A Mother in Israel (Part 1)

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

Today we’re talking about liberty and the struggle for liberty. When we talk about the great battles and struggles for liberty throughout history, often the Battle of Thermopylae or of Salamis will come up, but today in the book of Judges we have the battle of Megiddo. Joshua had taken the city, but apparently the pagans have won it back and are oppressing the Israelites, the people of God. We’re looking at a serious struggle, not just for liberty in some abstract sense, but for the liberty of Christ, the liberty of God’s promised Messiah.

The Battle of Megiddo is a battle between the Canaanites, the north, and God’s people. The chief city here is called Hazor, and Joshua had taken it toward the end of the original campaign of conquest. He had burnt it and dedicated it wholly to the Lord, made it [Hebrew word 1:23], put it under the ban, wholly devoted, just as Jericho had been devoted to the Lord at the beginning. Hazor becomes the last, wraps it all up in a neat package, and “We’ve won and everything is okay and we got it! The land is ours! No need to worry, because what could possibly go wrong now?”

Who was it that made the remark about eternal vigilance is the price of liberty? God’s people got sloppy. They didn’t stand guard over this strategic point, and in time the Canaanites returned. Whether these were friends of the giants or what exactly they were or how they got there, God’s people just turned their back. They may have noticed it happening and they may have seen the telltale signs, but the shadows came and God’s people let them, until it got to the point that Israel really couldn’t dislodge them, short of a straightforward attack that would probably involve gathering together all of Israel, and Israel really wasn’t in the military shape to do that right then.

Joshua was gone. They made it through the struggle against Mesopotamia under the leadership of Othniel, and now Othniel is dead and Israel is going back into idolatry. In chapter 4 of Judges it says –

And the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the Lord when Ehud was dead.

So we’ve gone through Othniel, we’ve gone through Ehud, and now again God’s people are apostatizing. They’re chasing the idols of the Canaanites. God’s attitude toward this is, “You like Canaanite gods? Well, let me give you Canaanite culture, because the one is the fruit of the other. Go live under the heel of the Canaanites for a while and see how you like that.” So he sells them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan.

Jabin is a title like Pharaoh or Caesar. There had been a Jabin once before that Joshua dealt with. Well, a new Jabin is here, a new military power. They’ve entrenched themselves and there’s no military leader at the moment to deal with them, so their power grows until they come out ready to stomp on God’s people.

…the captain of whose host was Sisera, which dwelt in Harosheth of the Gentiles. And the children of Israel cried unto the Lord, for he had nine hundred chariots of iron, and twenty years he mightily oppressed the children of Israel.

Twenty years! They got sloppy and it cost them their political liberty. They were under military oppression. They were being taxed heavily, from some of the things that follow in Deborah’s song in chapter 5. Conditions were not good. The highways were deserted. God’s people were forcibly disarmed. They were barely making it, and the Canaanites were not about to let up. There was no détente here, there was simply oppression.

But during this twenty years there is a very special woman who God raises up. Her name is Deborah – it means honeybee – and she judges Israel, and during that time she acts as a mother. She calls herself later “I arose a mother in Israel.”

She’s not going to be a war leader. She’s not a king. She does judge. She’s a prophetess. She has direct access to God and to divine revelation, so that makes her a really great judgess – female judge. She’s not a war leader and she does not want to or presume to go out on the battlefield, but what she’s doing is dealing with some of the young men in Israel, recognizing potential leaders, and training them and urging them to get themselves together with the Lord and before the Lord to deal with the threat, and it takes a while. It takes a while for young men to grow up and to become responsible.

Would an analogy today be like a female seminary professor?

I suppose it would depend upon what she taught and who she taught. If she’s presuming to be a pastor and preach and administer the sacraments – I think a better illustration, although it’s not that different – would be a female missionary who goes into some obscure corner, expecting that there’s going to be a male there to help her and there never is.

I’ve seen this before, where a woman ends up alone on the field. She’s the only witness for Christ, so the young men come to her and she teaches them. She teaches them everything she knows because there’s no one else to do it, but her goal is not to become the pastor or the preacher. Her goal is to get them trained.

To raise up others.

