Amen. Our scripture reading comes from the Book of Judges, beginning at chapter 11.
And the leaders of Gilead said to one another, ‘Who is the man who will begin to fight against the ammonites? He shall be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead.’ Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty warrior, but he was the son of a prostitute. Gilead was the father of Jephthah, and Gilead’s wife also bore him sons. When his wife’s sons grew up, they drove Jephthah out and said to him, ‘You shall not have an inheritance in our father’s house, for you are the son of another woman.’ Then Jephthah fled from his brothers and lived in the land of Tobe, and worthless fellows collected around Jephthah and went out with him.
After a time, the ammonites made war against Israel. When the ammonites made war against Israel, the elders of Gilead went to bring Jephthah from the land of Tobe. They said to Jephthah, ‘Come and be our leader that we may fight against the ammonites.’ But Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, ‘Did you not hate me and drive me out of my father’s house? Why have you come to me now when you are in distress?’
The elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, ‘That is why we have turned to you, now that you may go with us and fight against the ammonites, and be our head over all the inhabitants of Gilead.’ Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, ‘If you bring me home again to fight against the ammonites, and the Lord gives them over to me, I will be your head.’ The elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, ‘The Lord shall be a witness between us if we do not do as you say.’
So Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead, and the people made him head and leader over them. Jephthah spoke all his words before the Lord at Mizpah.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have so often raised up somebody to deliver your people. We are sorry that we have so often needed saving. Help us to learn and to repent and to remain resting in you, knowing that beyond Christ we need no other savior, but knowing that he has surely saved us for you save us according to your will. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Picking up from where we left off last week, we return from our commercial break to discover what is behind door number three. The answer is Jephthah—a soldier of fortune coming to us from the land of Tobe, but as originally from the tribe of Manasseh, hailing from the land of Gilead.
The question before us is: is Jephthah the big prize that the Gileadites were hoping for, or is he a Zonk? You be the judge.
Now, for those of us who are too young to remember Monty Hall’s ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ when it was originally programmed, or for those of us who never really watched it, let’s go over some of the game show basics. The premise of the show was really inspired by the question: is a bird in the hand worth more than two in the bush, or is the grass actually greener on the other side of the hill? It tested how satisfied people truly are with what they know they already have, and it tested just how greedy some people can become.
Contestants would be selected from out of the audience; they would come down to meet the host, Monty Hall, who would tell them what their initial prize was. Then, Monty would offer them a deal. He would offer them the chance to trade and get another potentially better but unknown prize if they swapped their first prize for it. The process continued until the contestants called a trader were no longer willing or able to trade.
Candy traders would balance their risks versus the reward, trying to maximize their prize. Still, there always remained a risk of losing it all. A trader could also get the opportunity to trade all their current winnings for whatever might be hidden behind one of three doors. Behind one was a really big prize, another one was an okay prize, and behind the last was a Zonk—a booby prize, something useless, impractical, or something that otherwise represented a total loss.
And when a person became a contestant on the show, they gambled, taking their chances to win big. Even though the odds may have appeared to be stacked in their favor, the plain truth is, as every gambler knows, the house always wins. Merely sitting in the audience gave a person the chance to be selected as a trader. Everyone had a chance to be chosen as a contestant. If they were picked, then they could always walk away with the very first prize, merely accepting the free gift of grace and not risking anything at all.
Or they could wager everything on the vain hope that what was offered next would have greater value. Those who chose to gamble sometimes won, but more often than not, they lost. However, nobody ever left the show in a worse condition than they began.
This kind of gambling and deal-making sounds an awful lot like how Israel frequently treated the Lord. It also sounds a lot like our human experience regarding salvation in Christ. Does this maybe sound like how you or other people you’ve known in life appear to treat Jesus?
Do you know people who have previously claimed to be Christians as long as it suited them, or as long as it offered them some kind of advantage, but have now abandoned the faith? Most of us know people who have sacrificed Christian convictions for social advancement, for a workplace promotion, or for financial gain. We have known people who traded obedience and faithfulness to God for temporary worldly benefits.
We have known people who are not satisfied with life as it is and are constantly chasing the next big thing, expecting it, whatever it may be, to become their source of fulfillment. You know, in the end, when life comes for them, as it must for us all, their end is rather miserable, full of fear, full of regret, absent of hope, and they lie anxious in their uncertainty—all because they have traded the truth of God for the false promises of the devil.
