195 - Heroes - Jephthah [B]

Hebrews Lesson 195    April 22, 2010

^NKJ Acts 4:12 "Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."

Well, you can go ahead if you wish and turn to the Old Testament to Judges 10. I'll go back over a little introduction to our context in Hebrew 11. In Hebrews 11 the writer is wrapping up his list of examples from the Old Testament. In verse 32 he gives 6 examples. I pointed out last time there are 3 pairs, and in each pair the person who comes later chronologically is put before the other person. The only thing that seems to be of any pattern to this is perhaps that the first person – that would be Gideon and Sampson and David – are all more well known. However that first list with Gideon preceding Barak is also patterned after a verse in 1 Samuel in one of Samuel's speeches. 

So the writer says:

^NKJ Hebrews 11:32 And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, also of David and Samuel and the prophets.

In that last example he includes the lives of men like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah, Zephaniah, Haggai, all of the Old Testament prophets; and he uses them in terms of the illustrations in the next verse that it is through faith they did the following.

^NKJ Hebrews 11:33 who through faith subdued kingdoms,

They conquered them. 

worked righteousness,

That is especially David established a righteous rule, a rule of justice.

obtained promises,

They realized certain promises of God within their own life spans.

stopped the mouths of lions,

We think of both Samson as well as Daniel in the lion's den, and this characterized these particular men.

Then in verse 34 we read:

^NKJ Hebrews 11:34 quenched the violence of fire,

We think of the 3 young Hebrew men who were Daniel's 3 friends: Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego and their being tossed in the fiery furnace. 

escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong,

Reminds us of what Paul says there in 2 Corinthians 11 that in our weakness we are made strong. God's strength comes through in our weakness so we are humbled under the mighty hand of God. 

became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.

That is those who came from outside the land of Israel. 

Now last week we looked at just that first pair which was Gideon and Barak. We went through the battles of Deborah and Barak as they threw off the Canaanites - specifically Jabin the King of Hazor and Sisera who was the commanding officer. Because Barak would not really trust God without Deborah going along, he did not receive the full honor of the victory. It went to a young woman Jael who invited Sisera into the tent to rest. He went to sleep, and she just nailed him; the first example of anybody getting nailed in history. 

Then the next example is Gideon. Gideon had a lot of failures, but he trusted God at a key point. So what we learned from these men is that they weren't exactly men who did everything right, always trusted God. In fact most the time they didn't, especially those in the book of Judges. Judges is a picture.  The book of Judges describes what happens to a culture when it succumbs to postmodernism. 

That is what we are watching in our culture today. We see it more and more. The history of Christianity just like the history of Israel in the Old Testament is the history of the people of God being impacted and overwhelmed by the worldview of the culture around it while they're saying throughout the whole time that they're still are walking with God.

Christians were warned by Timothy that in the latter days difficult times will come. Part of that is that people will deny the power of godliness while claiming to have it. So we all fall prey to different times and in different ways, succumbing to various forms of rationalization, various forms of compartmentalization where we separate out certain areas of our thinking, certain areas of application in our lives and whereas in certain ways we seem to be very mature, growing Christians; but in other ways we're just as pagan as the day we were saved. This still goes on today. 

In our culture it just gets worse and worse and worse. We see more and more of the same trends going on among Christians in our world today because most Christians (most of us) think in a lot of ways, ways that we're not always ready to admit. We think no differently from the pagans around us because we grew up and were influenced by the same forces, the same ideas, the same culture that the pagan down the street is influenced by. It's just that because of the Word of God we have reversed it to a certain degree. 

But what we see in the book of Judges is a negative trajectory. From the first judge Othniel of whom nothing negative is said to the last judge Samson of whom almost nothing positive is said, we see how a culture that is victoriously appropriating the promise of God to conquer the Canaanites in the first chapter of Judges ends up at the very end of the book where they're unable to trust God to throw off the oppression of the Philippines. 

In fact as we'll see tonight in our study of Samson, Samson never calls forth an army. Samson never calls for the people to come together and resist or overthrow the Philistines. All Samson is concerned about is himself. He is the prototype of the baby boomers of the last 40 or 50 years. It's all about him.  You could put a big "Me" button right on Sampson's chest – me, me, me. He is nothing but self absorbed and this goes through his entire life. He never follows through in obedience to God until right at the very end. Then there are a few moments of obedience and a few moments of trust in God. 

That lands him in Hebrews 11 which gives us a lot of hope because there are a lot of us who realize that we probably messed up as much as Samson has.  Yet there are times when we have trusted the Lord. We see God's grace in understanding the problems that we have and just the whole spiritual conflict. 

