Series: Here comes the Judge!
Sermon: Jephthah
Thesis: Jephthah overcame his mother and father’s sinful heritage by becoming dedicated to the Lord and the Lord rewarded him for his faithfulness. Many rejected him but God accepted him and then in the time of need his own people received him back with honor and then he made a big mistake with his daughter. But still remained faithful to the Lord and he brought peace to Israel and he led them for 6 more years.
Scripture Verse: Judges 10:6-12:7
Introduction:
In verse 6 we hear the phrase again, “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord (they served several other gods)…and because the Israelites forsook the Lord and no longer served him.”
We once again see the cycle of sin, the people worship other gods, reject God causing the Israelite’s to be let go by God. God became angry and sold them off into the hands of the Philistines and Ammonites. It seems Israel’s view of God is one of convenience rather than commitment. They only want God when they need His delivering power, a miracle or a favor from God. Notice the response of God toward their attitudes in verse 14 “Go and cry out to the gods you have chosen. Let them save you when you are in trouble.”
Notice how the Israelites genuinely repented of their sins and turned away from their other Gods before God intervened in their national life from their oppressors see verses 15-16: But the Israelites said to the Lord, “We have sinned. Do with us whatever you think best, but please rescue us now.” Then they got rid of the foreign gods among them and served the Lord. And he could bear Israel’s misery no longer.”
Let’s recall our main Bible verses in Judges once again:
• Judges 2:16: “Then the LORD raised up judges, who saved them out of the hands of these raiders.”
• Judges 17:6; 18:1; 19:1; 21:25: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”
• I am adding a 3rd key verse we see repeated over and over in Judges:
• “Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord!”
T.S. – The people steeped in idolatry and evil practices decided that Jephthah was unworthy of being a part of his family and his community and they declared he was unworthy and so they rejected him only to discover that God had rejected them and embraced the heart of Jephthah because his heart was connected to God’s heart.
1. The rejection “Get out you have no part of this family!”
a. He was rejected for the sins of his mother and father.
i. He was driven out by his 30 family members most likely upon the death of his father Gilead
ii. He was mocked and rejected by the elders of Gilead
b. Quotes by Timothy Cooley sermoncentral.com
i. Rabbi Telushkin suggests, “there might have been a certain ironic sensibility in so naming the father, comparable to saying, ‘And the father’s name was New York’; in other words any male in Gilead might have been Jephthah’s father. Many of Gilead’s citizens therefore might have mocked him, not just members of one family.” (Telushkin, Biblical Literacy )
But Jephthah’s father’s name must have also been Gilead because the text describes his brothers, sons of the same man by his lawful wife driving Jephthah from home and from sharing in their inheritance. (Keil and Delitzsch)
Jephthah was “a child of shame. His father had chosen to sacrifice upon the wayside altar. His father had had his fling. He had sown his wild oats and of necessity there was a harvest.” Jephthah’s mother was no better. She was “a professional outcast.” “The first eyes into which he looked were the eyes of an unclean woman.” “Ugly names were flung at him before he was old enough to know their dark and sinister meaning. He was forbidden to go to the big house of his father before he knew why he was not allowed to go. He was excluded from the games of those more fortunately born than he….” (Clovis Chappell, Sermons on Biblical Characters)
c. I can only wonder what it must have felt like to be rejected by 30 of his family. Mocked, spit one, told you are worthless you son of a whore, to be cast out most likley after his father passed away, driven from your home, thrown into unworthiness, told that you will never be worthy of any inheritance or family connection.
i. I find it amazing how a godless society kept reminding Jephthah of his mother and Father’s sin! Reject the one who really had no choice in the sin of his parents! Sad! But this is all too common even in today’s society.
ii. Roberts book “One Thing” and he states this about our society, “We’ve been bombarded from every angle by the media, and their message is always the same: you don’t look good enough, smell good enough, sing well enough, dance well enough; you aren’t smart enough, aren’t rich enough; and even if you were, you would still be lacking because no one is perfect, least all you. Think about it for a minute. This is the primary message of most commercials. They have convinced us that it matters if we buy this, shave that, wear this, smoke that, drink this, play that, eat this, and listen to that. Don’t you ever get tired of being told you are not worth anyone’s time, that you are not valuable-that you are not delighted in? Because that’s what it boil downs to. We are constantly saturated with the “Not delightful” message. We have all bought into it in one way or another-that’s why it is so difficult to see-but that doesn’t mean it’s true. It simply means we need to find the real message, the defining message, the identity-giving message. Thankfully, a commercial can never bestow identity. Our identity is not linked to this world, which means our reward in not in this world either. Our reward is God Himself, in this life and in the life to come. He wants us. We can have him Our pursuit should be to gain the reward of having Jesus. This is how it is supposed to be” (Page 26).
