Judges 2

Judges 2:6-3

Subdivision 2. (Judges 2:6-23; Judges 3:1-4.)The Breach with Jehovah.

1. Idolatry had evidently never really been quite rooted out from among the children of Israel. Long afterward God reminds them by Amos how in the wilderness they had borne the tabernacle of Moloch, and Chinn their images, the star of their god which they had made for themselves (Amos 5:26); and Joshua’s exhortation at the close of his life to “put away the strange gods that were among” them, shows that even when they entered into the land, they had not fully cleansed themselves, nor turned to God with a perfect heart. True, externally no foreign worship was tolerated in Joshua’s time, and in his days and those of the elders that outlived him, Israel generally served the Lord. But with the next generation decline became manifest. They had not seen the great works of the Lord, and the brief space that had elapsed was ample for forgetfulness. “Out of sight” was speedily “out of mind.” The Christian Church, in the same way, scarcely stood in any integrity during the lifetime of the apostles. Early in Paul’s day he told the Thessalonians, “the mystery of iniquity doth already work;” and this, when John wrote his first epistle, had ripened into “many antichrists.” The Church of uninspired history already retains but little semblance of its first condition. “As in water face answereth to face, so does the heart of man to man.” And so in its general features does the Israelite history to that of the present dispensation. This is what makes the book of Judges so exceedingly important for us. We have here as in a glass, our own faces spiritually: a photograph of divine light that will not flatter. There is a significant change in this connection of the name of Joshua’s inheritance, from Timnath-serah to Timnath-heres. The one word is simply the reversal of the letters of the other, but the change of meaning is striking, if with Fuerst and others we take the latter to mean, not “sun,” but “clay.” An “abundant portion” becomes thus a “portion of Clay.” How striking if we think of the spiritual meaning! How indeed thus does the abundant heavenly portion into which Christ has entered vanish from sight, leaving Him only a portion of clay" -an earthly one, expressed in its grossest form! And has not the Church in its decline lost sight of the heavenly portion and changed it, as it were, into mere earthliness? Or in its loss of the Lord as the Heavenly Man at the right hand of God, has it not, so to speak, left Him in the grave? All the more does this meaning come out in the position of this portion as given both in Joshua and here, on the north of the hill Gaash," the mystery side of the “quaking” earth out of which the Lord rose!

