Reflection on Judges 11:29-40

Scripture

Jephthah made a vow to the Lord. He said, “If you give me a victory over the Ammonites, I will give to the Lord whatever comes out of my house to meet me when I return in triumph. I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”

Observation

The Spirit of the Lord comes upon Jephthah, and he leads an army against the Ammonites. He makes a vow to the Lord that he will offer as a burnt offering whatever comes out of his house to meet him when he returns in triumph.

The Lord gives Jephthah a crushing victory over the Ammonites. When he returns home, his only daughter comes out to meet him, dancing for joy. Jephthah tears his clothes in anguish at the result of his foolish vow.

Jephthah’s daughter asks to go into the hills for two months and weep with her friends as she will never have children. She returns home, and her father keeps his vow.

Application

We must always be careful of the things we say, especially the promises we make. Jephthah’s vow was foolish and unnecessary.

The Lord does not require us to make brash promises or costly sacrifices to answer our prayers. He delights to pour out grace upon grace over us. Prayer is not a process of bargaining with God, but of seeking His will and His desires.

Jephthah was foolish in that he should have known that God’s law does not condone human sacrifice in any situation. This raises the question of where were the priests and other religious leaders who could have told him quite clearly that the Lord does not require or allow such things.

Jephthah killed his daughter as a sacrifice to the Lord to thank him for the victory God had given. This sacrifice was abhorrent to God.

Jephthah’s vow was foolish; it was unnecessary; and it was displeasing to the Lord.

Prayer

Lord, I pray that my religious acts will never be obnoxious to you. Please give me wisdom in my words and my deeds. Amen.

Today’s Bike Ride

A longer ride today. I was going to turn around after 20 km, then I saw a turn off to Yarrie Lake. I thought I would go there and see if the road is sealed all the way to the lake. It turns to dirt about 1 km short of the lake. At that point the wind started to get stronger and it was hard coming home. 😀

Quote for the Day

Freud has, in fact, provided the West with a compelling myth—not in the sense of a narrative that everybody knows is false but in the sense of a basic idea by which we can understand the world around us, regardless of whether it is “true” in the commonsense way of understanding the word. That myth is the idea that sex, in terms of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment, is the real key to human existence, to what it means to be human. Carl Trueman

Atheist rejected God because of science, then science led her to God

Atheist rejected God because of science, then science led her to God

Decidedly “100% atheist,” Mariah Jones pitied Christians, believing they reject reason and the advancements of scientific knowledge.

“I did not believe in God,” Mariah says on a 2019 video on her YouTube channel. “I didn’t believe in spirituality at all. I thought believing in such things was silly. Basically I was just a strong believer in science.”

Right after high school, Mariah joined the Navy in 2013. It was in the Navy that she developed anorexia and bulimia.

“It grew more and more aggressive as the years went by,” she says.

Once out of the Navy, she enrolled in college, and she positively relished the science classes which at first affirmed her belief in nothing.

“I used to enjoy when people would bring up God so that I could try and destroy their argument with science.” she admits. “I would ask them impossible questions that would put them in this awkward position and make it pretty much impossible for them to answer.

“I hated when people would talk about Jesus.”

Her distaste for Christianity was extreme, fueled by the grip of the evil one in her life.

“My mentality towards Christians and anyone who was religious was like, You’re wasting your entire life trying to live by these impossible standards and these rules that supposedly God created just to go to a place after you die,” she says. “I thought religion was a man-made construct that was harmful to people.”

Then a boomerang struck in 2017 in her second year in college. The same science that in the first year of college affirmed her atheist became the science of the second year of college that undermined her atheism.

Specifically, how could biological molecules with astronomical number of atoms all sequenced with confunding minute precision have just come together by chance? she wondered.

See related article: scientist Sy Garte became a Christian when he studied molecular biology.

So at first science contributed to her atheistic arrogance. Then, as the classes advanced, they deconstructed it.

“Having to accept that everything just formed on its own by itself on accident, it didn’t make sense to me,” Mariah admits. “It really started to bother me because deep down I didn’t want to believe something. I didn’t want to take that responsibility.”

Mariah stayed after class and probed professors looking for logical answers.

“What came first, was it the blood or was it the heart that pumped the blood?” she quizzed them. “Was it the skin that held it all together or the organs inside the skin? How did nothing turn into something? How did nothing result in intelligent life? How did an explosion result in living breathing loving unique beings?”