Now, of course, some people you know, for example, are required to work on Sundays because of the nature of their vocation—medical, rescue, etc. Other folks might be required to work on Sundays by their employers as a condition of their employment, like waitresses and many different kinds of retail workers. These are people without any power or ability to influence their schedules.
I myself was once trapped in that kind of circumstance when I was in retail management, so I have great pity for people in those situations, and I offer them no condemnation, even as I try to hold myself more rigidly to Sabbath observation. However, those who are required to work on Sundays, as negative as that is, can still work faithfully for God. Those who are needed to work because their vocation demands it can be doing good and merciful works in the eyes of the Lord.
Those who are made to work at the demand of their employers can be submitting to those with authority over them as they would submit to Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, I can’t make a justifiable argument for why a Christian must not or is unable to work on the Lord’s Day, and we should not be working then, but the New Testament does describe two strong exceptions grounded in the moral law that allow for the necessity—love for our neighbors and obedience to God’s authority.
Now, the kind of people I’m speaking more negatively about here are those who choose to stop attending church on Sundays as a norm so that they may go out to work or to play instead. Those who choose to support and encourage aberrant lifestyles because it is the popular thing to do or because they gain some kind of profit by it, such as politicians who support abortion, child murder, and infanticide in the name of women’s health care.
But how many female fetuses or how many infant females have been sacrificed on that altar? Or the people who are unwilling to affirm the plain scientific and biblical fact of there being only two genders and that a person’s gender is fixed, set, immutable according to the Divine will and Providence of God? Those are people who have abandoned biblical principles by trading the truth for lies, all so that they might get elected and hold on to the reins of power.
They become all too glad to make deals with the devil, who is himself all too glad to drag everyone he can down into damnation with him. So why would anyone who knows the Lord ever be willing to risk gambling away the good of God, which they already have, in the hope of getting something better?
Well, we should know how stacked against us the deck really is. The only answer I can offer is that we often do not understand how valuable what we already have really is. We often do not appreciate or recognize the value of things we have, like a person who goes through their mother’s estate and decides to take that dirty old vase which mom always kept daisies in to the Antique Roadshow, only to discover that it is a near-priceless Ming Dynasty piece that her father brought home from Asia after World War II.
So what else might we not appreciate? The true value of our faith in Christ or our salvation? Clearly, the Israelites did not actually appreciate what God had done for them. He freed them from slavery in Egypt; they received bread from the Lord’s hand every morning, except Sabbath, for 40 years in the wilderness. God gave them the whole land of Canaan to live in, and God had rescued them from the oppression of their enemies over and over.
Yet the Israelites also abandoned faith in the Lord over and over again. They would stop trusting the faithful one, the only person they could always count on, and instead preferred to trust in idols or in themselves, or trust in the strength of men—fallible things which cannot help but always disappoint them.
When the ammonites encamped against them, the men of Gilead were willing to trade their obedience and allegiance to whoever would give them victory and rescue them from their enemies. They owed their fidelity to the Lord, but in their impatience, they were willing to trade their loyalty to some other master, stubbornly refusing to trust the Lord.
They chose to open door number three—Jephthah. So, what did they win? Recall that the Israelites had suffered oppression for 18 years from the ammonites after 22 years of peace and prosperity under the judge Jair.
Now we’re being introduced to Jephthah via flashback: Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty warrior. Since he was known for being a mighty warrior and because Israel was looking for a leader to fight for them, we can presume that his resume met their minimum expectations at least.
So this begins by sounding like a pretty good deal, but he was the son of a prostitute. Please notice that the writer of Judges here will be waxing poetic with his use of euphemisms throughout this portion of scripture.
Now, although Jephthah bears no personal fault in being born the son of a prostitute, nor is it intended as a condemnation of his character, this statement tells us something about the tragic circumstances of his youth concerning his mother. The word translated here as prostitute is the Hebrew ‘Zona,’ or the Greek ‘pornase,’ and is probably better interpreted as ‘harlot,’ like the King James uses.
His mother was not being condemned as a cult prostitute; she was not working as a devotee of false religion worshiping Baal or Ashtoreth as part of their sex cult. Instead, this word describes her as being an immoral woman, a loose woman, or an unfaithful woman. Because Israelite law commanded the strongest penalty for adultery, the only remaining possible interpretation here is that sex was her profession.
