Judges, Part 2

"Faith is jumping off the diving board and trusting God to fill the pool with water." - John Wimber (I think...I was unable to verify that)

 Last week's Judges sermon was about Jephthah. He is probably most well-known as the man who accidentally swore that he would sacrifice his own daughter. In a lot of ways, Jephthah seems like a failure as a judge, but his name made it into the "hall of faith" in Hebrews 11, so he must have done something right.

Benvenuto di Giovanni - The Meeting of Jephthah and His Daughter

One of our commitments in my Denver Bible study was that if it's in the Bible there is something of value in the story. If we don't see anything of value in the story, then it's not the Bible that needs to change; it's us.

As I read Jephthah's story, looking for his faith, an amazing picture emerged.

Jephthah was the son of a prostitute. His half-brothers kicked him out of the family because they didn't want to share their inheritance with the son of a prostitute. He joined a group of bandits and outlaws because in Old Testament times, there really weren't a lot of options if you had no land or family.

Eventually the elders of the Gileadites asked Jephthah to lead their army against the Ammonites. Jephthah's band of outlaws must have been pretty well organized if the Gileadites thought he was capable of leading their army.

The Spirit of the Lord came on Jephthah and he was able to move forward against the Ammonites. But on the eve of the big battle, Jephthah promised God that were he victorious, he would sacrifice the first thing that came out of his house to meet him when he returned home.

For we who have the stories of faith, both the ones in the Bible and our own, Jephthah's promise seems foolish because his victory against the Ammonites seems like a foregone conclusion. But Jephthah had no previous experience of God's faithfulness, no experience of God's victory in battle. He fought for everything he had, for food to eat and a place to sleep, for his position of respect in the community. A God who gives freely with no strings attached must have seemed impossible to him. So he offered a sacrifice, just to make sure he had all his bases covered.

Here is where the faith comes in: then he went to battle. At the end of the day, he had to have faith in the mercy of God. He had to jump off the diving board and trust God to fill the pool.

Mike told me that the book of Mark is filled with people who believed. It doesn't say they were perfect, that they never messed up again, or that they weren't afraid. But at the end of the day, they believed. And then they jumped.

Jump!

In my last angry blog, I came to the conclusion that I need to be okay with failing. I need to be okay with jumping and not knowing what the end result will be.

As I have reflected further, I think the church also needs to be okay with me failing. How do you build a church on the shoulders of failures? How do you constantly jump with no idea of the outcome?

I have also been thinking a lot about holiness (per Clemens Sedmak's suggestion), and I think that we sometimes define holiness so narrowly that avoiding failure is easy. If we can make a clear enough list of things to avoid, then all we have to do is avoid them, and we are sinless.

However, if holiness is connected with belief and faith, which is connected with jumping, then suddenly, holiness becomes a lot more risky and a LOT more difficult to claim.

According to NTS's own Dr. Noble, we often start with sin when we define holiness. What if we started with belief? What if the "litmus test" of holiness was answering the question, "how willing are you to jump"? How willing are you to fail?