Jephthah
Times will appear once this episode's audio is aligned.
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 Jephthah. We’re putting him on trial for heroism. We’re not sure if we like him or not. Actually, we are sure. We have some conclusions that we’ve come to, but we want to share them with you, and maybe you can let us know what you think, if we made a compelling case in his defense [spoilers] or if we’ve miscarried justice.
It’s kind of a nice thing to know that we don’t actually have to decide. We don’t have to know. God knows and he’s the one who makes the actual decision. This is one of the comforts of being a finite human being.
Transjordan meaning on the other side of the river where the tribes were like, “This land looks good.”
“This land looks good. This is a land for cattle, and your servants have cattle.” Yeah, that part. He was illegitimate. It says Gilead begat Jephthah, but the historical Gilead that we know about lived a long time earlier, so either it’s just kind of “He was a son of Sacramento” kind of thing, or maybe it was some minor Gilead we don’t know anything about.
The interesting thing is this is the one story where it’s not a question because at the end Jephthah will be an expert on chronology, unlike most theologians, because he will tell us, “This is 300 years since the conquest,” so that puts it at the end of Judges, not far off from Samuel’s judgeship and all that, and eventually the crowning of Saul. So this is at the end of things.
Israel is being harassed this time by the Ammonites. In chapter 10, God’s people decided that maybe repentance from idolatry would be a good idea, so they did. God’s answer was a little obscure. “I delivered you from the Egyptians, the Amorites, and all these people, but you keep forsaking me and serving other gods, so I’m not delivering you anymore. Go cry to the gods that you’ve chosen and see if they can deliver you.”
Israel’s response was, “We have sinned. Do whatever you want, whatever seems good to you, only deliver us!” That’s not quite “whatever you want,” but they’re desperate. They’re beginning to get together and they realize that, yes, they’re going to take a stand against this tyranny. Good for them. They’re not the warrior types. They have their militia, but they really don’t have anybody who’s good at commanding troops, so they look around and they find this guy named Jephthah who’s been out on the frontier.
As we said, he was the son of a harlot and at some point his family kicked him out and he went out on the fringes, out on the periphery, the rim, and has been hanging out there probably on Ammonite land, doing the kind of thing that David’s going to do later, harassing the bad guys, the enemies of his people.
He is followed by – what’s the phrase – “there were gathered vain men” to him.
That’s what it sounds like, but he managed to whip them into an effective fighting force, so it’s to him that the elders of Gilead go and they say, “We need your help. We want you to be our leader.” He says, “Wait. You kind of agreed and were in on kicking me out and expelling me and chasing me out to the frontier, and you want me to be your leader?”
“Yeah, we want you to be our leader. And if you win, then you’ll be in charge. You’ll be our ruler. Won’t that be good? Yeah, that’ll be good.”
So that’s where we are and that’s where Jephthah now comes into focus. What kind of man is this Jephthah?
You look at the situation, and there was no doubt a time in church history where he doesn’t work for anybody, he’s under no one’s authority, he’s out there with a bunch of vain guys, and this guy doesn’t sound good at all. On the other hand, if you’re American it’s like, “Oh, you mean he’s the Lone Ranger. He’s Daniel Boone. He’s Davy Crockett.”
Yeah, he’s Clint Eastwood, so Americans may not have quite as much of a problem with choosing this guy, but is he really going to be a good ruler? We’re used to the guy who comes into town, blows away all the bad guys, then vanishes. But will he be a good king? A judge? Whatever?
Jephthah, having reconfirmed that this is indeed what they’re offering, the elders say –
The Lord be witness between us if we do not so according to thy words. Then Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead, and the people made him head and captain over them: and Jephthah uttered all his words before the Lord in Mizpeh.
So what we’re doing now is we’re walking through this historical record and considering the good, the bad, and the questionable. Here for instance is a good thing, not maybe a great thing but a good thing. He knows he’s going to take a political office and he wants to do it before God and he wants to make a solemn oath. So it’s not the ways of a profane man or a pagan, but you could argue, “Well, anybody who grew up in Israel would probably know that’s the way things are done. It’s just a starting point.”
