In Wake County alone, there are an average of 23 abortions every day. Why? Because we would rather end a child’s life than have that child impact ours.
Our appetite for pornography has created a sex industry in which the average age of the girl entering it is 13 years old. Why? Because we would rather have sexual gratification than think about what it’s doing to anyone besides us.
Upward of 30 million people, mostly teens, have been diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia. Why? Because we have exalted the idol of the perfect figure, crushing any who fail to fit it.
Idolatry always kills. Our 21st-century idolatries are not nearly as sophisticated as we’d like to think they are.
3. God’s grace is a hard thing to grasp.
Jephthah made a stupid vow to God because he wanted to ensure success. He thought that by negotiating with God, he could get God on his side. In other words, he was still operating under a system of works.
Grace has never been easy for us to grasp. Works-righteousness, as Martin Luther said, seems to be hardwired into us. When we allow our hearts to go unchecked for even a moment, they run back to works, to religion. We make promises to God, hoping that we can strike some kind of deal.
But the doctrine of grace says that God won’t make deals. The only trade he’s willing to make is his righteousness for our absolute surrender. It’s so simple, yet it’s so hard for us to grasp. As Luther said, “The law says ‘do,’ but it is never done; the gospel says ‘believe,’ and it is already done.”
4. We need a better Judge.
This is a recurring them in the book of Judges. Jephthah was a savior of Israel, but a terribly broken savior. And he, like all the other judges, points us to Jesus, the perfect Savior who was broken for the broken.
Jesus was driven from his brothers, like Jephthah. He was “despised and rejected by men.” But while Israel ran to Jephthah, we didn’t run to Jesus. He ran to us when he could bear our sufferings no longer.
Jephthah believed he could find favor with God through extreme sacrifice. Jesus offers us favor with God as a free gift, because the most extreme sacrifice has already been paid.
Jephthah started his deliverance with diplomacy, but when that failed, we wasn’t afraid to fight. In fact, he killed not only enemy Amorites but also fellow Israelites, and even his own daughter. Yet with Jesus, when pleading did not work, he took the war into himself. When it came time to die, it was his life, not ours, that he took. That’s a Judge worth following.
For more, be sure to listen to the entire message here.
