Hilton Head Island, SC – January 10, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Judges 2:8-15; 2:16-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the power of those who plundered them. – Judges 2:16 (RSV)
The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) is divided up into various sections. The first section is called the Torah, or the Law. It is Genesis through Deuteronomy, and with the exception of the Patriarchal Period in Genesis (under Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph), it is mainly about the Wilderness Wandering in Sinai under Moses, and Moses being given God’s laws on Mt. Sinai, with the explanation of what those laws mean. Next comes the History Section, Joshua through Esther. A small part of that is the Book of Judges, parts of which what we’ll be studying for four Sundays. Next is the Writings, Job through Song of Solomon. The last section is the Prophets, Isaiah through Malachi.
For four Sundays, we will be thinking about themes that are raised in the Book of Judges. As I said three weeks ago in the last sermon from last year, the word “judges” in the Bible does not connote what we understand judges to be. Our judges are judicial officials who preside in court rooms, interpreting the laws of the land. In the Book of Judges, judges were essentially tribal leaders. They were not really even national leaders, because there was no nation of Israel as such when there were judges. Instead there were twelve tribal areas of what eventually became the kingdom of Israel, each area named for one of the twelve sons of Jacob.
The period of the judges lasted about a hundred and fifty years, from roughly 1175 BCE to 1025 BCE. The death of Joshua is recorded in Judges 2:8, and Joshua died about 1175 BCE. From then on, until the crowning of the first king of Israel, whose name was Saul, there was no supreme leader (so to speak) like Moses or Joshua, nor was there a king, like Saul, David, or Solomon. Instead, there was a series of tribal chieftains or warlords, who collectively were called “judges.” But as long as there was no king, says Judges 2:11, “(T)he people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and served the Baals.” The word Baal is a Canaanite word, meaning “lord.” Without a Moses or Joshua or a king to insist on the worship of Adonoy, The Lord, the Israelites worshiped whatever gods or lords they chose.
The text for the last sermon of last year, on December 27, (two weeks ago), was the last verse of the last chapter of Judges, where it says, “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Whoever wrote the Book of Judges, (and no one knows who that was), he did not specifically say what he thought of that sober and sobering historical reality; he just stated it. Apparently he intended to leave it up to his readers, who lived a few centuries after the period of the judges and the time when the book was written, and us, who live three thousand years later, to figure out for ourselves what that cryptic statement means.
“In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” There was no Moses or Joshua to run the show, nor was there a royal central government in Jerusalem to run it. Rather there were these tribal strongmen (and two strongwomen, about whom we shall hear next week). Is that arrangement a good thing, or a bad thing? That’s what we forced to try to figure out for ourselves, not only for Israel in the twelfth through the first centuries BCE, but for the United States of America in the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries CE.
How do we discern God’s will in what is going on around us when it is going on? Do we know what God wants of us as individuals or as people when it is happening? Do we ever try to figure that out? Or do we just go along with whatever happens, and whoever leads us, assuming that God has no part and no interest in it? Do we have a responsibility as citizens to try to participate in what we believe God wants us to do, or do we accede to whatever happens and to whoever makes it happen at any given time? Specifically for us who live in a democracy and not a monarchy, is God concerned with how we vote, or is it acceptable to Him however we vote? Does God spiritually try to influence how we vote, or does He give us carte blanche to vote for whomever we want? When we have no king, are we all free to choose whomever we want as our leaders?
Was God’s will reflected in the presidential candidate and the senators and representatives who won on Nov. 3, and do you or does anyone clearly see God’s will in the two candidates who won in Georgia on Jan. 5? Or did God leave it up to the voters of Georgia to determine His will, if the divine will actually operates in that fashion?
Is there a direct or even an indirect relationship between voting and God’s will? Many American evangelical Christians and some (so to speak) American “evangelical” Jews and Muslims think there is such a relationship, but most Americans of any or no religious persuasion neither think like that, nor think that.
Now we’re going to drop all those preliminary issues in this sermon, and drop back thirty-two hundred years, and look at what was happening among the Israelites during the time of the judges. “Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the power of those who plundered them,” it says in Judges 2:16. And who would be likely to plunder the Israelites? Everybody who lived around them, that’s who: the Ammonites, and the Edomites, the Moabites, the Syrians, the Canaanites, and the Egyptians. For the past fifty years in our time the Middle East has often been referred to as “a rough neighborhood.” Well, it has always been a rough neighborhood, from the time of the patriarchs on, but especially during the time of the judges. Israel always had more enemies than you could shake a spear at. Furthermore --- and this is really a sad commentary --- when a relatively small geographical area of the world produced three of the five major world religions, it should come as no surprise that the Middle East has always been a rough neighborhood. Religious people love to fight about which religion is the proper one – but always in God’s name, of course.
