A television program, The People’s Court, involves a real-life judge presiding over actual courtroom cases. The judge sits behind the bench wearing a black robe, pronouncing final decisions pertaining to legal disputes. When you and I hear the term "judge," we probably envision such a person as the one just described. However, the judges described in the Old Testament functioned quite differently. Judges were military leaders who were raised up by the grace of God to govern Israel in times of trial. Psalm 2:10 relates that they enjoyed parallel authority to kings. It has been suggested that they were similar to the American Indian war chief whose authority was limited to the duration of a conflict.

The Hebrew people entered Canaan as a nomadic people with one God. Soon following the death of Joshua, it was as if they literally forgot themselves. Knowing little about agriculture, it was only natural that they should consult their Canaanite neighbors about how to manage crops. The Canaanites obliged not only by instructing them on how to raise crops, but also by teaching them about the gods who presided over the crops: the baals. From that point on, things began to go downhill. The God who had brought them safely across the sea and the Jordan River was forgotten and the new baals were worshiped. God’s own people had literally forgotten who they were. The need was to get back to God.

From all appearances, it seems that from time to time we have forgotten our own identity. 1. We have disillusioned ourselves into believing that we must have everything in small doses or condensed form. The Reader’s Digest has produced a condensed version of the Bible for those persons who "don’t have the time" to read the Scriptures in their entirely. We attend speed-reading clinics to enable us to read faster, but then there are those who prefer to see a movie about something rather than read the book. We like our news in short snatches such as we find on the 6:00 or 10:00 news report. We take our meals from fast food outlets and often eat them on the run. We want our religion packaged neatly into an hour on Sunday morning, and if it goes beyond that, we begin shaking our watches. It is as if we believe we must have our food, news, entertainment, and religion in short doses. 2. We have apparently fallen victim to a low self-esteem. Robert Schuller has written a new book titled Self-Esteem: The New Reformation, in which he proposes that the reason we are willing to settle for second and third best is because we have such a low opinion of ourselves. We will not pursue that observation here, but will simply remark that low self-esteem is a contradictory attitude to the picture of humanity presented in the Scriptures: "created in the image of God," and "the child of a king." 3. We have embraced what I refer to as a placebo ethic. That is, an ethic which is questionable but which makes us just "feel better" because we espouse it. Consider for instance, the movie rating system, which we have mistaken to be a kind of safeguard against our youth being offended by objectionable material (i.e., "PG" or "R" ratings). We know however, that any youth who has the price of admission can usually be admitted. We know that probably they are not going to hear any word that they have not already heard before. We know that they are not going to see much more violence than they have already seen on the 6:00 news. We know that about anything else they would see, they probably have seen it in some form or another already. We know that the rating is all but irrelevant, but we just "feel better" because it is there. We admonish our youth not to do something which we turn around and do ourselves, but we "feel better" because we have admonished them.

The Hebrew people in Canaan were faced with the problem of recovering their own identity. I submit, so are we!