ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 1 · Judges 2:6-23; Judges 21:25
A generation rises that knew not the LORD, and the same four beats repeat for three hundred years: sin, servitude, crying out, a deliverer.
The book of Judges opens with an obituary. Joshua dies at a hundred and ten, and in time the men who crossed the Jordan with him die too. Then comes the sentence the rest of the book grows out of: there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel (Judges 2:10).
One generation. Their parents had watched the river stand up in a heap and the walls of Jericho come down. These children had been told about it, or had not been told, and either way it had not taken. Deuteronomy 6 had said how faith passes from one generation to the next: teach these words to your children, in the house and on the road, lying down and rising up. Judges 2 is what happens when a people stop doing that. Thirty years is enough.
Judges 2:11-19 lays out the pattern the whole book will follow. Israel does evil and serves Baalim. The LORD sells them into the hand of their enemies. Under the oppression they cry out. The LORD raises up a judge who delivers them, and the land has rest as long as that judge lives. Then, when the judge was dead, that they returned, and corrupted themselves more than their fathers (Judges 2:19).
More than their fathers. Each turn of the wheel lands lower than the one before. Othniel, the first judge, has a short, clean record. Samson, the last, breaks every vow he carries and dies in a Philistine temple, and in the chapters after him the tribes are at war with one another and Benjamin is nearly wiped out by its brothers.
The judges of this book spent little time in anything like a courtroom. The Hebrew word (shophet) means one who sets things right, and here it mostly means a deliverer God raises for a particular crisis. A judge held no office he could hand to his son and built no palace. When the crisis ended his work ended with it. Gideon said so when the people offered to make him a king: I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you (Judges 8:23).
That was how Israel was meant to live. The LORD was their king. His law governed the tribes, elders judged in the town gates, and when the people cried out he sent a man to rescue them. There was no standing army and no royal tax. Such an arrangement could only hold while the people knew the LORD, and Judges 2:10 has already said that they did not.
The book ends on a sentence it has used four times since chapter 17: In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25). Part of what it means is that Israel is going to need a king; Ruth, the book that follows, ends on David's name. But the sentence also accuses. Israel had a King all along. Every man in the land simply did as he pleased instead, and no change of government would have cured that.
From here the story runs through the kings Israel asked for, through Solomon's house and the prophets who preached outside it, through two destructions of that house, and on to the King who came in the flesh. The question Judges asks at the start follows it all the way: what does it take for a people to know the LORD and not forget him?
Scripture's answer is a person. A judge saved Israel for one lifetime and then died, and the land forgot. Christ lived the obedience that no judge or king ever managed, died for the sins of his people, and rose; and he does not die and leave them to forget him, for he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25).