So we go back to Judges and we see that there is this negative trajectory that is taking place spiritually in the culture as it moves from being an obedient nation (an obedient culture) to being one that is no different from the culture around them. What they're doing by the time you get in the last 3 or 4 chapters of Judges in those final little epilogues is just unbelievably abhorrent. They are out paganizing the Canaanites. Their behavior is worse than that of the Canaanite culture around them. So they end the period in a hopeless state and that sets them up are really the hope that comes in 1 Samuel because the hope is in David, David as the prototype of the Messiah as the one who brings that ultimate victory over the Philistines as indicated by his victory over Goliath.  He's the one who brings real deliverance to the nation after years of compromise and years of relativism. 

The key verse in Judges is in Judges 21:25.

^NKJ Judges 21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

That should be on the tombstone of the current generations in the United States because that's what everybody's doing: what's right in their own eyes. They have lost sense of objectivity and lost a sense of external values and that dominates our postmodern culture in many different ways. 

So tonight what we're going to do is look at the next two examples that the writer of Hebrews refers to and these are Jephthah and Samson. We'll take them in chronological order rather than in the order that the writer of Hebrews takes them so that we can follow them. Last time we looked at the major figures of Barak and then Gideon. Then there are a couple of minor judges who show up and have minor roles in bringing up some deliverance (some relief) to Israel from their foreign oppressors – Tola and Jair mentioned in the first part of Judges 10. 

Then we come to the spiritual evaluation of the nation. We see that again and again and again they just commit this same cycle of sin. They do evil in the sight of the Lord. They chase after the false gods and goddesses of the pagan culture around them, adopt their value system.

Now one thing that really hit me this time and I don't think I quite looked at it the same way when I taught this before, but when you read this verse in Judges 10:6:

^NKJ Judges 10:6 Then the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served the Baals and the Ashtoreths, the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the people of Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines; and they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him.

Now the Baal and the Ashtoreths represent the male and female deity in the fertility cults which as I pointed out before when we studied this represents the same kind of thinking that we have in our culture today. It is basically a materialistic prosperity driven philosophy. It's not just that they are going down in some sort of compartmentalized way and being engaged in certain rituals with these gods and goddesses and then they go home and go about everyday life.  But once they begin to worship one of these gods or goddesses or into these idolatrous prosperity religions of that day; they're buying into the entire way of life that's represented by the religious ideals of those of those gods and goddesses. 

They are buying into the ethical system. Always remember that in a worldview, which is nothing more than a philosophy of life, you have the same basic elements you have in the study of philosophy. There's always an understanding of ultimate reality, let's say. That's called metaphysics which means that which is beyond the physical. That refers to usually gods or goddesses or ultimate forces that control the universe and that give birth to the universe. So the metaphysic relates to some sort of origin myth or legend. 

That's why origin is so important because if I tell you where a person thinks they came from, I can pretty much tell you what their value system is in life and how they're going to respond under certain kinds of pressure and where they think they're headed because all of that flows out of your view of origins. That's why we constantly see this battle in Western civilizations since the middle nineteenth century over Darwinism. It's either evolution or creation. You cannot blend them. 

Now this was a problem with the Christians (Bible believing Christians) in the nineteenth century who thought that somehow you could blend them. They had such a hope and faith in modern science that they lost their understanding of knowledge. That's your second element in any sort of worldview. First there's your view of a metaphysics (your view of ultimate reality) and then knowledge.  How do you know things? How do you know what's true? How do you know what's false? 

There we run into what we've talked about before in terms of your 4 basic ways of knowing truth. The first 3 ways all have something to do with glorifying some aspect of creation and some aspect of human makeup. Those 3 are rationalism, empiricism and mysticism. They all put their ultimate faith in the ability of the human mind to properly perceive, understand and interpret reality so that they can go from the individual examples of the individual instances (the individual details of what they observe, what they think) and then properly and correctly extrapolate from a few examples to universal principles and universal explanations. So the faith is in the human ability to somehow be able to explain all of reality without aid from some sort of outside source of information.

Now the fourth a way that we come to know truth is if somebody who is omniscient, somebody who is a witness, somebody who was there tells us what we can't learn from reason alone or from experience alone or empiricism or from just our own internal intuitive ability to somehow perceive reality on the basis of our own gut instinct as it were. All those 3 things have that one thing in common that their faith is in the human ability.

