A Sermon on Judges 5:19-31 has been lightly edited.
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If you have your Bibles with you today, please turn with me to the book of Judges. Today we are in Judges chapter 5 and we’ll finish out chapter 5. We’ll begin in verse 19 and we’ll read through verse 31. We are coming to the end of the Judges cycle.
Remember we’ve talked about the Judges cycle starts with God’s grace and rescue. God says, “I am the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of slavery,” and he gives them the law. He establishes them in the land.
Then the cycle moves from rescue and grace to idolatry and rebellion. he people of Israel forget God. They begin to worship the idols of the land of Canaan, the gods of the land of Canaan. God brings discipline and oppression upon them through different nations and different city-states throughout the land of Canaan or even from outside Canaan or Israel.
Ultimately, they cry out to him. Sometimes it’s a cry of repentance. Most of the time it’s just a cry of please help. And then God comes back around. We cycle back around to rescue and grace and that is where we find ourselves today as we will wrap up the passage with the declaration that the land had rest for 40 years.
And so we are recounting in song form the work that God did through Deborah and Barak and we pick up the song in verse 19 of chapter 5.
“The kings came, they fought, then fought the kings of Canaan. At Taanach by the waters of Megiddo. They got no spoils of silver. From heaven the stars fought. From their courses they fought against Sisera. The torrent Kishon swept them away. The ancient torrent, the torrent Kishon, march on my soul with might. Then loud beat the horse’s hooves with the galloping, galloping of his steeds. Curse Meraz, says the angel of the Lord. Curse its inhabitants thoroughly because they did not come to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty. Most blessed of women be Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, of tent dwelling women most blessed. He asked for water and she gave him milk. She brought him curds in a noble’s bowl. She sent her hand to the tent peg, in her right hand to the workman’s mallet. She struck Sisera, she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple. Between her feet he sank, he fell, he lay still. Between her feet he sank, he fell. Where he sank, there he fell, dead. Out of the window she peered. The mother of Sisera wailed through the lattice. Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the hoofbeats of his chariots? Her wisest princes answer. Indeed, she answers herself. Have they not found and divided the spoil? A womb or two for every man. Spoil of dyed materials for Sisera. Spoil of dyed materials embroidered. Two pieces of dyed work embroidered for the neck as spoil. So may all your enemies perish, O Lord, but your friends be like the sun as he rises in his might. And the land had rest for 40 years.”
Let’s pray. To the great God above, may we be reminded of your goodness. May we be reminded of your glory. May we be reminded of your sovereignty as we consider these words today. And may your Holy Spirit take these words and change our hearts so that we might be more and more like your son, Jesus Christ. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
So I am often surprised by the Puritans. Sometimes I’ll pick up a book by a Puritan, and knowing that they spoke English when they were alive, knowing that they wrote in English, knowing that modern translations of Puritan works are in an even simpler English than what it was written, I’ll still read a paragraph or a sentence and I’ll go, I think “I need a translator.”
Other times I’m surprised by the Puritans because they’re surprisingly accessible, and this is one of those examples. It’s Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices by Thomas Brooks.
It’s accessible. It’s relatively easy to read. Yes, there are a few words that I come across that I may not know their meaning, but you’ll see if you were to pick up my copy. On occasion that word is written down at the bottom of the page and a definition is next to it, so the next time I come along I can remember what that word means.
I would encourage you if you pick up a Christian book or any book that you’re reading and you come across a word you don’t know, just don’t speed right on past it. I say I picked up a dictionary, actually all I did was look it up on my phone, but you know, don’t just speed past those words you don’t know. Take a moment to look them up to try and understand what they mean and understand what they mean in the context.
But coming back to Precious Remedies here, this is a book where Brooks lists probably 30 or 35 tools that Satan uses to convince us to sin and then gives biblical answers to those devices, and I say they’re relatively surprising because you come across a device like this.
