Judges 19:1
“And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite staying in the remote mountains of Ephraim. He took for himself a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah.”
The closing chapters of Judges paint a dark picture of life in ancient Israel. We read of drunkenness, murder, rape, idolatry, spiritual confusion and moral indifference. It seems the people have lost their moral compass and are allowing their desires to determine right from wrong. This was never the way God intended for man to live. From the very beginning, God gave man an external code to guide him through life, and that code is the Word of God. When the Word of God is forgotten, ignored, hidden or altered, it always leads to spiritual confusion, immorality and suffering.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, if man is to be truly free, he must establish a standard outside of himself that will help guide him through life. He declared that allowing our emotions or desires to rule our life will never lead to true freedom. While he did not see the Bible as the standard, he did understand that man, left to himself, cannot rule himself well.
It seems that, today, we have ignored the warnings or Scripture and the counsel of the wise. It seems the world we live in today, is a lot more like the time of the judges, than anyone cares to admit. If we want to see a change, we must get back to the way God intended for man to live, not doing whatever is right in our own eyes, but allowing His Word to guide our lives.
Pastor Jim
Not every story recorded in Scripture is a positive one. In this case, we find a self-centered man with a drive for power and a taste for blood, fight his way to the top, where he can rule over the people of God. Abimelech was a strong man with many gifts, but he was also an ungodly man who took things by force, and was responsible for the death of many innocent men and women. His ungodly passions and unrighteous principles got him what he wanted, but only for a very short season. He found that no matter who you are, your sins will surely find you out, and you will give an account before God.
We live in an interesting time, when big philosophical ideas are compressed into quaint little sayings and scattered across social media. We are bombarded with these phrases that often express a worldview diametrically opposed to the teaching of Scripture.
The book of Judges ends on a tragic note. Personal immorality, social chaos, and civil war mark the close of the book. This was certainly one of the darkest times in the history of the people of God. The rape and murder of a young woman led to a heated battle between the tribes of Israel. Instead of facing their true enemies, Israel was caught up in civil infighting that cost the lives of some of their most gifted men. When all is recorded, we find they were simply fighting all the wrong battles.
Israel had forsaken the Word of God and fallen into a place of spiritual confusion. We read of “homemade religions” with their own gods, priests and theology. As the story unfolds, we will see this spiritual confusion leads to social chaos and immorality.
The story of Micah is all too familiar. In a time when the Word of God was being neglected, Micah created his own “homemade religion.” He used terminology familiar to true religion, he had a priest and an ephod. However, his god, his worship, and his lifestyle, was really nothing more than a product of his own imagination. As time went on, his religion became even more organized. He established a priesthood consisting first of his own son, then of a wayward Levite, who pretended to be an expert on the things of God. Only in vocabulary, did this religion bear any similarity to a real relationship with the true and living God.
The story of Samson is both fascinating and tragic. His feats of strength are paralleled only by legendary super heroes. He defeated lions, carried city walls, and fought off platoons of soldiers, with nothing more than skeleton bones. As far as Biblical characters go, he was the most gifted of all. Sadly, those gifts were never really used for the work of God. Each of his feats of strength was only used to get him out of difficult situations that his disobedience got himself into. Instead of reading of Samson leading the nation of Israel back to the Lord, we read only of his selfishness and continual compromise.
Whenever an artist attempts to illustrate Samson, he looks like a cross between an NFL linebacker and a competitive body builder. He is painted as bigger, stronger and more muscular than all those in in Israel or Philistia. You might find it interesting that no physical description of Samson is ever recorded in Scripture. What is evident is the fact that his strength and subsequent victories, were all directly connected to the Spirit of the Lord being upon him. It was not Samson’s ability that gave him strength, but the power of the Spirit. In this text, we find the Spirt of God enabling him to break the bonds that held him as a captive. Ropes that would hold the average man at bay were torn, as if they were wet tissue paper. 
Few people have ever had the kind of talent Samson had. He was gifted far above anyone else in his generation. Tragically, however, Samson wasted his gifts by consuming them in search of his own pleasures. Two truths seem to cry out from his story. 
During the time of the Judges, the nation of Israel was in peril; they had unprotected borders, faced attack from their neighbors, and had constant warfare from within, due to the nations they had failed to drive out of the land. At a time when the people should be joining together to deal with a common enemy, the tribes began to fight all the wrong battles. The enemies of Israel must have been so pleased when they heard that Ephraim and Jephthah had gone to battle against one another, instead of joining forces to deal with the real issues facing the nation. 
Jim Gallagher 