Judges used to live in my mind as one of the more thrilling books of the Bible — ordinary people doing extraordinary things, the kind of stories you'd want turned into a movie. The longer I've sat with it, the less that holds up. It reads less like heroism now and more like a diagnosis; the disease keeps getting worse and worse.
The writer tells you exactly what that looks like, early, almost in passing: whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers. A leader dying always comes with hurdles and challenges, but when Israel lost their leader, they cast everything aside.
Unless the judge wasn't only protecting them. Unless he was doing the seeking on their behalf, and when he was gone, there was no floor underneath. The bottom fell out, and the people crashed lower and lower.
Israel was instructed on how to prevent this and had been given a reminder to cling to. At Gilgal, twelve stones pulled from the middle of the Jordan, set up so that when a child asked what they meant, someone would have to tell the story again: the crossing, the provision, the God who did it. A monument engineered to keep the memory active, generation after generation. And still, by the time we reach Judges, the text says plainly: they forgot the Lord their God. Not rebelled against. Forgot. The stones were still standing. The problem is that nobody was asking what they meant anymore. They stopped caring.
Even the arrangement in this chapter was built against that outcome. God left the nations in the land specifically to know whether Israel would obey. An ongoing test, not a one-time entrance exam. Obedience was never meant to be established once and coasted on. It had to be shown, personally, by each generation standing in it.
I recognize the coasting more than I'd like to. I've watched people whose faith looked settled: a parent's, a mentor's, a church's momentum during a strong season. I filed that away as proof I didn't need to build my own underneath it. I let their pursuit of God stand in for mine, the way heat radiates off someone standing close to a fire even when you're not the one who lit it. I was warm. I told myself that meant something.
Their faithfulness was never actually mine. I was only ever standing close enough to borrow the warmth of it.
The trouble is what happens when the fire moves, or goes out, or you have to walk somewhere it can't follow you. That's when you find out whether you were warming yourself, or just standing near someone who was. Israel experienced that every time a judge died. I've discovered it in smaller ways, when a season of community ends or when a mentor moves on. What's left standing in those moments isn't a return to where I started. It's whatever was actually mine to begin with, which is sometimes less than I thought.
I don't think the answer is to stop being warmed by other people's faithfulness — that's part of what a church community is for, and I'd be lying if I said their example hasn't carried me through seasons I couldn't have carried myself. But I don't get to mistake being carried for having learned to walk. The stones at Gilgal are still standing whether or not anyone stops to ask about them.
The only thing that ever kept them meaning something was somebody choosing, again, to ask.