iii. I am sure he suffered from self-esteem issues or rejection issues – I am sure the sting and the pain impacted his heart. But even in the midst of rejection and hurt he rose to a leadership position. He had a relationship with the Lord for God and he gave him worth and value, and it was this acceptance from God that raised him up.
d. Jephthah is raised up by God to deliver the people. He is a son of a prostitute and God uses him to become leader of Israel – A most unlikely leader of Israel! He was rejected from his own family because of his illegitimacy – “You are not getting any inheritance because you are not part of our family!” Your mother was a hooker mine was my dad’s wife! He therefore fled – ran for the hills because of the rejection of His father’s family of Him.
i. Jephthah while in exile gathers around himself a bunch of adventurers who followed him. Interesting word adventurers – sounds like quit a bunch of guys hanging out, a great group of explorers. The Indiana Jones type guys! The Columbus type, or the Lewis and Clark type guys. Warriors, thrill seekers, not afraid of anything type guys!
ii. The truth God had set him free from rejection by accepting Him into His holy family.
iii. Jephthah lived up to his name in Hebrew which means – whom God sets free or break through. He was freed by the Spirit of the Lord and this freedom caused the very people who rejected him to then embrace him.
T.S. – Jephthah was rejected as an unworthy individual because of the sins of his parents and it caused him to be driven out of his home and his community but in his pit of despair and rejection he finds the Lord and the Lord helps to raise him up as a leader. This acceptance caused him to eventually be accepted by those who rejected him.
2. The acceptance “We need your skills and anointing now!”
a. His leadership skills become well known.
i. He is known as a mighty warrior and a leader of others.
ii. Gilead finds that no one wants to take the lead as captain of an army and they have no choice but to go ask for the help of the man they cast out.
1. The rejected one is now being the recruited one.
2. Amazing how hardship can change a person’s perception. It changes a person’s sense of value and worth.
a. They now look at Jephthah as a great leader and warrior, who has proven himself worthy to lead a bunch of adventurers.
b. They have heard of his strong leadership skills and abilities.
c. It’s interesting that when he does take over he does not immediately go to war but seeks to solve the issue with diplomacy and a history lesson. He tries to teach his enemies what happens to a nation when it opposes and army anointed and empowered by the Lord God.
d. The king of the Ammonites does not heed the warning and the history lesson. Pride has a way of blinding us to God’s warnings!
e. So diplomacy fails and God moves into action through our faith hero.
iii. Diplomacy fails and in Verse 29 we are told “The Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah.”
1. Literally means Jephthah was clothed in the Spirit of the Lord.
a. Can you imagine being clothed in the Holy Spirit?
b. It means that the Holy Spirit covers your arms, legs, chest, back, mouth, eyes, ears every part of you is clothed or covered by the tangible presence of God’s Holy Spirit.
i. Picture of gleaming person: See Power point picture.
c. This is how we as Christians should be saturated in the Spirit of the Lord.
i. Do you want this?
ii. Do you desire this?
iii. Are you hungry for this type of an experience with the Spirit of the Lord?
iv. I saw this hunger and thirst at IHOP – people committed to being in the presence and the will of Jesus.
1. Many had found acceptance in the presence of the Lord. They had learned what that one thing was –the most important desire of our life should be God.
2. The Spirit of the Lord was poured out on Jephthah who was an outcast, a low life, a misfit, a reject, a down and outer, unworthy in the eyes of his ½ brothers to be considered even part of the family, and God empowered him with his precious Holy Spirit?
a. God saw that he was worthy to be filled and empowered by the Spirit because he looked at his heart.
b. Remember God never looks at the outward appearance he looks at the heart!
iv. We today need to seek the filling of the Spirit of the Lord in our personal lives and in the life of the church – the Bride of Christ.
1. Remember Jesus tells us to wait on the empowerment of the Holy Spirit – just like they did in Acts 2. Then the Holy Spirit filled them in the upper room with power from on high and these Christians went out and changed the face of the earth and transformed societies and governments and people’s lives.
a. What is God calling you to do today?
i. Then call out to Him to cloth you in the Holy Spirit!
ii. To empower you for the task which needs to be completed in your life.
