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Judges 5:25 "He asked water and she gave him milk, she brought him curds in a lordly bowl."

 

Sounds good, right? This woman (Jael) must have been especially kind or enamored of this guy (Sisera). But after she brought him curds in a lordly bowl, he fell asleep and she drove a tent peg through his head (Judges 5:26), so there's that.

 

Sisera was the commander of the Canaanite army. He had "cruelly oppressed the Israelites" for twenty years (Judges 4:2-3). So when the Israelites finally rose up against him and he fled in defeat, taking shelter in Jael's tent when it was offered, he should have been a bit warier of her motives, to my mind.

 

I think the lesson here is if you know you are being offered something you do not deserve, and it's not coming from God's mercy, then there is probably a catch. Sisera knew how he had treated the Israelites. He was wicked, whether he acknowledged it to himself or not. Even if he thought Jael was "on his side", even if he believed she was fully supporting him as the wife of an ally, he should have known what his behavior deserved, and it was not curds in a lordly bowl. I think maybe he did, which is why he asked only for water, but when so much more was offered him he let his pride tell him to accept it. Now, if he had repented, this very well could have been God's offer of grace to him. But he had not, it was all Sisera, no God.

 

We really have to know ourselves, and know what we deserve. That's not to say God will not give us blessings we don't deserve, He always does (we are all sinners who really don't deserve anything)! But God's blessings come when we are in relationship with Him. This is one reason why frequent examinations of conscience are very helpful. They let us know ourselves. We come to see our weaknesses and our sinful tendencies. We see the times when we have gone against God's will, and the people we've hurt, the evil we've done. We can then repent, and God, who is just waiting for us to do so, will bless us.

 

But if we don't do this, if we don't know ourselves, or we don't repent of our sinfulness, and then are offered things we know we do not deserve, our pride can convince us to accept, and there lies true danger. At best, the person offering is a confused sinner just like us, and we both go further astray; at worst, it is a trap baited by our pride and we risk an unfortunate encounter with a tent peg.