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If we were looking at chapter 5 of Judges purely from a literary standpoint, we might call it largely redundant. While it contains a few interesting bits of information we will comment on here, for the most part it simply recapitulates much of the historical narrative from the previous chapter in the form of a Hebrew song of praise to God. A secular editor might be inclined to cut to the chase and move us right on to Gideon’s storyline.
Thankfully, our Editor had a better idea.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In Islam, the word tawbah refers to the process of asking Allah for forgiveness. The ritual is comprised of three stages:
Western culture, on the other hand, has largely dispensed with the practice of seeking forgiveness, not least because a public confession of wrongdoing may create liability issues. So you get bafflegab like, “I regret if anyone was offended by ...” instead of a sincere apology.
Tom: Immanuel Can, can you recall the last time someone unsaved asked you to forgive them?
I was chatting with a young man yesterday.
He considers himself a Christian. And maybe he is. I hope he is. But he’s certainly confused about something very basic to salvation; and maybe it will surprise you what it is.
He doesn’t really understand sin.
Now, understanding what it is we are saved from is pretty necessary to salvation, so I’m concerned. I want him to have a correct grasp of how sin relates to the holiness of God. And I’m troubled that his teachers have not taught him this.
So I’m going to try to do a short explanation for you. And I’m going to start with this question:
How bad is sin?
God is sovereign, and may accomplish his purposes through whomever he chooses, often including men and women whose actions are not consistently in harmony with his Spirit. That is to say, there is a vast difference between being used by the Holy Spirit of God from time to time and being a spiritual person. Obviously, the second state is preferable to the first by orders of magnitude, and the Christian who aspires to anything less than being a spiritual person is selling him- or herself short.
The writers of the New Testament use the adjective “spiritual” in a couple of slightly different senses.
The first sense is obvious and common. A spiritual gift is a gift given and empowered for use by the Holy Spirit. The gift itself is spiritual in terms of its origin and energy, but the presence of such gift tells us nothing about the spiritual state of the person using it. The Christians in Corinth were “not lacking in any gift”, yet Paul says to them, “I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.”
Faced with sufficient, ongoing sexual temptation, almost any man will succumb. Women will get the job done when nothing else works. That was certainly the case with Solomon. I note that in describing his descent into idolatry in later life, the writer of 1 Kings makes this comment: “His heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.”
That’s mind boggling to consider, isn’t it. God appeared to Solomon twice. You would think that validating a man’s belief in the transcendent so thoroughly, and doing it not once but on two separate occasions years apart, would guarantee lifelong faithfulness to the Lord and his commandments.
That was not the case with Solomon. Actually, it was not the case with many men and women privileged to experience a personal encounter with God.
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“What does it mean that ‘Satan entered into’ Judas?”
The quote we are concerned with comes from the upper room in John 13. Jesus responds to a question about the identity of his betrayer by saying, “It is he to whom I will give this morsel of bread when I have dipped it,” after which he dips the little piece of bread and hands it to Judas in plain sight of the other disciples, forever dividing his self-identified disciples into “fake” and “real”.
How did Judas feel about being outed like this in front of all his peers?
When I was a youngster, it was common for the person setting up for the communion service to place a collection box, bag or plate side by side with the cup and loaf on the table. At the appropriate time near the end of the hour, an usher or other member of the congregation would circulate first the broken bread, then the cup, and finally the designated mode of offering collection to the congregation, after which we would have a few announcements, close in prayer and head downstairs for coffee.
With minor variations, such was the norm in all the local churches in Ontario that I visited with my father as a boy. It struck me the other day that I don’t see this arrangement anymore, and I don’t miss it one bit.
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The fourth judge of Israel was a woman named Deborah. Yes, there was a female judge. Deborah was also a ‘prophetess’, a term the politically sensitive programmers of my word processor are desperate to render obsolete and refuse to dignify by acknowledging as legit English. I therefore refuse to stop typing it: it’s in my Bible, after all. Such is life in 2025.
