Please use your browser's back arrow to return to the previous page

No halfway covenant

Judges 4: 1 – 24

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 20 Nov, 2005

THE REVIVALIST, Jonathan Edwards, caused quite a stir in New England when he refused to acknowledge the concept of halfway covenant. He expected men and women to be full-on, or to admit that they were not Christians at all.

When the early settlers arrived in America, they were Christians and they knew it. Most of them had suffered persecution in England, and they were determined to live as godly a life as they could in their new home.

That is not to say that they got it right in America. The Congregationalists and the Presbyterians persecuted Baptists and Quakers, and the Baptists persecuted Quakers and Deists. But they were committed, and that was a good start.

But what happened when their children came along?

Everyone was baptised. There were penalties for not getting your children baptised.

Everyone was expected to attend church. There were penalties for not attending.

But not everyone had any personal faith or any personal commitment.

So they created a special class of membership for church members who were not Christians, a “Halfway Covenant” which committed the uncommitted to supporting the church, but expected little in the way of true faith. People assented to creeds, but they didn’t know the creator. They professed Christ, but did not follow him.

And Edwards said, “This is not good enough, and I will not tolerate it.”

It was from that attitude that revival found its way into New England society.

You might ask, “What has this to do with me? I am soundly converted, I am an active Church member, I am not merely keeping up appearances!”

But let’s ask ourselves, “What kind of covenant do I keep in my heart with God?” Am I a Christian in externals, but not at the core of my being?” We’ve all been there and done that.

The story of Deborah and Barak is just such a story, and it shows once again what happens when a person depends on someone else’s faith instead of having a full personal faith.

The story is fairly simple.

Israel did evil again, and reaped the same bitter crop — oppression by the Canaanites. They faced a king, Jabin, and the leader of his army, Sisera.

It’s worth noting here that kings derive their authority in this way. They can only rule with consent. No one elected king Jabin; he didn’t require the consent of the people. But without the consent of the army and of his nobles, his rule would soon have collapsed. That’s why dealing with Sisera was vital if Israel was to be freed.

The support and consent of army commanders and police chiefs and barons is necessary for a king to survive.

Someone said that the difference between a democracy and other forms of government is that we don’t have to shoot our leaders to get rid of them.

Anyway, here’s Israel, oppressed by Jabin and his commander, Sisera, and they are crying out to the Lord for help.

Often that’s the thing that brings God back into our situation. Life becomes so desperate that we turn to God for some relief.

A woman I work with is not a Christian, but her parents are. She tells me that it has only been their faith which has taken them through many crises due to her father’s poor health.

It’s good when people have that kind of steady faith through the ups and downs of life, but so often isn’t it only when the first wave goes over our heads that we remember our Redeemer?

Anyway, when Israel calls out to God, God speaks a word to a woman named Deborah. She is a prophetess and a judge, who settles disputes among Israelites.

If any one tells you that women should not speak or lead, point them to Deborah! God’s gifts are not dependent on gender, race or social status.

God tells Deborah to call Barak, and she tells him,

“The LORD, the God of Israel, commands you: `Go, take with you ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulun and lead the way to Mount Tabor. ⁷ I will lure Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his troops to the Kishon River and give him into your hands.’ “

It’s a very simple and direct instruction. “Get your men, come via Mount Tabor, and be ready to fight when I bring Sisera to you.”

One of the more amazing things in life is that God’s commands are usually simple.

There have been a couple of times in my life when I have faced pretty serious conflicts. Because I tend to think in what could be called “political” terms, I often find it difficult to work out how to deal with those kinds of problem. Several times, Christian friends have pointed out Biblical solutions, and I have thought, “How difficult!” And then, when I talk it over with them, and see how everything fits together, I say, “How simple!”

And the amazing thing is that God’s simple solutions work!

But I find all kinds of reasons for not doing it God’s way. I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the following, I don’t have the mind for it, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. Don’t we all? Moses was the same. He told God, “I’m a nobody. I’m a stammerer. I can’t speak for you, Lord!” But God sent him anyway.

Gideon was the same. He told God, “My clan is the smallest in Israel, and I’m at the bottom of my clan. Who am I to deliver Israel!?”

In one troubled situation, I had to stand up for a principle, but, to stand up for that principle, I opened myself to attack for not upholding another principle.

I was ready for battle, but knew I would lose.

But God gave me an answer from the Bible, something that included principle A and principle B, and held them in balance. It was so simple, and it showed up the shallowness ot the people who wanted to criticise me. God’s solutions aren’t always easy to face, but they are often very straight–forward. As the Psalmist said,

The wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein.

But what is simple isn’t always easy to face.

We’ve all faced the situation where it seems too threatening to act, and you feel it would be best just to leave it and let it sort itself out. “Time heals all wounds,” you tell yourself. And yet, you know the theory. You know that what is left doesn’t ever sort itself out. You know the pain might fade, but it will never go away. You remember long delays that lead to bitterness. Yet you don’t want to face the situation.

That’s where Barak was. He knew that God had called him to confront Sisera. He knew that Deborah was a prophetess, and had heard from God. He knew that a word from God should be obeyed. But he was scared to go. He put conditions on. And that was his biggest problem.

Of course, God does not always speak directly to you, and you need to hear when he speaks through other people, and you need to check with other people what seems to be from him.

When the call into ministry training came to me, in one way God was speaking inescapably to me, but that call might mean a lot of hardship and loss to me.

I decided to move ahead, and look for confirmation as I went.

