God's Guidance and Provision in Our Lives

In your Bibles, Judges 5. The book of Judges started out with an explanation about what took place in the life of the people of Israel when they settled in the land of promise in Canaan. So the first chapter of the book of Judges told in sort of a story way what happened as people of Israel came to settle in that land. And then the second chapter started telling the same story from God's point of view. In other words, in the first chapter he would say the people of Israel conquered this city and they conquered another city and conquered another city until they captured the land. The second chapter of Judges talks about this from God's point of view. He was telling them that they did capture one city, but they didn't do it the way God told them to. And then they went to the next place and they didn't do again what God told them to. And it got worse and worse and worse until by the end of the story of chapter 2, the people of Israel, God had turned His back on them and was no longer giving them the victories in their battles that He had promised that He would do because they had violated the contract or the covenant that God had made with them. So you had in chapter 1 a story and you had chapter 2, God's point of view about this first story. Well, it's almost the same thing has happened in chapter 4 and 5 of the book of Judges. Chapter 4 tells about the judgeship of Deborah who was instrumental in helping Israel throw off the enemy that had taken the land, the Canaanites. And in there it's a story of the military battles that took place from one story to another to another to another until all the story of Israel, of their conquest was told. Chapter 5 is a story of the very same thing except instead it's told again from a different point of view. It's not the military story about the conquest that takes place, but it's a spiritual explanation about what took place in the victory. Let me maybe illustrate this from our own point of view. You could be in a position, for example, like Lawrence looking for a job. And you could say, okay, I've applied at all these different places and I finally got a job. And that would be the story of getting a job. But if you'd been saying to God, here are the needs that I have and I want to find a way to be able to make a living and here are the skills that I have and so I'm asking you to lead me to a place where I can get a job, where I can work and earn a living. And then as a result of your circumstances, you go one place and you don't get the job. You go to another, someone recommends you go to another place and you've been asking God to tell you and show you what you need. He brings you to that place and you get a job and you know inside that God has guided you to this place and the job is exactly what you want. So you might say in the first instance, I tried several places and finally I found somebody to give me a job. On the second story, you might be saying to someone, you know, I was without a job, really needed a job and I started asking God to guide me where to go and I went to 1, 2, 3, 4 places and none of those were really work for me. And then I heard about this other place someone recommended, I went to that one and that was the job for me. God gave me a job. Once instance, you'd be telling the same story and the second, you'd be telling the story from a spiritual point of view, how God had helped you to get a job. Well, this is what the story in Judges is doing. The first story is the story of how they came to throw off the power of the Canaanites by calling Deborah, who was a judge at the time, and by God's systematic help for them, how they were victorious in driving the enemy out. The story of Deborah and the story of the other people involved in this can be told from a simply military point of view. Or you can come back and begin to look at it to say, what was the hand of God in all of this? Now, the reason this is important for us is if you give your life to Christ and you say to him, I'm going to live my life in obedience to you. You have a dimension in your life that other people might not have. And they would explain their life in terms of just merely human events. What I thought I should do, I did, and then things worked this way for me. But as a follower of Christ and one who submitted your life to God, you have to believe that all the things that take place in your life, if you're asking him for direction, you're depending on him for what he asks you to do, that in all of these events, God's hand is at work in your life. And what God wants us to do is to be able to tell other people around us what it means to follow God. God makes these promises to us. I want to guide you. So when you're trying to make choices, and you ask God what he wants you to do, and you are devoted to doing whatever he tells you, and in your mind you think, this is the right choice I should make, and you make that choice, and you're able to say to people, I prayed and asked God to guide me, and I had some decisions to make, and he helped me to make them, and I know it was the right one, and things have just fallen into place for me. So you're saying, God guided my choices. He kept his promise to me. Another promise he makes is, I'll provide for you. So whatever happens to you in your life, you're praying about circumstances, and you see that one after another, God does make provisions for you. So he wants you to say to people around you who are in trouble, and they need financial provisions or some kind of