Reader's Version
- Scandalous Scripture: The Bible We Don’t Read in Church
- Part 10: Killed by a Woman
- Reader’s Version — Sermon by Gene Simco
- As a married man for more than two decades now, I have learned that it is important to make your wife happy.
- So last week, I decided to make sure my wife woke up with a smile on her face.
- Now I am not allowed to have Sharpies in the house anymore.
- Speaking of making women angry, the book of Judges gives us a few survival tips of its own. If you learn nothing else from Judges today, men, remember this: if a woman in Judges invites you into a tent and there is a tent peg nearby, do not drink the milk and do not take a nap.
- Apparently there is another rule as well: if you are attacking a tower and there is a woman standing above you holding a millstone, you may want to back up.
- So perhaps lesson number one from Judges is simple: never underestimate a woman.
- Judges is not particularly good for the male ego. Powerful kings get embarrassed. Generals get killed by women. Men who think they are controlling the story discover that they are not. Much like marriage, apparently.
- And one man becomes so concerned that people might say a woman killed him that, while he is dying, he orders another man to finish him off so nobody will remember it that way.
- It does not work.
- The Bible remembers exactly what he was trying to hide.
- There is something running underneath all of these stories. Judges repeatedly overturns our assumptions about who is strong, who is important, who is impressive, and who is actually useful.
- We are very bad at recognizing what real strength looks like.
- What Is Judges?
- Last week Joshua brought Israel into the Promised Land. God kept His promise. Israel received the land, but then Joshua dies, and Judges immediately begins showing us what happens next. Israel does not completely conquer the land or consistently finish what it was commanded to do. Instead, the people begin living alongside the surrounding nations, adopting their practices and worshiping their gods.
- That produces the cycle that repeats throughout the book. Israel turns away from God, Israel falls under oppression, Israel cries out, God raises a deliverer—a judge—God delivers Israel, and the land experiences rest. Then the judge dies, Israel turns away again, and usually the next cycle is worse than the one before it.
- Judges marks that deterioration with a refrain that appears seven times in some form: Israel again “did evil in the sight of the LORD” (Judges 2:11; 3:7, 12; 4:1; 6:1; 10:6; 13:1). Judges is not really the story of Israel gradually improving. It is the story of Israel gradually unraveling. Yet in the middle of that unraveling, God repeatedly raises unexpected people to deliver them.
- Before Judges reaches Ehud and the more familiar cycle of deliverers, the book opens with a bizarre little victory in Judges 1. Judah and Simeon defeat Adoni-bezek, a local Canaanite ruler who tries to flee, but they capture him and cut off his thumbs and big toes. Strange enough already. Then Adoni-bezek himself explains the irony: he says that seventy kings with their thumbs and big toes cut off had once gathered scraps beneath his table, and now God had repaid him for what he had done to others. The mutilation was not random. Removing the thumbs and big toes would cripple a defeated king’s ability to fight effectively and make him a living symbol of humiliation. Judges begins, then, with a man who had spent his life reducing other rulers to helpless dependents suddenly suffering the same fate himself. It is an early warning for the entire book: power is unstable, pride turns quickly, and the person who seems to be controlling everyone else may be much closer to collapse than he realizes.
- When we reach Judges 3, the first major judge is Othniel. God raises him, Israel is delivered, and the land rests. Then Israel turns away again. Later in the same chapter we meet Shamgar almost in passing, a man who kills six hundred Philistines with an oxgoad—not exactly standard military equipment. Already Judges is signaling something that will continue throughout the book: God does not seem particularly dependent upon conventional strength.
- But before Shamgar comes Ehud.
- Ehud: The Unexpected Deliverer
- Israel again does evil, and God allows Eglon, king of Moab, to overpower them. For eighteen years Israel is subject to Moab before the people finally cry out to the LORD and God raises Ehud as their deliverer.
- Moab already carries a complicated history by this point. The Moabites were distant relatives of Israel, traditionally tracing their ancestry back to Lot through the disturbing episode with his daughters after the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 19:30–38. Later, Moab becomes the setting for Balaam’s attempt to curse Israel in Numbers 22–24 and for Israel’s disastrous involvement with Baal of Peor in Numbers 25. Yet much later the Bible will give us Ruth, a Moabite woman who turns to Israel’s God and eventually becomes an ancestor of David—and ultimately of Jesus. So Moab is never merely a simple category of “bad outsiders.” Its history with Israel is hostile and scandalous, but redemption will eventually come out of Moab too.
