Judges and Ruth present a compelling exploration of the tension between living life our way versus God’s way. We delve into how the narratives of these two books highlight the consequences of choosing personal desires over divine guidance. Through the stories of figures like Gideon and Samson, we learn that while these characters achieved great victories, they ultimately faltered due to a lack of spiritual integrity. The contrasting tale of Ruth emphasizes loyalty and faithfulness, illustrating that even in difficult times, God’s presence and purpose remain. This episode encourages us to reflect on our choices and consider the importance of aligning our lives with God’s will.

Takeaways:

1. This podcast explores the historical and thematic context of the Book of Judges and Ruth.
2. We learn that the actions of the Israelites in Judges illustrate the consequences of ignoring God's commands.
3. The podcast emphasizes the importance of teaching and passing on biblical truths to future generations.
4. Judges reveals a cycle of sin and redemption that reflects the spiritual state of Israel during that time.
5. Ruth's story demonstrates that even in difficult times, God's faithful people can still serve Him.
6. The overarching message encourages us to choose God's way over our own, regardless of societal pressures.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. www.bible805.com

The transcript for this podcast is A.I. generated and though it has all the content, it has odd breaks, spelling, and spacing.

For an almost exact copy of the text, go to the www.Bible805.com site for downloadable NOTES or to the www.Bible805Academy.com for downloadable and editable Notes, Discussion Guide, Audio and Video files, plus the original PowerPoints—for your personal study or all you need to teach the lesson.

I'm sorry the following is such a mess--I'm trying to work with the hosting company to correct this, but so far it hasn't worked out--but again the correct transcript is on the www.Bible805.com site.

Welcome to through the Bible in chronological order from Bible 805 and Yvon Prehn. This podcast is a somewhat unique and I trust, a helpful historical and thematic commentary on the readings in the Bible. It's not a verse by verse study,.

But one that I pray you'll find thoughtful and challenging. New episodes are released each Wednesday and.

Today our lesson is Judges and Ruth My way or God's Way? How to live the best Way from our earliest days, we want to do things our way. We don't want anybody else to tell us what to do.

Though we may appear to go along with rules as we get older, in our heart of hearts we often think we know what's best for us. But do we?

The Book of Judges and Ruth give us interesting pictures from the Old Testament on what happens to individuals and people when they either do what they want to do, regardless of what God wants, or trust him, no matter how difficult it might be. Judges is a little studied book in its entirety, but as you'll see, it's a very relevant one for our world today and for us personally.

All the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. Tips on Reading Judges more correctly Remember or review the lesson on how to read the narrative parts of the Bible.

Keep in mind that not every story, not every narrative, every action recorded in the Bible is something to follow. Judges is an example of how God reports true events, but many are not positive ones.

Or we're supposed to understand as we see the people's actions and consequences, how people ought to behave and understanding consequences when they happen, keeping our previous reading in mind. In other words, on this you read earlier in the books of the Pentateuch, people were supposed to do this, this, this, and this.

When you get to Judges, you see what happens when they don't do that. And from their examples we need to learn how their successes and failures apply to our lives.

Be especially Careful in reading about heroes in Judges and as we go through the rest of the Bible. This may be the first time you've read Judges in detail.

And when you do, it might be surprising to see a more complete picture of characters such as Gideon and Samson, especially if you've only read about them in children's Bible stories. They did do some great things, but their lives and the lives of many we read about in the Bible are not worth ones to emulate.

Samson was a pretty immoral character most of his life, and yes, he did some great things for God, but we can't use their lives as moral lessons for us. We're reminded in Judges that the true hero of the book and in all the books of the Bible is God, not fallible human beings.

God is the one who shows mercy, who uses imperfect people to accomplish his plans, who keeps biblical history moving forward to accomplish his long term plan of redemption. Now let's look at the book itself. Joshua has died. As the book opens, Joshua has died. And he passed on the leadership too. And there's the problem.

The first problem in the book, he, as near as we can tell, really didn't. It says the people serve in Judges 2.

7 It says the people serve the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the Lord had done for Israel. And then it says Joshua died. After that, the whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors.

Another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. We're never told why Joshua and the other elders didn't intentionally train leaders to follow them.

