Many thanks to Philip Pope for the permission to use his 2003 translation of the English King James Version Bible into Thai. Here's a link to the mission's website: www.thaipope.org
5886. 'Whom you sold into Egypt' means the internal which they had alienated. This is clear from the representation of Joseph, the one whom they had 'sold', as the internal, dealt with in 5805, 5826, 5827; from the meaning of 'selling' as alienating, dealt with in 4752, 4758, while 'Egypt' here means the lowest parts, as it does below in 5889. For placing some subject among the facts one knows without any acknowledgement of it is casting it to the sides, thus to the last or lowest parts of the mind. This is also how it is at the present day with the subject of the internal in the human being. The subject exists, it is true, among known facts because religious teaching provides knowledge of the existence of the internal man. Yet it is cast away to the lowest parts of the mind because there is no acknowledgement of it or belief in its existence, as a result of which it is alienated, not, it is true, from the memory but from faith. In the internal sense 'selling' is alienating matters of faith and charity, consequently the things that make a person a member of the internal Church, as may be recognized from the fact that in the spiritual world no buying or selling like that on earth takes place. Instead there is the making one's own of goodness and truth, meant by 'buying', and the alienation of them, meant by 'selling'. 'Buying' also means a communication of cognitions of goodness and truth, for the reason that 'trade' means the acquisition and communication of such cognitions, 2967, 4453; but in this case selling is said to be done 'not by silver'.
[2] The meaning of 'selling' as alienating is also evident from the following places in the Word: In Isaiah,
Thus said Jehovah, Where is your mother's bill of divorce, whom I have put away? Or who of My usurers is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, because of your sins you have been sold, and because of your transgressions your mother has been put away. Isaiah 50:1.
'Mother' stands for the Church, 'selling' for alienating. In Ezekiel,
The time has come, the day has arrived. Do not let the buyer rejoice, and do not let the seller mourn, because wrath is on the whole multitude of it. For the seller will not return to the thing that has been sold, though his life may still be among the living ones. Ezekiel 7:12-13.
This refers to the land of Israel, which is the spiritual Church. 'The seller stands for one who has alienated truths and subtly introduced falsities.
[3] In Joel,
You have sold the sons of Judah and the sons of Jerusalem to the sons of the Greeks, so that you might remove them far away from their borders. Behold, I will raise them up out of the place to which you have sold them. And I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hands of the sons of Judah, who will sell them to the Sabeans, 1
a people far off. Joel 3:6-8.
In this reference to Tyre and Sidon 'selling' again stands for alienating. In Moses,
'Selling' plainly stands for alienating. In the highest sense 'rock' is the Lord as regards truth, and in the representative sense faith, while 'Jehovah' is the Lord as regards good.
[4] Since 'buying' in the spiritual sense is acquiring to oneself and 'selling' is alienating, the Lord compares the kingdom of heaven to one selling and buying, in Matthew,
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man (homo) finds and hides, and in his joy he goes and sells whatever he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a trader seeking fine pearls, who, when he has found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it. Matthew 13:44-46.
'The kingdom of heaven' stands for the good and truth present with a person, and so for heaven present with him. 'Field' stands for good and 'pearl' for truth, while 'buying' stands for acquiring these and making them one's own. 'Selling all that one has' stands for alienating that which previously was properly one's own, thus alienating evil desires and false ideas, for these are properly one's own.
[5] In Luke,
Jesus said to the young ruler, You still lack one thing. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, then you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me. Luke 18:22.
In the internal sense these words mean that everything completely a person's own, which consists of nothing but evil desires and false ideas, ought to be alienated from him, for such desires and ideas are meant by 'all that he has', and then he will receive from the Lord good desires and true ideas, which are 'treasure in heaven'.
[6] This is similar to what is said elsewhere in the same gospel,
Sell your resources and give alms; make for yourselves money bags that do not grow old, a treasure that does not fail in heaven. Luke 12:33.
Anyone can see that this verse holds a meaning other than the literal one. For at the present day 'selling one's resources' would be making oneself a beggar, and depriving oneself of any further opportunity to exercise charity, quite apart from the fact that one would inevitably regard such a course of action as being meritorious. Also it is an invariable truth that there are rich people in heaven as well as poor ones. The meaning other than the literal one contained in this verse is what was stated just above.
[7] Since 'selling' meant alienating what belonged to the Church the following law was therefore laid down,
If a man was not pleased with a wife he had taken from among women captives, she was to be set apart from him. She should certainly not however be sold for silver; no gain was to be made out of her, because he had caused her distress. Deuteronomy 21:14.
