Clough Judges Lesson 10

Judges 9

 

Until this particular chapter, 8:33 and chapter 9, each chapter in this book has dealt with a judge.  Tonight we break that sequence, for the man that you read about in these pages never claimed to be a judge and actually defied the institution of judgeship.  He is the pseudo king, the first pseudo king over Israel.  And because there’s this shift from the sequence of judges over to a king it will benefit us if we went back and just briefly reviewed the argument of this book.

 

We said in the introduction to the book of Judges that this was the first historical analysis of God’s kingdom.  In other words, up until this time you had the Mosaic Law by direct revelation, the first five books of the Old Testament.  This represented God’s will; this was God’s will revealed.  This was the norm; this was the standard of the entire Old Testament nation.  And after this time you have the book of Joshua.  The book of Joshua is important because the book of Joshua for the first time shows you how Scripture was used.  During these first five books the Scripture was being written and we never get a chance to see how the people used the Word of God.  But when you get to Joshua you already have part of the Old Testament complete.  So you can study how the Word of God was taken as authority in Joshua’s day.  And now in the book of Judges, the 7th book of the Old Testament, we move out and we begin to have a prophetic analysis of history. 

 

Don’t be deceived when we talk about inspiration and inerrancy.  Inspiration has nothing to do with content.  That may seem odd to say that but basically there is no such thing as degrees of inspiration and that part of the Bible is more inspired in than other parts.  For example these first five books are more important, more inspired than the book of Judges.  This might be seen if you can think of any field where you have, when you work in the field and sometimes when you just have to learn details in a field that are not very pleasant to learn but you’ve go to do them because if you don’t there’s no way of handling things that don’t count in your own specialty.  If you work in a certain area or specialty you always will have these things that come up.  So in the Word of God you have these genealogical lists which at first glance don’t seem very thrilling, but nevertheless if they were not there the entire structure of the Word of God would crumble.  All these pieces, whether you like them or not, whether they give you much of an inspiration as you’re reading them or not, that’s not the issue in the doctrine of inspiration.  What we’re reading here, this prophetic analysis of history in the book of Judges is just as inerrant and just as authoritative as these first five books, there are no degrees of inspiration. 

 

This is why Paul said in 1 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable,” and the best interpretation of that verse is that in his day the rabbis had a three-degree theory of inspiration, namely that the Pentateuch was the highest, then came the prophetical writings, and then lower the writings, and you had these three levels of inspiration.  And Paul destroys that in 2 Timothy 3:16 when he says no, it’s all, all Scripture is equally inspired. 

 

So though this book engages in a lot of blood and gore and things that would appear on the surface to be unbeneficial, nevertheless, the book of Judges is very important.  Again we have to go back and look at contemporary society.  We have to look, for example at Phoenicia, we have to look at Mesopotamia and we have to look at Rome and we’ll notice that all of these countries that had officers had a title for them; they had two levels of authority, basically.  This is a very simplified version but it gets across the idea.  I will just put the consonants, not the vowels, since in the Semitic language the vowels are variable.  So you have melek meaning king; you have him as the number one person in Phoenicia.  You have the lugal or the ensi who ruled in Mesopotamia.  He was the number one.  You have Caesar in Rome.  These men all had the number one position of kingship.  Under them they had lesser officers.  They had the shapatim in Phoenicia, spt, that “p” is pronounced “ph,” and so filling in with the various vowels you get something like shaphat which is the same kind of thing as the word judge.  In Mesopotamia you had the same kind of thing, being a Semitic language, Akkadian.  And then in Rome you have the consuls. 

 

Now in Israel the interesting thing is you have the shaphat, the shaphatim; these are the judges you’re reading about in this book but there is no king; king is absolutely missing.  And the point we made at the beginning was that this shows you the tremendous freedom that they had in their society.  When God gave them the Promised Land, at least in part, at the end of the generation of Joshua you had set up for the first time in history one of the greatest systems of political freedom the world has ever known.  Think of it, the Law was enforced without one policeman on the corner, not one police.  Why?  Because every citizen undertook the enforcement of the Law.  The Law was that important for every citizen.  Every citizen in the nation had to read the constitution of the nation once every seven years and study it.  And so you had, at least on theoretical grounds, the perfect society, the maximum amount of freedom.

 

Tonight you’re going to see, in a progression of this argument in the book of Judges, why freedom will never last in a sinful society.  People do not wand freedom.  This may sound very paradoxical in a day of radical revolution but basically this is a testimony of God’s Word.  People willingly and quite joyfully give up their freedom.  They give up their freedom in two ways: the grass roots give up their freedom because the grass roots do not want responsibility.  We see this happening right before our eyes in 1971.  Why is there such great pressure on the United States government to pass all sorts of legislation to take children out of the home, form day care centers and so on?  Fortunately that was vetoed this week. 

 

People are trying to allow the government to come in and take your children out of the home but the interesting thing is that if the people in the beginning had exercised the doctrinal authority over their children, had taught the children the way they should be taught in God’s Word, that is through the father and mother, not through the pastor of the church, and this had gone on there probably wouldn’t be this clamor to get the kids into the day care centers.  You can look, in one sense, on the government extension of power in this area as a judgment upon the grass roots.  The grass roots refuse their responsibility to [can’t understand word] their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and it’s as though God is saying okay, you don’t want to do this yourself, I will see to it that Uncle does it.  You see the cause effect; don’t blame everything on the communist conspiracy.  Undoubtedly the ultra left has an ulterior motive in wanting to centralize power; we do not deny this, but you cannot explain from the Biblical point of view history by the conspiracy theory.  This is where conservative political organizations are wrong.  The conspiracy theory is only valid in God’s Word and there’s one conspiracy under Satan.  That’s the conspiracy theory, and the Jews and the communists and everybody else may have their plots and their conspiracies but the one basic plot is the satanic plot.  All these other things may be there but who is sovereign in history?  This is the trouble with a lot of political conservatives; they fail to understand the sovereignty of God.  God is the one who is the head of history.