provisions, I trusted this to God, I asked him to help me, and here's how he's provided for me. And then protection is the other thing that God promises he gives to us. So whenever we are faced with circumstances that are difficult, and we're afraid, we're afraid either of the people around us, or afraid to get out and take risks, or afraid to be in the public, or whatever kind of fear you might have, you say, I've had these fears in my life, and I've learned to trust God, and he's removed the fears from me. I remember one time years ago, a family came to our church on Sunday night, and the lady was afraid to get out in public and go in crowds. They could call that agoraphobia, don't they? And fortunately, on Sunday night, there weren't many people at church, so she wasn't very afraid of the crowd. And I went over to visit them, and her husband said to me, you know, my wife needs help, she's got this fear of getting out in front of people, but I don't need religion or God or anything like that, but she really needs it. So I brought her to church so she could get religion and help out her life. Well, she grew to where she was not afraid of being at church at night, to where she wasn't afraid of being there on Sunday morning, and the fear all left her. And she had a story to tell, to say, when I met this, there was a time in my life when I was so afraid I couldn't go out, and now I don't have any of those fears whatsoever. Maxine Nicholson said it was. And the result of that all was her husband came to know Christ Himself because of her experience in finding God, help her to be able to face her fears and to feel confident in His protection. So each of these stories is a way by which we are to tell God what He does for us. And what we're talking about with the people of Israel is they've been overtaken by people who are enemies of theirs. This happened to them because they no longer trusted God. They were trusting in the gods of Baal. And so because of that, God just withdrew His hand from them. But in the stories we're going to see all the way through the book of Judges, whenever the people got in desperate need and they cried out to God for help, He sent someone to relieve them from the burden that they were under. And they have a story to be able to tell about what God did. So chapter 5 is describing the events that took place, but from the point of view honoring God instead of the military captains or the leaders, it's trying to honor God and what God did and what God provided. So chapter 5, song of Deborah, verse 1. On that day, Deborah and Barak, the son of Ben-O-Amm, sang this song. Now, what we're seeing is that the story of what God did for them is written here as a song that they would sing. In the Bible, all the psalms, for example, were songs that they sang in their church services. And the songs that they sang were songs that described events in their life. They were living testimonies about what God had done to them, both showing how He provided for them, how He protected them, how He helped them through the difficult circumstances in their life. They were songs that they would sing in their services to remind them that God had kept the contract He made with them and that they had kept the contract that He made with them and what happened when they didn't keep the contract they made with God. So this is a description of how Israel failed to keep the contract and how God did keep His side of that contract even though they had not lived in faith. So the story that they have, the song that they would sing is like the song of Moses back in the last chapters of Deuteronomy. Whenever they brought the people of Israel into the land of promise, He ordered Moses to write a song. And the song was about the failure of Israel, the success that God gave them. These songs that they sang were really not like we sing songs in church. We sing songs in church, we want to have a good song, everybody likes it and enjoys it. And we don't talk very much about, we wouldn't have a song in our church and say in the days when First Southern Baptist Church didn't follow the Lord and we were off doing the wrong things, God shut us down or whatever, we wouldn't sing those kind of songs. But the people of Israel, they sang the songs about their failures. They sang their songs about how God's judgment came on them. And they sang songs about the power of God, how He reversed the course of history for them. So what we find here is that the song is written to describe in the book of Judges what has happened to them, why they got into trouble, and what God did to be able to rescue them. And they would sing this song in their worship in the temple and in the synagogues later on. They would make sure that the song was known. So on the day of Deborah and Barak, son of Abinuim, sang this song, and then it starts with verse 2 is the beginning of the song. When the princes of Israel take the lead, and the people willingly offer themselves, praise the Lord. So the start of this song is focusing on how God is at work in the life of the community of Israel. When the princes lead, that is the leaders of the nation, when they are responsive to God and willing to listen to what He has to say, then things go well. The leadership of the nation or the leadership of a church is a critical ingredient in God being able to do in the church and in the community what He really wants to do. So this links us to the story of what God does in leading His people. The two elements of this is when the princes or the leaders of