The transcript of A Sermon on Judges 4:1-24 has been lightly edited.
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Today we are going to cover all of chapter four in the book of Judges. So I would ask you to turn in your Bibles, if you have them, to Judges chapter four. And before we read all of Judges chapter four, I do want to mention a couple things.
Last week, we went back to creation. We followed Paul tracing back to creation the issue of women in the church. And I want us to understand that your view of creation is important. Whenever Paul deals with the issue we dealt with last week, whenever Paul deals with marriage, whenever Paul deals with sexuality, whenever Paul deals with a lot of the things that we deal with in our world today, he does so by referring back to the creation account, Genesis one through three.
And that teaches us that what you believe about creation is important. We need a true and historical first Adam who fell in sin so that we can also have a second Adam who did not fall and provided for us salvation.
We need to know that the world, that nature, that creation was subjected to futility because humans sin and because it was subjected to futility in the past, it will be subjected to glory and restoration in the future when our Lord returns. It is important what you believe about creation. And oftentimes we forget that, or at least I do within the church.
The other thing I want to point out is in the sixth paragraph of the Confession of Faith, chapter one, the chapter on scripture, the church fathers wrote this:
The whole council of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, for man’s salvation, for faith and life is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture.”
And summarizing this, the Shorter Catechism question two says:
“The word of God is the only rule to direct us how we might glorify and enjoy God.”
Well, everything we need for the Christian life is in the Scriptures and the Confession tells us that it’s either clearly written down for us—Salvation is clearly written down for us through the scriptures, but other things are not as clear, but they are still there. And they are there through the hard work of good, necessary deduction of truth.
We need to all be about that work, that work of Bible study, that work of mining the Scriptures for those things that may not be as clear as, say, the salvation message is in Scripture.
I need to be doing the hard work so that I might come and bring you tools and teaching that helps you to grow in your good and necessary work of deduction and reasoning to find those things that are not as clear as the other things.
You need that work for your own personal growth. I need it for my personal growth too. You need to do that work for your own personal growth, but also so that you can hold me accountable to the truth of the scripture. A lot of churches today have pastors who are proclaiming falsehoods, and their people don’t realize it because they’re not in the word as they should be.
Is it hard work? Absolutely. Are we called to it? Also absolutely. And just because something is not in the Bible as clearly as you would like it to be doesn’t mean it’s not in the Bible. And we need to be doing the good and necessary work of using our faculties of reason to dig and to find the treasures that God has for us in his words.
So with that in mind, let us turn our attention now to Judges chapter 4 beginning in verse 1.
And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord after Ehud died. And the Lord sold them into the hand of Jabin, king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. The commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in Harasheth-Hagoyim. Then the people of Israel cried out to the Lord for help, for he had 900 chariots of iron, and he oppressed the people of Israel cruelly for 20 years. Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the people of Israel came up to her for judgment. She sent and summoned Barak, the son of Abinoam from Kedesh Naphtali, and said to him, has not the Lord, the God of Israel commanded you, go gather your men at Mount Tabor, taking 10,000 from the people of Naphtali and the people of Zebulun, and I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by the river Kishon with his chariots and his troops, and I will give him into your hand. Barak said to her, if you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go. 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. Then Deborah arose and went with Barak to Kedesh, and Barak called out to Zebulun and Naphtali to Kedesh, and 10,000 men went up at his heels, and Deborah went up with him. Now Heber, the Kenite, had separated from the Kenites, the descendants of Hobab, the father-in-law of Moses, and had pitched his tent as far away as the oak in Zaananim, which is near Kedesh. When Sisera was told that Barak, the son of Abinoam, had gone up to Mount Tabor, Sisera called out all his chariots, 900 chariots of iron, and all the men who were with him from Harasheth-Hagoyim to the river Kishon. And Deborah said to Barak, up, for this is the day in which the Lord has given Sisera into your hand. Does not the Lord go out before you? So Barak went down from Tabor with 10,000 men following him, and the Lord routed Sisera and all his chariots and all his army before Barak by the edge of the sword. And Sisera got down from his chariot and fled away on foot, and Barak pursued the chariots and the army to Harasheth-Hagoyim, and all the army of Sisera fell by the edge of the sword. Not a man was left. But Sisera fled away on foot to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber, the Kenite. For there was peace between Jabin, the king of Hazor, and the house of Heber, the Kenite. And Jael came out to meet Sisera and said to him, turn aside, my lord, turn aside to me, do not be afraid. So he turned aside to her into the tent, and she covered him with a rug. And he said to her, please give me a little water to drink, for I am thirsty. So she opened the skin of milk and gave him a drink and covered him. And he said to her, stand in the opening of the tent, and if any man comes and asks you, is anyone here, say no. But Jael, the wife of Heber, took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand, and she went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple until it went down into the ground while he was laying fast asleep from weariness. So he died. And behold, as Barak was pursuing Sisera, Jael went out to meet him and said to him, come, and I will show you the man whom you are seeking. So he went into her tent, and there lay Sisera dead with the tent peg in his temple. So on that day, God subdued Jabin, the king of Canaan, before the people of Israel. And the hand of the people of Israel pressed harder and harder against Jabin, the king of Canaan, until they destroyed Jabin, the king of Canaan. And then we’re told at the end of chapter five that the land had rest for 40 years.”
