Deborah, Barak, And Jael Series

Good morning. Today we are going to continue to look at the series called the story. Today, we are going to dive into a mini-story that is part of the grander story. We are going to look at the story of Deborah that is found in the book of Judges. Some of you are familiar with the book of Judges. You may recall that the key theme is man’s sinfulness contrasted with God’s grace and mercy. Specifically, in the book of Judges we see how the Israelite people seem to have a problem. They would be delivered from one thing; they would be freed up from the hand of an aggressor or enemy, only to find themselves falling back into old habits and old ways. God was trying to use these people to rise up to be the chosen people, to be the blessed people that would be a blessing to others, so he could not tolerate this sort of thing. What would often happen is we would see the people engage in some sort of evil behavior. What God would do is allow the people to go back into some form of slavery for a period of time and then after that we would find that the people got tired of being in slavery and they would cry out to the Lord and the Lord would send a deliverer to them to free them from the hand of the oppressor. The deliverer’s name went by the title of Judge. Keep in mind when we talk about judge, we are not talking about a judge that we think of today. They have some similarities because the judge back then would be involved in legal disputes and that sort of thing. More often than not, the judges would be considered military leaders before they had kings. These judges would get involved in administrative things, legal things, but more often than not they were military leaders in charge of protecting the Jewish people and basically waging war if they had to.

You may be familiar with some of the judges in the book of judges, people like Gideon and Samson. I think I preached on them a few months back. Some of you may not be familiar with the judge that goes by the name of Deborah. Deborah was really a woman ahead of her time because over 3,000 years ago women were not thought of in high regard. They were on equal status with animals. They really were not given high status. Consequently, they did not have much of a voice at all in their community. For some reason, during this time, God chose to raise up a woman by the name of Deborah to be the leader of the Israelite people and lead them through this particular time of chaos. Really it was kind of a time of chaos. I said the theme of Judges was people doing evil in the eyes of the Lord. In the story of Deborah that is no exception. The first line in Judges 4:1 says “After Ehud died, the Israelites once again did evil in the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord sold them into the hand of Jabin, a king of Canaan who reigned in Hazor.” We see this pattern beginning to start again. The people were doing evil in the eyes of the Lord. We don’t know exactly what the evil was, but a lot of times it just has to do with just falling back into idol worship or marrying into pagan families and that sort of thing. We don’t know what it was, but we know that the Lord did not approve of it, so he sold them into the hands of Jabin. This is more of a metaphor because we don’t think he literally sold them into slavery, but it means that he allowed them to be enslaved by this wicked king named Jabin. Jabin indeed was a wicked king. He was very wicked. To make matters worse, he had a very large army. We are told that he had an army that consisted of 900 iron chariots and the thousands of men that would go with that. He had this large army. This large army was under the command of a guy named Sisera. He was the commander of the army. If we had time to look at it, we would see that Sisera ruled cruelly over the Israelite people for 20 years.

As the cycle continues, we see that the people got tired of being oppressed by Jabin and his commander Sisera. So they let out this collective cry and God again, in his grace and mercy, sends a deliverer, and the deliverer’s name is Deborah. We really don’t have a lot of information about Deborah other than the information we get in a few of the opening verses. In Judges 4:4-5 it says “Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was leading Israel at the time. She held court under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim and the Israelites came to her to have their disputes decided.” Out of that initial passage, we can glean some information about Deborah. First of all, we can glean that she was a prophetess, which is basically a woman prophet. Sometimes when we think of a prophet, we think of somebody who is able to somehow look into the future and make some sort of a prediction. In some cases the people were able to do that, but more often than not, when they were talking about a prophet, they were talking about somebody who had this direct pipeline to God. God would give a word and they would be able to speak a bit of truth into the existing situation. That was really the role of a prophet or prophetess.