Sermons

The people of Israel gather in one place. They have come together to judge the tribe of Benjamin, yet the first thing they settle is not repentance but an oath that they will not give their daughters. When that oath leaves the tribe of Benjamin wiped out, they turn and complain to God, asking why such a thing has happened.

They did wrong themselves, and then blamed God for the outcome. To cover that sin, they next sacrifice the people of a weak and innocent town and carry off women by force, making a show of honoring their oath. Outwardly they seem to be keeping the rules, but what comes to light is the true face of Israel: weak before the strong and cruel to the weak.

The whole story ends in neither repentance nor turning back. It closes with the words that there was no king, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes. This is what came of living as they pleased, refusing to acknowledge God even though he was there as their King.

Traveling by night, a Levite stops to lodge in Gibeah, and when a mob comes for him he puts his wife outside to them. She is killed in the course of that night, and the Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them out to every tribe of Israel. Israel gathers at Mizpah and resolves with one voice to bring judgment on the tribe of Benjamin.

The Levite concealed his own wrongdoing and inflated the injustice done to him, and on his word alone Israel burned with anger. They inquired of God and were told that Judah should go up first, yet twice they suffered heavy defeat, which meant that God was not with them in this war. They wept and fasted and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings, but God did not accept sacrifice and prayer that came without repentance.

In the end Benjamin was all but wiped out, with only six hundred men left. Only then did Israel feel remorse, yet rather than coming to true repentance they put the people of Jabesh Gilead to death and heaped one more sin upon the rest. The sin of a corrupted Benjamin was the sin of a fallen Israel itself. The path God desires is this: to repent of one’s own sin first, before looking at the faults of a brother.

A Levite traveling with his concubine stops for the night at Gibeah. A crowd from the town gathers and threatens him, demanding that he be brought out; to save himself, the Levite hands his concubine over to them instead, and after being abused all night she dies on the threshold.

The Levite was the one who should have been teaching the people God’s word. For such a man to give up his own wife to save his life meant that the first button, the one that should have held Israel together, had already come undone. When the first button is fastened wrongly, every one after it is out of line as well; so too, when the Levite fell, the whole nation went down with him.

Setting things right again from the first button takes time, but the quickest way back is for God’s people to repent and turn around. However much the world is shaken, and even when no one is there to lead them, they must be people who lift high the lamp of the word for themselves.

Afraid that her son, who had stolen money, would be cursed, Micah’s mother covers over his sin and instead has an image made and dedicates it to Yahweh. A Levite with nowhere to go becomes Micah’s private priest for ten pieces of silver and a set of clothes, and Micah now expects that God will bless him.

A heart that can accept anything except a curse on one’s own son is in fact serving that son as an idol. When the desire for blessing comes before setting sin right, even the chance to repent disappears. Just as the priest, for the sake of a living, sinks to the place of merely praying for one household’s blessing, the thought that offerings and prayers have been given and so life should go well is also the talk of someone who has never met God.

Parents’ greed that wants nothing but worldly success covers their children’s sin and blocks the way to repentance. God does not exist for the sake of personal prosperity; he looks on honest faith and blesses in his time. Those who do not stand firm on the word wander like Micah and his mother, the Levite, and the tribe of Dan, and in the end lose everything.

Samson is handed over by the men of Judah and led bound before the Philistines. Once his hands are freed, he strikes down a thousand men once more. In the end he reveals the secret of his strength to Delilah, loses both his eyes and is made a slave grinding at the mill.

What collapsed was not Samson’s strength but his faith. He always laid the blame for his own actions on others and was shut inside the conviction that his own thinking was right, so even with all his strength he could not work alongside God. When he himself cast aside his Nazirite vow, a secret known only to God and to him, the power of God departed from him as well.

Samson let the twenty years he should have lived as a judge drain away in human revenge and lust. In the same way, no one who squanders the time entrusted to them can offer an excuse, for God has already made known the work to be done, its purpose and even its outcome. Those who examine themselves and live as though today were their last day can receive a salvation without shame.

Manoah and his wife had no child, so they prayed earnestly to God. The angel of Yahweh came to the wife in person and told her she would bear a son, commanding her to give up wine and strong drink and not to eat any unclean thing. For the sake of a child who would live as a Nazirite from the womb to the day of his death, the parents had to live the Nazirite life first.

God could simply have given them the child, but his purpose was first to make clean the vessel that would hold something precious. A life of not drinking what everyone else drinks is hard, but if people live just as the world does and do not want to be called odd, they cannot receive what God entrusts to them. The angel of Yahweh gave his name as Wonderful, which speaks of God’s nature beyond human understanding and is also a name the Old Testament uses for the Messiah.

Samson was born amid such special grace and his parents’ devotion, yet he failed to keep a whole character and a pure faith, and his great strength brought him ruin instead. Receiving God’s love is not hard, but how that love is kept and used is up to each person. This was the message: God’s people, too, are called as Nazirites, so they are to obey with broken and humbled hearts and prepare to take on the souls God entrusts to them.