Let’s pray. To the great God above, I do ask that you would open our eyes and our ears so that we might not only see you and hear you, but also be changed by you. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
Empress Dowager Elizabeth Angela Marguerite. What a name. What a title.
Empress Dowager Elizabeth Angela Marguerite was the mother of Queen Elizabeth, the longest reigning monarch in England. And Elizabeth Angela was never supposed to be queen of England. Her husband, George, had a brother, an older brother, who was the monarch of England.
And he decided that he would rather have a divorced American woman as a wife than be king in England. And so he stepped down and abdicated. And George stepped in to fill the role as king, which means Elizabeth Angela became queen of England.
As the queen in her role, she was married to the king, so she had no real authority, but she acted on behalf of the nation of England throughout World War II. During the bombing of London, when Germany was sending planes across the English Channel bombing London, she was advised to leave Buckingham Palace and to flee into the countryside, where she would be safe. And she said, no, absolutely not.
So she would dress to the nines every day after the bombings had occurred in the evening, and she would go out and she would walk the streets of London. And she would offer encouragement and hope to the people of England. Deborah is very much a person who comes along when the nation of Israel needs hope and encouragement and offers that hope and encouragement to Barack so that he might be raised up to be the leader, the deliverer of Israel during this time of oppression.
And so today, as we go through this, we will look at Deborah and Jael and the glory of women within the nation of Israel and within the church. We will look at Barack and his reluctant faith, the reluctant hero. And we will also consider the true hero of the story, who is the Lord.
And by considering all these things, I want us to see the call upon us that by the power of God, that we are to go out and do what God has called us to do.
Now, before we jump into these three points, I want us to think about and to consider a truth that is told to us in the opening passage. We see this passage every time one of the major judges is introduced.
“And the people of Israel again or over and over did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.”
And it’s easy to lose that passage, that statement as we go through. And we see it six times throughout the book of Judges.
But it’s important for us to rest on that statement for just a moment because it points to us a very valuable truth. You can have all the victory and all the rules and all the laws that God gives you, and it’s not enough. Because unless the heart is changed, you will always turn from the victories of God. You will always turn from the rules of God. You will always turn from the laws of God. And you will again do evil in the sight of the Lord. You will forget God and you will chase after the gods of this world.
Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, the prophet Ezekiel, both talk about our need to have a heart of stone replaced with a heart of flesh, a heart of flesh that is living and in tune with the righteousness and the goodness of God.
All the rules in the world are not enough to change that heart. All the miracles in the world are not enough to change that heart. God had to act in history through Jesus. He had to act in your life by the power of the Holy Spirit to change that heart.
And so every time we see that statement and the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, instead of kind of shaking our heads and going, “Those Israelites are at it again, we need to search our own hearts and make sure that we have put our faith and our hope in Jesus and in Jesus alone. And in doing that, we have had our hearts changed by the power of the Holy Spirit.
DEBORAH & JAEL: THE GLORY OF WOMEN
So Israel has done evil once again in the sight of the Lord and God, as he promised to do, has sold them into discipline at the hand of Jabin and Sisera.
Jabin is the king of Canaan. Sisera is his general who runs his armies and Sisera has at his hands 900 chariots of iron. This was the edge of technology in military warfare during the time.
And if you were on a plain, if you were on a flat level surface, 900 chariots of iron with their horses and with the soldiers in them would decimate far larger armies as they rode through. And so this fact that Sisera had 900 chariots brings great fear to the Israelites. So they cry out to God, not a cry of repentance, just a cry of complaint.
And yet God hears and answers and he raises up Barak to be the deliverer, the judge, the savior of Israel. But we are told this time, which we haven’t been told in the past, how God raised him up. He sent a message to a woman, he sent a message to Deborah, the prophetess, we’re told there.
A prophet is one who merely carries a message from God to another person. Some prophets were inspired and we have their names on the books of the Bible: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nahum, Habakkuk.
Other prophets just worked in Israel doing the work of calling people to repentance. We see these groups of prophets in 1st and 2nd Kings, whether led by Elijah or Elisha. We see prophets in king’s courts like Nathan and Jonah. Jonah was a prophet to a king before he was a prophet to Nineveh.