Now when you get into the ancient world, what they're doing is they're starting with something else in creation, some aspect of nature. Then they magnify that and make that god. So we're always doing what Paul says in Romans chapter one: worshipping the creature or the creation rather than the Creator. That's the thrust of the sin nature. That's the default position of everybody's sin nature is to worship the creature rather than the Creator. 

So what we have here when we look at verse 6 and we see that once again they're serving the Baals and the Ashtoreths (that's the plural for those two deities) are the gods in Syria, the gods of Sidon. That's Baal, the area of Sidon, Tyre, and Phoenicia, the gods of Moab, the gods of the people of Amman. The god of Moab was Chemosh and his counterpart, or the name the Ammonites had, was Milcom. Now you can write that down. That's important for understanding what happens with Jephthah because he really tweaks the Ammonites because he completely ignores their god and some of the things that they have done in his little interchange with them. 

So you have the gods of Moab, the gods of Ammon and the gods of the Philistines. They forsook. That means they abandoned the Lord and did not serve Him. So the bottom line is life. The bottom line is what you do with your life, the decisions you make. Are you serving God or are you serving mammon as Jesus said. Are you serving material things? You can't serve both at the same time. You have to make a choice, one or the other. You are either going to be driven by some sort of creation-driven worship system. By that I mean you're worshipping some aspect of the creation as the ultimate reality. That's what materialism is. 

Materialism ultimately isn't just the worship of things or the accumulation of things. Materialism is a philosophy that believes that the ultimate reality is matter; is made of matter and is made of material things. It's not spiritual. The Scripture says God in Spirit. The ultimate reality, biblically speaking, is God.  It is that which is spirit. It is not physical or material measurable discernible. 

That has huge implications in a lot of different areas so that today most modern psychology is materialistic or driven by a materialistic philosophy so that there's no such thing as an immaterial soul. That means that all human behavior then is explained in how the chemicals of the brain are proportioned, how the synapse fire, all of these other things. They study all of the details and mechanics of the brain because it is the brain that determines everything. It is all physiological. All behavior is determined physiologically. 

But Scripture says no, there's something that's immaterial that is in the soul that's created in the image and likeness of God and at the core of the soul the determinative issue is always volition. 

Now those are two radically opposed ways of looking at reality. The materialistic view grows out of an ultimate materialistic metaphysic; that there's no God, no immaterial being out there. There's just matter. In the beginning there was a big bang, and it all just dense matter that there at the beginning and it somehow explodes and begins to expand everything else just accidentally develops from that. You start with matter. All you ever have is matter. 

That pretty much reduces human beings to being nothing more than another material cog in the machine. They have no more value than a rock. They have no more value than the slime that forms on top of a pond, just another accidental thing that is included within the material universe. That's materialism, and that is a basic component of the modern and postmodern philosophy of life. 

You have the same thing in these ancient cosmogonies. We've studied some of these before that in the way that they explained creation. There's always the existence of some sort of god or goddess; and then there's a battle. One of them is slain. Out of the blood and out of the body of the slain god, the other gods form creation. So again there's that materialistic worldview, and materialistic worldview is going also explain how you know things and then also your ethics or your values. All those things are connected. The bottom line is what it produces in the way people live. 

When you look at the descriptions of the Canaanite culture and all of the horrible things that they did, look at the worship systems of the Ammonites and Moabites and the worship of Chemosh and Milcom, which also produced child sacrifice, where people would basically bargain with their god that they would sacrifice a child in order to have prosperity, in order for god to make them wealthy or happy. 

You can certainly see certain parallels to that kind of thinking in today's world as people sacrifice family, they sacrifice their children in both figurative ways as well as literal ways in some cases with abortion in order to just have a simpler life so that they can have greater success and a great number of things and wealth and success and all of the things that go with it. 

So when we read a verse like this we have to read this in terms of the fact that the Israelites were completely rejecting everything that God had revealed to them from the creation to how to know God by faith and how to live in terms of the ethics and values systems as given in the Mosaic Law. They have just thrown all of it out, and it radically changes their culture so that they don't look any different from the pagans around them. The result of this is God's justice in time. 

We have the use of the same kind of word that we find again and again. The wrath of the Lord (the anger of the Lord) – literally in Hebrew it's the idea of his nose burns. It's a figure of speech related to what happens when a person gets angry and just to indicate the intensity of the condemnation that comes from the Supreme Court of Heaven. 

^NKJ Judges 10:7 So the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel; and He sold them into the hands of the Philistines and into the hands of the people of Ammon.