We’re going to see this very graphically illustrated in Judges 9.  But the point you want to see is when the grass roots give up their responsibility, when they refuse habitually to take on themselves what they should be taking on, they leave a power vacuum and you have unscrupulous politicians that are willing to extend their power and they get sucked right to that vacuum.  So anywhere you have a grass roots citizenry that are not exercising responsibility in various spheres you have the government standing there, just like a lion and a prey, to come in and take it.  So don’t always blame the government, it’s not always the government’s fault.  The simple matter of the fact is that you have many, many people, by them millions in this country, who could care less about their children.  When parents forsake their responsibility they’re just asking for government to take it over.  The principle is here and we’ll see it tonight; the grass roots of the nation Israel want to forsake their responsibility.  And Satan always has a centralized scheme of power ready to take advantage when that point is reached.

 

By way of introduction turn back to Deuteronomy 16:18.  I want you to understand the differences in the two officers.  We want to review these two kinds of officers; first the judges, second the kings.  There was provision under the constitution given for these two officers.  The first office: judge; in Deuteronomy 16:18, “Judges and officers shalt thou make in all thy gates,” “gates” is the word for cities, “which the LORD thy God gives thee, throughout thy tribes, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment.”  So you have established this office called “judge.”  [19] “You shall not wrest judgment [distort justice].  You shall not respect persons, neither shall you take a bribe,” and [20] “that which is righteous and only that which is righteous shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live and inherit the land which the LORD thy God gives thee.”  So you have an office called a judge; the judge is to be what would be analogous in our day to the city council.  It is to be a spontaneous local form of government out of the elders that were formed in these towns. 

 

Now God realized that as the nation became more and more complex, as Israel became larger and larger there would have to be some centralization power.  So in Deuteronomy 17:14 we have provision in advance for this centralized power.  “When you are come to the land which the LORD thy God gives thee, and you shall possess it, and dwell therein, and shall say, I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are about me.”  See, the Phoenicians had their melek and the ensi and the lugals of Mesopotamia, the Pharaoh’s of Egypt, and so now Israel wants one, keeping up with the Joneses, an He says you want a king.  [15] “You will in any way [surely] set him king over you whom the LORD thy God shall choose,” so you have the kingship ordained potentially but notice the restriction.  The restriction is this.  The restriction is found in verse 15, “whom the LORD shall choose.”  Now this implies there is a prophet who is going to have to be on the scene.  This prophet is going to have to be on the scene in order to interpret God’s will and God’s selection.  So it’s not that the king was always going to be bad; it was just that if they were going to go over to a system of centralized power it had to be very cautious and very careful and to follow exactly the guiding of the prophets.

 

Notice in Deuteronomy 17:16, “He shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses,” in other words this is the establishment of a super military industrial complex.  The horses were the ultimate military weapon in that day.  “…for as much as the LORD has said unto you, you shall henceforth return no more that way.”  In other words, don’t get your arms supplies from Egypt, just never mind, you have a king and the Lord will supply your need and you don’t have go to somebody else.  [17] Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart will turn away,” this was part of the international intrigue of that day when you had the swapping around of the various daughters of the rulers to become wives of other rulers and it was political payoffs and various religious intrigues involved.  [18] And it shall be, when he sits upon the throne of his kingdom,” the most important qualification, verse 18, “he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests, the Levites, [19] And it shall be with him and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them.”  Please notice this; constitutional government was how God ordained His kingdom.  The constitution is the book of Deuteronomy.  And political officers, including an absolute monarch, were to be underneath the constitution, a very important principle.  This is the government of men by law, not by men.  The king had to have his authority given to him by the Law, not the other way around. 

 

So as you see this you can understand why it is that Israel approached this problem of kingship with fear and trepidation.  It started about 1300 BC and it goes on down to the time of about 1050 BC when you have Saul authorized to rule as first king by Samuel.  But during this time, the period of the Judges, you have the nation slowly begin to move over to centralized power.  Judges 9 is one of the early and unsuccessful attempts to set up a centralized government.  So turn to Judges 8:33.  This section runs from Judges 8:33 to the end of chapter 9.  It’s divided into two subsections; chapter 8:33 to 9:6 which we can, for lack of anything better, refer to it as a revolution in reverse.  And from 9:7 through the rest of the chapter, a very interesting passage, the curse of Jotham.  So we’ll see a revolution and then we’ll see a curse. 

 

Judges 8:33, this continues the Gideon cycle and sets us up for the problem.  “And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the children of Israel turned again, and went a whoring after Baalim, and made Baal-berith their god.”  Now that is a tip off to the way the rest of this thing is going to go.  Let’s look at this word, “Baal-berith,” “berith” is the Hebrew word covenant and if you recall that every time Satan makes a move in history it always is a counterfeit of what God has first done.  Now what is Baal-berith? The Baal or the LORD of the covenant.  Who do you suppose that’s counterfeiting?  It’s counterfeiting Jehovah, so here you have an exact satanic counterfeit to the LORD, capitalized LORD in your King James, meaning Jehovah, Jehovah of the covenant.  So immediately Satan is starting a revival here.  The nation is weak and it doesn’t take him long to start it.  He’s going to start a revival centering around this pseudo god, Baal-berith, an exact counterfeit to the real God, the God of the covenant.  “…they went a whoring after the Baalim,” these are the various cultic shrines across the nation, “and they made Baal-berith their god.”  This is the first time in God’s Word where you begin to have a centralization of a cult around a proper name Baal; before this you have local Baals but now you begin to have more centralization around this.  When we get into Samuel we are going to go into a detailed study of Baalism and I’ll show you then what this belief involved and we’ll go into all the nitty-gritty so you can understand why later on in Samuel and Kings certain things are said and certain things are done.  You’ll understand it much better if you have the background in what Baalism was. 

