Fragmentation
and Failure; Barren Women • Judges 12:1-13:2
Israel is used in many ways as a picture of the believer’s soul, so by looking at what happens to Israel in terms of their trends toward spirituality as well as their trends towards apostasy we discover principles that illuminate what takes place in our own individual lives. What we see coming to the forefront in the twelfth chapter of Judges is what results from sin nature control in the life of Israel. The same thing happens when the sin nature controls the life of the individual. Even though there may be a time of a measure of happiness, stability, and success, eventually it will collapse. Sin nature control is going to result eventually in personal, cultural, and national fragmentation. It always ends up in destruction.
Whenever
you merge paganism with the truth it always destroys the truth. What happens is
that there is a façade of Christianity, the nomenclature of being Christian,
but at the core of the thinking and application there is no biblical
understanding of truth, no operation of truth, no evidence of real biblical
Christianity. What happens in those instances is religion in the guise of
Christianity. What needs to be emphasized is that no matter how good, noble,
idealistic or beneficial the end results might be, no matter how wonderful some
procedure may appear, if if flows from the sin nature and human good it
guarantees eventual failure, fragmentation and destruction. This is what we see
written across the history of Israel during the time of the judges. They kept
rejecting the truth of God as revealed in the Mosaic law and replaced it with
the religion of the nations that surrounded them. They weren’t rejecting
religion, they were rejecting God.
Jepthah’s
soul was fragmented because he had some truth but he had a lot of paganism,
there was no sense of spiritual maturity there, and at the pinnacle of his
success when he trusted God and had victory over the Ammonites at the same time
he then turned around and came back to his home and he made this terrible vow
because that is what he was taught. That was due to the elements of pagan
thought that had come into his soul. People today are the same way. So often we
find people who have grown up in churches but if we sit and talk to them about
what they really believe Christianity teaches it is a combination of truth and
error. They have picked up “cultural Christianity,” a lot of mythology about
what Christianity teaches, what the Bible teaches, but isn’t biblical. It ends
up in this merger of human viewpoint and divine viewpoint, and ultimately human
viewpoint is going to eat up and destroy the divine viewpoint and result in
fragmentation.
We
also see fragmentation of marriage. The more pagan the nation becomes the more
marriage is fragmented. Judges started off with the ideal marriage of Othniel
and Achsah at the beginning of Judges, and then by the time we get to Gideon we
see that Gideon is multiplying wives. He is committing polygamy so that he can
demonstrate his own power and position, acting like a despotic oriental king of
the time. We see prostitution. Jephthah’s father Gilead goes to a prostitute
and the result is the birth of Jephthah. We see Gideon’s concubine, and the
result of that is Abimelech. And the consequences of the liaisons with
concubines and prostitutes and the polygamy further deteriorates the whole
culture of Israel.
We
see the fragmentation of the third divine institution, the family. There is
abuse and destruction. By the time we get to Gideon we see that Abimelech, his
son, reject his family obligation and he convinces the leaders of Shechem to
give him enough money to hire killers so that they can go out and assassinate
his seventy brothers. When we come to Jephthah we see that he is more concerned
with his own personal power and prestige and is willing to sacrifice his
daughter in order accumulate and accrue power to himself, and so he commits one
of the most grievous forms of destruction and abuse by sacrificing his daughter
as a burnt offering.
Furthermore,
we see the fragmentation of the nation, and that is what happens in Judges
chapter twelve. We see how the nation is divided now. So let’s look at chapter
twelve and see what happens in terms of the breakup of the nation into a civil
war.
Judges
12:1, “And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together, and went northward,
and said unto Jephthah, Wherefore did you pass over to fight against the
children of Ammon, and did not call us to go with you? we will burn your house
upon you with fire.” This is after Jephthah’s victory over the Ammonites. Then
the Ephraimites come to Jephthah, and the last time we saw the Ephraimites they
were doing the same kind of thing towards Gideon. Gideon had victory over the Midianites,
and after the victory the Ephraimites came and said, “Why didn’t you call us to
battle?” Notice that when Gideon handled that he used diplomacy. He was not as
self-absorbed apparently as Jephthah was. But when it comes to the Ephraimites
he becomes hardened and hostile and it hardens them in their position. In
contrast, Gideon was able to say, “Well, your strength would have been better
than my strength,” and he appeals to their ego and he is able to defuse the
situation. But Jephthah doesn’t have that ability. Arrogance always results in
fragmentation and disharmony.
There
is no indication that Jephthah ever put out a call for troops among the general
population of the tribes on the other side of the Jordan. Remember, he is on
the eastern side of the Jordan with the Trans-Jordan tribes. The Ammonites now
threaten him and said, “We will burn your house upon you with fire.” Well there
is not much left of his house. There is an irony here, he has already
sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering and now they are threatening to
burn his house down with fire, but there is nothing left, his only child is
gone, there is no dynasty; there is no house.
