'The Lord Has Gone Before You'—Lessons from Deborah's Story

‘The Lord has Gone Before You’—Lessons from Deborah’s Story

By Jo Kadlecek (Judges Series, preached 6 October 2024)

My husband and I just got back from an amazing trip to the South of France so if you’ll indulge me, this might feel a little like wandering cobblestone roads and you’re not sure what’s around the corner.

Everywhere we walked in France’s villages, we encountered bits of Christianity’s history. In fact, not far from the ruins of a small Roman amphitheatre in Lyon, there’s a museum exhibiting the impact of Christians in the region. One room has murals of numerous martyrs.  

Because in the 2^nd century, Roman pagans in Lyon pressured city officials to imprison Christians, and eventually kill them. Captured Christians who were Roman citizens were decapitated; all others were sent to the arena to suffer horrible fates for a violence-hungry crowd.

Among them was a 15-year-old servant girl named Blandina. Blandina was the last of a group of friends to succumb to death, surviving one form of torture after another so she could stay alive to encourage the others, singing and praying so loudly and beautifully that eventually the crowd begged her to renounce her faith in Christ and live. She would not, so they sent bulls in to finish the job. The murals and statues, even a church named after her, show Blandina with a bull near her waist as she’s looking to heaven.

Back from Lyon, let’s fast forward to north Sydney in 1868. A small group of friends feel compelled to build a church together for the sake of their neighbours. They work hard, meet regularly, and despite the challenges, pray for God’s provision. Four years later in 1872, this building where you’re now sitting held its first services.

But Sydney was changing and in 1900, a young Anglican couple named Ethel and Arthur Foster worried as construction began for what we now know as Central Train Station. The new station was planned over a sprawling and deteriorating cemetery. With hundreds of tombstones crumbling, and memorial stones representing personal, often tragic histories of Irish/ English, Protestant and Catholic, poor and wealthy people, the Fosters feared these people’s memories would be lost for good.

So every weekend for two years, regardless of the weather, Ethel lugged around a huge box camera, wearing a full length skirt, to take pictures of tombstones. Arthur filled dozens of notebooks with the words and drawings from each person’s memorial. Together they captured the last earthly glimpses of 700 otherwise forgotten neighbours they never knew. A few years later the Fosters helped found the Royal Australian Historical Society and in 2019, their work formed the State Library’s exhibit, aptly named, Dead Central, about the construction of Central Station.

Jump ahead now to another road in England, 1960, when four young men are about to make a history of their own. They’ve got a funny name, but the Beatles become the most successful band in the world. Their songs are anthems for countless lives, romances, movies and social justice movements over the next decades and remain cultural staples to this day.

Now I doubt Blandina and her friends ever imagined they would be remembered for their faith as martyrs, just as I’m pretty sure the folks who started Christ Church couldn’t have anticipated we’d all be here in 2024 grateful for their vision. I’m confident too that Ethel Foster did not grow up thinking she’d take photographs someday in a cemetery, just as those guys from Liverpool didn’t realise the global impact they’d have in music.

What’s my point? All of them stepped outside their comfort zone to respond to the moment. And none of them made such contributions on their own. Because no significant thing in history, good or bad, happens in a vacuum, or in isolation.

From Lyon to Sydney to the rest of the world and across history, otherwise ordinary humans have been inspired to do amazing things with, and for, others. No one accomplishes anything alone. We need other people to complete the tasks we often have no idea we’re going to do. As corny as it might sound, life is a team effort—no one achieves anything on their own.

Especially God’s people. Which I think is a theme in Judges and in particular this story we’re looking at in chapter 4. As we’ve learned, Judges is about ordinary people whom God guides for his purposes, no matter if they’re fearful or wise, skilled or inexperienced. The fact that he is with THEM shows how he works best. In the community of human frailty. His strength in our weakness.

