Judges 1:1-7 | Episode #1264

August 20, 2026

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Judges 1:1-7

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for over 25 years. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word verse-by-verse and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

If this podcast ministered to you, please subscribe, and leave us a review. Reviews help us reach more people and spread the wisdom of God. 

Please follow us:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hopealivewithgod/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/hopealiveministry/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LakeComChurch/ -Lake Community Church

Transcript

This is Hope Alive, where we apply God's Word to our daily life. My name is Chad Harrison. I'm first a husband, a father and a grandfather. I'm also the teaching pastor at Lake Community Church in Dadeville, Alabama on beautiful Lake Martin. I've been serving as a pastor for over 30 years. I also serve as the Tallapoosa County District Judge. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word verse by verse through the Bible and to find his purpose and will for your daily life. If you would like sponsor this podcast, go to the Show Notes, where there's a link where you can make a donation. I pray in the name of Jesus that God would open his word to you, allow you to see him and to know him, so that you would know his will and his way for your life, that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today. Word of God, please speak to the hearers of your voice today in the name of Jesus. Amen. Foreign. Well, good morning. Welcome to Lake Community Church's morning Bible Study. We're finally starting the new year off. And you go, well, Pastor, it's the 6th of the year. I know, but we had, we had the end of the week last week, which was New Year's, and, and then yesterday I, I had to go and be on a show. And so at 7 o'. Clock. So we're finally getting started with the Bible study here, starting the year in the Book of Judges. And you're going, well, what is the Book of Judges about? Well, I'll give you the key verse. And the key verse is each man did what was right in his own eyes. And that's a hearkening to the priesthood of the believer. And what does that mean? Well, each believer has a special relationship with God. They're a priest. It comes from, well, New Testament teaching that starts with Jesus and goes all the way through the Book of Acts and the history of the church, and then the teachings that are found in all the epistles. We have a high priest who is Jesus Christ, and then we are under that. And we have a right to enter into his presence and hear from God. And we have the opportunity to learn to do what God says the way God says do it. Now, I want you to hear me. It's not the way somebody told you God said do it. It's the way God told you. Because conviction comes from your hearing God, experiencing God. And the way I experience God is I and God walk through a process together in which I learned something. And once I learned that my conviction about that, meaning the strength of, of. Of my position on that issue is going to be really, really high. It's going to be really, really heavy. And the reason it's going to be high and heavy is because, you know, I, I have, I've been down that road before as, as we would say in the South. We've been there before. We know what, we know what, we know what God says, we know how that relates to the world, and we live it out. And so conviction comes for that. Now, what happens in the Book of Judges in that process is very messy. I mean, the Book of Judges is just, if you want to describe it, it's a mess. It is a complete mess. And the reason it's a mess is because, well, individuals now have the right to hear God and to determine whether they're going to. This is the salvific process. This is the sanctification of God. Once you're born again, once you've heard God's voice and been converted, and by the way, even the conversion process is me choosing to turn and hear God and walk with Him. Once I begin to walk with him, well, I got to learn how to. I got to learn how to submit my will to his will. And that means I have a free will. And that means that God desires for me to learn how to trust him and walk with him in submission to his will, just like Jesus did. And we even read that on Sunday morning in John chapter 12. Jesus said his heart was troubled, but he also said, I'm going to do my Father's will. And that's in relation to the cross. And so we know that we have to. If Jesus, who was God in the flesh, if he had to submit his will to the Father, we gotta learn to do that. And what does that mean? Well, we've also gotta learn who God is, and we gotta learn from His Word who He is. And we gotta learn how to apply who he is to. To the world we live in. Now, we know from the prior six books that we've studied that God told the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites and all the ites, you parasites, Amorites, Hittites, all those ites, he told them to drive them out of the land and not leave a single one of them there. To take them all out, to get rid of them all. And so we start out in the Book of Judges and what happens causes us to get diverted on one issue and miss the big issue. And the big issue is what's gonna be the issue of the whole book of Judges, it's gonna be what we learn from the Book of Judges as we walk in the spirit filled Christian life. Meaning as I learned to walk as a priest. In fact, in the book of the Revelation, it says we are a kingdom of priests. It says that more than once has he not made them kings and priests or a kingdom of priests. So you could say we're royal and we are because we're co heirs with Christ, so that makes us royalty. And you can say obviously that even if the word kingdom is a descriptive word, an adjective, we're definitely priests, which means we have, we have access to the holy of holies and access to God. Access to that which is, is in essence God. And so understanding that is really, really, really important. And it is important that we learn how to hear what God says and do what God says the way he says do it. Now, God told them to drive out the, the, the occupiers of the land. And so it says in verse one. Now, after the death of Joshua, it came to pass that the children of Israel asked the Lord saying, who shall be first to go up for us against the Canaanites and fight against them? All right, well, they asked the Lord, who's going to go and fight the Canaanites? And that is, that's near the, that's near the land of Judah. They've not yet driven out all the people of the land. They've not taken it completely. I, I want you to hear me. That's a picture too, that we're never going to completely, ever, ever completely take the promised land until Jesus comes and provides the promised land for us in its completeness. But we're never going to take it completely. It's always going to be a battle. And so they inquire the Lord and they say, who shall go up against them? And the Lord said, Judah. Judah shall go up. Indeed, I've delivered the land into his hand. So Judah's going to go up. That's the largest tribe. And when it says up, it doesn't mean north, it means up into the hill country. Okay? And part of Judah was in the hill country. And in fact, part of Judah's in the hill country around Jerusalem. And so there's Canaanites there in the hill country, and there's also