Right from the start Naphtali was associated with struggling. He was born to Bilhah, Rachel’s maidservant, but it was Rachel who named him “My struggle,” because – she explained in Genesis 30:8 – “I have had a great struggle with my sister (Leah), and I have won.” 

So Naphtali got stuck with that name, and all because Rachel was jealous of her sister having so many children (1), and thinking she’d scored a victory over Leah by having two children of her own. But there was also a prophetic side to Naphtali having such a name, because Jesus would later set up his home base in Capernaum, in the land that Naphtali’s descendants inherited, and the struggle he would then go through.

He willingly brought that struggle on himself too, because he left his hometown of “Nazareth and lived in Capernaum” instead, Matthew 4:13, which Isaiah had described as a pitifully lost land where “the people were living in darkness, and in the shadow of death” (15-16). And the evidence of that soon became apparent in Mark 1:21-24, when Jesus began teaching in Capernaum and was immediately confronted by a man “possessed by an evil spirit” that accused Jesus of “coming to destroy us” – “us” meaning there were many more demons in people in that area too, which Jesus “also drove out” (34, 39). 

And that’s how Jesus’ struggle in the lost land of Naphtali began. For us it would be like starting from scratch with a person who’s had a horrible life, terrible childhood, having had all kinds of nutty ideas pumped into his head by people who either knew nothing about God or had some really weird religious ideas about him. Where on earth do you start?

It’s encouraging to know, then, that even when people are “living in darkness” it’s possible for them to “see a great light,” and in their minds “a light dawns,” Matthew 4:16, because that’s what happened when Jesus began to teach in that area. And it’s amazing how quickly thousands of people responded. They were Galileans too, viewed as “Gentile” rejects (Matthew 4:15), the lowest of the low. 

But these were the people Jesus spent most of his time with, because to him the struggle was worth it. He came to teach (Mark 1:38), because his teaching had the power to “remove the gloom for those who were in distress” (Isaiah 9:1). Which brings to mind the blessing that Jacob gave his son Naphtali in Genesis 49:21, that predicted “The lovely ministry of Jesus”….(next blog)

Like her ancestor Jacob, Anna the prophetess saw God face to face. And the reason for them both seeing God face to face was the same too. For Jacob it came after years and years of struggling in his relationship with God, and then suddenly coming face to face with the realization that a very real and personal God had known his struggle and been with him all along (Genesis 35:3). 

For Anna it came after years and years of struggling with God too, wondering when on earth he was going to come and save their nation and the whole world as promised in the Scriptures, and praying and fasting for that day to come, and then suddenly coming face to face with him in the arms of his parents, and realizing that a very real and personal God had known her struggle and been with her all along too.

Was their experience a foretaste, then, of Jesus knowing we’d have a struggle too, because in John 14:18 he told his disciples, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” and “you will see me” (19). He also promised to “show myself” to them (21), and along with his Father “make our home” with them (23). 

And in 1 Peter 2:19, it sounds like God really appreciates us believing that, “For it is commendable (or to your credit, verse 20) if you bear up under the pain of unjust suffering (or you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it, verse 20), because you are conscious of God.” 

And fortunately it’s God who makes us conscious of him, just as he did for Jacob, so that Jacob could get through the unfair treatment he got at the hands of his uncle Laban – and survive some of the stupid things Jacob did to himself too. God never left Jacob as an “orphan.” Many times he “showed himself” to Jacob to prove that “I (God) am with you and I watch over you wherever you go.…and I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you” (Genesis 28:15). 

And God didn’t leave Anna either, keeping her encouraged and hopeful through all those many decades of her not yet seeing the promised Saviour appear. And he does the same for us, that “even though you do not see him now,” 1 Peter 1:8, “you believe in him” – we’re “conscious” of him “shielding us by his power (through our struggles) until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time” (5) – when we fully see Jesus face to face (1 John 3:2). Which ties in nicely with the next of Jacob’s sons, “Naphtali: where Jesus struggled”….(next blog)

The tribe of Asher hit the jackpot in the land they were portioned in Canaan. The soil was so rich it could happily provide “delicacies fit for a king,” just as Jacob had predicted for Asher in Genesis 49:20. 

But the most famous Asherite in the Bible wasn’t rich. As a frail old lady Anna the Asherite had nothing to offer a king. She did have a king in mind, however, in how she spent her time each day, and many nights too. As a “prophetess” (Luke 2:36), it was her job to continue speaking about and confirming what “God said through his holy prophets of long ago,” Luke 1:70, that God would fulfill “the oath he swore to our father Abraham, to rescue us from the hand of our enemies” (73-74) through a person from “the royal house of his servant David” (69). 

She was in the temple every day, then, to make her life fit for such a king, despite the fact that year after dreary year under the thumb of Roman rule there was no sign at all that the king whom God had promised was coming to save them. But that didn’t stop Anna offering the delicacies she knew her king would relish. 