the people take the lead, and when the people willingly offer themselves, then God's success comes. We have an opportunity to show or see the greatness of God. That is what it means to say praise the Lord. We see then that things work like they ought to. So what God is talking about in His community of faith, we would say the church, is there two elements or ingredients that have to take place. One is the people who are spiritual leaders in the church, pastor and the other Sunday school teachers and the people that have positions of leadership in the church, it is very important for them to be participating and obeying what God wants them to do and take leadership in the spiritual events that happen. God counts on that. It is not just the pastor, but also the people who are in leadership roles. So he is starting this song saying, the way it works for God in God's people is that the leadership of God's people have to lead, and how do they lead? They lead by doing the things that God wants to have happen. Leadership in the church should read the Bible. They should be people that pray. They should be people that participate in the activities and events of the church, not just come and sit and watch or just do the things that are convenient, but the leadership has to be servant leaders who are prepared to do anything and everything God wants them to do. Now that doesn't work unless the rest of the people who are not in leadership roles do the same thing. So the second half of that, when the princes in Israel take the lead and then when the people willingly offer themselves, then the kingdom of God works as it ought to. Sacrifice. Willingly offer themselves. A lot of times in churches, people are willing to do the things that don't cost them anything. It doesn't cost them any time, it doesn't cost them any energy, it doesn't cost them any money. They are willing to do anything except those. So what Jesus did when he called his disciples was he said, I want you to understand that following me means denying yourself, paying the price to be obedient to me, and acting and living the way I live. And Jesus lived a life of sacrifice. That's what this whole Easter season is about. He gave his life in obedience to the Father for the work that he was to accomplish. So Israel, in these first paragraph, begins to describe for us exactly what it means for the success of the people of God. You have to have godly leaders who are prepared to do the things God asked them to do. And then you have to have people in the congregation who are willing to do the things God wants them to do too. There should never be in the church a shortage of people who do the work that the church needs to have done. If God has something in the church to do, whatever it is, and he says this is the job I want you to do, he always has people who can do that if they would. Anybody who has a business would not set out to ask the people that work for them to do jobs that they were not qualified or able to do. We wouldn't come in, if you owned an airline business, you wouldn't come in and look around and see a clerk that was selling tickets say, oh, we've got a shortage of pilots, would you go fly this plane? You would never do that. What you would always do is you would look around to find someone who knew how to fly and say we have a job for you to do. In the same way, God does that exactly in the church. Every church has in it the people who are prepared to do the work God wants them to do. Two things happen in the church. Sometimes we want to do things God has not called us to do, and so we try to do something God really doesn't want the church to do, and it's a mess. It's a disaster. The second thing that happens is God does call us to do things. He has the people here to do it, but people say I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to sacrifice my time to do that. I'm not going to sacrifice my money to get that done. So the church requires two things. One is God's guidance and for the leaders to see what it is God wants them to do, and then it requires that the people there be prepared to do whatever God asks. One side of that always works. God is always at work knowing what we ought to be doing. On the other side of it, this is where the failure comes, where people decide they're not ready to do that anymore, or they don't want to do it. They're not prepared to pay the price for that cost. So he begins his story by talking about the great victory that came by establishing the very foundation stone in which all the victories in the church actually occur. We were in desperate trouble. The leaders of the nation stepped up and said we will do whatever God wants us to do. The people of the nation stepped up and said we are willing to give our lives to make sure that we do what God tells us to do. So from this, all the success in this chapter comes to pass. So in this song, we don't know how many stanzas there were. Some people think there were seven and some people think there were nine. The stanzas are not like we have them. We have four verses and then a chorus and four verses and a chorus. So we don't always know exactly how these were done. Another difficulty with this passage is it's very old Hebrew. And have any of you ever tried to take a course in English where you had to read Beowulf or Shakespeare? Some of you? And it's hard to read? This is old Hebrew. In fact, it's one of the oldest passages of Hebrew in the Bible. So what happens in a language that's very old is that people don't always understand