And Jephthah sent messengers unto the king of the children of Ammon, saying, “What hast thou to do with me, that thou art come against me to fight in my land?” And the king of the children of Ammon answered unto the messengers of Jephthah, “Because Israel took away my land when they came up out of Egypt, from Arnon even unto Jabbok and unto Jordan. Now therefore restore those lands again peaceably.”
Jephthah is going to try a negotiation first. His immediate idea is not, “Hey, let’s send a hit team and knock out their king.” He’s ready to talk.
No, not particularly. He gets a response from the king, who says, “Well, it’s real simple. When you guys came out of Egypt you took my land, so give it back and we’ll call it a day.” Then Jephthah sent messengers back, and I’m going to read this, not so much because the details are important, but the fact that he knows the details is important.
Thus saith Jephthah, “Israel took not away the land of Moab, nor the land of the children of Ammon, but when Israel came up from Egypt and walked through the wilderness unto the Red Sea and came to Kadesh, then Israel sent messengers unto the king of Edom [another southern nation on that side of Jordan], saying, ‘Let me, I pray thee, pass through thy land,’ but the king of Edom would not hearken thereto. And in like manner they sent unto the king of Moab [these were cousins to the Ammonites], but he would not consent. And Israel abode in Kadesh,” [which is on the banks of Jordan.
“Then they went along through the wilderness, and compassed the land of Edom, and the land of Moab, and came by the east side of the land of Moab, and pitched on the other side of Arnon [a river or brook that runs into Jordan], but came not within the border of Moab: for Arnon was the border of Moab.”
“And Israel sent messengers unto Sihon king of the Amorites [not Ammonites], the king of Heshbon, and Israel said unto him, ‘Let us pass, we pray thee, through thy land into my place.’”
We need to get to Jordan so we can cross and be in the right place where we’re supposed to cross.
“But Sihon trusted not Israel to pass through his coast, but Sihon gathered all his people together and pitched in Jahaz and fought against Israel. And the Lord God of Israel delivered Sihon and all his people into the hand of Israel, and they smote them, so Israel possessed all the land of the Amorites, the inhabitants of that country. And they possessed all the coasts of the Amorites, from Arnon even unto Jabbok, and from the wilderness even unto Jordan.”
“In other words, Ammonites, you didn’t even own the land when we came out of Egypt. It was all Amorite territory and we were nice and we were asking permission everywhere we went, and they provoked the battle. We weren’t going to strike them at all because it wasn’t on the agenda. God didn’t promise us anything on that side of the land, but they started it and God finished it.”
He’s very emphatic too that it’s the Lord. “If you have a problem with this arrangement, take it up with God.”
And he pushes that further, and some people have been not pleased with his answer, but that’s because they don’t understand sarcasm, being good Christians and all.
So now the Lord God of Israel hath dispossessed the Amorites from before his people Israel, and shouldest thou possess it? Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess?
So whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them will we possess.
And now art thou anything better than Balak the son of Zippor, king of Moab?
Notice all the references are to Moab, who are cousins to the Ammonites, because Ammon apparently was not even a factor in the playing field at this point. Their cousins were the only people there, and the message here is, “And your cousins didn’t bother us. Well, there was that little thing of hiring Balaam to curse us, but in terms of military confrontation they didn’t even dare try that one. They left us alone.”
Did he ever strive against Israel or did he ever fight against them while Israel dwelt in Heshbon and her towns, and in Aroer and her towns, and in all the cities that be along by the coasts of Arnon, three hundred years?
This was all 300 years ago. If this were an issue, 300 years is too late to go back and fix it. A lot of people have lived and died on this land since then. And there are some issues here I think that this addresses that we don’t need to go into, but there’s always somebody like, “Well, this land belonged to our ancestors.”
“Yeah, 300 years ago. I’m sorry they lost it, but that’s 300 years ago. It’s a little late to try to fix things now.” The Jubilee laws put it at more like 50 years.
Wherefore I have not sinned against thee, but thou doest me wrong to war against me. The Lord the Judge be judge this day between the children of Israel and the children of Ammon.
Now, some things that are important here. First of all, I would guess that the average Bible-reading Christian in America today does not know this history. It’s mostly in Deuteronomy in the first few chapters, sections that most Christians don’t read, and if they do they don’t bother to remember it.
Jephthah knew his Bible. Now, you could say, “Maybe he called someone, a scribe or somebody who knew it.” Alright, at least he knew to call them.
