1. What qualities of God were shown in the stories of the judges?
2. What is the significance of the period of the judges in God’s plan of salvation?
3. Describe the relationship of God and Israel during the period of the judges?
Answers
Answer:
1. Threaded through the cycles of Judges is the underlying character of God. Stitched with various literary techniques, three of God’s character traits rise to the surface: His desire for partnership with man, His anger over man’s betrayal, and ultimately His steadfast focus on His Will.
2.Crisis in Israel
The book of Judges describes a period in the life of the nation of Israel between the prophetic leadership of Moses and Joshua and the establishment of the monarchy and kingship in Israel. The nature of this time period is described on four different occasions in the book, “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 17:6; cf. 18:1; 19:1; 21:25). This brief summary statement teaches us two important facts about the period of the judges in Israel: (1) there was a crisis of leadership; and (2) there was a subsequent crisis in Israel’s faithfulness to their covenant with the LORD.
The wilderness generation of Moses and the generation of conquest with Joshua had been eyewitnesses of God’s great signs and wonders to save and deliver. But then “there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel” (Judg. 2:10). In the generations between Joshua and the monarchy, Israel did “what was evil in the sight of the Lord” (Judg. 2:11). The evil described in the book of Judges should be understood as Israel’s progressive decline into idolatry. The nation of Israel was originally designed by God to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6), but by the end of the book of Judges Israel had become like all of the other nations around them, and even worse, like Sodom and Gomorrah (cf. Judges 19 with Genesis 19).
Life is messy and foul and complicated, and that it is the cycle of our own sin that has created these problems.