But we see the results in the next 400 years from the death of Joshua until Saul becomes king. I'm asking, you know, why was this? What was the difference? And we're going to take a minute to contrast Moses and Joshua.

I'm sharing this simply as my opinion. It's not any categorical truth from Scripture.

But as I've thought about it, the reason why perhaps one passed on strong leadership and the other didn't. Here are some of my comments. Both of them led, legislated and fought numerous battles.

Even though the Israelites didn't go into the land, they still had to fight during those 40 years. There are many similarities in the demands of their lives. So that wasn't the reason.

The big difference as near as I can tell, is that Moses preached to the people continuously about how they ought to serve God.

And the results were not good.

I can't help but wonder if the history of Israel for the next 400 years would have been different if Joshua had cared as much about instilling the commands of God in the people as Moses did. Yes, there were battles to fight, but winning the land, or in our day and age, making lots of money, having fun, etc.

Doesn't mean a whole lot if hearts aren't won. We need to be intentional, consistent and persistent about living and then passing on biblical truth to coming generations.

We need to be more interested in preparing and challenging them with the Bible, with following God than anything else that we do for them. We're told to do this in Deuteronomy 6, where it says, these are the commands, the decrees and laws.

The Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land. This is Moses speaking so that you, your children, and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live.

By keeping all his decrees and commands, be careful to obey so that it may go well with you. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God. The Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates. Serving God in every possible way is to be a pattern in our lives.

Personal application, living. It is the most important thing we need to pass on. Now, how to do that.

I have just a couple of books here that I'd like to recommend to you that I think might be helpful as you build spiritual disciplines and habits into your lives. The first one is Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Donald S. Whitney. I cannot recommend this enough.

It is such a good book that will teach you how to build habits into your life that will help you grow as a follower of Jesus. And then the next one is just an old classic that if you haven't read it, read the Practice of the Presence of God.

It's so good to just remind you again how to bring the Lord into all parts of your life. Now, of course, no book has the authority and overall truth of the Bible, but both of these have some very good suggestions.

They're really ways to build spiritual disciplines or healthy spiritual habits into your lives. But because the children of Israel didn't do that, here's the overall pattern of what happened in the Judges. The people sin.

They give in to really base impulses. They serve other gods, the ones that they should have gotten rid of, but they didn't.

And then serving other gods results in moral deterioration that you can see especially in the later chapters of Judges. It just it public life and it just gets gross.

God punishes them by allowing the people who should have been conquered, such as the Philistines, to oppress them. The people cry out to God for deliverance. God responds and sends a judge who is not only a decision maker, but often a military leader.

And they're delivered. But then the cycle repeats itself when they forget God's deliverance and go back to worshiping other gods again and again.

We see the judge's actions in deliverance, but not. We don't ever see this in continued teaching or in many cases even in moral living as a leader.

And so because they didn't deal, the Judges didn't deal with the core issues of sin that caused the problems in the first place. The nation repeats the same mistakes, get into the same messes, and they need a judge to bail them out again and again.

Now here's a little bit better definition on who were the Judges overall. Warren Wiersbe defines biblical judge in this way.

He calls him a ruler, a military leader, one who decided in judicial matters over limited areas, no income or taxing power. It wasn't a hereditary office they were called though, and empowered by God.

Now he also says that the monotony of Israel's sins in the Book of Judges can be contrasted with creativity of God's methods of deliverance. No two stories are the same. There are some wild stories in the Book of Judges. Now, There traditionally are 12 named judges.

Some of them we know really well, such as Samson and Gideon, but others we don't know really much of anything about. But there was a judge named Ehud, another Shamgar, Tola, Jair, Ebon, Elon, and Abdon. The Lord knows and they delivered the people.

But we won't know their stories till heaven. But let's look at a few of the more complete stories though, that we do have. First of all, Deborah. Her story is told in Judges 4 and 5.

Israel had been suffering 20 years of oppression. She was already leading Israel and serving as a judge. She is also the only identified female author of scripture.

She wrote the passage that's quoted in Judges 5. God called her to deliver the people. She summons Barak to lead the army. She directs everything, but she tells him he is to lead it.

He is victorious, though the war ends with the opposing general being killed by Jael, a Kenite woman. The Kenites were actually relatives of Moses. Once again, the land has rest for 40 years now.