And is it ideal? No, it’s not ideal, but it’s what you’ve got to do with the circumstances you’ve got. It’s kind of like when the enemy soldiers break into your house. Yes, woman should grab guns and shoot them dead. It’s one thing to send your women out on the battlefield in some foreign war. It’s another thing when the enemy is at the door and the men aren’t around. I always tell my female students, “Learn how to shoot a gun. Don’t miss. You’re going to need it someday.”

So that’s what Deborah is. There are no male leaders, and those who would point a finger at her and say, “Well, noddy noddy, just suck it up and deal with it” are mistaken. She is a prophetess. She does have divine authority.

“Prophetess? What are those all about?” Well, you know what? There’s quite a few of them in scripture, not nearly as many as there are male prophets, but there are a number. Philip the deacon had a number of daughters who prophesied. We can think of Anna upon Jesus’ birth. Isaiah was married to a prophetess. Hannah and Elizabeth and Mary on special occasions prophesied. Who am I forgetting? Somebody huge, I know. Huldah, the prophetess that Josiah sent to in the days when Jeremiah apparently wasn’t available. And of course, there’s Deborah. Miriam was a prophetess.

We find these women scattered throughout scripture, and nobody says, “Wait a minute. What are these women doing here? This is some strange theological aberration!” No, God just uses them sometimes when he thinks that this is the way to convey a message. But like Deborah, there’s a slightly different tack on things because men are men and women are women, and men do things as men and women do things as women. Even when you’re speaking the word of God there’s a difference. Deborah categorizes herself as a mother.

That makes sense too with God working through people as the people that they are, men bearing the masculine image of God, and women bearing the feminine image of God. Whatever God does through you is done through the person that you are, and the femininity is going to come through and that doesn’t detract from the message. It’s a different angle.

The one office that women are not given in the Old Testament is that of priest. There are no priestesses, at least not in Israel. There were temple prostitutes, but that’s something else. And in the New Testament we’re told that women are not to preach or usurp authority within the church, and yet the word is usurp. It doesn’t mean that women can’t have any authority. They can teach other women, and do. They can teach children, and do. They can give men advice, and do and often should. We’re going to be talking more about that over the next few weeks.

There is nothing unbiblical about women going to elders and pastors and saying, “There’s something I think you need to think about.” That’s not out of line. That’s not being uppity. Now, a woman could do that with an uppity and arrogant spirit, but so can men. The femininity is not the issue here. The issue is submission of the heart and the will through the word of God.

I think it’s easy to make an argument that that kind of attitude is a particularly feminine temptation.

Yeah, and the male temptation is to say nothing and do nothing – our roots in original sin.

Or to say too much and do too much.

There’s that, too. So here’s Deborah and she introduces us to this guy Barak, the son of Abinoam out of Kedeshnaphtali. Kedesh was a Levitical city, so he’s apparently a Levite. Naphtali is one of the tribes that borders the Sea of Galilee, and the name Barak itself means lightning flash or flash of light. So we’re looking at Galilee. We need to keep our antennas up for that. That’s significant. A judge, a hero coming out of Galilee – hmmm – and coming to Meggido.

One described as a light.

As a light from Galilee – wait, doesn’t that sound familiar from someplace?

But what Deborah has to say is this –

Hath not the Lord God of Israel commanded, saying, Go and draw toward mount Tabor, and take with thee ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali and of the children of Zebulun?

So the other tribes by the Sea of Galilee, Naphtali and Zebulun. Again a little bell should be going off in the back of our head. Haven’t we heard something about Naphtali and Zebulun and the Sea of Galilee and light? Well, they hadn’t heard it yet, and we won’t hear it in the Old Testament for a few hundred years, but this is laying the foundation for a prophecy that Isaiah will make and that Matthew will quote one day.

Notice the phrasing here – “Hath not the Lord God of Israel commanded?” She seems to be saying, “Hey bro, hasn’t God put a mission on you already? Don’t you have a job to do? Haven’t you already received an assignment? What’s up? Why aren’t you going with this?”

A conversation very familiar to classroom teachers.

Yes, very much so. “Didn’t I assign this problem? Didn’t I give you work to do?”

And the instruction – and she’s pretty clear – is “Go to Mount Tabor and take with you 10,000 men.”

