Rebecca Manley Pippert says, “Whatever controls us is really our god.”  We live and work in the midst of innumerable gods - not just those of formal religions, but also the gods of achievement, pleasure, wealth, beauty and status.  This time in which we live can be captured in the phrase that sums up the entire Old Testament book of Judges: “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).  One writer says a good subtitle for judges would be “trashy tales of dysfunctional characters.”  Despite the fact that we have nearly 3,000 years between their time and ours, our circumstances are quite similar.  We both live in cultures that are a multiethnic mix of believing and pagan people.  God’s people daily faced the choice of looking to the Lord as their God, or to the preferences of the age.  So do we.  In the end, the book of judges is about a God of mercy and long-suffering, who is relentlessly working in and through us despite our steadfast resistance to his purposes. For the time in which we live, we need what this book has to teach us.