The professors were of no help with these befuddling questions. So, her mind wandered to the obvious: there had to be an outside agent guiding the process, an external agent with a purpose from another dimension.

Her progression bugged her. She had always felt sorry for those who saw the need to believe in God. But now science was leading her towards him.

“Eventually I recognized my biases and I knew that I was being closed-minded towards the alternative which was God,” she says.

As she pondered what she had vowed never to do, she prayed to God.

“I refused to call it a prayer at this time,” she recalls. “But I basically said, ‘God if you’re real and you really exist, would you not want me to know you? Would you want me to wonder forever about if you exist? I don’t want to be disrespectful to you. But I just if you’re there, I want you to give me a sign and I’ll believe.’”

Immediately… nothing happened. To be truthful, Mariah felt embarrassed and dumb.

But as the next six months unwound, things happened: vivid dreams that reflected Bible verses and scary events rattled her.

Mariah was disinclined towards Christianity. So she searched every other religion: Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Buddhism, you name it, she researched it.

Finally, she looked into the character of Jesus in the Bible, and what she saw startled her.

“I started studying the Bible and learning about Jesus and the meaning of his life and death and what he claimed his purpose was,” Mariah says. “I ended up finding out that his purpose was essentially for me.”

Then in December 2017, her battles with anorexia and bulimia came to a head.

“I was trapped in this violent cycle that would never end, never, no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t break out of it,” she admits. “I remember being in the bathroom. I was in the bathtub and I was throwing up. I remember feeling like, How long will I keep doing this? I felt so enslaved by this disease, this addiction”

As the water was running, she broke down crying for the first time.

Without any forethought, she cried out: “Jesus, please help me.”

This time the response was immediate.

“I can’t explain the feeling what it was. It was love. Someone loved me. I felt stillness, peace,” she explains. “Within seconds the crying stopped, not on my own. Something had come over my entire being. There are no words. The entire room was filled with Jesus.”

The anorexia and bulimia simply disappeared from her life.

“I felt healed,” she thinks. “It felt almost like I never had an addiction to begin with. This darkness, this heaviness that was over me for four years, gone completely. I went to bed that night shocked – in a good way. I just could not believe what happened to me. I still can’t fathom what he did to me.”

A few days later, she received Jesus Christ into her heart.

Initially, Mariah was reluctant to share her testimony online because she feared a blowback from her atheist friends.

“I know what I’m going to face. I know people will probably make fun of me. I’ve accepted it,” Mariah says. “I know who I used to be. I would have laughed at me. But I don’t care. I will never forget what he did for me. I will always be in his debt. This is just a small, small portion of my gratitude for what he did for me.”

If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here

From: God Reports

Reflection on Judges 11:1-28

Scripture

“You keep whatever your god Chemosh gives you, and we will keep whatever the Lord our God gives us.”

Observation

Jephthah is a son of Gilead, but to a prostitute. The sons of Gilead’s wife drive him off the land so he flees to Tob, where he gathers a band of worthless rebels.

When the Ammonites attack Israel, the elders of Gilead send for Jephthah. They make him there ruler and commander of the army.

Jephthah then sends a message to the king of Ammon, demanding to know why they are attacking. The king says that Israel stole their land.

Jephthah writes back to say that they never stole any land from Ammon. In any event, the land is a gift from the Lord. The Ammonites can keep whatever their god gives them, but Israel will keep the land the Lord gives them. Not only that, they have held this land for 300 years, and the Ammonites never tried to take it back before.

Application

Jephthah was right to see this war in spiritual terms. Israel lived in land given to them by the Lord. The Ammonites had their own gods to gift them land. Therefore, any invasion was a test of whose God is the greater.

We live in a culture which does not recognise the reality of the unseen realm, except in romanticised terms. The reality is that we are in the thick pf a supernatural war. As Christians, everything we do advance as either God’s Kingdom or satan’s realm.

This battle is personal, but it is not human. We do not fight against people, but against powers and principalities, rulers and authorities in the spirit realm. The primary weapon of this warfare is prayer. As we surrender ourselves to God and listen to the indwelling Holy Spirit, He directs us how to pray and how to live in such a way as to destroy the works of satan.

The battle belongs to the Lord, and His victory is guaranteed.

Prayer

Lord, please grant me the gift of discernment of spirits. Open my spiritual eyes so that I can truly see where the battle is and how to fight it. Amen.