Sermon Transcript:

Sometimes as you are reading through the Bible you read a paragraph that causes you to think, “wait, what just happened?” and you need to go back and read it again. We come to one of those today as we continue our journey through the history of the judge Jephthah. The passage we will look at this morning is one of the most debated and controversial passages in the Bible. What you ultimately think about Jephthah is going to depend a great deal on how you understand this passage. 

Does Jephthah kill his daughter and offer her as a human sacrifice or does she end up dedicated to the lord for a life of celibacy? There is considerable debate about this and we will get to that, but either way, the vow Jephthah makes is foolish and rash. What I hope you will see today is that:

We must approach God not as negotiators, but as grateful recipients of His grace.

The last time we saw Jephthah he had tried to establish peace through negotiation but those negotiations broke down. Words had failed and war was unavoidable. We pick up in verse 29,

29 Then the Spirit of the Lord was upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh and passed on to Mizpah of Gilead, and from Mizpah of Gilead he passed on to the Ammonites. 

Like other judges, God’s spirit empowers Jephthah to deliver Israel. We expect the author to provide details of the battles like he did with others such as Barak, Gideon, or Abimelech but all we get is this very short summary. The author is in a hurry to share something else that is going to overshadow the victory. Verse 30 says,

30 And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord and said, “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, 31 then whatever comes out from the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the Ammonites shall be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.”

Jephthah continues to be an ambiguous character. Scripture does not explicitly criticize him, yet every action and word of his could be interpreted either as faithful or manipulative. He is portrayed as a devout worshiper of Yahweh, marked by fervent zeal, yet also embodies the cunning of a gang leader. His zeal, while directed towards God, is also mixed with pride and selfishness.

This vow is another example of this ambiguity. A vow is just a promise to God or a promise that invokes God when making it. Vows and oaths are used in different ways and there are different kinds. Many godly people take oaths and make vows in the Bible including Jacob, David, and even the apostle Paul. Isaiah prophesies of a day when even Israel’s enemies will make vows to the Lord. Vows related to various things were part of the worship of Israel. Psalm 65:1 says,

1 Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion, and to you shall vows be performed.

The Jewish law contains a lot of regulation surrounding the taking of oaths and vows. Appropriate use of oaths and vows were in contexts where God is called as a witness to a testimony, when certain offices are conferred, or to dedicate something or someone to the service of God. We make similar solemn promises when we join a church, get married, or give testimony in court. 

These should be rare and taken very seriously. Ecclesiastes 5:4–5 says,

4 When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay.

We should never make a vow under our own power or authority. When we make a solemn promise, we should do so with the prayer, “so help me God”. The New Testament warns us about taking frivolous vows or using God’s name in vain by taking solemn oaths where our word should be sufficient. James 5:12 says,

But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your ‘yes’ be yes and your ‘no’ be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.

We do not have the power to control the future and our faithfulness should speak for itself. We should therefore be humble. Jesus says in Matthew 5:34-37,

“... I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.”

So the fact that he makes a vow could be good or bad, but when we look at the vow he makes, it is, at best, an example of rash foolishness. At worst, it reflects a pagan like view of God, suggesting we can manipulate the will of God with our worship like a little boy telling his mother that if she gives him a cookie he will be good. Brothers and sisters, God’s blessings are not a response to our worship, true worship is a response to God’s blessings. 

God did not require this vow from him. There was no expectation for him to do this. It seems to be that he is negotiating with God to ensure victory. He wants to be sure of victory so he tries to sweeten the pot. It is foolish to try and trade something with God as though we have anything he needs or that he would withhold anything good from those who ask in faith.