And in the culture of her day what she offered was truly exotic, because the reason her fellow Israelites were in such a bind was their inability to see and fit in with God’s plan for the world through them (Isaiah 49:6) – and through a very special member of their clan from the house of David too. But Anna the Asherite had cottoned on, so she prayed and fasted to keep her faith in God and his saving plan alive.

And to God these were delicacies fit for a king, because this little old lady of all people was doing what so few of her fellow Israelites were doing – struggling day and night to keep her belief alive in a world where there was no evidence that God was either saving them as a nation or saving the whole world. 

And the great blessing she received for that was knowing when Joseph and Mary arrived in the temple carrying the eight day old Jesus, that the king she’d been making her life fit for had arrived. And in return for gearing her life to what her king would relish, she was given what she would most relish, the richest delicacy of all, actually seeing the King and Saviour of the world face to face. So was that just meant for her, or is “Seeing the face of Jesus” the same blessing for keeping our faith alive too?….(next blog)

If Anna the prophetess in Luke 2:36 was alive today and saw the demise of our western nations steadily growing, what would her advice to us be? – taking into account that she too was living in a biblically based nation that had been invaded by foreigners enforcing their pagan culture on the indigenous people as well. 

She also knew the solution, and she’d been praying and fasting about it for decades, “looking forward,” like many of her fellow Israelites (38), to the time when God would rescue them from their enemies, heal them as a nation and get them back on the track he’d set them on when changing Jacob’s name to Israel back in Genesis 32:28. 

And there’s a hint of that solution back in Luke 2:36, when describing Anna as “the daughter of Phanuel.” Phanuel meant “The face of God,” the Greek version of the Hebrew word Penuel, or Peniel, and Peniel was the name given by Jacob to the place where, he said, “I saw God face to face,” Genesis 32:30.

And now the daughter of Phanuel is seeing God face to face too, when she sees Jesus and immediately recognizes who he was. 

But the connection between Anna and Jacob goes one step further, because the reason God changed Jacob’s name to Israel was “because you have struggled with God,” Genesis 32:28. Well, that’s exactly what Anna had been doing for years, struggling with God, praying and fasting nights and days (Luke 2:37), hoping for God to intervene and rescue Israel from its demise. 

What would her advice to us be, then, as we find ourselves in much the same situation her country was in? The biblical values and traditions her country had been built on were being threatened with extinction, and revolution was in the air, just like today. But she knew that no populist uprising or civil war would free them from the tyranny of state control. Only God could. 

But no leader, governmental or religious, dared admit that. So the oppression and suppression would only get worse, and Anna knew it in her bones. But as a frail old lady what could she do? Well, she did what her country was founded on, good old Jacob who wrestled with God and would not quit until God gave in and blessed him. Was Anna the Asherite, then, the perfect illustration of what Jacob meant when he predicted Asher would provide “Delicacies fit for a king”?….(next blog)

The Asherites were a proud lot, but they didn’t have a proud record. According to Judges 1:31, Asher “did not drive out” the Canaanites in their portion of Canaan as God had commanded, and instead, verse 32, “the Asherites lived among the Canaanite inhabitants of the land.” 

But why would God tell them to wipe out the Canaanites and “break down their altars” (2:2), when surely it would be better to get along with the locals and make use of their skills, or “press them into forced labour” (1:28), wouldn’t it?

Well, it would’ve spared the Israelites a lot of agony if they had listened to God (2:17), because after 500 years of thinking they knew better the entire nation of Israel had become saturated with the Canaanite worship of Baal and Ashorah, thanks mainly to Jezebel, the Phoenician princess married to their Israelite king Ahab (1 Kings 16:29-33). As queen she influenced her husband into establishing her Canaanite worship of Baal as the state religion, and set about killing all God’s prophets in a massacre so thorough that Elijah thought he was the only one left alive (19:10). 

And the Israelites had no answer to their troubles. They had a few good kings, like Jehoshaphat who tried hard to rid the country of Baal worship (1 Kings 22:41-46), but never did they get rid of it totally, resulting in God destroying the Asherites and nine other Israelite tribes at the hands of the mighty Assyrians.

And from then on, it seems, the Asherites joined “the lost ten tribes of Israel” and disappeared from history. Or did they? Because when Jesus’ parents took the eight day old Jesus to the temple in Luke 2:21-22, “There was a prophetess, Anna, of the tribe of Asher” there (36). “She was very old,” possibly as old as 105, and according to verse 37, “She never left the temple but worshipped night and day, fasting and praying.”

So, not only had the Asherites survived, they also had a good one in Anna, who was the total opposite to the proud and arrogant tribe of Asher of old. Her heart instead, verse 38, was set on “the redemption of Jerusalem (representing all Israel).” She knew the only solution to Israel’s demise was a child being born to save them, and when Jesus’ parents came in carrying Jesus she knew he’d come. 