it because the words are used in different ways. If you raise Shakespeare and things that are that old, they will use words sometimes that have entirely different meanings than we use those same words today. So all the way through this song in chapter five, there are periodically words that the Hebrew scholars have no, they don't seem to fit. I think probably a pretty common way for us to understand that is back when Butch was a kid. Were you cool, Butch? Okay. But it has nothing to do with his body temperature, right? So if you picked up something and you saw a piece of paper and a guy said, I'm cool, and you were like 200 years from now, you'd say, well, why didn't he put on a coat? Or why didn't he turn up the stove? So whenever you pick these passages like this in Hebrew, some of the words that are used don't seem to fit the context for us. So it leaves us in a difficulty of exactly knowing how they ought to be translated. And if you read different translations of this chapter five, you will find it's oftentimes very different translations because the words, as they're translated, the words as they read in Hebrew don't seem to fit the circumstances that they're in. So this chapter two, verse three, hear this, you kings, listen, you rulers, I will sing to the Lord, I will sing, I will make music to the Lord, the God of Israel. So the writer is beginning to announce after they started, this is the way it's supposed to be. Now I'm going to tell you the song that I want to tell you to help you know exactly what took place. This is Deborah and Barak who are writing this information. That's the I that's found here. We are going to sing you a song to the kings. Now remember, they're writing this for the people of Israel to sing all the rest of their lives. This is for the kings to understand how to be able to rule the nation of Israel. Now they had no kings at this point in their history. Listen you rulers, you people are in leadership roles. These are the things that allow you to understand how to be able to live in obedience to God and find the success He wants to give you. I will sing to the Lord, I will sing. Now what you want to see is that this song is sung in front of the kings and in front of the rulers, but the object of the singing was to God. That's a very important thing to understand about the Bible, the Psalms that way and all the songs that are written, the song of Moses who is required to write, all the songs that are written in the Old Testament. They are not songs to be sung because they were popular. They were songs that were to be sung under certain circumstances to God. God was always the object of worship. I think that the effort in our culture to try to make the church relevant to the world around us so that people would come into the church and they would feel like they were at home has sort of lost, caused many people to lose the idea that what we do in church is aimed toward God. What the congregation does is aimed toward God. So the songs we sing are to be sung to God. They're not for our enjoyment, they're not for our pleasure, they're for God's enjoyment and God's pleasure. It's like you had a birthday party, you know, and you went into the birthday party and you said, well, we'd like to sing a song for the person who has a birthday. And the person said, well, here's a song I really like. Can you sing that? And the crowd then turns around and says, no, I don't like that song. I say, I like this song and that's the way I like this song. So they get in a fight about which one they're going to sing. The person who's the object of the event gets ignored. I think that can happen to us in our churches. What we're really doing when we sing in church is we're singing to God and the congregation is simply joining in a focus toward him. I saw in a Christian magazine not long ago, it was a publishing company that writes Christian music, publishes it, and their advertising was, we have songs that you can dance to. Who's the focus of that? It sounds like the old dance shows you used to have on TV. They would play a song and then they would all evaluate how you like this song. The 15, 16 year old kids would say, I like that song. You can dance to it. Well, it has nothing to do with a religious scheme. And so what's happened so much of the time in our services is we gauge what we do with regard to whether or not it satisfies or pleases us. Throughout the Bible, the focus it gives us is worshiping God is a focus on what he wants to have take place. So it starts out helping us understand that. Listen to you, kings. Listen, you rulers. The things we're going to tell you in this story are not for your benefit. They're to glorify God. For we sing to the Lord. I will sing. I will make music to the Lord, the God of Israel. So we see in what's going to take place in this story that the focus is on God, who he is. And what his people need to do to be obedient and a servant of his. Verse four, some think, starts the second stanza of this song. Oh, Lord, when you went out from Seir and when you marched from the land of Eden, Edom, the earth shook and the heavens poured and the clouds poured down water. The mountains quaked before the Lord, the one of Sinai, before the Lord God of Israel. Now, this passage is addressing what took place. And remember, it's always focused on what God was doing. Oh, Lord, when you went out from Seir. Now, Seir is another word in the Old Testament for the nation of Edom. Seir and Edom were really just different names for the same territory. You