This is a device that Satan uses to keep us from doing our holy duty, and he says that Satan
“…presents before them, the Christian, the examples of the greatest part of the world that walk in the ways of their own hearts and that make light and slight of the ways of the Lord.”
Now, what is Brooks saying there? He says, well, even in 1652 when he first wrote this, his kids used to come to him and say to him, “But dad, everybody’s doing it,” and then he answers that.
But the one I want us to think about today is the device that keeps us from doing our duty that he puts this way,
“…that Satan presents to them the paucity and the poverty of those that walk in the ways of God that hold on in religious practices.”
Brooks was confronted by the same thing that the psalmist Asaph was confronted with in Psalm 73. Sometimes God, well, not sometimes, all the time God has promised to reward the righteous and to punish the wicked, but sometimes as we look out upon our world, it looks the opposite. It looks like the wicked are being prosperous and rewarded, and it is the righteous who are being punished. Satan will come to us and say, “Why should you worry about doing what God wants you to do? Because look at all the other people that aren’t doing what God wants them to do. They’re doing so much better than you are. Just forget about it.”
And Brooks goes on in one of his remedies to that device of Satan. He goes on to say that we should consider the sovereignty of God. Just like Asaph saw when he went to the temple, he saw the sovereignty of God over the righteous and the wicked, and it led him to find peace in what he saw with his eyes.
We are called today in this passage to see that God’s sovereignty is the answer to help us find peace and rest, especially when we don’t quite understand what we see in the world and what we see in our lives compared to what we read in the scripture. Today we’re going to look at this passage and we’re going to see that it is God’s sovereignty that brings us victory in the middle of the chaos of our life and of our world, that it is God’s sovereignty that brings great reversals of glory, and it is God’s sovereignty that brings love to his and to our enemies.
GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY BRINGS VICTORY IN CHAOS
So first, one of the ways that we find rest and peace in God’s sovereignty is to realize that God’s sovereignty brings victory through the chaos. We opened up here in verse 19 with the description of a group of kings-likely Jabin and Sisera were not the only royal people in this. They had probably gathered a coalition of city-states in the area to come and to fight against Israel, and they were expecting to come away with great spoils of war.
In fact, we’ll see Sisera’s mother, a little bit later in the passage, is consoling herself by saying, you know, Sisera’s probably just dividing up all the great spoil that he and the army got from Israel when they defeated them, and that’s why he is delayed in returning home.
But there was something that led them to think that they were going to win the battle of the day. Part of it was the fact that they had a large army with military, the most advanced military technology of the day. They had 900 chariots, and nothing could stand, even an army of 10,000 like Israel had gathered, nothing could stand against those 900 chariots. But the stars were even aligned.
Notice in verse 20, from heaven the stars fought, from their courses they fought against Sisera. During this time, the pagan nations would look to the stars to give them direction. We do this, well maybe not we in this room, hopefully not we in this room, but much of our culture does the same thing today. You read the horoscope in the newspaper or online.
You’re looking to the stars, hoping that the stars will direct you and that they will line up just right. Or a lot of times people will use the alignment of the stars to excuse bad behavior in their life. Well, you know, “Freddie Mercury’s in the microwave” or something like that, I don’t know. Mercury’s in retrograde, that’s the excuse they use.
So anyway, so these nations were looking to the stars, and the stars told them it was a good time to go fight against the Israelites, but the author reminds us here that God was sovereign over the stars, and God used the stars to fight against Sisera and the army.
They looked to the river, they worshiped the river because the rivers were chaotic and unpredictable. You could predict them a little bit, but even flood stage, you couldn’t quite be sure about the rivers, so they deified the rivers, they deified the seas, they turned them into gods that they would worship, trying to appease them, and from whatever they could see, the river Kishon was giving them the “go” to do battle.
Then God used the chaos of river Kishon to sweep away the chariots, and it got so bad on the battlefield, the chariots were so ineffective that the soldiers were unhitching the horses and riding the horses off into the distance, trying to escape God’s judgment and God’s wrath.
