What happens when people abandon moral absolutes? John Snyder joins us to discuss his book and Bible study resource on the book of Judges. Judges is a case study of what happens when “Every man did what was right in his own eyes.” The results of radical autonomy are a clear warning to all of us. As Oprah Winfrey said, “Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool” Yes, it is powerful: evil people follow their hearts, and there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Jer 13:10, Prov 28:26 & Prov 14:12) and, woe to those who are wise in their own eyes (Isa 5:21).

You can access John Snyder’s study on Judges by clicking here on the Media Gratiae website.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and we're here to talk about a really important matter that we all can relate to and that is times when every man is doing what's right in his own eyes. We're here to discuss the book of Judges but particularly we have John Snyder to help us think about this because he has just completed a Bible study and a book here that you can get today called Living with the true God lessons from judges. So John Snyder, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me. So John is one of the pastors at Christ Church New Albany and he also creates resources on behalf of Media Gratia. John, John it's always been a delight to have you preach at our conferences as well and you know you you gave your testimony on one of these podcasts the story of God taking hold of your life. And wow, that was a blessing. So anybody who's listening, go check it out, John Snyder's testimony.

So You did this Bible study on judges, and it really resonated with me just because of the radical autonomy that we're seeing today when every man did what was right in his own eyes. And so that's what Judges is. It's a case study. It shows you what it looks like if you want to go your own way and follow your own heart and go do your own truth. This is what happens.

And the dangers that are there. You know, Solomon said there's a way that seems right to a man, but it's in death. And there are many appeals to us not to do what's right in our own eyes. So You have this picture of the tragedy of autonomy in judges. So John, what motivated you to do this Bible study and to write this book, this study guide about it?

Well, most of the things that we try to put into print for media grantee are just things that I feel are particularly needy, that we're particularly needy of as a church where I pastor with other men or in my own soul. And Judges, I think, has always been a book that has been one that kind of intrigued me because of the extraordinary accounts. They're quite shocking. And the shocking value of the accounts can sometimes mask the deeper problem that's going on underneath. And so, you know, a modern evangelical can read and can see, you know, what different people are doing And you think, but we would never do that.

But then when you get under the surface of that action, you can see that actually we are either doing that or we are very close to the edge of doing that. So let me give you like for, as an example, the church where I pastor. The church was about 20 years old when I started preaching through judges on a Wednesday night. And that eventually became the study years later. But while the reason I chose that was that the circumstances at the beginning of judges, really I felt fit the circumstances where we were as a church.

So for example, contrast the beginning of Joshua and the beginning of Joshua. Moses is not going into the promised land and God has appointed another leader. And so, obviously, this is quite a crisis moment. But not only is it a crisis moment and everyone is aware this is a crisis moment, you know, pay attention. But also you have the problem of when Moses, after the speech of Joshua, everybody doesn't go home.

You know, it's time to take the promised land after centuries of waiting. So at the end of Joshua's speech in Joshua, or at the end of Moses's speech, sorry, you know, you basically, the men join the army. Now look at judges. Beginning of judges, Joshua is old and he's giving his speech. He's going to be, you know, basically retiring and passing away and there's no great leader that follows him.

But the moment of crisis is not nearly as clear. At the end of Joshua's speech, you basically turn to your family and say, well, wow, that's, you know, it's the end of Joshua's ministry. It's time to go home and get back to normal life. Judges opens when the people have already lived in those homes and lived on the farms that once belonged to other Canaanites and God has already conquered the land and given it to them as a whole, there's some small pockets of resistance still. But think about it, you turn to your family and say, well, we just go home and live our normal lives.

And the crisis there, the spiritual crisis is not nearly as clear as when Joshua opens and there's the battle. So the battle for the land has been won. The battle for the hearts of the people is lost. Because you go back home and you're living in the land that God gave you, and immediately we find that the people disobey God and begin to embrace the idolatry of the culture around them. So in the introduction to the book, you draw out a question from Acts chapter two.

In Acts chapter two, it's the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit's poured out, there are specific manifestations of that. And then the people ask this question, What does this mean? I think anybody who reads the book of judges comes away from that because they are some of the most... It's scripture, so I don't want to call it defiling, but I don't know... The most defiling stories in scripture in terms of just the wickedness on display are there.

