Webb Judges and Ruth

God in Chaos
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2330-4
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

Reihe: Preaching the Word

The Old Testament books of Judges and Ruth record some of the most powerful stories in all of Scripture. Set in a time when everyone 'did what was right in his own eyes,' these books highlight God's faithfulness in the midst of Israel's continual disobedience. Exploring the stories of figures such as Gideon, Samson, and Naomi and Ruth, this accessible commentary emphasizes the countless ways God protected and preserved his people in the Bible. Experienced preacher Barry Webb explores important connections between Judges and Ruth, pointing out God's promises to his people and practical applications for daily life. Complete with powerful illustrations and engaging anecdotes, this commentary is a helpful resource for all who study, preach, and teach God's Word. Part of the Preaching the Word series.

Barry G. Webb (PhD, University of Sheffield) is the senior research fellow emeritus in Old Testament at Moore Theological College in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books and his work has been published in eight different languages. Barry and his wife live in Australia and have three daughters and five grandchildren.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Webb, Barry G.

Leseproben

1

After Joshua: The Legacy of a Great Leader

JUDGES 1:1–21

THERE ARE MOMENTS in the lives of people and nations that change everything. The birth of a first child is like that—his or her parents’ lives are changed forever. So is the death of one’s last surviving parent, the passing of a generation. We call such things boundary events because they are moments of irreversible transition. In the life of a nation it may be the passing of a great leader or the achievement of independence. Sometimes transitions to a new situation are traumatic and fill us with foreboding. The dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the year I was born, was an event like this. No longer could nations look to merely conventional weapons to protect them. A change had taken place that was irreversible, and those who understood this and had the means to do so began to arm themselves with new weapons. We had entered the nuclear age. The Second World War was ending, but another had already begun, and there was no going back. Those born after August 6, 1945, were born into a world that was radically changed from the one their parents had known.

The book of Judges opens with a boundary event of this kind. Joshua has died. An era of progress and confidence has ended, and the future is uncertain. Joshua was not just anyone. He had been a man of tremendous importance for Israel. By his personal example of courage, faith in God, and military leadership, he had brought Israel into its promised inheritance in Canaan. He was not perfect, but he was unquestionably great—the greatest man of his generation—and Israel would feel the loss of him keenly. As its name suggests, the book of Joshua is dominated by Joshua from beginning to end. It begins with the death of Moses, Joshua’s mentor, an even more towering figure than Joshua himself. That, too, was a mammoth boundary event. But by the time Moses died Joshua was already in place to take Israel forward. Moses had personally commissioned him. Deuteronomy 34:9 tells us that “Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him.” So after Moses there was Joshua. But after Joshua there was no one in particular. There was a leadership vacuum, and Israel was in crisis.

Joshua’s Influence

The crisis was mitigated to some extent by Joshua’s legacy—the imprint he left on Israel. Great people exert a powerful influence on others, an influence that often outlives them. But even great people have flaws, and their legacy can sometimes be more harmful than good. That was the case with Solomon, for example, whose failures in the latter part of this reign left Israel compromised and divided (1 Kings 11, 12). Joshua’s legacy, on the other hand, was positive: “the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua” (2:7). Joshua had been the greatest man of his generation, and those who knew him aspired to be like him. Even after his death they followed his example of godly living. Several things in 1:1–21 show the impact his life had made.

Unity (v. 1)

We have all witnessed the sad spectacle of divided families. Thoughtless words have been said or selfish actions taken. People have been hurt and found it hard to forgive. Strong people have gotten their way at the expense of weaker ones. Quarrels over money, especially disputed wills, have split families into warring factions that have led to stalemate rather than settlement. Bitterness has set in, and blighted relationships, and the damage done to the family can last for generations. The same thing sometimes happens in nations. Leaders maintain their hold on power by playing factions against one another, resulting in an appearance of unity without any real concord. When they finally die or fall from power, open warfare ensues as competing factions struggle for supremacy in the vacuum left behind. For all they may have achieved militarily, economically, and so on, their legacy is disaster—a nation divided against itself. Not so with Joshua. After his death what we find is not this or that faction vying for supremacy, but the Israelites acting as one: “the people of Israel inquired of the LORD” (v. 1). Joshua was the kind of leader who drew people together rather than setting them against one another, and that is a mark of true greatness.1