Now, the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun, that’s where the Canaanite oppression was centered but it reached beyond that, and we’re going to find out that eventually Deborah is going to condemn some of the other tribes for not joining in on this. But these two tribes she already knew would respond, so 10,000. That’s maybe not the biggest army in the world but it’s a significant number, and she says, “Go to Mount Tabor.”

The nice thing about a mountain is that chariots can’t go up them very well, so that part of it’s kind of safe. “Get all these people together and go up there.” We’re going to see again in the next chapter, as Deborah describes the circumstances they were living in, that they didn’t have weapons. “Was there a shield or spear seen among 40,000 in Israel?”

It might be hyperbole, there might have been one or two here and there, but by and large these people were unarmed. Maybe they had bows and arrows, but that seems to have been a later development. Largely they had sticks and stones and brute strength. So they’re being called to go into war against tanks, chariots of iron pulled by horses that are probably armored.

This is a lose/lose situation. It’s one thing to go stand on the mountain and taunt them, make faces and made rude gestures at them, but to come down off the mountain and engage them is suicide, as far as this world reckons such things. “It would take a miracle!” Good thing they believe in a God who does miracles.

Pardon me if I missed something. Had the Canaanites disarmed the populace?

Yes, they had. We are told “Was there a shield or spear seen among 40,000 in Israel?” The first mark of tyrants is to take away the guns. Make sure your enemies do not have weapons so they cannot rise up against you, because that’s just common sense.

So here we go. You get the idea, Barak? Deborah says –

And I will draw unto thee to the river Kishon Sisera, the captain of Jabin's army, with his chariots and his multitude, and I will deliver him into thine hand.

What’s missing there is how exactly God would do it. We don’t need to be told how God would do it, but you know…

It makes us feel better.

It makes us feel better. It’s like, “So lightning strike? Flame strike? Earth opens her mouth? Alien invasion? What are you going to do, God? You’re not going to tell me, are you? I’m just going to walk into this and somehow you say you’re going to rescue me. Okay. I want a teddy bear.”

Barak turns to Deborah and says –

If thou wilt go with me, then I will go, but if thou wilt not go with me, then I will not go.

This is not total unbelief, but neither is it terribly great faith. He’s willing to fight the battle, but he wants something tangible, somebody with skin on that he can see and touch and talk to, somebody he can look in the eye, somebody he has a history with. Deborah’s probably had long conversations into the night with him, instructing him and preparing him for leadership, and now this just all seems a bit overwhelming.

It’s not so much because she’s a woman and a mommy. It’s because she’s a prophetess and she has the word of God. He wants God down where he can lay hold on God, and Deborah gives only the mildest of rebukes. Deborah says -

And she said, I will surely go with thee: notwithstanding the journey that thou takest shall not be for thine honour, for the Lord shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.

“You don’t want to take the lead on your own. You want to share it with a woman. Then the honor that could have been yours, in terms of God’s kingdom, you’re going to share with a woman,” and we see that borne out later in the chapter and we’ll talk about that next week. Barak’s attitude is, “Fine with me. I don’t care.” He’s not in this for the glory.

You know, that whole thing about casting crowns at Jesus’ feet – it is a biblical concept because you have to have a crown to cast at his feet. You have to have some kind of victory before you can turn around and say, “And it all came from Jesus!”

If all you can say is, “My life was spiritually lame. I never accomplished much of anything, but praise God,” it’s not somehow quite the same as saying, “Here are some great things, and it was all God and not me.” So there is something to be said for the glory and honor of winning a battle in Jesus’ name, by Jesus’ power, for Jesus’ sake, and not just saying, “Well, you know, I’m content to be lame. That’s all right. I don’t want to draw attention to myself.”

The first battle that gets won in Jesus’ name is the battle over your own soul. So even if you lived most of your life as a hellion and come to Jesus at what you find out is the end of it, that transformation that God accomplished is still a miraculous glorious thing. So it’s not like we have to muster up the strength to find something extraordinary. God is doing something extraordinary in us.

But as he brings these extraordinary and very ordinary things to us, we’re supposed to do them, and Barak does. We need to give him that. In the book of Hebrews he is listed in the hall of the heroes of faith, without question or comment. Yet here, God just nudges him a little. He gives him Hebrews 11, but right now at this time some of the praise that would have been his is going to go to some yet to be named woman in the outfield, but Barak seems fine with this.