This idea, which is the most common way people even today think about God does not come from the Bible. It has its roots in the same lies the Devil told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is a false view of God that assumes we have the ability to do anything that requires God to move in a certain direction. It is the most deeply seated impulse of the sinful heart to want to hang on to some sliver of glory rather than to give it to God. We think, there must be something I can do. Somehow, I must be able to participate. This works-based, fleshly thinking comes naturally to us. Lord “if you will only do X, I will do Y.” It is a process throughout the Christian life for the Spirit to root out this pride from our hearts. If you bless me, I will serve, I will pray, I will stop sinning. Give me a cookie and I will be good. This is what Jephthah does. It is good to bring sacrifices but sinners cannot negotiate with God. 

The cross of Christ destroys this logic. That is why it is so offensive. The cross of Jesus shows us that our very best works, our very best thoughts, the outcome of all our supposed freedom leads to death. None of it was acceptable before God. On the cross, God’s wrath is satisfied. I think that when we say that Jesus died for our sins, people immediately think about the obviously bad things they have done. He did die for those things, but what we need to understand is that the wrath of God is poured out upon any so-called good things we try to offer as though we can earn anything.

Jesus reserved his most scathing rebukes not for humbled sinners, but for proud sinners who thought their works could earn God’s favor. The cross is not merely judgment upon the things we have done that offend our fellow man, the cross is judgment upon our entire self-reliance and self-righteousness. 

That blood soaked cross reveals that our best efforts, our most earnest attempts at goodness, and our most prized moral achievements are not just insufficient, they are offensive to God. To be crucified with Christ means the illusion that we can earn divine favor through our own merits is put to death once and for all. It means surrendering any claim that our works or our will contribute anything of value. It is to admit that to live, we must die. We must confess that the only way we can become righteous is to accept it as a gift entirely of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. 

The cross proves we have nothing to negotiate with. All human reason, religion, wisdom, and spirituality were crucified on that Cross because it is a declaration that nothing any sinner could offer was acceptable. It proves that all we were must die with Christ. It also proves that God’s love is far greater than our sin because the death that is required was paid by God himself, and if we have been united to him in his death, we shall also be raised with him to walk in newness of life. One preacher said, “the cross is the place God’s love and his justice kiss”.

That is the amazing thing about the gospel. To understand it rightly is to be utterly humbled, recognizing that our wills are not free, but enslaved to sin so that there is nothing good in us. But it is also to understand that if we are humbled, we shall also be exalted. It is to trust God alone for the free gift of the righteousness of Jesus. To receive the gospel is to accept that we are far more wicked than we could ever imagine, but that we are also far more loved than we could ever deserve. 

Jephthah in his foolishness tries to barter with God, “if you give me victory, I will offer you whatever comes to greet me when I get home.” Friends, God is not hesitant to be gracious. He does not need to be bribed. There is no lack in him that we can fill. He loves us not because of anything we can give to him, but because it pleases him to do so.

God offers salvation through Jesus Christ as a gift of grace. All you need to do to be saved is to put your faith in God’s promise that he will accept the perfect life of Jesus as your righteousness and that his death paid the price for your sins. Whether you are a scoundrel or hypocrite, a wretch or a pharisee, salvation is offered to you in Christ. Jesus was crucified for sin but three days later, he rose again to bring eternal life to all who believe and he offers that eternal life freely but we it can only be received as a free gift of grace.

OK, back to Jephthah, verse 32,

32 So Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against them, and the Lord gave them into his hand. 33 And he struck them from Aroer to the neighborhood of Minnith, twenty cities, and as far as Abel-keramim, with a great blow. So the Ammonites were subdued before the people of Israel.

The entire victory over the Ammonites is summarized in two verses but this was no small campaign, As you can see, this is large territory and over 20 cities were subdued. The emphasis of the author, however, is on Jephthah as he returns home.

34 Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah. And behold, his daughter came out to meet him with tambourines and with dances. She was his only child; besides her he had neither son nor daughter. 35 And as soon as he saw her, he tore his clothes and said, “Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low, and you have become the cause of great trouble to me. For I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.”

