“According to Thy manifold mercies Thou gavest the saviours, who saved them out of the hand of their enemies” (Neh. 9:27).
We are sometimes inclined to ask, “Of what use is the book of Judges? What lessons is it intended to teach? To what period does it answer in the history of the salvation of man?”
The safest way to approach such questions is to go to the history itself, and inquire what the position of the Israelites was at this time. The judges all stand between Joshua and Samuel who is the forerunner of David the king. Joshua first established Israel in the land of promise. David was the true beginning of their kingdom after Saul was put away. Through him God gave them rest from all their enemies round about. Between Joshua and David, the history of Israel is the history of many a severe struggle; there were backslidings, and punishments, and deliverances. A hundred and eleven years in the time of the Judges may almost be blotted out of the record of Israel’s progress as the chosen race–years of oppression, and suffering, and servitude, under some one or other of the heathen nations that still remained in or near the land of Canaan.
During all this time, however, a certain progress was made towards the purpose that God had in view. Six or seven of the oppressors of Israel were so effectively put down that they were never able to make headway against the Israelites anymore. At the end of the book of Judges, deliverance has begun for Israel, even from the most inveterate enemy of all, the enemy whom God had left to be a thorn in His people’s side. It was said of Samson, the last of the saviours in the book of Judges, “He shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.”
Thus the period of the judges covers almost the whole interval between the foundation of the congregation of Israel in Canaan and the kingdom that was to come. It corresponds to the age of Church history, the time between Christ’s first and second coming. At His first coming He was like Joshua: “The Shepherd and stone of Israel.” He gathered a flock together, and He laid the foundation on which His Church is rising higher and higher every day. At His second coming, He will set up His kingdom, and give us rest from every enemy that disturbs us now.
Meanwhile, we have the varied and eventful course of Church history, and a very mingled history it is. We are partly oppressed and partly victors. Our own sins and negligence and ignorance bring upon us many failures and calamities and defeats. We are often delivered into the hand of our enemies, as a chastisement for our faults; and then, when we “cry unto the Lord” in our trouble, He delivers us out of our distress. He sends us a Saviour. But as it was with Israel, so has it often been with the Church of Christ. “It came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they returned, and corrupted themselves more than their fathers…they ceased not from their own doings, nor from their stubborn way” (Jud. 2:19).
And so we go on, and yet, thanks be to God, progress is made, and His work continues; enemies are defeated and brought under, one by one, so that they do not rise again to oppress His Church and people as completely as they did before. The book of Judges tells us why believers are so sorely troubled with besetting sins (Jud. 2:20 to 3:4). Some troublesome enemies were left in the land because of Israel’s neglect. Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of some of their towns; neither did Ephraim drive out the Canaanites here; nor did Asher drive out those that were there; and the Amorites would dwell in the inheritance of the tribe of Dan. Israel would not fight in the first instance, therefore God left their enemies that they might feel the result. It is often much the same with a Christian’s besetting sin. He left it alone until it became too strong; God left it upon him as a chastisement for his neglect.
God also left some nations to prove Israel; and others to teach them how to war. And so our enemies are left, in order that by our struggles and conflicts we may give evidence whether the mind of Christ is in us or not. Our vigorous conflict with these enemies, or our passive submission to them, will prove our condition in the sight of God. Our battles with them will hone our skills in prayer and the use of the Spirit’s sword.
The Church of God has had many individual deliverers whom the Lord raised up as he did the judges; but it is not of man to find them or to bring them forth. The Israelites could not make their judges; the Lord raised them up. He gave them “saviours, who saved them out of the hand of their enemies” (Neh. 9:27).
This name of saviour is of course the same which we apply continually to our Lord Jesus Christ; and the application of this title to the judges makes all of them in some point or other to be likenesses of Him. They were, in their ways of delivering Israel, so many lesser forerunners of the Great Deliverer, Jesus Christ; and this is perfectly natural. In Jesus Christ is the well of salvation. Every other deliverer of God’s people, before and after, stole some plan of deliverance from Him. No noble act was ever done by man for the deliverance of his fellow-creatures that has not a complete and glorious counterpart in the work of the Lord Jesus.
But in thus regarding the judges, we must look not so much at the personal character of the men as at the nature of their work. It is not always as individuals that they are like our Saviour, but as men raised up for a certain work. The question how far they were personally holy and Christ-like is another matter.
The first Judge, Othniel, is of the tribe of Judah. Was not the great Saviour to be of the same tribe? Where in all Israel could we find a better family to head the list? Little is said of Othniel. He was the younger brother of Caleb, who followed the God of Israel with all his heart. “The Spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he judged Israel and went out to war, and his hand prevailed.”
