Deborah & Barak (Part 1)
Notes
Transcript
Exegetical Point:
Homiletic Point:
Intro
Intro
Withholding obedience...
kids, do you sometimes withhold you obedience? Are you slow to do what your parents ask of you? And then try to negotiate your obedience?
The LORD Gives Over
The LORD Gives Over
Judges follows a pattern of cycles, Disobedience - Oppression - Calling Out - Redemption
But each cycle things get a little worse. The first judge Othniel was the ideal, but each successive Judge cycle shows a worsening state of Israel and a worseing of their deliverers. By the time we get to Samson, things will be woeful.
Except Shamgar - a 2 verse judge! No cycle mentioned. Killed 600 Philistines with a cattle prod. He’ll get another mention next week.
As we come to Judges 4, we do get the next cycle. God’s people, stop serving God, and God gives them over.
And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord after Ehud died. And the Lord sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. The commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in Harosheth-hagoyim.
Ehud, the left-handed guy seems to have had a good influence. Yet as his life faded, so did the faithfulness of Israel.
They did what was evil in the sight of the Lord - could be several things, but in the prologue of Judges, we’re specifically told that the primary way the people did evil was by serving other Gods.
God rescued Israel out of Egypt, he was their God. He had chosen them, and entered into a covenant with them. The covenant included a loyalty clause, (just like marriage covenants). This was an exclusive relationship - serve one God only!
But Israel was perpetually tempted to worship other gods. Like the nations around them (the nations they were supposed to drive out!). At times they were faithful, but after one or two generations, they would be back at it again, worshiping Baals and Ashtoreth.
God gives His people consequences - He essentially says “You don’t want to be with me? I’ll step out for a bit, and you can try life without my protection and guidance.” God does not leave them there, he will never abandon them completely, but he will give them the natural consequences of their actions to wake them up to their actions.
In this case, God gives his people into the hand of Jabin of Hazor. A couple centuries earlier, Joshua had destroyed Hazor, but unsurprisingly, with Israel being unfaithful it looks like the city has been reestablished. Their failure has now become their slavery.
Friends sin is like that! Sin is something that enslaves. We let something go today, thinking it's not a big deal, we leave it to fester and metastasize, and then we feed it, and then we become captive to it because we did not excise it when we had the chance! How many of our sinful addictions sins started out minor inconveniences, and now they rule our life?
I just recently listened to JRR Tolkein’s Silmarillion. An interesting character in this book is Ungoliant. The Bad guy Melkor (a satan-like figure), corrupts and directs Ungoliant. She is a ravenous spider-like monster. The bad guy Melkor sets her loose for his own purposes, and for a while they have a mutually agreeable relationship; she does his bidding for him by attacking the good guys, and she gets to feed her endless hunger by devouring everything in her path. Problem is, eventually she runs out of things to devour, and so she turns on her boss and attacks Him.
Sin is like this. We feel like we can have it under control and make it suit us, but it is insatiable, and before you know it, it is trying to consume us. We should have mastery over sin, but if we give way to sin it will have mastery over us.
But often for a time God may leave us under the slavery of sin so that we may learn to look to him and walk in obedience. It is a judgement from God to be handed over to our sin. That why we can tell that we as a nation are under God’s judgment (it talks about this in Romans 1), when we pursue sin and refuse to heed God’s truth - he will give us up to our lusts.
Now for the Christian, God is not content to leave us there enslaved to our sin, so that even if we have a time of wandering away from the LORD, when we come to our senses, and realize our plight, we can to to God and call on him to rescue us from our own stupidity and stubbornness.
That’s what happened here in Judges. God gave them over to their wishes, and after a time, the people cried to the LORD to rescue them.
Because he had nine hundred chariots fitted with iron and had cruelly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years, they cried to the Lord for help.
They looked to God for help, but the problem was big. It was no ordinary oppressor - he had a technologically advanced army.
It’s the equivalent of F35 fighter jets - it was the latest and greatest invention for miliatry dominance.
This force was used to cruelly oppress God’s people - a step up in oppression.
20 years - a step up in time. Things getting worse. Did they take longer to call on the LORD? Or did God leave them longer to try and ratchet up the punishment? Maybe they’ll learn the lesson this time!
The LORD has Said
The LORD has Said
Lets move through the story now. I will kind of rehash the story, giving you some comments, then make some applications as they come up.
Here we have the unfolding story of what God does in response to the call for deliverance.
Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the people of Israel came up to her for judgment.
Deborah was a woman, it is pressed home x3!
It’s a bit strange, it is unexpected. There’s no-one else like her so far in Judges, and there will be no more. Why is she judging Israel? Park that question for a moment.
So, she is a prophetess, Deborah is a faithful woman, speaking the truth of God, and serving God’s people.
She’s well known, well-enough that she had a special spot that she would work from, and people knew thay had to go there to find her. Eventually a particular tree is known as “her tree”.
Hazor is in the north of Israel, and Deborah works in the south. She calls a guy called Barak to come see her.