might have a state, for example, in the United States that before it was settled, the Spanish were here and they may have named a community or part of our country by a name. And then whenever the Spanish left and the Europeans came in and settled the territory, they gave it another name. So, we would have places that have two different names because of their history. Well, looking back on this history in the Old Testament, the same thing's true. The nation of Edom was one time called Seir. Now, what he's talking about is the distance away from Israel God has started. When you went out from Seir, like you came from a distance and you were coming here. And when you came out from Seir and when you marched from the land of Edom, he's simply saying, this is the land of promise that you guided us to. And when you came from that distance with us to bring us to this place, you were here in power. Now, he describes the power in an unusual way. The earth shook, the heavens poured, and the cloud poured down waters. Now, if you look back in the story of the Exodus, you'll see some allusions to this kind of thing. You'll see the allusions that came at Mount Sinai when God was speaking to the people of Israel, how the mountain was shaking. The whole mountain of Sinai was shaking when God and Moses were up there on the mountain. He had given the Ten Commandments. We see times in which the water squirted out of the rocks and God made his power evident and known. So he's talking about how God, when he marched from Egypt to the land of promise with them, he did this with great and mighty power. Your power and strength was demonstrated in bringing us to this place. The earth shook, the heavens poured water out. It's a kind of an allusion to what took place at the Red Sea when they crossed the water there. How God's power and demonstration with water was clear and evident. You have shown us power beyond anything in the world that a person could ever do. The mountains quaked before the Lord, the one of Sinai. Here he focuses directly on the event that took place at Sinai and calls him the Lord, the one of Sinai. The one who demonstrated himself in that one location in that one place. Before the Lord, God of Israel. The mountains quaked before the Lord, the one of Sinai. Before the Lord, the God of Israel. You'll notice in these songs that oftentimes, it's common in Hebrew poetry what we call parallelisms. Hebrew poetry likes to have parallel lines. Sometimes it will have triplets of lines, but you'll see them here. Oh Lord, when you went out of Seir, which is one thing, then when you marched out of the land of Eden, it's the very same thing in a different way of saying it. Sometimes you'll hear preachers that will preach on one of, take a series of parallels like that and they'll preach on one line and then use the next line for a whole different sermon. But really, oftentimes they're the same thing, just said in different ways. Hebrew parallelism. And the second set of parallels is the earth shook, the heavens poured. Then the parallel is the clouds poured down water. The third parallel, the mountains quaked before the Lord, the one of Sinai. And the next parallel to that is before the Lord, the God of Israel. So what the Bible does is uses these parallels to describe the event they want to have take place. In this one, he's saying God, the power at Sinai, was also the Lord God of Israel. So he's completing that parallel by using another word. The first one, verse 4, O Lord, when you went out from Seir, now he's talking about the power of coming out, the strength of it. Then he says on the second line, when you marched from the land of Edom, now he's describing God led them out of there, but the people of Israel also marched out of there. So he's paralleling these to make a bigger picture of the truth that he wants to get across. Now in verse 6, he says, in the days of Shamgar, son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the roads were abandoned, travelers took to the winding paths. And here the parallel again is found all the way through here because it is poetic. The days of Shamgar, the son of Anath. Now Anath was the consort of Baal, the live-in girlfriend of Baal, we might say. So he's talking about now the days of Shamgar, son of Anath, and the days of Jael, who's also a pagan, a follower of Baal. The days of Jael, the roads were abandoned. So he's comparing here what this crisis was that Israel faced. The crisis was that in these days disaster came to them, but from two separate sources God delivered them. And they were both pagan forces. In the days of Shamgar, who was a follower of Anath, who was a consort of Baal, God delivered this through Shamgar, as shown in the earlier chapters. And now he's going to talk about in this story, in the days of Jael, the roads were abandoned whenever Israel was in disaster. No one could even get out of their house. What he's describing is a time of real critical circumstances for them. They were so afraid of the enemy around them that people were staying in their houses. They were not willing to go out into the fields to even do their harvest. So the whole economy was shut down. The people were starving. The crops were not being raised. Everyone was terrified because of the enemy surrounding them. And in both of those instances, God took a pagan leader and turned the tide for the nation. What he's describing, again, is a reflection on what God is able to do. God came marching with great power out, but he didn't necessarily use the people of