We do not know any of the details of her circumstances—the why’s or the wherefore’s—but her story was surely sad and certainly pitiable. As was often the historical case, she was likely a woman driven to this state out of desperation, selling the only commodity she possessed that she knew was always in demand: her body.
It is certain that she did not choose this life from a desire for it; whether she was selling herself for shelter to feed herself or just to continue providing for her son, we know that in the ancient world, no one ever willingly or wantingly chose that life. A woman would only choose it for survival.
So whatever kind of childhood Jephthah had, it was undoubtedly poor. But I also expect it was safe to assume that Jephthah was a loved child, at least by his mom. This woman, of whom he was son, although she is described as a woman of loose morals, was still his mom, and she was certainly a good enough mother because her son was raised into adulthood.
All the terrible things she was forced to do—all the sacrifices that she must have made—were for the benefit of one person alone: Jephthah. Still, they together would have been stuck down on the lowest rungs of Israelite society—a fact made even more tragic because he was almost certainly raised during the good years of peace and prosperity.
Saying that Gilead was the father of Jephthah, another euphemism confirms how exploited and taken advantage of she was. No one knew for certain who his father was, so the whole clan of Gilead counted as his father. But if everyone could be his father, then nobody was his father. He was an orphan child in the land; he had no name, no rights, no claim to property, and no inheritance.
All that he could depend upon was his mother and eventually the strength of his arm. Jephthah grew up having nothing. Like most people who grow up having very little, I am certain that he dreamed about someday having very much.
Gilead’s wife also bore him sons—another euphemism used to refer to the men of the clan, particularly the sons of those with authority. When his wife’s sons grew up, they drove Jephthah out and said to him, ‘You shall not have an inheritance in our father’s house, for you are the son of another woman.’
When all those sons were grown up, the son of the prostitute and the sons of authority kicked Jephthah out of the territory. They sinned greatly against him because the law had commanded, ‘You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.’
Because they would have all been at least 20 years old at this point, old enough to be counted in a census and old enough to serve in the army, his exile began near the end of the time of Jair’s peace or early on in the ammonite oppression.
But why do these men drive Jephthah away? What was their complaint against him? He was an other, although he may have been related to them. Without a father to claim him, Jephthah had no natural rights, no birthright, and no social position in Gilead apart from the gutter. He was no one. He was rejected because they saw him as a burden upon society.
He was rejected because they saw no value in his life. He was rejected because they could not and would not see his potential. Jephthah was rejected because in their opinion, he brought nothing to the table. Much like Isaiah’s suffering servant, there is nothing desirable about him.
Simply put, this penniless boy had nothing that they wanted, so they simply discarded him and drove him away, casting him off into exile. Jephthah is kind of like Jesus Christ in that way, with this story foreshadowing Jesus’s rejection and later elevation.
The psalmist may very well have had the memory of Jephthah in mind when he wrote Psalm 118: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.’ A statement which Jesus applied to himself and one which Peter and Paul also used.
Then Jephthah fled from his brothers and lived in the land of Tob. He was driven away from the home where he was raised until he found his place in the land of Tob—a land called good. Ironically, worthless fellows collected around Jephthah and went out with him.
So now we get to see how his resume was built and understand how he earned his reputation. The Hebrew words describing these worthless fellows meant that they were vain, empty, and valueless—euphemisms describing men without honor.
What it says about them is that they were untrustworthy, undependable, and unreliable. However, being that they went out with him, there must have still been something positive about them, for they were supported in relationship with him.
There’s only one profession in the ancient world that suits these descriptions as a relatively positive: the mercenary. These men were sell-swordsmen willing to work and fight and kill and die for whoever would pay them the most. They were always in it for number one, always working to get the very best deal possible for themselves, and Jephthah became their captain.
During times of peace, being a mercenary was not a lucrative occupation, but during 18 years of conflict while the ammonites were raiding, pillaging, and plundering Gilead, there would have been plenty of opportunity for them to earn a lot of money by exploiting the fears of the people for their own gain.
They would have been paid to defend people like the Gileadites against their enemies while those who should have been defending them were either unprepared, apathetic, or incapable of doing so. They would have considered it more cost-effective to pay and use mercenary soldiers rather than risk their own lives or lose even more wealth to the ammonites.
So this was a great time for Jephthah to build up his value. Fighting for 18 years is a great way to establish one’s reputation as a mighty warrior.
Now, we fast forward to the present when the ammonites made war against Israel. The elders of Gilead went to bring Jephthah from the land of Tobe, and they said to Jephthah, ‘Come and be our leader that we may fight against the ammonites.’