parasites. And so he says, so Judah said to Simeon, his brother, come up with me to be to my allotted territory. Now what did you ask Judas? Someone else to come and help? By the way, that's another picture, one of the things about the Spirit filled Christian life is we don't do it alone in that we don't do it without God. Also, we don't do it alone in that we have the Holy Spirit. Also we don't do it alone in that we have each other. We learn to walk by with God, with each other. And so one of the cool things about the Spirit filled Christian life, one of the cool things about the church is this spiritual journey is never, never truly alone. You're alone sometimes physically, and you and God and the Holy Spirit are at work, but you're never really truly alone in the world because we're all one body and we're the body of Christ. And so what does Judah do? Judah goes to one of the brothers, Simeon, one of the other tribes, and says, come up with me to my allotted territory that we may fight against the Canaanites. And I will likewise go with you to your allotted territory. So what did he say? Judah says, I'm going to go up with, we're going to go up to our allotted territory and take my territory, Judah, and then I'm going to go help you. Well, that's a beautiful picture of, well, that's beautiful picture of New Testament believers. That's how we do it. We help each other walk with God. And so as we're walking with God and we're helping each other, so Simeon went with him. It's not like it was a question. And truly, as we're believers, that's not how it works. When somebody asks you to help them in their spiritual journey, you help them. You help them as best you can. Now you don't enable them in things that they think are spiritual but are not biblical or not right. You don't enable them. You don't say, well, I'm trying to comfort them. I'm trying to help them. Where you're comforting them to do something that's clearly unbiblical. You can't do that. Okay, no enabling. But we do walk with each other through the process. And so even if they're struggling with something that you know is destructive to them, you walk them through the process. And that's what Canaan. I mean, that's what Judah and Simeon are going to do. They're going to go up. So they went up and the Lord delivered the Canaanites and the parasites into their hand and they killed 10,000 men at big Zach. Now, now they did what they were supposed to do. They went up. And what happens? They get. They get the benefit of God's promises. They do what God's told them to do and they get the promises. So they, they take it and they. And they. They defeat the Canaanites there. They kill 10,000 of them and they. They take Bezek. And they found an. An Adonib in Bezek, meaning they found a city and they fought again. I mean, they found Adonai Bezek. By the way, Adonai is. Is a name of God. So this is obviously a. It is obviously a spiritual aspect to this. You've got to see that the name Adoni Bezek tends to say that they took something spiritual also, not just the land it says, and fought against him and defeated the Canaanites and the Perizzites. Okay? So when you have this complete defeat of them, then you've got to do what you got to do what God told you to do. And what did God told him to do? Get rid of them completely. Right. So what did they do then? Adonai Bezek fled and they pursued him and caught him. Okay. And they cut off his thumb and big toes, his thumbs and big toes. You know, sometimes when we're Christians, we come up with some of the weirdest things to do. We really do. And it's not weird in the practical nature. It's weird in that it doesn't have anything to do with what God said. The practical nature of this is if I cut off your big toes, it makes you where you can't run very well. Well, really at all. And if I cut off your thumbs, you can't fight because you can't hold a sword. So practically, it seems like that's what you should do. I mean, it seemed logical that that's what I would do. I'd make it where he couldn't fight. And I would. I would take his ability to. To. To have any. Any, Any influence over. Over my people. Because I'm going to take this Adonai Bezek. Remember, it has a spiritual aspect to it. His name means the God of Bezek. Okay, Adoni Bezek. I am going to cut off his thumb and his toes. God did not tell them to do that. God told them to kill him to get rid of him. And they decide, I'm going to keep him, but I'm going to make it so that he has no effect. I want you to hear me. That does not work. You can't modify God's will and God's Word to suit your desires. They begin the Book of Judges by doing what God told them to do, but not doing everything God told them to do. They begin the Book of Judges by doing what they think is right, which would be, we don't want to kill him. We just want to humiliate him and keep him around. Well, I can tell you this. If you keep around spiritual things that are destructive and God has told you to remove, they will eventually take back control, and they will eventually be destructive to you and to your family. And so it says. And Adonibedek said, 70 kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off used to gather scraps under my table. And I. And I have done so. God has repaid me. Now, they did that to him because he did that to 70 kings that he had defeated. But remember, we don't do things the way the world does them. We don't do things the way the enemy does them. We do things the way God does them. And so the, the, the Judeans and, and the Simeonites thought that the best thing that they could do is do to him what he'd done to other people, do unto others as they did to other people. Notice, that's, that's not a spiritual rule. That's. That's not a spiritual rule. It's, it's, it's a lie. They said he cut off their thumbs and their toes. So we're going to do that to him. No, God said, cut him off, get rid of him. Then they brought him to Jerusalem, and there he died. Sure, he died in Jerusalem, but not because they had done what God had told them to do. And what does that do? That leaves an open door to the enemy to attack. And that's exactly what the enemy does. When you leave the open door, he comes through. When you give him opportunity, he. He takes advantage of that opportunity. And so we start out the Book of Judges on a very somber note. Seems like it's a victorious note. We defeated Adonib, but we didn't do it the way God said do it. We didn't do it the way God said do it. And what's going to happen? We're going to continue to do things that seem like they're God's will. They seem like it's in line with what God said, but it's not completely in line with what God says. So the key verse is, each man did what was right in his own eyes. The issue is, are you seeing things the way God sees them? Are you doing it the way God said do it? And if you're not, that doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't mean it's right at all. And we're going to figure out that Israel's going to face a whole lot of difficulty, because Israel's going to do things that seem godly, that have the appearance of godliness, and may in many ways 90% be exactly what God said. But the other 10% is where the snare is. That's where the trap is. That's where the problem is. And so our study through this book, is going to be learning how to do God's will and God's word, the way God says it, which means you got to know it. As you go. Today I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.