Introduction

History is full of people doing terrible things in the name of God. The most striking example might be the religious authorities in Jesus’ day who crucified Jesus while believing they were serving God. But other terrible examples abound. For instance, there were the crusaders who believed God was calling them to kill Muslims in the holy land; Church officials who persecuted and even executed Anabaptists because they were rebaptized; The people of Westboro Baptist Church, who protested at the funerals of killed US Soldiers with placards about God’s hatred for Gays and Lesbians. All these people thought they were serving God while doing what was harmful to others. 

These groups of people existed in a culture (or subculture) that affected their perception of what was right and wrong, what was true or untrue and what their lives should be about. It’s easy to identify cultural assumptions when they are other people’s cultural assumptions, but it’s difficult to do when it’s our own. It’s, as the saying goes, like asking a fish to describe water. Culture shapes our deeply held values and beliefs on a foundational level, so it’s not easy to shed those assumptions. But as Christians, we’re called to examine our cultural values in light of what God says. This is hard work, but if we don’t do it, we may find ourselves trying to serve God in ways that God wouldn’t commend. We see a classic example of this in the Old Testament story of Jephthah.

Jephthah: A Cautionary Tale

Jephthah’s story takes place during the time of the Judges. This was the period after the Israelites had conquered the land of Canaan, but before they had their first king. The Israelite conquest of the land had mostly displaced the previous inhabitants, but not totally. The scriptures tell us that the Israelites were repeatedly seduced by the religious practices of the remaining Canaanite people. When the people slid into idolatrous worship, God would allow them to be oppressed by foreign invaders. When the people came to their senses and repented, God would raise up a deliverer (called a judge) and he (or she) would lead the people in casting off their foreign oppressors. The people would then live faithfully…for a while. After each judge died, Israel slid back into idolatry and the cycle repeated. But after several repetitions, the Israelites had begun to lose their distinction from the Canaanites they had displaced. They had become enculturated with the very worst of Canaanite culture and had begun to look no different. 

Jephthah is one of the latter judges who delivers Israel during the time when the people start to look very Canaanite. He is an outcast from the beginning (the son of a prostitute) who gathers an army of scoundrels around himself. When the neighbouring Ammonites begin oppressing the Israelites, the people look to Jephthah to be their commander. But because Jephthah is a product of his toxic culture, he makes a rash promise to God to try to curry favour with him.

And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord: “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, 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.”

Then Jephthah went over to fight the Ammonites, and the Lord gave them into his hands. He devastated twenty towns from Aroer to the vicinity of Minnith, as far as Abel Keramim. Thus Israel subdued Ammon.

When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of timbrels! She was an only child. Except for her he had neither son nor daughter. When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, “Oh no, my daughter! You have brought me down and I am devastated. I have made a vow to the Lord that I cannot break.”

“My father,” she replied, “you have given your word to the Lord. Do to me just as you promised, now that the Lord has avenged you of your enemies, the Ammonites. But grant me this one request,” she said. “Give me two months to roam the hills and weep with my friends, because I will never marry.”

“You may go,” he said. And he let her go for two months. She and her friends went into the hills and wept because she would never marry. After the two months, she returned to her father, and he did to her as he had vowed (Judges 11:30-39a, NIV)

It’s unclear who/or what Jephthah might have expected to come out to meet him when he returned home after the battle (maybe his mother-in-law?) but it’s obvious that he’s devastated that it is his only child. Many a sermon has concluded that Jephthah shouldn’t have made such a rash promise. While that is good advice, I think it misses what is going on. The tragedy of Jephthah is that his mind had been marinating in the toxic Canaanite culture for so long that he believed God would accept that sacrifice. It’s not that God wasn’t clear in the law: “You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31, NIV).

Child sacrifice is singled out by God with special revulsion. As sins go, this is a biggie, and yet Jephthah feels compelled to follow through on his vow because he thinks this must be God’s will. His mind hasn’t been transformed, so he can’t imagine God is any different than all of the other Ancient Near Eastern warrior deities worshiped by the Canaanites. The truth is that God is different, but we won’t know that if we allow our thinking to be shaped by the people around us rather than by God. Paul makes this point succinctly in Romans 12:2: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” In other words, if I take for granted that my culture’s way of seeing the world is correct, then God’s will will seem absurd to me. “Deny myself, take up your cross and follow? Why would I do that?” But if we allow God to tell us what is right and true and good and glorious, then it will start to come into focus. Unlike Jephthah, we have the example of Jesus that more clearly shows us the character of the God we serve. When Jesus washing his disciples’ feet seems important, when his suffering death on the cross seems victorious, then we know that our minds have been transformed. 

Making Jephthah’s Mistake

If Jephthah, the Jerusalem religious leaders, or the Westboro Baptists can make the tragic mistake of doing terrible things in the name of God, we had better watch out, because we’re capable of making the same mistake. Critically examining your deeply held values is hard work. If the process isn’t uncomfortable, that’s a sure sign that you’re not doing it. 

