Awake! Awake!

God has a call on your life. He will use your past, your giftings (and your weaknesses;), and call to life the deep desires he has put in you; he will confirm it with the wise people he has put around you. We will look at three leaders who had a call on their lives: the prophet and Judge of Israel, Deborah, the fed-up housewife/executioner, Jael, and the reluctant commander of the Israelite army, Barak. Judges 4 tells the history; Judges 5 brings it to life in a masterpiece of Hebrew poetry. Each leader tells us something about God’s call on our lives; they tell us about credit, reluctance, and mercy.

Who gets the credit? The Song of Judges 5 is attributed to Deborah. Deborah, has one thing on her mind: she and Barak boast in the power and faithfulness of our God to rescue his people. These are God’s people who “again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” after the last judge died. They are being oppressed by the Canaanites as a consequence of their sin. Judges 4:2 says, “And the Lord sold them into the hand of Jabin, king of Canaan” and his army general, Sisera “who had 900 chariots of iron and he oppressed the people of Israel cruelly for twenty years.” The Jews were meant to finish the conquest of the land of Canaan started under Joshua. But instead, they got scared, they got tired, they got distracted; they exchanged the truth of God for something more immediate. They turned to something other than God to cope with the stress. What do you turn to when you feel overwhelmed? Stressed out? What do you reach for? I think we can all relate to the Jews. They did nothing to deserve this deliverance. Neither do we. This song is singing about the Lord, “I will make melody to the Lord, the God of Israel…” who would not give up on his promise; he would not go back on his name; thus he would not give up on his beloved sinners. He raised up deliverers, called judges, and awoke them from their slumber.

This song gives all the credit to God who raised up a very unlikely leader to whom the culture would give no credit. God raised up a woman to be a judge! The text is very aware of the culture views towards women. Take these examples: Deborah herself chides Barak for his resistance to God’s call to attack Sisera’s army. She sends for Barak and summons him, “Has not the Lord, the God of Israel, commanded you” to take your small army and the 2 tribes that are willing to fight with the assurance that the Lord himself will draw out Sisera and give him into your hand? Barak agrees but ONLY IF Deborah will go with him… “if you don’t go, I will not go.” She seems annoyed. I will go with you. “But this path you are on,” will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman” (Judges 4:9). You can almost hear the crowd say, oh no! Not a woman! Judges 9:54 echoes this sentiment when the wicked king Abimilech is mortally wounded by a woman and he asks his armor-bearer to quickly stab him so no one can say he was killed by a woman. At the end of Judges 5, after it celebrates the insidious execution of Sisera by Jael, Deborah imagines Sisera’s mother anxiously waiting for his return. The maidens comfort her by saying Sisera is probably delayed because he is busy raping the Jewish women, who are reduced to be simply called “wombs.” Meanwhile, one of those “wombs” had just killed Sisera. Furthermore, one of those wombs is writing this song and leading the charge!

The text is well aware of what people thought of women and seems to have a bit of fun with it. This only serves to reinforce the Gospel message: God is stronger than the cultural norms and uses them for good to advance his plan to save his people. God is the missionary; he is the leader; he will fulfill his plans for you; nothing is too strong for him; he keeps his promise to have mercy on you.

You hear a bit of that fun with cultural norms between Jesus and the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:22-27. She throws herself upon Jesus crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”

23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
27 “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” (Matthew 15:22-27)

Jesus pushes on this age-old enemy of the Jews, a Canaanite. He tips his hat to the cultural norms, norms the Old Testament developed (Jews first). Yet, Jesus came into the world to forgive the sins of people from every tribe and nation—just beginning with the Jews. That means this Canaanite woman’s too… and heal her daughter as well. She knows it. Our missionary God had returned to the Canaanite enemy from Judges 4 and 5. And a woman no less! His grace breaks through our boundaries. His forgiveness knows no bounds.

Deborah has one leader on her mind. She uses all her God-given authority to show the glory belongs to the Lord. He is the one scandalizing cultural norms for the sake of his saving work. He is the one who would fight Barak’s battle and time it perfectly with the rainstorm to knock out the chariots (Judges 5:20,21). He is the one who awoke her out of her complacency as she listened to the horrors of Canaanite cruelty under the palm tree between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim (Judges 4:5).

“Awake, Awake Deborah! Awake, awake, break out in song! Arise, Barak, lead away your captives, O son of Abinoam” (Judges 5:12).

You hear this again in Ephesians 5:15,

“Awake O sleeper, rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you.”

Have you ever been awoken from going with the flow, a flow that was no good for anybody anyway? A family pattern? A cultural of shaming? An addiction cycle? A status quo? Jesus is behind it; he is awaking your soul, giving you eyes to see yourself and others in a whole new light. He awoke Deborah and called her to summon Barak, to go with him, to lead the charge. It encouraged her and Barak and everyone so much that they glorified God and wrote this song. He remembered his covenant. He didn’t give up on us. Look what he did for me, for us.