And I think me, most of us come away answering the question after reading the book of judges, what does this mean? We answer that question by saying, I hope it never gets this bad here. And I think one of the points of the book is that's actually not the meaning of the book of judges. Right. Well, as Scott mentioned at the beginning, there is a recurring theme in judges, and that is that the people do what's right in their own eyes because there's no king in the land.

And of course, in a sense, this is preparing us for God choosing a Davidic king. But if you think of the bigger picture or the deeper issues, when God's people are not aware of the rule of their God in the present moment, then God's people will try to do right things, but they will be guided by what they think is right. So one of the most shocking things about judges, of the many, one of them is this is not a group of people trying to do really bad things all the time. Some of the people that make the worst choices are spiritually, are the spiritual leaders, men that God has chosen, like Samson or Gideon or Jephthah, or at the end of the book, you know, kind of the leaders of the tribes. They're actually, here are the men that God has entrusted with positions of leadership.

And while they're trying to do good things, while they're trying to fix problems, they're making decisions that are so destructive, because they're not guided by God's Word, but by what they think is right. If we are a people who are unaware in a very practical way that God rules me right now, God rules my marriage, God rules over my children, God rules over the way I eat and dress. God rules over the church. God rules over everything. But If I forget that, the only option then will be that I will do good things or what I think are good things based on what I think is best.

Some of the most discouraging accounts in the book are not the wicked activity of the people in embracing idols or the enemies that God raises up to punish Israel and to get her attention. But some of the most discouraging stories are the most godly people who out of carelessness make choices that are very shocking. So Gideon. Gideon of course is one of the more encouraging ones, but at the end of his life we find that Gideon gathers gold from the tribes who offer to make him a king. He refuses to be king.

But he says, I will take some of this gold. So they give him gold and he makes an ephod. And you know, we know an ephod is a part of the clothing that the priest wore. And So he makes this ephod and Israel plays the harlot with the ephod. They worship the ephod at the end of his life.

Samson is a very, you know, he's a very quiet, he's a shockingly clear picture of a bad man that God uses. And he does what's right in his eyes when he looks at a Philistine woman and judges uses very clear language. She was, she looked good in his eyes. So I like that. I don't care what God wants, I want that." And Samson, of course, is a very tragic picture of how God will honor himself, but he will do it at our expense if we will not hold his name high.

At the end of the book, another example of shocking choices, but not by the wicked people, but by the spiritual leaders. So in that account of a priest who has a concubine, which you know is already red flags everywhere, Why does a priest have a concubine? He has a concubine. She is attacked by a mob at night because they can't have the man. So this lust gripped mob attacks this concubine and leaves her dead on the porch.

When he finds her dead the next morning, he cuts her body into 12 pieces and sends a piece to each of the tribe leaders and says, this is what's happened. And we've never seen a thing like this happen in Israel and of course the 11 of those tribes say these men need to be punished and one of the tribes say well no we're not going to let you have our men and so this war erupts and if you read closely you see that the spiritual leaders of the 11 tribes are trying to accomplish something good. They're trying to deal with horrific sin in Israel, but their solution is almost worse than the original sin. So they practice genocide. They almost kill every one of that tribe.

And then they say, well, we've destroyed a tribe. What have we done? So because you're not allowed to marry one of those men, we took a vow. We've got to find a way to give them Israelite wives in a way that doesn't break our vows. So they said to those 600 remaining men of that tribe, there's going to be a worship service over here and the girls will run through the field singing praises to God and what you do is you hide in those fields, you grab the girl and you run home and we'll protect you when their dads come to us and say, are you going to do something about this?

And we will say to them, no, you're going to let them have your daughter. But hey, good news is we're not gonna have to kill you because if you'd have broken our vow and given your daughter, we'd kill you. But now you get to stay alive, but they get to have your daughter. And you read that passage, and like you said, it's some of the most confusing narratives in all the Bible, but there's a purpose there. That's what religion looks like when we try to fix the world's problems by doing what we think's best.

You know, this just proves something that Oprah Winfrey said. Oh boy. Speaking your own truth is the most powerful tool. Isn't that true? It really is.

It's very powerful. It causes everything to fall apart. That's what it does. It disassembles everything good. So I think what's always shocking to me about the book of Judges is this core problem, every man doing what's right in his own eyes.

