Alright, well with this lesson 18, looking at Israel under the judges, we're following on the heels with Israel, conquering the promised land under the leadership of Joshua, and last lesson, and I found a really wonderful quote I've always liked from this book I've recommended to you before Pathways and Scripture. It's definitely in our suggested reading list at the end of these notes. But I wanted to read this quote to you from Demazus Winson, and I think it's a really great segue to what we're going to be studying in this lecture. And this is what he says, here on the top of your notes.
The conquest of the Holy Land under the leadership of Joshua marks the end of the first phase of Jewish history, which began with the liberation of the chosen people from bondage in Egypt. It is the age of Israel's childhood, when God calls his son out of Egypt, takes him by the hand, and leads him with cords of love. With the conquest of Palestine, Israel leaves the kindergarten of the desert, and enters upon the trials and temptations of adolescence. These are described in the book of Judges.
So that's a really good quote I think it really explains, a lot of what we've seen already, God calls Israel to be his firstborn son, an Exodus 4, 22, brings him to Sinai, and Israel's very much in the infantile stage. In fact, that's actually probably pretty appropriate to call it the infantile stage, because of all their murmuring and the wilderness, and yet God is a patient, father, and he's always bringing them back to himself and disciplining Israel as a son. Well, now I can kind of look at Judges as like the teenage years, I suppose, and every age has its own problems. If you have kids, and you've had maybe older kids now, and you've seen your child from the time they're born, till the time they reach adulthood, every age has its problems, and that is certainly the case here in the book of Judges.
So before we dive in and look at some of the main highlights, as we always do, I thought it would be good just to give you a little bit more of a frame of reference for the book itself, like we did with Joshua. This is a period of about 300 years. It ranges from the death of Joshua all the way to Samuel, which we're going to cover in the next lesson, the appearance of the Prophet Samuel and the book of First Samuel. So 300 years at the very, very long time, and the book of Judges is divided into three pretty nice and clean divisions.
So you first have a couple chapters, really chapter one all the way through the beginning of chapter three, which is kind of an introduction and overview of prologue, the period of the judges after Joshua's death and after the death of that entire generation underneath Joshua, because it was a pretty, things are going pretty well as we saw last time with Joshua, they conquered the Promised Land, and there were some things unresolved, and we're going to see that play out now. So that's a bit of an overview of what happens after he dies, and then you get into the period of the judges properly, so called, right? So there's 12 judges, which is very easy to remember and to understand. 12 judges for the 12 Tribes of Israel.
Don't be confused, though. It's not like there's one judge for each of the 12 Tribes. It's this symbolic number here, of course, that God really wants to raise that people to lead all 12 Tribes. And we'll get there in just shortly.
But these 12 judges deliver Israel from oppression of various nations who have gotten the upper hand over Israel because of Israel sin. And then at the final section, you got a number of chapters 17 through the end of the book, 21, with a lot, unfortunately, a lot of drama, problems, corruption. It's lit, liturgical corruption, spiritual corruption, moral corruption. It's a disaster, an absolute disaster.
And we're going to cover that at the end of our lesson here. So throughout the period of the judges, as you go through these 12 judges, there is pretty much every single commentator on the judges will point this out. There is this recurring sevenfold cycle of covenant disobedience. And every single little cycle is like the Exodus relived over again.
So it's just these Exodus, these Exodus echoes through, well, let me just read these five points here in your notes. This happened seven times. Okay. So first sin is real corrupted by the culture.
That's certainly true because they don't drive out the inhabitants amongst them from their midst. They fall into the culture and they did quote unquote what was evil in the side of the Lord. What was evil in the side of the Lord is a constant refrain throughout the book of judges. So they sin the next, they're conquered by a foreign power.
So that's the phase of servitude. Okay. So again, think Exodus here like servitude like they were under Egypt, even if it wasn't as bad as Egypt, they still are oppressed by a foreign power. And then the third phase of supplication.
So they cry out to God, deliver us from oppression. We need your help. Okay. Just like they did with the Egyptians and then God sends a judge to deliver them from oppression into freedom.
