I. A person who thinks that a Divine lesson-book should present to us exclusively or chiefly high maxims of morality, or perfect models of character and behaviour, finds the Book of Judges a great stumbling-block. There the tribes of Israel are exhibited, not as specimens of excellence, but as disorganised and barbarous; in strife with each other, and with the nations round about. The very champions who rose up in their defence seem to indulge their vices in a more gigantic way than their fellow-men.
We must remember this: God calls these men out that they may act as His servants, as deliverers of their country, as benefactors to mankind. So far as they yield themselves to that calling, God speaks in them and shines through them; men see His image and are raised by it to know what they are meant to be. So soon as these men begin to act and speak for themselves, to use the strength or the wisdom which God has given them on their own behalf, to set themselves up as heroes or tyrants separate from their brethren, that moment they become witnesses for God by their rebellion as they had been by their obedience; making evident the truth of their assertion that He governs the world, since if these His servants governed it without Him, they would soon make a desert of it.
II. In this fifth chapter we have this very puzzle brought before us. Deborah is an inspired woman, yet she praises the murderess Jael. The Bible does not itself applaud this act; it tells us frankly that Deborah the prophetess applauded it. At that instant all other thoughts were absorbed in joy for the rescue which she ascribed to its true source. We must not allow our reverence for Deborah to interfere with our reverence for God. We must not insist that she is right when she contradicts law-givers, prophets, apostles, and the Son of God. Since the Son of God has been manifested, the works of the devil have been manifested also; it is a monstrous contempt of God's teaching to say that we cannot know them; an awful denial of it to say that in certain instances we may identify them with His works who has come to destroy them.
F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament,p. 320.
Reference: Judges 5:2. J. M. Neale, Sermons for the Church Year,vol. ii., p. 229.