- Here in Judges, however, Moab is Israel’s oppressor, and God raises Ehud.
- Ehud is from the tribe of Benjamin, and the text makes a point of telling us that he is left-handed. He makes a double-edged sword, straps it beneath his clothing, and carries Israel’s tribute to King Eglon. Eglon is described rather bluntly as an extremely fat man. After delivering the tribute, Ehud sends the other Israelites away, returns alone, and tells the king, “I have a secret message for you.”
- Eglon dismisses his attendants.
- Now Ehud has him alone.
- Judges 3:20–23 says:
- “Ehud walked over to Eglon, who was sitting alone in a cool upstairs room, and Ehud said, ‘I have a message from God for you!’ As King Eglon rose from his seat, Ehud reached with his left hand, pulled out the dagger strapped to his right thigh, and plunged it into the king’s belly. The dagger went so deep that the handle disappeared beneath the king’s fat. So Ehud did not pull out the dagger, and the king’s bowels emptied. Then Ehud closed and locked the doors of the room and escaped through the latrine.”
- The servants eventually return and find the doors locked. They assume the king must be relieving himself, so they wait. And wait. And wait. Judges says they wait until they become embarrassed. Finally, they unlock the doors and discover their king lying dead on the floor.
- By then, Ehud is long gone.
- He rallies Israel, Moab is defeated, and the land experiences rest for eighty years.
- There is dark humor running through the entire account. Eglon looks powerful. He is the king. Israel has served him for eighteen years. Ehud walks into the room looking like a harmless messenger bringing tribute. Eglon has every reason to assume that he is the powerful person in the room.
- He is not.
- And Ehud himself is unexpected.
- A Left-Handed Man From the “Right Hand” Tribe
- The Hebrew description of Ehud is actually more interesting than simply saying he was left-handed. Judges 3:15 calls him ’iṭṭēr yad-yĕmînô—something like “restricted in his right hand.” Ancient interpreters sometimes understood that to mean his right hand was impaired, while others take the expression as an idiom for left-handedness or possibly specialized training. Either way, the text emphasizes that Ehud does not use the hand an opponent would normally expect. His sword is hidden on his right thigh, exactly where a conventional search might be least likely to find the weapon of a left-handed man.
- There is even a little biblical irony in the fact that Ehud comes from Benjamin, a name traditionally understood as “son of the right hand.” The “son of the right hand” tribe produces a deliverer distinguished precisely by his left hand. And this is not the only time Judges associates Benjamin with unusual left-handed skill. Later, Judges 20:16 describes seven hundred specially selected Benjaminite warriors who are also left-handed and extraordinarily accurate with slings. Whatever the exact reason, left-handed fighting seems to have become something of a Benjaminite specialty.
- That fits the larger pattern beautifully. What might look like an oddity, limitation, or disadvantage becomes part of the very means God uses for deliverance. Ehud can conceal the weapon where Eglon’s people do not expect it, strike from the side they do not anticipate, and escape before anyone understands what has happened.
- The powerful king underestimates the man standing in front of him.
- And Judges is going to repeat that pattern.
- What looks powerful may not be. What looks insignificant may not be either.
- Deborah, Barak, and Jael
- By Judges 4, Israel has turned away again. This time the oppressor is Jabin, a Canaanite king, and his military commander is Sisera. Sisera has something terrifying at his disposal: nine hundred iron chariots. Israel has been badly oppressed for twenty years when we are introduced to Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, and a judge over Israel. People come to her for judgment, and she summons a man named Barak with a command from God. He is to gather ten thousand men and go to Mount Tabor. God will draw Sisera and his army out, and God promises victory.
- Barak responds that he will go, but only if Deborah goes with him. She agrees, but tells him that the honor of the victory will ultimately not belong to him, because the LORD will hand Sisera over to a woman. We should be fair to Barak here. Hebrews 11 later includes him among the people of faith, so he is not being presented as a complete coward. He does go. He does fight. But Judges deliberately shifts the honor of the story away from the obvious military hero.
- Sisera brings out his nine hundred iron chariots, and Deborah tells Barak that this is the day the LORD will give him victory. Barak descends from Mount Tabor, and God throws Sisera’s army into confusion. The army collapses. Sisera abandons his chariot and flees on foot. The man who began the battle with nine hundred iron chariots ends it running.
