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Beginning at the first verse: the men of Ephraim were called to arms, and they crossed to Zaphon and said to Jephthah, ‘Why did you cross over to fight against the Ammonites and did not call us to go with you? We will burn your house over you with fire.’
And Jephthah said to them, ‘I and my people had a great dispute with the Ammonites, and when I called you, you did not save me from their hand. And when I saw that you would not save me, I took my life in my hand and crossed over against the Ammonites, and the Lord gave them into my hand. Why then have you come up to me this day to fight against me?’
Then Jephthah gathered all the men of Gilead and fought with Ephraim, and the men of Gilead struck Ephraim because they had said, ‘You are fugitives of Ephraim, you Gileadites, in the midst of Ephraim and Manasseh.’
And the Gileadites captured the forge of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. When any of the fugitives of Ephraim said, ‘Let me go over,’ the men of Gilead said to him, ‘Are you an Ephraimite?’ When he said no, they said to him, ‘Then say Shibboleth.’ And he said, ‘Sibboleth,’ for he could not pronounce it right.
Then they seized him and slaughtered him at the forge of the Jordan. At that time, 42,000 of the Ephraimites fell. Jephthah judged Israel six years. Then Jephthah the Gileadite died and was buried in his city in Gilead.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Lord, you have so many lessons for us, so many instructions for our lives that are all found here in your great book that you have given to us. Help us to hear them, to learn them, to take them to heart, and to live by them. Help us to see them even when they are difficult to hear and difficult to apply. Help us to love you and obey you in faith by these lessons. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
There is a very sad truth concerning God’s people Israel, which we need to remember. Both ancient Israel and the Church of Christ have rarely existed as a single unified people. This is partly why Jesus found it so important to pray for the unity of his disciples and why the Holy Spirit inspired John to record Jesus’s prayer so that all those who came afterwards would hear and know about God’s concern for us—his plan and divine intention for our unity.
Jesus prayed, ‘I do not ask for these only but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one. I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.’
But instead of trusting Christ and living that ideal—experiencing corporate unity and believing that in our union with Christ and then acting from out of that unity—we may falsely claim that the visible Body of Christ is united when we actually are not.
We may wrongfully assert that every institution called church or denomination is equally Christian, affirming varied and incorrect interpretations of Scripture because it is just their interpretation, right? It’s a logical fallacy because many of these so-called churches teach things that contradict other churches, or they might even teach contradictory doctrines within their own body. Sadly, the visible church is not united as one.
We are not united because we are all still sinful people, and so long as there are at least two people remaining, no two people will ever agree about absolutely everything, much less everything concerning our faith in Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately, the scripture says every person that claims the name of Jesus Christ will not necessarily be found in him on the day of judgment because not everybody lives for the glory of God but instead lives for their own. Yet still, we tell ourselves these comforting lies about our unity—lying to ourselves as a means, perhaps, of coping, as a way to avoid conflict or anger and animosity over our disagreements.
We make nonsensical statements like, ‘We will just agree to disagree,’ as a way to end debate and discussion without any meaningful resolution. Sometimes we are all too happy to work and preserve peace and unity in the church by sacrificing the purity of doctrine, of faith, and of obedience to Jesus.
However, this attitude, mindset, and practice is not just limited to us inside the church. We see it being demanded and exploited by every other sphere in the world around us. They say, ‘Compromise your religious convictions concerning marriage and gender to preserve peace in the workplace. Compromise your personal autonomy and responsibility for self-care and enforce mask mandates to preserve peace because of other people’s fear.’
‘Send your children to public school so that they may be socially adjusted instead of becoming outward, awkward outcasts because they were homeschooled. Send your children to public school so that they may be indoctrinated and conformed to the culture instead of training up a child in the way they should go, so even when they are old, they will not depart from it, the way of Christ Jesus.’
If everybody else is walking off a cliff, does that mean you should too? Sacrificing purity because you mistakenly believe that it will preserve the peace and ensure unity only further destroys peace and unity because it breeds resentment and animosity. The sacrifice is being demanded not from a desire for unity but from a desire for conformity to a domineering spirit.