By now we also know that Judges is a history, one as visual as any set of photographs, and also as full of death and despair, change and heroes as our cobblestone glance through the past. It takes place just after Joshua’s death, and is about people rebelling against God until God mobilizes an enemy to get their attention. Then they cry out—together—for help and God sends a rescuer. There’s peace in the land—until, as Judges 4:1 says—: “The people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” And repeat.

Whether you want case studies for terrible leadership, an outline for an adventure movie or a message for improving your life, Judges provides each. And it’d be completely tragic if not for the promise in today’s verse: “Has not the Lord gone before you?”

See, Judges sets a precedent for leaving our comfort zone to trust Someone bigger than ourselves. To sacrifice for others. To be ready to do what we’d never imagine, in faith, alongside one another.

So let’s turn down Deborah’s road, the fourth judge who gets two chapters for her story (some only get a sentence). The consequence of Israel’s collective faithlessness is 20 years of cruel oppression under King Jabin and his brutal general Sisera. And it’ll get worse, just as it did in history when Christians were—and still are—martyred for their faith.

The people are so afraid they “cried to the Lord for help.” Enter 3 major characters: a wise judge who happens to be a woman, a reluctant warrior who happens to sit under a female judge, and a ‘tent-peg lady’ as Greg called her last week.

Deborah is a mother of Israel and a judge who trusts God and inspires trust in his people. She doesn’t lead by force—she’s no soldier—but she knows how to listen to her people. As she does, her heart breaks over their oppression.

Yes, she’s the only woman in a line of judges, which is no small thing in this patriarchal culture. But this is a story not so much about gender roles, as it is God working through three unlikely candidates as a team to accomplish his purposes.

Did Deborah grow up thinking, hmm, 20 years of oppression are coming, I’ll probably be a judge. Did she wonder what she’d do if the men of Israel were too afraid of Jabin or Sisera to respond?

Did Barak one day imagine he’d be asking a woman who’d never seen battle to go with him into one of the fiercest he’d faced? And after her husband Heber had her pitch their tent (v11), did Jael, a humble wife, anticipate that the peg she used would, um, come in handy for killing a rapist? Or that she’d be called ‘most blessed of tent making women’?

Probably not. God places Deborah in this position of authority and the people follow. Her trust in him paints a stark contrast to those who “did evil in the sight of the Lord” and suffered for it. God moves her to act, and in response, these others do too.  

When she calls for the warrior Barak, she tells him in v6 that, “The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you: ‘Go, take with you ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulun and lead them up to Mount Tabor.  I (the Lord) will lead Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his troops to the Kishon River and give him into your hands.’”

I doubt Barak is expecting such a specific order from God through a woman judge. So he hesitates. He’s a skilled warrior and this sounds like a suicide mission. Sisera’s army is huge, his is not. Sisera has 900 chariots of iron light years ahead of Israel’s, and Barak has to rally troops from six different tribes. Barak answers oddly in v.8: “‘If you will go, with me, I will go. If you do not, I will not.’”

We don’t know his motives for his, “I’ll go if you go” response. We only know that even with God’s command and promise, Barak’s isn’t all in—at first.

V9 reflects Deborah’s confidence not in her abilities but in God’s: “Certainly (she says) I will go with you. But because of the course you are taking, the honour will not be yours, for the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.” A military officer’s ultimate disgrace was to be conquered by a lesser-skilled opponent. Women didn’t fight. If this were a film, it’d be another twist because we’re all expecting Deborah to be that woman whose hands Sisera falls into.

When the moment arrives, Deborah sends Barak, see verse 14: “Go! This is the day the Lord has given Sisera into your hands. Has not the Lord gone ahead of you?” She knows Sisera’s army is no match for God!

Barak obeys with enough faith in God’s command that he’s listed in Hebrews chapter 11 v32, for helping conquer the Canaanites. He and Deborah together are part of God’s story. Both are instrumental for what happens next.

Floods are sweeping away Sisera’s army. Sisera’s knocked off his horse and fleeing on foot. Cut to a tent and the face of another woman, Jael, who never imagined this opportunity. Sisera thinks she is offering him refuge.