Now here I have a map that will help us orient a little bit. Just down here, you can barely see it on the lower left end the map, this light green area here is the edge of the Philistine territory.  Down here you have one of the cities of the Philistines, Ashdod. We'll pay more attention to that a little later on. It is down in this area that will be just off the edge of the map is where Samson operates. All of his activities were down in that area dealing with the Philistines. Then up here on the east side of the Jordan in this area which was known as Gilead between this river and this river is where you have the disputed territory between the Gileadites, the Israelites living on the east side of the Transjordan and the Ammonites who are coming in from the east and wanting to take over this territory from Israel. 

One of the Gileadites by the name of Jephthah is elevated to a position of leadership and becomes the next major judge. What we see here in chapter 10 is the setup for why Jephthah needs to be brought in. 

^NKJ Judges 10:8 From that year they harassed and oppressed the children of Israel for eighteen years -- all the children of Israel who were on the other side of the Jordan in the land of the Amorites, in Gilead. 

Here we see once again that Transjordan area. Everything in Israel is always from the perspective of Jerusalem and the Transjordan is across the Jordan so that would be on east side of Jordan in the area over there that's shaded in blue that was designated for the tribe of Gad.

Moreover we're told in verse 9 that the people of Amman crossed over to Jordan to fight against Judah also against Benjamin and against the house of Ephraim. Here we have Ephraim in the yellow and Benjamin is the purple here and Judah is the area to the south. They're attacking. They're crossing over the Jordan here and attacking the central highlands in Israel. 

Israel is severely distressed. Now what happens? This is what happens with most of us after about 18 years of being under divine discipline. Hopefully you won't wait that long. Maybe you'll wait 18 minutes or 18 days, but not 18 years. Unfortunately there are a lot of believers who are just as dense as the ancient Israelites. We can all be that way in different areas. 

All of a sudden, finally after eighteen years they cry out to the Lord. But there's a sense here in which the Lord is not really giving any real credence to what they're doing. They're just sort of giving lip service to confession; something we've all done at times. They're just going through the motions saying the right things hoping that somehow God will lighten up on the punishment. 

^NKJ Judges 10:10 And the children of Israel cried out to the LORD, saying, "We have sinned against You, because we have both forsaken our God and served the Baals!"

Notice God's response. Now that's a legitimate confession, but a lot of us have noticed at times that we confess our sins and 30 seconds later we're sinning again. It's not that that the initial confession wasn't invalid. It is just that because we're not dealing honestly and seriously with what's going on what's causing sin in our life and our rebellion against God we're out of fellowship almost immediately because the basic orientation of our soul is still toward the sin nature.

^NKJ Judges 10:11 So the LORD said to the children of Israel, "Did I not deliver you from the Egyptians

(back during the time of the Exodus)

and from the Amorites and from the people of Ammon and from the Philistines?

"How many times have I got to deliver you people before you get the message?"

^NKJ Judges 10:12 "Also the Sidonians and Amalekites and Maonites oppressed you; and you cried out to Me, and I delivered you from their hand.

"I've done it again and again and again."

^NKJ Judges 10:13 "Yet you have forsaken Me and

The word there for forsaken is the idea that you have abandoned me, rejected me, ignored me.

served other gods. Therefore I will deliver you no more.

Now how would you like it if God said, "Okay, you've confessed that sin 3,000 times now. I'm not forgiving of the 3001^st time. Just forget it."

But God is making a point here. It's not that He's not going to forgive them. He wants to get their attention. He can't just go through the motions and say you are confessing your sin of idolatry and not take time to reflect upon how that has permeated every thought in your soul. You have to start dealing with the basic rebellion in your soul and your orientation to personal autonomy because if you don't address that, then you just keep bouncing in and out of fellowship all the time, which is essentially what the Israelites were doing during this period of history.

^NKJ Judges 10:14 "Go and cry out to the gods which you have chosen; let them deliver you in your time of distress."

He is saying this in order to get their attention and get them to focus on the real underlying spiritual rebellion in their soul. They can't solve that just by getting back in fellowship for an instant or two, they have to start dealing with the underlying realities. 

What I would say if we were talking about the Church Age view of the spiritual life is getting in fellowship only puts you in a position of potential spiritual growth. The demands of Scripture are to walk by the Spirit, to abide in Christ (which means to stay in fellowship); both of those ideas are to stay there.  Confession (1 John 1:9) is just so we can recover from disobedience. It is not to give us the opportunity to be disobedient again and to just keep being disobedient but to put ourselves back in a position where we'll try to stay in fellowship, to walk by means of the Spirit, abide in Christ, walk in truth; these things. If you don't deal with the underlying orientation then you're still committed to that human viewpoint intellectual gods and goddesses in your soul.  Then what happens is you end up running through your spiritual life constantly bouncing in and out of fellowship and wondering why you never get anywhere in terms of spiritual growth. 

