Study the Word

Guest (Male): Today on Study the Word, Pastor Thom Keller opens the book of Judges and we've come in our study to the highly controversial account of Jephthah and his foolish vow. Now, there's a great deal to glean from this event. For example, the consequences of not knowing the word or being a lone ranger in your service.

But even more basic is why. Why does he even make the vow in the first place? And do I have that same tendency to try and merit what can't be earned? It seems the tragic legacy of this judge lives on, but it need not in your life. Let's join Pastor Thom in Judges chapter 11 and verse 29.

Pastor Thom Keller: At that time, the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah. We said this before, that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, was not given to all men or women who were believers. The Holy Spirit was only given to certain leaders. All true prophets of God had the Spirit of God. It was given to some judges, some rulers, some kings. But the Spirit would come upon people and leave as needed.

If you remember when Saul disobeyed God, the Holy Spirit was taken away from Saul and he was given a tormenting spirit. He really went crazy. David was then sent into his life to play the harp to calm him down. That's why when David sinned with Bathsheba and Nathan confronted him and said, "You have sinned," remember, Saul's the first king, David's the second king. The only history David had to look at was the first king.

David, when Nathan confronts him, says, "Oh, do not take thy Holy Spirit from me." You see why? He saw the Spirit of God taken from Saul and it led him to be a raving madman. David was terrified that the same was going to happen to him. Why would he think anything different? It happened to the only king before him. The point is the Spirit of God did come and go on certain individuals. In this instance, the Spirit of the Lord comes upon Jephthah.

He went throughout the land of Gilead and Manasseh, including Mizpah in Gilead, and led an army against the Ammonites. Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, a foolish vow. He said, "If you give me victory over the Ammonites, I will give to the Lord the first thing coming out of my house to greet me when I return in triumph. I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering."

So Jephthah led his army against the Ammonites and the Lord gave him victory. He thoroughly defeated the Ammonites from Aroer to the area near Minnith, twenty towns, and as far away as Abel-keramim. Thus Israel subdued the Ammonites. So he's victorious. When Jephthah returned home to Mizpah, his daughter, his only child, ran out to meet him, playing a tambourine and dancing for joy.

When he saw her, he tore his clothes in anguish. "My daughter," he cried out, "my heart is breaking. What a tragedy that you came out to greet me, for I have made a vow to the Lord and I cannot take it back." She said, "Father, you have made a promise to the Lord. You must do to me whatever you have promised, for the Lord has given you a great victory over your enemies, the Ammonites.

But first, let me go up and roam in the hills and weep with my friends for two months because I will die a virgin." "You may go," Jephthah said. He let her go away for two months. She and her friends went into the hills and wept because she would never have children. When she returned home, her father kept his vow, and she died a virgin.

So it has become a custom in Israel for young Israelite women to go away for four days each year to lament the fate of Jephthah's daughter. Just in passing, that custom only lasted a few years, not more than 100 years. So Jephthah makes a rash vow. King James says, "Whosoever cometh forth out of the doors of my house to meet me," New King James, "whatever comes out of the doors of my house, I will offer it as a burnt sacrifice."

That's what he says. He's victorious, he comes home, his daughter comes running out of the house, singing, jumping up and down, playing a tambourine, and his heart is torn. She comes running out dancing for joy. I've heard it said once, if it's true that the early bird catches a worm, what message does that give to the early worm? She shouldn't have come out of the house. It would have been a good day to sleep in.

It shows remarkable subjection to her father, doesn't it? She says, "Father, you've made a vow to the Lord, you must keep it. I understand. But first, let me go into the hills for two months with my friends." Because he had not set a timeline on when that vow needed to be completed—he did not say I will sacrifice her as soon as she comes out—he granted her that permission of two months.

Her understanding and his understanding was that vow was unalterable. That is not true. In Leviticus, which they would have received from the mouth of Moses, from the heart of God, it talks about if you touch something ceremonially unclean, if you come in contact with any source of human defilement. In verse 4 it says, "Or if they make a rash vow of any kind, whether its purpose is for good or bad, they will be considered guilty even if they were not fully aware of what they were doing at the time."

