I will do marvels such as have not been created in all the earth or in any nation, and all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the Lord, for it is an awesome thing that I will do with you. Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Verse 2. Lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land and when they whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and you were invited to eat of his sacrifice and you take of their daughters for your sons and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.
Speaker 2:So you see a warning in there that God has, as the Israelites are going into the promised land, no-transcript. And what will happen is the bad influence will affect the good influence, not the other way around. And so he's anticipating if you leave these people alone and intermingle with them and marry your children to their children, it's going to cause problems. Yeah, all right, so we'll jump ahead. A couple of books not too far in time it's about 40 years in time this time but we'll jump into the book of numbers and we get a quick glimpse at an early example of this. Okay, if you'll take that one, heath.
Speaker 1:Picking up in numbers. 25, verse one when Israel lived in Shittim, the people began to whore with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods. And the people ate and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to bail and pure, and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel.
Speaker 2:So just right away, even before they've taken the promised land, they're kind of camped right on the borders at this point and they're hanging out with the people who are around them who don't follow God, and you see what happens? Yeah, you do. A little later in that story get an introduction to a guy named Phineas, by the way, who we will talk about later. Phineas is not very happy with the people who are chasing after the Moabite gods.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:And he reacts rather violently and actually turns away God's wrath in that instance. That's Phineas' Aaron's grandson, the future high priest.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah. So you see these kind of clear warnings and you see that even before they make it in, they're already failing what God had told them. But maybe, if we just go back a little, I think it's, you clearly see that the Lord is judging these nations that are there. You clearly see that the Lord is judging these nations that are there. But I think modern Western readers have a real struggle with this idea of this conquest and the Lord sending Israel in and judging these nations. In fact, the Canaanites might be shocked of how much support they get from modern Western readers.
Speaker 1:How do you counsel people that struggle with this section of scripture?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it is a tricky topic to our kind of modern ears. The way I think of it, there's a couple of things to look at there, and if you read the Pentateuch closely, there's some things that jump out at you as far as who the Canaanites are and kind of what their behaviors are. So it's not just God wants to give his people this land and forget whoever lives there. Now we're going to kick them out or exterminate them or whatever, just to give God's people the land you have.
Speaker 2:I think actually, in the same covenant with Abraham that we went through, we skipped over this part, but there's a line in there where God says the sin of the Amorites is not yet complete, right, so it's not time for you to take the land yet, because the people living here haven't earned my judgment yet, which gives a sense that they're going to over the next four or 500 years. And then, if you go through Leviticus we don't want to delve too deep on a family-friendly podcast until Leviticus 18, I don't think. But it is essentially a laundry list of terrible behaviors that God tells the Israelites not to do, mostly involving, let's say, intimate relations, right, but also like child sacrifice and all these things. And it's oddly specific because you could just say only have intimate relations with your spouse and that's it, and that would cover all of those behaviors. And the reason it's oddly specific is at the end of the chapter where God says this is what the people who live in the land now do.
Speaker 1:They do all of these things.
Speaker 2:Because of that, the land is vomiting them out.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm yeah, really heinous, evil stuff was taking place, and that part gets overlooked.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a sensibility in the Western mind that really didn't exist for all of history, except maybe the last hundred years, but I think something that's clear from God's word and seeing him act in history, and I would say even history, that's something in the Bible, you see this that God judges the nations.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And he makes that abundantly clear throughout scripture. And some nations or cultures get infected to the point that they deserve to die there. People struggle with that today, but that just seems so clear for me from scripture, and I think God clearly judges the nation. There is a point that we can't draw a hard line of what that is, and I think it varies in time and place. The sense is what you were reading from the scriptures is their sin's going to come to the point you said the land's going to vomit them out, but God's going to judge them and in this particular case he's using the Israelites as that instrument of judgment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the other thing too is I think it's hard for us sometimes to reconcile that, because we wouldn't feel comfortable being in the judgment seat, if you will. That's right, I definitely would not. I would not either.
Speaker 1:It's a great thing.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't feel comfortable with really any other human in that seat either. Like, if you know, pick whoever your favorite president of the United States has been. If they said we need to exterminate this people, yeah, I would kind of give that a side eye. But this is God and we can trust his judgment, that his judgment is perfect in all situations, including this one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this happens to be the particular time in history as he's judging a nation that he gives us insight to what it looks like Good stuff. So as that first generation is going through and conquering the land and driving out the nations that they were supposed to, we'll see that they don't always do a great job of that. They really do see God at work, definitely.
