CRITICAL NOTES.—
Judges 2:11. And served Baalim.] The pl. form indicates the different Baalim, or the different characters and modifications under which Baal, the sun-god, was worshipped, rather than the different images of Baal. The singular, Baal = “lord.” principally in the sense of owner and possessor. “When the worshippers wished to express a particular Baal they generally added some particular epithet, as Baal-zephon, Baal-peor, Baal-zebub, Baal-shamayim, &c. The two former were adored by the Moabites; Baal-zebub, by the Ekronites; Baal-berith was honoured at Shechem; and Baal-shamayim, the lord of the heavens, was adored among the Phœnicians, Syrians, Chaldeans, &c. Probably among all these people, Baal meant the sun.” [Dr. A. Clarke.]
Judges 2:13. Ashtaroth.] The pl. form of Ashtoreth, the Greek Astarte. Solomon followed the impure worship of this idolatry (1 Kings 11:5; 1 Kings 11:33; 2 Kings 23:13). “Ashteroth Karnaim points to the horns of the crescent moon, by which also Astarte of Askelon is indicated on the coins of that city (cf. Stark, Guza, p. 259). The armed Aphrodite in Sparta is the same with Helena or Selene, the moon-goddess, a fact clearly demonstrative of her identity with Astarte. Moon and stars, the luminaries of the night-sky, are blended in Ashtaroth. She represents the collective host of heaven.” [Cassel.] Thus, Ashtoreth cannot be limited to Venus, but is the moon-goddess, including Venus and the rest of the stars, Ashtoreth of the night thus standing over against Baal of the day. This relation of Ashtoreth to the moon is of importance in understanding Joshua’s command for the moon “to stand still,” as well as the sun.
Judges 2:15. Whithersoever they went out the hand of the Lord was against them.] “This is in terrible contrast to what is said in Joshua 1:9.” [Speaker’s Com.] Hence the relevancy and great significance of the quotation in Judges 2:6-9. They were greatly distressed.] Lit., “And it became to them very narrow.” וַיֵּצֶר, from צוּר, “to straiten, to press upon, to compress;” thence, intrans., “to become straitened” (cf. Judges 10:9).
Judges 2:16. Nevertheless, the Lord raised up judges.] Heb., “and the Lord raised,” &c. This is the first use of the word shoph’tim, or judges, from which the book takes its name.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Judges 2:11-16
MAN’S SIN AND GOD’S ANGER
We see in these verses, sin notwithstanding much goodness, anger on account of grievous sin, and mercy because of great distress.
I. The sin of the Lord’s people. Their transgression was of a twofold nature.
1. They forsook God. (a) They forsook Him, notwithstanding His holy character. The lofty manifestations of His holy name made no abiding impression on them. The pure truths which He had given them had no place in their hearts. They preferred the lewd service of idols to the knowledge of the holy God. The reason of unbelief and forsaking God now, is often because God’s Word is too pure and too holy in its requirements. No man forsakes God because God is below his ideal of goodness. (b) They forsook God in spite of His Divine right to their service. They were not their own, but bought with a price. God was their Maker. He had “brought them out of the land of Egypt.” He had fed their fathers forty years long in the wilderness, and often saved them when they were ready to perish. (c) They forsook God, forgetting His boundless goodness to themselves. The mercy in which the Lord had dealt with their fathers He had shown to them no less. He had helped them in all their necessity. (d) They forsook God on the very ground which He had given to them for an inheritance. Every city which they held was Jehovah’s gift. They set up their idols on the land which He had won for them with a high hand and an outstretched arm. He who sins in these days, always sins with strength and amid opportunities which the Lord has given. This is ever one of the heinous features of all transgression. God gives men health, riches, intellectual gifts, a comely person, many social advantages; and when men sin they invariably use God’s favours as a means of offence against God. (e) They forsook God, heedless of many warnings. Jehovah had repeatedly warned them in plain and unmistakable terms, through both Moses and Joshua, of these very transgressions of which they were now guilty. He had warned them of the danger of disobedience by the defeat at Ai. More recently the angel of His own presence had warned them at Bochim. They had themselves affirmed to Joshua, in a solemn covenant at Shechem, that they would reject all the strange gods of the Canaanites. They had said, “The Lord our God will we serve, and His voice will we obey.” They had heard Joshua say, “Ye are witnesses against yourselves that ye have chosen you the Lord, to serve Him;” and, accepting that solemn challenge, they had answered back, “We are witnesses.” God ever has room to say to those who transgress, “Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee.” All sin is “without excuse.”
