Loading...
14 illustrations — Lessons from history, biography, and world events
The human mind naturally divides into two warring camps.
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions. Try it with Judges.
These phases repeat with such regularity that he compares them to *the white and red lights and darkness reappearing in a revolving lighthouse lantern, or figures recurring in a circulating decimal fraction*.
Exell, in his 1887 *Biblical Illustrator*, unpacks this summons with Victorian precision: we must arouse the bodily powers first.
She was nourished upon the Mosaic Law, moving through a world thick with heathen cruelties and mysterious divine terrors.
Jehovah could have crushed all Canaanites in one decisive blow, yet He withheld this miracle for spiritual pedagogy.
Why tarry the wheels of his chariots?" (Judges 5:28).
Her crosses and losses in Moab became God's instrument of instruction, turning her soul from a cursed country toward the blessed land of promise.
Yet God commanded Gideon to steal into the enemy camp on the very night his army felt their weakness most acutely.
The service of Elohim is exclusive; it admits no interference, competition, or divided homage.
Yet Maclaren observes a deeper mercy in this barbarity: "Pitiable as the loss was, Samson was better blind than seeing.
He does not merely condemn; He first enumerates the favours which He had shown Israel, recalling the conditions of the covenant: no entangling alliances with the inhabitants, no tolerance for their idolatry.
When your interest, your feelings, your wants, nay, even your future independence are on one side, and the plain dictates of duty and religion on the other, then it is that you must "be very courageous" and not turn aside...
When Joshua's leadership (30 years), Samuel's judgeship (30 years), and Saul's reign (40 years, Acts 13:21) are subtracted from the broader 240–260 year span between Israel's entrance into Canaan and David's coronation, this interval remains.
Surrounded in open field by six hundred Philistine desperadoes bent on plunder and death—not cornered at Thermopylae where numbers meant nothing—he wielded only an oxgoad against overwhelming odds.