JUDGES 9
Read Judges 9:1-56
This is a long chapter and contains lots of detail about civil war and political manoeuvrings amongst God’s people to determine who should be leader. At the end of Chapter 8 (verse 34) we read that the Israelites ‘did not remember the Lord their God who had rescued them from their enemies’. They also (verse 33) ‘set up Baal-Berith as their god’. We have learned from the book of Judges that worshipping other gods and forgetting about the one true god is bad news and always leads to disaster. This time, however, God did not need to raise up an enemy to punish his people, they did it themselves from within. It is worth noting, too, that God did not raise up a saviour. Abimelech, Gideon’s son, proclaimed himself ruler with the backing of a section of the population. It is often the case today that the problems for God’s people come from themselves every bit as much as from outside the family of God.
Abimelech disposed of all rivals to the throne – except one, Gideon’s youngest son, Jotham. Jotham told the story of the trees choosing not to be king over the other trees until the bramble, one of the least of all and not really a tree at all agrees to be the king of trees. What does this mean? I think Jotham’s point is that the people of Israel have readily accepted Abimelech as king, someone who is not worthy, who is not a God-ordained leader and someone who is destructive rather than constructive as a leader. How ready we are to not seek God’s guidance in our decision making and to go with popular opinion and make the wrong choice. Jotham is a good teacher to us here. God’s people should take care in seeking and selecting their leaders. And most of all, they should seek God’s guidance in doing so and not just follow the crowd and choose the most popular.
Ultimately and with irony, the bad leader Abimelech is destroyed by the very people (the men of Schechem) that he destroyed earlier in the story. God does sometimes work in this way in his judgement: evil men destroy evil men, evil nations destroy evil nations, alliances between the wicked tend not to prosper. There is no lasting faithfulness in wickedness. It is the love of God that produces lasting fellowship with one another.
Judges 9 shows that damage to God’s people can come from within as well as from without, from Israel as well as from Midian – and, in our own time, from within the church as well as from the pagan society in which we live. But ultimately God is sovereign and in charge. The bad leader Abimelech is dealt with, God does not abandon his people because of their bad choices and the reign of a bad ruler. With God we always have hope