For many of us, getting saved was the single most revolutionary moment of our lives: a change from death to life, from self-rule to being ruled by God. Consider Paul’s counsel to stay put in the situation you were called in, rather than assuming conversion requires upending your whole life.

Judges tells the story of a nation sinking ever deeper into sin, using each new generation of rulers to show what life without God actually looks like. Meet Jephthah, the outcast who becomes Israel’s unlikely last resort.

Last week ruled out what’s sometimes called the Catholic view of divorce, no remarriage under any circumstance. This continues through Paul’s answers to the Corinthians, now addressing marriages between believers and unbelievers.

Where is God when things go badly wrong? Judges 9 is the perfect chapter to wrestle with that question. Consider the dark, self-serving reign of Abimelech, a stain even within a book already full of moral decline.

The hardest topic in pastoral theology often isn’t election or the lapsarian debates, it’s marriage, divorce, and remarriage. Consider Paul’s own pastoral answers to the Corinthians on divorce.

One of the most dangerous temptations we face is success itself: once people start approving of us, we start believing our own opinions matter more than they do. Consider Gideon’s fall from humble deliverer to something far less admirable.

Error tends to fall into one of two ditches: legalism or license, asceticism or antinomianism, and Corinth had both at once. This begins answering the Corinthians’ own questions about singleness, marriage, and sex within it.

Paul’s thorn in the flesh, the weakness God refused to remove so his power could be seen instead, frames Gideon’s own army: whittled down from thousands to three hundred so the victory could only be credited to God.

Nancy Pearcey argues in Love Thy Body that it’s actually secular ethics, not Christianity, that ends up anti-body. Paul’s theology of the body in 1 Corinthians 6 shows why what we do with our bodies matters eternally.

The Hound of Heaven, Francis Thompson’s poem about a sinner running from God only to be persistently run down by him, frames Gideon’s own reluctant, roundabout conversion.