S5: Day 72: Judges 7–9

0:00Hey, this is Shelby and CJ. We're walking you through the book of Judges. We're in chapters seven through nine today. A lot of action in the first six chapters that we've covered in a lot more to come today. So we left off our reading yesterday with Gideon. We're going to kind of wrap up his story today, right, CJ? Exactly. Right. So we left off with Gideon and the fleece. And now we're at the cusp of battle where he's going to actually secure salvation from those who are oppressing Israel. But again, being getting, he's still a little cowardly. So they're on the cusp of battle. And God says, well, you know, you're afraid and you have a lot of troops. So actually, when I'm going to whittle down all these troops you have, I only want to save Israel using a really, really small number of soldiers so that I get all the glory and that you guys don't think you did it yourself. So what started out as 22,000 soldiers is whittle down to 300, which is wild. By the way, from 22,000 down to 300, right. But again, Gideon's

1:03still afraid. So he sneaks down to the camp. God instructs him to sneak down to the camp of the enemies. And he overhears someone recounted dream they had where they were destroyed. And someone says, oh, that must be Gideon. So I think this probably puffs up Gideon and he feels like, okay, I can actually secure a victory for the people. Okay. So then does everything turn out all right? Is Gideon like confident and ready to go into battle now? Well, they win the battle. He routes the enemies, but then there's sort of some internal conflict between Israelites. The Ephraimites, another tribe of Israel, they are bothered that Gideon didn't invite them to come down and take part in the battle. So then Gideon, he goes and he's chasing these remaining Midianites. And a few of the Israelites cities are unwilling to give him food and help him out because they don't really know where the battle is going to go. Is Israel going to win or the Canaanites going to win? And they want to be in the good grace of the Canaanites just in case. So they're sort of hedging, right. And then finally, Gideon captures these two men. These remaining Midianites are fleeing

2:05from him. And we find out that Gideon is mad at them because they also killed his brothers at some time past. So it started out as sort of a pure victory for the Lord. We see that Gideon has some personal motive. And this idea of personal motive or mixed motives is going to be a theme that we're going to continue to see in the book of Judges 2. So just something to keep in mind. So then again, he's a coward. So he tries to get his son to kill these remaining two commanders. And the commanders even say, you're going to have a boy kill us, you should do it yourself. So again, Gideon's true colors are coming out. And then because Gideon finally secures this victory, Israel says, hey, you should be our king. But Gideon, like a good man. So at least in this way, he's acting rightly. He's saying, no, I'm not going to be your king. But that moral victory is soon squashed because then he asks Israel for some of the loot that they've gotten from the battle. And he takes some of the gold earrings as part of the spoil from the Midianites to create this thing called an a-fold, which I think we talked

3:09about in Leviticus. We probably talked about in previous episodes. It's only reserved for the priests. And he crafts this golden a-fold, which should maybe remind us of the golden calf in Exodus. So we know where this is probably going. This is probably not going to be a good thing. And it says that all of Israel stumbled after this little a-fold, meaning that even though he destroyed an altar from an idolatrous shrine, I should say at the beginning of his story. And he constructed an altar for the Lord of the being of his story. By the end of his story, he's sort of doing the same thing. He's reconstructing this means of idolatry, which sort of shows that even though he saved Israel, Israel sort of in the same place they were before. So that's what we're at so far with Gideon. Yeah, Gideon's story is complicated for sure. I think mixed motives was a great call out there to help us follow kind of his story. So then we start to move toward Judges 9 in Gideon's son Abema Lake. What's going on there? Yeah. So after the victory that Gideon has, he has a lot

4:12of wives and a lot of children. And of course, he's going to die in Israel. It's going to go wild again because that's just sort of the cycle of the book of Judges, right? And this next story in Judges 9 has very little to do with external threats, meaning we're not really worried about canonites in these stories or in these chapters, I should say. But we begin to be worried about Israel fighting within Israel, which is sad, right? Yeah. And we're going to start to see this moral degeneration deteriorate even more rapidly than we saw before earlier in Judges. So Abema Lake, he's one of Gideon's sons, and he's from a concubine, which is just an unofficial wife. This is sort of recalling how Gideon just was a prolific man, I guess at this point. And Abema Lake wants to rule over his people, unlike Gideon's father, if you remember Gideon said, no, I won't be your king. So Abema Lake, he wants to secure his spot. So he goes and he kills all of the other sons of Gideon, all of his brothers or half brothers. And the men of Shechem,

5:16I guess they trust Abema Lake, and they say, okay, you can be our king. And then this man Jatham, who's one of Gideon's sons, who escapes Abema Lake, his brother, he stands up on this mountain, and he gives this incredible parable about if Abema Lake's really the guy, then I guess you guys will flourish, but if he's not the guy, then I think you guys will probably suffer. And that's exactly what happens. Another man, another Israelite rises up against Abema Lake, and they start to war against each other. So now, again, instead of Israelite versus Canaanite, we have Israelite versus Israelite, which is not good. And eventually a woman throws a big, heavy rock out of a tower and crushes Abema Lake's head, and that's how Abema Lake is squashed, literally and figuratively, I guess. Yeah. Again, another just like crazy story in the book of Judges. Okay. Can we just talk about like, where's God in all of this? How are we supposed to understand how he's presiding over this and even what we take away from these chapters? Yeah. So I think ironically, the name of

6:21God is pretty sparse in this section of scripture, in this chapter specifically. And I think that's on purpose. It kind of shows that even though God is providentially over everything that's happening, he's sort of letting nature run its course. And that reminds us of this prophetic parable of Jotham where he says, if Abema Lake's your guy, then you guys are going to be successful and God's going to be with you. If he's not the guy, then well, I think God's going to leave you to your own devices. And that's sort of what we see in these chapters. And lest we judge Israel for doing something that we wouldn't do. I think part of what this story shows is that sin isn't something out there in the Canaanites or in this people group or in non-Christians, but sin is something that's just right in our own heart and all of us. It's actually within us. And Christ came to save not just them, but us from those evil inclinations. So I think that's a way that we can view God in these chapters. Yeah, absolutely. We want to, and we talked about this so much in previous episodes,

7:24we want to judge people for the way they're responding. Then we have those same tendencies in ourselves. For my takeaway, I'm going to call back to something that happened in one of the first chapters we talked about. And that's this like victory that Gideon in his very small army experience. And I think just a takeaway for me for that is that victory belongs to the Lord. And we see that in the book of Proverbs in chapter 21, verse 31, it just straight up says that word forward victory belongs to the Lord. I'm a person who loves to do things in my own strength. Like I love to accomplish something in this is always a reminder for me that God does not need me. And we see God working through a really small group, a leader who is not courageous for most of the time. And so that's my think my takeaway in these chapters. But thanks for walking us through CJ. We're going to be back with more in the book of Judges tomorrow. Good.