The Message Remix (78 page)

INTRODUCTION
JUDGES

 

Sex and violence, rape and massacre, brutality and deceit do not seem to be congenial materials for use in developing a story of salvation.
Given the Bible’s subject matter—God and salvation, living well and loving deeply—we quite naturally expect to find in its pages leaders for us who are good, noble, honorable men and women showing us the way.
So it is always something of a shock to enter the pages of the book of Judges and find ourselves immersed in nearly unrelieved mayhem.

It might not gravel our sensibilities so much if these flawed and reprobate leaders were held up as negative moral examples, with lurid, hellfire descriptions of the punishing consequences of living such bad lives. But the story is not told quite that way. There is a kind of matter-of-fact indifference in the tone of the narration, almost as if God is saying, “Well, if this is all you’re going to give me to work with, I’ll use
these
men and women, just as they are, and get on with working out the story of salvation.” These people are even given a measure of dignity as they find their place in the story; they are most certainly not employed for the sake of vilification or lampoon.

God, it turns out, does not require good people in order to do good work. He can and does work with us in whatever moral and spiritual condition he finds us. God, we are learning, does some of his best work using the most unlikely people. If God found a way to significantly include these leaders (“judges”) in what we know is on its way to becoming a glorious conclusion, he can certainly use us along with our sometimes impossible friends and neighbors.

Twice in Judges (17:6 and 21:25) there is the telling refrain: “At that time there was no king in Israel. People did whatever they felt like doing.” But we readers know that there was a king in Israel:
God
was king. And so, while the lack of an earthly king accounts for the moral and political anarchy, the presence of the sovereign God, however obscurely realized, means that the reality of the kingdom is never in doubt.

 

 

From:
The unknown author wrote sometime shortly after God finally granted his people’s wish to have a human king, in the period described in 1-2 Samuel. Things were more stable than in the Judges period—laws were better enforced, and families didn’t have to worry that marauding gangs might overrun their farms at any moment. But the author of Judges had no illusions about kings—they were human, just like earlier leaders—so ultimately the whole kingdom project still depended on God.

 

To:
They were proud of their new king, thinking a strong man at the top would solve their problems. But the citizens of the new monarchy had the same bent toward fighting among themselves and adopting pagan habits that had plagued God’s people for generations. “People did whatever they felt like doing” was still all too true.

 

Re:
About 1220-1050 B.C. The Philistines invaded the coasts of Egypt and Canaan around 1200 B.C. from somewhere near Greece. They traded (and battled) with the Greeks who fought the Trojan War. Egypt quickly threw them out, but Israel struggled with them for 150 years. They gave the land its Greek name, Palestine.