January 8, 2023
Passage Read: Judges 14-17
Meditation Verse: 17:6
Thought
There is value in having a clear leader who will uphold the word of the Lord and promote His ways. The priests should have been sufficient, but there appears to be little evidence that they taught the people regularly from the Law. The people only seemed to understand that you could worship the Lord or other gods; they seem completely unaware of what the Lord desires. If a people is illiterate, they obviously need someone to teach them and to enforce compliance; that's the advantage of a king, if he honors the Lord. Most people are not inclined to seek the Lord and know His ways, even if they are literate. They still need someone to go and call them to know the Lord and walk in His ways. They need someone to lead them and set the example.
Application
Even today, with all our resources and capabilities, there is just as much confusion to keep most believers from studying to know the Lord. There are so many books and viewpoints and interpretations and disagreeing teachers, that the picture one gets of Christianity is that there is no way to really know what God wants! No wonder it is so attractive to just teach the Gospel and reduce Christianity to just the gospel; it's about all we agree on, the one thing that defines a Christian. Anything else the Bible teaches seems to be up for grabs, open to interpretation and therefore uncertain and unclear. In all our supposed modern intelligence and education, we're no better off than every man doing what is right in his own eyes. But Jesus didn't think the Scriptures were unclear; He didn't reduce all His teachings to just the Gospel. He had a clear and definite intent in all He taught. Ultimately there is only one right "interpretation" of anything in Scripture, and Jesus will rule by that standard when He reigns. The problem can't be with the Scriptures; it has to be with me, with my unwillingness to believe and obey, my unwillingness to submit to the simplicity of His instruction. Surely God has not made it too hard to anyone who truly wants to know Him, so the problem has to be with me, how truly do I want to know Him? How completely am I willing to give up sovereignty over my own life, which was never really my own to begin with?