THE STORY OF THE JUDGES
‘The Lord raised up judges.’
Judges 2:16
The Book of Judges may have struck you as a strange sequel to the triumphant entry into the Promised Land, and even more to the promises themselves, which had spoken not only of conquest but of rest. The book covers a space apparently of at least three hundred years; and it is a record of ever-renewed conflict, danger, hardly-won deliverance.
The history of Israel, as it is written in the Bible, is in this respect, as in so many others, an allegory of human life. It is written ‘for ensamples, for our admonition.’ We see in it a picture of man’s waywardness, temptations, opportunities, as God’s Spirit sees them, and as His providence overrules them.
I. Here is perhaps the key to some perplexities which meet us in the great social questions which now happily occupy so much of men’s thoughts and energies.—We dream of Utopias, of a happy state of human existence, where poverty should not exist, nor the degradation and temptations which it brings with it, nor the painful contrasts of life. It is difficult to keep at once a warm heart and a cool head; to feel as they should be felt the shame of our civilisation and the pain of innocent sufferers; to feel them as spurs to action, and to wise and temperate, and therefore fruitful, action; not to despair of humanity, and not to rebel against Providence. It is here that the Bible may help us if we will. It never preaches that wrong is the result of God’s laws. It is the result of human sin and selfishness, past and present. It never preaches acquiescence in wrong, or even in the miseries which follow in its train. Even if the wrong itself be long past undoing, and the punishment of it such as must be counted for and accepted as part of God’s ordinance, yet it teaches us to look on the enemies of human happiness, whatever they are, as God’s enemies. It teaches us to look for His help, raising deliverers when the need is sorest. It bids us hope that even human wrong-doing and suffering may be overruled by His wisdom for ultimate good, for the discipline of the individual character, for the slow evolving from disorder of a richer and higher order.
II. Again, the parable may find its fulfilment in every smaller society.—We are exposed to the two temptations—at one time to fold our hands in the presence of evil, to think and speak of it as something that must be, and that need hang no weight on our hearts—at another either to chafe at it, to despair, to feel that God has deserted us; or again, to think by some short and easy method to stay not only its present power but all opportunities and channels of its recurrence. The Israelite was taught that it was not part of God’s will that the Amorite and the Philistine, powers of foulness and cruelty, should haunt and poison the sacred inheritance of God’s people. It was the unfaithfulness, the half-heartedness, of himself and of his forefathers which had left the evil root in the soil from which it should have been utterly cleared away. But he was taught also that the work which might, if men’s hearts were truer, have been done once and for all, must now be done piecemeal, done perhaps again and again, but done patiently, bravely, hopefully.
III. Once more, the story of the Book of Judges is a parable of our individual lives.—It is a sad thing, as life goes on, to feel that old faults, old temptations, old weaknesses, cling to us.
We dreamed of life as a land of promise which a few short sharp struggles in boyhood and youth would clear from all God’s enemies, and make a scene thenceforth of peace and Divinely protected service and progress. And we find that evil had deeper root than we thought. It is more nearly part of ourselves. When defeated in one part of our life it seems to break out with fresh energy in another. The struggle is never over. It is not that His hand is shortened, that He cannot save. It is not that our ideal, our dream, our hope, was untrue. It is that His purposes are wider than ours, as well as that our wills are weaker than we thought. He would have us learn to the full the lesson of our own sinfulness. Life might have been easier and freer from temptation to all of us if in the first sunny hours of youth we had listened more faithfully to the voice of conscience, if we had made no compromises with evil. He is punishing us, but He is also testing, proving, training us.
—Dean Wickham.
Illustrations
(1) ‘God intended Israel to be a peculiar people, separate from all nations of the earth, having absolutely nothing in common with the surrounding peoples. Amid all the sin and abominations of idolatrous nations, this nation was to be like a beacon light—pure, holy, separate, pointing all people to the one true God. Just this position God intends His Church to occupy in this dispensation, and this position He means every individual member of the Church to aspire to. Let each of us ask, “Am I occupying this position, as did Israel, as seen in Joshua, or am I failing, as did Israel, as seen in Judges?” ’
(2) ‘ “A nation of heroes,” says Carlyle, “is a believing nation. You lay your finger on the heart of the world’s maladies when you call it a sceptical world.” If we are doubtful whether God has been “our Help in ages past,” how can He be “our Hope for years to come”? The motto, “Forgetting the things which are behind,” concerns only our own attainments; it never applies to “the great work of the Lord.” What God does once is a revelation of what He is always. And since history is the foundation of faith, there is no higher task than that of teaching “another generation” to know the mighty acts of God.
Let Thy work appear unto Thy servants,
And Thy glory unto their children.’
(3) ‘ “Man cannot choose his duties,” says George Eliot. Neither can he choose the conditions of his toil and warfare. When the famous Spartan warrior, Brasidas, complained that Sparta was so small a state, his mother replied to him, “My son, Sparta has fallen to your lot, and it is your duty to serve it.” The times of the Judges were not earth’s “Golden Years,” but they had fallen to the lot of these men, and they wrought with all their might to do the will of God in the conditions possible to them.’