You have to know that there’s an answer for you waiting in history in order to look at the history books in these political questions.
Doesn’t the Bible say somewhere, “Hey, call that guy Strong. Maybe he knows where it is.” So he details the history as an argument, and his mind is that of a political historian. He knows militarily and politically what has happened, why lands got transferred, who owned what and when, who was in control of what when.
He has a little fine sense of sarcasm where it comes to comparative religion. He has no respect for Chemosh. No, he is not saying, “Well, you get what your god gives and we’ll get…” This is not polytheism. This is sarcasm and irony. “Your god obviously can’t give you anything. Our God gives us whatever he wants. Get out of our way.”
As you say, he calls upon God to judge. He gives all the credit to God. He does not boast in Israel’s superior firepower, valor, strength, weapons, or whatever, so so far he’s coming across pretty good as a godly man who actually knows the Bible, thinks historically and not mythically, not philosophically but in terms of the practicalities of covenant history, and is sure that God is in control of history, including military struggles. So there’s that. But the king of Ammon won’t listen. Verse 29, and this is where things gets more personal.
Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed over Gilead and Manasseh and passed over Mizpeh of Gilead, and from Mizpeh of Gilead he passed over unto the children of Ammon.
The beginning of the prior sentence is, “The spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah.” The next sentence is, “And he vowed a vow.” In terms of the history described here, some time took place. In terms of the textual description, one leads right to the other.
No, there’s no contrast here. It’s a continuation of a thought. God’s spirit is upon him and moves him to go to places A, B, and C and take on enemy X, Y, and Z, and in that context is…”and Jephthah vowed a vow.” So what Jephthah is doing, he’s doing in the power of God’s spirit and under the influence of God’s spirit.
Now, do Christians screw up even when they’re under the influence of God’s spirit? Yes, but there’s a difference between missing the mark a little and veering a little to the right or left, and turning around and driving back over the person behind you, which is kind of what he’s accused of doing because of the nature of the vow. Here’s what he vows –
And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands…
…then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the Lord's and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.
Part of the problem here is that there are a lot of assumptions we put into reading what was just said, including translation.
Yeah, the burnt offering stands out to me. I don’t know if you were going to go there first.
You bring it up so let’s go there. The word for burnt offering is a Hebrew word ‘olah that means ascension. It does not in and of itself require anything burnt or fire or the destruction of the thing involved. It is true that in almost every time where we see it an ascension offering is a consumption of the whole thing, but there is at least one really, really, really important exception that’s testified to both by Genesis and by the writer of Hebrews, and that’s the offering up of Isaac.
God told Abraham to offer up his only begotten son, to offer up Isaac as an ascension offering, a whole burnt offering, and Abraham sets out to do so. From reading Genesis we might get the idea that he stops short, because he was ready to plunge the knife into Isaac’s chest and God intervenes. But when we get to the book of Hebrews we’re told that, “He who had the promises offered up his only begotten son.”
So there’s this ascension of the idea of going up. They went up the mountain. Usually when you burn something the smoke goes up, so it’s two different ways of this up-going, if you will.
Of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called. Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from whence also he received him in a figure.
So as far as the writer of Hebrews is concerned, Isaac was a whole burnt offering even though he walked away from it alive because Abraham had wholly committed him to God, and that’s the heart of it.
The next book coming up for us is Samuel, and the first story is this woman named Hannah who takes her son to the tabernacle and leaves him there, the King James says, ‘lent unto the Lord,’ given to the Lord for the rest of his life.
And not too long into that story we find that the priests, Hophni and Phinehas, are raping the women who assembled at the tabernacle. There are women who had a permanent place at the tabernacle, helping somehow. They weren’t priestesses but they did something there, maybe prayers, maybe songs, maybe servant work, we don’t know, whatever was necessary.
We run into this again in Luke’s gospel in the Christmas story, where Anna, which is by the way the same name as Hannah, is an old lady who’s a prophetess who lives in the temple, does not depart out of it, but serves God with prayers and fasting day and night, so she is a temple servant, too.
That doesn’t even include all the Gibeonites who are permanently bound to the tabernacle and then the temple, although they should have been executed, but that was their way out. So we have plenty of precedent for something being given holy to the Lord, even called an ascension offering, and yet living.