Would the Asherites have guessed, therefore, that one of their own, and a little old lady too, would know the answer to all their troubles – and actually see him in person too? So what would “Anna’s advice to us” today be?….(next blog)

In Judges 6:16, God told Gideon, “I will be with you, and you will strike down the Midianites as if they were but one man.” It was a massive slaughter too. According to the numbers given in Judges 8:10, 135,000 Midianite men were cut down in vicious fighting, including their top leaders and kings – the kings killed by Gideon himself (21). What possible purpose, though, did God have in such a horrible scene?

There’s a hint in where God directed Gideon’s violence first of all. It wasn’t against people. In Judges 6:25 God told Gideon to “Tear down your father’s altar to Baal and cut down the Asherah pole beside it.” God gets right at the heart of the problem, illustrated by Gideon’s own father who’d built an altar to the Canaanite god Baal and made that his “lord,” not God. Which never would have happened had the Israelites got rid of the Canaanite religion as God had commanded back in Judges 2:2. But instead, Judges 1:28, “When Israel became strong, they pressed the Canaanites into forced labour but never drove them out completely.” 

Which resulted in the Israelites being constantly stuck with the Canaanites “being thorns in their sides,” and the Canaanite religion being an endless “snare” to them, Judges 2:3. And that spelt trouble, because the appeal of Baal and Asherah was sex, as seen in Numbers 25:1-3, when Israelite men “began to indulge in sexual immorality with Moabite women, who invited them to the sacrifices of their gods.” And that made God fiercely angry (3-4), seeing the people he deeply loved and cared for being so easily seduced by demonic charm (17-18). 

So God got Gideon to strike at the very heart of what had got the Israelites into their horrible mess in the first place, to get the point across in vivid and brutal terms that if they didn’t get serious about eradicating every vestige of the Canaanite religion it would become an endless source of temptation and deception distracting them from God’s purpose for them, of curing the world of all its ills as he promised he would through Abraham and his descendants (Judges 2:1). 

The solution, then, was to get rid of the distraction so they wouldn’t be led into temptation (as Jesus phrased it in Matthew 6:13). But the Israelites were never able to do that, so where’s that leave the rest of us? Well, that takes us back to the tribe of Asher and “The little old lady from Asher” who had the answer….(next blog)

The lesson of history, as well as Scripture, is that violence is necessary to eradicate evil. It took the violent death of Jesus “to destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14), and it’s taken the violent death of many of Jesus’ followers since to prove in their lack of fear of dying that “Jesus truly did destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8).

But the Israelites only recognized the need to eradicate evil when they were hit hard by it – when evil easily deceived them into rejecting God and God then “gave them into the hands” of brutal invaders, Judges 6:1-6.

To which God responded with a reminder, that “I snatched you from the power of Egypt and from the hand of all your oppressors” (7-9), to get the point across that eradicating evil in their lives was what he’d got them out of Egypt for, and they would have remained free from the power of evil if they’d “listened to him” (10). 

But they didn’t listen, the result being God initiating and supporting violence, not only against the Israelites by outsiders, but also in the Israelites using violence to drive out the invaders.   

And such was the case here in Judges 6, because in God’s response to Israel crying out to him for help, an “angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon” – an ordinary farmer chap “threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites” (11) – and the angel telling Gideon, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior’” (12). 

Gideon ignored the “mighty warrior” bit, however, because he figured it was God’s job to get them out of the mess they were in, just like he’d rescued them out of Egypt. So he asked why, if God was truly “with” them, he hadn’t rescued them from the Midianites too (13). To which “the Lord replied, ‘Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand’” (14). 

God could have eradicated the Midianites all on his own – just like he’d eradicated the Egyptians on his own – but instead he initiated and supported Gideon being a “mighty warrior” using his own strength too, so that Gideon, in the savage, feral act of killing in a violent world, would also get the point that the only way to deal with evil was to totally crush it. But God demanding “Such massive slaughter – why?”….(next blog)

Pride had made the Asherites blind to evil. It was the same problem for all the Israelites in Canaan, who recklessly “did evil in the eyes of the Lord,” Judges 4:1, and only after God brought trouble on them did they wake up and resist evil instead (Judges 4 and 5). But not the Asherites, who felt safe and secure in their riches and location (5:17), and therefore in their pride could not see, or even care about, the need to resist evil.

Until, that is, the Israelites recklessly did evil again in Judges 6:1, and this time God handed them over to the Midianites, whose power for the next seven years “was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds” (2). The Midianite invasion eventually “so impoverished the Israelites” – by ruining all their crops and killing all their livestock – that “the Israelites cried out to God for help” (3-6).

