Judges Introduction • Turning from God

This is a women's Bible study on the book of Judges. And so last spring here in our Women of the Word studies, we left Israel in the land that God had promised to them since the days of Abraham. We studied the book of Joshua. And so in the Old Testament, in our English Bible, as the history books begin, we have Joshua and then we have Judges. They're kind of handy together because they both begin with the letter J. They are both six letters long, but that is where their similarities end because the book of Joshua was a time of triumph, remember? And the book of Judges is a time of turning. And that's the title of our entire Bible study, a time of turning. What do I mean by a time of triumph? Well, Joshua led Israel across the Jordan River. And so for the first time in the history of the world, God's people, whom he had chosen, the descendants of Abraham, were brought into God's place, which he had chosen, the promised land, for God's purpose, which was to bring forth the Messiah to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. So Joshua was really a fantastic study that way. God had gifted this land to Israel, but they would need to lay hold of it through some battles. It would be like if I gave you a gift and I said, here's this basket of oranges for you. I'll set it right over here. But you, at some point, have to get up from your chair and walk over and lay hold of it in order to take it away. It's yours when I give it to you, but there is some effort that you need to do in order to lay hold of it. And Israel did that effort in the book of Joshua. They did lay hold of the land for a while, for a season, to a certain extent, but then upon the death of their leader, Joshua, their passion to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord began to wane and they started doing what was right in their own eyes. And so that brings us into a time of turning, turning from what was doing right in the eyes of the Lord to what was doing what they felt was right in their own eyes. And that is a theme, that's one of the themes for the book of Joshua. In fact, that is the last sentence of this entire book. I'll put it on the screen for you. Judges, you know what, you guys? If I say the book of Joshua, and I mean judges, just translate that. And if I say the book of judges, if I get those mixed up, you just translate it. The last verse of the book of Judges, 21-25.

, okay? So that is kind of a banner over our study as well. It's an accurate characterization of this whole book. People turning away from obedience to the Lord and turning toward doing what they think is right. And so this is point number one of why this Bible study is so relevant for us in our day, because this is exactly what we're living through. As a nation, we began turning away from obeying the Lord a long time ago and doing what's right in our own eyes. And we're only now beginning to feel the full weight of that in our culture. Well, every time we start a new book, we wanna look at some background information. And so that's what we're gonna do now. We're gonna do some of the hard work. First, we talk about the timeframe. When did judges happen? Well, judges makes this smooth transition for us from the book of Joshua, where God led his people into the land of promise. And then it's going to transition us into the book of Samuel, where we will have the first king of Israel. So in terms of numbers, if we place the death of Joshua around 1375-ish BC, and if we place the coronation of Saul around 1050 BC, we have about 325-ish years between that. And that is what is going to make up the book of Judges. Now, who wrote the book of Judges? The author is not stated. Jewish history says that it was Samuel, who is both a prophet and a judge as well. And I think that makes good sense to me that it was written by Samuel. But what was the purpose? What was the purpose that Judges was written for? And I wanna say that there's three things that form a purpose for Judges. A history lesson, what actually happened in Israel during those 325 years, a theology lesson, what do we learn about God during this time, and a spiritual lesson. What can I learn by reading through this to apply to my own life? So first, the historical purpose. Again, it's to connect two time periods in the nation of Israel. The period when there was no judge in Israel to the period when there was a judge in Israel. And so I wonder, are there any generalizations that we can make about this time period? When we start a new book, I always love to dig through and say, is there a sentence? Is there a phrase that maybe forms a key for this whole book? And for me, I found that phrase, and so that's why I named the Bible study this. It is in Judges 2, verse 17. I will put it on the screen. It's also in your study guide at the bottom of this introduction page. And it is this.

