Man, Judges chapter five is a song sung by Deborah and Barak about the events that we
read about in chapter four last week.
So it starts out in verse number one, then saying Deborah and Barak, the son of Abinoham
on that day saying, so this is a duet of sorts.
So there are probably parts of it being sung by Deborah, parts of it being sung by Barak,
maybe they both sing part of it together, who knows.
But if you look at verse number 12, you can see this kind of back and forth where it says,
Awake, awake, Deborah.
So that's obviously Barak is singing that.
And then, awake, awake, utter a song, arise Barak and lead that captivity captive, that
son of Abinoham.
So you can see where they're singing to each other, so this is a duet, and they're both
singing their parts.
Obviously this is inspired by God.
And so when we come to a chapter like this that's poetic, it's no less God's word than
any other chapter.
The poetry of the Bible is inspired by God, it's infallible, it's God's word.
But obviously, when we read a poetic portion of scripture, we have to realize that sometimes
there are gonna be things in it that are what we would probably call exaggerations, right?
Hyperbole or things that are figurative or symbolic that are not to be taken super literally.
So let's keep reading here.
In verse number 2, it says, Praise ye the Lord for the avenging of Israel when the people
willingly offered themselves.
And the first thing I wanna point out here is that the Lord is praised and glorified
and Israel is avenged when the people willingly offered themselves.
God is always looking for people to choose to worship Him, not to worship Him because
they're forced or serve Him and work for Him because they're forced to, but God loves the
cheerful giver, the one who actually wants to volunteer and willingly offer themself.
That's why all throughout the Bible there's talk about the free will offerings and people
offering things to the Lord of their own free will.
And if you think about our Christian lives, God gives us so much freedom, and once we
are saved, it's not like we have to serve Him in order to stay saved because our salvation
is by grace and it's purchased by the blood of Christ and once we're saved, there's nothing
we could ever do to lose our salvation.
Nothing could separate us from the love of God.
And a lot of people ask the question, well, you know, well then why would you even serve
God then?
You know, if you can't lose your salvation, if you're going to heaven no matter what,
why serve God?
Why even go to church?
But here's the thing, that question isn't something that we sit around thinking about
because we want to go to church, we want to serve the Lord, we love the Lord, and so we're
here because we want to be here, not like, well, better go to church so I don't go to
hell.
We're not going to hell no matter what.
So you know, we're here because we want to be here.
We love the Lord and so that question is coming from a heart of someone who doesn't really
understand what it means to love Christ and to actually desire to serve Him.
And so God wants us to willingly offer ourselves unto Him.
And here's the thing, being saved is one thing, being saved is easy, it's just believing in
Christ, it's that easy.
But obviously there's more to the Christian life than just being saved because there are
other choices and other things that are difficult where we have to make a decision whether we're
going to make sacrifices for the Kingdom of God and God likes it when we make those sacrifices
willingly because we want to.
You know, why did God even put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden
of Eden in the first place?
It was because He's giving man a choice because He wants people to willingly choose Him and
choose what's right.
And I'm sure we can understand that as human beings.
Would you want to be friends with people because they're forced to be your friend?
Would you want to be married to someone who was forced to marry you and doesn't want to
be in that marriage?
Would you want people to come to your business or to your church or to your family and just
they're doing everything for you because they have to?
No, we want people to be friends with us because they love us.
I want people to listen to my preaching because they want to listen to my preaching.
You want people to patronize your business because they want to or you want your family
to spend time with you because they want to.
This is a totally normal, natural feeling and it comes from God because God feels the
same way.
You know, He wants people to willingly offer themselves and to choose to love Him and serve
Him, not to just always be forced to do everything.
He's most glorified when people do things willingly.
And so the people willingly offer themselves, praise God for the victory.
You know, God is the one who did the work and made it happen, but thank God for the
people that willingly offered themselves.
It's both.
You know, God works through people who willingly offer themselves.
They offer themselves and then God uses them.
Humanly speaking, this battle that they won was not something that they really had a good
chance of winning, humanly speaking.
The enemy had much better equipment, weapons, better troops.
They had the 900 iron chariots.
Israel is clearly the underdog here, but because the people willingly offered themselves, they
believed the promise of God because God had prophesied and given the prophecy to Deborah
and probably others that they were going to win.
They trusted that they had faith in that they offered themselves and God did a great work
through them.
God has the impossible through people who offer themselves to him just to show how much
of an underdog Israel was.
Look at verse number 28.
You know, this is the end of the song.