Ruth and the Concubine

“Behold, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, ‘Get up, let us be going.’ But there was no answer.” – Judges 19:27-28

“At midnight the man was startled and turned over, and behold, a woman lay at his feet! He said, ‘Who are you?’ And she answered, “I am Ruth, your servant. Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer.’” – Ruth 3:8-9

Reading through the Bible as we have been, I noticed for the first time the odd parallelism between the scenes in Judges 19 and Ruth 3. Both deal with an Israelite man (Levite, Boaz) and a woman of relatively low status (Ruth, a foreigner; the concubine, a secondary wife or slave). Both occur in the time of judges. Both occur not far from Jerusalem: in Gibeah, four miles north, and Bethlehem, five miles south. Both are detailed stories vividly told in the context of very little mention of God by the narrator. In both, a man wakes from sleep to find a woman lying prone near his feet. One occurs at the threshold of a door; the other on a threshing floor. Both are surprising situations. Both impact the course of an entire nation. 

The contrasts are even more striking. Consider simply what is spoken and what is not. Even before he knows who she is, Boaz asks for a name: the concubine has no name and is treated as chattel or worse. Ruth speaks her name; she asks for and receives protection. The Levite asks nothing. He expresses no sympathy or shock at what he finds, offers no protection. His words are chilling, and he receives no answer. We see the end of a so-called “marriage” in one scene; the beginning of a marriage in another. We see death and dismemberment in one; new life in the other—the restoration of name and property, the joining together of new limbs in the birth of a son who would be in the lineage of Christ. 

The Bible really goes to the darkest places, doesn’t it? But also into the brightest. Five chapters away from one of the most evil stories we’ve encountered up till now, there arrives its counterpart: a blazing beacon of protection, restoration, redemption, life. I don’t know why Ruth would have been given the chance to make the choices she did, to speak with the voice she did, and the concubine not. There is this tension throughout the time of judges between God’s covenantal grace and his judgment for disobedience. There are times we see sin in all its true horror—and perhaps we need to—and there are times when we see grace break out like the dawn. God will not leave us in the dark. The story of Ruth speaks really into the stories before it, to tell us this truth. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

Beware Gifts Without Fruit

“And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon him, and he went down to Ashkelon and struck down thirty men of the town and took their spoil and gave the garments to those who had told the riddle. In hot anger he went back to his father’s house.” – Judges 15:13

Michael Wilcock writes about Judges 8: “Gideon… has become, even on the testimony of his enemies, a man of majesty (8:18) and strength (8:21). But there is something less than admirable at the heart of him, for all the development of his great abilities. Beware the gifts of the Spirit without the fruit of the Spirit!”

Gideon became a great leader, but his heart was filled with pride, fear and anger. We see this in increasing degrees with subsequent judges, most of all with Samson, who though he had the gift of physical strength, had a heart filled with an anger and impulsiveness. The gifts of the Spirit are things like helping, giving, teaching, administration (1 Corinthians 12-14 and elsewhere). The fruit of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5). The gifts are about doing; the fruit are more about being.

We are generally much better at doing than being. We make being into doing. At school, our kids are taught how to be kind like they are taught math and reading—but while socio-emotional learning is important, these things cannot be fundamentally generated or willed into being. They come only as a result of our abiding in God: as David preached yesterday, loving in times of difficulty comes when we stay connected to God. As we grow in our gifts, we must grow in our fruit; as we expand our external ministry or service, we must attend even more deeply to our inner life. Gifts without fruit—exhortation without kindness, discernment without patience, hospitality without joy, anything without love—is something to be wary of. That at least is one of the lessons these judges leave us.

Samson's Death, Christ's Death

“And Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’ Then he bowed with all his strength, and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people who were in it. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he had killed during his life.” – Judges 16:30

Samson’s death was not like Christ’s in a few major ways. His death was the result of disobedience, which we see throughout his life in patterns of impulsive recklessness, sexual addiction, vindictive violence and pride. He died to redeem himself. Christ’s death was a result of his obedience, and he died to redeem us.