- Then he finds Jael.
- Jael is the wife of Heber the Kenite. There had been peace between Heber’s family and Jabin, so Sisera assumes that he has found a safe place. Jael invites him into her tent. He asks for water, and she gives him milk. She covers him, and Sisera tells her that if anyone comes looking for him, she is to deny that anyone is inside. Exhausted from the battle and his escape, Sisera falls asleep.
- Judges 4:21 says that Jael quietly approaches him with a hammer and a tent peg in her hand, drives the tent peg through his temple and into the ground, and he dies there. Barak eventually arrives looking for Sisera, and Jael essentially tells him, “Come here. I will show you the man you are looking for.” There lies Sisera with a tent peg through his head. Deborah’s prophecy has been fulfilled.
- The contrast is the point. Sisera has nine hundred iron chariots, military authority, an army, and a reputation. Jael has a tent peg and a hammer. Sisera loses. Judges is doing something deliberate here. The people who appear powerful are repeatedly humiliated, while the people everyone might overlook become the instruments God uses. Eglon underestimated Ehud. Sisera underestimates Jael. Once again, appearances are misleading.
- Sisera’s Mother Is Still Waiting
- Judges 5 retells the victory in the song of Deborah and Barak, and it ends with one of the darkest pieces of irony in the entire account. Sisera’s mother is standing at a window, waiting for her son to come home. She looks through the lattice and wonders why his chariot is taking so long and why she cannot yet hear the sound of the wheels.
- The women around her reassure her that there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation. In their minds, Sisera has won. He must still be dividing the spoils of battle: clothing, embroidered garments, and women taken as prizes of war. They imagine him returning triumphantly with the rewards of victory.
- But he is not coming home.
- While Sisera’s mother imagines her son dividing captured women among his soldiers, Sisera himself is already dead because of a woman.
- That is the brutal irony of Judges. Human beings keep misreading reality because they keep confusing outward strength with actual strength. Sisera looked powerful. His army looked superior. His chariots looked decisive. His mother assumed victory because everything she could see seemed to point in that direction.
- And she was wrong.
- Human arrogance keeps misreading reality.
- Gideon
- Next we come to the person everyone seems to park on: Gideon. We are not going to stay here very long, because Gideon gets plenty of attention already.
- The cycle has repeated. Israel sins again, Midian oppresses them, and we meet perhaps the most famous judge in the book. Gideon is hiding in a winepress, trying to thresh wheat without being seen, when the angel of the LORD greets him with the almost comical words, “Mighty hero, the LORD is with you!” Gideon does not look mighty. He is hiding. He questions. He doubts. He asks for signs. Eventually we get the famous fleece test.
- Then God reduces Gideon’s army. Thousands of soldiers become only three hundred after the well-known water test, and God delivers Israel again. The point is difficult to miss: God does not need impressive numbers to demonstrate His strength.
- But success changes Gideon, and this is where his story becomes more complicated. The frightened man hiding in the winepress becomes a victorious national hero, and sometimes failure is not our greatest spiritual danger. Sometimes success is.
- After the victory, Israel asks Gideon to rule over them. Judges 8:22–23 says, “Then the Israelites said to Gideon, ‘Be our ruler! You and your son and your grandson will be our rulers, for you have rescued us from Midian.’ But Gideon replied, ‘I will not rule over you, nor will my son. The LORD will rule over you!’”
- That is an excellent answer.
- Except what Gideon does afterward begins sounding remarkably like a king. He accumulates wealth and collects gold from the battle. He makes an ephod that eventually becomes a spiritual snare. He has many wives and seventy sons. Then one of his sons, born through his concubine in Shechem, receives an extremely interesting name: Abimelech. The name can carry the sense, “My father is king.”
- Gideon says, “I will not be king,” and then raises a son named, essentially, “My father is king.”
- Sometimes what we say about ourselves and what we actually want are not quite the same thing.
- There is another small scene worth noticing in Judges 8:20–21. Gideon captures the Midianite kings Zebah and Zalmunna and tells his young son Jether to kill them. Jether cannot do it. He is young and afraid. The kings then look at Gideon and essentially tell him to do it himself, adding the line, “As the man is, so is his strength.” Gideon kills them.