As we look at this, this is a good time to remember yet again the nature of Canaanite religion, Baal worship. It’s nature worship. It’s a belief that the forces of nature govern human existence, but those forces can be tapped, controlled, manipulated, or channeled by the proper magical technique. So it is both a secular religion because there’s no god involved here – they’re just the forces of nature, a very natural thing - and yet it is a magical thing.

Lewis was right in describing for us the satanic ideal of the materialist magician, where your religion and philosophy exes God out of the world, but still allows for demonic powers combined and confused with science. That’s what they had. So as they’re going into this, they assume that since their god is Baal or the baalim, the various baals that ruled their local towns, cities, and plains and such, that the forces of nature are on their side.

“Windstorms, the river, that’s all in our back pocket.” On top of that add military technology. Add science to magic. “We got this thing. These guys are laughable. They don’t even have weapons. Once they come down it’s all over.”

Whereas Barak and Deborah’s God is the sovereign God who stands outside of the universe and who stands within the universe, both transcendent and immanent, absolutely sovereign, controlling all things, present in every moment with his whole being in everything he has made, and has the entire universe at his present disposal for providence, miracle, or whatever he wants to do. That’s what the Canaanites are actually up against, and they don’t know it yet.

So they come to the mountain and then God says, “Okay Barak, go.”

And Barak called Zebulun and Naphtali to Kedesh, and he went up with ten thousand men at his feet and Deborah went up with him. Now Heber the Kenite, which was of the children of Hobab, the father-in-law of Moses, had severed himself from the Kenites and pitched his tent unto the plain of Zaanaim, which is by Kedesh.

A little side trip here. Some of Moses’ father-in-law’s family had stayed with Moses and had become scouts for them during the wilderness time and had entered the land with them and had assimilated to some degree into Israel and were allies with Israel. But one particular family thought it more advantageous to side with the Canaanites. His name is Heber and he’s separated himself and he’s moved up into southern Galilee, and he has an idea on the comings and goings of the Israelites. He sees all of these militias passing by and moving toward Mt. Tabor. And being the traitor that he is, wanting to keep in good with the Canaanites, he tells Sisera, the general.

And they shewed Sisera that Barak the son of Abinoam was gone up to mount Tabor. And Sisera gathered together all his chariots, even nine hundred chariots of iron, and all the people that were with him, from Harosheth of the Gentiles unto the river of Kishon.

God said he was going to gather Sisera. Sisera sees it as “There’s been an intelligence leak. We have crucial information. Get the chariots ready. We’re going now!”

“That’s kind of what God said was going to happen. You just think that you’re smart for doing it. You don’t see this is a trap and you’re walking right into it, because it doesn’t look like a trap. It looks like certain victory.”

Verse 14 –

And Deborah said unto Barak, Up, for this is the day in which the Lord hath delivered Sisera into thine hand. Is not the Lord gone out before thee? So Barak went down from mount Tabor, and ten thousand men after him.

We’re not told here exactly what God did. We’re told the outcome, and we have to get to the next chapter before it becomes clear. What we’re told here is –

And the Lord discomfited Sisera and all his chariots and all his host, with the edge of the sword before Barak so that Sisera lighted down off his chariot and fled away on his feet. But Barak pursued after the chariots, and after the host, unto Harosheth of the Gentiles. And all the host of Sisera fell upon the edge of the sword and there was not a man left.

We’ll track down Sisera and where he goes and what he does and what becomes of him next week. But if we flash ahead into chapter 5 and to Deborah’s song that summarizes some of this, we get a few hints. In chapter 5, first of all she condemns the tribes that didn’t come, and we’ll look at that next time.

Verse 19 –

The kings came and fought, then fought the kings of Canaan in Taanach by the waters of Megiddo. They took no gain of money. They fought from heaven. The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.

The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon. O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength. Then were the horse hoofs broken by the means of the prancings, the prancings of their mighty ones.

Then we go on in her account of what happened to Sisera.

So a couple things. First of all, God’s in control of nature. The stars in their courses fought against Sisera. We’re not told whether this means there was actually a meteorite strike. That’s possible. Or whether it’s more vague and general in that God orchestrated the entire universe down to the stars themselves against Sisera. That’s certainly true.