Jael gives him milk, and he falls asleep. She grabs a peg and a hammer, women’s tools for putting up tents. Jael then shocks us all with the grisly act of driving the peg through Sisera’s temple. Just to be sure we get it, the writer confirms in v.21: “And he died.”  

Meanwhile, Barak is still pursuing Sisera, when Jael greets him and invites him into her tent. Barak probably reaches for his sword; instead, he finds a dead general, blood gushing from his head. Barak looks at Jael, who I imagine has a tiny smirk on her face.

Cut back to Jabin the King of Canaan whom v.23 says God subdues, and the people of Israel are rescued! Through a godly judge, a reluctant soldier and an unlikely opponent!

No wonder the next chapter has Deborah and Barak leading the people in song! Though we didn’t read it (I’d encourage you to), we see why they invite the people to praise the God who has rescued them: The unimaginable has happened!

In chapter 5, Deborah recalls, their history, names, places, events, so they see how personal and involved their Creator is. She reminds them how God guided them, even calling Jael ‘most blessed of women’. As Deborah describes Sisera’s mother looking for his return in the final verses of chapter 5, we learn just how awful Sisera was.

As Rev. Tim Keller put it: “This Judges cycle is framed around the actions of women: Deborah leads Israel under Sisera’s oppression, seen most horribly in how he treats Israel’s women; and Jael, another woman, is the means by which his reign of rape and terror is ended. After making the lives of many women hellish nightmares, it is two women who bring Sisera down; there is a great irony that the man who used women as objects is killed by a womanly object.”

We see their impact in Chapter 5’s beautiful final verse, “May all your enemies perish, Lord! But may all who love you be like the sun when it rises in its strength. Then the land had peace forty years.”

Another forty years of peace—until the people again rebel and God sends another rescuer. Judges 4 and 5, though, show God achieving amazing things through ordinary, available humans, no matter how strange or difficult the calling might be.  

And that brings us back to this place. What do we believe God can accomplish through us at Christ Church? Are we willing to have our lives disrupted? Or are we holding too tightly to our plans or routines, afraid of what might happen if we respond to God’s nudging? What if an opportunity appears to us as a congregation that we never imagined? What then?

If we believe we are his children, that he formed us in his image, surely he is trustworthy in the unknown. In Judges 4 we see his persistent love through the three: after all, they could have been complacent or unwilling to seize the moment, yet together they were ready, and God wrote the history.

This same God after all brings his Son to another gruesome moment no one expects. Jesus must face his own fears in the Garden if he’s to rescue his people once and for all. As he endures the violence and alienation from his Father, those watching from the road are sure this is the picture of death. Even when the hammer drives the nails into his flesh, we cannot imagine anything else will happen.

But three days later the faithfulness of God explodes in Resurrected Life. For all of us. On the cross Jesus enters a battlefield and from the grave, he offers new life, of wisdom and courage, forgiveness and purpose, wherever and however he’s called us to spend our days together.

This Risen Jesus invites us into his presence and his family, to be his new body as Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 12, offering our gifts and ordinariness to do with others whatever God calls us to do, however strange or unexpected.

Maybe some of us have talked about an idea for a creative new ministry. Others know it’s time to step up to lead a Bible study or step out to help others serve.

If we’re followers of Jesus, we have amazing opportunities, if we’re willing. And we can trust God will go before us. Together, we can live as we never imagined but always hoped we would, reflecting his love in ways that go beyond our abilities.

Instead of stressed from the changes, violence and busyness of our world, we can be confident of God’s strength, just as Deborah, Barak and Jael were strengthened for each moment.

So what if we as a church didn’t hesitate to trust God, but joined him as he works in surprising ways, through his people to serve our city and the world? Has not the Lord gone before you?

May all of us who love God be like the sun when it rises in its strength, so the land, with its many roads, may enjoy great peace. Amen.

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