Judges // 4 Lessons
After finishing a journey through Joshua, I decided to carry onto into the following book, Judges. It had been a while since I’d last looked at Judges. Samson’s in there, right? Isn’t it all just a bit crazy and full of gruesome passages that atheists use to make God out to be vicious and evil?
Despite such initial thoughts, it’s been an unbelievably helpful and challenging book. The Lord has blessed my reading of it, teaching me some real lessons. This post is an attempt to tie those lessons together under some specific and (hopefully) helpful headings.
The depravity of man.
Judges contains the lowest ebbs of human sinfulness found in the Bible. It ends with three chapters of fatal gang rape, dismemberment, genocide and virgin abduction. You come across that and ask “why on earth is this in the Bible?” Quite simply, it is the incontrovertible evidence of man’s sinfulness. This stuff is meant to make us uncomfortable. And it is meant to make us examine ourselves.
Judges caused me to reflect on the gravity of my own rebellion against God. It is easy to compare your life to Judges and think that actually you’re not that bad. But the worst acts of depravity in the book come from God’s people! God’s covenant community are full of division and idolatry. Judges should be a warning to Christians to never become proud, assuming that your position as one of God’s people means you are any less liable to sin than a non-Christian.
Consider Judges 17. A man named Micah makes idols of silver, hiring a Levite as his personal priest. He consecrates these idols to the God of Israel, taking one of God’s priests to work in his shrine. Micah believes that he is rightly worshipping God. But he has fashioned an idol – a god on his own terms. He has fashioned a god in his own image, convinced he is worshipping the God of the Bible. This story posed a challenging question. In my mind, do I strip God of attributes which I do not wish him to have, as it would make my life difficult – his authority, his sovereignty, his holiness?
On a grander scale, I was convicted about my attitude to the sins of society. Judges depicts a national departure from God’s law. When a nation does not have God as king it descends into collective depravity. I realised that I am guilty of insufficient anger at societal evils such as abortion and the erosion of marriage. I have always been opposed to these things, but my belief that they are inevitable consequence of our Godless society has meant that I have recently not been truly appalled at their sinfulness. I still believe that, in this age, they are here to stay. However, the Lord has highlighted for me just how vile they are in his sight.
The constant refrain of Judges, and its closing line is that “in those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit”. When man is on the throne of his life, there are no bounds to his sinfulness. Chaos and rebellion reign.
The gracious sovereignty of God.
Inseparable from this lesson of man’s depravity is that of God’s sovereignty. It is so clear in Judges that God is totally sovereign over the sinfulness of man. He is always in control.
This is evident in the people he uses. Judges is not a book of exemplars for living the Christian. Samson, Gideon, Ehud and Jephtah are all deeply flawed, deeply sinful men. Yet God uses them, even using their very acts of sinfulness, to accomplish his purposes. Samson’s adultery leads him to be captured by the Philistines, but God uses him whilst in captivity to kill all the Philistine rulers – “thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived” (Judges 16:30 NIV).
The question can be asked “if God uses people’s sin, doesn’t that mean he condones it?” Far from it. God using people’s sin demonstrates that nothing is outside of his perfect sovereignty, even things which are abhorrent to him. So gracious is he that he does not write us off when we have sinned. He shows us grace, welcoming us back, using us and our very acts of sinfulness to advance his kingdom. God is so great and gracious that there is no evil out of which he cannot bring his glory – just consider the evil of his own Son hung on a cross.
God also uses his sovereignty over the events of Judges to foreshadow the coming of Christ. His unlikely servants foreshadow the arrival of his Son as a baby who would grow up as a carpenter in the middle of nowhere.
My favourite foreshadowing is in Chapter 9. We meet the evil ruler Abimelech. He is the son of a slave woman, persuading the people to let him rule as he is their flesh and blood and his name means “my father is king”. The people give him money to build a temple, so they might experience God. He attacks them for rebelling, but many of them find refuge in a strong tower, and Abimelech’s rule comes to a bloody end. His evil points us to the goodness of the perfect ruler, Christ. He came to set children of slavery free, which he can do because he was made like us in flesh. He is the true temple, in which we meet with God. His father is the king, and one day he will come to judge rebels and establish an eternal reign, but his people will find refuge in the strong tower – he himself!
The slavery of sin.
Judges vivdly illustrates the toll which sin takes when we are mastered by it. When we sin, we often believe we are freely taking control of our lives. After a while though, the lustre inevitably fades and we realise that we are slaves to sin and that it is an exploitative, unrelenting master.
In Judges 2, the angel of the Lord appears to disobedient Israel, saying “Now therefore I tell you that I will not drive them [the Canaanites] out before you; they will be thorns in your sides and their gods with be a snare to you” (v3). God’s judgement on Israel is to give them over to the false gods they have chosen to worship. He gives them what they want, as they have refused to snuff out the pagan nations and chosen to worship their gods. They are subsequently and repeatedly conquered and oppressed by other nations.
In Judges 3, we get a close up of one of these slave masters, King Eglon. He is described as “a very fat man” (v17), having gorged himself on the grain of the oppressed Israelites. He is so grotesquely overweight that when he is assassinated by the judge Ehud, the sword used is swallowed up by his folds of fat. This is a literal picture of what happens when we are ruled by sin. It demands tribute from us, and we cannot help but offer it, fattening it up and cementing its oppressive rule over our lives. When once it looked harmless, even desirable, it is actually a vile, demanding tyrant. The grotesque nature of this story should dispel any doubts about just how comprehensive and inescapable the power of sin is.
The most horrifying part of Judges is its endless repetition. Israel sin, God gives them over the other nations. Israel cry for help, God delivers them from oppression and peace is restored. Then Israel sin again, rejecting God as king and instead letting sin reign. What a damning reminder of our own thick-headed attitudes and destructive habits, even as God’s people. While sin reigns, it is inescapable, taxing and exhausting. We are its helpless slaves.
The easy yoke of Christ the King.
It is only from the depths of human sinfulness in Judges that you can crane your neck upwards to understand the true heights of the majesty of Christ the King. Israel is crying out for a ruler in this book! God sends them judges, but no human ruler, however Godly, can tame the hearts of sinful men. Israel crawl back under their chosen yoke of slavery. We are just the same. But we have been mercifully invited into the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Of course, all things are under his rule already, but it is a different thing to be in his people and to know him as Lord. And when that has happened, you step into this marvellous promise:
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1 NIV)
In Christ, we are free. Sin is no longer our master. Its presence remains in the flesh, and we will continue to indulge in it. But it is not our master. It does not call the shots – King Jesus does. The pagan kings in Judges demanded the riches of the people, laying the burden of slavery on them. King Jesus invites all the weary and heavy laden sinners of the world to lay their burdens on him, and offers them his riches to enjoy – freely and without cost.
Living under his rule is a joyous liberation. We are free from sin’s penalty, because of his death. Whilst sin’s presence remains in our flesh, we are free from its mastery over us. We can begin to say “no” to it, to live lives that honour God, reflecting the presence of Christ in us. We will mess up continually, as Israel did. But we are always under the yoke of Christ, and so our sins are never held against us. One day, the presence of sin will be destroyed entirely when Jesus returns to reign forever as King.
To think that, despite bowing the knee to sin constantly in my life, I have been set free by my merciful Lord. On my own, I couldn’t even choose to do that, and would be rightly damned for my sinful nature. But he has laid his easy yoke on me. Hallelujah – what a saviour!
“For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope – the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good” – (Titus 2:11-14 NIV)
An Unshakable Kingdom 