'A wife taken from among women captives' stands for truth that is foreign, not from a genuine stock, yet can be linked in some way to the good of the Church present in a person. If however that truth proves to, be in many respects incompatible it can be separated; but it cannot be alienated since it has been joined in some way to that good. This is the spiritual meaning of that law.
[8] There was also this law,
If there is found a man who has stolen a soul from his brothers, from the children of Israel, and has made profit on him, and has sold him, that thief shall be killed, so that you remove evil from the midst of you. Deuteronomy 24:7.
'Those who steal the children of Israel' stands for those who acquire the truths of the Church, not with the intention of living according to them and thus teaching them from their hearts, but with the intention of using those truths for personal profit. The damnation of such a person is meant by 'he shall be killed'.
There’s a saying, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” (Orson Welles).
In part two of this series, we read about Gideon’s miraculous rout of the Midianites. With just 300 men he took on an enemy force of 145,000 and won. We often stop the story there and get our happy ending. But, in the Bible, that’s not where the story of Gideon ends. It carries on, and there’s not such a happy ending. It seems important to look at this and talk about what it means for our efforts at spiritual growth, because if we just read the success stories in the Bible we might get a rather skewed picture of what to expect in our lives.
There are two main sections of this part of the story:
1) Finishing off the Midianites (and dealing with some Israelites along the way), and
2) what happened after the battle.
The first thing that happens in this chapter is that the men of the tribe of Ephraim are angry at Gideon for not involving them in the battle from the beginning. They say, “What is this thing you have done to us by not calling us when you went to fight against the Midianites?” (Judges 8:1). Nothing has been done to them. It’s wasn't about them; it was about beating the enemy, not who about who got to do the beating.
Nonetheless, for the men of Ephraim it really seems to matter who did it. A few chapters later in the Book of Judges, they complain to another judge who just led Israelites to another great victory. They say, “Why did you go to fight the Ammonites without calling us to go with you? We’re going to burn down your house over your head” (Judges 12:1). And in that case they fight against the judge - and the judge wins and kills 42,000 of them.
The teachings of the New Church say that Ephraim represents intelligence (Secrets of Heaven 264). And when intelligence is called in from the mountains to help, by Gideon and the 300 who lapped, it’s a powerful ally. Similarly, when we have a humble desire to seek what the Lord says, then it can be really powerful to use our minds to their full extent and think through all of the ramifications of the truth which helps with capturing the selfishness that might be trying to get away. But, when they’re just the men of Ephraim on their own, they seem to represent intelligence that has a lot of pride in its own power. Watch out for the pride of Ephraim in yourself after you make some progress in your spiritual life — it might just want to destroy the humble desire to learn and follow the truth — the very thing that actually gave you victory in the first place.
Gideon and his men now carry on chasing the Midianites, trying to capture their kings, Zebah and Zalmunnah. They cross the Jordan river and come to Succoth and Penuel - two border towns near the edge of the land of Canaan.
Chasing the Midianites into this region seems to represent really trying to drive the selfish love of pleasure for its own sake (which is what is represented by Midian) right the way out of our lives — even out of our more external thoughts and habits.
Here they encounter resistance. They’re exhausted and they ask for bread to sustain them and the people of Succoth and Penuel mock them, saying, “Oh, so we should give you bread because you’re just about to capture Zebah and Zalmunnah? Right… No — not going to happen.” It’s a picture of cynicism. They’ve got elders and princes - people who’ve been around the block a few times, and a tower with well-established defenses.
There’s part of us that doesn’t believe that we can actually change our external behaviour too. But, “Jehovah said to Gideon, ‘By the three hundred men who lapped I will save you, and give the Midianites into your hand’” (Judges 7:7). They were going to capture the Midianites because Jehovah said so and they didn’t have to have any bread from Succoth and Penuel to do so.
Gideon and his men go on, attack the camp of the Midianites, “while the camp felt secure” (8:11) and capture the kings. Then they go back to Succoth and Penuel, and Gideon does something that to us seems totally brutal and unnecessary: “And he took the elders of the city, and thorns of the wilderness and briers, and with them he made the men of Succoth know. Then he tore down the tower of Penuel and killed the men of the city” (8:16-17).
