Cheryl Schatz

Where does God say that Deborah as a Judge or Huldah as a Prophet were picked because there were no male leaders?  Does doesn’t say this.  Huldah was picked even though Jeremiah had been a Prophet in Israel for 5 years.  The book of Judges says that the LORD raised up judges for a purpose:

Judges 2:16  Then the LORD raised up judges who delivered them from the hands of those who plundered them.

The purpose was not to show that there were no male leaders.  This is foreign to the text.  In fact this is the one verse that was the final straw for my Pastor that caused him to accept women in ministry.  He reasoned that if God was the only who installed the Judges per Judges 2:16 and he chose to install Deborah, then Deborah was a valid Judge to deliver Israel just as were all the other God-ordained Judges.

The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge says this about the judges:

The shophetim were not judges in the usual sense of the term; but were heads or chiefs of the Israelites, raised up on extraordinary occasions, who directed and ruled the nation with sovereign power, administered justice, made peace or war, and led the armies over whom they presided.

Deborah did indeed rule with sovereign power as God raised her up for that purpose.  To state a purpose of Deborah that is not stated in scripture (that she was only there to put men to shame since every man was unavailable), we do a great disservice to the scriptures by adding to the scriptures.

God always has reserved men for himself.  Elijah thought he was alone but there were 7,000 others that the Lord reserved for himself (Romans 11:3, 4).  To say that there was not even one man in Israel that was godly, is to say that God could not raise up one of the men that he had reserved for himself.  That makes God much less Sovereign that he truly is.  My Pastor has stated that the one who God raises up, is who we are to accept.  If God can choose a woman, then we are not to reject God’s choice.  Who are we to tell God what he can and cannot do?