It is as we realize or not that of which this speaks, that we shall give our answer here. That quaking of the earth has its significance: that which is shaken can be removed. The “yet once more I shake, not the earth only, but also heaven,” signifies, according to the apostle (Hebrews 12:26-27), the “removal of those things that are shaken.” For faith this was now taking place, and out of a judged world there was already beginning the call of a heavenly people. 2. Man must worship something. He has a religious instinct, an apprehension of some Power or Powers to which he is related, out of which he may perhaps reason himself, but which requires reason, however perverted, to accomplish this. Hence atheism is a disease of cultivation, and where it exists has still in general to do homage to what it denies, as in the Comtean worship of humanity itself. Hence fulfilling the well-known saying that if there were no God, it would be still necessary to invent one. The Comtean worship reveals more than this (for in truth it is humanity that man, fallen away from God, everywhere worships. He may invest this with more or less of the attributes of deity: because he is not a being groping his way out of native darkness, as so many would persuade us; the inspired version of heathenism is more honoring to God, if more condemnatory of the creature, that “when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” They had not to invent God, but rather to invent the god that they desired; and the god that they desired was one like themselves, a being who could sympathize with the lusts and passions of a corrupt nature. Hence “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the image of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man.” Higher they could not go; but they could go lower. In the creatures below man they could find represented the lower instincts, cravings, appetites of man, with no check of conscience or morality. In the beast there is an unmoral nature, which may appear to sanction what in man is immoral. Thus came in the bestial gods of Egypt and elsewhere: “birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things” (Romans 1:23), became to them the images of the divine glory; and the infinite degradation degraded more and more the worshipers: they were assimilated to what they worshiped, and received back in divine government “that recompense of their error that was meet.” The imagination of man was employed to throw a halo around what was utterly abominable. Taught by the sacred lips of parents, maintained by law, becoming more venerable continually with the passing of generations, conscience itself lost almost the power of protest against whatever enormities, and even came to confirm and enforce the putting of good for evil and evil for good, of darkness for light and of light for darkness. Such was the devilish system to which Israel, with their back on God, now turned. “The children of Israel did the evil thing” -what was emphatically that -“in Jehovah’s eyes, and served the Baals.” “They forsook Jehovah, and served Baal and the Ashtoreths.” Their gods, being the product of their own minds, were necessarily many as their minds were. The plural in both cases, it is allowed, stands not for the multiplicity of images, but for different modifications of the deity himself. Baal was in no wise one, as Jehovah was; nor was even Ashtoreth the same goddess everywhere, although the general idea was one. Baal means “husband” and “lord,” with the primary idea of ownership. A bird even is a “baal of wing”; and a hairy man a “baal of hair.” It does not stand so much for the idea of one who rules therefore, which is rather adon, from din, to “discern,” to “judge.” Yet it has no necessary bad sense either: in that of “husband,” God uses it of His own relation to the people: “thy Maker is thy baal;” “though I was a baal unto them.” (Isaiah 54:5; Jeremiah 31:32.) Nevertheless, God finally repudiates the word. By Hosea He says, “Thou shalt call me Ishi [my husband], and thou shalt no more call me Baali: for I will take away the names of the Baals out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name.” (Hosea 2:16-17.) The difference here is not hard to be made out. Ishi is, literally, “my man”; woman being Ishah, as “taken out of man.” (Genesis 2:23.) Ishi speaks, therefore, of one who fills the due place implied by the relationship, man being divinely fitted to woman, and woman to man. The baal might be in the relationship, and not rightly fill it. When God says, “I was a baal to them,” or “Thy Maker is thy baal,” it is the fact of who it is that is in this relation which assures us of the blessing implied. But baal thus being at the best indifferent, it is at last disclaimed, with all the abhorrence due to the false gods that had usurped Jehovah’s place. Baal stands thus for the power implied in possession, apart from any thought of how it may be used, as Ashtoreth speaks (comp. Joshua 21:27) of fruitfulness here in the nature-sense. Both might be used (and were) in the vilest applications and unitedly they reveal the mystery of iniquity that is native in the heart of man. Power he seeks, -to have things in his hand: that, without question of how he will use it, -irresponsible power; while, underneath, the lusts that war in his members" hold him as a poor slave to their will. Baal and Ashtoreth are twin worships, the natural complements of each other: both meaning independence of God, and together self-bondage; in which is found the awful tyranny of a more malignant despotism, that of the adversary of God and man alike, the “spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience.” (Ephesians 2:2.) Satan is thus the “prince of this world,” and, spite of Christianity, -man, alas, not accepting the deliverance, -“the god” also “of this age.” (2 Corinthians 4:4, Greek.) This he will be until the Lord comes, and he is cast into the “bottomless pit.” (Revelation 20:2.) This makes the effort at world-reform so hopeless, and is the only thing that can account for the history of Christendom. The Baals and the Ashtoreths have no more been kept out of the Christian than out of the Jewish enclosure: “while men slept, the enemy came” has repeated itself in the history of every spiritual movement. And as surely as in Israel’s history here the Lord’s chastening hand has had to be upon His people. Spoilers had spoiled them, and they could no longer stand before their enemies; and this for us also is, “as Jehovah has said -yea, as Jehovah has sworn”: nor is He “man, that He should lie; nor the son of man, that He should repent.” 3. The means of deliverance was by the Lord’s raising up judges -a remedy as plain as can be, though effectual only to a limited extent, the obstinate return to the old sins being consequent upon the passing away of the judge, if not before. Yet the remedy showed plainly the disease: deliverance could be only by revival, and this would be in self-judgment as to their condition, and return to Him from whom they had departed. The “judge” plainly was not merely such between man and man, but above all was the leader in the people’s repentance and return to God -the representative of Jehovah’s law and sway in Israel. 4. Spite of all this, the course of things all through -apart from such interruptions -is ever downward: “when the judge died they returned and corrupted themselves beyond their fathers.” Correspondingly, even the deliverances become less and less full, and the character of the deliverers deteriorates (although this not continuously), until they reach together their lowest point in Samson, whose death still leaves the people in captivity. In view of this God declares that He will not drive out the nations that remain, but will leave them for a trial to Israel, and that they may know war by experience, the war of conquest not having had its due effect. The very trial thus which comes in through sin, He makes a means of practising faith, for those who have faith. Since by the history of their fathers they had not learnt the need of obedience and reliance upon the living God, they should learn these by practically meeting these enemies that their fathers met. Their discipline should be a school of faith.

This, it is evident, applies to many more than Israel in the book of Judges, or than to such wars as these of Canaan. All the long series of evils that have afflicted the Church as the result of multiplied departure from God and from His word, have furnished for faith the exercise by which it is made to overcome. The history in all alike becomes, however, thus largely individual. The people disappear as a whole from sight, or furnish a background in the front of which a few figures walk apart. There are men of God, indeed, but where are the people of God? Yet divine love cannot forget these, nor can the hearts therefore of those in whom this love has stirred. Judges F. W. Grant.