When any of the people become aware of their guilt of doing this, they must confess their sin, bring to the Lord as a penalty a female from the flock, either sheep or goat. This will be a sin offering to remove their sin and the priest will make atonement for them. Verse 13 says, "In this way the priest will make atonement for those who are guilty and they will be forgiven." So this vow was alterable.

He could have canceled it. He did not know the word. His daughter trusted his word. We as parents have a responsibility to teach our children rightly. Some more liberal commentaries reason that what Jephthah did was he set his daughter aside for Tabernacle service. These women were called the women who assembled at the door of the Tabernacle meeting, and they were widows, usually older widows that were committed to widowhood, not to remarry, and they would go and serve at the temple.

Some more liberal commentators say that really that's probably what he did. He said you can't marry, you must remain a virgin, and you need to serve at the temple. The problem with it is it never says that. There are several reasons why this should be questioned. The father's lament is beyond the lament of one who gives a child up for temple service. Hannah gave up Samuel for temple service.

It was an honor. He could have continued to see his daughter. His lament is beyond that. Thirdly, the parents did not have the power to require a daughter not to marry. He couldn't say that to his daughter. Under Jewish law, no parent could say to a child, "You are not allowed to marry." That was not permitted. Fourth, all historians and commentators, all of them, accepted that she was offered as a burnt offering up until the Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages on, some well-meaning Bible scholars, trying to excuse this away, started coming up with other reasons. But there are no commentaries prior to that that say anything except that she was sacrificed. Josephus, the Jewish historian who lived from 37 to 100 AD, born of a priest's family, wrote this in his book *Antiquities*: "As he, Jephthah, came back, he fell into a calamity no way correspondent to the great actions he had done."

"In other words, he came back to a problem that shouldn't be there for the great victory he just had. For it was his daughter that came to meet him. She was also an only child and a virgin. Upon Jephthah's heavily lament, the greatness of his affliction and blaming his daughter for being so forward in meeting him, for he had vowed to sacrifice her to God. She, in turn, only desired that her father would give her leave for two months to bewail her youth with her fellow citizens.

Then she agreed that at the aforementioned time, he might do with her according to his vow." Accordingly, when the time was over, he sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering, offering such as oblation or as offering which was neither comfortable to the law nor acceptable to God, not weighing with himself what opinion the hearers would have of such a practice. There's a lot we could say about this.

Saul made the same kind of a vow with his son Jonathan. Jonathan goes and has this great victory, and Saul comes and continues to pursue the enemy with his army. Saul says, "If anyone stops and has anything to eat, a curse upon him." Well, Jonathan didn't hear the vow because he had already been in battle. He finds some honey and takes it. The battle starts to go a little sideways and Saul inquires of the Lord, "What went wrong? Somebody sinned."

They go down tribe, family, and it comes down to him and Jonathan side by side. Then it was revealed that it was his son. He said, "Look, I vowed that you have to die. I vowed upon my life that you would have to die." And then his soldiers said, "You're nuts. Nobody's going to die on a day like this." And it all went away. See what happened here? Jephthah never did this.

He was never around a circle of friends. He was never around anybody to give him any sound reasoning or rationale why he was off-base. Again, we talk about this often, but it's a danger of being a lone ranger. It's a danger of cloistering yourself away with your Bible and reading it and studying it. That's a good thing. But there's a danger if you don't get around other believers. Iron sharpens iron.

Every single one of you in this room, if you cloistered yourself away in a room for 20 years and never talked to anyone about the Bible, then you came here and started talking about your thoughts, we'd be going, "Whoa." A lot of the points you'd be right on, but some of those points you would have gone off on tangents and made a whole theology over nothing. We need one another to balance the understanding of God's word.

Had Jephthah had a group of people he would have consulted on this, he probably wouldn't have done this. But he didn't. And he didn't have to do it. Had he had one person that knew the law, they could have said the law says you don't have to do this. You can be free of that vow. Back to the why question. Why did Jephthah make this rash vow?