But there are striking similarities as well. Both were betrayed by those they loved and handed over to Gentile oppressors. Both were mocked, chained, and became weak. Both acted alone.

This latter point is an interesting one. The cycles in Judges are really more of a downward spiral: judges become more and more flawed. Repentance becomes less and less genuine or even present. The last five chapters of the book break the chronological flow of the story to go back and demonstrate just how far the Israelites had strayed from covenantal faith. But as the cycles become darker and darker, there are elements that increasingly point to Christ, like this one. Othniel rallied all of Israel (3:7-11). Deborah rallied part of Israel (5:15-18). Gideon fought with 300. Samson fought alone. As Edmund P. Clowney writes, “God had shown that He could deliver Israel with an army of willing volunteers; He had also shown that He could save with as few as three hundred… But when the Spirit of God came upon Samson, the Lord showed that He had no need for even three hundred. He could deliver by one.”

Samson killed at least over one thousand men (15:16) through his one act of death, creating a permanent rift between the Philistines and Israelites. God used Samson to bring Israel out of a place of profound and complete capitulation to Canaanite culture, paving the way to restoring their identity as people of God. Like Christ, Samson’s death opened the way to new life—despite his unprecedented flaws. And so we see that, in the midst of the darkening spiral, there is also a movement towards God, towards the Christ who dies, the Spirit who counsels, the Father who rules with justice. As the Psalmist wrote, “Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord, for he comes, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness, and the peoples in his faithfulness” (Psalm 96:13).

Gideon's Ephod

“And Gideon made an ephod of it and put it in his city, in Ophrah. And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family.” – Judges 8:27

I’m slowly reading through Watership Down with Ellie and Eric, and for a long time we were in suspense about what mysterious thing was wrong with the first warren Hazel and his friends encounter on their journey. All the rabbits there are sleek and well-fed, but there is an atmosphere of unspoken fear and secrecy. They finally discover the truth in one horror-filled moment: “What enemy was at work on the other side of the hedge? There were no cries—no spitting of a cat, no squealing of a rabbit—only the crackling of twigs and the tearing of the grass in violence. By an effort of courage against all instinct, Hazel forced himself forward into the gap, with Fiver following. A terrible sight lay before them… Bigwig was lying on his side, his back legs kicking and struggling. A length of twisted copper wire, gleaming dully in the first sunlight, was looped round his neck and ran taut across one forepaw… The projecting point of one strand had lacerated his neck and drops of blood, dark and red as yew berries, welled one by one down his shoulder. For a few moments he lay panting, his side heaving in exhaustion. Then again began the struggling and fighting, backward and forward, jerking and falling, until he choked and lay quiet.”

Snares are things that trap you unexpectedly. They appear simple, even harmless, but are purposely set for one reason: to immobilize and kill. Early on, God warns the Israelites that the Canaanite “gods shall be a snare to you” (Judges 2:3): idols, in other words, work like snares do. They insidiously trap and enslave, they ultimately control and immobilize, and their end is death. In this passage, Gideon refuses a golden crown only to turn around and make a golden ephod, melting down earrings in a way that eerily resembles how the golden calf was made (Exodus 32). The ephod was intended for glory and beauty, to bear the names of God’s people in remembrance before Him, to receive God’s guidance through the Urim and Thummim stones set upon it (Exodus 28). The actual ephod was worn at that time by the high priest in Shiloh (Judges 18:31), but by creating his own version of it, Gideon takes something that God intended to symbolize beauty, relationship, and guidance, and turns it into a snare for all the people. 