A few comments about Deborah she's the only judge who is also called a prophet until Samuel. She's the only one who was actively serving God when she was called to deliver the people.

Most of the others that we know about, they were doing other things and God just called them to do what he wanted them to do. She's the only one who writes a psalm of praise after the victory which is included in the Bible.

And it's interesting though, and this is a whole huge other topic that we won't get into now.

She there's no comment in the Bible that she was unique or unusual or that she was the only example of a woman during this time who led, prophesied, and held a position of spiritual authority and power. Huldah is a later prophet. And there are other Miriam, of course, previously. But the story of Deborah.

There's nowhere in the Bible that says, oh, this was just really a weird thing and, you know, never happened before since. But again, much more could be said on that for another time. Moving right along, let's talk about Gideon.

In Judges 6 through 9, Israel was oppressed by the Midianites for seven years. They were also descendants of Abraham. They were the people that Moses fled to.

But something had gone wrong, very wrong, in their relationship with the Jews. In the intervening years, idol worship was rampant in public In Gideon's town. There was an altar to baal. But the angel of the Lord appears to him.

He's hiding and he's threshing grain. And the angel says, the Lord is with you, mighty warrior, mighty man of valor. Gideon protests, if God is with us, why all the problems? He asks.

The Lord doesn't answer him, but simply calls him to be a deliverer. Then we have the situation with the fleece. Gideon is testing to see if God would make it wet or dry to confirm his calling.

Now, this was not a sign of trust, but it was a sign of his continuing unbelief. God told him what he was going to do and he just didn't believe God. God is merciful in his answer. But we aren't commanded to do this.

It is not an example that we should follow in how we should trust God. But Gideon gets his answer. He calls out the army. But then the Lord reduces his army from 22,000 to 300 and he gives them a great victory.

Our lesson here, if you don't think you have the resources to do what God wants, that might be precisely the point, precisely where God wants you to be. But after the victory, the people wanted Gideon to rule over them. He refused.

But then he turns around and makes a golden ephod, which is kind of like a breastplate that you put on. And the people worshiped it Again, a physical battle has taken place with no spiritual revival. Gideon won the war, but lost the spiritual battle.

There are 40 years of peace, but then the people return to sin. And his son Abimelech kills all his brothers and is a tyrant until he dies. Now, little parentheses here.

While all this drama is going on, the story of Ruth is taking place at the same time. There's a famine in Israel during the time of the judgment. Judges and Elimelech and Naomi go to Moab to see if there's food there.

They go to live there for a while. Their sons marry Moabite women, two sons, then all three men die. Naomi hears that things are better back in Israel, and so she decides to go home.

Both daughter in laws start out with her, but one turns back. Only Ruth remains. Where you go, I'll go, Ruth says.

And the most significant part of her declaration is when she also follows that by saying, your God will be my God. They go back to Bethlehem. Now, it's really important to recognize that this was obviously a city that still revered God and lived by his laws.

There was much sin going on in the land, but here was a godly city. And we see that, that they obeyed the laws of gleaning and that of the kinsman Redeemer.

An important note here is there are always people who serve God, even in the midst of really evil times. You may feel alone in your work, in your school or your family situation. But stay strong. God is with you. And there are usually others also.

Now back to the story. Ruth and Naomi have no money, no income, no protector. So Ruth goes out to the fields to glean, in other words, to gather leftover scraps.

Ruth just happens to go into Boaz field. But of course, there are no accidents with God. Boaz, who is a descendant of Rahab, notices her and protects her.

He is her kinsman Redeemer, one who can buy their land, marry Ruth and have children to carry on the name of the family. He does that, and their son is Obed. He's the father of Jesse, who is the father of the coming King David.

Ruth is blessed in her life, and Naomi ends her life with joy. Now, some lessons of Ruth.

No matter how bad overall society may be, no matter how difficult personal circumstances may be, God always has his people who serve him. And God is at work in their lives and circumstances, perhaps in far bigger ways than you can imagine.

When he was younger, he married a Philistine woman, which was expressly forbidden, and it did not go well. He ends up killing a thousand of them in revenge.

This led to wars and troubles and all that, but he ends up victorious and he leads Israel as a judge for 20 years. But he never got over sins with women. He went to Gaza, which is a Philistine city, and there he visited a prostitute.