I think that spiritually this is a picture of actually bringing order to our external life. The power of eagerness for the truth can tear down our cynicism. Using thorns and briers to make “the men of Succoth know” sounds like an echo of the many other times in the Word where Jehovah says, “…and then they shall know that I am Jehovah.” Jehovah is the one with the power, in case that wasn’t already clear.
Once Gideon is done with Succoth and Penuel, he deals with the kings of Midian. As we work on fighting against an evil in our lives, we gradually see more and more of what it has done to us. Gideon talks with them and this is the first time we hear that they had killed Gideon’s brothers. In the Word brothers are a symbol of charity—of love for our fellow man. How many times have we been given an opportunity to help someone and we’ve decided to do something fun instead? And so they need to be killed.
Gideon’s son, Jether, can’t do it—he’s too young— and our younger self can’t quite bring itself to really make an end to the love of pleasure for its own sake. Gideon can, though. His name means hewer or chopper.
In the positive sense this is him living out his potential—chasing the Midianites down and cutting them down. And because of this, a little further on, it says, “Thus Midian was subdued before the children of Israel, so that they lifted their heads no more. And the country was quiet for forty years in the days of Gideon” (Judges 8:28).
Can’t we stop the story there? We have to look at what happened after the battle.
After the Battle They Want Gideon to Rule Over Them
Remind me, who was it that won the battle? Jehovah, using Gideon and the 300 men who lapped. Without Jehovah, Gideon would still be cowering in a winepress somewhere while the Midianites overran the land. Jehovah didn’t need the 32 thousand men. He didn’t need the 10 thousand men. He needed 300 that were eager to follow Him, to listen to Him, to lap up His teachings.
Jehovah in Hebrew means the One who Is. The teachings of the New Church explain the meaning of this name of God in this way (from Secrets of Heaven 1735, from John Elliot's translation):
"Jehovah… [is] Love itself, to which no other attributes are appropriate than those of pure Love and so of pure Mercy towards the whole human race, that Mercy being such that it wills to save all people, to make them eternally happy, and to impart to them all that is its Own—thus out of pure Mercy and by the mighty power of love to draw towards heaven… all who are willing to follow. That Love itself is Jehovah…."
The Lord’s pure love is what won the battle for Gideon, what wins the battle against selfishness in us. It’s the driving force, the motivation, the strength, the endurance. If we didn’t have love from the Lord to want to be a good person, to care about other people, to live for something more than ourselves, we would still be nowhere, having done nothing.
But the people want Gideon to rule over them. And then his son. And then his son’s son. And on forever. Really, Gideon without Jehovah is not something you want to rule over you. To take Gideon and his line of sons after him and ask that to rule over you is to take one thread of the truth and make it everything. A hewing and chopping approach is good for some things, like getting rid of Midianites, but it's not good for everything, especially once it’s been separated from Jehovah.
A branch that abide in the vine bears much fruit but if a branch stops abiding in the vine—no matter how much fruit it bore in the past—it’s going to wither and die because there’s no life in it (John 15:4-6). The people want Gideon to be king because it looks like he’s the one who gave them victory. It looks like what made us successful was a certain approach that we took that worked in that circumstance. Our lazy selves like simple—we like one size fits all solutions.
But that is not the kind of solution that the Word provides. The Word of God is frustratingly complex at times. In one place it says, “Beat your ploughshares into swords….” (Joel 3:10). And we say, “Got it! Take the fighting approach!” But, in other places it talks about people beating their swords into ploughshares (Isaiah 2:4 ; Micah 4:3 ).
It can be hard to keep going back to the Word with eagerness to learn what it has to say. It takes patience. It take intellectual humility to say, “I don’t get it.” It takes a willingness to hear something different than what we might want to hear. When we don’t want to do that work we want Gideon rule over us instead of Jehovah and he makes us an ephod to worship.
Gideon Makes an Ephod
Gideon requests that the people give him the golden earrings from their plunder and he makes some sort of golden ephod out of it. An ephod is a priestly apron and, functionally, in the Bible they were used to get answers from God (1 Samuel 23:9-13; 30:7-8). They are symbolic of the literal sense of the Word where we get answers from God. Gideon's making an ephod for himself means giving people a substitute for the Word to get answers from. This is when we feel like we’ve had some success in becoming a spiritual person and we feel like we’ve got a good enough grasp of the Bible that we don’t actually have to read it.