This is really important because otherwise it sounds like – well, the first thought I think is, “Well, he just meant when the dog or the cat come out to meet him…” No, you don’t offer God dogs and cats.
And pets weren’t a thing. Dogs and cats were unclean, and pigs, which should not live in Jewish homes. I suppose you might have a goat living in your house, and in small peasant houses it was not impossible that animals might be there, clean animals, so it’s possible a sheep or a goat might live there. But more than likely to greet him?
First of all, backs to dog and cats. Sure, dogs come out to greet you. Cats do not. Cats don’t care. They’re annoyed that you are gone and annoyed that you are back. It doesn’t matter, so all of that’s going on. He could certainly have ensured that a sheep or a goat, if that were the case, would come out.
To come out to greet him would almost certainly be a human being, probably a servant, and he does not consider that maybe someone else might come out first – and the whatever is a whoever. He knows up front that he’s going to be giving someone permanently to the service of God.
In fact, in the last chapter of Leviticus there’s a difficult section that has to do with estimating people for vows, and it’s not terribly clear what’s going on there, but here’s the thing. We know that you could become a Levite or, if you were a Levite, you could be adopted into a priestly family. Samuel was.
There’s a problem with that. That’s a lucrative position and it would be easy to say, “Oh, I want to serve God with all my heart. I can’t wait for that tasty beef and lamb every day. Mmmm.”
This is how simony was invented, and this is how God stopped simony. You want to be adopted? Here are the prices you have to pay as an entry fee, and they were not slight. They’re basically the prices of slaves. So if you want into this family, you have to show it by coming up with a good deal of money up front, so lazy scroungey people aren’t going to be doing this. There has to be a serious desire to serve God and a certain up front capital investment.
Is there credit to thinking that you’re thinking of a person who comes out of the house to greet you? This is not someone who’s already outside, so if it’s a servant, they’re fairly high up the chain of command whose place is in the house, so this is a high-value person.
Yeah, and he’s going to have to pay this for the servant. He will have won a battle. He will have spoil. He will be able to afford this and he’s promising that he’ll do this. He will give this greatest of gifts, someone to serve the Lord in perpetuity from here on out, so this in and of itself is not a problem.
Of course, in our culture we’d say, “Wait. You’re vowing for somebody else!” In Israel it was a thing, okay? We’re individualists, we don’t do that, but they, thinking a little more covenantally and where servanthood was a reality that God legislated for that time, it was okay. He had the authority to do this, so he makes the vow.
So Jephthah fights and he wins. The children of Ammon are subdued before him. You see the main thing is not the battle. It just gets a couple quick verses, but Jephthah comes back to his house and his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances, and she was his only child. This sounds a little familiar. You’re about to give your only child as a burnt offering to God, hmm.
Beside her he had neither son nor daughter. And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes and said, Alas, my daughter! Thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me, for I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and I cannot go back.
What happens here with some commentators is they say, “You see, Jephthah was very superstitious. He did not understand that you cannot vow to murder somebody, and he thought he was trapped by his words. He basically believes in magic, so he doesn’t see that what he really should do is simply renounce his rash and ungodly vow and let his little girl live, because that’s what any human loving father would do.”
And that’s assuming that it’s meaning to burn her alive. If you take that assumption out of the way it’s like, “Oh, you mean he doesn’t want to lie to God?”
No, he doesn’t, as a matter of fact. The assumptions you bring matter here.
Apparently she is a very bright young lady and understands immediately what’s going on.
And she said unto him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth, forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon.
And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains and bewail my virginity, I and my fellows.
Yeah, she’s not bewailing her life, that it was so short, that she never found true love, that she never had a husband. It’s very simply, “I’m never going to be a mom.” It’s not about a short life. It’s about, “I’m not going to have children.”
And he said, Go. And he sent her away for two months: and she went with her companions and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. And it came to pass at the end of two months that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed, and she knew no man.
Yeah, I think we were just told exactly what he did to her. He consigned her to perpetual virginity, probably at the tabernacle, but more than that. There’s something I think here that’s more crucial than that. “He did with her according to his vow.”
