Wow, Israel’s a mess. The book of Judges turns out to be chock-full of crazy stories that make you say “wait, the Bible really says THAT?”
I mean, they killed one man for mis-pronouncing “Shibboleth”. Another guy gets a huge stone dropped on his head by a woman, so he makes his servant kill him so that people won’t say that a woman succeeded in killing him. Samson gets obviously betrayed by his girlfriend 3 times, yet still tells her his deepest secret. Oh, and he also killed a thousand men with nothing but a bone. Who writes this stuff?
Err…well, ok, we know Who. But…why? My first impression of the story of Israel during the time of the Judges is that it’s a wild mess. It was a wild west thing, with everyone doing their own thing. Israel, as a whole, is certainly not serving God consistently. They have their spurts, I suppose, but clearly “every man did what was right in his own eyes” was a very accurate description. So…what’s the point?
That is, what’s the point for me? What does the state of a nation ruled off and on by judges have to do with my life? Well, here are a couple of thoughts:
- Human nature – clearly we see a lot of that in Israel. There is no tendency of mankind to better themselves. There’s no tendency to stay on track once they get there. The tendency is to forget, get into trouble, and then beg for forgiveness. Nice to know it’s not just me.
- Human leadership – in the long run, it doesn’t really help. Oh, many of the judges may have whipped the nation into shape for a while. But, each of the judges demonstrated clearly that they had their own personal problems. And even when they did succeed in getting Israel to behave, it never lasted for long.
- Human…weirdness – I heard someone say recently that we all think we struggle differently. An interesting concept. Certainly, I’ve never been faced with a predicament where I had to sacrifice my daughter to keep a vow. But in all of the many, many weird stories, there are many common threads of sin, and need. It seems we are all similar in out weirdness.