Speaker 2:The generation before obviously saw the plagues and they had manna in the desert for 40 years and God to some extent reinforces kind of his presence and his supremacy as we cross into the promised land.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we get three specific examples in the book of Joshua, while that conquest is ongoing.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So we will go first to Joshua 3, as they are entering the promised land. They're on the banks of the Jordan River, and starting in verse 14, you have. So. When the people set out from their tents to pass over the Jordan, with the priests bearing the Ark of the Covenant before the people, and as soon as those bearing the Ark had come as far as the Jordan and the feet of the priests bearing the Ark were dipped in the brink of the water, the waters coming down from above stood up and rose in a heap very far. Hmm, miracle, definitely. And it's interesting too, I think, that it's directly reminiscent of the crossing of the Red Sea. So you have crossing water to get out of slavery and you have crossing water to get into the promised land. Yeah, miracle Number two will be the famous one.
Speaker 1:Joshua six 20. So the people shouted and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people shouted a great shout and the wall fell down flat so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they captured the city.
Speaker 2:That, of course, is the fall of Jericho, which is probably one of the five to 10 most famous stories in the old Testament.
Speaker 1:It is yes.
Speaker 2:And then we'll get to a story that is definitely not in the top five or 10, but I think arguably should be because, it is crazy if you think about it too much and at some point maybe we can talk about Joshua in more detail and we can get into this one.
Speaker 2:We will definitely do that Joshua, 10, 12 through 14. You have at that time. We are in the middle of a battle here as the Israelites are trying to continue their conquest. At that time, Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Son, stand still at Wow, yeah, so you have that confirmation here.
Speaker 1:Three miracles of God's instructions to go and take the land.
Speaker 2:And you have the generation that's involved in that conquest, the people following Joshua who see all of this. You think they remembered that? You think they remembered the sun standing still in the sky for 24 hours.
Speaker 1:I think I would remember that.
Speaker 2:I think that would stick with you. Yeah, so a couple more things we want to add from Joshua. Before we get into Judges itself, we will jump over to Joshua 21, which gives one of my favorite summary statements in any book in the Bible.
Speaker 1:Okay, joshua 21, picking up in verse 43. Thus the Lord gave to Israel all the land that he swore to give to their fathers, and they took possession of it and they settled there, and the Lord gave them the rest on every side, just as he had sworn to their fathers. Not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the Lord had given all their enemies into their hands. Not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed. All came to pass.
Speaker 2:I love that so much. Wow, that's so good, especially like if you're reading through the entire book and you see all that God does and you hit that and it's like man. That is cool.
Speaker 1:That is really cool and then kind of how the book closes up in Joshua 23.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have Joshua at the end of the book, gives a couple of speeches, one, I think, to the elders of Israel and one to the people as a whole, and he's kind of wrapping up his time as leader and, essentially, his life. And this is a little snippet of what he wants to say to them on his way out. Essentially he says be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God, for if you turn back and cling to the remnant of these nations remaining among you and make marriages with them so that you associate with them and they with you, know for certain that the Lord, your God will no longer drive out these nations before you, but they shall be a snare and a trap for you, a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good ground that the Lord your God has given you. That was in Joshua 23, starting in verse 11.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so a warning and clearly prophetic yeah.
Speaker 2:Again, he's not mincing words there. This is do not do that or else you will have severe negative consequences. He says elsewhere in there God kept all his good promises. He didn't only make promises that are nice, like there are a lot of promises that God made in Deuteronomy about what happens if you don't follow him. Yeah, and Joshua reminds the Israelites here what will happen. Like he'll keep those promises too, if he has to. That's right.
Speaker 1:Let's get into this book Judges, and actually before we get into it, that term, I think that's kind of confusing to our modern ears as well, because when I hear judge, I think gavel gown, sitting on a court making a ruling or a decision, you know, judging something. What is this term, judges, and how does it get applied to these leaders?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the reason it's applied to the leaders is because that was a big part of what they did. Okay, the first judge the Israelites had was Moses, and the reason he's called that is, if you go back to Exodus 18 is because that was what his day to day was. He was judging, he was settling disputes.
Speaker 1:Settling disputes, yeah. So people would have an argument and then they would go to Moses and say, hey, what should we do about this? And Moses would decide it's a people that had a sense of morality from the Lord and an oral tradition in history, but really it's in there where they get a law that defines them as a people, and it's brand new, it's brand new to these people that have been living under subjugation for generations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they have not been in charge of their own fate for a few hundred years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so they come out and show up in the wilderness. And well, that guy's in charge, let's just go ask him what to do. That's right.