And then there are all these devastating illustrations of immorality, fake religion, you know, hire a priest, you know, all kinds of things that go on there. Let's talk about our contemporary culture because our contemporary culture is autonomous on steroids and we're seeing all kinds of manifestations of our autonomy. You know some of the clearest are the desire of so many in our culture to be autonomous in the sense that they don't even accept the creation order about they were created as a male or a female. And you know, the desire to be something else than what you were created for. You're playing the game of your own truth.

But let's talk about some of the manifestations of every man doing what's right in his own eyes in our own culture. Yeah, I think that, you know, that even the phrase, I identify as, whatever it is, I identify as. Like you mentioned, really, ultimately, It is such a usurping of God's place. I ultimately, I say in some of the most basic ways a human can say it, I do not accept his authority to create me the way he has created me. So I will simply identify as something else.

And that is still, even in our culture, as it's begun to embrace that phrase in different areas, even in our culture today, the average person is still a little shocked by that kind of talk. But I think that we see that running through every sin from the fall of Satan from heaven because he would be like the most high. I mean, he could have had a T-shirt that said, I identify as the most high, you know, and down he goes. And then Adam, you know, who feels that he could trust his desires better than he trusts the word of God. You know, he has a right that rises above God's rights and Adam identifies, has his own little king for a moment and then all of us are cast into this, you know, this terrible ruin of sin.

But self-identification, I think we don't use those words in churches or in religious gatherings, but that's at the root of every one of our sins. I do think that we have to take some blame in the sense that if America is a land crammed full of evangelical buildings, they call themselves churches and, and, you know, everyone I work with says they're a Christian. If the root that their decisions grow on is fundamentally that I have the right to identify as the king of my life in very respectable ways. Why am I surprised, you know, 50 years later when the worldling who has no interest in God takes that same pattern and does it in a much more shocking way. But it's the same root.

Yeah, it's dissatisfaction with God and his creation order. I mean, I think that on the edges of this is the tattoo movement where you wanna have your body look different than the way that you were created. You have this rising movement called, you know, the furries, I don't know if you've heard of this. Rolling Stone Magazine, I'll quote, why are so many Gen Z kids becoming furries? Well, a furry is a person who wants to identify with an animal, So there are these massive conferences where people come and they dress out as animals.

This article in Rolling Stone said that the furries are, quote, disproportionately more likely to self-identify as LGBTQ. And so you have this self-identification Movement it's so it's so huge. It's it's reached proportions that we never dreamed a girl's mom Was quoted as saying This has helped my daughter to become who she's supposed to be. So the self-identification movement is such a remarkable application or manifestation of every man wanting to do what's right in his own eyes. So Scott, maybe I could just take a minute and back up and say what's in the book or what the book is.

It's actually a book and a workbook all within the same covers. If you've never been through some of John's earlier works like Behold Your God, my family went through, I think it's 12 weeks, so it's a study plan, it's a book, it's a workbook, and you go through it day by day. And John, my family benefited very much by going through Behold Your God. This is sort of a smaller version than that in that it's seven weeks, not 12. But it gives you an opportunity to go to certain texts of Scripture that have been selected for each chapter on the characters and judges, etc., and to answer questions that sort of lead you into a deeper understanding of what's in the Book of judges.

Yeah, and there's a video element that goes with it. Some churches still use DVDs. I was trying to remember the last time we used a DVD in our house. You know, it probably was 18 months ago, you know, and you had to fish through your drawer to find... I thought we had one.

Oh, there it is. And then you had to find the DVD player, which I don't know where it is now, but... So most of us do streaming, and if you go to the website, you know, you can get that teaching through the streaming, and then it goes along with the book. So yeah, it's a much more simplified format than the Behold Your God series. I would say that while the book is only seven weeks rather than 12, it also has one long lesson that you work through during the week rather than five medium.

So the books about a fifth the size of the other books. Again it's meant to be a mini study for small groups that you can work through in two months or less. And it's the first of those. Jordan Thomas, who helped us with the Behold Your God study, is working on one right now. He's supposed to be filming soon.

And his topic is the glory of Christ in the church. I'm working on one now that I'm supposed to be more productive than I am, but I'm working on one that shows Christ as mighty to save, to borrow from Isaiah's description in chapter 63 of his prophecy. So we look at evidences in the New Testament where Christ's power to save is demonstrated so beautifully through the miracles. So these are small studies that you can work through in two months. You can do it as an individual, but it's also designed for small groups.