 

Judges 8:34, “And the children of Israel remembered not the LORD their God, who had delivered them out of the hands of all their enemies on every side,” notice that is a theme that recurs over and over again in this book, “they remembered not.”  In other words, the historical evidences, notice the tie-in, the historical evidences of the Lord of the covenant, what are the?  His deliverance from Egypt, His deliverance during the Jericho campaign, His deliverance during the northern campaign, the southern campaign in the book of Joshua, His deliverance under Othniel, His deliverance with Deborah, His deliverance with Gideon, all these are the historical evidences of the Lord of the covenant.  But as soon as the people go on negative volition the first thing to go out of their mind is the historical evidences.  And when you release the historical evidences you are free for the imagination to create anything because the imagination is free of any control.  We have Christians that are doing the same kind of thing when they’re building their theology out of the basis of their own personal individual experience.  You can’t do this; you have to go back to the controls of the historical evidences, the documents of the Old Testament and New Testament.  These have to be your controls or Satan will just take you for a long ride.  This is what’s happening here. 

 

They did not remember “the LORD their God,” and notice the last phrase of verse 34 is what they didn’t remember, they didn’t remember what He had done for them, “who had delivered them out of the hands of all their enemies on every side.”  Judges 8:34, “Neither showed they kindness to the house of Jerubbaal, Gideon, according to all the goodness which he had shown unto Israel.”  One further note on the word “Jerubbaal.”  Now Jerubbaal, this name is going to be a key to what’s going on in this chapter.  Jerubbaal means let Baal contend, or let him defend himself; we might say Mr. Apologetic, a challenge to the non-Christian to justify his position, a challenge to the forces that cooperate under Satan to blind men’s minds mentally, for them to produce their evidences.  Now Satan never likes this; Satan never likes to be challenged and you are going to see Satan launch a most vicious attack against this man’s family in this chapter.  All of his sons except one will be wiped out.  And this should remind you once again, as 1 Peter 5:7 says that our adversary, Satan, is “a roaring lion, who seeks whom he may devour.”  And so the picture you get in the Bible is not that Satan is some sort of a funny man running around with a pitchfork in red and so on.  He’s not that at all.  Satan is a vicious, vicious individual.  And you don’t cross him.

 

For example, turn to Jude.  To show you how vicious Satan is you’ll notice in Jude 8 a little chance remark, apparently, that tells us how the great archangel, Michael, dealt with Satan.  And this shows you what Satan is like.  If Michael, the archangel, has to work with him like this…  “Yet Michael, the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses,” we covered that in Deuteronomy 32-34, “dared not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.”  So here you have one of the greatest angels in God’s spiritual hierarchy and even that spiritual angel does not dare to challenge Satan frontally.  This shows you what kind of an individual Satan is.  He is a genius to start with; he is a religious genius to add to that, and he is a vicious religious genius when it comes to obscuring the issues, and when you cross him and when you being to work you can expect a tremendously strong and vicious counter­attack. 

 

If you pay attention to some of the missionary letters in the bulletin, these are given to inform you so that you can pray more adequately.  We’ve been getting prayer letters from the translators in South America and wasn’t it interesting, just as soon as they got the translations made for the natives, then bang everything came loose, they got sick, there was an epidemic, never had that before, there was trouble within the existing tribal structure so that the believers became excluded, where this trouble all start and why did it start just at the moment the translation was finished and into the native hands.  Satan hates it and because he hates it he is going to conduct a campaign of hatred against it.  So the warning of the New Testament is, similar to Judges 9, that if you cross Satan you can expect to have trouble.  This is not to scare us because our Lord Jesus Christ, risen at the Father’s right hand, is equal to the task and more than equal to the task, but it is to say to us that we can expect a kickback, we can expect a counterattack if we are doing God’s will, and we can expect it sometimes very sharply and very viciously.

 

Here you have one man, Gideon; actually adopts the name, “let Baal contend,” he ridicules the whole Baalism cult.  Now Satan is going to launch his attack and kill and wipe out this entire family with one exception.

 

Judges 9:1, “And Abimelech, the son of Jerubbaal, went to Shechem unto his mother’s brethren, and talked with them, and with all the family of the house of his mother’s father, saying.”  Now this Abimelech, again we go to the name to see how it looks in Hebrew; if you separate the name you’ll see it’s “Abi” “melech;” melech is king, abi is my father, so his name means “my father is king.”  Now is that true?  No, because what happened in Judges 8:32-33, “Gideon, the son of Joash, died in a good old age and was buried in the sepulcher of Joash, his father.  [33] And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead,” there’s no evidence here that Gideon toward the end of his life reneged on his previous promise that he had made. 

 

Over and over again in Judges 8:22-23 when they asked him to rule.  Nowhere in Gideon’s life do we ever have a hint that he succumbed to that great temptation.  He was a successful military leader but he never succumbed to that power vacuum.  There was a power vacuum in that day, people were clamoring to loose their freedom, in every way possible, and they asked Gideon to take their freedom away and start a dynasty, and Gideon refused.  And yet this name, Abimelech, indicates that this particular son of Gideon went around saying that his father was king, and yet his father wasn’t.  And it seems to indicate this man is a total unbeliever, he has no concept of spirituality, he has no concept of what it was in his father that made him reject it, and it goes back to something else.  And that is in Judges 8:30-31 how Abimelech came into existence.  “Gideon had threescore and ten sons of his body begotten; for he had many wives.  [31] And his concubine, who was in Shechem, also bore him a son, whose name he called Abimelech.” 