Speaker 1:Okay, we get these judges and this is just called the Book of Judges. Do we know who wrote this?
Speaker 2:Not officially. I believe the speculation usually is that it was maybe Samuel. I believe the speculation usually is that it was maybe Samuel, but we don't have no one claims authorship within the text.
Speaker 1:Samuel's a good educated guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, we don't know for sure. Yeah, it may have also been just compiled as a history over decades or centuries.
Speaker 1:Right, this is all happening yeah.
Speaker 2:It may have had multiple authors, we just don't know for sure.
Speaker 1:We don't know All right. So how does the book start, or when, actually when, that maybe is a better question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it starts, I would say, right where Joshua leaves off. Except even that's not quite true. There's actually overlap between the end of Joshua and the beginning of Judges. There are a couple of stories in Judges that are just outright duplicated from Joshua.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And we'll talk about a couple of those as we go through. It starts as Joshua is ending essentially. In fact, the first words of the book Judges 1 and 1, are after the death of Joshua. So it starts right off exactly where we left off there, because the end of Joshua talks about the death of Joshua. And then the first chapter of the book is essentially the Israelites trying to take the land that remained to be captured because they didn't finish the conquest in Joshua's lifetime, and for the most part it doesn't go great. Okay, we don't necessarily need to dig in too deeply to the details there. You start off with the men of Judah, and they and the men of Simeon go and try and take over their land, and they do pretty well.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There is one little nugget in there that I do want to touch on.
Speaker 1:I'll have you take verses five through seven there Judges one five through seven. Yeah, okay, they found Adonai Bezek, is that it?
Speaker 2:Close enough.
Speaker 1:They found Adonai Bezek and Bezek fought against him and they defeated the Canaanites and the Perizzites. But Adonai Bezek fled and they pursued him and caught him and cut off his thumbs and his big toes. Adonai Bezek said 70 Kings, with their thumbs and their big toes cut off, used to gather up scraps under my table, as I have done. So God has repaid me. So they brought him to Jerusalem and he died there.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting story, I think, because it gives you a sense of the Canaanites as a people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a couple of things in there. First off, they're not super friendly. Like this guy goes around cutting people's thumbs and big toes off.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But they also don't get along very well. I think sometimes we kind of think of them as like a United nation that the Israelites came and took over and that's not what it is at all. They're basically a bunch of little city states, city states, yeah, at best.
Speaker 2:And so I don't know if it's possible. The 70 kings comment is not literal. It may just mean a lot, right, I think 70 was a number that was used to just mean a bunch sometimes, but he had apparently defeated a bunch of kings, and yet his territory is small enough that it's not the entire territory of the tribe of Judah within the greater nation of Israel. Wow, so this is not a large nation that is coherent and fights as a whole. It is a group of very small kind of fiefdoms or little city States.
Speaker 1:Little city States, yeah.
Speaker 2:Sometimes work together, sometimes fight each other, and From what we know very violent. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And chaotic. I think it's interesting to how he accepts because they quote him he accepts judgment from God. True, and I think that's something we don't have a lens for in our modern Western world. But in the ancient world everyone perceived life theologically, definitely. I think it's CS Lewis that talks about us having chronological snobbery. It's a great phrase and I think it's important. When we read these, do we need to have the lens on how they saw the world and quit trying to apply the lens that we live with today on them?
Speaker 2:As much as we can, as much as we can.
Speaker 1:It's not easy, it's not easy.
Speaker 2:So a little further on in the chapter, we get introduced or reintroduced to a person we've seen a few times in the past. Starting verse 12, we run into Caleb, who's, along with Joshua, the only two men who survived from the initial generation that left Egypt Right. So we have, and Caleb said, he who attacks Kiriath Sefer and captures it, I will give him Aksa, my daughter, for a wife, and Othniel, the son of Kanaz, caleb's younger brother, captured it, and so we get a little bit of Caleb there. We also get introduced to Othniel, who will be relevant here in a bit. What do you make of that little story?
Speaker 1:I don't know quite what to make of it.
Speaker 2:I really do I don't I mean.
Speaker 1:I just he clearly is wanting to settle the land and find husbands for his daughters.
Speaker 2:So the thing that I find interesting about that is in verse 14, it says that Aksa came to Othniel and urged him to ask her father for the field. Who actually asked Caleb for the field?
