Welcome to the Bible in a Year for 2025. Intro to this series and resource links available here, plus here’s how I’m approaching this year.
Scriptures for Today:
Reflection:
Abandonment to God (10:11-16) - This is a strong passage. It demonstrates the seriousness of betraying the Lord and the Lord’s desire to save and see reconciliation. Israel keeps ditching Yahweh to serve other gods and the Lord calls their bluff: “Go and cry out to the gods you have chosen. Let them save you when you are in trouble!” (10:14) This is not grace being misunderstood as sloppy permissiveness. At the same time, real repentance occurs in the form of abandonment to God’s sovereign wisdom (“Do with us whatever you think best, but please rescue us now.”) and acts of contrition, not merely words (“Then they got rid of the foreign gods among them and served the Lord.”). At this authentic repentance, we see the heart of God: “And He could bear Israel’s misery no longer.” Though He would not simply brush aside their unfaithfulness, God deeply longed for them to return to Him and delighted in their decision to turn around.
Hasty and misplaced vows (11:29-40) - Jephthah’s vow to sacrifice whatever comes out of his door when he returns if the Lord will give him victory is grotesquely foolish and ungodly. There’s a sad and terrible irony here in that the book of Judges is built around the theme of the Israelites’ failure to keep covenant—to keep their word to be faithful to God. Yet Jephthah considers his hasty, stupid, and unnecessary vow inviolable. Further, human sacrifice was prohibited by Yahweh, so fulfilling this vow shows the degree to which Jephthah’s mind was still more formed by his neighbors’ religion than by the Lord’s word. A tragedy all around!
Say “Shibboleth” (12:1-7) - This dispute between fellow countrymen of different tribes gets so heated (and out of control) that one tribe gains control of the river passing and kills another tribe simply because they’ve all decided that the rivalry is more important than their common national citizenship. The cruel thing is they found a way to figure out who was who: Their accent gave them away when they had to say the word “shibboleth.” Unable to pronounce the “sh,” they said “sibboleth” and were killed. The parallels for this sad episode are many and should serve as an important check on us today in a variety of ways.
Questions:
When necessary, how might you repent with both words and actions?
When have you regretted making hasty promises?
What else might the Holy Spirit be speaking with you about in the text today?
Prayer: Lord, help me watch my words and life that I may speak with truth and grace in everything. Amen.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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