In these three chapters we hear the stories of 6 Judges. Let me sum them up for you:
Tola: 23 years of judging, lived and died in Shamir.
Jair: 22 years, had thirty sons who rode thirty donkeys and controlled thirty towns.
Jephthah: 6 years, saved Israel from the hands of the Ammonites but couldn't save his daughter when he swore to sacrifice to God the first thing that came out of his house after battle. Who should unfortunately and even slightly ironically come out but his daughter. Despite his great work in war he will best be know for this err of words. Speaking of err or words he also killed 42000 Ephraimites in a somewhat amusing story of their inability to pronounce an "sh" sound.
Ibzan: 7 years, had all of his kids (30 sons 30 daughters) marry outside his clan.
Elon: 10 years.
Abdon: 8 years, his kids and grandkids rode donkeys.
There we have it. 6 stories, five of which are quite boring while the sixth, extremely unfortunate. Judges is full of heroes, God's heroes, who saved Israel from all sorts of harm at the hands of the surrounding peoples. In this chapter however we find one war-hero overshadowed by a dumb pledge and two men who aspired for their children to ride donkeys. Wow! Can you imagine young Hebrew boys asking their grandfathers to tell them the great tales of the judges? I would assume that none of these stories ever got told. Surrounded by the tales of Gideon and Samson (next week) you would be crazy to talk about Abdon and Jair and their donkey riding kin. "And when you grow up, you can ride a donkey just like Jair's children!". What did these people do for God? Obviously in some way they served him; they were judges, but nonetheless what ever they did do was overshadowed by donkeys!
As Christians I think we can ask ourselves the same question. What are we doing for the sake of the gospel? To further God's kingdom? Someday when we see God face to face will he tell us good job for giving up comfort and safety for my kingdom or will he pat us on the back cause we learned how to ride a donkey and then taught our kids. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we should strive for any praise in this, however I do think at the end of the day what will our legacy look like? Did we wholeheartedly serve God? Did we give him our all? Or did we go to church most Sunday's and participate in weeknight programs, oh and we read our bible a lot, and, and we prayed and one time we gave a homeless guy a dollar. I think as Christians we too often fall into two places. First, and worst we fall into the gears of life. Our dream legacy is a great house, great job, great kids who carry on our legacy. All we care about is making much of this life. But don't you see? By doing that all we are doing is putting our kids on donkeys and then dying. Secondly I think Christians fall into a checklist mentality. We check off our spiritual to-do list and hopefully we'll be good enough when we die to get into heaven.
Neither of these methods are how we can leave a great legacy for the Kingdom of God. Rather, we need to remember that Jesus Christ has already paid the price for our sins and through that we have salvation. Not through how many people we convert (as if its even us who converts them) or how much we go to church. Then, we need to put our faith fully in Christ and give up our life to him. We need to be radical, we need to put our life on the line for the gospel. Get out of our comfort zones so that someday we can leave a legacy that shouts "Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior and my life was lived for the glory of his name"!
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