Welcome to the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one's about Judges.

Hey my friends, it's Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.

We are working our way through the entire Bible right now, one book per day until we're done.

And today we're looking at Judges.

This is a doozy.

This is a book that reminds me of the saying, don't meet your heroes.

You've heard that cautionary remark, the truism.

It just means that if you get too close to people you admire from afar, you see their humanity,

you see their flaws without the Photoshop and the auto-tune and the speech-writers, and

it can be pretty unflattering when you see your heroes in a true and unbiased light.

Judges, when I was a kid, I read through this book very much with the mindset of the heroes

or whoever's on screen, a good guy, bad guy, comic book, kind of reading, and as I've gone back to this book

as an adult who's lived a little bit in the real world and who's read a little bit more Bible,

I'm now able to better see how flawed pretty much literally every single character in this book is.

The people are not the heroes, the people are the objects of redemption.

They have problems, the God character is the hero, and he is the one who appears in all the

different stories, and he is the one who is choosing to redeem in spite of the behavior of

run-of-the-mill people and oftentimes in spite of the very people who claim to love him and serve him.

Judges represents the moment where we really spiral all the way down the toilet here in terms of

what we see happening on screen. This is an awful story, and I guess I could just keep saying,

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