That's the stage of salvation. Again, that's kind of like a Moses type figure there. It then there's silence. There's quote unquote rest in the land, right?
So there's rest in the land. However, there is no sign of true repentance that people do not learn their lessons and then they fall into the same cycle again, sin, servitude, supplication, salvation and silence that happened seven times throughout the book of judges, seven being the number of covenant. But in this case, it's the number of covenant breaking. Poor Israel is breaking the covenant that they have with God over and over and over again.
Okay. Now, when you're looking at the judges, something is something very shocking. You're going to notice right away. The judges themselves are not necessarily upright, moral and spiritual leaders.
God doesn't call saints in this period. It's not called saints to leave his people. The judges are deeply flawed individuals, but they're military and civil leaders that God raises up for the good of the people to deliver them from oppression. All right.
The Levites are really supposed to as the priests are supposed to lead the people into holiness. Remember everything that we said about the book of Leviticus before there. The people are meant to be set apart for holiness, holy living, holy worship. But as we're going to see at the end of this period of salvation history, at the end of the judges, the Levites themselves are corrupt and they are not leading the people into righteousness.
So the judges themselves don't think that the judges are supposed to be the saints who lead the people into a proper worship of God in a virtuous life. No, they're deeply flawed. And I'm going to point out some highlights here throughout this lecture, but they're primarily military deliverers. Okay.
And I think that will help make sense as you read their stories. All right. So you've got six major judges. They're listed here in your notes as well as minor judges.
The only difference really is that the minor judges have very little, what I like to call airtime. Okay. The major judges have a lot of scripture. The most and we'll end with his story of the highlights at least.
And so they have more airtime, a little bit more description as to what happened, what was the situation, how they delivered Israel, et cetera. The minor judges maybe get a verse or two, maybe tiny bit more. All right. So not very much.
Now, another really important key theme to keep in mind is that this entire period is plagued by one, a rejection of God, which you can totally see in that recurring cycle of sin, right? They're rejecting God. They're not repenting. And then also to a rampant, deeply rooted moral relativism is shocking how moral relativism is depicted as one of the root causes for this recurring cycle of covenant breaking, right?
So we're going to see in the last part of the book of judges, there is this verse that forms what we call, it's a literary device. It's called an inclusio. Think of it as like book ends, book end versus that really cap off a particular section. And those verses highlight the theme of that section.
Now, you can have these inclusios be just a few versus long chapter, a book, whatever it might be. In this case, it runs from judges 17, six all the way through judges 21, 25. And the versus this, in those days, there was no king in favor. In Israel, every man did what was right in his own eyes, right?
So that summarizes those two issues that they're dealing with at the time. They are rejecting God. There's no king in Israel. So there's no physical king that sits on a physical throne, as we're going to see later on in the United Kingdom.
But really, the point is God is not their king. They've rejected God as their king. And number two, every man did what was right in his own eyes. Okay.
So that's moral relativism. Hey, what's right for me is right for me. What's right for you is right for you. Don't judge, be tolerant.
I'm not sure if you're picking up on this, but this is a problem in our age as well. And it's a problem in every single age where you begin to think that you can do whatever you want. In fact, if you go all the way back to the Garden of Eden, this is what Satan said to Adam and Eve, right? You can be like God determining good and evil, meaning you can call the shots.
And this is what we're seeing right here as well. This is Satan's age old tactic that he used back then and he's using right now, do whatever you want, do whatever makes you feel good, do whatever you think is right in your own eyes. And really what that is is rejection of God. And that is going to be some of the root causes, not all of them.
I'll explain some more, but some of the root causes for the chaos that we're going to see in this period. Okay. Like I said, liturgical, spiritual, moral. Or insanity, what's going on?
So definitely grab yourself a glass of wine or whatever it is because it's, I don't know, I always ask my students, do you think that judges is worse than numbers or numbers worse than judges? And it's a toss up. So with that, let's dive in here with chapter one.