Or using stars as an image for the leaders of men.

Yes, exactly, or for angels behind the scenes. It’s poetic language and can have a number of meanings. The thing is that the stars – Astarte or Ashtaroth was a star, was Venus. They thought they had the stars on their side. They were wrong. God owns the stars. The stars turned and fought against the Canaanites, and then the river swept them away. The river was just there being a river and all, but suddenly it becomes a flood.

Apparently God sent storms – Baal’s territory, storm god. He sent a huge storm that just dumped tons of water all along the river and its tributaries and across the plain so that one minute they’re just sitting there looking across the river and looking up at the mountain and seeing the troops coming, and suddenly they hear this rushing and gushing and burbling and thundering, and they look and they see basically this tidal wave of flood coming right at them.

They pull on their reins and flap them and the horses try to move and here come the waters. By the time it’s done the chariots are topped, they’re mired and stuck in the mud. They can’t go anywhere. The horses are prancing and jumping and trying to get out and jumping on the people who are trying to control them.

God’s people are looking at this like, “Whoa. That’s impressive. Okay.”

“Good one!”

Or they’re standing off in the distance like, “What are they doing over there?”

So at some point they figure that most of the water has gone by. “Let’s go get them!” and they come and the soldiers who are left – between being drowned, muddied, and smashed by their own horses or turned over in their chariots – pull themselves out, only to see Israelites with big clubs smacking them in the head, taking their sword, and running them through.

They are shocked and dismayed to the point that they start running. The Canaanite soldiers run for it and the Israelites are picking up swords and shields that they had dropped, and chasing them. They chase them until they have wiped out the entire army of Sisera. So God delivers them into their hand.

“But no, wait. They actually did the fighting.” That’s the way Providence works, strangely enough. God uses means. Yes, he could lightning bolt everybody. A couple things come to mind – the day of battle when the sun stood still and God rained stones down from heaven, an artillery strike from the skies, and there’s also that interesting passage when Absalom’s troops are engaging David’s, where the forest killed more people that day than the armies.

But here’s the thing, though. God did use a lightning bolt. The lightning bolt’s name was Barak.

It is a lightning bolt, but we oftentimes have trouble seeing how something could be a human action and a divine action at the same time, particularly when the human involved is not particularly faithful, yielded, committed, whatever. We can think here later of Samson. When I was younger, one of the mantras of certain parts of Christendom was, “God will not work through an unclean vessel.”

There’s only one clean vessel. Does he just not work the rest of the time?

“Once you get yourself cleaned up then God can use you.” That’s not the gospel, but a lot of people thought it was.

People come to the Old Testament expecting to see these great flawless saints around whom miracles spin, and when they actually read the text sometimes they’re terribly disappointed. “I wouldn’t even want this guy at my dinner table. He’s kind of like a redneck or something, who kills people and takes their stuff and lets a woman tell him what to do. No light sabers, even.”

No, this is an ordinary believer who God has raised up for a particular task that he doesn’t necessarily particularly want to do. I mean he wants it done and he’s willing to do it with some encouragement and with some hand-holding, which is something no one else apparently was willing to do, so he was actually the best Israel had to offer at the moment, but it wasn’t because he was this super-sanctified wonderful super-spiritual saint. It was because he was this guy who heard the word of God and believed enough to do what God said.

Even a hen-pecked redneck can have faith?

Yeah, exactly, because it’s not the quality or quantity of our faith, but the power of the one we believe in. Jesus said, “Though your faith be as a mustard seed, it can move mountains.” I think his faith was a little more than that of a mustard seed.

He did go into battle.

He went into battle, something that most of us – despite the fact that we do it in role-playing games and video games – it’s probably not something we really want to do too much.

“Going to have to fight a few battles here. Get the washing machine ready. I’ll probably come home with a lot of blood and gore on my clothes. I’m hoping it will mostly be the enemies’. I should be back by 8 or 9. Pray for me. Don’t worry too much.”

“All right. Pick up a bottle of hydrogen peroxide on the way home.”

[laughing] He submits to being a warrior and he wins a great battle.

Now is the time I think to mention the name of the battlefield. It’s Megiddo. Armageddon is what the New Testament calls it. We will see it again in the Old Testament. It’s the place where Josiah is going to die, and here it marks the victory of God’s people and an end to Canaanite terrorism in the north.

