Judges 4:1-5:31, Luke 22:35-53, Psalms 94:1-23, Proverbs 14:3-4
Today is the 25th day of April. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is always, always, always a joy to walk in here around the global campfire. And here we are together, stepping outside of all of the responsibilities and obligations and even chaos that’s going on around us, and just let God’s word wash into our lives and in over us and into us and then we leave this time rejuvenated. It’s pretty amazing what can happen in just a few minutes with the Scriptures. So, let’s get to it. We’ve begun the book of Judges and we’re beginning to meet the judges. We met 3 of the 13 judges yesterday. Some of these judges, you know, there’s just a paragraph of mention, others have the full, you know, kind of story and what we’re ultimately learning is what happened after Moses and Joshua, what happened after the children of Israel moved into the promised land. So today we’re reading from the English Standard Version and we’ll read Judges chapters 4 and 5.
Commentary:
Okay. So, in the Old Testament we’re learning of the judge Deborah, a valiant woman leader of Israel and of Jael who did away with the enemy lieutenant general in a way that would’ve at bare minimum taken some bravery, right? You’re sneaking up on a man of war as he sleeps with a tent peg and a hammer and…and yeah you drive the tent peg with the hammer into the head of Sisera, the general and, of course, he dies doing away with the military leader who has been oppressing the children of Israel in their land for a couple of decades, which is powerful imagery. I mean going back into that time, it is an entirely patriarchal world. So, seeing Deborah and Jael once again shows God pulling people forward, pulling…pulling them forward even as they’re doing everything they can to fight against Him and His will and ways for them.
We move into the gospel of Luke and we’re moving back into the passion narrative and we find Jesus in intense agony of prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. And even though we have just passed through Easter and have just kinda lived out this story it comes at a good time. It’s easy for us to get through Easter and just kind of move on. We’ve focused our energy and efforts on the passion narrative and then we just kinda move on. It’s nice to encounter it again and let it sink more deeply into our souls, what it cost, what it cost for us to take for granted, our freedom’s.
Then we get into the book of Proverbs and we hear these words, “where there are no oxen the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.” So, if the manger weren’t clean because the ox was there, how would the ox have made the manger dirty. It would’ve made manger dirty by just being itself right and just doing whatever it did, including pooping and peeing all over the place. It has to be cleaned up to keep the barn clean. So, the barn will stay clean without the animals, but the abundant crops won’t come without the strength of the animals. So, you have to maintain the animals in the barn in order to have the strength to have the abundant crops. And this, like most of the Proverbs, simply imitates our lives. The proverb wasn’t written to give us an agricultural lesson. We can kind of deduce that if you’ve got an ox in a barn and you’re not to clean up the barn then the barn’s gonna be disgusting, but in our lives in community things can indeed get messy at times and they need to be maintained and cleaned up, but the strength that we have together is vastly superior than the strength that we have isolated and alone. And if we want an abundant harvest for the kingdom, then we’re going to have to learn to clean up after ourselves and even clean up each other’s messes. It’s gonna get messy. And I think that we can probably even as the body of Christ to deal with the mess if we could get over who we’re going to blame for the mess. And the best possible way that we can do that is to realize that we are all a mess, but together we are strong.
Prayer:
Father, we invite You into that. We work so hard to not look messy. We work so hard to disguise the truth of the fact that we’re all going through the same life at the same time on planet Earth with all of the same challenges and some of us are more challenged than others in certain areas, but we’re all challenged and we’re all struggling and we’re all learning that we are utterly dependent upon You and the faster that we can learn the faster that we can just deal with the mass and we can just clean the barn and we can maintain it and then we can have an abundant harvest for Your kingdom once we get out of our own way and out of Your way. So, come Holy Spirit. Help us to be patient. Help us to offer grace today. Help us to reveal Your kingdom today and be mindful of the fact that’s what we’re doing with every thought, word and deed in our lives. Come Jesus we pray. In Your mighty name we ask. Amen.
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