That’s the inspired writer’s voice-over. The inspired writer – Samuel or whoever this may have been – is saying what he vowed is what he did. The words of the vow are to give this person to God as an ascension offering. He did that, not commit child sacrifice, not commit bloody murder, not break all of God’s laws at once. It was to worship God with a sacrifice, and the writer says that’s what he did. I don’t know how you get it much plainer.
If he had said the vow differently then you might have some wiggle room. But given exactly what he said, and the writer says “And that’s what he did,” then he must have given her to God, and God must have accepted it, because otherwise he didn’t give her to God. He threw her out into the void and God said, “Whoops, what’s that all about?” And she knew no man. There’s a footnote.
And it was a custom in Israel that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year.
The marginal note says “to talk with.” The word itself, from what I can tell from Strong’s and such, the word rendered lament means praise or celebrate – not Jephthah but Jephthah’s daughter. She becomes the great hero because in a few years Jephthah dies, but she goes on. Since she’s a young woman she goes on for years ministering to these young women who come to her to talk to her about what it means to give your all for the kingdom of God and for the preservation of the promise of Messiah.
People give Jephthah a hard time, but in the process they completely ignore this young lady who is one of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament because she wasn’t asked. She wasn’t consulted. Her free will choice was not involved here. She did what someone else vowed for her, and God honored her very greatly for it.
We can contrast Saul and David, when Saul forbade people to eat until the battle was over, and Jonathan didn’t know about it and he ate the wild honey. When there’s the reckoning for that disconnect he was like, “First of all, what were you thinking? Why on earth would you vow to keep your army on an empty stomach? That’s kind of dumb.”
Yeah, for dad this was a dumb idea. But then Jonathan is willing to submit – I mean not with a great deal of enthusiasm, because he thinks it was a dumb vow in the first place, because “Now I must die.”
“Yeah, son, you’re going to die,” because Saul was jealous of him at that point, but the people have to intervene and say no to their king – what a concept – and rescue him.
The rest of the story, I think we won’t spend time with it now, but Ephraim gets his nose all out of shape again. “You went over and attacked the Ammonites and you didn’t call us, so we must burn your house with fire now.”
Jephthah says, “What? No.” He’s not nice like Gideon because he realizes these guys are so out of line. “I did call you. You didn’t help. And none of this ‘Oh, the little bit you did is as good as what I did.’ No, you’re out of line so it looks like I get to kill you now,” so Jephthah and his guys attacked Ephraim and just slaughtered them. They then took the fords of Jordan so they couldn’t get back to their own territory.
I mention this only because of one word. As the Ephraimites came back and they saw the guards at the river, they knew they had to pretend to be not Ephraimites, but there was one little problem. This tribe that wanted to be the leader tribe, wanted to be the head of everybody, they were so insulated and isolated that they picked up a characteristic lisp. They couldn’t pronounce the sh- sound.
“What? No!” and thus the English word shibboleth, meaning a secret password that gets you places.
The story ends with Jephthah only judging Israel for six years, and he dies and he’s buried in one of the cities of Gilead.
That said, we need to say something about why Jephthah was so upset about having to give his daughter to the Lord. Isn’t that a great honor? Even with Abraham we’re not told that he went into a panic. He trusted that God knew what he was doing and that God would keep his promises, but one of the underlying things of the book of Judges is this desire for a human dynasty and the prevailing theme, “There was no king in Israel. Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”
The point is not that there wasn’t a human king, but that they were not reckoning God as their king, so there’s this constant push for a human king to take the place of God. We saw it with Gideon. We’ll see it again in the days of Saul. Again, 1 Samuel follows right on top of this, because remember right now we’re at the end, 300 years after the exodus. We’re right at the end of the period of the judges. Samuel is beginning his judgeship about this time and Israel has not learned its lesson. They still want a human king.
It’s notable too that the intuition is that kingship is an inherited thing. It’s not something that comes to the American mind naturally, necessarily.
No, it doesn’t but it is interesting that we should think the king’s son has some natural place. There’s a little divine imagery in that.
The closing comment that people just plain ignore sometimes – again, back to the writer of Hebrews, chapter 11 talking of the great heroes of faith, he says in verse 32 –
And what shall I more say, for the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah, of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets, who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.
It doesn’t say these people were perfect people. It doesn’t say they didn’t go astray here and there. We saw that Gideon really did some weird things toward the end of his life. David did some weird and horrible things in the middle of his life, and yet God used them, which should be a great comfort to us that we don’t have to be perfect for God to use us.