. That pretty much summarizes this book between Joshua and the kings. They turned away. So it is a time of turning. What we're about to study is a time of turning. That's not the happiest thing that we could ever think of to study, but it's very, very important for us, and we're going to learn some great things and really see God's character in this, which brings us to the theology and the spiritual purposes. So the narratives in Judges are intended to inform us about the disastrous consequences when people turn from God. That's pretty much the point of the book, is what happens when people turn from God. So we called it a time of turning. You know, when we think, when we use the word turn, probably most often we think, I'm gonna turn to the right, or I'm gonna turn to the left, but don't we also say that the hands of the clock turn? And so turning is also a circular motion, a clock or a combination lock. My first real job that didn't include food after high school and college was being a bank teller, and I enjoyed the people. That did not stress me dealing with the customers. It did not stress me to balance my till at the end of the day. I generally balanced. You know where my stress was? I was at such high anxiety on opening the combination lock every morning. Will I be able to open that little vault? I have always been lock challenged. It doesn't matter if it's combinations or keys. I can never figure out which way they go. So every morning I came with high anxiety. You know, I watch tellers nowadays, and it seems like they have like a key, you know? It's a little bit easier, but no, we had to do the combination lock, and I went to a small high school, and I never got practice. We didn't lock our lockers, and so anyway. But this, what we're going to see in judges is a circular cycle. It's gonna happen over and over again, and it looks like this. You start at 12 o'clock, and the nation of Israel begins to do, not do what's right in the eyes of God, but rather do what's right in their own eyes. God takes notice of that, and He wants better for His kids. So He brings oppressors into them to oppress them to make their life difficult so that they might turn back to Him. It works, and Israel pays attention, and they cry out to the Lord in their distress. They repent. Sometimes they're merely remorseful, and God hears them, and what does He do? He raises up a judge for them to defeat those oppressors, to draw them back to him, and then they encounter a time of peace, which brings them right back up to 12 o'clock, and they do it all over again, over and over. Six times we'll read this, and as we read this, we'll begin to see, ah, this is human nature. We do this. A time of peace can be our worst enemy sometimes, because we can tend to forget God during times of peace. What do we notice about God's response in here? What is our theology lesson as we go through this book? We see God's response is always one of faithfulness. He hears his people cry out, and he is willing to send help and to restore his people into fellowship. Okay, so what about these judges, these persons that were judges? Who were they? How were they chosen? And how did they lead? Well, let's talk about what they're not. They're not like a president of the United States who is elected by people and leads from the same location, the White House, as we have the cycle. They're not like that. They're not like a king who is raised up and then passes on their rulership to their sons. It's not like that. They're also not like judges that we think of like a judge, like I'm on jury duty this month, and when I go in, there will be a judge there, and we think of judges, whether it's in our county court or all the way up to Supreme Court, we think of judges as listening to evidence and then ruling with a verdict. That's not what they were either. These men were more political and military leaders that were raised up in different regions of Israel. On page nine, there's a map, and you'll begin to see that over the 300-ish years, there is, they're all over the place. God raised up different men and a woman from all over the places. So, 12 in all, we're gonna study through 12 judges. Now, if you like to read your Bible, if you know your Old Testament, or if you're a Sunday school teacher, you know some of the names. You know Gideon, you know Samson, you probably know Deborah, and those are among what we call the major judges, okay? There are six major judges and six minor judges, and I'll bet that you have heard, at least heard the names of the major judges. They include Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson. Now, the six minor judges, even if you know your Bible very well, when I say them, you'll go, oh, yeah, maybe I heard about that guy. They are Shamgar, Tola, Jer, Ibn, Elan, and Abdon, okay? They're minor because not very much is said about them, even though they serve the same purpose. So, again, the time period. The first judge, which you'll study this week, Othniel, he was actually a boy, he overlaps with Joshua. Joshua was an old man when Othniel was on the scene, and our last judge, Samson, was actually already, he was an old man when Samuel was on the scene. So, we have this overlap on both sides of us. And so, like I said, in the first week of study, when you leave here, you're gonna study chapters one, two, and three. You'll already study the first three judges that we have. So, I want to remind you about something because every one of us in here is a Western thinker. And Western readers, Western thinkers, we love things in chronological order. We love it to be when you're reading a story, first this happened, then this happened, and the result was that. And that's generally how we write things, but not so much with Hebrew literature. And so, what we're gonna find out is that sometimes when we're reading the Bible, we're going through a chronology and boom, all of a sudden we have something different. We have like a summary or an overview or something that microscopically looks into one thing or expands out to that. And that's what happens in Judges chapter two. And so, that's what I'm going to use this morning for an introduction. We're gonna go through some of the scriptures. You can open your Bible to Joshua, see, Judges chapter two. When I eat my Oreo, I am a dunker. So, I grab an Oreo and I dunk it in my coffee, preferably, if there's no hot coffee around. Milk, but not almond milk, that would be terrible. But I have had some children, and I bet you have too. What do they do with an Oreo? They twist it apart and lick off every bit of the white. And I'm like, ooh, it makes my teeth hurt how sweet that is. But that's kind of what we're doing this morning. We're finding the creamy filling right in the middle of chapters one through three, because all of a sudden, we find, in the middle of chapter two, it gives us the summary, the introduction, overview, and summary that we need this morning to get into this book. So, Judges chapter two, verse six. We're actually gonna cover 13 verses this morning. So, by the time you get to study them, you'll have a head start. And I'm gonna start reading in verse six.