Because he thinks that his sacrifice, in somehow, that this severe commitment, this radical promise to God will somehow help his cause. That God will be pleased by him giving something that could cost him an enormous amount. Somehow he has to give something to God of great value in order to get something back from God of great value. Is this foolish?

The thought that God is somehow pleased by our suffering and pain or our self-sacrifice somehow helps us get what we want has been with us throughout the centuries. Not just in eastern culture and as a result of some religious philosophy of the Israelites that passed down to other cultures. The Aztecs, for example, their pyramids were religious sites for appeasing the gods by human sacrifices.

Their religious ceremonies included skinning victims alive with priests then performing ritual dances while wearing the victim's skin. The bodies were then thrown down the steps of these pyramids. In just one of the buildings where the Aztecs kept the remains of their sacrifice, the Spaniards, when they discovered the region, found one building—there were more than one building—they found 136,000 skulls.

People that had been sacrificed. They estimate that between 20,000 and 50,000 people were sacrificed a year by the Aztecs. Now, that's in South America, no influence from Europe or Israel. Where'd they come up with that? Where'd they come up with the fact that somehow God's going to be pleased? Imagine driving along the road someday and you see a dog with a puppy on an altar and he's lighting a fire under it.

You'd say, "What is up with that?" You know, there's something wrong here. Where did that dog get that idea? What's that about? Why would a dog do that? What would possess him to want to do that? And yet all around the world different cultures, they offer sacrifices to try to appease, to please this god. In our human value system, nothing for nothing can't be.

We have to give something to get something. Therefore God requires something of great value for us to get something of great value back. An idea following after these verses that God is pleased when we do penance. God is pleased when we have a repentant heart, but God does not expect us to do penance. Penance by definition is an act of self-abasement to prove, to show our sorrow and payment for our sin.

Throughout history this has been the case. Prior to Christ, cults in Greece and Rome practiced flagellation. In Rome, women were flogged believing that by receiving the pain, the gods would bless them with fertility. It was believed that flagellation first became a form of penance in the Christian church among the monks living in monastic orders. These self-whipping rituals were based around processions, singing hymns, making distinct gestures and discipline.

Popular passion for this movement occurred all over Europe beginning in and around the 12th century. Thousands of citizens would gather in great processions singing with crosses and banners as they marched through the city whipping themselves. The movement spread across Northern Italy to where it grew up to 10,000 strong. Peak of the activity was during the Black Death or the Black Plague, which began around 1347.

One of the groups coming out of this was called the Brothers of the Cross. They wore white robes and marched across Germany in 33 and a half days to symbolize the years of Christ, one day for year. They established their camps in fields near towns and they held their rituals twice a day. The ritual would begin with the reading of a letter that they claimed had been delivered by an angel justifying the flagellants' activities.

Next, the followers would fall to their knees, they would whip themselves, gesturing with their free hand to indicate their sin and striking themselves rhythmically to songs known as *Geisslerlieder* until blood flowed. Sometimes the blood was soaked up in rags and treated as holy relic, the idea being that the blood coming from them was in very similar or the same as the blood coming from Christ. In 1399, 15,000 flagellants marched on Rome.

Are there modern examples of this, trying to beat ourselves, whip ourselves to please God? In Taoist temples on Chinese New Year, women are whipped and men are spanked. Modern processions of hooded flagellants are still feature various Mediterranean Catholic countries, especially Spain, Portugal, and Italy, every year, usually during Lent. *Opus Dei*, you've heard of this, has been linked with the doctrine of self-mortification.

Where some of this comes from is where Paul said, "I crucify my flesh daily." So they take that literally, that there's something to be gained, that the body's suffering helps us spiritually. It goes deeper than that, I believe. A medieval practice which included self-flagellation, self-inflicted wounds, the wearing of a hair shirt as a form of penitential sacrifice.

