Considering Judges & 1st Corinthians

Last week I finished reading Judges.  I actually should have posted this last week since it fit in so well with Holy Week.  Please, forgive me (in keeping with the grace you have received).

In the first half of Judges you have the A-B-C-D pattern.  The people forget God and commit apostasy.  God batters them in keeping with the covenant.  The people cry out to God, and He then sends someone to deliver them.  Easy pattern, and at first the stories are short.  It all seems cut and dried.  But they get longer beginning with Deborah.  Part of the apostasy in this case was wimpy men.  Their apostasy is heightened by the fact that Deborah leads them into battle, and Jael kills Sisera.  Barak and his men are fearful & timid.  Deborah’s leadership is not to be seen as authorizing female leadership, but as an abberition caused by disobedient men.

Gideon was also timid, but eventually came around to faithfully deliver Israel from Midian.  But he led the people, unknowingly, into another round of apostasy by created the golden ephod that he and they began to worship in Ophrah (Judges 8:27).  The quality of deliverers is quickly declining.  His son, by a concubine, Abimelech is the next local judge who slaughters his brothers.  He does not deliver the people, but rather is most likely an instrument of judgment on those who prostituted themselves with the ephod.  For his own wickedness, he is slain in battle at the hands of a woman to fulfill the prophecy of Gideon’s only remaining legitimate son.

Samson is next, and he can’t seem to deliver Israel from the Philistines even though he kills many of them.  He is a nightmare, consorting with prostitutes.  He doesn’t deliver on this miraculous birth.  We see the pattern here- there  are no capable merely human deliverers.  All such human deliverers are flawed, and their deliverance is imperfect.  They are like Abraham Lincoln who could deliver African-Americans from slavery (a great deliverance indeed) but couldn’t deliver them from racism.

In the final section of Judges, there are no more Judges.  Rather we find a series of stories revolving around a Levite from Bethlehem who becomes a priest in Ephraim.  The refrain becomes “there was no king and people did what was right in their own eyes” and that was very wrong.  A guy named Micah makes him a priest for his personal shrine.  All of this was forbidden in Israel.  A group of Danites claim the idols and the “priest” for themselves.  A Levite from Bethlehem in Ephraim (the Scripture is unclear if it is the same guy, but most likely is) goes home to reclaim his concubine.  On the way back to Ephraim, he stays in Benjaminite territory, lest he stay among the wicked Jebusites.  Well, his fellow Israelites want to rape him.  Instead they rape his concubine until she’s dead.  All Israel rallies to defeat the evil in Benjamin, but their own impulsiveness is judged too.

Judges functions as providing justification for a king.  The sins of Benjamin are there to discredit Saul, paving the way for David.  But all such human rulers will fail to deliver what we need- a Mediator between God and man: Jesus.

Fast forward to 1 Corinthians 1.  Like the Israelites, the Corinthians were quarrelous.  Paul points them to Christ, and Him crucified, as the center of his message.  He laments that Jews want powerful signs, and Greeks want wisdom.  Paul begins an apologetic about Jesus as the the power and wisdom of God which thwarts the power and wisdom of men.  In chapter 3 he uses his analogies of the field and the building to help them understand ministry.  The focus on both is Jesus, not the gospel-laborers.

This morning I was pondering anew the ways in which we try to build the kingdom according to worldly, fleshly, wisdom.  Church leadership is derived from general revelation rather than special revelation.  I don’t want to totally discount general revelation.  It has its place.  But I am concerned that we often do not subject general revelation to examination by special revelation.  We tend to ignore what special revelation says about ministry and leadership, and use general revelation uncritically.

We risk building on foundations other than Christ.  We risk building with inferior materials which will burn up upon examination and testing.  We have been seduced by techniques and programs as magic bullets.  This distracts us from keeping the gospel the main thing and the overarching emphasis of all our programs.  Like the Corinthians, we can over-emphasize human leaders.  We fall into fleshly thinking and create personality cults following Paul & Apollos (or Sproul, Warren, MacArthur) rather than Jesus.

God has provided the Deliverer we need.  It is when we take our eyes off of Him that we begin to stray, and the church becomes a hindrance instead of a help in making Jesus known that we might glorify & enjoy God.  I am thankful for the fulness of that deliverance accomplished through His incarnation, obedience, death, resurrection and ascension.