How can the vestures of our faith become idols? How can the very tools of worship become hindrances of that worship? How can we look towards our ministry to be our savior? How can the beauty of the created keep us from experiencing the beauty of the Creator? Perhaps we become ensnared by legalism; by power, visibility, or reputation in ministry; by a desire to control God on our own terms; by overemphasis on a particular style of worship; by the momentary at the cost of the eternal. The danger of these kinds of idols lies in their hiddenness, even to ourselves, cloaked as they are by the veneer of religion, by victory and rest as it was for Gideon (Judges 8:38). In the story, it took Hazel, Silver, Buckthorn, Pipkin and Fiver, working together and in turns, to dig out and bite through the peg to free Bigwig. It took seeing the copper wire for what it was to move them from a place of indolence and material comfort. May God open our eyes to the presence and workings of hidden idols in our lives.

Repentance Vs. Regret

“When the people of Israel cried out to the Lord on account of the Midianites, the Lord sent a prophet to the people of Israel. And he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from Egypt and brought you out of the house of slavery.” – Judges 6:7

Judges has a cycle of rebellion, retribution, repentance, and rescue, which is repeated six times throughout the course of the book. The fact that God sends an unnamed prophet here to speak to the Israelites suggests that there is something about their cry for help that may be regret, but falls short of true repentance. What is the difference between the two? Regret, or worldly sorrow (2 Corinthians 7), is sad over the consequences of sin rather than the sin itself. Once the consequences go away, the behavior returns. Repentance is sad at how the sin grieves God and results in the loss of a relationship with him. Repentance opens the door to grace and restoration, the ability to move on past the sin. 

Regret is about ourselves; repentance is about God. The prophet’s brief sermon is entirely God-centered: he wants them to see who God is and what He has done; he wants to drive home what their disobedience means to that God, rather than just what their disobedience means to them.  

How can we discern whether we respond to sin with regret or repentance? We can go to God’s word, just as the prophet quotes God to his people. We can observe patterns of sin in our lives. As one commentator wrote, “If you are continually falling into the same spiritual pit and your falls are not decreasing in number or intensity, you may be responding to sin in regret rather than repentance. In other words, you may regret the troubles your sin causes but be unwilling to reject the idol underlying the sin, which is still attractive to you.”

We can examine our patterns of confession. It is telling that we so often find it easier to confess alone or within a congregation than to one or two other people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it well:

“Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution... Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.”

Obedience In The Unseen

“And she said, ‘I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.’” – Judges 4:9

“As we live our ordinary lives we are declaring all the time exactly what we are.” – Martyn Lloyd-Jones

At this time of transition from the bronze to the iron age, Sisera’s 900 iron chariots represented a huge technological advantage. In human terms, Barak was leading his 10,000 men into certain slaughter, but they stream down Mount Tabor anyway under Deborah’s command. We learn later in song (Judges 5:21) that God flooded the valley, creating mud that clogged the chariots’ wheels and giving the Israelites victory. 

Barak points to Christ, who like him is under authority (John 8:28), does not act apart from the one who sent him (John 5:19), and is victorious through obedience (Romans 5:19, Philippians 2:8; Hebrews 5:8). In all this, he demonstrates courage, humility, and a faith for which he is remembered in Hebrews 11. But most of all, he does it all unseen. He goes on a mission instigated by a woman and finished by a woman, knowing he will get little credit for it.

Sometimes it feels like my hardest battles are the ones I fight unseen, the hidden battles of ordinary life. Battles to control what I say or don’t say. Battles to not indulge in self-pity, complaint, judgment, or gossip. Battles to give up what I know God is calling me to turn away from. Battles to forgive someone, again. Battles to discipline well when I’m tired. Battles over my thoughts in the dark before sleep. I fight these battles against my own sinful nature, against the schemes of Satan, and for the most part there is no element of public recognition. The struggles are real, hard, and sometimes long; the victories when they happen can be unmistakable experiences of God’s power. But no one really sees them.

Barak had no less courage though he knew there would be no fame, and neither should I. Because the reality is, of course, that I am seen. Deborah’s words echo Jesus’: I will be with you. Mount Tabor is thought to be the place of Jesus’ transfiguration so many years later, the place where God declares his love to his Son as he does to us. The Holy Spirit lives inside me. I am not alone, in these most important battles in my life.