Sometime later, it says he fell in love with Delilah, another Philistine. After many deceptions, he finally realizes. He finally, excuse me, reveals the secret of his strength. His hair.

That he had been a Nazarite from birth and couldn't have his hair cut. But his hair is cut. He's suddenly weak and he's captured and his eyes are put out. But it says that the hair on his head began to grow.

The Philistines bring him to their temple so they can mock him. He's been a slave grinding grain, and they have made fun of him and they've tormented him.

And they decide they're going to make a public spectacle of him. So a big celebration. They bring him to their temple. He asks the young man, though with him, to put his hands on the pillars of the temple.

He does that. And as he does that, Samson prays. Sovereign Lord, remember me.

Please, God, strengthen me just once more and let me with one blow, get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes. And the entire temple crashes down. It's a great example of God's second chances. Now, really interesting little side note here.

When I was doing the research for this, I found this great thing. Those of you, if you can watch it on the YouTube video, you'll see the pictures of it. It's just really cool.

Archaeologists have uncovered some Philistine temples, and two of them, both temples have a very unique design, and that is that they were supported by two central pillars. These pillars supported the roof and they were made of wood and rested on stone supports.

And you can see in the picture that I have on YouTube of the stone supports that are remaining, and they're really close together.

They were only apparently about six feet apart, and a very strong man could dislodge them from their stone bases and bring the entire structure crashing down. And so we have this marvelous bit of archaeological evidence on how what Samson did was physically and structurally possible.

There are many additional reminders that these early stories are not fairy tales, but about real people and places. There are archaeological verifications of names, places, battlefields, timelines. This isn't a small thing.

Not all religious texts have verification like this. And I have other lessons on the Bible 805 website and YouTube channel that talk about how history helps confirm what we know in the Bible.

Also too, there is what's known as the Ras Simar excavation.

It's a huge city and you can see an aerial view of it that again, I have on the website where they made many, many discoveries of Canaanite culture and religion.

We have images of BAAL and an Asherah pillar and just lots and lots of things that once again, not only help us understand, but confirm what was in the Bible. Now, just to finish up the Book of Judges, it ends with really horrid, horrid stories.

In Judges 17 and 18, a Levite serves a man for pay, and then he uses his family idols as sort of a bargaining chip and sells himself to the highest bidder. It's quite terrible. A group of Danites comes by, they take the Levite with them, they go to another city, they slaughter Everybody. Judges 19.

Horrible story. Story of a Levite and his concubine who. Who is killed brutally. Then in revenge for her death, a tribe is almost destroyed.

And because of a foolish vow they kidnap women to be wives for the warriors. This is not how God's people were supposed to live. It ends with the summary statement I shared at the start. In those days, Israel had no king.

All the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. The challenge of Judges his way or our way? It's our choice.

Judges shows what happens when we do it our way and the results of not passing on how God wants His people to live. We have a choice. No matter what might be happening in our crazy world. Individual actions matter.

Romans 12:1 and 2 in the message tells us how to make positive choices where it says so and this is a message translation so here's what I want you to do.

God helping you take your everyday ordinary life, your sleeping, eating, going to work and walking around life and place it before God as an offering. Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God.

You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you and quickly respond to it.

Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity. God brings out the best, brings the best out of you, develops well formed maturity in you. It truly will make us most happy when we do that.

St. Augustine summed it up in this way when he said, you have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

And when we fail in resting in God, in living like he wants us to, we can admit it to him as Brother Lawrence did when confessing his faults to God, he said, I shall never do otherwise if you leave me to myself. Without God, we're a mess. He knows it and he loves us anyway. Our Lord, though, doesn't leave us to ourselves.

He's given us His Word, the Holy Spirit, our church and friends to remind us. So make it your goal that each day of your life and at the end of your life, don't say I did it my way, but I did it God's way.

That's all for now.

For notes from this lesson, related resources and links to teaching materials, go to www bible805.com in closing, I'm Yvonne Prin, your fellow pilgrim, writer and teacher for Jesus, and I'd like to close with this benediction.

May you know the invitation of God to move from confusion to clarity, from wandering to rest, from loneliness to knowing you are loved, from turmoil to peace, from wherever you are on your spiritual journey to a growing knowledge of God's Word and in your personal relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.