Up to this point, he was probably having the greatest day of his life. He returns the victorious hero of Israel, his name vindicated before all of Gilead, but this quickly becomes a very dark day. As we begin reading verse 34 we get a knot in our stomach. We can sense what is coming. His daughter is the first to greet him.

Jephthah is horrified. There are provisions in the law that allow payment to be made to release a person from certain vows. Scholars debate whether this situation would meet that criteria. Jephthah, however, clearly believes he has to follow through and his daughter agrees.

36 And she said to him, “My father, you have opened your mouth to the Lord; do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, now that the Lord has avenged you on your enemies, on the Ammonites.” 37 So she said to her father, “Let this thing be done for me: leave me alone two months, that I may go up and down on the mountains and weep for my virginity, I and my companions.” 38 So he said, “Go.” Then he sent her away for two months, and she departed, she and her companions, and wept for her virginity on the mountains.

Her submission and her response contrast strikingly with his. When he sees her come out, his concern is about himself… he says “you have brought me low”. She is the one to be offered. Of all the people in this whole story, she is the most godly. She only asks for two months to spend time with her friends before the thing is done so that she could mourn her virginity. 

39 And at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow that he had made. She had never known a man, and it became a custom in Israel 40 that the daughters of Israel went year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year.

Jephthah grants her request and then, with a sickening thud, the Bible says, …she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow that he had made.

So what happened? There is tremendous debate about that but the views boil down to two major interpretations. The first is that Jephthah did actually offer his daughter as a human sacrifice. The second is that he dedicated her to lifelong service to Yahweh so she was never able to marry. Most of the details could fit either scenario. First, I will explain why many think she was not killed.

Jephthah is depicted as a worshiper of Yahweh, in fact, he is listed in Hebrews 11:32 as a hero of faith. The Bible never explicitly rebukes him, which is hard to understand if he murdered his child. Human sacrifice, particularly of one's own child, was clearly condemned by Mosaic law and we know he is familiar with the Mosaic law. 

The phrase "shall be the Lord’s, AND I will offer it up for a burnt offering" could be translated “shall be to the Lord’s OR I will offer it up as a burnt offering.” so the vow could have been one of dedication. The law required burnt offerings to be male and a priest would be required to make the offering. 

The mention of her perpetual virginity and her willingness to go along also point to some sort of living offering. Finally, it is never recorded that he killed her, only that he "did with her according to his vow". 

While I recognize the weight of several of these arguments, the most plain reading of this passage in its context leads me to believe that he did offer her as a human sacrifice. Several of the arguments for the other view are assumptions and there are counter arguments for each of them.

His commendation in Hebrews does not mean that he was perfect in obedience. Others on the list also committed grievous sins. If she was going to survive, then she wouldn’t need two months to mourn her virginity, she would have had the rest of her life. The author might not give us details of the sacrifice because the act is so obviously horrific that comment wasn’t necessary. We could go on but the most natural reading of this is that he did it.

If that is the case, I think we need to be absolutely clear that God in no way condones what he did. This is a horrendous and sinful act. Jephthah treats Yahweh as if he is like the Canaanite gods. Referring to child sacrifice Leviticus 18:21 says,

21 You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord.

Speaking of importing Canaanite worship practices, Deuteronomy 12:31 says,

31 You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.

Before the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, the Spirit came on people to enable them for a specific purpose. The Spirit came to Jephthah to empower him to deliver Israel. That he is listed in Hebrews as a hero of the faith shows us only that in a dark time of compromise, he was a worshiper of Yahweh. It does not mean that he could not have committed a horrible act. Remember, they were not sealed by the Spirit in the way New Covenant believers are. 

This reading fits well with the flow of the book. Israel has fallen low and even a great leader like Jephthah was compromised by Canaanite corruption. There are ultimately no heroes in the book of Judges other than God. The message is that without a God appointed king, the people descend into chaos and even Jephthah is an example of this. We see the creeping darkness of idolatry penetrating every aspect of life.

