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A Familiar Voice

Judges 4:1-2a & 4-5
And the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the LORD after Ehud died. And the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. … Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at the time. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the people of Israel came up to her for judgment.

Persecution is a great leveler for God’s people. In times of duress and injustice and even enslavement, times where freedoms of speech and religious expression are censored, times when godless Pharoahs and Eglons and Jabins rule with an iron fist rather than a shepherd’s staff, times where the church has to assemble in secret apartments or underground catacombs, times where adherence to God’s Word will get you thrown into prison and beaten up or even martyred, times where seminary courses and theological podcasts and biblical recourses are defunct, the life of faith gets really simple. In days of heavenly silence, even a whisper from the LORD cuts through the static.

Hear, O Israel, a voice crying from the wilderness! Do you want to see what justice looks like in days of exile? Do you long for a mountaintop encounter with Almighty God in days of obstinacy? Then pack your bag, put on your hiking boots, and take a day trip to the hill country of Ephraim. Once you get there, keep walking, past the open pasturelands and past the olive groves, past the rubble of previous generations, till you come to a palm tree in the gap between Bethel and Ramah. Then, upon arriving, inquire of that faithful prophetess seated there on her judicial throne—Heaven’s mercy seat—a lawn chair—what the Spirit of God desires of you.

Friend, God never stops speaking to those who have ears to hear. Some days He speaks from a Solomonic temple and others from a palm grove. Some days he adjudicates through stony thrones in a high court and others by a stump in the woods. Some days he roars through a patriarch and others He sings through a matriarch. But always, in the good times and bad, in the seasons of plenty and in the seasons of want, He leaves a voice in the wilderness to draw us near.

 

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