In Josiah’s day it marks the end of Jerusalem and the beginning of the downward spiral toward the Babylonian captivity, so this is a place of turning points where decisive calls are made that will last hundreds of years. That’s why the book of Revelation picks it up and uses it as a symbolic name for a great conflict between Christ and Satan.

The reference to Barak is echoed in Isaiah. This is Isaiah chapter 9. It’s a Christmas sermon that we all know. Backing up a little into chapter 8, Isaiah is describing how bad it’s going to be for Judah before it gets any better. He says –

And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry. And it shall come to pass that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves and curse their king and their God, and look upward. And they shall look unto the earth and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish. And they shall be driven to darkness.

Notice the dark, dark, dark thing here. Chapter 9 starts “Nevertheless…”

What he’s talking about to this point is the captivity. Beginning with the armies of Assyria, they will come down from the north and the east and they will begin their war in Galilee. It’s called Galilee of the Gentiles because that part of Israel bordered on Gentile territory and a lot of Gentiles just kind of joined in those communities.

And this is a little bit of – I’d call it a tangent, but I’m not even sure it’s that closely related. There’s a line in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets where he says, “Dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark,” and you have this darkening of the world, and then that becomes the darkening of a theater as God is changing the scene.

That’s a beautiful image because that’s exactly what’s going on here. What Judah will see in that day is they’re going to see Israel, the northern kingdom, destroyed and carried captive. They’re going to see the Assyrian armies now coming for them, and it looks horrible. But chapter 9 begins to spin it.

Nevertheless, the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation, when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and afterward did more grievously afflict her by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.

This leads into the very familiar prophecy -

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given…

Matthew picks up on this, in case we miss it totally, in chapter 4 right after the temptation.

Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he departed into Galilee, and leaving Nazareth he came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is upon the sea coast, in the borders of Zebulon and Nephthali, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, The land of Zebulon and the land of Nephthali, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. The people which sat in darkness saw great light, and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up. From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

That always amazes me because so much emphasis is put on the New Testament, especially on the gospels, and Matthew is making a big deal about a story that I never once heard in Sunday School, never once. He’s like, “Hey, you remember that thing? That thing that was real important?”

Wait, you never heard about Deborah the female judge or Jael with the hammer?

I heard about Deborah as an example of a woman serving God. I’m not sure I heard about Jael until much later. I mean I read through the Bible in like junior high, but I’m not counting that as Sunday School education.

Well, no, it’s not actually. Barak, flash of lightning. It starts here in Judges. A flash of light judge, deliverer in Zebulun and Naphtali, in the land of Galilee of the Gentiles. Isaiah picks it up and turns it into a prophecy. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Matthew looks at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and says, “Yeah, that. It’s beginning.” And it’s not his miracles, it his preaching. And the message is, “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe.” So the roots of it are here.

The long twilight struggle for freedom is ultimately a religious battle, because if men’s hearts at not right – and this is something the book of Judges testifies to again and again – if men can’t get the idols out of their heart, they’re going to be right back in slavery again within a generation or two. It just keeps recycling over and over again.

As long as the things that we value, the things we set our hearts on, the things we’re committed to and obsessed with belong to the pagan world, to the world that’s at war with God, to Satan’s kingdom, the lust of the flesh and lust of the eyes and pride of life, we will not be free. We may obtain a little bit of license for larceny and lewdness for a little bit, but we will not have the kind of responsible freedom that Christ promises. We will be the servants of sin.

And that freedom doesn’t come by the law.

No, it does not come by the law. So the light is not the light of “Do good, be good. Change your environment so everyone is good.” Jesus summed it up, “Repent and believe. Turn from your sins. Turn from your war against God. Turn from your stupid ideas, your rebellious idolatrous worldviews, and submit yourself to the coming king. Believe in Jesus and let him be your salvation and your health and peace.” So this is the beginning of the struggle for freedom.

We can look at Greece and say, “Well, okay, so they kicked out Persians who maybe should or should not have been there.” Of course, historians rarely mention the fact that the Greeks already were messing in Persia anyhow and had been politely asked to knock it off, but we read our history through Greek eyes and the Persians are the bad guys, despite everything the Bible says about them.