2. Do you know what it says in 2 Corinthians 3:17? It says in the (NIV) “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (In the KJV freedom is interpreted as “Liberty”).”
a. Do you want to be free – to receive liberty?
b. Do you want to see others set free by the power of the Holy Spirit?
i. Israel was delivered and set free because of the Spirit of the Lord coming on the Judges on more than one occasion.
c. God desires to do the same today!
i. Do you want to be clothed in the Holy Spirit?
ii. Do you want to be freed from the gods of this world?
iii. Do you want His acceptance?
v. Robert Leroe states this about “Jephthah became the only hope to stop the Ammonite invasion. His fame grew through organizing a band of warriors (perhaps fellow outcasts and misfits), which—in hindsight we see as God’s preparation for greater responsibilities. His half-brothers soon arrive, desperate for their estranged brother’s help. He agrees, but with a condition: if he is successful in driving out the enemy, they must vow to accept him as their leader. They haggle with him over this, and finally agree to raise Jephthah’s status as a full citizen of Gilead with a reinstated family inheritance. Jephthah the outcast becomes Jephthah the judge. He finally gains the respect of his family…but first, he had to believe in God and in himself. We can learn to heal the pain of the past. The past doesn’t have to weigh us down. The author of Hebrews encourages us to “throw off every weight that hinders us and the sin that so easily entangles, and run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (12:1). What baggage from our past is hindering us from living for the Lord?” (sermoncentral.com)
1. A lesson from our hero of the faith was he let the old baggage go!
a. He threw it off
b. He refused to hang on to it.
c. He choose to be free of it by his desire for the Lord!
2. The baggage of the past can keep us from flowing in the anointing and in the Spirit of the Lord. Cloud and Townsend in their book “God Will Make Away” states this about the importance of checking your baggage:
a. We all have relationships, experiences, and lessons in life that are sometimes painful, difficult, and, for whatever reason, hard to process. As a result, we walk around with certain feelings, patterns, and conflicts that do not really relate to the present but to people and events from a previous time. Because those things are not “finished,” they get in the way of present situations, present relationships, or present goals. And the sad thing is, this ‘baggage’ that we carry around does not go away until it is dealt with, or ‘finished.’ … If hurtful things have happened to your heart and you have not yet dealt with them, those old events will continue to produce what we refer to as ‘issues’ in your life. God promises that from our heart, all sorts of things happen. The issues that we find ourselves dealing with day to day come from inside, as the Book of Proverbs reveals: “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life’ (Proverbs 4:23 KJV) ” (page 48 and 49).
i. The two Doc’s suggest the following steps to rescue your heart from the past:
1. Agree that you have a problem from the past, and confess it.
a. No denial – we must admit that it exists and ask God to help us deal with it.
2. Get healing and express grief.
a. The next step is actively deal with the issue and receive care God’s way – with the help of His Spirit and others He sends to help us deal with it.
i. Romans 12:15: “Weep with those who weep.”
ii. They add “God’s process of helping us to get finished with pain, hurt and loss usually involves grieving as well” (page 52).
3. Receive Forgiveness.
a. They note, ‘To tackle life with gusto, we have to be free from guilt and shame associated with previous failures and short comings. Leaving our baggage behind means that we have to know we are totally accepted, forgiven, and loved” (Page 52).
b. Psalm 103: 11,12
c. 1 John 1:19
d. Hebrews 8:12
e. Romans 8:1
i. God loves to give us fresh starts! The Bible and this church are filled with those kinds of stories.
4. Forgive others
a. Because many hold onto resentment and refuse to give forgiveness to others, they hold onto old baggage. This baggage weighs them down.
b. The Doc’s add, “In a very real way, everyone who had ever hurt him (us) was still hurting him (us) every day. They were very alive in his (our) memory, and these memories were eating away at his soul. His past was very present. The baggage that he carried (we) carried into each new situation was heavy. As a result, he (we) was suspicious of every new authority and was somewhat of a ticking time bomb. This is spiritual cancer at work. Things that we cannot let go of eat away at us from the inside.” (53, 54).
c. They also add, “As long as we feel like someone ‘owes us,’ we’re tied to him or her by the offense committed. That’s why the Bible uses the word ‘forgive,’ which means ‘to cancel a debt.’ When we forgive, we are saying the person no longer owes us, and were releasing that person. Once we have forgiven, the debt is over, and we no longer fell obligated to punish the person or to retaliate. However, when we hold a grudge, we’re always in a mode of punishment toward the offender. Forgiveness frees us in both directions” (Page 54).
