ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 2 · Judges 7; Judges 16:23-31; Ruth 4:13-22
Gideon with three hundred men, Samson with his eyes put out, and in the same days a widow from Moab whose great-grandson is David.
When the angel of the LORD finds Gideon, he is threshing wheat in a winepress so the Midianites will not see him, and the angel greets him as a mighty man of valour. Gideon asks for a sign, then another, then a third with the fleece, and God gives him all three. Then God thins his army. Thirty-two thousand men have come out, and God says that is too many, lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me (Judges 7:2).
Twenty-two thousand go home when they are told the fearful may leave. Of the ten thousand who stay, God keeps only the three hundred who lap water from their hands like dogs. They go down to the camp at night with trumpets, empty pitchers and lamps, and the Midianites turn their swords on each other in the dark. Nobody in Israel could say afterward that the army had won it.
The same Gideon then takes the gold earrings from the spoil and makes an ephod, and all Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house (Judges 8:27). He had turned down a crown a few verses earlier. His son Abimelech took the crown anyway and killed seventy of his brothers to hold it.
Samson was set apart as a Nazarite before he was born: no wine, no razor, nothing unclean. He went through the vow a piece at a time. He scooped honey out of a lion's carcass, married a Philistine, visited a harlot in Gaza, and finally told Delilah where his strength lay. When she had cut his hair and he woke to fight, he wist not that the LORD was departed from him (Judges 16:20). He did not even know.
The Philistines put out his eyes and set him to grinding in the prison house, and when they wanted sport they brought him into the temple of Dagon with three thousand people on the roof. He prayed for his strength once more and pulled the house down on all of them, so that the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life (Judges 16:30). Hebrews 11:32 counts him among the men of faith all the same. God used him, and Scripture does not clean him up.
The book of Ruth opens in the days when the judges ruled (Ruth 1:1), so the two books cover the same years, and they could hardly read more differently. Ruth was a Moabitess. Moab was the nation descended from Lot's incest (Genesis 19:37) and shut out of the congregation by the law (Deuteronomy 23:3). Yet when her Israelite husband was dead and her mother-in-law was going home with nothing, Ruth went with her: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God (Ruth 1:16). While the tribes in Judges were serving Baal, a foreigner was taking hold of the God of Israel.
Boaz, a landowner in Bethlehem, does more than the law required of him. He lets Ruth glean in his field and sees that she is protected, and when the time comes he buys back the family land and takes Ruth as his wife, as the near kinsman (the goel) had the right to do. It cost him money and gained him nothing a Bethlehem farmer needed, and he did it for a woman from Moab.
Ruth closes with a genealogy: Boaz begat Obed, and Obed begat Jesse, and Jesse begat David (Ruth 4:22). Judges had ended with no king in Israel. Here, two generations off, is the king's name. Through all those years of Baal and civil war God was bringing David's line forward through a widow from an enemy people, and Matthew sets her name in the first chapter of the New Testament (Matthew 1:5).
Gideon and Samson delivered Israel and could do nothing about Israel's heart, and both of them died. Boaz redeemed at his own cost. Christ took our flesh so that he would be our kinsman with the right to redeem, lived the obedience we owed and never gave, and paid for us with his own blood.