The question is not how good are you. The question is how good is God and what is God going to do with you, in spite of the fact you’re not all that great, and that’s a very different question. There used to be a saying in some evangelical circles, mostly I think holiness circles, that said, “God cannot work through an unclean vessel.”
Aside from Jesus himself, that’s pretty much what we have on this earth. Jesus was the only clean vessel who ever walked the planet as a human being. We are all unclean things. God used these judges, with all of their fallibilities and all of their sins, and some of the sins were pretty big, yet God used them. Then God recorded that he was well-pleased with them, and that’s something to remember.
This is one of the practicalities of the doctrine of justification by faith. When God says we’re righteous before him, he actually means it. He doesn’t mean, “Well, look. We’re calling you righteous, but don’t push it, bud.” He really means that our works are acceptable, and the things that are flat-out sin he forgives and passes over and sees us in the righteousness of his son, and that’s a call for great joy. Reading through these Old Testament stories together should be really encouraging, not “Wow, can’t anybody get anything right around here?”
Though we sometimes feel that looking at our own lives. Maybe I should speak for myself.
That reminds me, Greg, of a quote, and I want to say it’s from Sinclair Ferguson, who I absolutely also respect as a biblical teacher. He says, “No amount of your sanctification actually adds to your justification,” which also means that no amount of our screwing up our sanctification detracts from our justification.
That is such a precious and marvelous thing, and a lot of people really don’t get that. They don’t understand the full extent of justification. Not only does God accept us at the moment, but the righteousness of Christ, the sprinkling of his blood covers not only our lives but all of our actions, either to wipe them out or to tweak them so that even the imperfections God does not see. He accepts them as righteous things if they’re done in faith for his glory. Even when the motives are not completely pure and the faith is weak, he takes us a meaning better than we meant, as Lewis would say.
That’s a great reason to rejoice. You don’t have to spend your whole life saying, “Well, I really screwed that up, and my motives were rotten there, and I completely failed on that one. Look, what I should have said there and I didn’t, and look what happened.”
It’s easy to go through life that way, and one day God will reckon with us with complete accuracy and purity. In the meantime, as Paul says, “I judge not my own self.” We’ll leave that to God, and in the meantime rejoice that he loves us as we are, and yet he wants us to be better, but that doesn’t change his love.
We look at the heroes of the faith, the Old Testament heroes and legends, so to speak, not that they’re real but that they are legendary in their quality.
Yes, get ahead of the synonyms there. We look at them and if you don’t actually read their passages, there is even in Christian circle just kind of the general cultural, “Oh, these guys were like God’s favorite. They did everything right and he loved them for it.”
Actually reading their lives and seeing their mistakes and seeing the sins they committed, even while they professed Jehovah as Lord, it is incredibly comforting to be like, “Wow, David did all that nonsense and God still said ‘He was a man after my own heart.’” Okay, I feel a little bit better now that I forgot to give back this person’s pen that I used to sign a check at the bank.
I think we all are to some extent inherent perfectionists that can never get it right. It all weighs down on our shoulders and we’re like, “I can’t do anything right. There’s nothing I can do.” Yeah, that’s correct, but it doesn’t mean you’re lost.
Just to ring the Gnostic bell <ring!> and take another turn, one of the dangers of Sunday School and certain types of Sunday School teachers is they only tell the nice sweet parts of the story and leave out lots.
I don’t know how much Jephthah makes the Top 10 Sunday School stories anymore. I’m pretty sure I heard it as a kid, but I probably heard it as, “Yeah, he offered her on the altar,” sort of like Agamemnon offering up Iphigenia, but there would have been much more than that, maybe “How horrible was he?”
I got that very question today. Well, it wasn’t adultery, it was lust. I was teaching on Matthew 5.
I once got that in high school. This was years and years ago at my other school, and it was from the son of an elder at his church.
Yeah, he was well past puberty and he was serious. He wanted to know, and I told him in very blatant terms. He was a humble young man, a godly young man, and he said, “Whoa, I’ve got a lot of repenting to do.” Okay, good. He’s a good guy and he’s still walking with the Lord faithfully with his godly wife.
