Judges 2: 10-19

As we move through the various books of the Old Testament we come face to face with the reality of the human heart after the Fall – we are all about ourselves.  Our tendency is to tell ourselves that we are okay, that we are good people.  We compare ourselves with someone “really bad” and then declare that we are doing all right.  But the Bible paints a different picture.  It paints a picture that shows the downward spiral humanity finds itself on once we rejected God’s sovereignty and decided we should rule our own lives.

 The book of Judges shows us what kind of relationship we were intended to have with Him.  It is supposed to be like a marriage covenant – a relationship of fidelity, loyalty and trust.  In an effort to restore this relationship – that He had done nothing to damage mind you – God puts in place a series of judges to help lead His people.  But as the book of Judges makes it clear, humanity’s response was to “whore after other gods.” In fact, as verse 19 points out, each time a judge died the people behaved even worse than they had previously.

The cause of this downward spiral was simple.  In verse 10 we are told that a generation arose that did not know the Lord God and what He had done for them.  They had no context for their lives other than themselves and what was running around inside their heads.  The same is true for us so many years later.  When we forget what the Lord has done for us – either because we are too focused on ourselves or because we have failed to actively open His word – we lose perspective.  We lose a nuanced sense of time and so we lose the ability of seeing the difference between what is truly important and what is simply tugging at our sleeves at that moment.

The call to God’s people has always been to keep the memory of His saving actions to forefathers at the front of our minds and hearts; and of course to teach them to the coming generations.  When we keep this perspective of life, everything else has a way of falling in to place so that we have the ability to see the world in a more realistic way.