- That line fits Judges remarkably well because the whole book keeps asking us, What does strength actually look like? The hiding Gideon becomes powerful, but eventually that power becomes dangerous. Then Gideon dies, and his son Abimelech decides that he really does want to be king.
- Abimelech and the Bramble King
- Judges 9 introduces Abimelech as Gideon’s son through the concubine from Shechem, and he wants power. He goes to his mother’s relatives there and asks whether they would rather be ruled by all of Gideon’s sons or by one man who is their own flesh and blood. His relatives support him. They give him silver from the temple of Baal-berith, and Abimelech uses the money to hire reckless men.
- Then he goes to his father’s household and slaughters his brothers on one stone. Gideon had seventy sons; only the youngest, Jotham, escapes. Afterward the people of Shechem make Abimelech king.
- The son whose name means “My father is king” has now become king himself.
- Jotham responds with one of the earliest political parables in the Bible. He climbs Mount Gerizim and tells the people about trees searching for a king. First they approach the olive tree, but the olive tree refuses to abandon the oil by which it serves God and people merely to wave over the other trees. Then they ask the fig tree, but it refuses to give up its sweetness and fruit. The grapevine refuses for the same reason; it already has something productive to do.
- Finally, the trees ask the thornbush—the bramble.
- And the bramble says yes.
- It offers the absurd invitation, “Come and take refuge in my shade,” even though a thornbush provides almost no useful shade at all. Then it threatens that if the trees will not submit, fire will come from the bramble and consume even the cedars of Lebanon.
- The satire is brilliant. The productive trees are busy producing something worthwhile. The useless bramble is the one eager to rule. Jotham’s point complicates our theme in an important way. Judges is not saying that everybody unimpressive is automatically virtuous or that everybody powerful is automatically evil. It is showing how badly human beings judge strength and usefulness. Sometimes the overlooked person is exactly the one God uses. At other times, the person most desperate to appear important is precisely the one least qualified to have power.
- Jotham warns that Abimelech and Shechem will eventually destroy one another.
- That is exactly what happens.
- “Don’t Let Them Say a Woman Killed Me”
- Abimelech rules for about three years before everything begins unraveling. The people of Shechem turn against him. Conflict breaks out, bloodshed follows, and Abimelech eventually destroys Shechem. Then he attacks another town, Thebez, where the people flee into a fortified tower.
- Abimelech approaches the tower intending to burn the entrance and destroy everyone inside.
- And then Judges does it again.
- Judges 9:52–54 says, “Abimelech followed them to attack the tower. But as he prepared to set fire to the entrance, a woman on the roof dropped a millstone that landed on Abimelech’s head and crushed his skull. He quickly said to his young armor bearer, ‘Draw your sword and kill me! Don’t let it be said that a woman killed Abimelech!’ So the young man ran him through with his sword, and he died.”
- Abimelech knows he is dying, but apparently he has one final concern: his reputation. His skull is crushed, his kingdom is collapsing, and his last thought is essentially, Please do not let history say that a woman killed me.
- So his armor-bearer runs him through with a sword.
- Problem solved.
- Right?
- Not exactly.
- The Bible Remembers
- Years later, in 2 Samuel 11, David’s commander Joab sends a messenger to report on a disastrous battle near the walls of Rabbah. Joab anticipates that David may become angry when he hears that the soldiers got too close to the city wall, so he tells the messenger what David might say: “Who killed Abimelech son of Jerub-besheth? Wasn’t it a woman who dropped an upper millstone on him from the wall at Thebez?” (2 Samuel 11:21).
- Think about that.
- Abimelech’s final act on earth was an attempt to control how people would remember his death. He did not want anyone saying, “A woman killed Abimelech.”
- And generations later, Scripture remembers him essentially as:
- “Remember the guy a woman killed with a millstone?”
- That is almost perfect.
- Abimelech could control the final sword thrust, but he could not control the truth. Pride spends enormous energy trying to manage the story, but eventually reality has a way of surviving the spin.
- You cannot control your legacy through pride.
- What is Judges Showing us?
- By this point, the pattern should be impossible to miss. Eglon is a powerful king, and he underestimates Ehud. Sisera is a powerful general with nine hundred iron chariots, and he underestimates Jael. Gideon begins weak, frightened, and dependent upon God, but success begins changing him. Abimelech murders his way into power, only to have a nameless woman drop a millstone on his head.