 

Now in Judges 9:1 you have an emphasis on the mother, and that is put in there to tip you off to the fact that Abimelech goes back to his hometown.  His mother never lived with the rest of Gideon’s sons.  She lived at Shechem and she raised her family at Shechem.  And out of this concubine came various people, one of which was Abimelech.  So what you’re dealing with here are a group of people living in Shechem who are actually it turns out, when you study this historically, are part Canaanites.  You have a Canaanite enclave at Shechem and you have a very dangerous situation here because you’ve got Abimelech coming out of a non-Israelite stock.  He is a byproduct of polygamy and this always is going to reap the results and now in verse 1 he goes back, not to Gideon’s home, notice it doesn’t say his father, it says “his mother’s.”

 

Judges 9:2, “Speak, I pray you, in the hearing of all the men of Shechem,” and he’s going to start a revolution, “Which is better for you, either that all the sons of Jerubbaal, threescore and ten persons, reign over you, or that one reign over you?  Remember also that I am your bone and your flesh.”  And with this he means to obviously imply, look you people at Shechem, what’s the idea of letting these Jews rule over you when I am not a Jew, I’m part with you and part Canaanite, I’m of your flesh and your blood and I have just as much right to rule as Jerubbaal’s sons.  Another interesting thing about this, evidently Jerubbaal’s sons weren’t willing.  They were held in great respect but they weren’t reigning over them.  This, of course, Abimelech just uses as a rouse to get his whole revolution started. 

 

Judges 9:3, “And his mother’s brethren spoke of him in the hearing of all the men of Shechem all these words.  And their hearts inclined to follow Abimelech; for they said, Yes, he is our brother.”  In verse 4 he hires a bunch of professional killers for seventy pieces of silver.  In verse 5, “And he went to his father’s house at Ophrah, and slew his brethren, the sons of Jerubbaal, threescore and ten persons, upon one stone,” the phrase “upon one stone” refers to a ritual killing, you remember at Gideon’s home there was this Baalite cult.  This is one of the things that shows you Satan is behind this thing all the way through this.  He goes back and he has murdered the sons of the man who defied him.  Apparently they are murdered on the exact location of that cult of Baal that we saw dismantled in Judges 6.  And so all seventy of these son actually have their throats slit and their blood stays on this stone slab, so he gets his goons and they hire out to various people and they go and they kill off the whole family at this one site, it’s a religious killing, the “upon one stone” refers to a ritual killing.  However, one boy escapes, “notwithstanding, yet Jotham, the youngest son of Jerubbaal, was left; for he hid himself.” 

Judges 9:6, “And all the men of Shechem gathered together … and made Abimelech king.”  So you have the first evidence of kingship in the nation Israel here.  It is unauthorized, God has not given any indication this is the time in history to do this, and yet you find men willingly do this; the city of Shechem willingly gave up its freedom.  Now let’s see what happens.  Where do they make him king?  It says, “by the plain of the pillar that was in Shechem.”  The “plain of the pillar” was actually the oak, and this was a cultess, it was a shrine, it was a shrine that was used in previous days to worship Jehovah, obviously now it’s been taken over by the liberals of the day, the Baalism cult.  The Baalism cult had taken over this shrine and now you have instituted a king in the middle of an apostate religion.  You can begin to see Satan tying slowly his stranglehold around the people.  First he gets them to give up their freedom and as he always does, the corollary to giving up your freedom is that you have to accept some human viewpoint religion along with it. The totalitarian states always have a religion, and here again we have the Baal-berith cult now attains political power. 

 

In Judges 9:7 we have the beginning of the second phase of this chapter and that is the curse of Jotham.  To understand the nature of a curse we want to go back in history because this entire satanic plot to destroy the freedom of these people is going to be undone by a man who curses.  So we want to understand what a curse is and how a curse works.  The first curse is Genesis 3.  Every legitimate curse in the rest of history is an extension from this curse.  Now there are a lot of illegitimate curses; missionaries have a term for the satanic type curses, they call them black magic.  If you think that’s a big joke you talk to a missionary who’s been working, say in Haiti, or some of these places where they have black magic well rooted in the society and they can give you case after case where believers and non-Christians have been cursed and various things have happened in their life.  I was talking to a person a year ago who was saying a person he was trying to lead to Christ had been cursed by this particular witch doctor and his whole hand just withered up and there was no medical aid to solve the problem.  As yet the person hadn’t trusted the Lord so there it was.  There is a power of black magic that can be done through cursing so don’t laugh at this, this is something that actually happens. 

 

Now the real curse, however, again Satan always counterfeits.  There is such a thing as a godly curse and it’s given to us in Genesis 3:17, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow thou shalt eat of it the days of thy life; [18] Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee,” now keep the word “thistle” in mind because it’s going to come up again in Judges 9.  The thistles and the thorns are part of a cursed creation.  There is a disruption in the biology and the chemical nature of reality that is due to a curse.  There is no other way of getting around this, you can laugh at it, you can say it’s myth, but if you’re going to accept this as a historical document you must say that a curse is biological, physiological and chemical reactions in reality.  We live in a cursed universe.  In Genesis 3:14 we have the first part of that curse, “And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because you have done this, you are cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.  [15] I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed,” the first prediction of Jesus Christ, [he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.]”