What a twist! Do they have just a sudden reversal in attitude concerning Jephthah, or were they just that desperate and scared? But Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, ‘Did you not hate me and drive me out of my father’s house? Why have you come to me now when you are in distress?’
He makes the valid point, and you really can’t blame him for wanting to make them admit it. Why did they turn to him now? He knew why they needed him—because now he had something that they wanted.
He called them out on their hypocrisy and their inconstancy. He answered them much as the Lord had answered them when they called out to him: ‘Did I not save you from the Egyptians and the Amorites, from the ammonites and from the Philistines? The Sidonians also, and the Amalekites and the Maonites oppressed you, and you cried out to me, and I saved you out of their hand. Yet you have forsaken me and served other gods; therefore I will save you no more. Go and cry out to the gods whom you have chosen; let them save you in the time of your distress.’
Jephthah asks them, ‘If you did not want me before, then why do you want me now?’ The elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, ‘That is why we’ve turned to you, now that you may go with us and fight against the ammonites and be our head over all the inhabitants of Gilead.’
Jephthah forced the elders to acknowledge and admit that he had something they wanted, just as the Lord God had also done. Why did the elders go to Jephthah? They wanted him to go and fight for them against the ammonites.
He was a mighty warrior, which is exactly what they believed they needed. He had a fierce reputation—strong enough to make them want him. Strong enough to overcome their sense of shame and guilt for driving him out.
Once they became desperate enough to ask for his help, how hard is it to go and ask somebody that you have greatly wronged for help? You are confronted by your shame and disgrace. You may have to admit that you are wrong and apologize.
A person would have to sacrifice a lot of their self-respect to make this kind of ask. A prideful person would only do this as an absolute last resort and only after they have exhausted every other possible option and only after they have lost all other possibilities of hope.
Perhaps they realized that Jephthah only grew up into being a man for such a time as this because they drove him into exile by doing evil to him, just as Jacob’s sons did to Joseph, who said, ‘As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.’
That this was part of God’s providential plan for them. Perhaps they hoped that he would be similarly forgiving and gracious like Joseph, hoping for fortuitous and maybe inexpensive reconciliation. It’s possible, but I doubt it.
I do not expect that there is a group possessed of that much self-awareness or emotional intelligence because they did not approach Jephthah and beg for his forgiveness. They approached him directly, rather matter-of-factly, and made a direct appeal to his mercenary nature: that he may go with them and fight against the ammonites and be their head over all the inhabitants of Gilead.
They did not ask him to help out of the kindness of his heart. They did not appeal to his sense of patriotism as an Israelite, nor to presume a loyalty to his homeland, nor even to their family ties.
Instead, they appealed to his boyhood dreams, to his sense of pride, relying upon the attraction of ironic justice, saying, ‘If you come and fight for us, then we will make you our ruler.’ They made him an offer which would have been very hard for anyone to refuse; they offered Jephthah, a man who once had nothing, everything.
They offered to elevate this man who may have formerly been considered as the least of them and make him their ruler—the greatest and most powerful person in the land. Indeed, this may well be a last-shall-be-first kind of moment. They promised him the big prize, the whole kit and caboodle, if he would only save them, rescue them, and deliver them from all of their enemies.
They offered to trade all that they had for a chance at door number three—to trade God for a man instead. Then Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, ‘If you bring me home again to fight against the ammonites and the Lord gives them over to me, I will be your head.’
The elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, ‘The Lord will be witness between us if we do not do as you say.’ The men of Gilead were trading all that the Lord had given them and their ancestors in the hope that this man waiting behind door number three was going to do better for them than the Lord could, would, or might be.
They were impatient, just as most of us are from time to time. They were unwilling to wait on God’s timing for God’s plan. They felt the need to hurry things along, so they sealed the deal and made a covenant with Jephthah before the Lord.
They made him their head and their leader, their ruler and the commander of their immediate destiny. He became the person in whom they were placing all their hopes for deliverance.
So did they make a good deal or not? I think the verdict is still out, and I have to wait and see how things play out.
But what should we now take away from Gilead’s deal and this introduction of Jephthah? We know that all people are transactional by nature. We cannot help it. It is very difficult, nigh impossible for us to receive something—anything at all—without giving or doing something else in return, even if it is only a thank you.