Judges
12:2, “And Jephthah said to them, I and my people were at great struggle with
the children of Ammon; and when I called you, you delivered me not out of their
hands.” He is going to lie. He is going to say he called them when in fact he
did not—at least there is no record of it. Verse 3, “And when I saw that you
delivered me not, I put my life in my hands, and passed over against the
children of Ammon, and the LORD
delivered them into my hand: wherefore then are you come up unto me this day,
to fight against me?” This is one of the few mentions of the name of the Lord.
We don’t know if this is just lip service or whether he is definitely trusting
God. But he is in the midst of carnality. He is lying, being deceptive, and he
is creating a reaction among the Ephraimites. He has created a hostile
situation and he is reacting to their reaction. This is always the dynamics of
personal fights and disruptions.
Judges
12:4, “Then Jephthah gathered together all the men of Gilead, and fought with
Ephraim: and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim, because they said, You Gileadites
are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites.”
Rather than negotiating the situation and defusing it he just got angry with
them and called his troops together and attacked. “You Gileadites are fugitives
of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites” is a racial insult.
The Ephraimites are basically saying, You are just the scum from Ephraim, you
are not really as worthy as we are, we are superior to you. So they are
belittling the Gileadites.
Judges
12:5, “And the Gileadites siezed the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites:
and it was so that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go
over; that the men of Gilead said to him, Are you an Ephraimite? If he said,
No.” Ephraim had crossed over from west to east, and now the Gileadites sent a
major contingent to block the force, to cut off the retreat of the Ephraimite
army. If they said No to the question, then the Gileadites would give them a
little test. The Ephraimites had a bit of a speech impediment or it was
standard of their dialect that they did not pronounce the sh sound.
Judges
12:6, “Then said they to him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he
could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the
passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and
two thousand.” This just about decimates Ephraim and it shows the hostility,
the fragmentation. This is just tribe against tribe, the eastern tribes against
the western tribes, the Gileadites against the Ephraimites. So now this nation,
the sons of Jacob who are called out in unity to be a testimony to God and His
grace in the world, and to be a bastion of peace and stability, because of the
fact that they have assimilated the foreign gods and are thinking like the
world instead of believers on the basis of doctrine, has become divided. The
result is division, civil war, one fighting against another.
Then
the concluding comment in verse 7, “And Jephthah judged Israel six years. Then
died Jephthah the Gileadite, and was buried in one of the cities of Gilead.”
Looking
back over the overall structure of Judges, we started off saying there is a
cycle. A cycle of disobedience when Israel goes after the other gods and they
are enslaved to the other gods, the Scripture says, and they begin to lose
their freedom, their capacity for freedom which is always based on doctrine.
The issue is always doctrine and spiritual relationship with God based on the
truth of His revelation, it is never the secondary causes which have to do with
military factors, industrial-technological factors, leadership factors,
economic factors. All of those are simply manifestations of the basic problem
of spiritual rebellion. So the cycle would begin with disobedience and God
would discipline them with the invasion of a foreign nation who would oppress
them for any number of years. Then the people would get tired of it and would
cry out to the Lord. They would admit their sin of idolatry and then God would
deliver them. With the first judges God always delivered them and there was
always the sentence, “And God delivered them and the land was undisturbed.”
That is a crucial statement—the land was undisturbed. Every time the land is
mentioned it ought to take us right back to the Deuteronomic promises that God gave
Moses, that they would inhabit the land. That goes back to the Abrahamic
covenant. God gave the land to the people. It says that God gave the land rest,
for twenty years, for thirty years, and for forty years. And at the end of the
Jephthah cycle what do we not read? Even at the end of the Gideon cycle we read
that God gave the land rest for forty years, and in the midst of that there is
civil war and turmoil with Abimelech. God gave the land rest but there is no
rest for the land at this particular time. It is a partial deliverance. We
start to see the breakdown now. It takes years. We have seen the judgeship of
Othniel, Ahud, Deborah and Gideon. It the end of each God gave the land rest.
Now
we come to the last two: Jephthah dealing with the Ammonites and their pressure
from the east, and Samson dealing with the Philistines in the south. And when
the book concludes they are still under the oppression of the Philistines. There
is no deliverance under Samson. In fact Samson dies as a prisoner of the Philistines.
So the book of Judges overall is an extremely pessimistic book. That is why it
must always be taught in conjunction with Ruth, and ultimately in conjunction
with 1 Samuel because in 1 Samuel we see the deliverer come on the scene. A the
same time that these events are going on with Jephthah and Samson we have to
understand that God is in the process of providing the deliverance. That
emphasizes the grace of God in this whole procedure, that even though Israel is
turning its back on God, God has not turned His back on Israel. God continues
to be faithful. Samuel is the picture of the deliverer, and in some sense he is
the foreshadow of John the Baptist because he will anoint the king. The
anointing is a picture of the coming one, the Messiah. Starting with the
beginning of 1 Samuel the nation is at the bottom, it is fragmented and in the
condition it is in in this latter part of Judges, 11-14, and God in His grace
provides Samuel. At the beginning of Samuel the nation is spiritually barren,
it is divided and in civil war. But at the end of 2 Samuel the nation is under
the Davidic kingship, God has promised a greater son to David in the Messiah,
the Davidic kingdom is a picture of the eventual messianic kingdom, and what we
see is a picture of the grace of God, the deliverance of a spiritually bankrupt
nation at the beginning of that period—the solution is grace—and the solution
is going to be the divine deliverance. And it is a picture of the gospel, the
divine deliverance under the Davidic Messiah, because at the beginning of
Samuel at their worst is the most fragmented part in their history, and at the
end of Samuel is the expansion of the Davidic kingdom and the great glories
that came with that.