We reduce sanctification, the process of growing in holiness, to avoiding certain behaviours that are stigmatized in church culture. “You know I’m a good Christian because ‘I don’t drink or smoke or chew or go around with girls that do.’” But holiness isn’t about reforming our external behaviours, it’s about the Spirit transforming us into new people. It means the Spirit gets to completely upend our definition of what is desirable. The Spirit gets to tell us what kind of goals we should have in life, and what kind of virtues we ought to cultivate. The transformation of our mind will identify the cultural values at odds with the gospel that we’ve tried to baptize so we can hold on to them. I’ll look at a couple just to show you what I mean

Self-Reliance

Believe it or not, “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible. The sentiment is incompatible with the calling of Christ. While it is a good thing to work hard so that you can generously share with others, it is not a virtue to not need the assistance of others. Independence is a cultural value. We like it because when I’m independent, I can take pride in what I have accomplished on my own. It also permits me to withhold help from others because it would be depriving them of the chance to stand on their own two feet. But what do we see in the scriptures? We’re not called to be independent but rather interdependent. Interdependence is where we choose to rely on one another. In the places where I allow you to rely on me, I learn generosity. In the places where I rely on you, I learn humility. For people who cherish independence, learning the humility to receive from others is difficult. I remember on a mission trip in Costa Rica I was given a bedroom to sleep in in the house where I was billeted. During the night, I needed to use the bathroom, so I got up and realized that the kids and their father were all huddled together on a single mattress in the living room so I could have the space. I felt horrified, but God showed me it was important to let them offer me their hospitality. We have to ask ourselves if we’re willing to humble ourselves to receive, or if it’s too uncomfortable do we come up with excuses why we can give but can never take from others? 

Christian Nationalism

Christian Nationalism is the idea that the church should be in charge of our country. To this end, Christians see it as their sacred duty to amass political power for themselves so they can build or defend God’s kingdom. Getting and maintaining this power often involves questionable behaviour. But all of this rests on the assumption that God needs help building his kingdom and that the world needs Christians with political power. Jesus challenges both of these notions. Jesus isn’t a pragmatist, doing what must regrettably be done to ensure God’s kingdom arrives. Rather Jesus is totally (and impractically) faithful to God’s command, doing things that seemed destined to end up in defeat (i.e. the crucifixion) and yet Jesus trusts that the Father can use his obedience to make things work out. And they do. Jesus’ disciples aren’t ‘the right stuff.’ They’re a bunch of questionably literate working-class stiffs with no political connections who, in faithful obedience to the example set by Jesus, transform the world (although for most of them, it came at the cost of their lives). God doesn’t seem to need his followers to have temporal power for his kingdom to come. So why do we assume he does now? 

It’s not just that God doesn’t need our strength. It’s that he often works directly against it. We love to think about how much the Apostle Paul accomplished during his missionary journeys and in writing a big chunk of the New Testament, but Paul was not a strong guy. He had some sort of physical ailment (He doesn’t share the specifics) that is holding him back. He prays to God over and over for God to remove it, “Lord, think of how much more I could accomplish if only I didn’t have to deal with this!” But God sees things differently:

Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Corinthians 12:9-10, NIV).

God shows him that it’s Paul’s lack of strength that allows God’s power to shine more clearly through him. So Paul embraces the weakness as a badge of honor. We don’t need to bring God’s kingdom. God does that. In weakness, we are invited to enter it. No political chicanery is required.

I should also point out that as Christian Nationalists try to amass power they often deliberately inflame others’ resentments. Christian leaders wanting to be political players have often demonized the boogeyman of the hour to whip their flock up into a lather. “If we don’t stand up against________, we won’t have a country left, and they’ll come and destroy your children.” This can effectively harness people’s outrage and turn them into a motivated voting bloc, but at what cost? Amplifying conflict is the opposite of what Jesus commands. Instead, we’re supposed to disarm conflict by loving our enemies, and by seeking reconciliation with those who have wronged us. We don’t get a pass because we hate the people on the other side. Our hatred is a sign that our minds are conformed to the patterns of this world and not yet transformed and renewed by the Holy Spirit. Christian Nationalism is a failure of our imagination. It’s a failure to believe that God can set right what is wrong in this world using the death of his son. We assume he needs us to give him some help with our very human way of operating. 

Conclusion

God invites us to become new creatures, but we often want to skip the process of transformation. Becoming new requires that we subject our old ways of thinking to the examination of the Holy Spirit, so he can transform our minds. This is a deeply uncomfortable process. Who wants to be told that their most dearly held values are wrong? But it’s only as we allow the Spirit to do this work that God’s new way of being in the world makes any sense. Trying to follow God with old patterns of thinking doesn’t work. As Jesus himself says, “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined” (Mark 2:22).  We can’t put the new wine of God’s kingdom into the old, inflexible vessels that are our old, culturally bound, ways of thinking, or things can go disastrously wrong, as we see in the case of Jephthah. Being new creatures can only begin when we have new minds.