This post is part of my ongoing series of writing down my thoughts on the Bible passages I read each day. Some days I hope to have great insight that the Lord gives me, and many days, I will likely struggle through the text and not know what to write down based on what I read. My hope and prayer is that as I make this a habit, just as I did daily writing for so long, that I will improve on my ability to read and understand the passages I’m reading. Please keep in mind that many of these posts may be published late at night or with little time studying and simply be my first thoughts after reading. This is in no way a commentary that one should use to discern the Bible, but my own personal thoughts.
It’s astonishing to me how practical and similar to modern-day life so much of this history, which was written over 3,000 years ago, is. A couple of the things that stood out to me as I was reading today was that it seems every single time the people of Israel allow others to live in their midst and the men marry their women, and the women marry their men, it’s the people who don’t know God that pull the spouse toward where they are, not the other way around.
Despite people’s best attempts, when we are “unequally yoked” especially in marriage with someone who doesn’t believe in the truth of the gospel, they are 9 times out of 10 going to lead us away from God. We may think we will be able to “convert them,” but history speaks for itself. That almost never happens.
There may be other times in the Bible that happens, but the only other one that I can think of top of mind is when God expressly tells Hosea to marry a prostitute. In that story (which we’ll get to in a couple of months) the prostitute, Gomer, continues to prostitute herself even through Hosea’s faithfulness. God used this to show how His love continues for us even when we “whore” after other gods and idols. So it was still proving the same point the rest of these stories are. That we are prone to run away, like sheep, from God.
The other thing I saw, that had such strong implications now, was that as soon as these judges died, it seems like almost immediately the people of Israel went and served other gods and did what was evil in the sight of God. Even in the new testament, you see that after Jesus has gone, the disciples stayed put. They didn’t spread out as they were supposed to. Jesus had given them a direct command, and yet it took outside force to actually get them to follow the command they were given.
It reveals to me how important strong leadership is. If we don’t have strong leadership, we are so easily swayed to the whims of the world. For us, that strong leadership can be God, through His Word, but at the same time, there are tangible needs for humans as well that require strong human leadership.
If we are in the place to be strong leaders for those around us (which arguably all Christians should be leaders of a sort), we should seek to live lives above reproach, and lives constantly pointing back to Christ and His promises, just as we’ve seen Moses and Joshua do in the old testament.
Lastly, I just want to see the scene where Eglon the king is killed by Ehud by Ehud coming up to him saying “I have a gift from the Lord…stab. Man, what a good movie scene…