Speaker 1:I mean the daughter, but through Othniel right. Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 2:It goes, it starts off. She urged him to ask her father for a field. Okay, then it immediately says. She dismounted her donkey and Caleb said to her what do you want?
Speaker 1:And so she asked him for the field she does.
Speaker 2:What do you think that is? I don't know. So there's there's some speculation about this and it's not like a massively important topic, but when you have a little twist like that that is not clearly explained in the text, I like to take the interpretation that I find the funniest. And so the interpretation I find the funniest in this case is that Othniel is severely intimidated by Caleb and is not going to ask him for anything.
Speaker 1:He and Joshua would be significant people. Absolutely I mean they're the two that made it from that generation out of the promised land. I mean their status is big time.
Speaker 2:It's partly that, and it's also partly something you see in verse 20. Okay, so in verse 20, it says and Hebron was given to Caleb, as Moses had said, and he drove out from it the three sons of Anak. Okay, you know who the sons of Anak were? I don't. They were giants.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:So these two stories, the story of Caleb Othniel Aksa and the story of Caleb taking Hebron, are both told in Joshua and also around that same time in Joshua, caleb tells us that he is 85 years old. Wow, so he is an 85 year old man who still beats up giants. I can imagine, you know, shying away a little bit from just asking him to give you stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a pretty intimidating father-in-law. Caleb was something. Caleb was great. Mighty warrior Wow.
Speaker 2:So, progressing through the rest of chapter one, judah's conquests mostly go okay. Caleb is in the tribe of Judah and so he's probably kind of leading the way there to some extent. And then you have the sons of Joseph, who do a little worse but not completely terrible, and then you get into the other tribes and most of the rest of the chapters. This tribe didn't do a good job. This tribe did a worse job. This tribe kind of did okay, but they didn't drive the inhabitants out, they subjected them to forced labor. This tribe just completely failed utterly to take any of the land they were supposed to take at all.
Speaker 1:It's just, it's a whole mess, it's a whole mess the rest of the way down. Do you think it's just failure of leadership, just falling away from the promises and that they were given to them?
Speaker 2:It's hard to say exactly because it doesn't specify in the text. It doesn't. It probably is a combination of lack of leadership and lack of faith.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that kind of summarizes chapter one as we head into chapter two set the scene for us.
Speaker 2:So chapter two is kind of a tricky one too, because it's one of those places where the chronology is not what you would expect. So, you would think chapter one happens and then chapter two happens, and it's not really like that.
Speaker 1:It's just not.
Speaker 2:There's a little incident at the beginning of chapter two that is laid out and it's not clear whether it is before chapter one or after chapter one. But the rest of the chapter is partly before chapter one and partly just a summary statement for the rest of the book.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:At the beginning of chapter two, you have an actual appearance from the angel of the Lord to the people of Israel. Okay, and he essentially calls them out and says that they haven't obeyed him and now he's not going to drive out the people before them anymore.
Speaker 1:Okay, so there's a declaration of hey, your chance is gone, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've not obeyed me. You have actually made covenants that you weren't supposed to make with the people in the land, and so now you're stuck with them. Okay, verse six of chapter two. It says when Joshua dismissed the people. And so this is before Joshua dies, because he's dismissing the people. He's not dead yet.
Speaker 2:Remember, chapter one starts when Joshua dies, so the chronology goes back and forth and it's it's not told the way we would tell it, right. People back then told stories in just a different way than we do. There's much more of emphasis on the location and the event rather than being linear, right, and so, starting in verse 6, again, it starts off when Joshua dismisses the people and it says that the people of Israel went to take their own inheritances and, going from there, it says the people served the Lord all the days of Joshua and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great work that the Lord had done for Israel and we talked about that earlier the three miracles that happened during the conquest, and so the people who saw that, they remembered and they did what they were supposed to do. So if you go back to the end of Joshua, it talks about Joshua challenging the people of Israel to choose whether they would serve God or not. And they said they would.
Speaker 1:As for me and my house. As for me and my house we will serve the Lord.
Speaker 2:And the Israelites agreed. They said, yes, we will serve God too. And Joshua says, no, you won't, you won't be able to do it. And they said, yes, no, we will. And the people who were there did. It's easy for us to look at that and kind of scoff at that, because we know what's coming Right. But that generation they did, what generation also were gathered to their fathers and there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they do forget it. They didn't get to witness it, so there's a memory problem there. Right, but is there a failure on that generation to not pass that down to the next generation? That's?
