Israel had strong leadership under Moses and Joshua during the exodus, and later under David and Solomon in the monarchy. In both eras there was a strong human leader who represented God and ruled society on the basis of divine law. But in these intervening years, the Israelites lived in a “spiritually pluralistic” society. Due to Israel’s various failures, the society of Canaan was a mixture of pagan and believing peoples. There are many parallels between that situation and ours today. Largely due to the failures of the church, believers in the West find themselves living in a religiously pluralistic society. Individual Christians work and live among a great variety of gods–not only those of other formal religions, but also the gods of wealth, celebrity, pleasure, ideology, achievement.
Christians reading Judges today must ask: how can we be sure to follow God rather than the idols of our society and neighbors? How can we renew ourselves when we fail or fall?
This is a great resource in preparing to study any book in the New Testament.
This is a great commentary set to use as a resource for your small group.
The link below will take you to a site to purchase the whole set, but you can purchase individual commentaries for the book you are studying.
If you are looking for a good commentary to help with your small group study, Will Pavone and the small groups team recommend the following site.
http://www.bestcommentaries.com/
A good free commentary resource by Dr. Constable can be found at:
This study takes an in-depth look at the lives of those mentioned in the Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11. There are 5 days of work each week, but it is not an overwhelming amount of work.
This is a great study rich with Old Testament history and background provided by Beth Moore in a fun and thorough way. One thing to keep in mind is each DVD teaching is about an hour and the work during the week is about 2.5 hours per week.