“In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit. ”
In Judges the Israelites are a hot mess.
It’s no wonder this book doesn’t get much screen time in sermons. Think about it – how often do you hear pastors quoting from Judges?
Like Ezekiel or Jeremiah or Ecclesiastes, Judges is a book which is known well in part, but not so much in whole. Samson is a favourite character study for Sunday school. Deborah is famous for being the only female judge. If you study the Word more on your own, you may even read how God used an insecure man named Gideon and a dwindled Israelite army to defeat their enemies.
But studying these stories in isolation misses a critical question; why were these judges needed to rescue the people? Had they not already conquered and taken possession of the land under Joshua?
The answer is in these key words, peppered throughout the book: “the Israelites once again did evil in the eyes of the LORD.”
I’d like you to cast your mind back to the first five books of the Bible, when God made a covenant with Israel. The terms were simple: “Love and obey Me and I will give take care of you; turn away from Me and I will remove you from the land you have inherited.”
Can you guess what the Israelites did in response to these clear instructions? Yupp, they turned away from God, and they did so not once, not twice, not thrice… you get the idea.
After repeatedly failing to keep up their end of the bargain, God was well within His rights to break His covenant with the Israelites. But He didn’t. Why? A particular verse in Judges speaks to my heart on a possible answer:
“and He could bear Israel’s misery no longer.”
He could bear it no longer. To my understanding, that suggests He had been ‘bearing’ it from the beginning. Bear means ‘to endure an ordeal or difficulty’. God was not indifferent to their pain. Contrary to what we might have been taught about Him in the Old Testament, it hurt God to see His creation suffer, even if their suffering was the well-deserved consequence of their wrongdoing. God did not want to hand them over to the oppression of their enemies but had to because He is a God who keeps His word and who does not let the guilty go free.
However, it gets to the point where He can bear it no longer. So, He forgives. God always, always, always, provided a way out for the Israelites when they repented. The same is true of Him today. Except – instead of judges – our way out is Jesus.
Like the Israelites in Judges, mankind repeatedly sins against God. Each following our personal moral code, we hurt one another and disobey God. We too need rescuing from the consequences of the evil we’ve done in the eyes of the LORD. But the judges of old are not good enough. They were imperfect, they only provided temporary salvation, and they were unable to permanently keep the people away from sin.
Enter Jesus. He is our Saviour and deliverer. He bore the consequences of our wrongdoing so that we wouldn’t have to. His death in our place is God’s ultimate rescue of undeserving sinners whom He could no longer bear to see suffer.
Jesus is also our standard. The judges were imperfect and could only point their people to God’s Law. Because Jesus is perfect, He points us to Himself. He gives us the template of righteousness against which we should measure ourselves. Judges shows that this moral absolutism is necessary. The moral relativity demonstrated in this book led only to degradation, sin and suffering.
Yet even when Jesus gave the absolutes of His commandments people still couldn’t get it right. After spending three years literally living with God, Peter still denied Him, Thomas still doubted Him, and many still didn’t believe in Him. Being an example wasn’t enough. God needed to permanently dwell with man. So, His final act of salvation was to send the Holy Spirit to live in His followers.
Thanks to the Holy Spirit, we don’t have to live in an endless cycle of turning away from God and back to Him. We have been empowered to live a life that always pleases God. And thanks to Jesus, when we do fall short, we don’t need to look to our fellow humans for deliverance. We have direct access to the righteous, merciful Judge who will lead us back to God.