Brace yourself for the inevitable if you dare to Google-search the combo of ‘Deborah’ and ‘judge’. Tanya Hendrix conjectures, “She was a warrior.” Christianity.com is confident being a judge and prophetess means Deborah “preached” and led “worship services”. The Jewish Women’s Archive hypothesizes, “Torah scholars would come to learn from her” and that she was “a worker at the temple”.
*Sigh*. Oh well, as Michael Buffer used to so memorably intone, “Let’s get ready to rumble!”
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Almost all in-groups, public or private, have some form of disciplinary process in place. At work, if you engage in behavior the company defines as “harassment”, you will generally find yourself in front of a supervisor and a Human Resources rep, either to be written up or dismissed. The NFL regularly suspends players who don’t comply with its codes. Even Twitter will freeze your account for expressing what it considers to be inappropriate political views. All of this is standard procedure.
Tom: If you read a fair bit of recent online commentary, you might be forgiven for thinking that contemporary evangelical churches are the only institutions in existence that have no self-policing mechanisms in place.
When John Milton, the famous 17th century poet and eventual author of the epic Paradise Lost realized in mid-life that he was going totally blind, he felt a rising sense of panic. How could a wordsmith be of any value, to God or anyone else, when he had not even the use of his own two eyes?
When the great night finally descended, he was reduced to dependency and darkness. And understandably, he agonized over why the Lord would allow such a thing. He recorded his struggles in a short poem — perhaps his most-quoted piece of work.
“When I consider how my light is spent …” he began. With half a life left to give, what point would there be in him losing the one great talent he had? It would remain, he worried, “lodg’d within me useless”, and yet his “soul [was] more bent to serve therewith [his] Maker”. How could he give an account to the Lord if he could no longer serve, and in fact, could no longer even see?
I read a chapter of the Old Testament every morning and a chapter of the New, and I’ve commented more than once on the weird “coincidences” that occasionally result when two chapters paired entirely at random wind up speaking to precisely the same subject.
I say “random”, because there are 929 chapters in the OT and 260 in the NT, two numbers that, if you know your math, have no common denominator greater than 1. In short, the chances of any two chapters I read pairing up more than once in a single human lifetime does not exist. Thus, on any given day, each propitious thematic pairing is its own unique and delightful surprise. I documented a couple of these “happy accidents” in 2021, and they continue to crop up now and again. I’m not a superstitious guy, as I have often been at pains to note, but the frequency with which I experience biblical déjà vu makes me wonder what gives.
The connection between is morning’s pair of lengthy readings was unusually glaring.
When I worked in print years ago, every shift started the same way. The lead would put a job into production by stacking all the marked-up hard copy on a central table, where typesetters would queue up to grab themselves a handful of pages and go to work coding or correcting the content to produce the desired output.
One of my fellow employees became notorious for loitering at the table, picking through the hard copy looking for what we referred to as the ‘cake’: pages of straight text with no complex tables to code and no graphics to insert, or corrections that amounted to nothing more than adding a few periods to the end of existing paragraphs.
You couldn’t miss what he was doing; he was always holding up the line. The only time ‘Norm’ ever attempted anything more challenging was if you put it right in his hand and assured him he had no other option.
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“What does it mean that Jesus will return like a thief in the night?”
Some Christians have a difficult time with the way the writers of scripture consistently and flagrantly compare the timing of our Lord’s second coming to the unexpected entrance of a thief operating in the dark. Perhaps they feel it’s undignified for God to do anything less than appear in blazing glory, defying evil and routing all opposition before the splendor of his appearing. Perhaps they feel he should announce himself with trumpets.
They need not be troubled. He will, and he will. We’ll get to that shortly.
“There is nothing new under the sun,” wrote the Preacher in Ecclesiastes a little over 3,000 years ago. People have been quoting him ever since, and the manifest accuracy of his statement is both reassuring and humbling for the Christian in search of truth.
Humbling, because it implies that none of the ideas that come to us as we read the word of God and discover great ‘new’ things about it are actually original to us. Someone always got there before us; we just don’t necessarily know whom. Reassuring, because the fact that others have walked the same path before us and come to exactly the same conclusions about scripture provides confirmation that we are correct in our understanding of it.
