Hello and welcome to the Scriptures or Real podcast. I'm your host, Carrie Mielstein, and this is the podcast where we look at elements of the scriptures that make them become more real for us because we believe there's a great power in the

scriptures and as they become real we can apply that power in our lives better and we sure need that

this is the second of our shortcast is the third episode covering the book of judges but it's the

second of our shortcast where we're just going quickly through some of the stories and trying to

point out some things

that make them become very real and also help them apply to our lives better. And we are going to

cover both the story of Gideon, which we are as part of our Come Follow Me reading for the week,

but we will also cover some stories that are not in the

Come Follow Me reading. And let me say a little bit of why. The book of judges covers some of

Israel's worst times, in some ways, some of their lowest points. And I know someone who once said

that they stopped reading the Old Testament when

they got to the Book of Judges because they said, how could they believe that God wanted us to act

like that? Well, I don't think that the Book of Judges is telling us how we should act all the

time. Sometimes when we see the people repenting and following God, then yes, that's how we should

act. But it also tells us how they did when they were doing quite poorly. Because as I've said a number of times, the Old Testament does not hide that from us. Instead, it shows us. Here's what we did wrong, and here's what you should learn from it. And that is on display in the book of judges probably more than anywhere, at least as much as it is anywhere. And so we're going to look at some of those

stories. But let's start with the great story of Gideon in Chapter 6. Now, I'm going to tell you

there, I'm doing this on both, all of my podcasts are on both YouTube and on podcasts like Apple

podcasts and Google and Spotify and whatever else. But as a result,

I don't do these with a heavy video emphasis because most of my audience is actually just listening.

But I do go through this particular story in some depth and some detail with maps and pictures. So I'll try and describe that for you

here. But if you want to go into it more in depth with lots of maps and pictures, then you should go

to my YouTube channel. The scriptures are real, but look at the playlist that is called Old Testament

...