“Awake” by Kate Norris, charcoal on paper, 9”x9”

Deborah is an extraordinary leader, a culture-shaper, an influencer who knows where real glory lies. She takes no credit for herself. It all belongs to the Lord, to him be the glory, the honor, for ever and ever amen. Our sin will always crave the credit. In Jesus, God frees you from it so you can run the race he’s given you. He knows what you can do—he made you. Even better, he knows what he will do through you. Furthermore, there’s something unlikely about you… something that challenges the cultural norms where you might feel like you don’t measure up… that they are waiting for you to fail. You are in good company. That unlikely part is a witness that you are here because God wanted you here. You don’t have the strength or clout for the job at hand but he does. He’s going to strengthen you in him as he uses you to serve him.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

Feeling reluctant? Barak was. Deborah’s call to him implies that he already knew God had called him to lead the army, “Has not God called you?” It’s convicting to all of us, who centuries later, are like Barak and still get scared about doing stuff we don’t want to do yet we know God has put it in front of us. Like apologizing, or listening to your elderly neighbor, or laying your entire life on the line for a people who will never appreciate it. Barak is alive and well in all of us. God is still reassuring him and convicting him through prophets like Deborah in our lives right now. His resistance turned into worship and praise. Judges 5 is a song of praise by Deborah and Barak.

In Judges and Ruth: An Introduction and Commentary, Arthur Cundall and Leon Morris (85), write, “A great man realizes his own inadequacy when called by the Lord to some great task, but the divine call is never alone, it is accompanied by the divine provision. Paul’s words refer to all those who are called to God’s service, ‘Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our sufficiency is from God, who has qualified us to be ministers…’ (2 Corinthians 3:5,6).” You and I are reluctant about something this morning. That’s just where Jesus meets us. Hebrews 11:34 describes the list of heroes from Judges. It includes Barak because of this testimony: “For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, etc… [who] were made strong out of weakness.” Our reluctance always turns into a testimony someone else needs to hear, and that we need to hear again. I couldn’t; but he could and he was faithful to me.

Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash
… I’m taking some liberties on Jael’s household duties ;)

Now to our final point on mercy in the character of Jael. And this is odd because Jael is the least merciful one in this account!

Before we get to mercy, we need to look at Jael’s justice. Jael executes justice upon Sisera in a sly and gruesome way. Sisera, exhausted, thirsty, and defeated runs by her tent. She beckons him in, offers him milk, covers him in a blanket. He falls asleep, unsuspecting. Women were in charge of erecting the tents, so she skillfully takes the tent peg and mallet and drives it through his temple into the ground. Both the narrative in Judges 4 and especially the poem in Judges 5 dwell on her process. The poem emphasizes that she crushed his head, pierced his temple. God had delivered her enemy to her door to give him justice. Sisera got what he deserved. You can hear the Jewish audience cheer when she makes their enemy pay. This is an ancient Hebrew version of a World War II film where the Nazi’s fail, or a public execution where the victim’s family can watch. We still do this today. A Christian might even champion Jesus defeating sin, Satan, and the temptations of the world this way. Yet the New Testament shines back on the Old and every one of our mouths is stopped.

Isaiah saw that the real savior, the one to whom Deborah, Barak, and Jael all point. Jesus would save us from a much greater enemy than Jabin the Canaanite king. He was “crushed for our sins, pierced for our transgressions… yet by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). He would kill the sin in our heart, the sin that drives us over and over to abandon the source of all our love and hope. He would defeat Satan who tempts us and the world that loves to take all the credit.

Jael shows us justice. The people of her day praised God for it. And we do champion justice for all victims of oppression and know that God sees everything and will bring a right to every wrong. However, we are deeply humbled. Jael the executioner foreshadows how Jesus was executed. That makes you and I like Sisera, the enemy. We have been forgiven much by a savior who spared us from justice and took the punishment we deserved. As he leads you out to seek justice and bring light to the darkness, it is as one who has been forgiven much. It is likely from the place he has forgiven you most that you will have the most authority and love for the enemies to whom he sends you. We seek justice for the oppressed but as ones who have been forgiven ourselves. Our militancy for justice on our enemies “out there” cannot be divorced from the mercy we have received for the enemy in our own heart.

God awakens your gifts and your calling. He always focuses you on him, not yourself. That is a blessing because it does not rest on your shoulders but on him who has qualified you and called you. He won’t let you down. He finds you where you are reluctant. He is strong where you are weak. Mark this time of reluctance and confusion. From it you will see him be strong in your weakness. The tent peg reminds us that we were once enemies of the cross, and our sinful self always will be. Jesus forgives you and me. From the place of deepest forgiveness comes the strongest love. He’s got a whole lot of love to give to you and flow through you. I can’t wait to hear your song of praise.

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Dandelion Ministries