Jephthah’s offering was not an act of faithful worship. The point of this narrative is not to show us the greatness of Jephthah but to point us to the desperate need for the perfect redemption God provides through Jesus Christ. We need the deliverer who gives himself for us. 

That brings us face to face with the repulsive, gruesome, and awful reality of human sacrifice. How could any loving father sacrifice their only child? Yet the Bible says it is through the sacrifice of his only begotten son that God’s justice and wrath against sin is satisfied. Isaiah 53:10 says it was the will of God to crush him and Acts 2:23 says Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. How do we make sense of this?

We must begin with an understanding that God is holy and we are sinners. Before coming to Christ, human beings are under the just wrath of God, and heading for eternal destruction. The Bible says those without Christ as lord and savior are "children of wrath". Because we cannot erase our sin or change our own hearts we have no power to save ourselves. We are defenseless against a righteous judgment.

If we are to be saved it will require nothing less than an act of God Himself, for we are powerless to overcome our own spiritual deadness. It requires nothing less than the infinite wisdom and love of God to reconcile justice with mercy. He achieved this through the selfless death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Jesus is every bit as much God as the Father. He only dies because he chose, in love, to identify himself with us.

To suggest God is an abusive father who punishes His own Son for the sins of others starkly misunderstands that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God that always work in perfect unison. Each person of the Trinity seeks the glory of the other two in a perfect expression of self-giving love. The cross is therefore not a moment of divine child abuse but the ultimate display of God's perfect love in all its glory. The Father's glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father in the cross. In John 12:27–28 Jesus says,

27 “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

The Son of God chose to take on human nature not because He was compelled to suffer unwillingly, but because this was the only way to fulfill the righteous requirements of the law for human beings. He is troubled as he faces death not because of fear or reluctance but because He, as the incarnate God-man, would bear the immense weight of divine wrath against sin—our sin.

The cross does more than conquer death and Satan; it addresses the profound problem of sin and God's justice. The suffering of Jesus on the cross was not merely the physical torture and death, but bearing the full wrath of God. He had never felt the separation that sin causes but in this moment he bore the full penalty of the sins of all who would be saved. 

Throughout the Gospels he always calls on His Father, but nailed to that cross in my place, he cries out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In a sense he experienced hell so that I do not have to. It was not the nails, but love for us that held him on that tree.

Jesus upon the cross is the most profound revelation of divine love and glory. It is the revelation of a God who goes to unimaginable lengths to redeem His people. This is not abuse, this is the greatest act of love ever. What righteous judge would die for the guilty? What king would give his life for a rebel. This is the glory of God, that he is perfectly holy and perfectly loving. The cross proves God the Father holds nothing back, not even His own Son, to save His people and God the Son holds nothing back, not even his own life, to redeem His bride, and glorify the Father.

Through this profound truth God the Holy Spirit transforms our relationship with God, moving us from objects of his wrath to children of His mercy. Now, free from wrath and condemnation, we live in the joy of being completely accepted, adopted, loved, and forgiven. 

This is not abuse. This is indescribable love and it is offered as a free gift of grace to all who will receive it by faith. It is offensive for us to think we who are sinners can offer anything that would earn a love like that. For any sinner to think we can imitate this, as Jephthah apparently did, is opposed to the very heart of a God who planned from all eternity to provide the one perfect sacrifice that could ever possibly remove sin. We have nothing valuable enough to offer, but the good news is we only need to believe and it is done. Remember our main point? 

We must approach God not as negotiators, but as grateful recipients of His grace.

Preachers often encourage their hearers to give their life to Christ. I know what they mean, but the truth is that Jesus did not come so that you would give him your life, He came to give you his life. We had no life to offer. As one theologian has said, we contribute nothing to our salvation but the sin that made it necessary. Let us therefore, repent, be humbled, and come empty handed that we may receive the free gift of grace, new life, and peace with God.

I would like us to finish with the words of the Apostle Paul as he reflects on these same themes in Ephesians 2:1–10,

1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.