It’s part of the work of the law. Paul talks about how the law teaches me what my sin is. If we’re not giving that to our kids, we’re robbing them of the comfort of Christ because they don’t know how far they’ve fallen. They don’t know where the sin is in their lives and how Christ redeems them.
That reminds me a bit of when we talked about how there’s not really a part of scripture that that is not meant for everyone to hear, because it’s God’s word to his people. That means his people of all ages.
I think I brought up how Song of Solomon was something that Jewish children weren’t allowed to read until they had reached the age of their Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah. You can’t do that with scripture. If you’re going to actually teach law and gospel together, you have to actually tell them what the law says.
And what it means. It will be counterpointed in solid teaching with gospel where it’s like, “Look, this is something you’re supposed to do, but if you’re justified you can’t lose that.” You have to have the balance, and I’ve always found it sort of difficult to put that into words, even though I understand it.
I think you did a good job. We preach the holiness of God, which is to say the love of God, because his holiness and his love are the same thing. What it means to be holy is to love perfectly, and we don’t, so in preaching that we show ourselves sinners. So now we see the redemptive love of God in Christ and we preach justification by faith and by atonement.
Then on the other side of that and along with that we can then say, “And now how would you like to be more like Jesus?” and we actually from our heart say, “Oh, that would be wonderful.”
That’s also something I love too about the Reformed tradition, is that the major Reformed confessions begin with who God actually is, and then they move on and talk about how we fall short of that standard. But I think there is a danger in starting with just – this is specifically an issue for the vaguely new Reformed kind of people of the last 20 years or so, starting with just TULIP. It starts with us and starts with total depravity.
I don’t know that it’s that recent. I think it’s been a problem for a long time.
That’s true, it’s been around longer than that, but condensing doctrine just starting with soteriology and starting with us and starting with our problem instead of starting with the beauty of God – you have the wrong focus, basically.
You have the wrong focus, and some would suggest – and I don’t know with how much truth – that this is the difference between Luther and Calvin, that they got hung up on justification by faith. Calvin backed away and said, “No, the glory of God which would lead us to justification by faith.” I’m sure Luther would have given full credit to the glory of God, but emphasis can matter.
If you’re just talking one person it may not matter, but when that one person begins to affect an entire tradition or a seminary or school or denomination, then those kinds of things begin to take on form and consequence.
I’ve always thought of that phrase from our Lord when he was talking to the Pharisees. He basically says, “You go miles and miles to make a convert, and then you just make them 10 times the son of hell that you are.”
The negative aspect of that would be with false teaching. Yeah, the first guy who taught this sort of error might have squeaked by as far as his doctrinal accuracy. He was just a little bit off, but those things then get emphasized by the next generation that he taught, and then they just go off into these weird branches.
That is obviously a thing that happens even with good things getting the wrong emphasis or strength of emphasis. We always have to go back to what scripture and what the voices from church history have always emphasized. What’s that phrase from Bavinck? It’s a book that recently got translated. It’s like the wonderful works of God, basically.
In passing, and we can close with this, I got an email from a former student. I don’t remember if you would know him, and I won’t use his name without his permission, but he wrote and just said, “Hi, how you doing? I really appreciated your classes, the emphasis on covenant and all that,” and he’s not from a Reformed church. He was interested in my health and my family and how the school is doing and all of that, and he said, “So I’m involved in teen ministry now,” and he asked four questions, really good questions.
The first one was how do you give encouragement to young people, and my answer was – it was more than that, but the first line was, “Teach them to know God,” because if you don’t do that, if they don’t know God personally – theologically, personally, experientially, in obedience – all the other stuff is going to be fluff and flack. So the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Amen. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations? I’m going to recommend having friends over, specifically while you clean your house. A couple weeks ago I had a friend say to me, “Emily, I’m coming over to your house tomorrow and I’m not leaving until you’ve cleaned it.”
She’s not saying this because I’m a slob, although I feel like I am. She’s saying this because I’m a pregnant lady who hasn’t gotten on top of life and is starting a new job and has just moved into a new place and it’s been a lot. She knew that what I needed was someone to sit with me and keep me on task, and that’s exactly what I needed. She did this a few weeks ago and it was a transformation. It was life-changing for sure.