 

So you have the curse.  Notice something about the curse, this is the legitimate curse.  First notice who does the cursing; God does the cursing.  Notice it is directed toward Satan or Satan’s domain.  So where you have a curse pronounced in God’s Word it usually is pronounced against a satanic plot.  The curse is by God or God’s ordained representative and it is to destroy a work of Satan.  We could go into many areas of God’s Word where this comes forth.  In the book of Kings you have what appears to be a very, very cruel thing, we have these little children follow after Elijah and they say, hey funny man and so on, and he turns around and he curses them.  You say what is this, why does this prophet turn around and curse these children.  Again it can be looked upon in this light; we’ll get into the problems of the children’s allegiance to Baalism and so on.  You have Christ cursing the fig tree and so on.  So you have this curse repeated over and over again in history but the archetype of it all is Genesis 3.  Keep that in mind, God curses the works of Satan.

 

Now come back to Judges 9 and let’s see what Jotham does.  He is going to curse; he is going to place a curse on Shechem.  Jotham at this point is acting as a prophet of God, even though we do not have a direct testimony that he’s a nabiim, nevertheless he is acting as a prophet of God when he makes this curse.  It’s a very, very serious thing and he is cursing a satanic revival is what he’s doing.  Now I point this nature of the curse out and I bring it over and over to you because I want you to realize that Christianity is not the sort of kid-glove affair, that involved in the spiritual struggle of history we have a war that goes on forever, a war that plays for keeps and Satan and God are locked in mortal combat.  And you’ve got to have this view of history or you never can appreciate…you’ll be a [can’t understand word] believer, if you think you can rock along in life and you don’t have to worry about the Word of God and you can put the Word of God 28th priority in your life and let it go, other things come first, parties and so on, and the Word of God is always relegated to some 8th rate place in your life, you can, of course, be a casualty and will be, because we are involved we are involved, whether we like it or not, in an extremely intense spiritual conflict.  And the nature of this conflict is shown best by these curses.  This is a cruel vicious curse that he is going to place on this person but that is part of holy war.  It is cruel and it is vicious.

 

Let’s look at it; in verse 7 he goes to Mount Gerizim, and this is symbolic because Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal were the mountains of blessing and cursing.  It’s interesting he picks Gerizim, that is not the mountain of cursing; it’s the mountain of blessing.  And the reason he does this is because his curse is placed in the framework of grace.  Notice what he says: 

 

Judges 9:7, “And when they told it to Jotham, he went and stood in the top of mount Gerizim, and lifted up his voice, and cried, and said unto them, Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you.”  In other words, there’s an invitation here to correct what is wrong; so he doesn’t curse them from Mount Ebal, he curses them from Mount Gerizim.  The background on that is Deuteronomy 27.  And he begins the first parable of Scripture; this chapter is historic because here’s your first parable in God’s Word.   

 

Judges 9:8, “The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us.  [9] But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, where­with by me they honor God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?  [10] And the trees said to the fig tree, Come thou, and reign over us.  [11] But the fig tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees?  [12] Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us.  [13] And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheers God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?”

 

Now what is true of the vine, the fig and the olive?  In all areas of God’s Word these three are producing plants, part of the plant kingdom and the production that they have is typological of spiritual works.  The olive, the olive oil is a type of the Holy Spirit.  You have the fig tree coming forth with fruit.  God plants a vineyard and He expects Israel to produce the wine as symbolic of joy.  So you have these three producers and the idea that Jotham is getting across is that…he’s not knocking kingship, by the way; notice he knows enough about Deuteronomy 17 and 18 to know look, if you want a king ask someone who is a spiritually authorized believer to reign over you.  But he says if you were really to do that like you did with my father, Gideon, you would find that these spiritual believers are too busy producing fro the Lord to be bothered with your little silliness and so they would refuse him and they wouldn’t buy it.  But it is only the bramble which we come to in verse 14. 

 

Judges 9:14, “Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us.”  Now the bramble is the same as the thistle of Genesis 3, it is part of a curse.  The bramble is a sign of the curse of Genesis 3; a bramble is absolutely useless.  In the ancient world the bramble was worse than useless because the brambles would come into the orchards and they would entangle themselves around the trees, and they would become a fire hazard.  And we’re going to see this mention of fire in a moment.  So the bramble is not only not productive, it is negative productive, it’s a threat.  And so the trees, being stupid, come and they say to the bramble, “come now and rule over us.”  It’s very sarcastic here because later on he’s going to identify what the trees are.  The trees are the cedars of Lebanon and he says you people are like the trees of Lebanon, magnificent cedars, and then you’re going to let this little crummy vine rule over you.  It’s an obvious slap at Abimelech. 

 

Judges 9:15, “And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me” and by the way, the word “anoint” is the word for Christ, Meshach, Messiah, there’s a symbolism here, you see, hidden behind this whole question of kingship is the great King who will one day come.  “And the bramble said unto the trees, If you will Christ me,” or make me Messiah, “king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow,” notice the irony of this, a bramble saying to a cedar, “trust in my shadow, and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.  

 

Judges 9:16, “Now therefore, if ye have done truly and sincerely, in that ye have made Abimelech king, and if ye have dealt well with Jerubbaal and his house, and have done unto him according to the deserving of his hands;” and then skipping the parenthesis…[17 “(For my father fought for you, and adventured his life far, and delivered you out of the hand of Midian:  [18] And ye are risen up against my father's house this day, and have slain his sons, threescore and ten persons, upon one stone, and have made Abimelech, the son of his maidservant, king over the men of Shechem, because he is your brother;)”].