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The gory doings in Judges continue this week (and probably the next two) with the story of Jael and Sisera. I will probably not dwell on Jael’s novel use for a tent peg at great length, but scripture devotes two chapters to the deliverance of Israel from the king of Hazor and its aftermath, so we should probably examine some of the historical background to the chapters that Sunday school teachers tend to leave out.
Of special interest (to me at least) is the song preserved in chapter 5, which gives us far more detail about the battle than the summary in chapter 4, which takes all of four words: “the Lord routed Sisera”.
So he did. No great credit to Barak, the leader of Israel’s armies.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Rod Dreher says nobody meets their spouses at church anymore.
Catholic, Protestant, whatever: some Christian folks are making the case you’ll have better luck finding a spouse in a bar or restaurant, through friends or online than you are going to have finding a man or woman in your own local church worth partnering up with for life. And Dreher agrees.
That’s quite a claim, IC. Where did you meet your wife?
Immanuel Can: At church, first. But we didn’t get interested in each other until we started working together, serving the Lord at a university. My experience may or may not be indicative, though.
“Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”
A few years ago, I remember hearing about an evangelist who claimed he’d managed to conquer sin absolutely, and eliminate it from his life. In fact, he said he hadn’t committed one in twelve years.
His wife, apparently, backed him up on that.
Now, if you’re a woman that has lived with a man for any period of time longer than fifteen minutes, you probably suspect the wife has gotten into the cooking sherry. It’s just not reality. Sinless perfection just isn’t possible on this earth. And if you meet someone who says he’s achieved it, he probably needs to take a second look — if at nothing else, at the sin of pride.
But I don’t need to tell you that. You know from your own experience. As I do, from mine.
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Some people are naturally more reactive than others, but everybody has moments in which their words and actions are the product of pure emotion rather than common sense, let alone real wisdom. A few days ago, we posted here about David’s very public emotional reaction to the death of his son Absalom at the hand of David’s nephew Joab, the commander of Israel’s army, in violation of the king’s own edict to keep the rebel safe. It was the natural reaction of a loving father, but the optics were horrible coming from a head of state in whose cause many loyal men had just fought and died.
Thankfully, David had time for a sober second thought or two, or at least so it seems.
In the last few days, I’ve come across two different discussion threads online about the problem of Christian wives disrespecting their husbands in public.
One case involved a pair of friendly couples from the same local church. The first couple had observed on several different occasions the way the wife of the second couple treated her husband in public. The first husband and wife (surprisingly) agreed that this woman’s treatment of her man was inappropriate, unchristian and a terrible testimony to anyone watching.
Readers floated a few suggestions: maybe the observing husband should talk to the disrespected husband; maybe somebody should talk to church leadership about the problem, and so on.
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“How does the Lord make me know the measure of my days?”
Today’s question is about a phrase in the ESV’s rendering of Psalm 39, though Moses asks the Lord for something similar in Psalm 90. In the fourth verse of Psalm 39, David appeals to his God this way: “O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!”
What do you think: did David get an answer to that request?
David was a man after God’s own heart … most of the time. His desire to obey and glorify God was the motivating force for his actions throughout the vast majority of his tumultuous life. The obvious exceptions to this are unambiguously called out by the writer of Samuel in words like “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord” or “God was displeased with this thing, and he struck Israel.”
If you miss those sorts of editorial comments, you are not reading with great care.
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“Shamgar had an oxgoad,
David had a sling,
Dorcas had a needle,
Rahab had some string,
Samson had a jawbone,
Aaron had a rod,
Mary had some ointment,
and they all were used of God.”
So goes the children’s song, and in its first line it provides almost as much information about the third judge in the book of Judges as does scripture itself.
Almost, but not quite.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Our friend Michael Gungor is at it again, doubling down on his statement to the effect that “Genesis is a poem if I’ve ever seen one.”