. Stop there. Those last two verses are almost identical to where we left off last spring with Joshua. You can just take them and overlap them very nicely, and it gives us an understanding of exactly where we're at in scripture. But it's the next verse that is new information for us, and we wanna really pay attention to, verse 10.

. Stop right there. That's our theme for today. Do you notice the big problem we find in verse 10? They did not know the Lord. They did not know the work he had done for Israel. Now, that's curious. Was this information suppressed from them? Was this information buried somewhere that they did not know the Lord? I think that's unlikely. I think they had access to the information. When it says they did not know the Lord, I think we can read that they forgot the Lord. Have you ever forgot something on purpose? Oh, say a dental appointment coming up or something like that. We know what it's like to forget something on accident. We also know what it's like to forget something on purpose. If it's something we don't wanna do, a confrontation, okay? If you need to confront somebody, you put it off, you don't wanna think about it, let's forget about that. And we can purposefully forget. Now, actually in chapter three, it uses that phrase, they forgot the Lord. So the truth is they did have information about the Lord, but just because we possess information about God, just because we have knowledge about God, just because we memorized 112 verses in Awana does not mean we know the Lord, right? I memorized all kinds of Bible verses before I knew the Lord. So it's easy to collect information, it's easy for us to say the same things, go the same places, do what we've always done all the while the relationship is cooling. Israel was in a covenant relationship with Yahweh. They knew that he led them out of Egypt. They knew what he had done for them, but their failure was to honor him and to nurture that relationship. So when it says they did not know the Lord, what we understand is they forgot the Lord, they edited him out of their life, is what they did. They turned from God. That's the title for today's introductory teaching, turning from God. So when you study this week for next week's lesson, the title is going to be Turning to Idols. So here's a question for you. Do people turn from God because they have turned to idols? Or do people turn to idols because they've turned from God? You can think about that. Another question, was this the first generation's fault that the second generation didn't know the Lord? Is the blame to be placed on the first generation? Or did the second generation fail on their own merit? In other words, are we to take from this verse, parents, if you do everything right, your kids will not forget the Lord. That is a level of pressure I would put on no one, because even God did not live up to that. He had kids that went off the rails. And so right here in this moment, I think one thing, certainly, certainly, we have a responsibility. Each generation has a responsibility to pass on not only information about the Lord through teaching of the Bible, but the inspiration to follow Him from the testimony of what it has meant in our lives. But the kids have a free will, and they stand and they fall on their own merit. My choices in life are not my mother's responsibility. Okay? And so I always like to find places that we can state that to each other, because I feel like a lot of women in the church suffer under a weight of guilt regarding their children's choices. And so this verse is not to teach us that if that first generation had done everything perfectly, the next would have done it perfectly too. So I want to get past that. What do people do? What does it look like when they don't really have an intimate knowledge of God? What are the characteristics of those kind of people? Let's keep on going on. Verse 11.

. That's what it looks like. Look at those phrases. Abandon the Lord, provoke the Lord, go after other gods, do what's evil in the sight of the Lord. This very succinctly describes a society that has turned from God. It describes our society that has turned from God. So here's another theology question. What does God do when His kids go off the rails? What is His response? Let's keep reading. Verse 14.

. Discipline. That's what God does when His kids go off the rails. He disciplines them. He doesn't push them away. He doesn't punish them forever, but He brings discipline upon them. God promised this to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament. Hebrews 12.6 promises to us the Lord disciplines the one He loves. This is one of our Bible promises. But God doesn't discipline just to make our life difficult. He does it for a redemptive purpose, and this is what we see in the book of Judges. The redemptive purpose is that people will remember Him and cry out in their distress so that He can act upon that and restore the relationship. And so verse 16 says the Lord raised up judges who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them. Look at the rescue of the Lord. It's awesome. We already read verse 17, so let's talk about the impact of the judges in verse 18.

