Mark picked back up with the series: Lesser-known Bible Women with a focus on Judges 19. Mark shared some context for the storyline, what went wrong and some application points for home.
Storyline: 1200 BC to 1040 BC. Israel is in the promised land. No earthly kings yet. A young woman of the Levite tribe is brutally murdered in the area of the Benjaminites. Her body is cut into twelve pieces and sent to the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel. Eleven tribes war against the tribe of Benjamin. All the women and children are killed with unrighteousness actions and results and blame God for the situation!
What went wrong: God was supposed to be king, but not in the eyes of the Israelites.
Points for home
Is God your King?
I hate sin!
How are you treating those on the edges of society?
Listen to Mark teach the challenges of culture and timing when understanding stories of the Bible.He shares the status and meaning of a pilegesh or what has been translated in English as concubine during the times of Judges. This story shows what happens when God is not King, and everyone does what they believe is right in their own eyes.
Lesson Transcript
Women Lesson 3
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[00:00:00] This is exciting for me. I get to teach you this morning on lesser-known women of the Bible. But I'm excited to teach because of what the class is. The actual story is deplorable. It's-- I, I'm gonna talk to you about what I consider to be, outside of the crucifixion, the, the worst chapters in the Bible I almost titled today Worst Chapters in the Bible, but I decided that that might scare away people, so instead it's Lesser-Known Bible Women.
One of the problems we've got, though, is a real challenge any time we're reading the [00:01:00] Bible, and it's the challenge of trying to understand the culture and the time, because it's not where we live today. Uh, for some of us, it's enough of a struggle just understanding the culture of today. Um, but in terms of relative ease, this year is relatively easy.
We've got a decent grasp of, of what's going on today. But if you go back in time, you can go back just, oh, I don't know, a few decades back. Still decently easy, but it starts to get harder. I start thinking about, you know, th- this is an election cycle. The first election cycle that I can remember... Well, no, not that I can remember.
The first one I voted in for president was Ronald Reagan, 1980. First [00:02:00] time I was eligible to vote. The world was a different place then, and culture was different, and music was different. I can remember when I was in high school in the '70s, we had arguments over whether or not the Equal Rights Amendment should be passed.
And one fella in our class used to upset several gals in our class because he argued against the Equal Rights Amendment. And I remember Polly Maynard saying to him, "What reason could you possibly have for arguing against the Equal Rights Amendment?" And his reply was, "Women aren't equal. Why should they have equal rights?"
I thought Polly was gonna hit him [00:03:00] But times were different then. If you get on YouTube, on YouTube you can watch reaction videos where people will, in the, the modern generation, will be reacting to things that are older. Uh, uh, I love to watch people react to great songs from the '60s and '70s that they just didn't grow up knowing, and they hear them, and, and and now they, they react to them.
Um, I saw recently these three guys who were reacting to All in the Family
They couldn't believe that stuff could even be said on TV. These are people in today's era not believing that something like that could have been on TV back in the '70s. I played some of it for my kids. [00:04:00] My kids were offended that I even played it for them. They couldn't believe that was mainstream TV because culture has changed.
Now go back even further. You get all the way back into the past that's, that's pre-US culture You know, w- w- one of the things I, I, I love about England is over there we have what, what I call the rule of 200. And, and people say, "Well, what do you mean?" And I say, "Well, it's the difference between England and America is my rule of 200."
In America, if something is 200 years old, it's really old. Yeah. In England, if something's 200 years old, it's like yesterday
