Day 130

Judges 10:1-11:40, John 6:25-59, Psalm 59:1-8

They say that seeing is believing and today people went off on a tangent yet again when they were not looking at God and in the Gospel, people wanted a sign from Jesus so that they could believe.

Our journey along with the judges speeds past two of them, Tola and Jair and then leaves us in a rather disturbing place with the next one. Both Jair and Jephthah were Gileadites so they lived down to the west of the Jordan. Jephthah has quite a battle on with many of the people living in the area but God is with him so he is promised victory. Because of the promise that God has made to help him, Jephthah makes promise to give back to God, rather a dangerous promise at that. And then his daughter ends up being the sacrifice.

This just seems very wrong but it would be remiss to be ignore it. Firstly we see a man who is caught up in the moment and overwhelmed by a passion for God. Jephthah has not just made a promise, he has made a vow, and they have to be kept. Was he expecting an animal to come out first, his faithful dog perhaps (he certainly says ‘whatever’ rather than ‘whoever’), but unfortunately it is his daughter. We also see that he did not expect her to greet him, as he was utterly devastated when she did. People sometimes see the gruesome nature of the Old Testament but we do have to hold this nasty bit in context. Human sacrifice is pretty much condemned throughout the OT (Lev 18:21, 20:1-5 Deut 12:31) and it is treated with the disgust that it deserves when it does happen. What we see here with Jephthah is not the norm and the fact that it is not elaborated on (the sacrifice just mentioned so briefly at the end) shows that it is not good. It is perhaps a rather shocking story of a man who made a vow to God and did what he had to do, which was keep it, something that many people today may do well to remember.

From armies we move on to stomachs, because we all know that armies move on their stomachs. The people are demanding something that they can see but what Jesus points them to is something that they can experience, in fact we looked at the bread that Jesus offers just yesterday. What we eat though goes into us and sustains our lives, we feed on it. Jesus is offering the food that sustains all life for all time, but he reminds us that all of this can only come from the father and it is the father that we  will be with on the last day. We see these words a few times today, Jesus reiterating that he is here to bring us to the father to be with God.

There were some really turbulent times in these passages but that is the promise that lies at the end, that is the vow that Jesus made and will fulfil, that we will be with God right at the end.