- Again and again, human beings misidentify strength.
- We see position, title, money, armies, influence, reputation, masculinity, visibility, and success, and we assume that those things must equal strength. Judges repeatedly says otherwise. The powerful are often much weaker than they appear, and the people who seem insignificant may become the very people God uses.
- Before we finish this first half of Judges, however, there is one more disturbing story we need to look at. It is not mainly a story about physical strength. It is a story about a man who has already been empowered by God but apparently believes he needs to add something dramatic of his own.
- His name is Jephthah.
- Jephthah and the Vow God Never Asked For
- Jephthah begins as another unlikely deliverer. He is the son of a prostitute, rejected by his brothers and driven away from his family inheritance. Later, when the Ammonites threaten Israel, the same people who had pushed him away come looking for him because they need a capable military leader.
- Jephthah becomes that leader, and Judges 11:29 tells us something extremely important before he ever makes his famous vow: “The Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah.”
- That order matters.
- The Spirit comes first.
- God is already empowering Jephthah for the task.
- Then Jephthah makes his vow.
- He promises that if God gives him victory over the Ammonites, whatever comes out from the doors of his house to meet him when he returns will belong to the LORD, and he will offer it as a burnt offering.
- God gives him the victory.
- Then Jephthah returns home.
- His daughter comes out to meet him, dancing and playing a tambourine.
- She is his only child.
- Jephthah tears his clothes because he immediately understands what his own words have cost him. His daughter asks for two months to go into the mountains with her companions and mourn her virginity. When the two months are over, she returns.
- Then Judges 11:39 gives us one of the most chillingly understated sentences in the entire book: “He did to her according to the vow which he had made.”
- God never asked Jephthah for this vow. God never required a bargain before granting the victory. In fact, the text specifically told us that the Spirit of the LORD had already come upon him before he made it. Jephthah tried to add his own dramatic promise to what God was already doing, and his family paid the price.
- Did Jephthah Actually Kill His Daughter?
- Because the story is so horrific, Christians have understandably looked for another way to read it. A popular interpretation says Jephthah did not kill his daughter at all. Instead, he supposedly dedicated her permanently to God, perhaps to a life of celibacy or service at a sanctuary.
- That interpretation makes the story easier to live with.
- The problem is that it is much harder to make it fit the actual text.
- Judges 11:31 in Hebrew says:
- וְהָיָה לַיהוָה וְהַעֲלִיתִיהוּ עוֹלָה
- wehāyâ laYHWH wehaʿălîtîhû ʿōlâ
- The natural sense is: “It shall be the LORD’s, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering.”
- The key word is עֹלָה — ʿōlâ, the ordinary Hebrew term for a burnt offering, an offering that ascends in smoke. The verb before it, from עָלָה — ʿālâ, means “to cause to go up” and is standard sacrificial language. The suggestion that the waw connecting the two clauses should mean “or”—“it shall belong to the LORD, or I will offer it as a burnt offering”—is grammatically possible in some Hebrew constructions, but it is not the most natural reading here. The NET translators specifically note that the construction is much more naturally understood as explaining how the first thing will belong to the LORD: by being offered as a sacrifice.
- The Greek Septuagint does not soften the language either. It renders Jephthah’s promise with:
- ἀνοίσω αὐτὸν ὁλοκαύτωμα
- anoisō auton holokautōma
- “I will offer him as a whole burnt offering.”
- The noun ὁλοκαύτωμα — holokautōma refers to an offering consumed completely by fire. Whatever later interpreters may have wished Jephthah meant, the ancient Greek translators understood the vow as sacrificial language in the ordinary sense.
- Then the narrative itself follows the vow straight through. Jephthah vows. God gives victory. His daughter comes out. Jephthah is devastated. She asks for two months. She returns. And the narrator says:
- He did to her according to the vow he had made.
- If the vow was a burnt offering, and the narrator says he carried out the vow, the burden of proof rests heavily upon any interpretation that says he actually did something entirely different.
- The BibleBelievingChristian.org treatment makes essentially this argument: the story’s horror should not cause us to rewrite the story. The straightforward sequence of Judges 11 presents the vow and its fulfillment without inserting a hidden alternative outcome.
- Articles Below.
- But Why Does She Mourn Her Virginity?
- This is usually the strongest objection.
- If she is about to die, why does she mourn her virginity rather than her death?