God is just rebuking them for a shallow superficial confession that isn't going to the next stage and focusing on what's really causing the problem. It gets their attention.

In verse 15 they respond.

^NKJ Judges 10:15 And the children of Israel said to the LORD, "We have sinned!

That's the essence of confession: to admit the sin. 

They say:

Do to us whatever seems best to You; only deliver us this day, we pray."

Then what did they do in verse 16?

^NKJ Judges 10:16 So they put away the foreign gods from among them and served the LORD. And His soul could no longer endure the misery of Israel.

See confession (1 John 1:9) get you back in fellowship. That's all you needed to do to get in fellowship. But to stay in fellowship there has to be an ongoing application of Scripture (of doctrine) doing what the Word of God says to do, following the mandates and the prohibitions of Scripture. Because if you think that all you have to do is confess your sins and somehow magically, majestically and wonderfully we're going to start growing again. That only happens as you stay in fellowship, and that only occurs by obeying the Lord because if you disobey you're back out of fellowship again. 

So they confess their sin and then they're obedient which means they put away the foreign gods and they serve the Lord. They're going to put into practice what they are claiming to believe.

Then it says, and literally in Hebrew the New King James translates it correctly. It's an idiom for the Lord could no longer endure the misery of Israel. It's expressing His recognition that they have turned back to Him and indicating that now He is going to provide and deliver; but it doesn't go that far. It doesn't say that overtly, but we learn that as we go into the next chapter. 

Then we're told that there's a foreign policy problem in Israel, just like today. This has gone on down through the ages that the enemies of Israel have gathered on their border, and the people of Amman have gathered together and encamped in Gilead. 

Now here I have a slightly different map for you. This is a larger map that I'm going to zero in on. This is from a new set of maps that have come out in the new Logos program that are really well done. Once I get to where I can use it a little better, it's got some really neat things you can do with it. For example, if I typed in a city like Jerusalem, it also gives you the current satellite reference points (latitude and longitude) and you can click on that and go to Google's satellite and zero right in on the same place as it looks today. So there are a lot of interesting things we can do once I get a little more adept at using it. 

But this is a large overview. This little blue tip is the Sea of Galilee up here in the north and the blue line going from north to south is the Jordan River. Then down here is the Dead Sea. Jerusalem is I think right over right here. We have the tribal area of Jerusalem down here to the south, Benjamin here, Ephraim up here to the north and some of Manasseh up here. This is on the west side of Jordan. Over here we have the territory of Gad. In this area all this mountain area in here is the territory of Gilead. 

The green over here represents the undefined territory Ammon. At this stage they don't have set borders. They're not settled into a specific territory.  Remember Moab and Ammon. The individuals were the offspring of the drunken incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters. This represents the land where the Ammonites are dwelling and the lines that are there we see here are a little closer here bring us into a little more perspective. They're going to indicate the lines of movement during the battle. So this shows the capital of Amman, which is modern Ammon, and this is a capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. 

The area that is of concern is the area up here, which is the Jabbok River that flows in this area here and the Yamuk (?) which is down here to the south. This is the disputed territory that is going to come up in this particular episode. 

^NKJ Judges 10:17 Then the people of Ammon gathered together and encamped in Gilead. And the children of Israel assembled together and encamped in Mizpah.

Now this isn't the Mizpah that we've studied about that's over near Bethel in this area of the hill country. This is Mizpah here. This is the Mizpah of Gilead.  So this is the area where they're both gathering together and this particular part the territory in view of a battle.

But the Israelites don't have a leader and so they announce:

^NKJ Judges 10:18 And the people, the leaders of Gilead, said to one another, "Who is the man who will begin the fight against the people of Ammon? He shall be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead."

Basically they say he'll be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead. Now there's a change of scene. Now we have to be introduced to the main character, the main actor who is Jephthah.

^NKJ Judges 11:1 Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valor, but he was the son of a harlot; and Gilead begot Jephthah.

That's just a term for the fact that he was a strong warrior, and he's going to be able to defeat any one of that he fights. He's the son of a harlot so that immediately indicates that he is illegitimate. He is outside of the family line. We don't know exactly whether she is just a common everyday prostitute or whether she was a temple prostitute. It's very likely that she was a temple prostitute, which indicates that he's coming out of a rather tainted background that's part of the whole fertility cult that had found its way into Israel at that time. He's the son of a harlot and Gilead is his father, but he's outside of the line of inheritance.

