'Father's Day' in Ancient Israel

Aim: To recognize that everyone needs God as their father.

Doctrine: Without God as our Father our lives completely unravel. Israel's king was to represent God's Fatherhood to the church; the wrong (or no) ''king'' leads to disaster.

Exegesis: A sampling of ''fathers'' in ancient Israel: some of them did not seem to have a clue (vv. 1-9); some of them were rightly cautious (vv. 10-15); some of them possessed some moral sense (though it was still flawed) (vv. 16-21).

Further application: What the church is to glean from biblical accounts such as these: that without good gospel doctrine, people act like demons; and that God's choice of undershepherds makes all the difference.

Key phrase: v. 1a ''And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel, that there was a certain Levite staying in the remote mountains of Ephraim.''