She sent and summoned Barak the son of Abinoam from Kedesh-naphtali and said to him, “Has not the Lord, the God of Israel, commanded you, ‘Go, gather your men at Mount Tabor, taking 10,000 from the people of Naphtali and the people of Zebulun. And I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by the river Kishon with his chariots and his troops, and I will give him into your hand’?”
So Deborah as a prophet, speaks to Barak about a mission God has for him. What is the mission?
Get a bunch of guys together from the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali
God will draw out Sisera and his army, chariots and all.
Meet him at a specific battle ground
Fight and win
Straight forward enough right? But this is a big deal! You want us with our Sopwith camels and spitfires to take on the F35s? That’s madness! At least according to human reasoning!
How does Barak respond?
Barak said to her, “If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go.”
Barak sets conditions upon obedience to God. And now we definitely know something is very wrong about the state of affairs in Israel. The best commander for the job is hesitant about obeying God.
Now it’s time to go back and answer that question we parked before “Why is Deborah judging Israel?”
The LORD’s Indictment
The LORD’s Indictment
We have to come to grips with the fact that we live in a society that is in opposition to God. And in we have been affected by it - it has trained us to think in certain ways. The perpetual call of the Christian is not to be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind (Ro 12:2). As we broach this topic around gender and leadership of God’s people, we need to put off the training of the world that hates God, and listen to God’s word with great care.
At a cursory reading, one may be tempted to think that this a is a feminist daydream - “Look Deborah can do all the same things that men do, and she does it well! Because she did that, it justifies other women taking up positions of civil & spiritual authority over God’s people.”
But not so fast!
When we take off the worldly lenses, and let God speak, we get a different picture. Let’s trace it out:
First, we have already noted the oddity of Deborah judging in Israel. While there are other prophetesses, no-where else in Judges, or the whole Bible do we have a figure quite like Deborah. So she is an exception.
Second, when Deb speaks to Barak, she poses the command as a question “Has not the Lord commanded you?” (see ESV and others). Now on it’s own, this would not be weird, it is a way that commands are sometimes given in the Bible, but there is an implication that Barak had already been asked to do this, and he hasn’t done it. He has witheld his obedience. Maybe.
Third, and more obviously, when Barak is told point blank that God wants him to go on this mission, Barak withholds his obedience, and sets pre-requisites. He is essentially saying, I won’t obey God, unless you do something for me! Imagine that, saying I will sin unless you do what I want! It’s trying to guilt somebody into doing something for you (ladies, if ever a guy treats you like this, you should have alarm bells going off!)
Now we could try and put a positive spin on this - He just wants to get wisdom from God on the road, so that he can make wise battle plans etc. He needs Deborah to be God’s mouthpiece on the campaign. But even if there is this motive mixed in, most commentators have agreed that this is a sign of Barak’s cowardice. He is trying to shirk his duty. And part of the reason we can be so sure about this, is the way Deb responds.
This is the forth element of this picture we’re tracing out. Deborah says:
“Certainly I will go with you,” said Deborah. “But because of the course you are taking, the honor will not be yours, for the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.” So Deborah went with Barak to Kedesh.
NIV brings out the sense here “because of the course you are taking” - because of the way that you’re acting, the battle glory won’t go to you. It will go to a woman. This is meant to be a somewhat shamefull thing - the mighty leader Barak is going to have his reputation dinted and his victory shadowed by a valiant housewife.
Now I hope you can see clearly the issue here. Lets put it together: Deborah is an exception as a Judge, Barak may have not obeyed God’s command the first time, he withholds his obedience by trying to put it back on Deborah, and the consequences of all this is his glory will be taken by a woman.
The reason that Deborah is a judge is because the blokes are useless. Her judgeship is an indictment (accusation of wrongdoing) against the people. If Barak is the cream of the crop, then the country is in a woeful state. The men are shirking their duty to step up and lead to protect, and so God installs Deborah, and uses Jael, to demonstrate the failure of the men.
Deborah and Jael are great women. They are the ones who demonstrate faithfulness and courage, a great example to all women and men alike. However the reason that they end up in the spotlight is because the men aren’t doing their job.
I have a verse to share with you that will offend your modern sensibilities. It is from Isaiah, in a passage that bemoans the terrible state of Israel in later years (seems not much will change!!):
Youths oppress my people, women rule over them. My people, your guides lead you astray; they turn you from the path.
The leadership of women is used as a poetic device to describe the poor state of leadership among the people. And this is not because there is a problem with women, this is an indictment against the men who are failing to be faithful.
Men and women are different. And God made us that way. We are different in our physiology, we are different in the way our brains work, and we have on average, distinctly different temperaments. God made us for the mission he has for us in two genders, he made us to inhabit his good design.
