This is Scott Han and I want to welcome you to the Road to Amaeus, 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 Aquiliness, friendship and the fathers.

Visit our shownotes at St Paul Center.com forward slash Road to learn more. Today we're going to take a look at the scripture readings 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

response sorial 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 a 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.

...