We even see throughout the books four people throughout scripture in the Old Testament named prophetess, whether it’s Deborah or Huldah or the other ladies throughout 1st and 2nd Kings.
A prophet is merely one who brings a message. And the message Deborah brings to Barak is that God has raised him up to be the next deliverer of Israel. And she encourages him in this by giving the plans, the battle plans that God had given to her, by carrying those battle plans to Barak. And at one point in the battle, even telling Barak, the Lord has given the battle into your hands. Now go.
God gifts some people with the gift of encouragement, with the gift of lifting up, with the gift of discernment. And we should be willing to listen to those people that have that gift, as long as what the message they bring to us parallels what Scripture says. If they bring something new to us, we need to beware.
But God gifts people within his church with the gift of encouragement. And we need Deborah’s within our church. We need women who will come to us and encourage us in our ministry.
I am fortunate to have one. I call her Michelle instead of Deborah, it gets me in far less trouble. But all leaders in church needed Deborah to come to them and to encourage them and to lift them up.
And God reminds us of this with Deborah in this particular passage. Now, she is also described as one who sits under the palm and people came to her for judgment. And this could be a little problematic because this role of deciding the law for or against people was given to a specific group of people within the nation of Israel, and that was the priesthood.
And so I believe there’s a double meaning here when it says that the sons or the people of Israel come to her for judgment. She is set up near Bethel, which is where the tabernacle was set up, which is where the priests were supposed to minister and were supposed to take cases to adjudicate the law.
And so I think the double meaning here is that the priests have given up their role, have abdicated their role. And so Deborah is doing this. And so not only are they coming to her for legal judgment, but she is also God’s judgment on the priesthood for not doing their job.
BARAK: THE RELUCTANT HERO
But back to the battle. Barak, she calls Barak and she says, “Go grab your men.” It’s very, it’s very intentional in there that it says, your men grab your 10,000 men and take them to Tabor. Likely, Barak had already done some military stuff and he had people following him.
And he’s told that God will draw Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army to meet him by the river. Now, what is Barak’s response to this? And this is where we see the reluctance in Barak. And this is often where we get hung up on Barak.
Barak says to Deborah, I’m going to leave the decision as to whether or not I’m going to go in your hands. If you go, I’ll go. If you don’t go, I won’t go.
This is blaming somebody else, basically, for whatever goes right or whatever goes wrong. This is Adam in Genesis chapter three, when God comes to him saying, well, the woman you gave me made me sin. He is deflecting responsibility from himself and he’s putting that responsibility on Deborah.
And in this, he fails in his faith. Really, we should see Deborah come to him and say, go in verse six. And then the very next verse should be verse 10. And Barak called out Zebulun and Naphtali to Kadesh and 10,000 men went up at his heels. That’s what we should see. But Barak in this moment does have a faltering of faith.
But how does Barak with this faltering of faith end up in Hebrews 11, 32 with this Hebrews 11, 32 say, well, in this, this hall of faith, as we often call it, where we have Abraham and Noah and all these people who are faithful as examples of those who live by faith in verse 32, we see:
“What more shall I say for time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and of the prophets.”
If Barak gives up his faith or acts in a faithless and reluctant way here, how do we say that he’s faithful? Well, if you’re anything like me, you forget the rest of the story. We get so hung up on Barak acting and abdicating his responsibility in this part that we forget the rest of the story.
And what is the rest of the story? Well, he gathers his army and he goes to Mount Tabor. God draws Sisera to the river Kishon. The river Kishon was dry most of the year, but during the rainy season, it would fill up and it would be a flooding river. And it cut this plain in half in between in this valley. And it was dry at this time, we’re told.
And as Sisera approached it, something happened. Chapter five tells us that God used his authority over nature to cause rain and earthquakes and things like that. But all of a sudden, the chariots were no longer effective. Likely what happened is God sent a flash flood along the river Kishon, muddied the ground so the chariots wouldn’t work.
And at that point, Deborah says to Barak, up, for this is the day which the Lord has given Sisera into your hand. Does not the Lord go out before you? And this time Barak goes without reluctance, without equivocation. He goes and he runs six of the he runs six miles across the plain to these chariots and he meets them and he beats them.
He pushes them all the way back to the city that they were set in. And he utterly destroys them. He destroys, he and his army destroy every single soldier that was fighting against them that day.
He even takes the battle, we’re told at the end of the chapter, he takes the battle all the way back to where Jabin the king is set up and he destroys Jabin the king. He finishes the job with the king of Canaan that they were supposed to do at the beginning of the book of Judges. He utterly wipes out the Canaanites.
Barak starts out with reluctance, but he finishes with faith and he finishes with victory. And we cannot and should not take that away from him, getting hung up on his moment of faithlessness, because doesn’t that describe us? We have moments of faith and moments of faithlessness. Or we have moments where God gives us a task and we go after it wholeheartedly and then we have moments where God gives us a task and we say, I don’t know, you think somebody else can handle this for me, God.