2. They served the Baalim and Ashtaroth of the Canaanites. (Different forms of Baal-worship have already been mentioned in the Critical Notes on this verse.) “The worship of Baal amongst the Jews seems to have been appointed with much pomp and ceremonial. Temples were erected to him (1 Kings 16:32; 2 Kings 11:18); his images were set up (2 Kings 10:26) his altars were very numerous (Jeremiah 11:13), were erected particularly on lofty eminences (1 Kings 18:20), and on the roofs of houses (Jeremiah 32:29); there were priests in great numbers (1 Kings 18:19), and of various classes (2 Kings 10:19); the worshippers appear to have been arrayed in appropriate robes (2 Kings 10:22); the worship was performed by burning incense (Jeremiah 7:9) and offering burnt sacrifices, which occasionally consisted of human victims (Jeremiah 19:5); the officiating priests danced with frantic shouts around the altar, and cut themselves with knives to excite the attention and compassion of the god (1 Kings 18:26-28). Throughout all the Phœnician colonies we continually find traces of the worship of this god; nor need we hesitate to regard the Babylonian Bel (Isaiah 46:1), or Belus, as essentially identical with Baal, though perhaps under some modified form.” [Smith’s Bib. Dict.] In the same manner, there can be little doubt that the Assyrian goddess Ishtar is, for the most part, the same as the Phœnician Ashtaroth. In the “Assyrian Discoveries” of the late Mr. George Smith, many of the inscriptions refer to the goddess Ishtar and to the honours demanded and rendered in her worship. It need hardly be said that the distinguishing feature between the worship of Jehovah, whom the Israelites forsook, and of Baal and Ashtaroth, for whom they went astray, was emphatically this;—one was pure and self-denying, the other was lewd and self-indulgent. They who change their gods, generally do so because their affections are set on things of the earth, and not on things which are above; because sensuousness and indulgence of the passions are more pleasant than the self-denying ordinances of the God of heaven.
II. The severity of the Lord’s anger. “The anger of the Lord was hot against Israel.”
1. It was terrible in its reality. Some people lay so much stress upon the mercy of God, that they get to treat His anger as a mere sentiment, having little expression except in words. God’s anger is the anger of truth, and righteousness, and love. It is no less severe because it is calm and full of patient waiting. The angel does not smite at Bochim, but the smiting is none the less terrible when it comes.
“When anger rushes unrestrained to action,
Like a hot steed, it stumbles in its way.
The man of thought strikes deepest, and strikes safely.” [Savage.]
God bears long with His disobedient children, but woe comes heavily on those who mistake His patience for indifference.
2. God’s anger was fearful in its consequences. “He delivered them into the hands of the spoilers that spoiled them, and He sold them into the hands of their enemies round about, that so they could not any longer stand before their enemies.” These consequences became matters of history. The Book of Judges is one early fragment of that history. When men would forget the anger of the Lord in the more pleasing thought of His mercy, they should remember that Divine anger has an awful history. No vapid sentiments can do away with the history of the deluge, with the overthrow of Sodom, with the plagues of the wilderness, with this suffering under the judges, or with the subsequent captivity at Babylon. Men may refine upon future punishment as they will; past punishment will always stand ready to revise their theorisings in the human judgment, and an ineffaceable sense of the deserts of sin stands equally ready to correct them in the human conscience. Any calm and tender preacher of the wrath of the Lamb is good against all the books that were ever written to make light of it; history and conscience make short work of what may be called the poetry of the appetites.
3. God’s anger is not vindictive. There ever seems to be in it far more thought for truth and for His creatures than for Himself. The wise man can do little but fear an anger which rests on a basis so broad as this, and which moves to punishment with slow gentleness through so many remonstrances.
4. The anger of God is necessary. Unlike ours, His anger is Mercy’s last plea with the obstinate. It is necessary for the vindication of His own laws; it thus becomes necessary for justice; it is necessary for those who have not been so fully tempted to transgress; it is, at least in this life, necessary for the transgressor himself. Fancy the effect, in a single year, if the thought of the reality of God’s anger were blotted out from the universal conscience of living men to-morrow!
III. The tenderness of the Lord’s pity. “Nevertheless the Lord raised up judges which delivered them out of the hand of those that spoiled them.” Man’s distress is, in itself, a plea before God. It was “when they were greatly distressed” that the Lord was thus moved to compassion. Our suffering becomes a prayer to God, even when no word of prayer is uttered. It was so with the Israelites in Egypt. When “the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant” (Exodus 2:23-24). “Mercy hath but its name from misery,” said Thomas Binney, “and is no other thing than to lay another’s misery to heart.” It is the severe Apostle James who tells us that “the Lord is very pitiful.” The severity of truth and the tenderness of love ever dwell together. The anger of the Lord makes His mercy very beautiful; the mercy of the Lord makes His anger very terrible.
OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
THE ALL-SEEING EYE OF GOD.—Judges 2:11
I. He who “does evil,” always does it “in the sight of Jehovah.” There is no other place in which to do it. “Thou art acquainted with all my ways.”
II. He who forsakes the Lord is still and ever in the presence of the Lord. He “compasses the path and lying down” of the idolater also.
III. He who serves, other gods,” ever bows down to them under the eye of the only God. All the idolatries of men are carried on at the foot of the throne of their insulted Lord.
Mrs. E. B. Browning tells us that though all her gentlest-hearted friends could concentre their gentleness in one heart, that still grew gentler, till its pulse was less for life than pity, she must hesitate to reveal her own heart even to such a friend. She says—
“I should fear
Some plait between the brows, some rougher chime
In the free voice;”
and then, thinking of those who stand continually under the glance of Omniscience, she exclaims in wonder and envy concerning the holy angels,
“Who bear calmly all the time
This everlasting face-to-face with God.”
We all have to bear this everlasting face-to-face with God every day; many bear it heedlessly, because His face is not yet visible. They walk before Him neither by sight nor faith, but they are “in the sight of the Lord,” nevertheless. Human blindness blots out of existence nothing that is. Every tree is a tree, whether seen or not; every rose is beautiful, though every passer-by has lost his eyes. So man is not out of “the sight of the Lord,” because the Lord is out of the sight of man.
FORSAKING GOD.—Judges 2:12
I. When men forsake God they seek false gods. Few men propose to do without a god. It is only “the fool” who hath “said in his heart, There is no God.” Man must have a god. Men may forsake the living God in heart and thought, and still cleave to Him in their creed. Even then, they both forsake God, and serve false gods. The essence of idolatry is in having a new god, not in serving the new god openly.
II. When men forsake God it is usually through misguided love. It is “with the heart,” also, that man believeth unto wickedness. Changed affections ever have to do with a change of gods.
III. When men forsake God they do so in misdirected efforts. They still “serve;” and serving idols, they serve where the yoke is no longer easy, and the burden no longer light. Israel forsook God, but “served Baalim,” and “followed other gods and bowed themselves unto them.” He who forsakes the fountain of living waters, always finds a heavier task in hewing out “broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
IV. When men attempt to forsake the Lord, they attempt what is impossible. They may follow other gods, but God, from whom they would depart, still follows them.
1. If men could forsake God, they would be godless indeed. With exquisite sarcasm Jeremiah says of the gods of the idolaters: “They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not; they must needs be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them, for they cannot do evil; neither also is it in them to do good.”
2. But no man can forsake God. The children of Israel tried to, for many generations, but presently returned even from Babylon to build again the Temple of Jehovah. God will not forsake us. He will be for us, as He was for Israel under Joshua; or He will be against us, as He was often against Israel under the judges (Judges 2:15). “He must reign.” There is no Tarshish to which we can flee that is beyond His presence. There is no sea on which we can sail that He does not rule its waves. There is no shipmaster with whom we can take passage whom He cannot constrain to cry to us, “What meanest thou, O sleeper? Arise, call upon thy God.” The Lord has His messengers of reproof beside every idol altar before which it is possible for men to bow down.
CHANGING GODS.—Judges 2:12-13
I. Gods changed, heedless of the claims of the only true God. Jehovah had done great things for them, but they were not glad in Him.
II. Gods changed out of regard to indulgences which might be afforded. Children sometimes think a foolish nurse kinder than wise parents. That is because they are children.
III. Gods changed, and prosperity changing also. He who had been for them in many a field, was turned to be their enemy, and fought against them (Judges 2:15.) That could only end in their being “greatly distressed.”
IV. Gods changed, and heaven finding therein an occasion for astonishment. “Hath a nation changed their gods which are yet no gods? but My people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid; be ye very desolate, saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 2:11-12).
I. Motives for changing gods. These all lay in the direction of sense, and of time.
II. Determination in changing gods. Neither Moses nor Joshua, and not even the angel at Bochim, sufficed to hinder these men, whose hearts were set in them to do evil.