The men of Ephraim came to Jephthah and picked a quarrel with him for not calling them to the battle, threatening to burn him and his house down. Jephthah rebuked them, the two sides clashed, and forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed.

Ephraim had raised the same complaint in Gideon’s day, and because the matter had been settled then with soft words, they expected the same approach to work again. What repeated itself was an old ambition: to stand at the center of Israel while sacrificing nothing of their own. Envy and jealousy, unless they are held in check, grow until they end in harming others. Jephthah, too, wanted to live among the upper class for the six years he was set up as judge; that desire drove him to vow his daughter as a burnt offering, and it cost him what was most precious to him.

No one knows how much time remains to them, which is why it matters to live today without regret. The judges pursued their own households, riches and glory rather than God, and did not teach the people the word; as a result Israel lost its faith and came under the oppression of the Philistines for forty years. Whether a leader or one of the congregation, only a life that is first approved by God will earn true trust from people as well.

On the eve of battle, Jephthah vowed that if he were given victory over the Ammonites, he would offer as a burnt offering whoever first came out of his house to meet him. When he returned from the battle victorious, the first to come out to greet him was his daughter, his one and only child.

Driven out by his half-brothers, Jephthah had lived among the lowest of society. Once he became head of Gilead, he assumed that whoever came out first to meet him would be a servant, and he made his vow thinking it would not matter if that person were sacrificed as a burnt offering. God did not prevent the moment when his daughter ran out ahead of everyone else. The anguish of a daughter who must die for her father’s wrongdoing calls to mind the suffering of Jesus, who died for our transgressions.

A vow should be made not out of greed but in thanksgiving for the grace we have received. Even when we feel wronged and long for revenge, we must leave it in God’s hands, wait patiently, and live holy lives with a pure faith.

Israel goes back to serving idols, and when oppression comes, the people cry out to God in repentance. This time, however, God answers differently. He reminds them, one deliverance after another, of how he rescued them from Egypt and from the Amorites, the Ammonites and the Philistines, and then tells them to go and ask the gods they have chosen to save them.

Israel sought God only when they needed him, and when peace returned they forsook him again, over and over. The judges, too, were divided: some left the people a true faith, while others, through their wealth and their many children, made the people envy the world. Depending on what their leader set before them, the people turned now toward God, now toward idols.

A believer who lives for self alone can never be happy, and those who turn away from God again and again may at last come to the place where he no longer answers. Yet God does not forget faithfulness offered from the heart, even for a short while; he remembers it. The sermon closes by saying that the faithful must put away grumbling, greed and self-righteousness, humble themselves, and become people who give themselves in sacrifice.

Gideon captured Zebah and Zalmunna, the kings of Midian, and brought the war to a complete end. Yet the first thing he did after his victory was to take the crescent ornaments from the necks of their camels. He then asked the people to gather their spoils for him, and from that gold he made an ephod and set it up in his own town of Ophrah.

It is human nature to cling to God in the midst of hardship, and then, once the hardship has passed, to be gripped by the conviction that one’s own judgment is right, and so to fall. The place where Gideon put his ephod was Ophrah, the very town where he had once torn down the altar of Baal and nearly lost his life for it. He wanted to show the people who had tried to kill him just how great he had become; it was a choice made not for God but for his own glory and for revenge.

Gideon went on to rule in peace for forty years, yet that silence was no blessing. God was no longer speaking to him. To hear the Word and be cut to the heart is the greatest miracle a person can receive. To stand at the height of glory without falling, a person must never forget who gave them that place, and must remain thankful always.

Gideon twice asked God for a sign with the fleece and had his answer confirmed, yet on the night before the battle, in a camp now reduced to three hundred men, he was once again doubtful and afraid. God told him to take his servant down to the enemy camp and listen to what was being said there, and in that camp, through the account of a dream about a barley loaf, God made the victory known in advance.

Gideon’s character remained unchanged to the very end. His was a faith that could barely manage a single step unless something was shown and explained to him, and God simply went on answering him at the level where he stood. Leaving only three hundred men, and bringing the victory through jars, torches and trumpets, were both meant to let the people know that it was God who had done it, not human strength.

Gideon gained the victory, yet because he never changed his character, his life was a failure. Only when a person breaks the jar that holds the self can the torch of Christ within be revealed. God’s people must put away a faith full of doubt and live by an honest one.

As God had commanded, Gideon took ten of his servants by night, tore down the altar of Baal, cut down the Asherah pole and offered a burnt offering. When the townspeople saw it in the morning and came crowding in, furious, Gideon did not step forward boldly but hid behind his father, and it was Joash’s wise words that saved his son’s life.

When God told him to offer the second bull, he was in fact calling Gideon to present himself as a living sacrifice. God had accepted his gift, promised that he would not die and even brought him the recognition of the people; yet Gideon put God to the test once more with the sign of the fleece. That request was answered not for Gideon’s sake but because God had a greater plan to save Israel.

A temple may fall short of perfection, and so may long years of faith. But God waits patiently, to the very end, until the one he has chosen has wholly fulfilled the calling entrusted to him. In later years Gideon came to betray God, and yet the love God had shown him was a love without conditions.