^NKJ Judges 11:2 Gilead's wife bore sons; and when his wife's sons grew up, they drove Jephthah out, and said to him,

Apparently he grew up with them, but they then disinherited him or kicked him out and told him:

"You shall have no inheritance in our father's house, for you are the son of another woman."

He leaves and he goes to the land of Tob. Now this is another ill-defined territory that is indicated by this blue line. It's somewhere up to either the northeast or further east and is just this territory out beyond the boundaries of civilization where he has basically been operating as a brigand and a mercenary, as a roving bandit. So he's just not the most savory of characters in terms of his background.

The question we should ask is: in light of his background, how much does he know about the Torah? How much does he know about the Lord? How much truth does he know or is his knowledge of God just something that is kind of pieced together through various legends or myths or secondhand accounts that's also blended in with various other pieces of Canaanite and pagan mythology; not unlike a lot of American Christians. 

It's always amazed me and some of the churches and the Christians that I've had dealings with over the years because they're not very well taught, is the things that they believe are in the Bible and the things that they believe that the Bible actually teaches, and they're nowhere to be found in the Scripture. Because we live in a time when Christians are biblically illiterate and theologically illiterate and unfortunately the pulpits tend to follow the same way. So that's the same kind of thing we have. There so many parallels with modern American culture.

He's got what I would call a popular view of God, not a whole well informed view of God. It's just a hodgepodge of different ideas and values and that's going work itself in some of the decisions that he makes. He is out there in the land of Tob.

^NKJ Judges 11:3 Then Jephthah fled from his brothers and dwelt in the land of Tob; and worthless men banded together with Jephthah and went out raiding with him.

They go out on various raiding expeditions. Yet he has a reputation. This guy has a fearsome reputation. He's sort of a Robin Hood type of individual from the ancient world although he's not robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. He's just out there robbing from anyone that comes along and then taking what they have. 

As the Ammonites are about to make war with Israel, Israel knows they have to get somebody who is really bad to come and lead their forces because they are not tough enough to deal with armies of the Ammonites. When the war begins they send out their elders to find Jephthah and invite him to come to be their commander.

Starting in verse 7 he enters into some pretty sophisticated negotiations with them in order to make sure that he's not going to come back, do them a favor and then get betrayed in the process. He talks with them and negotiates with them that if he comes back he will be placed as the head over this clan of Gilead and that he will be in a position of power and influence and have his inheritance restored. 

^NKJ Judges 11:9 So Jephthah said to the elders of Gilead, "If you take me back home to fight against the people of Ammon, and the LORD delivers them to me, shall I be your head?"

They promised.

^NKJ Judges 11:10 And the elders of Gilead said to Jephthah, "The LORD will be a witness between us,

..the first time we've seen the Lord's name invoked by the way since they confessed back there. 

if we do not do according to your words."

Notice they never prayed to God after the confession for guidance in picking this deliverer. The Lord's name is left out of the whole process until they're swearing this oath to Jephthah. 

^NKJ Judges 11:11 Then Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead, and the people made him head and commander over them; and Jephthah spoke all his words before the LORD in Mizpah.

He sends a delegation of messengers to the king of the Ammonites and asked him, what is his claim? Why is he crossing into this territory that he's going to steal from the Israelites? What is his basis for taking this land? 

In verse 13 we see the response. This is really interesting to follow. First of all we have to realize that the king of the Ammonites has no knowledge of history and his whole claim to the land is fraudulent because he's completely ignorant of the past, either intentionally or unintentionally we don't know, and he's just making up the facts as he goes along in order to justify his own position. His argument is based on either wishful thinking or propaganda just in order to expand his territory to get some well-defined borders.

^NKJ Judges 11:13 And the king of the people of Ammon answered the messengers of Jephthah, "Because Israel took away my land when they came up out of Egypt,

Now this wasn't his land. That's the point that Jephthah will make. It wasn't his land. He was making that up. This land did not belong to Ammon. But that's his claim. 

from the Arnon as far as the Jabbok,

..which is this area here.  He says they took that land and stole it from us. 

and to the Jordan. Now therefore, restore those lands peaceably."

Jephthah again sends his messengers back to the king of Amman (he completely refutes his position), sets up a very well reasoned logical argument, and he says:

^NKJ Judges 11:15 and said to him, "Thus says Jephthah: 'Israel did not take away the land of Moab, nor the land of the people of Ammon;

^NKJ Judges 11:16 'for when Israel came up from Egypt, they walked through the wilderness as far as the Red Sea and came to Kadesh.