Battlefields are chaotic, our world is chaotic, our nature is chaotic, and yet we see that God is sovereign over that chaos, and he actually uses the chaos of this world to bring victory for his people, and the same goes for us today. We think of, you know, we had the first hurricane of this season, made landfall in Mexico this week, we had the rivers flooding and people losing their lives in the northern part of our state as the rivers overflowed their banks, and everything seems chaotic, but it’s important for us to remember that God is sovereign over that chaos, but God’s sovereign over your chaos too.
Those little chaoses throughout the week that we don’t often think about, you know, the unexpected phone call or the unexpected email or the unexpected event in our week, God is sovereign over those, and he brings victory through those things.
Let me give you a brief example. I had to find a new doctor, my doctor quit a year and a half ago, and so I had to find a new doctor, and I’ve been putting it off as long as I can because there’s part of that finding a new doctor process that I absolutely don’t like, and it’s the part where they want to take blood for the blood work.
Now listen, you give me a shot, a vaccination, I’m fine. You need help cleaning a deer, I’m your guy. But those two little tubes of blood that they have to take, you know what, I’m sliding out of that chair and I’m hitting the floor.
So I felt it coming on, it was taking a little bit longer than I thought it should, I thought about things a little bit too much, and I finally, the nurse looked at me, I looked at the nurse, and she says, “You’re not okay, are you?” I’m like, “No I’m not.” She said, “What do we do?” I mean she knew what to do, but she said, I said, “Well could we just lay down on the floor?” And she said, “Why do you want to lay down on the floor?” I said, “Because we’re at a point now where that’s where I’m headed anyway, and it’s easier if we control it.” She goes, “Yeah you got a point.”
Why do I bring that up? That was a chaotic part of my day, that was a chaotic 10 minutes of my day. Did I rest and find peace and joy in the sovereignty of God in that chaos? Absolutely not, I let it ruin my entire weekend. And that’s the thing that I want us to see, is those little insignificant chaoses that we just let dig under our skin.
God is sovereign over those, and he even brings victory through those. God has used this over the last 30 or so years to whittle away at my pride. 30 years ago, I’d have gone ahead and blacked out in the chair and bumped my chin and my forehead as I slid out of it, but I’m not that proud anymore, and I also don’t need the bruises on my chin, but you know, God has used that to whittle away pride. He’s brought victory in my life through that.
I mean, think about those chaoses in your life, that if you truly understand that God is sovereign over them, God brings victory to you through those chaoses. And so, an understanding of God’s sovereignty helps us to see that he brings victory through the chaos of our life.
GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY BRING GREAT REVERSALS
Well, God also brings great reversals. You know, these armies were gathered on the plains near the waters of Megiddo, we’re told, and they were expecting to get great spoils of silver, and yet they were defeated. And even though Sisera’s mother consoled herself with the spoils that he was going to, that she was going to receive through Sisera’s victory, we see that Sisera came to defeat through the sovereignty of God.
And so we see that reversal, but there’s an even greater reversal here, and it’s the reversal of the glory that you would expect. You know, if we were to go back and reread chapter four, we would see Deborah come to Barak and say, “The Lord has called you to gather an army, and this is how and where he wants you to gather the army, and this is where he will give you the victory over Sisera’s army.” And of course, Barak, at the beginning, he had that moment of faithlessness where he says, “That’s up to you. You know what? I’ll go if you go, but Deborah, if you don’t go, I’m not going.”
And what was Deborah’s response? “You should have the glory of this battle, but that glory will go to a woman.” Barak should have defeated Sisera in hand-to-hand combat and had the glory of Sisera’s death. And yet from that moment of faithlessness, which we know that he repented of and he was faithful the second time Deborah said, go fight, he showed his great faith. But even in that, the glory was stolen from him. God works through great reversals.
