3. The tone, no doubt, is not the tone of Christ. We will admit that about religion Deborah, the judge of Israel, had much still to learn. But one sometimes feels that it is fortunate there was a Deborah, that her imperfection has a value of its own. In the very ancient days, when life was simple, broad, and spontaneous, the passions of men had a vehemence and a plain-spokenness, their actions had a violence and a grand directness, which have been mitigated and confused by more reflective days. Our gentler ways are not all gain. Tales of our modern life and manners are not so impressive as tales of the ruder life. These deeds of patriarchs — an Abraham lifting the knife to slay his son, a Phineas cutting down unshrinkingly his idolatrous brethren — teach what they have to teach with incomparable vigour. These deeds, by their simplicity and grand excess, paint a truth of morals in strong, fierce colours which shine across the ages ; they write the lesson as with a pen of steel that graves a rock ; they dint it into the soul of man past forgetting.
» W. M. Smith.
JUDGES V. 23 189
il. It is the Curse of God.
" Curse ye MeioZt. said the angel of the Lord." For we must not forget one remarkable characteristic of the Jewish theocracy : what we should term in a secular history its lofty public spirit, its superiority to all that is merely personal and selfish. David and other psalmists especially illustrate this. David reserves his enthusiasms for the friends of God; his aspirations for the success of the cause of God ; his anxieties for the risks of God's Kingdom ; his hatred for the enemies of God's truth and glory : " Whom have I in heaven but thee ? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee." " Do not I hate them, 0 Lord, that hate thee ? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies." So Ezra : " Mine eyes run down with rivers of water, because they observe not thy law." So a captive in Babylon : " If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not ; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy." The language of Deborah was not the expression of a personal, or social, or political spite any more than was the language of David and Ezra. It was not her own cause ; not even the cause of her country, as such ; it was the cause of the Lord God which she had at heart, which had long since won her love, and now fired and guided her indignation.
iii. And the Curse comes.
1. " Cjirse.-y©:^4€^zJLjrhe words. stilLJive. May they not be heard within the soul when a man has consciously declined that which conscience has recognized as plain duty? Such a man needs no audible voice of the Angel of the Lord or of the prophetess ; conscience prophesies within him.
^ Every failure of men or nations to fulfil their manifest duty involves by a law of the Divine government of the universe an appropriate punishment. So here. When we turn to Judges ii. 1-5 we see how God uttered such awful words of solemn warning as plunged the nation into penitent sorrow. Why was it? Because instead of rooting out the remaining Canaanites and destroying their altars they were content to make them tributary, consulting thus their ease and their pockets at the same time. They broke the covenant, and, instead of destroying the men and
I90 THE SIN OF MEROZ
the religious ideas so intimately associated with the land, they preserved them. It was indifference and cowardice from first to last. They had been warned of the result (see Num. xxxiii, 55). Now, I believe the failure of the men of Meroz brought specifically upon them the abiding curse on all negligence and disobedience. What that is is set forth in Judges ii. 1-5 — viz. that the men and the idolatrous worship they permitted to remain in the land were as pricks in their eyes, thorns in their side to vex them in the land wherein they dwelt. In other words, the men and the ideas remained in their midst as moral stumbling-blocks or as some contagious disease whose virus would poison the blood of unborn generations to their complete undoing. For their failure the men of Meroz would experience the bitter entail of sin to the full. Their cup would run over with misery and woe. Israel's sub- sequent history illustrates the words even if we do not know the after history of Meroz.^
2. Neither nations nor individuals become reprobates all at once. The process of individual and national decay is usually, if not always, gradual. They go on from lost opportunity to lost opportunity till their fate at last is sealed, and the doom goes forth: "Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty." But although judgment may tarry, it comes at last, and the sin- ner, whether an individual or a nation, never escapes the doom. Meroz did not escape it.