Dole, but important stuff on this edition of key life. Math with Steve Brown, and this is key life, a no-nonsense approach to God's word. If you have a Bible, get it, and let's see how it applies to real life. Steve? Thanks, Mike. I hope you had a great weekend, and I hope your pastor sermon meant as much to you as mine did to me. If you have your Bible open into the Book of Judges, if you're in a place where you can open a Bible, if not just trust that when I read passages of Scripture, that I'm reading them properly. By the way, if you're just a new listener to key life, what we're doing during this series, is we're trying to see the Old Testament as a user-friendly section of the Bible. Unfortunately, a lot of Christians stay out of the, oh, we may read the 23rd Psalm on occasion. It may be a proverb or two, but we don't go into the Old Testament to see its richness, its glory, its grace, and God's amazing love, and so I'm taking whatever time it takes, and we're going to do this until we both get tired of it, and then we'll stop for a while and maybe do something else, but we're going to come back to it because I want to make sure that we go through the entire Old Testament. We're up now to the Book of Judges, and we're starting our week or two, maybe three weeks study, in the Book of Judges. Before we turn to the Book, it's our practice to go before the throne, so let's do that. Father, we are sometimes just blown away with your kindness. When we're honest with ourselves, when we stop playing games, when we look at the way we live and what we think, the bad stuff we did and the bad stuff we didn't get around to, when we really see at the core of who we are, some things that are not very pleasing to us or to you, we're ashamed, and then we see your kindness, we see your generosity, we see your gentleness, and we see your love, and we're overwhelmed with the wonder of it. Thank you, Father. We praise you as a creature, would praise the Creator, but more than that as a child would look to a good Father and be glad. Father, you know everybody who's listening to this broadcast right now, and you know all the problems that are represented by the listeners. We live in a fallen world and we're not home yet, and some are lonely, and they need a friend, and some are afraid, and some have broken hearts, and some are going through incredible marriage problems, some have financial difficulties and can't pay the mortgage, there's a man who's listening who just lost his job, father another who's dealing with alcohol, and he just can't stop. Father, you know it all, and so we come to you not because we're good, but because we're yours and certainly not because we're together, but because we're yours, meet us. Join yourself in heal and cleanse and change and forgive and motivate and remind us of home. And now Father, as we study your word on key life, as always we pray for the one who teaches, forgive him his sins, for they are many, they call him Reverend, and he's not. We would see Jesus and him only, and we pray in Jesus' name, amen. All right. I'm going to take some time. We're up to the book of Judges. Now, we have seen, as we've gone through this series in the Older Testament, and I am not taking it line upon line in verse upon verse and precept upon precept. Should we do that? It would take forever and ever and ever into infinity. And I'm an old guy, and I don't have that much time, but what I want to do is to make the Older Testament a book that you can go to and feel comfortable, comfortable with, or for you English teachers, with which you can be comfortable, to make it, as it were, user friendly. Now, we've seen that in the Hebrew Bible, there are three great divisions. There's the Pentateuch. That's called the Torah, the first five books of Moses, written by Moses and great part. Nine and right about his death, we know that. But generally the tradition, and I accepted its factual, is that Moses wrote most of the first five books of the Bible. In the prophets, in the Hebrew Bible, there are eight books, in your English Bible, there are twenty-one, and the prophets are divided into two sections, there are the former prophets. These are Joshua and Judges and Samuel and Kings, and then the latter prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then the twelve, the smaller books. And then the third section is called the Riding's. Now in order to relate what we're studying, and I know this is dull, but this will be helpful to you when you study the Older Testament, and you will be tested on the material. Look at the divisions in the English Bible because they're different than in the Hebrew Bible. First, as the Pentateuch, the five books, then the historical books, twelve books, then the poetical books, the next five books, then the major prophets, five books, and the minor prophets, the twelve. And this week we're studying the book of Judges, the second of the former prophets in the Hebrew Bible, the second of the historical books in the English Bible. And you say, wait, wait, wait, wait, what are we missing? I mean, something's not right there. Well, I want you to know that the material in both the Hebrew Bible and in the English Bible is exactly the same. It's just a matter of how one arranges those books. The English Bible follows, and just for your information in case you're asked on a contest or something, the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, and that was done about 280, 150, before the birth of Christ, and it was done in the city of Alexandria. All right. Our study for this week is centering around the book of Judges, and we don't know who wrote this book. Tradition has said that it was perhaps Samuel, but even that tradition has not always been a tradition. Sometimes, a lot of different people have been suggested, so whoever the author of this book is, his or her name, like that of the writer of the book of Hebrews, is simply unknown, so deal with it. Now, some of the material in the book of Judges is really, really old. Some of the oldest, maybe the oldest, in the entire Bible. For instance, in Judges 5, 1 through 31, we will see, and we're going to talk some about Debra when we come along to that part, but the song of Debra, amazing, wonderful poetry in Judges 5, has been dated as early as 1125 BC. Now, because of the use of the phrase, there was no king in Israel in those days, and that you use some five times in the book of Judges. It's evident, if you use deductive logic 101 that the book was compiled, at least as late as the period of the kings of Israel and 1025 BC. The name of the book, and by the way, this is different than the names of the books of Moses in the sense that it's the same in the English, and it's the same in the Hebrew Bible. Judges, book of Judges, covers a period between the death of Joshua and the reign of the kings, or perhaps the time of Samuel, circa 1360 BC to 1035 BC. Book tells the story of 12 leaders, 12, if you will, spirit anointed leaders of Israel. Some of them leading only a portion of the people of God and some of their terms of leadership overlapping are running concurrent with other leaders. Some of the leaders were good, some of them were not half bad, and some of them were bad. Some did good stuff, and some did bad stuff. It goes on and on, and it hasn't changed in our time. Now, if you're looking for a fairly short outline of the book of Judges, if you're going to be reading it, there's the introduction to the period of Judges. It's one through two five, and then the political conditions from Joshua to Judges, that's in chapter one, one through 36, and then Israel weeps in failure two, one through five. Now, that's all the first introduction section. Then there's the period of the Judges, and that goes from the second chapter, the sixth verse, to the sixteenth chapter, and the thirty first verse. Then there's a double appendix in the book of Judges, and it's quite interesting. That's seventeen one through twenty one, twenty five. First, the idolatry of Micah and the Dan Hites, and that's seventeen and eighteen, and then the crime of Gibbia, and its punishment, nineteen through twenty one. Now, in order to get an overview of the book of Judges, you got to go and read the entire second chapter of the book. Now, I don't have time to do that, but if you're going to start studying the book of Judges, it's important to go to the second chapter of Judges. And what you'll find there first is we look at major themes in this particular book, is a wonderful and biblical philosophy of history. Look at Judges two, eleven through twelve, and the people of Israel did what was evil in the side of the Lord and served the Bays, and they forsook the Lord and the God of their fathers who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods from among the gods of the peoples who were around about them, and bowed down to them, and they provoked the Lord to anger. Then Judges two, fourteen through fifteen, so the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers who plundered them, and he sold them into the power of their enemies round about so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for evil, as the Lord had warned, and as the Lord had sworn to them, and they were in sore straits, and then look at Judges two, eighteen. Whenever the Lord raised up Judges for him, the Lord was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies, all the days of the judge, for the Lord was moved to the city by their groaning, because of those who afflicted them and depressed them. We'll talk more about it tomorrow, but there is a philosophy of history, and summarized it means that the word history is his story, don't mess around with God. You think about that? I mean, yeah, I know what I just did was pretty dull, but I promise, or at least I hope that tomorrow we'll get a little bit more exciting, but that's foundational material. You really need to understand the book of Judges. Hey, listen, you're part of our key life tape family. If you aren't, I'd love for you to be a part of it. Now, these are not the tapes of the broadcast. You can subscribe to those, and if you ask us, we'll tell you how. 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