This morning’s stop on the Root 66 series was the book of Judges. In the overall story of the Bible, Judges serves as a bridge to connect the conquest of the promised land (in the book of Joshua) to the history of Israel’s kings (in the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles). As Justin Taylor hinted at last week, although God fulfilled his promise of bringing the people to the land of Canaan, the Israelites failed to completely drive out the Canaanites setting themselves up for a great deal of pain and suffering.

Judges tells a very disturbing story of brokenness, idolatry, and violence among the people of Israel that can be summarized as a downward cycle of sin in these stages:

Rebellion → Retribution → Repentance → Restoration → Rest

Each time through the cycle, the sin of the people became worse than before as they imitated the evil Canaanites. In the end, the final verse of Judges summarizes the chaos and rebellion of the people: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Their lack of connection to God’s truth led to moral, spiritual, and national chaos.

But even in the midst of such a horrific story, the light of the Gospel can be found. Pastor Alex called our attention to the story of Gideon in Judges 6 and pointed out two important gospel truths.

First, that although mankind is broken and capable of unspeakable evil, the light of the gospel shines through. Gideon built an altar called “Yahweh Shalom” which means “God is Peace.” Deep darkness like the kind in Judges sets the stage for God to fulfill his promise to restore Shalom to the world. No story is so dark that God cannot redeem it with the gospel.