66 amply forewarned them, that if they acted thus perversely, the punishment due to their crimes would surely be brought upon them, and had especially pointed out the nations round about them, as being the instruments by whom, should they provoke him to such a course, he purposed to inflict it.* Their departure from him, as we see in the case of Micah and his image, consisted originally in a breach of the second commandment; the worship apparently was intended for him, but it was offered to him contrary to his express directions, as represented by an image. It appears, however, that having gone thus far, they did not long hesitate to go farther: they soon proceeded to violate his first and great command. ment, Thou shalt have none other gods but me;" seduced by the example of the heathens round about them, they worshipped their idols; and most fitly, therefore, was their chastisement brought about by means of those very heathens who had led them into sin. The first who brought them into slavery was the king of Mesopotamia, whom they served eight years. It behoves us, looking to this sad example, not only to keep ourselves from the gross act of worshipping an idol, as it is the image of some fancied god different from ours, to which, our God be thanked, we have no temptation as had the Jews; but also from whatsoever approaches and leads to it, such as is the worship of the true God under any visible representation, an error into which the doctrine and practice of the church of Rome has a strong tendency to lead the unwary. The children of Israel, while doing that which was right in their own eyes, had exercised all manner of violence and oppression upon one another, without provoking, except in one instance already mentioned, any great expression of * Num. xxxiii. 55. Josh. xxiii. 13. national feeling; but when similar oppressions were inflicted upon them by the hand of a foreign tyrant, they began to implore the assistance of the God whom they had forsaken, to deliver them out of their distress. And, deeply undeserving as they were of such a mercy, they did not cry to him in vain : though he foresaw, that again and again they would prove ungrateful for his deliverances, and relapse into their old offences; he nevertheless gave them that which they so earnestly desired- -a respite from their present misery. God delighteth in prayer-it is at all times an acknowledgment of his superintending providence, an act of faith in one of his most blessed attributes, his everlasting mercy. He has commanded us to pray, and instructed us in the manner and matter of our prayers; he has appointed his own Son to be the Mediator through whom they shall be acceptably presented before him, and has promised not to reject the humblest suppliant who thus comes to him in lowliness and sincerity of heart, and in full dependence upon him. God heard his people Israel, and gave them a deliverer, Othniel, the nephew and son-in-law of Caleb, who prevailed against their enemy, and restored them to a state of freedom. He was not a deliverer merely, he was also a judge; what they needed was not absolute liberty to do what they thought good, a condition for which they had already showed themselves unfit, but a liberty to do all that a lawful and competent authority should pronounce conducive to their welfare. And such, to illustrate spiritual things by temporal, is the nature of our christian freedom; we are "not as without law, but under the law to Christ:"* he, like, but far above, the divinely appointed governors of Israel, is both our Saviour and our Judge; he has obtained over us a 1 Cor. ix. 21. P complete authority, in that he has overthrown our ghostly enemy, and delivered us from the bondage of sin and death. The temporal judges of Israel, when they had done the will of God in their generations, died, and the people were left without a head; but Christ is the head of his church for ever—"death hath no dominion over him."* In entering further into the history of these judges, it will be proper to remark once for all, that, being mortal men, they retained and showed in their actions a large portion of human infirmity: God's Spirit was so far with them as to enable them to accomplish those special ends for which he raised them to their dignity and power; but we are not therefore to suppose, that every thing they did was done under his sanction, or is to be thought worthy of being imitated by us. An opportunity of applying this remark is afforded us by the conduct of the judge who comes next under our observation, Ehud, the Benjamite: that his general administration was that of a worthy and exemplary ruler, we may infer from the assurance, that the people did not do evil in the sight of the Lord until after his death :- but the manner in which he began to deliver Israel, by stabbing the king of Moab at a private audience, we cannot look upon otherwise than with abhorrence as a treacherous murder. After Shamgar, the son of Anath, whose victories were over the Philistines in the southern parts of the land, the judge whom God raised up for the deliverance of Israel from Jabin the Canaanite, who oppressed them in the north, was Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, a prophetess; at whose command Barak, with ten thousand men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun, encountered and totally defeated Sisera, the captain of Jabin's army, and his nine hundred chariots of iron. The Kenites, descended from Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, in the line of Heber, were a wandering tribe, and at that time encamped near the scene of action: they were at peace with Jabin, and Sisera therefore fled from the battle to the protection of their tents. Jael, the wife of Heber, received, concealed him, and gave him food and then, excited, we must suppose, by some over-ruling impulse from God, who had determined, and had previously declared, that he should fall by the hand of a woman, she put him to death as he slept, by striking the nail of the tent into his temples. For the assassination committed by Ehud before mentioned, we find no warrant in the words of Scripture; but with respect to Jael's act, it appears that Deborah, when she heard of the event, expressed herself in words of commendation, forming part of the triumphant song which she composed for the occasion-" Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be, blessed shall she be above women in the tent."* On this account I am disposed to ascribe her otherwise inexplicable conduct to a sudden impulse produced in her mind by the Almighty, which, for the moment, took from her all compassionate and womanly feeling, and converted her into the resolute performer of God's vengeance upon one whom he had doomed to death. It might also be designed to show the enemies of God, that even their imagined friends could be rendered in his hands the instruments of their destruction; and make them own, when their mightiest champion lay nailed to the earth at the feet of a feeble woman, that not only in the battle, but in the secret places of their retreat and refuge, the haters of his name were overtaken by his vengeance. A state of repose during forty * Judges v. 24. years followed this victory and the death of Sisera; when the crimes of the people, being again renewed, brought down upon them their usual punishment. They who inflicted it in the present instance were the Midianites, a people who, having recovered from the severe blow received by them from the Israelites during the stay of the latter in the country of Moab, were now able, and well inclined, to revenge it upon them in their new possessions. They came accordingly, with a great host, augmented by the alliance of the Amalekites and some other neighbouring tribes, for several years successively, to lay waste the land of Israel, destroying the increase of the earth, and compelling the inhabitants to shun their fury by hiding themselves in the dens and caverns of the mountains. The consequence of these repeated invasions was, the affliction of a grievous famine, the same probably which induced Elimelech of Bethlehem-judah, with his wife Naomi, and his two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, to emigrate to the country of Moab, in order to avoid its evils; intending doubtless to return to their own city when better times should come; a resolution, however, which one of the four only, the widowed and childless Naomi, was enabled to accom.. plish. Those better times arrived, when God, having first severely rebuked the disobedience of his people by a prophet, determined to deliver them once more out of the hand of their enemies. The person whom he selected to do this was Gideon, son of Joash, the Abiezrite, of the tribe of Manasseh, who was engaged, when the angel of the Lord appeared to summon him to his task, in threshing wheat, not in the usual place, but by the wine-press, to hide it from the Midianites. With a mind humble as his occupation, he shrank back for a while from the responsibility; nor was it until the messenger who addressed him had distinctly proved himself to be |
