Thoughts on Judges 21 & Romans 4

Today's reading: Judges 21; Romans 4

Thoughts on Judges 21

For all the trouble Israel was getting themselves in during the period of the judges, I feel like their concern and compassion for Benjamin is one thing they got right (even if what they did about it was a little messed up).

Mostly I am thinking about this in comparison to Israel's later history where the northern and southern kingdoms were at war with one another and the southern kingdom rejoiced to see the northern tribes wiped out and carried off. Here, in Judges, even though Israel was willing to take a hard stand against the sin that the Benjaminites were willing to allow in their territory, even to the point of killing off almost the entire tribe as a result, they then mourned for the loss of a tribe among God's people and sought what restoration they could.

This attitude was missing from Judah later in their history. The northern tribes really brought their destruction on themselves by turning from God and refusing to listen to the prophets He sent to them, but that does not mean that the southern tribes should not have mourned that ten tribes were lost from Israel.

So while I can't assume God was necessarily pleased with how they handled it (having the remaining Benjaminites kidnap two hundred young girls to be their wives), I'm betting He was pleased with the compassion they had for this portion of His people.

I would also say that this is the same kind of attitude we should have toward sin. Jesus Himself calls for us, in Matthew 18, to refuse to accept sin, and to even refuse someone fellowship for refusing to repent of serious enough sin, but we should not rejoice in such discipline, but mourn over the situation and yearn for the person's restoration. 

Thoughts on Romans 4

I once heard a teaching on Romans 4 where the teacher made an offhand remark about Abraham's faithfulness. When Paul says that Abraham did not waver in unbelief about God's promise, the teacher made a comment like, "Well, except for the whole Hagar thing..." and then went on to say that Abraham finished in faithfulness and that's what Paul is really getting at here. I've heard others make similar comments about Hagar/Ishmael being unfaithfulness/distrust on Abraham's part, but the more I've thought about it, the more I just don't think that's actually accurate.

We tend to look at Abraham having Ishmael with Hagar as being an act of unbelief on his part, not believing that God could give him a son through Sarah and thus taking matters into his own hands, but I think that might be more cultural differences than anything else. We know from other places that it was a normal (or at least accepted) cultural practice that a woman could give her servant to her husband and "claim" that woman's children as her own. Just look at Leah and Rachel as they compete to have children with Jacob. Each woman gives her servant to Jacob as another wife, but then they consider those children as their own in their escalating conflict with one another. So in a world where it was common for the patriarch of a family to have multiple wives and/or concubines, and accepted practice for a woman to give her servant to her husband to bear children on her behalf, for Abraham to have a child with Hagar would have been a pretty mundane occurrence.

So given that, the example that goes through my head is if, when my wife and I were considering buying a house in Gahanna, God had said, "I will give you a house in Gahanna." We were already considering it, so I would probably take that as affirmation that that was the direction God wanted us to go and I would start watching for houses to crop up. If a week later we find a great house for our family and put an offer in that gets accepted, I would probably thank and praise the Lord for doing exactly what He said and giving us a house in Gahanna! But then imagine if, a decade later, God showed up and said, "I will give you a house in Gahanna." I would probably be a little confused and say, "But God, you already gave me a house in Gahanna, and we've been living here and enjoying it for ten years." Then imagine God says, "No, but I will give you a house in Gahanna," and then a couple years later we randomly get the deed to a different Gahanna house in the mail. When God said He was going to give us the house, He had intended this other house He was ultimately going to simply hand us, but does that make it an act of unfaithfulness that we bought the first house? Definitely not! In fact, in that scenario, it could very well be that we only bought the first house because we thought that's how God was providing the house for us and we were buying it out of faithfulness to Him.

For Abraham then, when God tells him He is going to make a great nation out of him through a child of his own, and when God doesn't mention Sarah in those initial promises, it would make perfect sense for Abraham to assume, especially given Sarah's age, that his promised heir would come by a different woman. In that sense, taking Hagar and having a son with her may very well have been Abraham trusting that God was able to accomplish His promise and make a great nation out of his descendants, and so he acted in faith on that promise to have a son through whom God could bring forth that nation. I really think Abraham's response when God comes to repeat the promise betrays this thinking. He doesn't seem ashamed of having had Ishmael, or act like he did something wrong, but instead seems confused because he already has Ishmael. I would expect a different reaction from Abraham at that point if Ishmael was born of faithlessness to God. But then that conversation is the first time God specifically mentions that this son would be born from Sarah, and Abraham continues to trust in God's promise.

All that to say, I think when Paul says that Abraham didn't waver in unbelief, he means that Abraham didn't waver in unbelief. Just because he carried out his trust in God's promise in a way that doesn't match with our own cultural practices doesn't mean that what he did was necessarily done out of anything other than faith.