To get a feel for what this looks like in real life I want to read you something from a fascinating book called Stages of Faith by James W. Fowler in which the author attempts to describe 6 different stages of development that a person’s faith can go through. Here are a few quotes from one of the many interviews that Fowler had conducted as part of his research. This an interview with a teenage girl about her faith that Fowler says is typical of Stage 3—Synthetic-Conventional Faith:
“I feel like I’m not afraid of anything now because I know what I believe in and I know what I want to do in life, and nothing could really set me off course. …. Before, if we moved… I got into people, different people, and I sort of changed as the people went. But I have learned that just the best thing is to be yourself” (p155).
When asked what she thinks God is she says, “God is different to a lot of people….I don’t go exactly by the Bible. I think you should try to make… people happy and at the same time enjoy yourself, you know? In a good kind way….” (pp155-156).
When asked what she thinks will happen to her when she dies she says, “I have this feeling, like, when I die I’m going to go to heaven because I’ve tried on earth to be good to people and I believe in God and I’m a follower” (p156).
When asked what it means to go to heaven she said, “I guess I’ll find out sometime. But, see, I don’t want to ask too many questions like that. …. I never wanted to go that much into it. I just want to do what the Bible says” (p157).
She knows what she believes and that she’s going to heaven and she just wants to do what the Bible says but she also doesn’t “go exactly go by the Bible” or want to really go that much into it. She’s got her ephod - her version of the truth which is “the best thing is to be yourself” and “try to make people happy and at the same time enjoy yourself… In a good kind way.”
That’s pretty much what the Bible says, right? The point of this is not to make fun of this teenage girl but to recognise this exact same tendency in ourselves. Beating the Midianites only gets us this far - that is, not very far at all in the big scheme of things. What about the Philistines, and the Assyrians, and the Babylonians all still to come?
The teachings of the New Church say:
If after temptation a person does not believe that the Lord alone has fought for him and brought him victory, the temptation he has undergone is merely external. Such temptation does not extend into him deeply or cause anything of faith and charity to take root. (Secrets of Heaven 8969)
At this stage, while we think we’re worshipping God, we will also be playing the harlot with this idol at the same time. And it can be a snare to us, just like it was to Gideon and his house. During Gideon’s life, “the country was quiet for forty years” (Judges 8:28) and it sounds like the people were at least still worshipping Jehovah alongside of this ephod. But, we read, “So it was, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the children of Israel turned back and again played the harlot with the Baals, and made Baal-Berith their god” (Judges 8:33).
Worshipping the Baals was the real problem in the first place. If the children of Israel had been worshipping Jehovah, the Midianites never would have been a threat. It was because they were worshipping the Baals that they were vulnerable to attack. The problem with this ephod version of the Word of God is that it can be a stepping stone right back to worshipping Baal again. And worshipping Baal is not just loving pleasure above all else: it’s “worship from the evils of the love of self and of the world” (Apocalypse Explained 160:2). It’s embracing hell, while still thinking that we’re somehow God’s chosen people.
The particular Baal that they made their god was Baal-Berith which means “lord of the covenant.” The covenant was meant to be an agreement between Jehovah and His people that they would follow His commandments and He would bless them. To worship a Baal of the covenant would seem to be a corruption of that idea - to make God and His covenant with us into our own image. To say, “I’m a good Christian and that means that I can live however I want and God is going to look after me and give me whatever I want.”
If we stop the story here with Gideon’s death and the people’s return to idolatry, it’s a pretty depressing picture. But, of course, the bigger story doesn’t stop here, there are more judges to come - more amazing victories over seemingly overwhelming odds and, too, more terrible decisions by the people who are supposed to be following Jehovah.
But the story doesn’t stop with the judges—there are the stories of the kings, good and bad, and prophets, and eventually the story of Jesus Christ and His life and death and resurrection and eventually Him calling us to be with Him in the Holy City New Jerusalem.
As we look across that whole storyline, with a willingness to acknowledge the defeats as well as the victories, one message that seems to come through is, “Don’t stop your story where you are.” Don’t think that you’re done. Keep striving to worship only Jesus Christ (who is Jehovah come down into this world to save us). Remember that is the Lord’s love—and only the Lord’s love—that will give you victory over your enemies. Remember that the Lord will save you, by the 300 men who lapped. Ignore the pride of Ephraim that wants you to think the power is in your intelligence. Destroy the cynicism of Succoth and Penuel who don’t believe change is possible. And keep going back with urgency to the Lord in His Word—stay thirsty for the truth, eager to learn, willing to follow and the Lord will give you victory and keep leading you towards a happy end.