God works in the unexpected. Abraham had two sons. He had Isaac and he had Ishmael. Who was the older? It was Ishmael. Who should have gotten the inheritance and the glory? It should have been Ishmael, but it was Isaac.
Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Who was the older? It was Esau. Who should have gotten the inheritance and the glory? Esau, but God gave it to Jacob.
And we see this happen with Joseph and his 12 brothers. We see it on a large scale with Judah, who was not the firstborn. And yet the crown is given to Judah to not leave Judah’s hand for all eternity.
And that day on the cross, as Jesus was there, we have fulfilled for us the word of God in Genesis 3:15, where God tells the serpent,
“I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.”
Now, if a poisonous snake bites you on the heel, that’s a bad thing, isn’t it? It can cause death, it can cause pain, it can cause great difficulty. But if you take your heel, especially if you’ve got a nice heavy boot on and you just stomp the head of that snake after he bites you, that’s worse for the snake, isn’t it?
Here is Satan at Golgotha looking at the cross saying, “I’ve won, I’ve got him, I have killed the Son of God.” Not knowing, not understanding that the death and resurrection of our Savior was the death blow to Satan. Our salvation came through the greatest reversal of all time. Satan thought he had won, and yet Jesus gets the full glory of your salvation and my salvation.
GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY BRINGS LOVE TO OUR ENEMIES
And so, God’s sovereignty teaches us that victory comes through chaos, that great reversals of glory can happen through God’s sovereignty, and it also brings love to our enemy.
The last verse, verse 31, the first two lines, we love the middle line of verse 31, “but your friends be like the sun as he rises in his might.” We want to be called the friends of God. We want to know that we are the friends of God and we want to pray for other friends of God that they will be prosperous and they will be mighty in the power of the Lord.
But we cringe a little bit at the first line of verse 31. “So may all your enemies perish, oh Lord.” We’re culturally conditioned to cringe when it comes to talking about the judgment of God. When we talk about those things, some of these imprecatory prayers that we see here in this first line and we also see throughout the Psalms give us a little bit of cringe there.
And yet, the imprecations, the imprecatory prayers of Scripture allow us to love our enemies.
Let me give you an example. Psalm 137 is probably the most graphic of the imprecatory prayers. It starts out with the Israelites saying, “Oh Lord, the Babylonians are mocking us. They keep telling us to sing songs about your glory and songs about your protection and songs about how you guard us and will never let us down. And yet here we are in Babylon. And we were eyewitnesses to the horror of Babylonian warfare.”
The Babylonians were not kind when they went into a city. And the end of the Psalm tells us how unkind they were.
One of the things the Babylonian soldiers would do is they would find a mom holding an infant and they would come up and they would rip the infant from the mom’s arms, grab it by the feet. Well, and the Psalm says, “Blessed is he who dashes your babies against the rock.” And we cringe when we hear that prayer.
And yet who are the Israelites in Psalm 137 saying, blessed is he who dashes your against the rock? Are they saying blessed is Joe across the street, my neighbor? Are they saying blessed is Mary when Mary goes and grabs a Babylonian baby?
And well, you know, it’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying, “Lord, may you be blessed to give justice and judgment to those who have treated us horribly and violently in our life.”
And what prayers of imprecation allow us to do, imprecatory prayers, what they allow us to do is to rest in the promise that God gives us in Deuteronomy chapter 32.
Deuteronomy chapter 32, verse 35 and 36 say,
“Vengeance is mine and recompense for the time when their foot shall slip for the day of their calamity is at hand and their doom comes swiftly. For the Lord will vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants when he sees that their power is gone and there is none remaining bond or free.”
You and I live in a world that is antagonistic to Christianity in our culture here in America, even in West Virginia, the part of the Bible Belt. We will be insulted and people will say nasty things about us if we take a stand for holiness, if we take a stand for righteousness through Christ and through Christ alone.
