The Wrong Promise
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
The Wrong Promise
I was bawling during my morning commute. On the way to school drop-off, we listen to The Daily Radio Bible podcast. This morning Hunter Barnes was reading from Judges 11, the story of Jephthah. Hunter in his smooth baritone helps us read the scriptures in the light of the good news of Jesus. Including the stories we would rather leave out.
Most people don’t know this story. Jephthah emerged from a bad family situation to become a sought-after military leader. He was recruited into an army retaliating after an Ammonite strike. At this time he made a promise to Israel’s God, the LORD: Jephthah would reward divine victory by dedicating to the LORD whatever creature came out of his house to meet him when he returned triumphant.
I am sure Jephthah was expecting livestock. I am sure Jephthah always was greeted by a goat or a sheep from the family pen; he’d cross the fence around his property before he reached the house itself. This time, instead of a goat or a sheep, here came his sweet young daughter, his only child, his family’s future and the joy of his life. But Jephthah had made a promise, a vow, and though he was lost in grief upon seeing his daughter instead of a goat, he felt bound to follow through. You see, “dedicating to the LORD” in Japheth’s world meant death and fire. In his world, you gave gifts to gods by killing animals and roasting their bodies so the aroma would ascend to heaven. So that’s what Japheth felt he had to do with his daughter. And that’s what he did.
I have read this story several times, and every time I do I break down, sharing in Jephthah’s grief. I feel the grief as if it were my own, as if it had been my child, as if I had lost my joy and hope for the future. There in the car, that grief overwhelmed me again and I could not but bawl.
My son asked what was going on. (His attention had been elsewhere.) Through tears, I expressed how sad I was over the story. I also named my anger. Anger that any father could misunderstand what God wants as badly as Jephthah had. Anger that any father would think keeping that kind of promise was a better choice than having mercy on his own child.
I tried to explain, ever so briefly, that some stories in the Bible aren’t there because they tell us what we should do. Some are there to tell us what we shouldn’t do. Some stories are there to show us, to paraphrase Rowan Williams, how things can go so terribly wrong when people like us terribly misunderstand what God wants.
It is so important to get God right by dwelling on the image of himself he has given us in Jesus. Not so much because he will hold it against us if we don’t; instead, because our lives and the lives of those we love will be ruined if we wind up worshiping and imitating a god who isn’t real. We become like what we imagine, and some of our ideas about God come right out of our wrong imagination.
May we receive the love of our Heavenly Father and the safety of his embrace as Jesus carries us into his presence. May we come to trust that we can trust him with everything, as Jesus himself did and does. May he transform our regret and our grief into divine joy.