Over the last couple of weeks we have been looking at God's movement toward the ultimate redemption of the world. Needless to say God is taking God's good time in bringing this about. If we consider that Abraham (the one to whom the original promise of redemption was given) lived about 1,200 years before Christ, that means God has been at this redemption business for about 2,300 years. In a society like ours where the only thing that matters is what happens today (or how things go this quarter) this long term transformation can seem a bit frustrating. The good news however is that along the way we can witness God at work in our midst advancing God's plan. We are able to catch glimpses of redemption. This is case with the time of the judges.
For those of you who are not familiar with the time of the judges, let me do a recap. The stories about the judges are contained in the seventh book of the Bible, appropriately named, Judges. The historical setting was the time between the arrival of the people of Israel in the Promised Land and the kingships beginning with Saul and David. This was a time of great trial for God's people. Though the previous book of the Bible, Joshua, implied that the Hebrews had completely conquered the Promised Land and could therefore live in peace, the reality on the ground was very, very different. The Israelites were no more than a loose confederation of tribes who had taken control of small parts of the hill country in what we would now think of as Israel. The plains and the coasts belonged to more established and well-armed nations including the Canaanites and Philistines. Those peoples had better weapons, better organization (kings) and better fortified cities. This made life very difficult for the lightly armed and disorganized Hebrews. What followed was several hundred years of conflict in which the Hebrews often found themselves "outgunned" and out guided.
This is the point in the story where the judges appear and play their part in God's redemption story. The judges were both men and women. Some of their names are familiar to us; Gideon, Deborah and Samson. Others are not familiar at all: Otheniel, Ehud and Shagmar. What binds these people and their stories together is that they were charismatic leaders who received a specific call from God, in a specific moment in history to perform a specific task, the liberation of God's people. Without their efforts the Hebrews would have vanished into the mists of time, along with the redemptive task to which they were called. We can see this in the way that the writer of the Book of Judges always casts the call and efforts of the judges as part of God's long range plan for world-wide redemption.
The recurring theme of Judges is that "The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and worshipped the Ba'als." The Ba'als were the nature gods of the Canaanites and Philistines. When the people of Israel would go astray and follow the Ba'als God would give God's people over to their enemies. Ultimately the people would cry out to God (just as in Egypt) and God would send them a judge. These judges would then rally the people, defeat the enemies of Israel and bring the people back to God and to their true calling; being the people through whom God would liberate and redeem creation.
A second way for us to see the importance of the judges is to see them as prefiguring Jesus. Jesus would be the one called and sent by God to liberate humanity from the powers and principalities of this world. While the manner of liberation would be different, a sacrificial death rather than war and armed conflict, the results would be the same; God's people would be free to once again turn their lives over to following the living God and the way of life God offers. My hope is that both of these stories, that of the Judges and that of Jesus will encourage us to look for signs of God's redemptive work in the world, and be an encouragement for us to do our part in this amazing work.
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