And once more I say to all of you who have been so generous and loving to my bride and I, thank you. But we are not able to initiate or engage in transactions with the Lord God. We have nothing to offer Him that He needs or which is not already His by right, and in fact, nothing that He has not first given to us.
We cannot even offer to make Him our King and our Lord in return for whatever it is that we want or think that we need. He is the King, the only Lord, whether we wish Him to be or not.
And we all seem to keep on trying to make deals, looking behind every other door to find ways to save ourselves. But what we need to realize is that what we need—the only thing we need, the only one we need—has been standing right in front of us all along: Jesus Christ.
Do we not understand that all of humanity is born under the judgment of sin because of Adam’s fall? Everyone on every side agrees that the world is an absolute mess. It is broken in ways that we cannot fully understand.
Do we not understand the terrible fate that we are doomed to unless we are rescued? Otherwise, why else do people fear the end? Why else does everyone apart from those who trust in Christ fear death unless they are worried that something terrible for them is coming?
As much as we try, we cannot rescue ourselves from our deserved fate. We cannot free ourselves from our sinfulness. We cannot change our eternal destiny. We cannot do anything or offer anything to escape the righteous wrath of God.
But there is one person who can and has: Jesus Christ. God the Son made an offer that God the Father did not refuse to save some. Jesus gave His all. Apart from the obedience and work of Christ, no one would be saved because God is not obligated to save or forgive anyone.
Fortunately, because He loves us, our Sovereign God decided to save some for Himself. He disciplines us because He loves us, and He is just. He chose to save some because He loves us. Since He is also mercy and since He alone has the power to do so, He alone has the will to choose, and thus He freely gives His grace to whomever He wills.
If we truly understood the full horror of what we deserve for our sin, then we would better appreciate the fullness of grace and salvation that Christ has purchased for us. Jesus alone initiated this divine transaction, and He has finalized the deal for us.
He rescued us from judgment and brought us into a close relationship with Him and with our Heavenly Father. He set the terms, and while they are favorable to us, they are not favorable to our sin. Jesus has saved us as His part, delivering us from the judgment to our sins.
Now, our part, our obligation, is to stop sinning, to be obedient to His commandments, and to be thankful for His mercy. He has done all of this because He loves us. Because He is our King, we are each called up, like one of Monty Hall’s traders, and salvation by God’s grace is the prize that we begin with.
But unless we recognize that God has actually front-loaded the big prize, we are apt to sinfully try and trade it away, wrongly believing that we might find something better. So often we will reject the best and then we must settle for the worst.
However, the good news is, like on ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’ where the traders who get called up never truly leave empty-handed. Because even a Zonk will be traded for a standard value cash prize.
Even Christians who sinfully try to make deals with God and who end up making bad deals—as we always do and always will—compared to the deal that Christ has made, when we earnestly and sincerely repent, then Christ is certain to forgive us.
Because although we tried, we tried to trade away the gift of grace for the wages of works, once God has given you the precious gift of His Son, Jesus, you cannot ever trade Him away.
Every person gets to appear in God’s studio audience, but not everyone will hear, ‘Come on down.’ But if you are fortunate enough to be called up onto God’s game show, then you may know that your election and salvation in Christ is certain and sure.
Remember, the foundation of our relationship with Jesus is not transactional; it is as a King to His subjects. We cannot make Jesus our King because He is our King by right. We have no right to make any demands upon our King, falsely believing that we can obligate Him to meet them.
But our King can and does make demands upon His people because He alone can ensure we meet them. We cannot make Jesus save us, nor can we prevent Jesus from saving us, however God wills it. And thank God for that plain fact.
Jesus does not save us because we ask Him to or because we offer Him something. All we can do is accept His salvation when He calls us, but then we must give to Him our everything. We have nothing to offer Him to gain God’s grace and mercy, but if and when and after He gives it to us, we are therefore obligated to fidelity and love.
We cannot make a deal with God because our salvation is not predicated on our obedience or faithfulness, but upon the obedience and faithfulness of Jesus Christ. Remember that you cannot make Jesus King; you cannot make Him Lord of your life because He already is.
All you may do is acknowledge His kingship and be grateful that He has called you and given you the big prize—Himself. So be satisfied with what He has given you in His providence and stop trying to find something better, because you cannot. Amen.
Let us stand and say what we believe using the words of the Apostles’ Creed:
‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who is conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended to hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended to heaven and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.’
Our closing hymn is number 458: ‘O Perfect Love.’