 

Judges 9:19, “If ye then have dealt truly and sincerely with Jerubbaal and with his house this day, then rejoice ye in Abimelech, and let him also rejoice in you:  [20] But if not, let fire come out from Abimelech, and devour the men of Shechem, and the house of Millo; and let fire come out from the men of Shechem, and from the house of Millo, and devour Abimelech.  [21] And Jotham ran away, and fled, and went to Beer, and dwelt there, for fear of Abimelech his brother.”  He evidently got on an Iraqi pinnacle and he yelled across this.  This is a great area with Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal come and there’s an acoustical echoing between these two hills so a man can get up at the top and be heard in this valley and he’s calling down to the city this announce­ment.  And of course before they can send men he takes off and goes and hides but he has uttered his curse.  The rest of this chapter is the outworking of this man’s curse, and it starts in verse 22.

 

Judges 9:22, “When Abimelech had reigned three years over Israel,” now this doesn’t mean over all the nation Israel, it apparently means over the cities that were up around Shechem; this is the area of the kingship, it’s just one small area in the middle around Shechem, but nevertheless, this is how the word “reign over Israel” is used in historical context.  [23] Then God sent an evil spirit” not this is something to watch, how a curse actually occurs in history, “God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem; and the men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech, [24] That the cruelty done to the threescore and ten sons of Jerubbaal might come, and their blood be laid upon Abimelech their brother, which slew them; and upon the men of Shechem, which aided him in the killing of his brethren.”  Now this evil spirit that God sends in verse 23 is not just an evil attitude. 

 

Go to 1 Kings 22 to show you the mechanics of history and how these curses work out.  By the way, this is one reason why sociology and psychology are never going to get anywhere in analyzing great groups of history and the causation behind society because one of the factors they exclude at the beginning of their discussion is the spiritual factor.  If you look at the text of both the Old Testament and New Testament there’s no getting around it, whether you like it or not, a group or a society is influenced by spiritual beings that we can’t see.  And if we could see these spiritual beings and how they move nations, whole nations appear to have an angelic structure over them, this is taught in the book of Daniel, where Daniel sees the bodies of angels that appear to be nationally oriented, so we open a book and we look at a map of the world, we see the political boundaries.  If were to really think spiritually about this, those boundaries that we see on a map of the world basically are the domain of angelic forces that operate, that stir up and so on.  We can’t see these because they are spiritually invisible to the human eye, but the Bible’s testimony is that great wars and great movements, social movements are stirring up or the results of angels actually working in these social structures. 

 

Here’s a very good illustration of this; I Kings 22:5 “And Jehoshaphat said unto the king of Israel, Inquire, I pray thee, at the word of the LORD today.  [6] Then the king of Israel,” remember Jehoshaphat is king of the south, Judah, and the king of Israel is the king of the north, they were both getting together to do battle against the common enemy, but notice, they want to know God’s will.  And so “the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred men, and said unto them, Shall I go against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall I forbear?  And they said, God up; for the Lord shall deliver it into the hand of the king.  [7] And Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD besides, that we might inquire of him?”  Now Jehoshaphat is a believer, and he gets a little disturbed at this clod in the north, this king of Israel, who was about as low as you can get spiritually, and he’s disturbed when he starts seeing him call on these prophets of Baal.  And he says now just a minute, before I go out there, you can go out there in your chariot and get the ax but before you expect me to go out there and lead my troops in this battle I want a word from Jehovah.  Now you just get me a prophet from Jehovah. 

 

1 Kings 22:8, “And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, There is yet one man, Micaiah, the son of Imlah, by whom we may inquire of Jehovah.  But I hate him; for he does not prophesy good concerning me, but evil.”  So he has a real open mind for the truth here.  But nevertheless, Jehoshaphat is willing to play along, “And Jehoshaphat said, Let not the king say so.  [9] Then the king of Israel called an officer, and said, Go get Micaiah, the son of Imlah.”  [10] And the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, sat each on his throne, having put on their robes, in threshing floor at the entrance of the gate of Samaria, and all the prophets prophesied before them.”  This is occurring right near where we are tonight in Judges 9.  [10b] And all the prophets prophesied before them” all the Baal worshippers, saying oh go ahead, go into battle you’ll get the victory. 

 

1 Kings 22:11, “And Zedekiah, the son of Chenaanah, made horns of iron.  And he said, Thus saith the LORD, With these shalt thou push the Syrians, until thou have consumed them.  [12] And all the prophets prophesied so, saying, Go up to Ramoth-gilead, and prosper; for the LORD shall deliver it into the king’s hand.  [13] And the messenger who was gone to call Micaiah spoke unto him, saying, Behold, now, the words of the prophets declare good unto the king with one mouth; let thy word, I pray thee, be like the word of one of them, and speak that which is good.”  See, the pressure is on, compromise your message because you’ll be a party-pooper if you don’t, go along with the crowd. 

 

1 Kings 22:14, “And Micaiah said, As the LORD lives, what the LORD said unto me, that will I speak.”  See, he’s one of these guys, there’s always a square peg in a round hole and here you have the entire religious climate dominated by Baalism and he just doesn’t fit.  [15] So he came to the king, and the king said unto him, Micaiah, shall we go against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall we forbear?  And said, Go, and prosper: for the LORD shall deliver it into the hand of the king.

[16] And the king said unto him, How many times shall I adjure thee that thou tell me nothing but that which is true in the name of the LORD?”  Now this is really a laugh, he doesn’t want what is true in the name of the Lord, but there’s something about this prophecy, oh yeah, go ahead, go ahead.  He’s probably saying to himself I’d like to watch you get killed out there, you see, there’s kind of a smirk on his face as he says this and the king sees it. 