And yet in Christ, our faith is strong. Our faith is secure. And it’s not the strength of our faith. It’s the strength of the one who our faith is in.
Now there is discipline for faithlessness at times and Barak is disciplined. He is told that the glory of the battle will go to a woman rather than to him.
Notice Deborah does not say in the glory of the battle will go to me. Deborah doesn’t say God has raised me up. Deborah doesn’t say God is giving me victory.
She is always encouraging and lifting Barak up, which he does say that because of his moment of faithlessness, that the glory will go to the hand of a woman. And you know, this is where the story gets a little bit not safe for the little ears. We pick up from Deborah and we move to Jael.
As Sisera is fleeing from the battle, the sense here is that Barak is moving on with the chariots and chasing them down and Sisera is running the other direction. He goes and he finds the tent of his friend Heber and he finds Heber’s wife there and he hides out in the tent at her invitation. Now, much like Ehud earlier, God kind of disappears from this little bit of a section here.
And we’re led to think, is Jael acting more like somebody who follows God or is she acting more like a Canaanite? And she’s acting more like a Canaanite here. But God still uses her actions to bring relief, to bring rescue to his people. There are times where God will use even the actions of pagans to move his kingdom forward and to protect his people.
But Jael invites him in. She takes control of the situation. She tells him to lay down to take a nap. She covers him up with some floor coverings. He asks for water. She gives him milk.
And after he dozes off, she takes the tent peg, she drives it through his temple, and she kills the enemy. And then as Barak comes, she calls him into the tent and says, I will show you the man whom you are seeking. And he goes in and he finds Sisera there dead.
And so we have this interaction between Deborah and Jael and the glory that God shows through them and through their work of encouragement and through Jael’s work of defeat. And we see Barak here also the reluctant hero who had a moment of weakness and a moment of faith. But how does this all work together? Well, it’s because the true hero of this is neither Deborah nor Barak.
GOD: THE TRUE HERO
The true Hebrew of this is God. Notice when Deborah does come to Barak, she says that God has given you this battle plan. God tells her to tell Barak, gather your troops together, go to this particular place and wait.
We’re also told that God draws the enemy to the place of their defeat. It is God that led Sisera to the river Kishon. And then we’re told later on in the passage during the battle in verses 14 and 15 that
“It is the day that the Lord has given Sisera into your hand. Does not the Lord go out before you?”
We must always remember that regardless of who the deliverer is in the book of Judges, it is always God who is doing the delivery. Yes, he works through human agents. Yes, he works through our prayers. Yes, he works through our evangelism. Yes, he works through our worship and our teaching and our preaching.
But it is always God who gives success in the Christian life. It’s also God who defines success in the Christian life. God has secured your salvation. God has secured your sanctification. God has secured your glorification.
Regardless of how chaotic life looks, God has secured your safety as his child. And whatever God has called you to do, he has already brought the success.
So what are you not doing today that God has called you to do because he has already done it? Has God called you to set aside one of your pet sins? And yet you’re holding on to it, not realizing that that sin was nailed to the cross with Christ. It is dead and it is no longer part of you. And yet you and I sit there and try to resuscitate this sin as much as we can because it’s comfortable and we like it. And yet God has already defeated it for you and he’s calling you to set it aside.
This is one I struggle with. This is one where I was convicted with today. But who is God calling you to talk to about the good news of salvation that you are just scared to do? Evangelism and salvation. Yes, we are the ones who proclaim it. But if they reject, that’s not on you, that’s on God. If they accept, that’s not on you, that’s on God. It is God, Paul says, who brings the harvest. Paul planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who brings the harvest.
What is God calling you to do today that you are not doing? And yet by the power of God, you know that he will do it.
CONCLUSION
Paul in Philippians chapter four is talking about contentment, another thing I struggle with. But he says,
“…not that I am speaking about being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low and I know how to abound in any and every circumstance. I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger and abundance and need.”
Does verse 13 go on to say, I have taught myself to be content no matter what the situation? No, he says “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
You can do all things through Jesus who strengthens you. In fact, everything that God is calling you to do, he’s already done and he’s just asking you along for the ride. So what should you be doing today that you’re not?
Let’s pray. Father God above, we do thank you for the witness of Deborah. We thank you for the witness of Barack and we thank you most importantly for the glorious truth that whatever you call us to do, you have already done. Lord, may we live in the hope of that strength. May we live in the glory of that truth. I pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
As you leave this place and you go out into the world, whether that’s a world of work, world of hobbies, world of family, world of community interaction, whatever your world looks like, take this blessing with you:
“May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s love and perseverance.”
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
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