“And besides, they taught us to think like naturalists and rationalists, so obviously that’s the road to freedom.” Maybe eventually someday in this series - it’ll be a long way off – we’ll get to talk about Greece more directly and see that that’s not at all what Greece was. The polis was a totalitarian institution. It was religious to the core. It was built upon ancestor worship and the walls of the polis defined the life of those within.

Men were political animals, beasts, made human only by the fact that they belonged to that political magical order. Any kind of straying from it, any kind of rampant individualism – think Socrates – was completely unacceptable. You had to play by the rules because that’s what made you human.

It kind of sounds familiar to some arguments you hear today.

Yeah. We’ve inherited a great deal from the Greeks. Liberty simply wasn’t it, but perspectives on politics? Absolutely. And Plato’s Republic is still with us, unfortunately. Over against that, God sets the freedom of the gospel, and the battle is perennial. Every generation we’re called to fight for freedom. Sometimes it’s intellectual. Sometimes it’s liturgical. Always it’s spiritual. And occasionally it may take us into the battlefield with guns and swords and things like that.

But we do need to understand that simply going and killing people doesn’t make anybody free. That by itself is insufficient. The idols have to fall, and ultimately the only thing that can topple idols in the long run is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

That is a great note to end on. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations? I’ll go first. This is something my friend John started like yesterday. I recommend being a reporter for the CGNN – the Common Grace News Network, where you report that the rain fell on the just and the unjust, and the crops grew and the sun shone and it was a good day, because that stuff never makes the headlines and yet there’s God faithfulness right there.

I’m not making this my recommendation, but on LinkedIn there is something like that. I forget what it’s called – something like Positive Thoughts or something – where they only put on good news stories. I think it’s used to be called something like Unsung Heroes and they changed it, but it was about people who go out of their way to do something that helps other people.

It can be something fairly big, or often it’s something fairly small. A cop doesn’t arrest a homeless man but buys him food and then drives him off to see his children someplace. A teenager runs into a burning building and pulls out the people who are there, and doesn’t expect to be thanked because what else would you do? Those kinds of things.

Those things are wonderful, to know that despite all the darkness there are still sparks of light, and they’re not all from Christians. God is still doing good even in the midst of unbelievers. He hasn’t abandoned the world wholly to its wickedness. But that’s not my recommendation. Bryan, have you got one?

Yes. This one is a little bit more meta. I’m going to recommend that if you are a director for a multi-million-dollar franchise – it could happen…

This means you, listeners.

…specifically adapting a well-loved children’s book series to the silver screen, to not miss the point of how your main villain is defeated in the ultimate book. This is brought about because my fiancé and I just watched through the entire Harry Potter series.

No! I had no idea what book series you were talking about.

I actually didn’t. I was thinking Narnia, because it’s come to the screen, but you know…

We still haven’t gotten to the seventh book for them yet.

Thank goodness.

Yeah, I know. But in any case, if you were unaware – and I will give a spoiler alert for Harry Potter, since I only just finished reading the book series for the first time this year…

How old does it have to be before you don’t have to give the spoiler warnings?

I don’t know, but since I hadn’t read it I figure it’s only kind to give the same courtesy.

Basically, in the book series when Voldemort is defeated, I forget exactly which spell does him in but he’s killed.

Isn’t it Expelliarmus?

That’s even better. It’s the only one Harry knows.

Right, that’s why I guessed it.

So he’s struck dead and Rowling describes it in the narration as, “He fell backwards to the stone floor with a mundane sense of finality.” It’s just like he tried so hard to be super-cool and immortal and the super-evil guy for all eternity, and then he just died like anybody else.

Then if you watch the movie, they just apparently didn’t read that section and they fight in the courtyard away from everyone else, which is also not how it happened, and the last Horcrux is killed or destroyed with the Sword of Gryffindor. Then the Expelliarmus hits him and Voldemort’s wand flies to Harry’s hand, and then Voldemort just disintegrates and turns into ash and floats into the wind in this super-cool death scene. That’s not how it’s supposed to be.

No, dead on a rock.

Dead on a rock. He needs to fall down dead.

If your name is – whatever the name of the director for this – fie upon thee. And if you are not him, or maybe if you are him as well, learn from that mistake next time and make the thematic ending a little bit stronger.

