This is Scott Hahn, and I want to welcome you to the Road to Amas, a podcast from the St. Paul Center.

How can we overcome our current crisis of faith?

The same way we overcome our crisis of loneliness,

through friendship. At least that's what the early Christians would say. Learn more in Mike Aquilinas,

friendship and the fathers. Visit our show notes at St Paul's for the Monday of the 20th week in ordinary time.

We have three readings per usual.

One is the Old Testament reading from Judges, Chapter 2. The second is the

responsorial Psalm, 106. And finally, the Gospel is taken from the 19th chapter of the Gospel

of Matthew, the Rich Young Ruler. First, I'd like to look briefly at the reading in Judges 2. I think many of you might be familiar with the

pattern that we find throughout the entire book of judges, that the children of Israel sin against

the Lord, and so he empowers their foes to oppress them until finally they cry out in repentance and he raises up a judge and over a dozen

different judges are identified and described in the narrative of the book of judges. And so the judge

will deliver the people of God from their enemies, but then they grow flabby once again

and they fall back under the dominion of their enemies, idolaters,

and so on. And so it begins rather auspiciously. The children of Israel offended the Lord by

serving the Bales. Now, you're probably familiar with Bail worship from the stories of Elijah,

but Bales are not just false gods. They're idols. That is,

we're not just talking about superstition here. We're not just talking about false religion. We're

talking about demonic powers who provide diabolical deception to the people of God. Why?

To tempt the people to shop around for the God who will deliver the goods.

If the God of Israel will, well, we'll obey him. But if the God of these foreign peoples will,

will go after their gods. And so you can see this downward spiral, this sort of spiritual

...