Judges – Introduction (Judges 1:1-10)

There is one consistent message in the bible for His people. That is, the message of complete and utter depravity (our inability to do good, be righteous and save ourselves), and the undeserved grace that is bestowed upon us by God through the blood of Jesus Christ. That is the one message that is repeated with various different people, different symbolisms, examples and stories.
The book of Judges is no exception to that – and from this week we’ll be going through the book of Judges from start to finish, and learning amazing truths from it.
As you know, Judges is a book detailing the accounts from when the Israelites have come out from Egypt, passed through the wilderness and entered the Promised Land.
Here, of course, the Promised Land ultimately symbolises heaven. But it also symbolises the concealed heaven that the people of God live through here in the world, as those who have been saved already but still live in the physical body. As such, we will be able to learn in detail what kind of wars we will fight as we live in the heaven that has infiltrated/penetrated this earth, and how we must fight those wars.

As you read through Judges, there’s a phrase you’ll come across often:
“In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.”
That’s why scholars think the book of Judges was written by Samuel. In 1Samuel, Israel, who needs to live with God as their King, having not acknowledge the true King and having lived as they saw fit, comes to Samuel and asks for a King. Samuel is using the book of Judges to depict that state of Israel.
So the book of Judges is  a book that contains detailed stories of how God takes those who need to live with God as their King, but live with themselves as the King, and one-sidedly decides to become their God anyway, through grace. So through Judges, our impossibility and our helplessness will be thoroughly exposed, and we’ll experience the amazing depth of God’s grace who just covers up that darkness of ours.
Of course, that is the entire narrative of the bible, not just the book of Judges. Which is why before we go into Judges this week, we’ll first look at summary of the contents of bible from Genesis up until the book of Judges.

The bible is divided largely into the Old Testament and the New Testament, but if you combined the whole thing, it is a book of one “Covenant”. The verse that describes the covenant well in just one phrase is Exodus 19:5-6:
<READ Exodus 19:5-6>
This is the unchangeable eternal covenant that God has given us. How does this covenant appear in Genesis? The covenant regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat the fruit from the tree, you will die, but if you do not eat from the tree, that is if you listen to me well and obey me, then you will live eternally.
Here, we have to understand correctly the meaning of obeying God. To say that the created, the creation is obeying the creator, is not merely adhering to a handful of regulations that God has given, but truly recognizing and acknowledging that I am nothing but mere dust in front of God and He owns my life.
God filling Himself into a truly empty vessel like that is called “Unity” and “Obedience”. Only then can creation become God’s people. The bible calls that state “life” and the rest is called “death”. So existence can only take place when united with God.
But to us mere creation, we do not have the ability to unite completely with God. In order for us to become being obedient to God, we need His almighty omniscientself to intervene in our lives.
That process of God coming into our disobedient lives, smashing up our pride that thinks we can be worthy of salvation, and making us fall flat on the ground before Him and submitting our entire selves to him (while still retaining our character and reason), is called Salvation.

1. The start of this narrative of salvation is Adam and Eve:

• See man who cannot obey the word of God
• God absolutely must punish them with death, as He said.
• But out of the blue comes the leather of a dead sacrificed animal and that leather covers the death of man.
• All creation is meant to live as naked, helpless being in front of God
• But the fact that Adam felt “shameful and fearful” means Adam started to grow his pride/self-respect.
• That is sin and that state is called death.
• But God gratuitously covers that failure of man.
• That is the grace of God’s covering.

2. Cain and Abel
<READ Genesis 3:23>
• Sent to work the earth – grace by God to continue to remind us of who we are. Dust. Because only when we see the truth of who we are, as nothing, we can be obedient to God.
• Cain wants his offerings, and kills Abel for it.
• The meaning of the name “Abel” is “Nothing”. That’s the rightful state of man before God – “Nothing”
• But the “Something” (Cain) kills “Nothing” (Abel)
• This is the start of the appearance of two distinct groups of people
o One group is the kind that murders others in order to keep their pride and self-respect
o Other group is the kind that is murdered by the first kind of people, but by grace of God’s covering, receive new life of resurrection.

3. Noah’s family and the rest
• God uses one individual Noah, and his family, to once again illustrate and re-iterate his message of covering grace.
• The entire world other than Noah are living as the Nephilim, the heroes and men of renown
<READ Gen6:4-8>
• As people are living like this, only Noah receives grace.
• How does Noah, who has received grace from God, live for 120 years? He is ridiculed, outcast and deserted by everyone = Noah’s death.
• Is that what you call life of grace? It should be!!!
• But in the end God only saves Noah, because the others are not attracted to grace, they’re attracted to strength, might and pride.

4. Tower of Babel
• God uses the incident of the tower of babel to once again see the limitless nature of people’s faith in their ability and their desire to be God.
• God completely crushes that.

5. Abraham’s life
• God then chooses one person, Abraham, to again explain in detail how His salvation is given only through His own grace.
• Abraham’s entire life is an illustration of how the start to finish of Salvation is all God.
• Begins with the idol worshiping, idol selling man and ends with the blood sacrifice of Mout Moriah (Isaac incident = cross of Jesus Christ)
• All Abraham did in the meantime was fail and fail again.

6. Abraham’s descendants (Israel) in Egypt
• Then God send the descendants of Abraham to Egypt to paint another clear picture of His salvation.
• He makes Israelites slaves to Egypt. He is directing the stage again to illustrate that His people will be beaten to death by the world.
• But in the end the people of the world who were beating the people of God to death will ultimately finish death, and the armies of Egypt that symbolises the might of the world, crashes down to drown in the Red Sea.
• But the people who were suffering in the hands of the world are freed and given life through the blood sacrifice of the Passover.
• All the people did in the meantime was whinge and moan.

7. Wilderness (Deuteronomy 8)
• Then those who have finally come out of Egypt and supposed to be heading for Canaan, are sent through the Wilderness for 40 years…. Why?
• The event that was the catalyst for that was when the Israelites were scared to fight the Anakites and said “we are never going to get into Canaan”.
• They were made to trust completely in the Lord and reserve their own judgement in favour of God’s promise and guidance – but they relied on their judgment more.
• That is the Adam who took the fruit from the tree of good and evil.
• God sends these Adams into the wilderness to experience for themselves how useless their own judgment is, how futile they are.
<READ Deuteronomy 8:1-3>
This is saying that the reason God sent Israelites into the wilderness is to expose the fact that they can’t keep God’s commandments with their own effort.
God uses the wilderness to teach us the truth that the fruits of the world that we are obsessed with is actually poison, and that true blessing is a life of obedience and submission to God. That wilderness is an absolute pre-requisite for all of God’s people.

And in that wilderness, God provides the law and the system of sacrifice offerings.
Why give them both at the same time?
Because they can’t keep the laws, and must learn grace. It is a carbon copy foreshadowing of the cross of Jesus Christ.
In that way the lives of God’s people are all full of the exposure of our impossibility, and to lead us to cling on to the grace of Jesus Christ. That impossibility and death to self was demonstrated by the death of all 600,000 old Israelites in the wilderness, and only the new born 600,000 Israelites (symbolizing the re-born Christians) were able to cross the Jordan, through grace.
That is the story up until Judges.