Left-Handed Salvation

“The Lord raised up for them a deliverer, Ehud, the song of Gera, the Benjamite, a left-handed man.” – Judges 3:15

After Othniel, none of the judges named in this book seem like who you’d expect to be a leader. Deborah is a woman, Gideon the least in a house of the weakest clan, and Ehud is left-handed. At that time, the right hand was a symbol of power and ability: God swears by his right hand, has pleasures at his right hand, and the Chosen One sits at his right hand (Isaiah 62:8-9; Psalm 16:11, 110:1). In Hebrew, Judges 3:15 literally says Ehud was “unable to use his right hand,” leading some scholars to speculate that he had some kind of paralysis or disability. No one would expect a left-handed man to be dangerous. They would assume that if he could not wield a weapon with his right hand, he couldn’t wield one at all—and that is why he was admitted to the king’s presence both publicly and privately. No one thought he could be a threat; he was completely beneath their notice.

Paul tells us in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians that God does not choose the worldly-wise or powerful. He does not choose those of privileged birth. God chooses the foolish, the weak, the low and despised. Why is this? 

The temptation for the Israelites at that time was not outright rejection of God so much as adding him to a pantheon of gods. The prevailing polytheistic culture objected not to the existence of God, but to his absolute sovereignty. When it came to various Canaanite gods, you generally did something to please a certain god so that they would give you something in response. But God is making it clear that he does not work as idols do. He chooses the unexpected, and works through them in strikingly different but undeniably powerful ways, to show that he is not a vending machine or formula. He is not one of many. He cannot be manipulated. And what he wants is not merely our tribute but our hearts, our total surrender to him alone. 

David Jackman writes: “Let us remember that Israel’s flirtation with other gods came from their over-domestication of the living Lord. It was because they thought they had God sewn up, in their pockets… [His] unbreakable promises led them to presume upon his mercy to the point of indulgence… they thought they had trained God. That is always the essence of idolatry… [Then] God teaches his rebellious people their total dependence on omnipotence by breaking out of their predictable boxes to use methods and men that no one could have imagined."

Jesus came like the left-handed Ehud: “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him… we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:2-3). He was beneath our notice. And through him God shows us that salvation comes left-handed. Not in the way we would think or the world would laud, but in a way that shows us he is a God like no other.

Optimization And Obedience

“And the Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain because they had chariots of iron.” – Judges 1:19

In the book of Joshua, we saw God’s faithfulness in bringing his people into the promised land, defeating their enemies, and giving them rest. But at the time of Joshua’s death, there was still much to be done in settling the remainder of the land and pushing out its inhabitants. Joshua leaves them with exhortations to trust and obey God: and here, in the book of Judges, which covers the period from Joshua’s death until the first kings, we see how they do. 

Judah is the first tribe God tells to go and claim their portion of the land: “Judah shall go up” (1:2). Then something curious happens. Judah does go up, but instead of trusting completely in God, he asks the Simeonites to go with him as well: “Come up with me” (1:3). He obeys, but not completely. God still gives Judah victory, but we see later that Judah does not completely drive out some of the Canaanites, “because they had chariots of iron.” From there, it’s a cascade of similar behavior from all the tribes: that of Joseph, Manasseh, Ephraim, Zebulun, who allowed the Canaanites to live with them. Even worse were the Asherites and Naphtalites, who went to go live among the Canaanites. By the end of the chapter, there’s a sad kind of contrast: the language is now not about the boundaries of God’s promised land, but “the border of the Amorites” (1:36).

The Israelites’ obedience to God was diluted by their own human calculations, by what seemed to make more military or economic sense. And on first reading, it all works. On first reading, this is a chapter of great conquest: the Israelites were living in the land, living a life their enslaved predecessors would never have dreamed of. But in reality—and the previous book of Joshua makes this unmistakably clear—they have not fully obeyed God. They trusted in their own assessments more than they trusted God.