Which would be fine, as mere opinions go, but now he’s brought Jesus Christ into it:
“Even if he was wrong, even if he did believe that Noah was a historical person, or Adam was a historical person, and ended up being wrong, I don’t understand how that even would deny the divinity of Christ. The point is it wouldn’t freak me out if he was wrong about it, in his human side.”
Tom: Let’s just catch us up here.
Tertius once told me about something that happened to him many years ago, when he was a young Christian. He had started to study the Bible with a friend who had a particular mainline church denominational background.
One day he received an angry letter from his friend’s priest, who was upset about the idea that two lay people were attempting to read and understand the word of God without his “professional” help.
“No prophecy of scripture is of any private interpretation,” declared the priest, quoting part of 2 Peter 1:20. From this, he expected Tertius to see that it was just wrong for a person not approved and trained by church authorities to dare to read and understand for himself.
“If the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?”
In the passage quoted above, the apostle Paul is speaking of the use of the first century gift of tongues in church without the presence of an interpreter, but the principle has a more general application: indistinct sounds don’t get people moving. If you don’t know what you just heard, you can’t possibly act on it.
More importantly, the Lord cannot expect you to act on it, and he doesn’t.
Back in February of this year we ran a post on millennial lifespans inspired by a Baptist publication I was reading at the time entitled Why Dispensationalism Matters. The subject came up again this morning in Doug Wilson’s weekly letter column, when a reader inquired about Isaiah 65:20. Specifically, he asked for Doug’s postmillennialist take on this: “Will there be a time prior to Christ’s return where the age spans of people are possibly similar to that of people you read about in the early generations of Genesis?”
Good question, and it occurs to me that the differences between the postmillennial and dispensational answers are more extensive than whether the fulfillment of Isaiah 65 will take place prior to Christ’s return or afterward.
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“What does it mean to put God first?”
The phrase has become something of a cliché in Christian circles, but the principle it expresses is entirely biblical. Considering the alternative, for the believer no other way of navigating through life makes any sense. Not only is putting God first obedient and loving, but nothing else works.
That doesn’t stop people trying to find other ways, of course.
“If you then, who are evil …”
The Lord Jesus used the phrase “your Father” a full eleven times in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 through 7, including in this very verse. In full, it reads, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” He was primarily addressing those who believed in him, trusted in him, and were seeking to follow him. (Throughout scripture, God is never “your Father” to the unbelieving world — I have yet to discover a single instance — though he certainly created it and seeks to call its lost to himself.)
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I’m not going to cut and paste the entire book of Judges into these posts for your reading pleasure but will pick verses here and there to reflect on in greater depth. I hope to travel through the twelve judges whose exploits we find in these chapters at a reasonable pace. I would encourage any readers unfamiliar with the stories to look them up as we move through the book. For most of our regulars, they will be well-known territory.
Then again, maybe your Sunday school teacher judiciously redacted the exploits of today’s judge from the curriculum when you were growing up. I’m not sure I recall getting his story in mine. It’s got some fairly PG-rated moments.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Hmm, this smells like clickbait … or deliberate provocation.
An Amy Julia Becker blog post from early 2015 suggests Christians should scale back our New Year’s resolutions and quit trying to read the Bible cover to cover.
Tom: Mrs. Becker wonders about the helpfulness of reading the Bible in its entirety and practically brags about not having read Nahum “in ages”. You can almost feel the calculated poke in the eye to Christians committed to getting through the whole Bible annually as she adds, “Perhaps you’ll join me.”
Thanks but no thanks.
So I got talking with a guy the other day.
Those of you who know me know I’ve made my career among secular people. Philosophy being my thing, I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of different sorts of people — many very far from Christian. But in this case, I was talking to a youngish Christian who had been pulled sideways by reading too much of the Unitarians and various Gnostic sects before getting his grounding in scripture. He’s got shaken about the general reliability of scripture, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and a variety of other issues, and he’s working his way through them.
I asked him what he thought was the touchstone of truth. He’d already expressed doubts about large sections of scripture, so I wanted to know what he was relying on to show him what was reliable and what wasn’t.