"The Governed" -2

"To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress." (Psalms 10:18) If you could for a moment, stop and quickly think about the word "oppressed"; I will wait, but take just a brief moment and think about what that might look like, to be oppressed. Okay, so if you did what I asked of you, you might have envisioned something along the lines of those statues of men holding up those pillars in the movie 'Dispicable Me'; as he is walking into the Bank of Evil, each one gets worse and worse, until finally, all that you see is arms and legs sticking out from underneath a pillar. Crushed is the word that best describes the meaning, and I am getting a feeling that I might not be quite done with this Psalm yet! The word 'judge' that is used by David, is a word in the Hebrew that means to decide; to hear a cause and render a decision, and to deliver the sentence. The word is 'Shaphat', and is the most common word to designate the function of government in any realm or in any form. After the death of Joshua, without leadership, the children of Israel became very disorganized and repeatedly fell into idolatry; therefore God raised up "judges" that they might deliver a given local tribe from apostasy and then govern them. This period of time for the children of Israel was considered by many to be their Dark Ages; where fore about 350 years, they continually kept losing their way: during which time, you can decipher seven apostasies, seven bondages, and seven deliveries; and the Book of Judges begins with compromise and ends with anarchy. The last verse in the Book of Judges, reads, "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes". (Judges 21:25) As we consider what it is that God has called us to, there is always the fear of being brought into something and then left unattended, or ungoverned. I know that some may not agree with that notion, and we all should not accept it as so; but nonetheless, I do believe, that whether you realize it or not, there is some doubt that rises up in us as to where God will lead us, and what that ending will look like. The way that we correct that fear or doubt that rises up inside of us, is by committing our way completely to the Lord; thereby, we are no longer responsible for the way things might go, but it is left fully in His hands. I find it somewhat interesting that the Book of Ruth follows the Book of Judges; for Ruth, although depicted as a love story, it is also the story of what it looks like to surrender our lives over to be governed by God; by which there is no way of detecting what shall happen or how each chapter of our life will end; only that we want to be governed by the One who knows all the answers...  "Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you." (John 6:53)