GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
JUDGES 13:9-14
9 God heard Manoah, and the angel of God returned to the woman while she was out in the field, but her husband Manoah was not with her. 10 The woman ran quickly to her husband and said, “The man who came to me the other day has just come back! ” 11 So Manoah got up and followed his wife. When he came to the angel, he asked, “Are you the one who spoke to my wife? ”
We don’t know how much time had passed, but the couple had gone back to work. I don’t think it was even one day later, but the very same day. This is because we’re talking about the woman being careful all through her pregnancy, and it would have been important to get the ground rules about Nazirite babies straight before the pregnancy occurred. More about that below.
We will discover later that this angel of God was in fact God, the Second Person of the Trinity, who would later be born as Jesus Christ (sometimes we use the clunky title “the pre-incarnate Christ”). Here, he is the messenger for his heavenly Father, and acts and speaks with all the authority of God. Why? Because he is God, every bit as much here as when he rose from the dead (John 20:28), or earlier when he had participated in the creation of the universe (John 1:1-8).
She calls him “the man” in Hebrew (ha-ish) in verse 10, and although this is the same word used throughout verse 11, I have translated “the angel” and “the one,” because the people in the verse understood that you could call an angel a man and not mean anything about flesh, but be talking about his appearance. He was a spirit—the Second Person of the Holy Trinity—with no flesh, but he looked like a man. Did he look the way Jesus would look in the flesh almost 1100 years later? That’s a question for your “ask Jesus in heaven” list. When you see him there, he will still have the fleshly body he had here on earth (Acts 1:11).
“I am,” he said.
It may answer an often-asked Bible class question to point out that the angel does not use God’s name Yahweh here (spelled יְהוָה in Hebrew), which means “I Am” (Exodus 13:14). Here, he simply uses the pronoun “I (am)” (ani, spelled אָנִי in Hebrew). This is a term that can be used by the bashful bride (“dark am I, yet lovely,” Song 1:5); or a prophet caught running away from God (“I am a Hebrew and I worship the LORD,” Jonah 1:9). There is no special theological weight behind it—and so Manoah and his wife were still not sure who he was.
12 Then Manoah asked, “When your words are fulfilled, what will be the boy’s guideline? What will he do? ” 13 The angel of the LORD answered Manoah, “Your wife needs to do everything I told her. 14 She must not eat anything that comes from the grapevine or drink wine or beer. And she must not eat anything unclean. Your wife must do everything I have commanded her.”
This is a passage that speaks to God’s attitude about babies who are not yet born. God commands us to love life and not take it except under very specific circumstances, and the Bible strongly condemns ending a pregnancy. If men were fighting and a pregnant woman was hit, and she gave birth prematurely, there was a fine set by the woman’s husband, but as long as the baby was all right, that was all. God gave this command to Moses about both the mother and her baby: “But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life” (Exodus 21:22-23). Although some modern translation try to water this passage down, it says what it says. Also, David recognized that a conceived but as yet unborn fetus is sinful (Psalm 51:5) and in need of a Savior.
The simplest way of stating an individual’s human rights is this: “My rights end where your rights begin.” This must be true for a baby as well as for a mother. If it’s not true, then every single pregnant woman becomes a one-person death panel, and every conceived infant is a slave, and we have undone Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It means we as a nation are discriminating against babies on account of their physical development.
Our way of saying a woman is pregnant is that she “is going to have a baby.” This is deceptive. She is not merely “going” to have a baby, she has a baby already. The Greeks said that she had her baby “in the womb” (en gastri, ἐν γαστρὶ Matthew 1:23; Isaiah 7:14), and not just some time in the future. Right now. Our point of view about this will dictate our point of view about many other things, including abortion, smoking, alcohol consumption, drug use, noise pollution, and a host of other negative things, but especially positive things, like prayer (remember Manoah’s example) and worship attendance habits. The time to get the baby to church for the first time is the first Sunday of that baby’s life—not just her baptism 40 weeks later.
The example of Manoah and his wife can teach us a lot. What about the example we set for the people around us—people who haven’t read Judges, and may never read Judges, but who need to know about their Savior? Share your faith, not just your pro-life views, and the Holy Spirit will change hearts and lives through the power of the gospel.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota