“And the Spirit of Yahweh was upon him and he judged Israel. And he went into battle and Yahweh gave into his hand, Cushan Rishathayim. And the land was peaceful for 40 years. And Othniel, son of Qenaz died.”

(Judges 3:10-11)

Isn’t it interesting that in this first cycle, the paradigm against which all of the others will fall short, that the peace which God gave to the people lasted the equivalent of one generation. Often when we read this, we focus on the life of the judge — while he was alive the people followed the commands of God, but when he died, the people fell back into their old sins. And it is proper to make that connection, as we often observe in the Bible and in history, the godliness (or lack thereof) of a nation’s leader affects the godliness of the people for good or for ill.

While that is true, may we not stop there because the responsibility to hand down the matters of faith from one generation to the next does not lie with the national leaders. It lies in the family. In particular, it lies with the father, the spiritual head of the households. And if the fathers are silent about the things of faith, the commands of God, and the works of God in history, then the next generation will drift away.

We are seeing the effects of this in America today. In the 1950s, people bought into the lie that spiritual things were private things and not to be talked about in the public sector. Many of the children of that era followed that practice and thus the grandchildren of that era began growing up in a world where godliness became a more or less optional matter (or embraced the notion that one could find spirituality in a variety of places. Today, the culture has almost entirely rejected the authority of God over life in the social square, and the people, much like what we will find here after Othniel’s death, have fallen into idolatry.

So, what is the solution? The solution is not Christian politicians. The solution is not laws that reflect Christian values. The reality is that politicians and laws are impotent when it comes to transforming our culture; at best, having Christian politicians and laws is only a byproduct of getting the more significant problem squared away properly. What is the most significant thing to do? We need to teach our kids the word of God and we need to model obedience to that word in our families. We need to train our children to refute the nonsense that is being taught in the broader and more secular culture and that means we need to teach ourselves not only what is taught but also how to refute it. Wen need to engage the culture with Truth and not be silent, for as we read the book of Judges, we will be confronted over and over again with the cost of that silence.