People Who Seek God (v. 1)

A leader has to lead, and to do that he must stand out in some way from others. He must exercise authority and have that authority respected. But Joshua had never claimed to have absolute power or focused attention on himself as though he was Israel’s supreme leader or as if they would be lost without him. He had always directed his followers to the Lord as the one to whom all alike were accountable, including himself. This was something that had been impressed on him by his predecessor Moses (Deuteronomy 31:1–8, 23) and powerfully reinforced by his own encounter with God, the true “commander of the army of the LORD,” in Joshua 5:13–15. So although Joshua left a huge gap when he died, the Israelites knew they were not leaderless. They “inquired of the LORD,” seeking direction from him as their supreme commander. They knew they were his people, his army. Joshua had never eclipsed God in their vision, and it is a central part of his legacy that they continued to look to God as their leader after Joshua himself was no longer with them.

It’s not clear how the inquiry was made. Perhaps it was through a priest, using oracular stones (the Urim and Thummim) as in 20:27, 28.2 According to Numbers 27:18–21 this is how Joshua had been given instructions about Israel’s movements in the wilderness. But the nature of the response here (a whole complex sentence rather than a simple yes or no) suggests that in this case something more was involved than the use of the Urim and Thummim—most likely the delivery of a spoken oracle by the priest himself or (as elsewhere in Judges) a prophet or the mysterious “messenger of the LORD.”3 We’re simply not told. What is significant is not how the inquiry was made, but the attitude it reveals. The Israelites inquired of the Lord because they recognized him as their supreme leader, as Joshua had done, and believed he had not abandoned them now that Joshua was gone. This, too, shows the powerful impact Joshua had made on their lives. We will return later to the significant response to Israel’s inquiry in verse 2.

People Who Know They Need One Another and Work Together (vv. 3–21)

This is another aspect of the national unity that was part of Joshua’s legacy. Joshua had never been an autocrat. He believed in teamwork. He was a man who knew how to delegate responsibility and work cooperatively with others and had modeled this in his leadership. Again and again in the book of Joshua we see him exercising leadership along with Eleazar the priest, the elders, and heads of families and tribes.4 The phrase “he and the elders of Israel” is particularly revealing about the way Joshua had shared his leadership with these key men. He had mourned with them when Israel suffered a heavy defeat at Ai (Joshua 7:6) and literally walked with them “before the people” as they went up to Ai a second time (Joshua 8:10). It was a great and courageous example of team leadership that put humility, trust, and cooperation before self-seeking, personal status, and competitiveness. These were the men who would eventually have to shoulder the responsibility of leading in their own right, and the book of Judges indicates just how profoundly their understanding of what that entailed was shaped by Joshua’s example: “And the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua” (2:7). Furthermore, as we are about to see, Joshua’s example of noncompetitive, cooperative leadership impacted not only the elders of Israel but the whole nation.

In the time of the judges the major people groups that made up Israel were the twelve tribes, named after their ancestors, the twelve sons of Jacob. This gave the people of each tribe an identity more specific than simply “Israelites.” This was a good thing in itself, because people need to feel they belong to something smaller and more strongly kinship-based than a nation. In the modern world this is expressed (among other ways) in the need many feel to do genealogical research and produce a family tree that shows their connectedness to others sharing the same forebears. But there are dangers when the desire for a distinct identity goes too far. Kinship connectedness can descend into a kind of tribalism that threatens the unity of the larger community to which the tribes belong. It can set tribe against tribe in a way that leads to rivalry and the kind of fierce competitiveness that destabilizes nations and can ultimately destroy them. This very nearly happened in the period of the judges, as the closing chapters of the book show. In the period immediately following Joshua’s death, however, and no doubt due to his influence, relationships between the tribes were marked by cooperation rather than rivalry.

Joshua had led Israel in a series of military campaigns that broke the back of Canaanite resistance and then divided up the land by lot, giving each tribe a specific part of Canaan as its inheritance in the land the Lord had given them (Joshua...