Reading the Old Testament can be difficult. It’s not exactly full of the kinds of stories we’d pick out for our kids to read before bed. It’s more likely to sound like a brutal recounting of the Hatfields and McCoys than a scene from Goodnight Moon. What lessons can we learn from the less-than-pleasant parts of God’s Word?
Judges 9 gives us a great example. It chronicles the life of Gideon’s son, Abimelech—his bloody rise to power and his violent end. His story begins when he ruthlessly murders 69 of his 70 brothers, declaring himself king and demanding tribute from the surrounding cities. The one brother who survives, Jotham, warns Abimelech that this atrocity won’t go unpunished.
It takes a few years, but Jotham turns out to be right. Abimelech, the murderous usurper, has a series of rebellions on his hand almost immediately. He’s able to stamp out one by burning hundreds of people alive in a tower (in Shechem). But when he tries the same trick in the next city, an anonymous woman drops a millstone on his head. It doesn’t quite finish him off, so he asks his armor-bearer to kill him with a sword. He obliges, and Abimelech’s bloody reign is over. End of story. Roll credits.
What lessons can we learn from this bloody tale?
1. God’s judgment is slow, and sometimes subtle, but always sure.
Judges 9 is full of action, but it’s noticeably lacking something crucial—the covenant name of God. As one person violently rises to power and is overtaken by another bloody challenger, it’s easy to think that God is absent. We’ve heard stories like this before. It’s just one tragedy after another, evil upon evil.
Until Judges 9:56-57. When Abimelech dies, the narrator lifts the curtain for us to see that “God returned the evil of Abimelech…And God made all the evil of the men of Shechem return on their heads.” Apparently God had been at work the whole time—the invisible hand in history’s glove, using sinful men as his instruments, even when they don’t know they’re being used.
This world gives us ample evidence to assume that God is absent. But stories like this show us that in the end, God will have the last word. They also warn us that we must never let the slowness of God’s judgment lull us into complacency. As the Apostle Peter said, we are always liable to mistake God’s patience in judgment for his absence. That was the fatal error in Noah’s day. And it’s the fatal error for many today. You say, “I can repent tomorrow. Tomorrow will be just like today, anyway.” Abimelech must have thought so. But it’s not true. So don’t use what God intends to be space to repent with his absence.
2. The problem isn’t out there. It’s in here.
Abimelech is the first ruler in Judges that actually causes the oppression. Before him, oppression seemed to come from the outside. But now the foreign nations aren’t the problem: Israel is its own problem. In fact, it has been the whole time.
The problems in our lives are never just out there. It’s not our circumstances or our peers who are making our lives miserable. Our greatest problem is always sin. And often, as in this story, God’s “punishment” for that sin is simply to step back and let it run its course. That’s what you see with Abimelech: no fire from heaven, no earthquake. Just people reaping the consequences of their own sinful choices.
God doesn’t need to invent or create punishment. We do that ourselves. As C.S. Lewis once said,
“In the long run, the answer to all those who object [to God’s judgment] is a question: ‘What are you asking God to do?’ To wipe out their past sins and to give them a fresh start…offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does. … In the end, there are only two kinds of people: those who say to God ‘thy will be done’ and those to whom God says ‘thy will be done.’”[1]
This leads to #3…
3. We need a new King, a better Judge.
Like Israel, we come to God thinking that we need him to deliver us from some bad thing—pain, broken relationships, lack of money. We might need those things, but that’s never what we most need. Since we are our own curse, we need freedom from our own hearts.
We’re constantly duped into thinking that money, education, or government can fix what ails us. But history doesn’t bear that out. The richest people aren’t necessarily more virtuous, and education doesn’t magically make us saints. Money gives us means; education gives us ideas. Both give us power. Neither gives us salvation.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn realized this while languishing in a Communist gulag. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds,” he said, “then we could separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through every human being. And who is willing to destroy his own heart?” We think that the problem is the Republicans, or the Democrats; the folks on Wall Street, or the people collecting welfare. But the curse isn’t around us; the curse is within us.
That’s why, despite all their messiness, brutal stories like Abimelech’s point us forward to a Savior, to the one who would not only fix our situation, but would fix us. Jesus is the true King we seek in every reform, the better Judge who can free us from our own bondage to ourselves. Salvation isn’t found in a better situation; it’s found in the embrace of the Savior.
For more, be sure to listen to the entire message here.
[1] Combined from Problem of Pain and The Great Divorce.
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