Even our attempts to preserve unity for the right reasons, in the spirit of Christ and for his kingdom, is messy because people are contrary and argumentative by nature. God’s people are no exception; we are no different. God and God’s chosen have rarely been better than the pagans who surround us.
We easily forget that the 12 tribes of ancient Israel only became united into the nation of Israel during the reign of King David—a condition that barely lasted through the reign of his son Solomon. After his death, the ten northern tribes immediately rebelled, establishing Jeroboam the son of Nebat from the tribe of Ephraim as king of Israel, leaving Solomon’s successor Rehoboam with only Judah and Benjamin loyal to the Davidic dynasty.
We also often ignore or neglect our own church history. We forget that the church did not become a major influential social institution until after the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312 A.D. We did not even begin to see signs of broad unity in the church until after he called for the Council of Nicaea in 323 A.D., addressing and responding to the Arian heresy and defining Christian orthodoxy.
It was not until the papacy of Gregory the Great in 604 A.D. that the influence and self-importance of the Roman Church had grown to where he could claim that the care of the whole church had been placed in the hands of Peter and his successors in Rome. The first great schism of the church occurred in 1054 A.D. when the Eastern Greek-speaking church that was centered in Constantinople divided from the Latin-speaking church that was centered in Rome over the addition of the word ‘Filioque,’ the expression ‘and from the Son’ when they added that to the Nicene Creed.
Even still, before this, other smaller splits and divisions were common occurrences, and we don’t need any further evidence of the church’s division than the Reformation or even the many splits that have happened within American Presbyterianism just to see how divided the church is. Again, the more things appear to change, the more they remain the same.
Even being in the same family of God, our brothers and sisters and cousins in Christ do not always get along. Sometimes we have rivalries; sometimes we nurse grudges against each other. Sometimes we act in a very unsanctified manner towards one another, and sometimes we act even less lovingly towards the other members and neighbors of our shared faith in Jesus than we act towards our unbelieving neighbors—those people who hate and fear us and the God we serve.
Today, our scripture shows us just how bad the people of God may get when we allow ourselves to become divided for the wrong reasons.
Sometimes after Jephthah’s victory over the Ammonites, the men of Ephraim were called to arms. They crossed the Zaphon and said to Jephthah, ‘Why did you cross over to fight against the Ammonites and did not call us to go with you?’ They were upset enough to come out in force against the tribe of Manasseh, threatening to attack and burn down the home of Jephthah, the hero of Gilead.
See, Ephraim acted towards Jephthah much as they had towards Gideon earlier when the men of Ephraim said to him, ‘Gideon, what is this that you’ve done to us, not to call us when you went to fight against Midian?’ They accused him fiercely, but Gideon defused his conflict with diplomacy by offering flattering words and soothing their bruised egos.
However, Jephthah responded to them much as he had responded to the king of Ammon. He reminded them of recent history. He pointed out the total absence of justification for their animosity against him and protested Gilead’s innocence in causing offense.
Just as the Ammonites became aggressors, offending against Gilead, now Ephraim was as well. Where did all their anger and animosity, indignation and offendedness come from? Were Gilead and Ephraim not both a part of the Lord’s chosen people? Were they not family? Why was their situation allowed to escalate to such a degree? Was Jephthah not God’s approved judge?
See, judges did not claim authority over all of Israel; truthfully, they could only exercise as much authority as the people were willing to give them, so long as they were willing to listen to and obey their judgments. Nobody was really in charge of Israel. Unfortunately, although Ephraim thought they should be, the simple answer to where all this came from is of course sin.
The more complicated answer is sibling rivalry—a rivalry which went back all the way to Jacob and his sons because they were a dysfunctional and disunited family. Jacob’s household had a very messy family dynamic; Jacob’s two wives, the sisters Leah and Rachel, and a couple of concubines collectively bore him 12 sons and a daughter, Dinah.
Leah and Rachel were sibling rivals because while Jacob loved Rachel, he was tricked and trapped into marrying her older sister, Leah. Then the rivalry got worse when Leah gave birth to six sons and a daughter before Rachel became pregnant with her firstborn, Joseph.