Then they sent messengers to the king Edom and basically he rehearses what happened: that the Edomites and Moabites would not let the Israelites come through their land so they circled around and they came into this particular territory that was not under the control of the Ammonites at the time. As a matter of fact he never mentions the Ammonites. This territory was under the control of the Amorites to Sihon the king of the Amorites. They defeated Sihon and so they took this land by right of conquest. But in his argument, number one he ignores the Ammonites completely. Number two, when he does get around to mentioning God whose influence was there; he ignores their god and he just talks about Chemosh who's actually the god of the Moabites. So he's tweaking them. He's making fun of them a little bit. He is not being very respectful of them in the way he is handling them. Because the Ammonites were present (if you go back to the accounts in Numbers the Ammonites were present) and are mentioned. They don't have that land, but they are mentioned. But he ignores it as if it is all irrelevant. He's just acting as if they are basically inconsequential.

So he and then concludes his argument by saying in verse 27:

^NKJ Judges 11:27 'Therefore I have not sinned against you, but you wronged me by fighting against me. May the LORD, the Judge, render judgment this day between the children of Israel and the people of Ammon.' "

That concludes the negotiations. They break off; and they form up their sides and they're going to go to battle. 

Now we're not told of any specific overt revelation from God to Jephthah. The next thing we know in verse 29:

^NKJ Judges 11:29 Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh, and passed through Mizpah of Gilead; and from Mizpah of Gilead he advanced toward the people of Ammon.

Now we have to understand what this means. Don't confuse this with anything related to the filling of the Spirit in the New Testament. In the Old Testament we have various ways of expressing the ministry of the Holy Spirit to certain key people in Israel, for example Aholiab and Bezalel who are the craftsman.  They are the heads of the guilds of the silversmiths, goldsmiths, the workmen who make the furniture of the Tabernacle. The Spirit of God comes along and to give them skill in the work that they're going to do. It doesn't have anything to do with whether they're believers or unbelievers or whether they are going to grow to maturity or whether what they're doing is morally right or wrong. 

The other judges also have the Spirit of the Lord come upon them, but the purpose is not for their spiritual life. It's not ethical. It is to give them certain capacities in relation to their leadership role of the theocracy. All the Spirit of God is doing in coming upon Jephthah is he's going to empower him and give him the wisdom and the skill in order to defeat the enemies of Israel. It has nothing to do with his own spiritual life or spiritual obedience or anything else, and it doesn't indicate that anything that he's going to do afterward is any better or worse than what it was before. The Spirit of the Lord comes on in verse 29 and then he enters into this vow. 

Now many people, I believe, may characterize this as a rash vow. I don't think it's a rash vow. I think it is a vow that comes out of his background. Remember this is a man who had grown up in a pagan environment. He has grown up with very little opportunity to learn anything about God, anything about the Torah, anything about how to properly serve God, and he has been living outside of the law as a brigand out in the land of Tob. 

Today if I were going to take this and make it into play and I was going to portray this in a modernized contemporary context, Jephthah would be the head of the Hell's Angels. He would be a biker dude who has absolutely no idea of what is right or wrong or what the Bible says. He just has a popular understanding of a lot of different mixed elements as to what's right. But when you're going to get in a fight, if you want a win, you're going to make this guy the head of your side because you know that he can win. He's just a bad dude. That's the way Jephthah was. 

But he has a certain religious streak and he decides that he's very superstitious. This kind of thing is supported in some of the ancient documents that we had a related to the worship of Nilham and Chemosh the gods of the Moabites and the Ammonites and the Philistines where people would make bargains with God and they would sacrifice their children to seal the deal and to show how serious it was. Jephthah knows that when he makes this vow that it is pretty much going to end his lineage. But he wants to win. He wanted to win, and he wants to have the power of being the chief of the Gileadites. So he makes this vow to God. Nowhere in the Scripture does it say this was a good thing.

^NKJ Judges 11:30 And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD, and said, "If You will indeed deliver the people of Ammon into my hands,

^NKJ Judges 11:31 "then it will be that whatever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the people of Ammon, shall surely be the LORD's, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering."

Now the English translates it as if it could be anything. That's not true in Greek Hebrew. They didn't have pets. Okay, he's not expecting Fido to come running out of the door to jump up in his arms and smother him in licks. He's not expecting the cat to come running out. He's not even expecting the Vietnamese pig to come out. They don't have pets in that sense. The only thing they could fit the explanation here of something coming out to greet him would be a human being. Nonhuman beings don't perform that action. So he knows that he is talking about a human being here and expecting a human being to be the one to come out of his house greet him.