But the most striking details in the work of the judges are those which especially indicate a suffering Saviour; weak in those things that are accounted the glory and strength of man, but strong in the power of God.
The second of the judges is a left-handed man of Benjamin, the least of all the tribes. There is something strange about the left-handedness. Benjamin, who was born at the cost of his mother’s life, was named by her, Benoni, “Son of my sorrow, as her soul was in departing, for she died.” It seemed to the ear of Jacob a name suggestive of the greatest sorrow of his life. He therefore changed the name to Benjamin, “Son of the right hand.” Yet the best warriors of the tribe of Benjamin were left-handed until David was on the throne.
The first great Benjamite leader of whom we read was a left-handed man; and this very left-handedness was the means by which he was able to save. Ehud “made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length.” Yes, “a sharp two-edged sword” was his weapon, “and he did gird it under his raiment, upon his right thigh.” Thus he came into the presence of Israel’s enemy, armed with his left-handed weapon, in a place where no one would think of looking for it, and, saying to the King of Moab, “I have a message from God unto thee,” he delivered the sword into his body and was gone. A strange deliverance, and yet it was a pointed message from God. This was Ehud’s part in the salvation of Israel; the rest was easy when his left-handed weapon had done its work. Is there no allusion here to Him who vanquished the tempter with the sharp two-edged sword, which is the word of the Father?
Of the next Judge, Shamgar, little is recorded; but what there is is very suggestive. “He slew of the Philistines 600 men with an ox goad.” This time it was to be seen that “the Lord sayeth not with sword or spear, but the battle is His still.” The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but they “are mighty through God.” So Shamgar is passed over with this brief record, “He also delivered1 Israel.” He also was a saviour, though little more than his name is written in the Book of Life.
After Shamgar we find still stronger indications that God’s thoughts are not like those of man. The woman, and not the man, is first throughout the next deliverance. It is Deborah and Barak, not Barak and Deborah. The man says, “If thou (Deborah) wilt go with me.” “I will go with thee,” she answers; and the oppressor is slain by another woman, Jael, in a tent, with a hammer and a nail.
Then we find an intimation that this shall not be the last time that such a thing would come to pass. “So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord” (Jud. 5:31). What is all this but a hint given beforehand how the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head? Yes, it was with the nail and the workman’s hammer that our salvation was actually wrought. The nail that pierced the feet of the Saviour pierced the serpent’s head.
When we come to Jephthah and Samson, how clearly do we see it foreshadowed that the Saviour of Israel must die? Jephthah’s family was absolutely extinguished by the victory that he won. He vowed a vow if the Lord would deliver the Amonites to him. And when the victory was over, “his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances; and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter;” and she was the price of his victory, so that his name in Israel was extinguished. “He was cut off out of the land of the living;” he had not a representative in Israel left. The question “Who shall declare his generation?” might literally have been asked with regard to him.
But the likeness is even stronger when it comes to Samson, the last of the judges, who stands out from among the others in a remarkable way. His mother is a Nazarite when he is born, and he is a Nazarite to God from his birth. That is, he lives in the purest ceremonial holiness. Regarding outward and legal purity he is perfect; in that his strength lies. As long as he is a Nazarite2 he is unconquerable. He only of all the judges of whom we have any history, does everything single-handed and alone. He never calls the armies of Israel together; he asks for no assistance; sometimes he is even hindered. What he does, he does himself, in his own unconquerable strength. “I looked, and there was none to help; I wondered that there was none to uphold; therefore mine own arm brought salvation to me; and my fury, it upheld me” (Isa. 63:5).
The life of Samson ends in a scene which needs no interpreter. Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines. So he bowed himself with all his might, and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein; so the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.” Whose doing was it to wind up the history of the saviours of Israel in such words as these? Is it not the true sum of salvation? The death of the Saviour of Israel was the ruin of the enemies of Israel, too. Nowhere was Satan confounded, so thoroughly overthrown, as he was by the cross of our Saviour Christ.
We may see in the work of the judges various illustrations of the method by which God saves His people. We may see many shadows of the work of the one Saviour, and how much it cost the Deliverer of Israel to do His work. We may see how the weapons of man are rejected, and the things which man despises are often the very instruments whereby the Lord will save. It is here as it is always, “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise…that no flesh should glory in His presence” (1 Cor. 1:27, 29).
From The Path to the City of Gold, the Companion Volume to The Names on the Gates of Pearl