Amen to that.

That was an anti-recommendation.

That was like sub-tweeting over the air.

“Why the last movie got this wrong” – thread, 1 out of 37.

Well, since we’re on this turf I will extend on that. If you are a director who’s trying to bring to the silver screen one of the greatest fantasy epics ever, by someone who knows more about literature and Anglo-Saxon culture than you’re ever going to know…

I can’t imagine what book you’re talking about.

Are we talking about Percy Jackson?

…do not assume that you have a plot twist that is more clever or relevant and with-it than your original source. We understand that books are longer than movies and that some things have to be cut. There’s a big difference between cutting something for length-sake and inserting irrelevant story elements.

Made-up characters, for instance?

Yeah, that. I was thinking more of, “Oh, we need to give the girl something to do so she can sit back and, at a distance, bless magically her true love Aragorn, who got lost with his horse, having survived an incredible battle and then kind of gets lost and falls down, and a certain [g? she? 44:51] needs something to do – that was just so big a stumble and a clunk. “What movie am I watching? What stories? Who are these people anyway?”

What’s going on here in both cases – I think there’s two things going on. There’s the arrogance that says, “This is my thing. I can do whatever I want, and I want to do this.” Then there’s, “And I know what the audience wants.” You know, just possibly you really don’t.

Let me play devil’s advocate here. In every scene containing Arwen, I assume that Peter Jackson is doing it so that the audience does not forget that she exists, so that when Eowyn shows up we don’t automatically go, “Yes, I ship it.” We know Aragorn has his true love and we need to be reminded of that from time to time, because we’re a Hollywood audience that has the intellectual capacity of an 8-year-old.

I would counter-argue that there may be a need to remind people of one’s true love, but that there are better ways of doing it than falling off your horse. I can handle her going into battle, because that wasn’t why she was there, and that the forces of darkness would attack a lone woman, that’s totally believable, and that she would let loose her native power, that makes sense, so I’ll give him that one. I didn’t mind that. But that other thing that was just intruded because he thought that would communicate more effectively their true love, no, it absolutely failed and it didn’t make any sense and it was just a hiccup.

I believe that was the second one, and as we move into the third he keeps doing things like that. Some of it kind of works, especially if it’s been a long time since you read the books and don’t really remember what’s going on.

I guess there’s a difference between saying “Inspired by a true story” or “Inspired by the novel” and saying, “This is the novel brought to the screen.” Those are different concepts. If you want to do the honest tribute of saying, “This is a great book and people deserve to see it more in another medium,” then do that. If you want to simply say, “There’s some great ideas here, but it just isn’t going to work so I’m just going to take some great ideas and run with them, because I am a genius,” okay, at least be honest about it and don’t be surprised when your audience does not show up, or when they do show up and find out that you…

Betrayed them.

Yeah. Don’t wonder what happened and don’t complain about how fickle your audience is.

“Oh, they just don’t understand real art.”

Yes. Do we have strong opinions about literature and cinema? Nahhh.

Nooo.

This is also an excellent point in time to bring back my anti-recommendation from a few weeks ago, the Green Knight adaptation.

No!

Oh yes, that was painful.

Most of it was off the air, for which you can be thankful, listeners. Every detail of the movie was horrible.

There were two details that were lovely, and that was the cinematography and the music, and that is not necessarily the high bar that you want to aim for as a filmmaker.

Cinematography and good music do not a good movie make.

Unfortunately, not.

It would be interesting some day to look at all of the movies we know, and find the ones that have virtually no soundtrack and see if that can be done successfully. I suspect there are a few – probably a precious few, but a few examples where that actually is a thing.

The Shop Around the Corner has almost no soundtrack.

There you go.

And it’s the world’s greatest movie, so there’s that.

My wife would agree.

Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband, who I discovered this week makes really, really excellent homemade chicken soup. I bet you didn’t know that about David.

No, I missed that.

Thanks also to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. We’re so glad you could join us. Thanks to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website: anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.

If you’d like to get in touch with us about life, the universe, and everything, it will probably take multiple emails to cover everything, but send us an email at [email protected]. We will read as many emails as you send us, I can almost promise that. David will read several of the emails you send us.

Thanks so much for listening. Hope to see you next week.