- Because in the world of Judges, the two tragedies are connected.
- The narrator has already emphasized that she is Jephthah’s only child. He has no other son or daughter. If she dies unmarried and childless, Jephthah’s family line ends with her. She will never marry, never bear children, and never continue her father’s household.
- Her virginity therefore does not prove she survived. It intensifies the tragedy of her death.
- The text never says, “She remained a virgin for the rest of her long life.” It says that Jephthah fulfilled his vow and then adds that she had never known a man. That makes excellent sense as an obituary-like observation: she died before marriage and without descendants.
- The annual remembrance also points in the same direction. Judges says that Israelite women went out four days every year in connection with Jephthah’s daughter. The rare Hebrew verb לְתַנּוֹת — le-tannot can be discussed in several ways—commemorate, recount, lament—but the Septuagint removes much of the ambiguity by using θρηνεῖν — thrēnein, “to mourn” or “lament.” These women are not described as making an annual visit to a living recluse. The ancient Greek tradition understands them to be mourning her.
- And the earliest surviving Jewish interpretations understood the story that way. Josephus, writing in the first century, explicitly says Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering and adds that the act was contrary to the Law and unacceptable to God. Pseudo-Philo, another early Jewish witness, likewise understands her as actually sacrificed. A study in Jewish Bible Quarterly notes that, insofar as surviving evidence allows us to tell, Jewish commentators throughout the first millennium understood her death literally. The important historical point goes in the opposite direction from what many modern Christians assume: the literal-sacrifice interpretation is not a new skeptical reading. It is the ancient reading. The permanent-celibacy explanation appears much later and requires assumptions that Judges itself never states.
- God Did Not Command This
- And this is where we have to make an equally important distinction.
- Saying that Jephthah sacrificed his daughter does not mean God approved of what he did.
- The Law explicitly condemns human sacrifice. Israel was forbidden to imitate the nations by offering sons or daughters in fire (Leviticus 18:21; Deuteronomy 12:31; 18:10). Other biblical texts condemn the practice in the strongest possible terms. Judges does not suddenly reverse that theology.
- This is the book of Judges.
- The entire book is documenting the moral and theological deterioration of Israel.
- God’s Spirit empowering someone for a particular act of deliverance does not mean that everything that person subsequently thinks, says, or does carries divine approval. Samson should have cured us of that assumption already.
- Jephthah is listed among the people of faith in Hebrews 11, just as other deeply flawed people appear there. Hebrews celebrates acts of faith; it does not canonize every decision those people ever made.
- And that is precisely why the order in Judges 11 is so tragic.
- The Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah before the vow.
- He did not need to bargain for victory.
- He did not need to purchase God’s favor.
- He did not need to make the promise.
- God was already at work.
- Jephthah seems to take the transactional logic of the surrounding world—If you give me this, I will give you that—and attach the name of YHWH to it. Whether that reflects direct pagan influence or simply disastrous religious ignorance, the result is the same: zeal outruns truth.
- And his daughter pays for it.
- That is what makes Jephthah’s story so scandalous. It is not a story teaching us that God desires human sacrifice. It is a story showing us what can happen when someone invokes God’s name while acting contrary to what God has actually revealed.
- God never asked for the vow.
- Jephthah had already received the Spirit.
- The victory was already God’s to give.
- And in trying to add something dramatic to God’s work, Jephthah destroyed the very future he should have treasured.
- That, too, fits the downward spiral of Judges.
- The question is no longer merely, “Who looks strong?”
- Now another question is beginning to emerge:
- What happens when people who genuinely know God’s name begin doing things God never asked them to do?
- Articles for Further Reading:
- https://www.biblebelievingchristian.org/post/the-death-of-jephthah-s-daughter-a-tragedy-of-zeal-without-knowledge
- https://www.biblebelievingchristian.org/post/jephthah-and-the-danger-of-rash-vows
- Paul Has Seen This Problem Before
- When we get to the New Testament, Paul addresses the same tendency to misunderstand strength. He writes to the Corinthians, a church living in a prominent city and surrounded by a culture that valued status, public reputation, eloquence, philosophical sophistication, and impressive speakers. Those values were beginning to shape the church as well.
