JUDGES 10, 11, 12 and 13
Israel had been in the Promised Land 300 years by then and the spiritual temperature towards the Lord had fallen again. It was G. K. Chesterton who said: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” – and these Israelites were out to prove him right! It is really very strange that such a high proportion of the population seems to think that ‘all roads lead to heaven’, when the main doctrines of the main world religions are completely contradictory. You would not for a moment take that advice if you wanted to drive from London to Glasgow, would you? “Any road in any direction will do, as long as you are sincere” – I don’t think so! Yet these apostate Israelites were happy to follow a raft of man-made gods, whose worship started from idols and ended at demons, and to believe a mass of contradictory doctrines. The only constant rule seemed to be: “Any god but the Lord”. We see this today in our own nation, where the national institutions will bend over backwards to avoid offence, and to offer platitudes to every other possible form of religion or atheism – other than the belief in the One who says: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no-one comes to the Father, except through me”.
So Israel’s actions greatly offended the Lord (and our society’s does also today); therefore he allowed the Amorites and Ammonites, who had almost been completely destroyed 300 years previously, to re-form and to oppress Israel. This mainly concerned the region of Gilead in Transjordan. After 18 years, Israel could stand it no more, and repented. ‘Repentance’ simply means changing your mind about your allegiance to the Lord; true repentance is evidenced by unambiguous actions consistent with it. (Acts 26:20.)
Jephthah was a mighty warrior, similar to the future King David, and out of favour with his family because his mother was a prostitute. The elders of Gilead recognized a winner and so struck a bargain with him to become their military commander, with the reward of being their President afterwards. Sensibly, Jephthah got them to put it in writing before the Lord! Then, full of the Holy Spirit (very necessary for success) he led Israel to a great victory in battle. Less sensibly, for insurance purposes, he had made a reckless oath to God that he would sacrifice a random person from home in exchange for God’s ensuring the victory. The outcome, inevitably, reads like a Thomas Hardy novel and the unfortunate victim of this oath was Japheth’s beloved only daughter, and only child. A word of advice here: don’t make reckless oaths to God; in fact, don’t make any!
Twice in two days, we read that Ephraim became very ‘prickly’ with a national hero, simply because they felt they had not been given sufficient prominence in the battle (it is very easy to be ‘heroic’ during a victory parade!). Unlike the experience of Gideon, they were not placated by Jephthah’s diplomacy, but insulted and attacked him. His battle-hardened army deservedly routed the Ephraimites and drove the survivors away from their own land. As the stragglers attempted to re-cross the Jordan home, Jephthah’s security forces imposed a small ‘native language’ test on them; being able to pronounce the ‘Sh-‘ sound in ‘shibboleth’ became a matter of life and death! Civil wars are often the bloodiest of all, and 42,000 men from Ephraim were killed during that conflict – far more than God’s enemies could have managed. The word ‘Shibboleth’ originally meant either ‘an ear of grain’ or ‘stream’ – which was rather an appropriate choice of password on this occasion! Today it has passed into the English language to mean a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular group of people. In New Covenant terms, this event teaches us that unity amongst believers is not only a prerequisite for the Church’s power and witness, but its absence is immensely destructive to us all.
Samson, whose name means ‘Brightness’ was much-wanted baby, a spoilt teenager, and a nasty piece of work as a man. His twin driving forces in life were a lust for beautiful women and the arrogance that comes from overwhelming physical power over men. He indulged both those impulses to the max! He managed to break just about every vow that his parents made to the Lord on his behalf, and virtually every rule in God’s Book; what is surprising is that the Lord waited until the final condition of Nazirite living had been broken (the cutting of his hair) before switching off the power! What is even more surprising is that the Lord chose to use him in the first place – but that is part of the mystery of God’s grace that defines it as ‘grace’.
The Angel of the Lord visited Manoah and his wife – they were Danites and lived on the West coast of Israel not far from the Philistine coastal region. This, of course, was before the wholesale migration of the Tribe of Dan to the far North of Israel (see Judges 18). The Lord promised the couple (previously barren) a baby son if they brought him up to be a Nazirite all his life (see Numbers 6). The conditions included the avoidance of wine and grape juice, dead bodies, unclean food, and the cutting of any hair on his head. Since he was to be set apart ‘from the womb’, it meant that his mother also needed to avoid fermented substances and unclean foods during pregnancy too. Well, it happened, just as God said, and as the boy grew up, the Spirit of God began to fill him.
Chapter 13:10-22 is another key Old Testament passage (following on from 6:11-22) that distinguishes between the Invisible God in heaven who was due to receive their offering, and ‘The Angel of the LORD’ (always with the definite article) as the visible person of the Trinity (later to be identified as the Messiah) who appeared to Samson’s parents as a man. The interactions in these verses indicate that the two persons of the Godhead were separately identifiable and, at times, in different locations during the ‘offering’ process. Theologically very significant!
The Big Picture 