My pastor told me that a lady at the last Wednesday night’s prayer meeting, for no reason that she could think of, prayed for me to be willing to respond to the call into ministry. Mid week, the Secretary of the Baptist Union phoned me because our pastor had told him my story, and the Secretary thought I should have a chance to talk about it, even though the closing date for applications had passed.

That week, a Catholic friend phoned and, when I told her I might have a change coming, she said, “You are going to be a minister, aren‘t you?” I'd never said anything about that to her, but she said, “I had thought for a long time that you would do that. You are just like the priests and brothers that I know.”

God encouraged my decision in many ways.

God wants us to know his will, and he will speak through others, through his word, through our circumstances — whatever will speak clearly to us.

So Barak was wise to listen to what Deborah said to him, because it was God’s word to him.

But Barak didn’t go all the way. He wanted Deborah to go with him. He didn’t stand on his own two feet. He needed his hand held.

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, there’s a song with the words,

When a man’s afraid

A beautiful maid

Is a touching sight to see...

Barak would have agreed.

When I was given a bad time by some of the Councillors over our position on prostitution, I really felt shaken up, that I had taken big risks and failed.

I went to sit down, but my seat had been taken, so I sat on the floor near the ABC crew to watch the rest of the proceedings.

The reporter sitting near me on a table — Victoria was her name — reached down and held my hand, and I really felt comforted. Someone knew how knocked around I felt.

But I didn’t need to have anyone stand with me. I had to stand up in my own right and say what I had to say alone. It was my calling.

If Barak had fought the fight alone, I’m sure Deborah would have squeezed his hand at the end. But he was supposed to stand at the head of his army and fight the battle. He was supposed to be the leader, not the front man.

And we read what Deborah told Barak:

JDG 4:9 “Very well,” Deborah said, “I will go with you. But because of the way you are going about this, the honour will not be yours, for the LORD will hand Sisera over to a woman.”

In those days that would be a dreadful thing, for a soldier not to capture his enemy, but for a woman to do it. There would have been tremendous loss of face for Barak. He had failed as a a soldier, and Jael, the wife of Heber, the Kenite, tricked Sisera, betrayed him, and killed him.

In those days, being a soldier was exclusively a thing for men to do; and a woman had to fill in for Barak.

Sometimes there is a risk that we men will become front men for our wives and girlfriends. We grow up with our mothers telling us what to do, often with fathers who have learned to do what their mothers and wives tell them to do; sometimes we have seen our mothers struggling and have a feeling we would never let that happen to our wife, and the conclusion is that we find it hard to say, “No” to a woman and will never quite live our own lives.

Even bullies and wife–beaters are often driven by the same attitude, only they hate the situation instead of resigning to it.

But, whether you are a Barak who insists that he won’t go without Deborah, or whether you are a man who waits for his wife to speak, it’s the same problem. And, if you are a woman who needs her hand held, who can’t stand out front alone because she’s too shy, and uses that as an excuse not to serve God, it’s the same problem. God wants us to stand up in our own right, and not expect others to carry us along.

I particularly want to commend some of you women in this church, because some of you have led services, and some of you have shared really difficult aspects of your lives, and you have done it even when you were scared to do it.

I like to watch the feet, they way they roll onto the edges of their shoes and back again. They’ve been anxious, but they have done what they were called to do.

But we all look for reasons not to obey when God calls, or for ways to obey only if someone else really does the hard work for us.

For three months, Rev Dickie Barton told us 14–year–olds about how different Biblical Characters had responded to Jesus. Then he asked us, “How are you going to respond to Jesus?” And he gave us until the next week to decide.

I saw with uncommon clarity what Jesus did for me in dying on the cross. I saw how, in the cross, God commends his love to me in that, while I was still a sinner, Christ died for me.

And I did nothing. I probably would have responded to Jesus had someone told me, “I’m going to do it — let’s do it together!”

And then I’d have worried forever that I wasn’t acting in my own right.

Have you been thinking about Jesus for weeks, for months, for years, and never really given yourself to him? Are you still waiting for someone else to do it first? Why give your blessing to that other person when it is earmarked for you?

Have you considered baptism in obedience to Jesus? Are you still standing by the edge of the pool waiting for the waters to move and someone else to put you in?

Is there a calling on your life — ministry, missionary service, some parachurch organisation, even — but you refuse to do it alone?

Here’s a lesson from Barak. Do what God calls you to do, or you will lose your blessing, no matter what alternatives you might offer God. He wants our obedience, not our better ideas.

John Aloisi was upset when he was left off the Australian team for the World Cup play-off. The coach, Guus Hiddink, had a plan.

The night before the game, Hiddink called Aloisi, and challenged him to a contest. Whoever hit the crossbar first got a bottle of wine.

Hiddink missed every time, but Aloisi eventually hit the bar. Hiddink congratulated him. That night, at the team dinner in the hotel, Hiddink crossed the room to Aloisi’s table and poured him a full glass from a newly–opened bottle. Aloisi began to feel like a member of the team again.

He could have said, “What a silly idea. I’ve got training to do.” He could have found some way to wriggle out of really playing the game with Hiddink. But he’d have missed out on the blessing Hiddink had for him.

Don’t be a halfway believer, don’t try to be in a partial covenant with God, because there is no such thing.

I just have a very brief application, a challenge for us all, to stand on our own feet with our faith, not to depend on others to cover for us. God knows what he is doing when he tells you to do something, so you will miss out on his special blessing if you don’t respond.

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)