Pray the Word with David Platt is a resource from Radical.net.

Judges chapter 2, verses 11 through 15.

And the people of Israel did what was evil in the side of the Lord and served the Bales.

And they abandoned the Lord, 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 them,

and bowed down to them. And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord,

and served the Bales and the Astorath. 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 hand of their surrounding

enemies, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the

Lord was against them for harm, as the Lord had warned, and as the Lord had sworn to them,

and they were in terrible distress. Oh, these verses just set the stage for a book that so grimly

depicts the sinfulness of men and women and the distress that we find ourselves in

as a result of our sin and just horrible heinous things that happen in the book of judges that make you cringe.

And you see the people of God,

they'll realize that their suffering as a result of their sin,

and they'll turn back to God for a time,

but just relatively a small amount of time

before they start turning back to sin again.

And the cycle goes over and over and over again as they succumb to sin, they experience

the effects of sin and suffering due to sin.

They turn back to God and then turn right back to their sin.

And in the end, the book of judges just leaves us longing

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