Speaker 2:one of the things that Moses tells the Israelites in Deuteronomy is remember what God has done and teach it to your children. Talk about it with them all the time. And clearly that did not come through.
Speaker 1:That's the thing. Lower C conservatism. I know that has a political connotation, but the idea in general, in principle, is to conserve the wisdom of the prior generations. But that is an active thing that has to be done.
Speaker 2:Definitely it doesn't just happen on its own.
Speaker 1:It does not just happen on its own, it has to be maintained every generation, every generation, yeah.
Speaker 2:And we will see, as we go through the rest of this chapter, what happens when that does not take place. Okay, so if you'll start us off in verse 11.
Speaker 1:So chapter two, verse 11, then the sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals, and they forsake the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods from among the gods of the people who were around them and bowed themselves down to them. Thus they provoked the Lord to anger. So they forsook the Lord and served Baal and Ashtaroth. Lord had spoken and as the Lord had sworn to them so that they were severely distressed, then the Lord raised up judges who delivered them from the hands of those who plundered them. Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they played the harlot after other gods and bowed themselves down to them.
Speaker 1:They turned aside quickly from the way in which their fathers had walked and obeying the commandments of the Lord, they did not do as their fathers. And obeying the commandments of the Lord, they did not do as their fathers. When the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and delivered them from the hand of their enemies. All the days of the judge For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who oppressed and afflicted them. But it came about, when the judge died, that they would turn back and act more corruptly than their fathers and following other gods to serve them and bow down to them. They did not abandon their practices or their stubborn ways that's essentially the whole book.
Speaker 2:That's the whoever? We talked about. We don't know who wrote it. Whoever wrote it decided. We're just going to lay out everything that's going to happen for the next 19 chapters that's the framework.
Speaker 1:It happens. It happens over and over again Over and over In different regions and different peoples and different times, but this kind of Joshua to Samuel. This is what it looked like.
Speaker 2:One of the things that interests me about Judges so much is that there aren't really a lot of books of any kind, especially the histories that just say here's what's going to happen, the whole time.
Speaker 1:No, that's right.
Speaker 2:And this one does it. It lays out the entire pattern that we're going to go through over and over again. You have Israel's sins. You have God sends punishment to them. You have Israel cries out to God for deliverance. You have God sends a judge to deliver them. And then you have peace in the land until the judge dies. And then the whole thing starts over again, yeah, and.
Speaker 1:And then the whole thing starts over again, yeah, and this book and this timeframe is famous for this cycle. But you can find this cycle in other parts of history. Oh, absolutely, and I think you find this cycle even in church history a fading away, revival, reformation, returning back to our roots and our key promises from the Lord future generations. Fade away revival.
Speaker 2:Yes, Definitely yeah. And so we get in the next few verses a little bit of a further elaboration on this. We have God again reinforcing that he's not going to keep driving the nations out before the people. And then you have a statement that the Israelites are starting to intermarry their children with the other nations, despite God's commands. And so then you get to our first judge and our first judge in the book of judges, our old friend Othniel, who we talked about in chapter one. So we'll go through his story here. We'll just read the whole thing because it's real short. So we'll talk about Othniel, starting in chapter three, verse seven.
Speaker 2:It says and the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. They forgot the Lord, their God, and served the Baals and the Asheroth. Therefore, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he sold them into the hand of Cushon Rishathim, king of Mesopotamia. And the people of Israel served King Cushon Rishathim for eight years. But when the people of Israel cried out to the Lord, the Lord raised up a deliverer for the people of Israel who saved them Othniel, the son of Canaz, Caleb's younger brother. The spirit of the Lord was upon him and he judged Israel, he went out to war and the Lord gave Cushon Rishathim, king of Mesopotamia, into his hand, and his hand prevailed over Cushon Rishathim. So the land years.
Speaker 1:Then Othniel, the son of Canaz, died Glad you read that one At least it was just the one name over and over again. So you just pick a pronunciation to go with it. Run with it, all right.
Speaker 2:So what jumps out to you about the little story of Othniel? There? It's all the five verses long.
