Now we come to the next part, which is the main division of the book. Here you see the results of not going on to apprehend Christ, of not pressing forward and getting more and more of what is our own in Him. You find here bondage after bondage. With painful uniformity you are told that the people did evil, turned away from God, united themselves with the people of the land, and, as a result, God sold them into the hands of one enemy after another. They are thus brought low and to a sense of their utter helplessness and absolute failure, and departure from God. When there was no help for them, He raises up for them a helper who delivers them.
I want tonight to try to see in each of these enemies, in each of these bondages, what form of evil it represents, what that is not of Christ, what it is that the enemy used that is not of Christ, that is contradictory to Christ, to rob us of what is our own in Christ; and next to see in the deliverer, whom God raises up, what element there is of Christ in him, that enables one when he apprehends it to gain the victory over the power that had overthrown and taken possession of him. You see how these two thoughts fit together; for every one surely has felt, we know, the enemy's power, the power of something that is not Christ. As the apostle says, "Ye have not so learned Christ" It is not merely what the evil is, but that it is not Christ. It is a failure in various ways to apprehend what He is.