- That helps explain why one of the first problems Paul confronts in 1 Corinthians is what we might call pastor worship or personality-driven Christianity. Some were saying, “I follow Paul.” Others preferred Apollos, Peter, or another prominent teacher. They were beginning to evaluate Christian leaders using the same measurements their surrounding culture used to evaluate public speakers and rhetoricians: Who is the most impressive? Who speaks best? Who carries the greatest status? Who do I want associated with my name?
- Paul attacks the entire way of thinking.
- In 1 Corinthians 1:26–29 he tells them to look at themselves. Few of them were considered wise by the world’s standards. Few were powerful or came from privileged backgrounds. Instead, God deliberately chose people and things the world regarded as foolish, weak, despised, or insignificant in order to overturn the world’s measurements and remove every reason for human boasting.
- Paul almost sounds as though he has been reading Judges.
- Ehud does not look impressive standing before King Eglon. Deborah leads in a world dominated by men. Jael has no army or iron chariots. Gideon begins hiding in a winepress. A nameless woman standing on a tower ends the reign of Abimelech with a millstone. Again and again, God works in ways that make it impossible for human beings to take the credit.
- God keeps choosing people who expose how unreliable our measurements of importance really are.
- But Paul’s argument is much bigger than Judges.
- The Cross Redefines Strength
- If we back up several verses in 1 Corinthians 1, Paul says that the message of the cross itself looks foolish according to the world’s standards. People want wisdom, power, signs, eloquence—something impressive enough to command respect.
- And God gives them a crucified Messiah.
- Think about how the scene would have looked in the moment. Rome looked powerful. The cross looked weak. The soldiers looked powerful. Jesus looked defeated. The empire appeared victorious. The Messiah appeared humiliated.
- Everything visible seemed to say that Rome had won.
- Paul says they had misunderstood strength again.
- What looked like weakness was accomplishing salvation. What looked like defeat was becoming victory. The cross exposed the limitations of every worldly measurement of power because, as Paul says, even what appears to be the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
- That makes the ultimate example of God overturning our ideas about strength not Ehud, Deborah, Jael, Gideon, or the woman with the millstone.
- It is Jesus Christ.
- The world looked at the cross and saw failure. God was reconciling the world to Himself.
- The world saw humiliation. God was accomplishing redemption.
- The world saw weakness.
- God saw victory.
- Be Careful What Success Does to You
- So how does all of this apply to us?
- Gideon begins knowing that he is weak and needs God. Then God uses him. Success comes. Influence grows. Somewhere along the way, the man who refused the title of king begins living increasingly like one.
- Sometimes we pray, “God, make me successful.” Maybe we should also pray, “God, if You give me success, do not let that success change who I belong to.”
- Weakness made Gideon depend on God. Success tempted Gideon to depend on Gideon.
- That is something we touched on last week when I told part of my own story. We can spend our lives pursuing things that we believe will finally make us secure, successful, or significant, only to discover that those same things can quietly draw us away from God.
- Proverbs 30 contains one of the wisest prayers in Scripture. Agur asks God not to give him either poverty or riches, but only what he needs. Why? Because he understands both dangers. In poverty he might become desperate and dishonor God, but in prosperity he fears becoming so satisfied that he says, essentially, “Who is the LORD?” (Proverbs 30:8–9).
- Success can make us forget the God we once desperately needed.
- So this is one of those lessons Scripture keeps teaching us from different directions. If something we are calling a blessing is consistently pulling us away from God, we need to question what it has become in our lives. If success causes us to stop praying, stop gathering with believers, stop depending upon God, or begin taking credit for what He has done, then something has gone terribly wrong.
- And if what we have causes us to boast in ourselves rather than glorify God, we have missed the point Paul just made in 1 Corinthians.
- God works in such a way that no one can boast before Him.
- Stop Managing Your Reputation
- Abimelech is dying with his skull crushed, and he is still worried about what people will say about him.
- We may laugh at that, but we do the same thing.
- We protect the image. We spin the failure. We hide the weakness. We try to control the story.
- There are entire businesses devoted to online reputation management. In fact, one of the companies I operated when I was in business did exactly that, so I understand how important reputation can become to people.
- But reputation management is no longer just something celebrities and corporations do. Social media has turned almost everyone into some version of a public-relations department. We curate what people see. We present the successes and hide the failures. We manage the photograph, the résumé, the story, the image.
- People do it professionally too. Résumés are polished until sometimes they barely resemble the person who wrote them. Weaknesses disappear. Embarrassing chapters are omitted. Everything is arranged to tell the most flattering possible version of the story.