Oh, that's great. So, okay, John, here's the deal. So this is perhaps one of the most discouraging books in the Bible because it displays the these cycles of sin and heartache and then there's recovery. So John, where's the encouragement in this book? Yeah, I agree and I'm glad to say that we all see the encouragement when we read it carefully.

There is a very sweet, very godly lady in our church who's an older lady who when I started to preach that first Wednesday on Judges, She pulled me aside and she is so supportive. And she said to me, out of character, she said, oh, why are we doing judges? You know? I mean, you know, you think that you think of Samson, you think of Jephthah, you think of those, that last account and oh, it's just what, what, you know, it's so dark. But I would say judges gives us a lot of hope but it but you do go through a dark kind of a dark archway to get to them so the dark archway is is that very honest look at the nature of all of our sin.

It is idolatry. It is, you know, when you embrace an idol 4,000 years ago, It's not really the idol you love, it's really self that you worship. The idol just promised you a lot. And so it's promising you God-like benefits at half the price or immediately. And you get to remain in charge of your life as long as you give enough to the idol.

But the nature of sin is so clearly painted in the fact that what the idol promised, that very thing, it destroys. So think of Gideon. In the days of Gideon, they worshiped the Baal idols again. And Baal is a fertility god, so that would touch areas like wealth, children, and crops. So Baal was supposed to ride on the clouds and bring rain to his people.

So Israel worships Baal because the people around them worship Baal. God sends the Midianites. What do the Midianites do? For a number of years, the Midianites don't come and destroy the Israelites. They just wait until it's harvest time and they send their army and their animals in and they take all the food and go back home.

So Israel is now a starving people because they worship an idol that promised a lot of food. It's just, you know, it's such a clear picture that sin comes to steal and kill and destroy. But if you can go through that dark archway, The hope is in the extraordinary mercy of God. You can see this in a number of ways. First of all, you see it in the fact that in these cycles where God uses, you know, these cycles in history to teach us the lesson over and over.

Everyone starts off kind of at the top, that each cycle, and they're walking with the Lord because the judge, the spiritual, military, and legal kind of leader is walking with the Lord. But when that judge dies, Israel begins to drift and kind of drop down and they continue to spiral down until they until God sends judgment and he disciplines his people using an enemy. It's so sad to read that God hands his people over to the enemy when in Joshua's book, God handed the enemy to Israel. We still see this, of course, today. So they hit bottom and they cry out to God.

He sends, he raises up a deliverer, a judge, he delivers them through the leadership of the judge and then they're back up at the top, they're walking with God again. So you can kind of think of that circle. But one expression of mercy is not that God is willing to hear their cry, but one expression is that as these cycles continue, they get worse. In other words, at the end of the cycles in the time of Samson, they're not back where they were at the end of the first cycle of decline. So it's not like a merry-go-round that stays on the same level and just gets brought.

It's a downward spiral. The book shows a progression of the impact of sin, but at the same time, a progression of God's mercy as sin becomes darker. So let's think of Samson's day. God meets a woman and tells her he's going to give her a son and that son will rescue Israel. So if we think about our cycle, Israel is at the bottom.

They've been judged and they're under the Philistines and they're miserable, but there's something different about Samson. When God speaks to Samson's mom and then later mom and dad together with these gracious promises. It did not follow the cry of Israel. This is the first cycle that doesn't mention the people crying out to God in misery. What that means is Israel has become so accustomed to the judgment of God and the rule of an enemy that as God's people they don't even know there's anything better.

I mean you realize this has been generation after generation And so they don't even know enough to look around at the church, so to speak, and say, God, will you come in mercy and save us? They're okay with it. And I think that's really where we find ourselves. We are not necessarily a nation filled with churches saying, oh God, will you not give us repentance? But we're a nation of people who have become accustomed to the judgment and we don't cry out.

But God was still merciful and we do still find him showing mercy to us today. Wow, what a rich study. Thanks for doing it, John. I hope people can click in on go to the Media Graté website and download everything and even buy the hard copy of the book like the one that we have here, I think it will be a very rich, rich time. You know, it's such a helpful testimony of what happens when every man does what's right in his own eyes, when every person does what Oprah tells you to do, to go seek your own truth.

But at the same time, it helps you to see how good it is to do the things that are right in God's eyes. Because His ways are pleasant ways, and all His paths are peace, so says Solomon. So thank you for joining us on the church and family life podcast, and we hope to see you next time Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us.

Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.