Judges 11:30–31 And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord: “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, 31 whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”
Sometimes it can be hard to walk in faith! Even when we have a clear picture of the path the LORD is leading us to follow, there can be moments when following is the last thing we want to do. Following in those moments requires effort, and many of us don’t like effort, especially effort in an unknown direction.
But so often we must move in an unknown direction in life. I would contend that most of life is moving in an unknown direction. We think we know the future in certain areas, but that isn’t knowledge. It is presumption or faith, and it can be hard to know the difference at times.
The hero in our text is Jephthah. He had a past that made him a complex individual. He was born out of wedlock to a prostitute, which says more about his father Gilead than it does about him. I can imagine that this led to a difficult childhood with lots of name calling and ridicule.
Perhaps it was this childhood that made him into the mighty warrior he became. He might have honed his skills at fighting when he was a teenager in the back corners of the school playground or back alleys of the village where he lived. But those experiences, whatever they were made him the perfect person for the job at hand.
He was also kicked out of his home, driven out by his father’s legitimate children. They wanted nothing to do with anyone who could steal part of their inheritance. Again, this says more about his half brothers than it does about him.
After he left, he seemed to collect other rejects from society, scoundrels, those willing to do things that others wouldn’t do. We might call them thugs for hire. And they got a reputation for getting things done.
We don’t know much more about Jephthah’s background, and even some of this I am speculating about. But eventually his father’s people came to him because they needed his kind of skills to get them out of a tight spot.
These were the LORD’s people, people who had been promised victory in battle if they were in right relationship with Him. And as the pattern of Judges shows, they had just repented after being oppressed by their enemies, and were now getting a leader who would help deliver them again.
Jephthah, who already has the promise of victory, the same promise given to all Israel, that the LORD would go before them into battle, this Jephthah becomes their leader. He has tried to do the diplomatic thing, but the Ammonite king ignored the negotiations. This meant battle was approaching.
Then the Spirit of the LORD comes on Jephthah. You would think this would be enough to assure him that the LORD would fight the battle, that he would be victorious. But it wasn’t. He added a hasty vow to the top of the LORD’s promise. And it is this hasty vow that gets him in trouble.
If only Jephthah had trusted in the LORD’s promise. His vow was shortsighted. He desperately wanted to win the battle, a battle the LORD had already promised to win.
The story does not end well. He wins the battle, but his daughter is lost in the fulfilling of the vow. What a high cost to pay, a needless cost, a foolish cost.
The Arnold Journey 