The clear lesson being, that when nations built on God’s values recklessly reject those values, the pattern of God’s response is to invade those nations with oppressive powers – in the hope, though, that those nations come to their senses and get back to “listening” to him (10), and he will then “snatch them from the hand of all their oppressors” (9). 

That’s the lesson of Israel, and it got through to the Asherites who repented of their pompous, uncaring attitude, and this time they responded to Gideon’s “call to arms” (35) to save the nation. But God had to make things really bad for the Asherites’ pride to be shattered, which makes one wonder if that’s what God is doing with the nations proudly dismissing him today as well. 

Because according to Paul what happened to Israel is just as relevant for us today (1 Corinthians 10:11), so when nations built on biblical values today are also being heavily oppressed by invaders both ideologically and literally, is God at work again to shatter our elitist attitude to his laws and ethics, to get us back to realizing those old values that built our countries were right after all? 

Paul also said the times of ignorance are over and it’s time for “people everywhere to repent,” Acts 17:30. So it’s repentance that God is after, but with Israel it took violent oppression by others to get them to that point, and violence on their part to rescue them too. But “Why does God initiate and support violence so much?”….(next blog)

When it was time for God to deliver Israel in Judges 4, it wasn’t the tribe of Asher he called on. 

And we find out why in Judges 5:17 – it’s because “Asher remained on the seacoast and stayed in his coves.” And that wasn’t good because for twenty years the Israelites had been “cruelly oppressed” by the Canaanite king Jabin and Sisera his army commander with his nine hundred iron chariots (4:2-3). And when God then sent Israel into battle against Jabin (4-6) to rescue them, the Asherites, to put it bluntly, “simply didn’t care.”  

They stayed home instead, safe in their seacoast fortifications and rocky hideaways. It’s not surprising, then, that Deborah, the prophetess “leading Israel at that time” (4:4), was thoroughly put out by the Asherites callous lack of concern for their fellow Israelites – and she said so publicly in her victory speech in Chapter 5 (verse 17). 

And it wasn’t because the Asherites didn’t have their share of fighting men ready for such an occasion too. At one point during the Israelites’ journey to Canaan they had 41,500 fighting men (Numbers 1:40-41), which must have increased in number considerably by Judges chapter 5. 

But it illustrates the second thing that happens as to what pride can lead to. In the last blog pride caused the Asherites to forget that it was God who’d rescued them from Egypt and God who’d given them this paradise on the seacoast of Canaan with its immensely rich soils and abundant metals in the rocks (Deuteronomy 8:11-18).

Interesting, then, that as their love for God diminished so did their love for neighbour. The parallel with today is unnerving, as nations built on biblical values are going the same route, first of all in rejecting God and Christian values, which has created an elite bubble of rich people who simply don’t care what their fellow citizens’ concerns are. 

But there’s hope, because In Judges 6:33, when “the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern people joined forces and crossed the  Jordan” into Israel, Gideon “sent messengers throughout Manasseh calling them to arms and also into Asher,” and this time Asher did respond and did care (35). So “What made Asher repent?”….(next blog)

From the Asherites we learn that pride can lead to two things – the first one being that God began to slip their minds, because, as Moses explained in Deuteronomy 8:10-14, when they’d got all they could possibly need and want physically in money, homes and security “your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God.”

In other words, they’d get to thinking, “Who needs God?” They’d even get to thinking that it was by their own cleverness and strength (17) that they’d ended up “lacking nothing” (9), when it was totally God who’d got them out of Egypt in the first place (14-16), and God who’d got them into their beautiful, rich land in Canaan as well (7-9).

And what was the point too, of God dragging them “through the desert for forty years” (2) to teach them “that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes out of the mouth of the Lord” (3) if that was only meant in the past and it didn’t matter anymore? 

Which is a highly relevant question for us today, because for those of us finding ourselves in countries built on the biblical values of law, justice, morality, concern for the vulnerable, strength in the family, community and serving, all of which clearly explain why our countries grew and prospered – then why of late are our governments, academia and media rubbishing our past and condemning it as inherently corrupt and in need of being destroyed and replaced?

Is it any coincidence too, that those doing the rubbishing are noticeably from among those who have everything they need physically (just like the Asherites), who believe they can make life successful on their own strength (just like the Israelites), who think God and his word are antiquated nonsense, and they much prefer a world where you can do what you like without consequence – which was exactly the world the Asherites and Israelites preferred too (Judges 21:25). 

Sounds like history repeating itself. In which case so could the outcome predicted by Moses in Deuteronomy 8:20, that “Like the nations the Lord destroyed before you, so you will be destroyed for not obeying the Lord your God.” And historically there’s proof of that, because great (and proud) empires have come and gone. It’s worth a look, then, at the second thing that happened to the Asherites because of pride, that also got an angry response, when “They simply didn’t care”….(next blog)