This is a constant temptation for us, particularly living in an age where we rely so much on data, data that we can optimize for and with. As Virginia Heffernan from The New York Times writes, “In the last few years, The Huffington Post has doled out advice on how to ‘optimize’ your three-day weekend, your taxes, your Twitter profile, your year-end ritual, your sex drive, your website, your wallet, your joy, your workouts, your Social Security benefits, your testosterone, your investor pitch, your news release, your to-do list, and the world itself.” Optimization, she points out, is back-formation. It worships efficiency or performance. It flattens values: “there’s optimal at one end and the dread of suboptimal at the other.”

Optimization is like a functional crutch here in the Bay Area. When faced with a goal, we simply look at the data, research from experts or figure out what everyone else is doing, and back-engineer to increase our odds of achieving the outcome. It tends to lead to anxiety and FOBO (Fear Of Better Options). But that is not how God calls me to live. My mission is dependent on Him, not on data. He values faithfulness over outcomes and obedience over optimization. At the heart of it all is this question: who do I believe has true power and control, God, or me? God, or the data? God, or my chariots? God, or my ability to make things happen? My answers to these questions may not be outwardly obvious, but they change everything. The book of Judges ends with horrific levels of disobedience, but it is here too, however early and small. 

When God Commands Destruction

“So Joshua struck the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings. He left none remaining, but devoted to destruction all that breathed, just as the Lord God of Israel commanded.” – Joshua 10:40

We can’t really read through Joshua and Judges without addressing the elephant in the room: how could God give his people the promised land by commanding the destruction of all who were already living in it? This is far too large a topic to be addressed in one post, but here are at least some points worth considering. 

The mission of Israel to occupy Canaan was unlike any military operation, before or since, in several important ways. It was not carried out on the basis of race and cannot be a warrant for ethnic cleansing: in fact, God later judges the Israelites themselves through military defeat and exile. It was not carried out on the basis of imperialistic expansion, to expand Israel’s power or wealth: unlike most military invasions at that time, the Israelites were commanded not to plunder or enslave anyone. It was not carried out because the Israelites were intrinsically superior to the Canaanites: in fact, the need to evict the Canaanites only testifies to the Israelites’ spiritual weakness in the face of temptation.

The war is carried out as God’s judgement upon the Canaanites, through direct verbal revelation (Joshua 1:1-9, 23:1-16; Judges 1:1), for the purpose of breaking down idols and evicting pagan worship. This was a specific category of warfare that, in Deuteronomy 20, God makes clear is different from war conducted outside the promised land, where total destruction is not commanded. This was a specific act of judgment that occurs after God had given the Canaanites four generations for their sin to reach “its full measure” (Genesis 15), upon an unrepentant people who persisted in practices like child sacrifice, temple prostitution, incest and adultery. Despite the commands, there are provisions for salvation as we see with Rahab and the Gibeonites, again making it clear that the point of judgment was not ethnicity but rebellious unbelief. The war protected Israel’s theocracy: a union of religion and government unique to that time.

One theologian, Meredith Kline, calls this an “intrusion ethic”: a time when future judgment “intrudes” on the present. God, who alone knows who will be condemned on Judgment Day when Jesus returns, is in these instances bringing down judgment upon those people early, the same way the blessings of the gospel are also intrusions of the future grace into the present.

And that brings me back to this question: why should God’s intrusions of judgment bother me more than his intrusions of grace? One interesting thing I’ve noticed about our children is that two of them tend to be justice-oriented: they need to hear, “you can’t do whatever you want to get whatever you want.” The other two tend to be grace-oriented: they need to hear, “sometimes being kind is more important than being right.” The point is, however our inherent personality, personal experiences, or cultural milieu may make us lean, God is a God of both justice and mercy. Jesus came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Both. Not one without the other. In fact, without judgment, grace would be meaningless. The disturbing parts of the Bible arrest our attention for good reason. They point to gaps between how we like to think of God, and who He really is. How we like to think of sin, and what sin really means. How we like to think of grace, and how costly that grace really was to Him.