. I am very sorry to end on such a sad note, but those 13 verses really form an introductory and a summary of what happens when people turn from God. Do you see now how this study is called a time of turning? And it's really sobering to read. It's difficult to read, but it's a very important part of God's plan of redemption. And like I said, we will see the character of God. We will see His mercy in this. And when people turn from God at any level, at the individual level, when a church turns from God, when a nation turns from God, there are characteristics that we see, and usually these precede the consequences that we see. That's what we're going to study. Now in the New Testament, there's a companion verse that I think puts it into slightly different words. I want us to look at Romans chapter 1, verse 21, 22, 28. And this is the way Paul put it.

. And so here in the New Testament, we have these characteristics that are described as futility of thinking and foolish minds and debased minds. And these are characteristics of people or a society that has turned from God. And we can identify this very easily around us, can't we? So they're nothing new, nothing new under the sun. What we are going through is a very ancient process. And we see it right here. That alone should settle our hearts to say, huh, humans have been the same for centuries and centuries and centuries. And you know what? God has been the same too. God has always been faithful. God has always been merciful. God has always been watching out and reaching out for His kids. Now, we don't want to leave an introduction like this being frustrated with people. Last thing we want to do is say, oh, those Israelites, right? Or the last thing we want to say is, you know, I bet you everybody in this room has a sibling that has turned from the Lord. You're here. You have some sibling or husband or child who has turned from the Lord. So we don't want to say, oh, that person in my life. And we also don't want to say, oh, America, if you would only just... No, no, no. Here's what we want to get out of this Bible study. Could this happen to me? Right? We always want to say, what does this mean to me? And so in order to drill that point home, I just want to share in my Through the Bible reading, I was in Daniel. And so I want to share a little bit about King Nebuchadnezzar real quick. You probably know about him. So King Nebuchadnezzar was the guy who built the great big statue and said, when you hear the harp and the lyre and all that, you're supposed to bow down. Of course, Daniel did not bow down. And he and his friends got snitched on. And that was the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, thrown into the fiery furnace. They didn't burn. They didn't even smell like smoke. And they come out. And King Nebuchadnezzar is so impressed. He's like, your God is God. We might say he got saved, but he's impressed with the creator God. So we get to chapter four. And what does he do? He kind of is the ruler of the whole world at this point. And he sends a memo to the whole world. And he says these words about Daniel's God. How great are his signs? How mighty his wonders. His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and his dominion endures from generation to generation. That is how Daniel chapter four begins. Those are the words of King Nebuchadnezzar, giving all credit, all honor, all glory to creator God. Then we go down the way a little bit and all of a sudden it says 12 months later, okay, a cycle, is not this great Babylon which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty, a time of turning. That's human nature. That level of being at peace and building up pride is a propensity that we should all take note of and be warned and say to ourselves, ah, I could do that too. Of course, in this story, the minute the words came out, he was humbled, driven from among men, made to eat grass like an ox and then ultimately restored. So God was even gracious to King Nebuchadnezzar. But it boils down to humility and knowing God and honoring God and walking with him. So I just want to end with a text from Hebrews, Hebrews chapter two. I think this summarizes really succinctly as a message for us to walk out with. It says, therefore, we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard lest we drift from it. And that is the danger. The danger is in the drift. The danger is in the turning. The danger is in editing God out of our lives. The danger is in taking credit ourselves. So some, you know, I talked about women who have kids that aren't walking with the Lord. Hey, here's the danger. Oh, all of my children are walking with the Lord. Okay, that creates a drift. And so we need to just have that mind as we enter into this Bible study and say, what is this passage saying to me? So let's pray about that. Okay. Father God, would you open our eyes as we study and as we see. And Lord, we just as a group, we want to determine to know you. We want to determine to remember you. I think of that verse, remember your creator in the days of your youth. And we want to determine to walk with you and put our lives in such a way that it makes it very difficult for us to forget you in our life. And so we thank you right here and right now for what you have done for us. We thank you for the works that you have done, because that is a really important part of remembering who you are, is remembering your works toward us, Lord. So I pray that you would lead us and guide us as we study each in our homes, as we come together and discuss in coming weeks. And we just commit this to you in Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.