What does God want?
We don't always know what's best for us, but God does!... It's easy to
make tragic mistakes in our life when we refuse to listen to what God wants for
Himself, and for us!
It is easy to be
mistaken about what God wants - oftentimes, we figure God wants what we want. Some
of the most important lessons of our life come when we realize that we don't
always know what's best for us, but God does!
Another mistake is
to assume that God wants what other people mistakenly say He wants. This was
the mistake Jephthah made - he assumed God would be pleased with the same type
of human sacrifices the bloodthirsty pagan idols looked for! So, to thank God
for victory, he promised God, "Whoever comes out of the doors of my house
to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites shall belong to the
LORD. I shall offer him up as a burnt offering!"
Reading the text of
Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter curdles our blood - we wonder why the
awful deed is not condemned here (human sacrifice is, of course, condemned
elsewhere - see, for example, Deut. 12:29-31). There's no question that the
grisly sacrifice was not pleasing at all to God!
But here we can
learn a lesson about reading scripture: isolated passages can easily be
misinterpreted. Reading this passage by itself, someone could conceivably
conclude that God was pleased with Jephthah's vow, and therefore granted him
the victory he sought. But reading the passage in the whole context of
scripture, remembering what God tells us He wants (the psalm gives some good
hints - much later, Jesus came to give some good answers!), it's impossible to
praise Jephthah's vow, but we can reflect on it, and maybe learn an important
lesson from its gruesomeness - it's easy to make tragic mistakes in our life
when we refuse to listen to what God wants for Himself, and for us!