Israel. In times like that, he even took pagans who weren't even followers of God and he delivered his people. What the writer of this story is trying to get to us is that God, in his miraculous and powerful way, was able to rescue his people, having people who were not even his followers to be able to run the enemy out of their lives. Shemgar was a soldier in the Egyptian army. And he'd come up into the land of Israel and he defeated the Philistines in the time whenever the people of Israel were hiding and afraid even to get out of their houses. They didn't have even the military ability to help themselves. But you, with the mighty power that you had, took a pagan and you drove away our enemies. Then he says, in the days of jail, as he's going to describe now, sort of leading up to what we're going to look at in the rest of this chapter, in the days of jail the roads were abandoned. Again, we were afraid to go out. And here, now in the story they're going to tell, you've used another pagan person, but this time it's not a pagan military man who killed 6,000 with an ox goad, but now he's going to find Jael, a woman who killed the king of their enemies with a spike and a hammer. What he's demonstrating here for them is the ability that God has to rescue his people from nothing. So far in these two emphases he's given, not one Hebrew person did anything to win this victory, but God took perfectly pagan people who had no power of God and no interest in helping Israel to win the victory for them in the past. Now here's kind of the implication. So if God can do this through pagans, what in the world could he do with all of us who belong to him? That's his point. It shows the power that God has to take care of his people. What God wants us to understand is that the victories that come to his people do not come because of us. They don't come because we're smart, they don't come because we're powerful, they don't come because we have money, they don't come because there's a lot of us. It comes because God in his grace has said, I am going to intervene in what's taking place. In these stories in the book of Judges, he doesn't even intervene because the people want to be more followers of his. He intervenes because they're in desperate trouble and he wants to protect and save them. So for us, we can look for God's answer to our needs in many places, but it always comes from God. And what he does in these two stories is to say to the people of Israel, imagine what I could do with someone who really listened to me and followed me. If I can take a pagan and do my work through them, imagine what I can do with you. I've always been impressed every time I think of this, about reading a story one time of a golfer that was a great golfer and he was Lee Trevino, grew up as a Mexican kid, hanging around at golf courses, learned to play golf very well, and he would play golf with golf clubs and win money. Well, pretty soon everybody at the golf course said, well, you know, don't play Lee for money, he'll win every time. So he couldn't earn any money. So he changed his approach and played using a Dr. Pepper bottle. So he'd go out and say to the golfers, I can beat you with a Dr. Pepper bottle. And they would bet him that they couldn't, and he would win with a Dr. Pepper bottle. Now, you have to be a good golfer to be able to play with a Dr. Pepper bottle and beat people with clubs. God has the power to take nothing and win victories that are impossible to the greatest forces in the world. That's what he wants to get across to us. So don't be afraid of anything you see, for the power of God is sufficient for anything we come to. That's what he wants us to understand. And whenever you're in times of fear, as the people of Israel are going to be in many times in this book, remember this story. He doesn't even need you to do this. But if you will let him take you, imagine what he can do with someone who really will listen to him. So if you can win with a Dr. Pepper bottle, imagine what you can do with golf clubs. That's kind of what he's saying. So we're never to be discouraged or defeated because of the story. Let's pray. You may know somebody that's struggling with circumstances in their own life and they feel like they're overwhelmed and life's impossible for them. This is your witness to be able to say, God can change things in your life. He can do it with nothing. All he needs is you to say, Lord, help me, and if you will, I'll do what you asked me to do. And all of his power is available to you. From the very beginning, God wants us to keep telling his story, how he is always successful, how he always is able to do whatever he chooses to do. So Father, remind us whenever we get into crisis and trouble, we devoted our lives to you and you've made this contract with us that you would guide us and you would provide for us, protect us, and you'd make our lives have a great impact on the world around us. So when we're in this covenant relationship, you have an obligation to us that you've made, you've promised this, and we promised you we would do everything you tell us to do. So we have the perfect setup in which in any circumstance we can find victory and success. Remind us to tell this same story to the people around us who are struggling and have not this contract with God. We say to them, if you make a contract with God, he will keep his side of this. If you keep yours, help us to tell the story of the power you have to change any kind of human circumstance that you might get glory and honor. Amen.