III. Results from changing gods.
1. The results which were external and general. “They were greatly distressed” in their surroundings.
2. The results which were internal and personal. Every man must have been troubled in his own conscience.
IV. God’s way of asserting that He alone is God.
1. He chastised them severely.
2. He chastised them by the very people with whom they had made leagues.
3. He chastised them by the corruptions which came of their newly-chosen worship.
THE LORD GOD OF OUR FATHERS.—Judges 2:12
The expressions, “My father’s God,” “the God of his fathers,” “God of our fathers,” “God of my fathers,” &c., are used many times in the Scriptures. The thought is common to both the Old and New Testament utterances. Dr. Parker, under the title, “The Pathos of Theology,” has a suggestive outline on the phrase, as occurring in Exodus 15:2. An abstract from this is here given. “My father’s God”:—
“
I. Then religion was no new thing to them.… Religion should not be an originality to us; it should not be a novel sensation; it should be the common breath of our daily life, and the mention of the name of God in the relation of our experiences ought to excite no mere amazement.
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II. Then their father’s religion was not concealed from them. They knew that their father had a God.… Is it possible that your child is unaware that you have a God? Is it possible that your servants may be ignorant of the existence of your religion?
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III. Yet it does not follow that the father and the child must have the same God. Religion is not hereditary. You have power deliberately to sever the connection between yourself and the God of your fathers. It is a terrible power.
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IV. Then we are debtors to the religious past. There are some results of goodness we inherit independently of our own will. This age inherits the civilisation of the past. The child is the better for his father’s temperance. Mephibosheth received honours for Jonathan’s sake. The processes of God are not always consummated in the age with which they begin. Generations may pass away, and then the full blessing may come. We are told that some light which may be reaching the earth to-day, started from its source a thousand years ago. What is true in astronomy is also true in moral processes and events; to-day we are inheriting the results of martyrdoms, sacrifices, testimonies, and pledges which stretch far back into the grey past of human history.
“The text impels us to ask a few practical questions:—
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1. Are you so much wiser than your father that you can afford to set aside his example?
2. Will you undertake to break the line of a holy succession?
3. Will you inherit all that your father has given you in name, in reputation, in social position, and throw away all the religious elements which made him what he was? You would not willingly forego one handful of his material possessions. Are you willing to thrust out his Saviour?
4. Your father could not live without God,—can you? Your father encountered death in the name of the Living One. How do you propose to encounter the same dread antagonist? When your father was dying, he said that God was the strength of his heart, and would be his portion for ever. He declared that but for the presence of his Saviour he would greatly fear the last cold river which rolled between him and eternity, but that in the presence of Christ that chilling stream had no terror for him. When the battle approached the decisive hour, your father said, ‘Thanks be unto God which giveth to us the victory,’—how do you propose to wind up the story of your pilgrimage?” [Dr. Parker.]
IDOLATRY
“Idolatry! you cannot find any more gross, any more cruel, on the broad earth, than within the area of a mile around this pulpit (in New York). Dark minds, from which God is obscured; deluded souls, whose fetish is the dice-box or the bottle; apathetic spirits, steeped in sensual abomination, unmoved by a moral ripple, soaking in the swamp of animal vitality. False gods, more hideous, more awful than Moloch or Baal; worshipped with shrieks, worshipped with curses, with the hearth-stone for the bloody altar, and the drunken husband for the immolating priest, and women and children for the victims.” [Chapin.]
“A singular phenomenon, known as the Spectre of the Brocken, is seen on a certain mountain in Germany. The traveller who at dawn stands on the topmost ridge, beholds a colossal shadowy spectre moving on the summits of the distant hills. But, in fact, it is only his own shadow projected upon the morning mists by the rising sun, and it imitates, of course, every movement of its creator. So heathen nations have mistaken their own image for Deity. Their gods display human frailties and passions, and scanty virtues, projected and magnified upon the heavens, just as the small figures on the slide of a magic lantern are projected magnified and illuminated upon a white sheet.” [E. B.]
EFFECTS OF THE LORD’S ANGER.—Judges 2:14-15
“After the judgment of the word comes the judgment of the sword.
“He who ceases to remember the works of God, ceases also to enjoy the power of God. For him who shuts his eyes, the sun affords no light.
“Men are judged by the truth which they despise, and betrayed by the sin which they love. Israel can no longer withstand the nations over whom it formerly triumphed, because it courts their idols and leaves its own God.” [Cassel.]
“He who engages in another worship, forsakes the true God, and apostatises from Him. But woe to the man who does this, for he brings himself into endless trouble.
“God is as true to His threats as to His promises.” [Starke.]
“The judgment affords a deep glance into God’s government of the world, showing how He makes all sin subservient to His own power, by punishing it with the very evils that arise from it.” [Gerlach.]