There are cultures and countries throughout the world where Christians are suffering the horrors of the book of Revelation for their faith and their belief in Jesus Christ. How do we respond to our enemies with love? We want justice, don’t we? We want things to be set right. We want those insults to be paid. We want that violence to be to be met with even worse violence because those people deserve it. They do.
And without Jesus, so do you and I. Because we were enemies of God, we did injustice against God. And yet while we were sinners, Christ died for us. And so those prayers of imprecation, leaving our enemies to God’s sovereignty allows us to fulfill the words of Jesus.
“You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven. For he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same. You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.”
Somebody insults you or calls you a name because you believe in Jesus. How do you handle that? Well, you serve them and you love them? And that means if they tell you, “Hey, I don’t ever want you to talk to me about Jesus again.” You at least keep the conversation open. Even if they tell you, “Hey, I think you’re the dumbest person in the world for believing that Jesus saved sinners, that some dude 2000 years ago rose from the dead.”
You keep serving them. You keep loving them and you keep avenues open for the gospel to be there.
Then you take one step further and you pray for them. And make sure your prayer for that person doesn’t stop with the imprecatory part. Because they need Jesus as much as you do. And so our imprecatory prayers after the cross should sound something like this: “Jesus, this man, this woman calls me all kind of names. They spew hatred against your people. If they if it was OK for them in our culture to do it, they would probably take violence against your people. And you have promised to judge people who act like that, who say things like that, who do violence against your people like that. But Lord, I pray that rather than judging them, that you would give them the Holy Spirit to redeem them for your own. Because you have redeemed me and I am not I’m not perfect, but Jesus was perfect for me and I am no longer in danger of the fires of hell. And I love them enough to want that for them. So, Lord, please change their heart before it’s too late. And let me rest in however, Lord, you will do that, however, your sovereignty works in that.”
You see, God’s sovereignty allows us to fulfill that call to love our enemies. It’s easy to love our neighbors. It’s easy to love the people that like us. But God’s sovereignty allows us to fulfill that call to love our enemies in the same way we love those that like us.
CONCLUSION
So God’s sovereignty, whenever Satan comes to us and says, “You know, God’s promise to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. But if you look at the world, it is the wicked who are getting rewards and it is the righteous who are being punished.” God’s sovereignty allows us to seek holiness anyway in the midst of that, because God’s sovereignty brings us victory through the chaos.
Yes, it’s important to remember God’s sovereignty when big things happen. The flood of 2016, you lose a loved one, an earthquake happens. War breaks out again and again and again.
But what are those little chaoses of your life that just overwhelm you? It doesn’t have to be something like passing out in a phlebotomist chair. It can be a phone call. It can be an email. It can be an unexpected knock on the door. It could be an interruption to your day. God’s sovereign over those chaoses, and he’s working his victory in you through those.
And even if we do see the injustice of this world, we have a great reversal to wait forward to look forward to when Jesus comes back. You know, ultimately, the trials of this world are for a brief moment compared to eternity in God’s presence. What is 80 to 100 years? It’s not even a drop in the bucket. And we will see God’s glory and his ultimate eternal reward forever. And so don’t let the apparent inequities of this world get you down.
And finally, where you struggle to love your enemies, rest in God’s sovereignty over them. Pray for his sovereignty to save them, but rest in his sovereignty that ultimately his glory, his holiness, his justice, his righteousness, his mercy, and his grace will win out in the end. Brothers and sisters, find peace and rest in the sovereignty of God.
Let’s pray. Father, we thank you that you are sovereign over all things. We thank you that we are not. And Lord, help us to see your glory and your majesty in the chaoses of our life.
Help us to see your victory in our salvation and also in our savior’s return. And Lord, help us to give our enemies to you so that we might love and serve them rather than seeking retribution. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
You know, as we go this week, we go into our families, we go into the workplace, we go to vacations or to hobbies or to enjoying our retirements. Whatever walk of life we find ourselves in, God blesses us in those walks. So take this blessing from God upon you.
“Now may the Lord of peace give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with you all.”
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
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