Autocracy or monarchy has been the most common form of government among most tribes or ethnic groups for the vast majority of human history. For some reason, most people agreed that they needed a single ruler to govern them, or else one person took over and the people didn’t have enough power or moxie to overthrow him. Before there were nations anywhere there were tribes everywhere, and virtually all of those tribes had one person as their leader, almost always a male, and usually an older male. Then, when enough tribes coalesced to form nations, they had monarchs, almost always kings, not queens. Only toward the end of the eighteenth century CE, and primarily because of the establishment of the United States of America, a movement toward democratic government began. And only toward the end of the twentieth century were there a large number of democracies in the world, although more than half of the world’s nations still have autocratic governments, of which a decreasing number are actually monarchies. Furthermore, in the last fifteen years or so, there have been tendencies in many democracies to revert to autocrats as the heads of state.
The first of the judges of Israel was a man named Ehud. The Bible says little about him, but one thing it does say is that he was left-handed. Many people who are left- handed are automatically considered sinister. That very word implies it. In Latin the word for “left,” as in left-handed, is sinistra. In French “left” is gauche. As one who is left-handed, I don’t know which is more offensive: sinister or gauche. It’s a linguistic plot.
We are told in Chapter 2 of Judges that the people east of the Jordan River were making life miserable for the Israelites. The opening verse about Ehud says this: “But when the people of Israel cried to the Lord, the Lord raised up for them a deliverer, Ehud…, a left-handed man.” The reason it says that is because Ehud intended to become the assassin of the king of Moab, a man named Eglon. Ehud made a short two-edged sword for himself and strapped it under his robe to his right thigh. He went to see Eglon in private. When he saw the king, he said, “I have a message from God for you.” With that he reached beneath his robe, drew out his sword, and stabbed Eglon clear through, so that the point of the sword came out his back. He left the sword in his victim, successfully fled the scene, and poor old Eglon’s innards spilled out all over the floor. Swell story.
If this is the kind of thing the judges did, we are justified in questioning what they did. It is the sort of thing which the other judges also did, which we also shall examine.
Is it even conceivable that it was God who “raised up judges,” or did the judges merely appoint themselves to become military champions of the Israelites? The Book of Judges is one bloody story after another, and virtually no one seems to be what we prim and proper twenty-first century Christians would call prim and proper.
Our last hymn is going to be “O worship the King, all glorious above.” The king to whom the hymn text refers is clearly God. And that cpncept was the earliest and most unifying theological notion of the Israelites. God was to be their king, and they would have no other monarch. In the eighth chapter of the Book of I Samuel, the people come to Samuel demanding that he crown somebody as king. Apparently they had had their fill of the murderous warlords known as the judges, and the Israelites wanted what every other respectable Middle Eastern ethnic group had, namely, a monarch.
It says Samuel thought a human king was a very bad idea. Samuel told God what the people thought. God told Samuel the people’s insistence about having a king was not a reflection on Samuel, which, no doubt, Samuel was glad to hear. Instead, said God, their complaint was really against God. They didn’t want God to be their unseen, divine ruler. So God told Samuel to warn the people that if they got a king, the king would conscript their sons into the royal army, and make the people plow the king’s land and plant crops for him, and take their daughters for his own selfish purposes, and tax them a tenth of the produce of their own fields. But the people clamored for a king anyway, so Samuel anointed Saul as their king. Saul started out well, but ended up badly. Reading between the lines, we might deduce that if he hadn’t always been a narcissistic madman, as king he became one. In the end, Saul was killed in battle by the Philistines.
That is enough background about the nature of Israel under the judges, and the actions of Ehud, the first judge. Let us return to the questions raised in the opening part of this sermon, those that have relevance to us in our current situation.
Since biblical times, does God choose who become heads of state anywhere, or does that just happen however and wherever it happens? If God prefers certain leaders over others, did He prefer Carter or Reagan, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, Trump or Biden, Pelosi or McConnell? Behind the scenes, how active is God as a political kingmaker? Can God’s will be perceived in the affairs of state?
In those days there was no president; all the people did whatever was right in their own eyes. Since January 20, 2016, or November 3, 2020, have we had a president? According to the president, there cannot be a president-elect named Biden? So can a president-elect govern?
Am I suggesting there is a direct relationship between God’s will and how we vote? Am I implying that we should vote for candidates who, in our opinion, most represent what we believe to be God’s will, to the degree that we believe we can determine that? Yes. I am suggesting and implying that. Very pointedly I am suggesting that.
I also believe it is our duty as Christian citizens to vote in every election, trying as best we can to discern God’s will in the campaign rhetoric of everyone seeking public office. As religious people, we can even claim that we have a sacred duty to vote.
Is every person of faith likely to agree with all other people of faith as to who shall best represent the will of God if those people are elected to public office? Never. It won’t happen. But we need to vote for those we think are most motivated politically to following biblical principles in public office, whether or not they themselves are religious people. And when the elections are completed, we must support whoever is leading us, even if frequently we disagree with them. Otherwise chaos reigns. During the period of the judges, there was considerable chaos, as we shall see for the next three Sundays.