I’m sure we all remember the negativity that Joseph’s brothers felt towards him as their father’s favorite and for his dreams, but we also miss oftentimes the other reason that, despite his youth, he was also Jacob’s primary heir. After Reuben, Leah and Jacob’s eldest son, slept with one of Jacob’s concubines and after Leah’s next two sons, Simeon and Levi, murdered all the men of Shechem as retribution for the rape of Dinah, their sister, Joseph gained the firstborn’s rights, being the firstborn son of Jacob’s secondary wife.
Then compounding complications, after Joseph was reunited with his father and brothers, Jacob declared that not only would Joseph’s two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, receive Joseph’s share of his inheritance, but that Ephraim, the younger boy, would also receive the firstborn rights due to Joseph.
Thus, Ephraim and his descendants became a powerful and influential tribe over Israel, presuming a position of preeminent authority over all of their kin. From Gilead’s perspective, by going to war against the Ammonites—especially by going to war and winning, and by neither asking their assistance nor asking their permission—they had usurped Ephraim’s rightful authority and therefore must be punished for their insolence.
Gilead, by winning without the aid of their cousins, wounded Ephraim’s pride and self-righteousness, and this offense prompted Ephraim’s aggression. Rather than celebrating God’s ordained success of their kinfolk, their neighbors, their ally, Ephraim raged against them because they did not believe that Gilead’s success was also their success.
Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like how people in many churches will rage against the social and evangelistic successes of other churches? This sounds like the Christian Pharisees attacking the success of Paul and Barnabas with the Gentiles because they did not mandate circumcision or full Torah observation. Sadly, some things never change, even among God’s elect in Christ.
Then Jephthah gathered all the men of Gilead and fought with Ephraim. The men of Gilead struck Ephraim because they said, ‘You are fugitives of Ephraim, you Gileadites, in the midst of Ephraim and Manasseh.’
Again, Jephthah gathered together the fighting men of Gilead to defend themselves against unprovoked aggression. Gilead needed to defend themselves because Ephraim declared them fugitives of Ephraim, using a Hebrew word for fugitives meaning they were fleeing in rebellion or those fleeing from danger.
This further demonstrated that Ephraim believed that the men of Gilead and so greater Manasseh owed them their loyalty and allegiance. But Jephthah’s men defeated the Ephraimites, routing them and causing them to flee before them—to turn tail and run.
The Gileadites captured the ford of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. Now we would hope that this would be the end of things, that peace could now be restored. But as is the case throughout the Book of Judges and is often the case in our world now, aggression leads to retribution, which then leads to escalation.
Now the men of Ephraim had become the fugitives when they tried to escape back across the Jordan to their own territory. However, considering that both Gilead and Ephraim shared the same culture, the same style of clothes, similar hair and beard styles, a common religion, ancestral heritage, and the same language, a person could not really distinguish one from the other merely by looking at them.
So we would expect that many Ephraimites could sneak through the Gileadite blockade, but the men of Gilead, smartly, figured out how to tell who was a friend and who was an enemy. They had a trait which could not be disguised: their voices.
When any of the fugitives of Ephraim said, ‘Let me go over,’ the men of Gilead said to him, ‘Are you an Ephraimite?’ When he said no, they said to him, ‘Then say Shibboleth.’ He said ‘Sibileth,’ for he could not pronounce it right.
Like it or not, whether or not we ourselves want to admit it, we all have different accents which are determined and influenced by where we are born and everywhere that we have ever lived. It’s often said that Americans and British are two peoples divided by a common language.
So although the men of Gilead and the men of Ephraim spoke Hebrew, apparently the different tribes had peculiar or unique accents different enough to be able to distinguish Ephraim from Gilead by the sound of one word in particular: Shibboleth.
Now, the meaning of this word is unimportant for the purposes of the story; it still serves here as a verbal accent identifier, much like aluminum versus al-you-minium or tomato versus tomato or wash versus wash. Whenever we hear someone using different pronunciations, we usually have a good idea of where that person comes from.