5. Examine your ways
a. The Doc’s state, “We’ve talked about hurts-but a significant part of the baggage of the past has to do with patterns of behavior that we learned from those hurtful situations” (page 55).
6. See the new you through new eyes
a. Let the Lord reveal to you how he sees you!
b. See yourself as God see’s you.
c. Be free to be you!
3. Baggage of the past could be any or all of the following:
a. Unforgiveness
b. Pride
c. Gossip
d. Hurtful memories,
e. Scars on the heart and the mind caused by others
f. Types of Abuse
g. Low self-esteem
h. Bitterness
i. We need to let the baggage of the past go – we need to be like Jephthah willing to let the past go so he could move forward in the Spirit of the Lord into the future.
T.S. – Jephthah was embraced back into his family and into his community because he was faithful to the Lord even while in exile. But we still need to careful that in the good times we still guard our hearts and our minds so we don’t make a mistake like Jephthah did.
3. The mistake “Watch what you say and what you make vows too!”
a. Jephthah is most known for making this one mistake – it was a costly one.
b. The vow – the Bible gives clear warning about making vows.
i. Numbers 30:2: 2When a man makes a vow to the LORD or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said.
ii. Ecc. 5:1-6: 1Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.
2Do not be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.
3As a dream comes when there are many cares, so the speech of a fool when there are many words.
4When you make a vow to God, do not delay in fulfilling it. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill your vow.
5It is better not to vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it.
6Do not let your mouth lead you into sin. And do not protest to the ‹temple› messenger, “My vow was a mistake.” Why should God be angry at what you say and destroy the work of your hands?
iii. Scripture warns that it is better not make a vow that you will not keep.
c. The vow in accordance with Jewish scholars and proper Hebrew grammar: “Lord I will either consecrate the first person to you or if an animal offer it as a burnt offering to you.”
i. The Hebrew text:
1. Robert Leroe from sermoncentral.com states: Bible scholars are divided at this point—some maintain that Jephthah sacrificed his daughter, while others say she was given to the Levitical priests to serve in a religious vocation. My position is that she went to serve at the Tabernacle. Here’s my line of reasoning:
a. Everything in Jephthah’s life was already dedicated to God. Human sacrifice was an abomination specifically forbidden by the Law (Lev 18:21, Deut 12:31) and condemned as pagan practice. No Jewish priest would have ever approved or participated in it. Jephthah realized that either an animal or person would meet him when he returned from battle. If an animal appeared, it would be sacrificed as a burnt offering, and if a person came out, he or she would be dedicated to God for life-long service at the Tabernacle. He probably expected a servant to greet him; instead, his daughter rushes out of their home. Jephthah set apart his daughter for the Lord’s service, which was in line with Jewish practice (Lev 27:2ff); we see a similar promise made concerning the prophet Samuel, who was dedicated to God’s service by Hannah, his mother (perhaps Samuel, the likely author of Judges, knew Jephthah’s daughter). There were orders of unmarried females at the Tabernacle who assisted with the logistics of worship. Jephthah’s sorrow came because his lineage would end with his only child, a significant loss. Her sadness centers on the fact that “she had no relations with a man”, which shows that rather than being slain she was being devoted to an unmarried, celibate life.
2. Jephthah’s vow (From Parson’s Bible Dictionary) (Judg. 11:30, 31). After a crushing defeat of the Ammonites, Jephthah returned to his own house, and the first to welcome him was his own daughter. This was a terrible blow to the victor, and in his despair he cried out, “Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low... I have opened my mouth unto the Lord, and cannot go back.” With singular nobleness of spirit she answered, “Do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth.” She only asked two months to bewail her maidenhood with her companions upon the mountains. She utters no reproach against her father’s rashness, and is content to yield her life since her father has returned a conqueror. But was it so? Did Jephthah offer up his daughter as a “burnt-offering”? This question has been much debated, and there are many able commentators who argue that such a sacrifice was actually offered. We are constrained, however, by a consideration of Jephthah’s known piety as a true worshipper of Jehovah, his evident acquaintance with the law of Moses, to which such sacrifices were abhorrent (Lev. 18:21; 20:2-5; Deut. 12:31), and the place he holds in the roll of the heroes of the faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Heb. 11:32), to conclude that she was only doomed to a life of perpetual celibacy.
3. Wikipedia has this to say about the result of the vow: Ethelbert William Bullinger,[8] looks at the word "and" in the Jephthah