- But Jesus says in Matthew 23:12, “Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
- Abimelech spends his final breath trying to control his legacy. Scripture remembers the truth anyway.
- The truth has a way of surviving our attempts to manage it.
- One of the most freeing things I have learned is that if you own the truth, nobody can weaponize the truth against you in quite the same way. Be honest about what happened. Be humble about your weakness. Let your test become part of your testimony. Let the mess become part of the message God uses to help somebody else.
- That does not mean we glorify our failures or pretend sin does not matter. It means we stop wasting our lives pretending that we never failed.
- Reputation management can become a prison. Truth and humility can set us free from having to maintain the illusion.
- Stop Measuring Strength the Way the World Does
- Judges also forces us to reconsider what we call strength.
- We are impressed by money, titles, charisma, influence, platforms, education, physical strength, and success. None of those things is automatically bad, but none of them tells us whether God approves of someone.
- Visibility is not anointing. Influence is not character. Success is not necessarily faithfulness.
- Sisera had nine hundred iron chariots.
- Jael had one tent peg.
- Guess who won.
- We are going to return to this theme as Israel’s story continues, because eventually Israel will demand a king so that they can be like the nations around them. They will begin importing the world’s picture of what leadership should look like into the people of God.
- Christians can do exactly the same thing.
- We can become impressed by degrees, titles, résumés, celebrity, platforms, and institutional prestige and begin assuming those things are evidence of spiritual authority. Education can be enormously valuable. Scholarship can serve the church beautifully. There is nothing wrong with earning a PhD or developing expertise.
- The problem comes when we begin believing that the power of the church depends upon those things.
- Paul has just told us otherwise.
- The church must never reject genuine learning, but neither should we reject the genuine power of the Holy Spirit because the person God chooses to use does not possess the credentials the world finds impressive.
- The question is not whether someone can display enough letters after his name.
- The question is whether God is being glorified through a faithful life.
- Do Not Underestimate Who God Can Use — Including You
- And that brings the message closer to home.
- Last week I mentioned that I grew up with a form of dyslexia. School was difficult for me. I did not feel particularly intelligent or academically successful, and for a long time I carried the sense that I had disappointed people who expected more from me.
- So I responded by trying to become strong according to the world’s measurements. If I could not be impressive in one way, I would become impressive in another. I pursued physical strength, success, business, money, and the kinds of accomplishments that I thought might prove something.
- It did not ultimately give me what I was looking for.
- In fact, much of it drew me farther away from God until I eventually had to surrender and recognize how badly I needed Him.
- What I once considered weakness became part of my testimony. I believe God healed and transformed what had limited me, not so that I could boast about myself, but so that He would receive the glory for what He could do through a weakness I could never have overcome on my own.
- That is why Judges matters beyond these strange ancient stories.
- Judges repeatedly puts unexpected people in the middle of God’s work. Ehud. Deborah. Jael. A frightened Gideon hiding in a winepress. A nameless woman standing on a tower holding a millstone.
- So be careful saying, “God could never use that person.”
- And be equally careful saying, “God could never use me.”
- Maybe you are not the strongest person in the room. Maybe you do not have the title, the platform, the education, the confidence, or the personality everyone immediately notices.
- Good.
- God has never been limited by what the world finds impressive.
- You Do Not Have to Be Impressive
- Judges keeps turning strength upside down. Kings fall. Armies collapse. The proud are humbled. The overlooked become central.
- And ultimately, that pattern leads us to Jesus.
- The world looked at the cross and saw weakness. God accomplished salvation. The world saw defeat. God accomplished victory.
- So perhaps the question is not, “Am I strong enough?”
- Maybe the better question is, “Am I faithful enough to let God use what I have?”
- Paul says that God chooses what the world calls weak to shame what it calls strong, so that no one can boast before Him.
- And if God could use Ehud, Deborah, Jael, a frightened Gideon, and a nameless woman with a millstone, then God is not limited by what the world thinks of you either.
- You do not need to become impressive first. You do not need everybody to notice you. You do not need to look strong before God can use you.
- Give Him what you have. Stay humble. Stay dependent. Stay faithful.
- You do not have to be impressive. You just have to be faithful.
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- ©️Copyright 2026 Gene Simco Most Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Scriptures in brackets reflect the original Biblical languages.