Those
are the major figures that are on the scene at this time. Starting in Judges
11:24 two oppressions begin, one from the east and one from the west. The
Ammonite oppression is basically put down by 1106. We don’t hear anything more
about the Ammonites for some time. The Philistine oppression continues. Samson
is ineffective and it is not until the battle of Mizpeh in 1084 BC under Saul
that the Philistines are eventually defeated and Israel begins to push back the
Philistines in the process.
Jephthah
begins with many strikes against him. He began from a human perspective with
many problems, many flaws. He was the bastard son of a prostitute, he had no
position in society, he was rejected by his family. He fled from them and took
up a lifestyle in the wilderness where he associated with outlaws and the dregs
of society, and operated outside of the law. So in terms of human viewpoint
status he has none, yet God used him. So there is the picture of grace. Yet
this is not a man that is fully devoted to God or who understands the
Scripture. Those are the positive things about Jephthah. He trusts God in the
midst of the battle to give him victory. But he is so caught up with his
failures that eventually his arrogance brings failure and destruction and
proves his own undoing. He held to a mixed form if religion: some truth but a
lot of error that he incorporated from the paganism around him. The result is
that he destroys everything he set out to gain.
When
you operate on human viewpoint, when you do not sell yourself completely to the
Word of God and to doctrine as your priority, eventually your arrogance will catch
up with you and destroy you.
Jephthah
is a picture of the theme of the book: “Everyone did what was right in his own
eyes.” He is a manipulator, trying to manipulate God with the seriousness of
his vow. He is willing to sacrifice anything for his own ambition, for his own
power, for his own prestige and career. He illustrates that self-absorption and
arrogance are the core of pagan thought and it ultimately results in our self-destruction.
Though there is room in paganism for altruism, for good deeds, for charity,
ultimately it is human good and it will produce sin and evil and lead to
tragedy. One commentator on Judges writes: “This arrogant man proves himself the
consummate manipulator who opportunistically seizes power over his tribesmen,
bargains with God, victimizes his daughter, and brutalizes fellow Israelites.” Paganism
always results in the brutalization of mankind.
Jepthah
is the son of a prostitute and embodies all that is wrong in spiritually
unfaithful Israel. For Israel man does not exist to serve God, but God exists
to serve man. Sacrifice for Jepthah is no an expression of sacrifice and devotion
to God but is a means to manipulate God. The result is failure on his part, the
loss of everything he hoped to gain, and once again it symbolizes how barren the
nation has become spiritually.
Furthermore,
when we look at the Ephraimite civil war ot portrays one problem with arrogant
self-absorption, and that is that people become hypersensitive. When you are
focused on yourself then all of a sudden you become very sensitive to anything
which is a real or perceived slight or insult. The reaction is that you then
seek to build yourself up and to promote yourself and defend yourself.
Finally,
in his extremes and abuse Jephthah demonstrates the problem with non-biblical patriarchal
authority. What happens with the feminist vrowd today when they come and look
at Jephthah and the period of the judges, they say that it just demonstrates
the problem with patriarchy. No it doesn’t. Patriarchy is the position that the
man is the head of the home, the man is the head of the state, a man is the
head of the church—the pastor is to be a man, a male, and not a woman. The
Bible does not ever authorize women to be pastors or to teach or have authority
over men. That is a patriarchal system. But it is a patriarchal system based on
the truth, based on the concept of love. Jesus summarized the law as Love the
Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your
neighbor as yourself. When that energizes the biblical concept of patriarchy it
is a vastly different system than when you have the pagan version of
patriarchy. The pagan version of patriarchy is as much a failure as any version
of matriarchy, because any and all versions of matriarchy are false and they
always end up as failures. No society in the history of man that is based on
matriarchy has ever been successful or has ever produced anything of
significance or value. What we see in Judges is what happens when you take
authority and divorce it from the absolute authority of God. The result is
always going to be tyranny, and tyranny in every dimension of life. While
happens with Jephthah is his male power becomes exercised for his own personal
ends. He exploits everyone, male and female, just to further his own agenda.
That always happens when people are divorced from God and divorced from grace
and divorced from humility.
In
conclusion, we see that God is in the background of this. He is not mentioned,
but He is the one who delivers them. We see His grace working despite Israel’s
apostasy and their carnality. The point we learn from that is that we are still
alive, so God still has a plan for our lives. It doesn’t matter how much we
fail or how heinous our crimes are, how horrible our sins are, how many people
we have offended, stepped on, or destroyed in the process, we are still alive
and God still has a plan for our life. No matter how badly we self-destruct in
life there is a way to recovery It starts with confession of sin.