Furthermore, whenever we think that we know where someone comes from, it often leads us to make assumptions about them—such as their educational level or their social standing. I mean, that was the whole premise behind Professor Henry Higgins’s wager in My Fair Lady.
It’s because of this story in Scripture that the older English vernacular actually adopted the word ‘shibboleth’ into our language and used it to mean the criterion of a party or that which distinguishes one party from another, and usually some peculiarity in things of little importance.
I mean, normally the way a person pronounced the word was itself unimportant, but in this case, the application and consequence of the pronunciation was. And when he said no, they said to him, ‘Then say Shibboleth.’ And he said ‘Sibileth,’ for he could not pronounce it right.
Then they seized him and slaughtered him at the fords of the Jordan. At that time, 42,000 of the Ephraimites fell. If a person pronounced the word wrong, then they were executed as an enemy of Gilead. Thus, the aggressors of Ephraim were efficiently massacred in retribution because their voices betrayed them.
Lastly, we learned that Jephthah judged Israel for six years. Then Jephthah the Gileadite died and was buried in his city in Gilead.
We are left here with Israelites fighting amongst themselves at the sad conclusion of Jephthah’s tale, killing one another without justifiable cause. So the question now faces us: What are some of our modern-day shibboleths, and what do we do on account of them? What divides us? What should divide us?
I tell you that everyone is constantly facing a shibboleth test, whether they’re in the secular arena or whether we are among the body of Christ. The new satanic liberal orthodoxy concerning sex and gender identity that presently holds America in its perverse grip recently declared, according to Fox News, that Dee Snider, the frontman for the 1980s glam rock band Twisted Sister—which was famous for performing while badly dressed in drag—is now labeled a transphobe because he opposes gender reassignment surgery for minors.
In spite of all of his past and present advocacy for every other alphabet soup sexual cause, this single deviation from their socially accepted standard was enough for them to try and cancel him—either to force his conversion and glad acceptance of their stance or to execute him as their enemy.
The very same thing happened a few years ago to J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books and a former liberal darling, after she asserted that several of her characters in the Harry Potter stories were some form of LGBTQIA+. I don’t know what, but ever since she affirmed the biological fact that only people who menstruate are women, she has been under constant attack, and the value of the Harry Potter intellectual property has crashed.
Apparently, these liberals let slip ‘sibileth’ instead of ‘shibboleth.’ What about within the Christian community? Do we also have certain shibboleths that cause us to fight against one another or attack each other? Sadly, yes, we do, and many of them lead to stupid fights and petty animosities between individual people, churches, and whole denominations over important doctrines which might have some unimportant differences in interpretation.
While others will cause us to rightly separate ourselves from those who can no longer be justly called Christian, we foolishly debate over whether it is only believing adults who may be baptized into Christ or whether the children of believers might also be baptized into the Covenant.
What matters most is that everyone whom Jesus Christ calls is covered by his gracious Covenant and is indwelt by the Holy Spirit from the moment of their regeneration. It is our sacred duty as Christians to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, commanding them to observe all that Jesus has commanded us.
This commandment from Christ does not follow a particular order of operations; it is not first make disciples, then baptize them, then teach them. It is do all of the above, or we will debate the doctrine of salvation between the Reformed Calvinist view that the Lord sovereignly chose to save his foreknown, predestined elect from before the foundation of the world with the Arminian perspective that the Lord elected and predestined those whom he foreknew would one day choose to accept salvation in Christ.
But both views are likely partly correct and partly incorrect—both perspectives are imperfect interpretations since we are still imperfect, sinful people with imperfect understanding. If we would just be honest with ourselves, then both sides would agree that fundamentally Jesus saves and that we are saved by Jesus.
So these shibboleths describe the principal theological differences between Presbyterians and modern Baptists, and are unfortunate because we allow them to divide us, keeping us from joining each other in good, faithful Christian fellowship and our shared evangelistic mission to the world.
Too often, we allow these differences to prevent us from celebrating the successes of our neighboring churches, whether it be their good works or their evangelism efforts. They may lead many of us to avoid collaboration and cooperation between Christian churches. They cause us to forget that when Jesus Christ returns, then all of his faithful elect will be gathered together to worship around his throne in his kingdom, whether we are Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, or Pentecostal or other.
