Take the test - Devotion for 10/15/07

Take the test – Devotion for 10/15/07

There is a passage in the book of Judges that I think is really cool – Judges 12:1-7. In this passage, one of the judges that God has raised up to deliver Israel is Jephthah the Gileadite, and the people of Ephraim have entered into a dispute with the Gileadites. They got to war against each other, and the Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan opposite the Jordan river. When any on would come to the river to cross over, the Gileadites would ask them if they were from Ephraim, and if the people said “no,” then they were given a special test. The Gileadite would say, “Say now, ‘Shibboleth,’” but someone who was truly from Ephraim would instead say “Sibboleth” (without the “h”), because they would not pronounce it correctly. If they failed this quick linguistics test, then the people of Gilead would seize the person and kill them. Judges 12:6 tell us that “thus there fell at that time 42,000 of Ephraim.” Personally, I think I would have tried to learn to say “Shibboleth.” Such a language test was used many years later in the border wars between Scotland and England, and the word “tree” was used to identify who someone really was.

I think that test is really cool – it shows quite simply who you really are. In this day and time, such a thing could be quite useful. Many times people aren’t actually what they seem – we say one thing, yet do another. What kind of test could we take to determine what we really are? In Interior Castle, by St. Teresa of Avila, she has a good idea of what that test might look like. “Fix your eyes on the Crucified and nothing else will be of much importance to you. If his Majesty revealed his love to us by doing and suffering such amazing thing, how can you expect to please him by words alone?” Take the test – are we attempting to please God with only words? Let our lives be a pleasing and acceptable sacrifice to God as we serve him each day in the specific ways God has called each one of us.