JUDGES is the second book of this historical series, Joshua being the first. In the proper and spiritual order of things, Judges would simply be the book of progress, carrying on to full completion that which Joshua had inaugurated. Joshua was the book of blessing, the nation entering into the blessings which God had given them in their inheritance. Typically it is the book which tells of our being blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Judges, naturally, as a second book, would have been simply the development of that, a book of progress, as its number would suggest. And yet we have found assuredly, as I need not remind you, that instead of progress there has been the other side, retrogression.
When you turn over the leaf of a book, you will either go on to something better, something brighter, or back into something darker; and, alas, as we turn the page from Joshua to Judges we find in fact, as we are prepared toward the end of the former book, that we are in darker days. The days are darker, not because God has changed or because the blessing is diminished. Quite the opposite of that; but there are darker days simply because faith has waned, and wherever faith wanes and God is thus put at a distance, you may be sure that everything else will come nigh, every form of the enemy, everything that will assault and hurt the souls of God's people, will come nigh when He is removed to a distance. So that the whole book, you might say, is the book of distance and separation from God, instead of progress in the ways of God. It is getting away from God. Instead of adding to what they had gained, they lose what they had, and the lesson that God would impress upon us in the whole book, is the danger and folly of declension, and its sure results.