Then the story goes on that he leads the Israelites against the Ammonites.

^NKJ Judges 11:32 So Jephthah advanced toward the people of Ammon to fight against them, and the LORD delivered them into his hands.

Just because God gave him the victory doesn't mean it's because of the vow. God was going to give them the victory anyway. That's why God empowered him by the Holy Spirit in verse 29. 

^NKJ Judges 11:33 And he defeated them from Aroer as far as Minnith -- twenty cities -- and to Abel Keramim, with a very great slaughter. Thus the people of Ammon were subdued before the children of Israel.

Now if we look at the map here, we see that the fight against the Ammonites follows this trajectory. You see the yellow lines here. That is his attack. There are three prongs to that attack and then further attacks down here. Here is Abel Keramim. Here is Aroer. So he fights all the way down to here and then the red lines represent a further oppression. The yellow lines are where he defeats them and wipes them out. 

Now when he comes home, we read in verse 34:

^NKJ Judges 11:34 When Jephthah came to his house at Mizpah, there was his daughter, coming out to meet him with timbrels and dancing;

Now let's stop here for a minute. The illustration is picked up by the writer of Hebrews because at some point at some elementary rudimentary spiritual level, Jephthah is trusting God to give him the victory. That is why he is mentioned by the writer of Hebrews, even though before and after and mixed up with all of this is a lot of confusion and a lot of pagan ideas that are in the soul. Nevertheless there is at least a core recognition that YHWH is the God of Israel. This is the land that God gave to Israel and that therefore he has a right to defend it and he is depending upon God to give him the victory and God gives him the victory. That is there, but there's a lot of other garbage that's there as well.

Now when he gets home his daughter comes running out to meet him. She is throwing a party for him. She's got tambourines and she's dancing. We're told that she was his only child.

and she was his only child. Besides her he had neither son nor daughter.

^NKJ Judges 11:35 And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he tore his clothes, and said, "Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low! You are among those who trouble me! For I have given my word to the LORD, and I cannot go back on it."

Well, what was his word? To offer her as an olah, a burnt offering. That word everywhere else in the Old Testament means a burnt offering. This would be the same word that was used of child sacrifices and human sacrifices in the pagan religion.

So she says to him:

^NKJ Judges 11:36 So she said to him, "My father, if you have given your word to the LORD, do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, because the LORD has avenged you of your enemies, the people of Ammon."

Now you can't say this any other way. "If you said, 'I will be an olah,' then you have to do according to what you said."

You may have a study Bible that says that he dedicated her to perpetual virginity or some sort of early form of nunnery or something like that. There is nothing like that going on in Israel in the ancient world. They don't have the Daughters of Perpetual Chastity or anything like that going on in the ancient world. All you have is the rank paganism. Any of the women who are dedicated to any of the goddesses in the ancient world became temple prostitutes. So there's just not a place for that kind of interpretation.

^NKJ Judges 11:37 Then she said to her father, "Let this thing be done for me: let me alone for two months, that I may go and wander on the mountains and bewail my virginity, my friends and I."

Now what that's all about is she's never going to realize her role in life to have children and and possibly be in the line of the Messiah and to bring in the Messiah and to have the next generation of children.

^NKJ Judges 11:39 And it was so at the end of two months that she returned to her father, and he carried out his vow with her which he had vowed. She knew no man. And it became a custom in Israel

In the Hebrew it's very clear. He did to her what he vowed and you can't get around it. You can't soften it. You can't make it easier. You can't figure out someway to compromise. Remember this leader is sandwiched in between Gideon who leads the nation back into idolatry and Samson who is a womanizer who never does anything right except for about ten seconds at the end of his life. So we're talking about a series of leaders in the book of Judges each one of which is worse, is more spiritually corrupt and acts more like a pagan than the one before. It shows the impact of the assimilation to the culture of the leadership, the leadership of Israel. 

But what the writer of Hebrews brings out is that it's not all negative. It's not all negative because he does trust God at one small area of his life and because of that there's victory over the enemies of Israel and so he is honored because of that which ought to encourage all of us that no matter how much we fail, no matter how pagan our culture is, no matter how pagan or relativistic we've become; there is still hope for all of us to trust in God, claim promises and be used by God and not end up completely forgotten and to be complete losers at the Judgment Seat of Christ. 

Now we didn't get to cover both Jephthah and Samson. They're just too big. So next time we come back and we'll do a survey of Samson before we move on in our study of Hebrews. 

So let's bow our heads in closing prayer.