Speaker 1:I mean it's short, probably have more questions than answers, but it felt like he's doing the thing that the writers set up of what the judges are going to do.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Okay. So my kind of take on this. Obviously there's a lot of detail that's left out. We're going to talk about a bunch of fights and battles later on in the book of Judges. All we get on this one is he won. That's right. Like God gave the enemy into his hand. We have a verse on the battle that he fights. We know nothing about how many soldiers he had. We know nothing about how many soldiers the other guy had, whose name I'm not going to try to keep pronouncing but regionally, where we're at basically judah, probably right, yeah, okay yeah, at least othniel is from the tribe of judah, so it would be reasonable for him, for him to be in that general area as was caleb.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, okay but yeah, all we get really as far as the structure of the story is the cycle that we just laid out. Israel sins. God sends a nation to punish them. Israel cries out for help. God calls othniel to deliver them. Othniel succeeds in delivering them and they have peace for 40 years. Yeah, 40 years significant, it's a long time and they were generation.
Speaker 1:They were oppressed for eight years and they're. They have peace for 40 years. Yeah, 40 years Significant, it's a long time and they were generation.
Speaker 2:They were oppressed for eight years and they're they have peace for 40 years. That ratio may not quite stay that high as we go along, but yeah, and so my kind of take on this is, the reason it's so bare bones is that the author wants to reinforce the cycle and kind of how the cycle is going to keep happening over and over again, and so that's what you get. It's like remember that cycle we just talked about in the last couple of paragraphs.
Speaker 1:We're going to go through this story and that's all you're going to get.
Speaker 2:is that cycle again? And I think also to some extent that may be the reason we get the little story with Othniel in chapter one, because again, that story is duplicated from Joshua. There's no need to repeat it in scripture.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Except to say, hey, here's this guy. We're going to introduce this guy who we're going to talk about later, and we're going to give you a little personal detail about him that you're not going to get in the story, because when we talk about his actual story, where he's important, we're just going to go through the cycle.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:That's complete speculation on my part. That's kind of how I read that.
Speaker 1:Now that framework makes sense. Well, talking about that cycle, what are some lessons that we can take from this and apply to our lives?
Speaker 2:So the thing that comes to mind for me is what Moses says to the Israelites at the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy, where he says remember what God has done for you. He says that over and over and over again through those opening chapters, and he reminds them of the specific things that God did for them in Egypt and in the wilderness, and teach your children what God has done for you so that they will remember too. That just should be a central part of the Israelites' lives, and it was not in this circumstance. Because you can see, like againoshua's generation knew, they remembered, but their children did not, and so the message did not come across. And that may be a failure of the previous generation to teach as much as they should have. It may just be that the younger generation ignored them. It may be a combination of those things, yeah. But whatever it was, the generational transition did not happen, and that can happen to us too.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:It happens all the time within families, within nations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, families, nations, local churches, Local churches fall away and they stop this process of passing down to the next generation.
Speaker 2:And it takes one generation for it to be gone.
Speaker 1:One generation to forget God. I think we're going to see that in this book once or twice. Once or twice. Oh, this is great stuff. We got to jump into our first judge. We're going to break this up into multiple episodes and Eric is going to walk us through this whole book of judges. I am looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:Outstanding.
Speaker 1:Thanks for coming in, and next week we'll pick up in Judges 4.
Speaker 2:Actually not Judges 3 yet. Actually, next week we're going to jump toward the end of the book for a little bit and talk about the worst story in the Bible, and then we'll circle back to Judges 3.
Speaker 1:Okay, the worst story in the Bible. That's what I call it anyway.
Speaker 2:It's not an objective description.
Speaker 1:That's a great teaser. All right, thanks everybody, and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining.
Speaker 1:If you'd like to learn more, go to FBC Tulsa dot org.
Speaker 2:And when they whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and you were invited to eat of his sacrifice and you take of their daughters for your sons and their daughters whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and you were invited to eat of his sacrifice and you take of their daughters for your sons and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods. I was going to look up and see if there was a translation that didn't use that word.
Speaker 1:so many times I forgot to do that. That's the one.
Speaker 2:I'm reading that's what it says.
Speaker 1:That's going at the end of the episode Fair enough. It's good.
Speaker 2:You good switching off on reading.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we should switch off.
Speaker 2:I may have you read some of the funny names just to see if I can do it.
Speaker 1:I'll have fun. Add some lightheartedness to it.
Speaker 2:Yes, it doesn't have a lot of lightheartedness it's good.
Speaker 1:I would love to read some. While israel lived in shittim you're doing this to me.
Speaker 2:That one was not on purpose. Actually, I think I want. I want to say it's shittim, there's no way I'm pronouncing that right, all right okay.