It's interesting, too, this even reaches into some areas that you wouldn't think it would reach into. Mother Teresa. Christopher Hitchens wrote a book and did a television documentary on Mother Teresa. He said he documented the pitiful conditions of Mother Teresa's care facilities despite the millions of dollars she collected yearly. The care facilities were grossly simple, rudimentary, unscientific, miles behind the modern conception of what medical science was supposed to do.

Hitchens did not indict her with a lack of compassion or cruelty toward her patients. The problem was that her Roman Catholic belief that personal suffering helps to earn one's salvation. She thought suffering was good, and as a result she would not use pain relievers in her clinics. She had said that the suffering of the poor is something very beautiful and the world is being much helped by the nobility of this example of misery and suffering.

Many Catholic priests and nuns to this day wear hair undergarments, put stones in their shoes, flagellate themselves, and otherwise try to merit heaven by suffering. Poverty and suffering are not simply to be endured, but are to be sought after and even created. Just as she hoped to earn her way to heaven through her own deprivation and suffering, so Mother Teresa hoped to help her patients earn their way to heaven through the suffering she allowed them to go through.

Shiite Muslims flagellate themselves during religious procession on the 10th day of the holy month of Muharram. Thousands of young and old march together during Ashura when, according to Islamic tradition, Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed during a battle of Karbala near Iraq in AD 680. There's something in us. There's something that just feels when we really want something bad that somehow God would be pleased through my self-sacrifice, through my giving something up.

That's what Lent's all about. You say, "Well, this really doesn't apply to me." Well, does it? Do you ever feel that when you don't feel God's favor that if you read your Bible more, if you get more serious about it, or you pray more often, that somehow he'll be more pleased with you? You know, God can't be more pleased with you than he is. He can't. He can't love you.

On your best day, on your best-behaved day, he loves you the most he could ever love you. On your worst-behaved day, he loves you the most he could ever love you. His love does not cycle up and down on the basis of your behavior. You know, a lot of you, a lot of us grew up with parents where our love was conditional. We felt that on days where we behaved they loved us, on days when we did not they didn't love us.

So we carry that into our relationship or understanding with God. And so there's a thought that if I can do something to please him, I'll be back in his favor. And that's a very, very dangerous concept. And I think all of us have it to one degree or another. And it's at the root of so much. Obsessive-compulsive behavior, you know, there's a set of internal rules that must be kept in order for everything to be okay.

It's not safe not to do it. It's scary not to do it. If I don't, something's going to go wrong. There's something I have to do. I think cutting, self-cutting falls into this area. I have a friend that when he got saved, he loved to play ice hockey. And he came to me and said, "I'm giving up ice hockey." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because it's too much fun. I don't think God wants me to play it."

I said, "Well, is it in balance?" He said, "I play one night a week." He was single. I said, "You're giving it up because God—well, I enjoy it too much." I said, "You think God doesn't want you to enjoy life?" Man, does he want us to enjoy life. You know why a lot of people aren't Christians? They think we can't have any fun. That's sick.

God created all that there is to lead us to him and to enjoy. He doesn't get pleasure from seeing us give up on the things that we enjoy doing, as long as obviously they're things that are okay to do. Jesus said in Luke 12:32, "Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." You don't have to earn it. The price was paid. Every drop of blood that needed to be shed for your sins was shed by Jesus. Nothing you can sacrifice will add to his sacrifice. The price has been paid.

[–-Guest (Male)--] Pastor Thom Keller with important insight on the grace of God and our tendency to try and earn what can't be earned, only received. This has been Study the Word, and we've been in the book of Judges. To hear this message again, simply go to CCLEB.com and look under resources. We're at CCLEB.com. If you'd rather have a CD copy, call 717-507-7862. That's 717-507-7862.

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If you live close by or will be visiting the area soon, drop on by. For service times and more information about Calvary Chapel Lebanon, turn to CCLEB.com and download our free Android app. Search Calvary Chapel Lebanon in the Google Play store. We'll get back into Judges next time on Study the Word with Pastor Thom Keller. And may God richly bless you as you study the Word.