Going back to the first man Adam, God made him, gave him a mission, and then made Eve to help him accomplish that mission. She became the 2IC, who made up what he was lacking. They complimented each other. Now Adam has the preeminance of leadership in the mission, but this is not a comment on Eve’s value - she is equal in human dignity to Adam, but not called to be what Adam was called to be. The downside to Adams leadership, was that he also had the responsibility, so that when Eve later broke God’s command, Adam is called to account for it. It’s called Adam’s sin because of his failure to set-up for those under his leadership.
You may think I’m spending a fair bit of time on this, and that’s because I am. But gender stuff seems to be a particularly hard topic for many people, both inside and outside the church. There are a few areas where we’re going to have some back and forth on applying the specifics of Biblical commands in practice around the topic of gender, but the principles of the scripture are quite clear.
What that means is that as a local church we are unapologetically complimentarian, and not pretend complementarianism that is just dressed up egalitairianism. We believe men and women are equal in dignity but complimentary in nature and function. We truly want to obey God as women and obey God as men, and that means in some areas we are called to different things. It also means each sex has different sins that we need to guard against.
SO bringing this back to Deborah, the sin of the men of Israel is that they were not stepping up to lead and defend, and this is exemplified in Barak who shirks his duty and withholds his obedience.
When women lead in families, its because something has gone terribly wrong - either the father has abdicated, or died. When women are leading in churches its because the men have abdicated or are missing. This is what has happened in Israel in Deborah’s day, a sign that things are wrong, and another sign of the spiraling darkness in Israel. So Deborah and Jael get all the glory.
Women are already the Glory of Man (1 Corinthians 11:7), you are the glorious half of humanity, but in this story the women also take the glory that could have gone to the men if only they had stepped up.
The LORD has Given Victory
The LORD has Given Victory
Now Heber the Kenite had left the other Kenites, the descendants of Hobab, Moses’ brother-in-law, and pitched his tent by the great tree in Zaanannim near Kedesh.
Remember that for later. These are not Israelites, but they have followed Israel.
When they told Sisera that Barak son of Abinoam had gone up to Mount Tabor, Sisera summoned from Harosheth Haggoyim to the Kishon River all his men and his nine hundred chariots fitted with iron.
Out come the battle-tanks - the heavy artillery.
They head to the river Kishon. A Wadi, more like a floodway. Wet when it rains, but then it dries out.
Then Deborah said to Barak, “Go! This is the day the Lord has given Sisera into your hands. Has not the Lord gone ahead of you?” So Barak went down Mount Tabor, with ten thousand men following him.
Barak called to action!
The LORD has given Sisera into his hand!
The LORD goes out before him.
No need to fear or doubt, God is at work!
At Barak’s advance, the Lord routed Sisera and all his chariots and army by the sword, and Sisera got down from his chariot and fled on foot. Barak pursued the chariots and army as far as Harosheth Haggoyim, and all Sisera’s troops fell by the sword; not a man was left.
The LORD routed Siseras army!
The new military tech was no match for God!
We’ll talk more about the specifics of the battle next week in Chapter 5 but lets quickly review the map.
MAP
What promises of God are you doubting? God has won in Jesus Christ, and guaranteed victory - you can go out into the fray with confidence, because the LORD goes out before us.
Like the Rider on the white horse in Revelation, his army follows in his train. He brings victory, we just go and obey.
It is given, take it up!
The LORD Delivers
The LORD Delivers
Coming to the crux of the story.
Sisera legged it because his chariot was useless.
Sisera, meanwhile, fled on foot to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, because there was an alliance between Jabin king of Hazor and the family of Heber the Kenite. Jael went out to meet Sisera and said to him, “Come, my lord, come right in. Don’t be afraid.” So he entered her tent, and she covered him with a blanket.
Ah, so now the Kenite thing makes sense. There were allies in the vicinty.
Sisera is coming past, and Jael convinces him to hide in her tent.
He is thristy, asks for water, she goies one better and gets him milk! Looks good for Sisera!
He asks her to keep watch and turn away any prying eyes
Sisera is obviously feeling safe enough to sleep.
But Jael, Heber’s wife, picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died.
Tent peg, hefty thing. Women would often put up the tents of their nomadic existance.
She took his life. “He died” really? who would have thought? :)
War-time ethics
Ok to deceive, But she was a non-combatant.
Mixed loyalties?
God used something that you might not recommend to others.
Examples - Rahab, Midwives, battle plans (feints)
On that day God subdued Jabin king of Canaan before the Israelites. And the hand of the Israelites pressed harder and harder against Jabin king of Canaan until they destroyed him.
Who did the Work? The LORD! v23
One commentator said: God doesn’t need our help, but he always requires that we do our duty.
The Israelites were then strengthened to overcome the enemy.
So to, we have been strengthened to overcome our enemies - put to death what is earthly in you!
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming.
So What?
So What?
Drive home conclusion
The Lord Gives us over, for a time.
The Lord has said, are you withholding obedience?
The Lord’s indictment, would the LORD indict you for your failure as a man?
The LORD gives Victory in Jesus!
the LORD delivers his People! Jesus as a better deliverer than Barak!