 

1 Kings 22:17, “And he said, I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd: and the LORD said, These have no master: let them return every man to his house in peace,” a slap at the king.  All these people are going to be out there and they have no master, in other words, you are not their master.  [18] “And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell thee that he would prophesy no good concerning me, but evil?  [19] And he said, Hear thou therefore the word of the LORD,” now he begins a rare moment in Scripture.  This is a very, very famous passage here, because this passage more than any other passage allows us to glimpse behind the scenes and see how these prophets received their message.  Normally we don’t get a chance to see this, normally we just have the announcement, “thus saith the Lord,” and there it is, we have no idea how these prophets got the message, but now beginning in this verse we are allowed to take a peak behind the scenes to see how these men in practice did receive their revelation.

 

1 Kings 22:19, and so Micaiah says, “Hear thou therefore the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne,” this is very similar to Isaiah, “and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left.”  Those are angels.  [20] And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?  And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner.  [21] And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him.  [22] And the LORD said unto him, Wherewith?  And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.  And he said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so.  [23] “Now therefore, behold, the LORD hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the LORD hath spoken evil concerning thee.”]

You say, isn’t this God using evil to His end?  Yes it is, this is an evil spirit, it’s a satanic demon and the demon volunteers to do the dirty work and so God says good, I’ve got a person I need dirty work done to, go ahead. 

 

Now this is where you have the sovereignty of God and evil in history, where God is using demonic forces to deliberately dissuade, deliberately confuse, deliberately mislead those who have rejected him.  It’s the same kind of thing as the blindness.  I have often seen this, for example, in witnessing situations, where a person who has rejected the gospel over and over and over again always appears to get involved in a situation with a believer that targets him further to the gospel; it’s amazing how sometimes this happens.  A person who has rejected and rejected and rejected and it just seems every time that person gets around the gospel, there is something else that happens at just that moment to turn them away for the gospel, there’s always something so God deliberately brings this to make him reject further.  So this again is a very, very serious thing in history and you see here how God manipulates society and people through the use of demonic and angelic agencies, and you have this assignment given in 1 Kings 22.

 

Let’s turn back and finish Judges 9; summing it up quickly in verse 23 God sent an evil spirit, so you have a demon.  And God [can’t understand word] the demon to stir up trouble between these people.  Now on the surface, if you’d been there, as a sociologist and you tried to measure what was happening with surveys and whatever your tool of investigation you wouldn’t notice this.  But here’s what you would notice, beginning in verse 24 and following is the outworking of this.  You have, for example in verse 26, a man by the name of Gaal.  [25, “And the men of Shechem set liars in wait for him in the top of the mountains, and they robbed all that came along that way by them: and it was told Abimelech.”

 

Judges 9:26, “And Gaal the son of Ebed came with his brethren, and went over to Shechem: and the men of Shechem put their confidence in him,” see the men of Shechem always want to trust some man, some power, so God says fine, you trust Abimelech, here’s what I’m going to do to you; you’re on this thing about trusting people to solve your problems, I’m going to give you somebody else that’s even more attractive to trust, this guy Gaal.  So you see how God does this, and I think if you think it through you can see where this has happened in history, where a non-Christian or a non-Christian system of thought or a non-Christian religion sets itself up moving in one direction and God just helps it out.  This is basically what apologetics is, you help out the non-Christian go all the way down to the pigpen.  You don’t stop him, you let him go.  And so here in verse 26 you have this tendency, there’s a prostate tendency to centralize and collectivize power around one man; God is using that apostate tendency, deepening it, intensifying it, to bring about his will.

 

Judges 9:27, “And they went out into the fields, and gathered their vineyards, and trod the grapes, and made merry, and went into the house of their god, and did eat and drink, and cursed Abimelech.”  And then in verse 28 Gaal does the same thing to Abimelech that Abimelech did to Jerabbaal’s sons, he says hey, do you like this guy ruling over you—no, you want me to rule over you.  So God simply takes this negative behavior pattern and uses it to damn them.  [28, “And Gaal the son of Ebed said, Who is Abimelech, and who is Shechem, that we should serve him?  Is not he the son of Jerubbaal?  And Zebul his officer?  Serve the men of Hamor the father of Shechem; for why should we serve him?”

 

Judges 9:29, “And would to God this people were under my hand!  Then would I remove Abimelech.  And he said to Abimelech, Increase thine army, and come out.”  Abimelech obviously is not around the city, but it turns out there’s a man by the name of Zebul, Zebul is the mayor of Shechem and he hears this, so he sends out to Abimelech and says listen, we’ve got a little hot problem here in the city and if you’ll bring some of your forces here and do what I tell you we can knock this guy off.  [30, “And when Zebul the ruler of the city heard the words of Gaal the son of Ebed, his anger was kindled.  [31] And he sent messengers unto Abimelech privily, saying, Behold, Gaal the son of Ebed and his brethren be come to Shechem; and, behold, they fortify the city against thee.  [32] Now therefore up by night, thou and the people that is with thee, and lie in wait in the field: [33] And it shall be, that in the morning, as soon as the sun is up, thou shalt rise early, and set upon the city: and, behold, when he and the people that is with him come out against thee, then mayest thou do to them as thou shalt find occasion.”]

 

So the forces come, Judges 9:34, “And Abimelech rose up, and all the people that were with him, by night, and they laid wait against Shechem in four companies.”  They surround the city.  [35] And Gaal the son of Ebed went out, and stood in the entering of the gate of the city: and Abimelech rose up, and the people that were with him, from lying in wait.  [36] And when Gaal saw the people, he said to Zebul,” a very humorous passage here, he said, “Behold, there come people down from the top of the mountains.  And Zebul said unto him, oh, you see the shadow of the mountains as if they were men,  [37] And Gaal spoke again, and said, See there come people down by the middle of the land, and another company come along by the plain of Meonenim.”

 

And then in Judges 9:28, beautiful rebuttal, “Then said Zebul unto him, Where is now thy mouth, wherewith thou said, Who is Abimelech, that we should serve him?  Is not this the people that thou hast despised?  Go out, I pray now, and fight with them.”  In other words, he says look at where your big mouth is now friend, so he sees Abimelech and his forces come, and needless to say they win.  [39, “And Gaal went out before the men of Shechem, and fought with Abimelech.  [40] And Abimelech chased him, and he fled before him, and many were overthrown and wounded, even unto the entering of the gate.  [41] And Abimelech dwelt at Arumah: and Zebul thrust out Gaal and his brethren, that they should not dwell in Shechem.  [42] And it came to pass on the morrow, that the people went out into the field; and they told Abimelech.  [43] And he took the people, and divided them into three companies, and laid wait in the field, and looked, and, behold, the people were come forth out of the city; and he rose up against them, and smote them.  [44] And Abimelech, and the company that was with him, rushed forward, and stood in the entering of the gate of the city: and the two other companies ran upon all the people that were in the fields, and slew them.”]

 

And needless to say they win, Judges 9:45, “And Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took the city, and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt.”  Now this means that they can’t plant any more, they just took salt and turned it right into the field; that’s how he handled Shechem.  Now that’s one-half of the curse fulfilled, because the city of Shechem has been damned by God’s curse through the words and the mouth of this young man, Jotham.  But we still have part of the curse to be fulfilled, Abimelech must be killed. 

 

Judges 9:46, “And when all the men of the tower of Shechem heard that, they entered into an hold of the house of the god Berith.  [47] And it was told Abimelech, that all the men of the tower of Shechem were gathered together.  [48] And Abimelech gat him up to mount Zalmon, he and all the people that were with him; and Abimelech took an axe in his hand, and cut down a bough from the trees, and took it, and laid it on his shoulder, and said unto the people that were with him, What ye have seen me do, make haste, and do as I have done.”  He’s going to burn the thing down, a very cruel individual, he burns it down and at the end of verse 49 about a thousand men and women perish in that fire, it’s a tremendous conflagration.  [49, “And all the people likewise cut down every man his bough, and followed Abimelech, and put them to the hold, and set the hold on fire upon them; so that all the men of the tower of Shechem died also, about a thousand men and women.”]  So he eliminates them.

 

Judges 9:50, “Then went Abimelech to Thebez, and encamped against Thebez, and took it.”  [Can’t understand word] a strong tower within the city, this is evidently another part of his confederacy that he had set up in the middle of Israel.  [51] “But there was a strong tower within the city, and thither fled all the men and women, and all they of the city, and shut it to them, and gat them up to the top of the tower.  [52] And Abimelech came unto the tower, and fought against it, and went hard unto the door of the tower to burn it with fire.”  Same tactic again.  [53] “And a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech’s head, and all to break his skull.  [54] Then he called hastily unto the young man his armor-bearer, and said unto him, Draw thy sword, and slay me, that men say not of me, A women slew him.  And his young man thrust him through, and he died.”  This, by the way, is a theme that recurs in the ancient near eastern literature; the warrior never wants to be killed by a woman.  This is why I tried to show you back with Deborah and Barak and that episode, why it was such a disgrace to have Sisera killed by a woman.  This was just horrible, it was the worst fate a warrior could ever have, and the most unglamorous thing to have some woman brain him with at millstone. 

 

Judges 9:55, “And when the men of Israel saw that Abimelech was dead, they departed every man unto his place.   [56] Thus God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech, which he did unto his father, in slaying his seventy brethren.  [57] And all the evil of the men of Shechem did God render upon their heads: and upon them came the curse of Jotham the son of Jerubbaal.”

 

Now to tie this together and bring the curse up into the New Testament, I want to show you two passages in God’s Word that may shock you a little bit because the same theme of the curse reappears in the New Testament.  Turn to Galatians 1:8, this is something that people enjoy reading the Old Testament, it’s kind of humorous, but when you get into the New Testament and you want to apply this doctrine of the curse it doesn’t become so humorous any more.  “Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.”  That is a very, very serious verse in the New Testament. 

 

Do you know what that’s saying?  That any person in the Church Age who dares to falsely misrepresent Christianity and preach a gospel other than the gospel of the New Testament has a curse resting upon his head.  This goes for every false cult, this goes for any person who misrepresents the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ—a curse upon his head.  It’s a tremendously serious thing.  And oftentimes we get a little flippant about our theology, oh, you don’t have to nitpick, you don’t have to bother with these things, let’s have religious dialogue, let’s loosen up.  And yet isn’t it interesting, the New Testament has a hard, hard, hard line—cursed be the one who would mis­represent the gospel, cursed by the one!  If you want a more literal rendering, to hell with you, literally that’s what it means, to hell with you if you are misrepresenting the gospel.  Now wouldn’t that go well in a religious ecumenical dialogue?  For a fundamentalist to get up and to hell with you; that would really have the brotherhood award for the year.  But this is the curse of the New Testament, to hell with anybody that disagrees with the New Testament.  That’s what it says, to hell with them. 

 

Now let’s see another part, the same aspect of this.  The last part of God’s Word, the book of Revelation to show you that God takes His Word seriously and He curses the one who misuses it.  Revelation 22:18-19, “For I testify unto every man that hears the words of the prophecy of this book.  If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book,” that is the judgments.   Verse 19, “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book,” obviously indicating the unsaved state of any person who would misrepresent and destroy the canon of Scripture, a serious, serious curse.  Cursed be the one who misrepresents Scripture; cursed be that one.