Then she actually came over again this past weekend and helped us. This was more active. This wasn’t her just sitting with me, this was her actually taking charge of this room that actually you guys can see right now. It’s all clean. It didn’t used to be this clean. I don’t know if you remember, but we have our little nursery set up now and it’s all nice now and it’s clean and I have a floor that was previously covered in cardboard boxes, because it was the junk room. It was, “This is the place where all the things are going to go until we figure out where they actually go.”
So have people over who are willing to be over at your house when it’s dirty, whether they’re just going to sit with you or actually take your life in hand and help you out. Both of those were tremendous blessings.
I’m going to jump on that and I’m going to recommend having people over to your house when your house is not spotless, because often our houses aren’t because, you know what, real people live in them.
Yes, we want to make it nice for people and that’s an act of courtesy. I understand that and there’s a place for that, but our friends want to see us, not our house. Yes, oftentimes they will jump in and help us clean because it gives us something good to do together. Working together and facing a problem together is one way that God helps to sanctify us.
People to do things with and to set examples and to encourage us and give us advice, and things where we do that together – this is a good thing. Even just visiting and talking about the things of scripture or a good book we’ve read or singing songs together, these are good things. Please don’t wait until your house is perfect. Be okay to have a homey house where people feel welcome.
I’ve heard that summarized as the difference between hospitality and entertaining.
Yes. We covered that a little bit during Sunday School at Reformation Fellowship one time last year, maybe the year before. I think they used the word ‘hosting’ – hospitality vs hosting. Like all good OPC pastors, they had to have alliteration.
I’ve only really noticed it in the OPC churches that I’ve been to. All the Baptist ones typically don’t, at least the ones I’ve been to.
On that point, though, I did want to also add when my wife, who is also named Emily, and I were still engaged, I would work from her living room and in lulls during work, while she was there anyway, we would find things to clean and it was a top-notch engaged people activity. It was like, “Ah, this place is filthy, and look, the two of us worked together and it’s now clean. We can accomplish anything!”
My recommendation is very different. It’s actually a television show I would like to recommend called Locke and Key. It’s a Netflix Original and it is surprisingly good. It’s based on a graphic novel and essentially the plot is a family moves back to their dad’s family home in Massachusetts, and being Massachusetts it is creepy and there are magical things happening, because as we all know New England is just like that.
Yes, but it is very interesting because essentially the MacGuffins, so to speak, are magical keys that the kids start to find, because the keys whisper to them from their locations in the house, and they each have something they can do.
There’s the Anywhere key, and you put it into a door. You think of a door you have seen in person or in a picture, and you turn the lock and you open the door and you can walk to that place where that door is located. There are other ones too, and I won’t go into all the detail.
What’s interesting and why I ended up liking it so much is that the antagonists who show up – there’s only one at first – but they are demons and they’re referred to as demons in the show, and they are surprisingly accurate to how Christians think of demons as obviously malevolent entities.
The way that they actually seduce, for the lack of a better term, in the show is how Satan works as well, which I found very intriguing to come from secular writers. Most of the temptations are like, “Well, I can help you. I can help you get the life that you want, and to not have fear anymore. All you have to do is just one little thing.” Just bow down and worship me, basically is the pitch.
I could rant because we actually finished Season 2 yesterday evening and they so beautifully brought seven or eight different plot threads from both seasons to a satisfying conclusion within about 15 minutes. I cried. There were very good moments.
It’s a Netflix show. There’s stuff that is not consistent with the Christian worldview, but on the whole I found it very, very satisfying and very interesting and very well-written as well, although a lot of the characters are very stupid. Honestly, that’s probably the most realistic part of the show,. So that’s my recommendation, Locke and Key, because they are the Locke family.
That’s so funny. I had a 5th grader today, and we were talking about how the fool says in his heart there is no God. This was in reading class, hours and hours after I taught Bible class, and I was playing a little bit of devil’s advocate with the kids.
One of them said, “But like everybody’s a fool,” and I said, “Alright, what makes you say that?” and she said, “You literally said that this morning,” so that one came back to bite me.
Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a treat. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.
If you’d like to get in touch with us, please do. Our email address is [email protected]. We’re on YouTube and Rumble. I think we’re still on Facebook.
If you’d like to support us financially you can visit our website: anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. A huge thank-you to our financial supporters. We really appreciate you.