However, there are other shibboleths that help us to remain separated from those who seek to destroy the people of God—those who seek to twist, pervert, and corrupt our God-given faith, those who try to draw us back into bondage to sin and return us to our former status as Satan’s slaves.
The most important shibboleth which every Christian must listen for is anything that contradicts or denies the plain text of Scripture. That is why it is so important for every one of us to know our Bibles well, for us to constantly study it, to believe what it says, and to love the truth that it tells because it is the truth of Jesus Christ.
So God created man in his own image; in the image of God, he created him male and female. He created them. God created humanity in his image, and he created us with only two genders: male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. God ordained the institution of marriage as a blessing for all of humanity; he ordained it before the fall and established it as the union of a man and his wife.
Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. The miraculous sign which the Lord promised King Ahaz was that a virgin would conceive and bear a son—not that merely some young girl would conceive. That wouldn’t be miraculous on its own.
Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds, and they all ate and were satisfied. They took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over, and those who ate were about five thousand men besides women and children. Miraculously, Jesus fed all of those people with only five loaves and two fish.
This was not some miracle of sharing, where everyone was guilted into sharing whatever food they happened to have brought with them, nor was this a sham act of misdirection with Jesus seated in front of a cave while the disciples were passing out food from inside behind him.
And Paul wrote, ‘For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me, for I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God.’
Jesus was physically raised from the dead, and there were a lot of witnesses to that fact. He appeared to the disciples and talked with them; they touched him; he ate food with them. Every one of the apostles went on to suffer torture and were executed as martyrs of the faith. Nobody recanted; no one renounced Jesus. There is no record of a single witness denying the resurrection because if there was, you know that it would be paraded out in front of us all the time.
No person will willingly suffer pain and death for something that they know is a lie. Jesus Christ is risen—he’s risen indeed!
So any person, any denomination, or any church that denies any of these truths, whether categorically or by allowing their denial as being an acceptable belief, they deny the truth of Scripture, its authority, its inerrancy, and its sufficiency, and they are therefore not Christian. If someone says that the Bible is wrong about anything which it plainly says, then they’re saying that either God lies or he is mistaken.
If they believe that the Bible is wrong on one thing, then they must also believe that the Bible is wrong elsewhere. The Bible must be accepted as totally and entirely true in every regard and in every detail; otherwise, none of it can be reasonably accepted as true. It either is or it is not—yes or no. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.
The most important shibboleth which every follower of Jesus must listen for and pay attention to is whether or not somebody believes the Bible is true. That is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. There can be no compromising with those who believe that it is not because by their denial, they betray themselves as fugitives of the great King, Jesus Christ.
Although he is the one who shall judge them for their wickedness and disbelief in his sovereign time, our duty remains to tell them the truth, warning them of the danger that they’re in. Their condemnation remains upon their own heads.
So give up the petty feuds and rivalries, the fights and animosities that ultimately do not matter for us, our salvation, or for God’s Kingdom. Save your energy to fight the necessary fights that Jesus calls us to: make disciples, teach them to obey everything that Jesus commands, and live as a faithful witness to the love that the Lord has shown you.
Let others know about the grace, mercy, and forgiveness he has given to you. Do not let yourselves be divided over unimportant details when you agree upon the important truths: God loves you, Jesus is Lord, Jesus saves repentant sinners, judgment is coming, and the Holy Spirit will transform and sanctify the life of those who believe.
Remember and be encouraged that every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself; how then can his kingdom stand? The evidence surrounds us that Satan’s kingdom is divided; we see the enemies of God devouring each other.
Well, Christians, we are called to be united together in Jesus Christ. Let the shibboleths of Scripture help keep you divided from those who hate and seek to destroy our Lord and Master, and let it unite you with other Christians. Let it protect you and defend you from falling into fellowship and union with Satan and sin until Jesus returns and judges the world with mercy and justice. Grace, amen.
Please stand and let us 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 was 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 sitteth 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 404, ‘Faith of Our Fathers.’ [Music]