Judges – God’s Grace in Dark Times

The Consequences of repeated rebellion is Spiritual and Moral Anarchy - Judges 17-21

This section continues the extremely depressing condition of the Children of Israel at the end of this period of the Judges. In Chapters 17-18 we saw the ‘spiritually bankrupt’ condition of the nation, now we see the ‘morally bankrupt’ state of the nation. It is important to recognize that the one leads to the other. As we are experiencing here in Australia and is happening in most of the historically ‘Christian’ nations, the decline of our Christian heritage is leading to an equivalent decline in the moral health of our societies.

It is easy to dismiss this as just nostalgia but the reality is that as Peter Harrison states in Religion and Ethics: the central moral category in the West had been ‘virtues’ rather than ‘values’. The first is objective while the latter is subjective. The concept of ‘virtues’ assumes a consensus of moral absolutes whereas the concept of ‘values’ can vary from individual to individual or organization to organization. Virtues in our Western heritage were pretty much defined by the 10 Commandments specifically or at least a Biblical worldview generally. However, there is no societal consensus as to what values should be based on today except maybe very vacuous, undefined cliches such as ‘inclusion, tolerance etc’. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott laments ‘the neglect of the Western canon, the literature, the poetry, the music, the history and above all the faith without which our culture and our civilisation is unimaginable.’

This section begins with the statement ‘In those days Israel had no king’ (19:1) and ends with the statement ‘In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit’ (21:25). Much like today as mentioned above, there was no recognizable moral authority so they could choose whatever ‘values’ seemed right to them. The truth of course was that they did have a king – the one and only true king of kings! When later they said, ‘“Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the LORD. And the LORD told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.’ (1 Sam 8:6-7) 

MORAL ANARCHY – Ch 19-21

In these chapters there are three causes and consequences of gross immorality.

1. Personal sin – the Levite ‘took a concubine’ (19:1) – a concubine was a wife of secondary rank (‘the Hebrew word for concubine pileges is a non-Semitic loanword borrowed to refer to a phenomenon not indigenous to Israel’ – Bakers dictionary of Biblical theology) but who was guaranteed food, clothing, and marital privileges (Ex. 21:7–11; Deut. 21:10–14). This is very different from the true definition of Biblical marriage established by God in Genesis 2:24 and affirmed by Jesus in Matt 19:4-6, and everything about this arrangement smacks of self-interest not divine calling. It is obvious he wants the sexual privileges without a true marriage commitment. He is a Levite – and so called to the priestly role in the nation with all the moral expectations that would go with that role. As Timothy Keller says: ‘It is a deeply ominous opening that this Levite who was supposed to be set apart as holy, has instead been swept into pagan culture, taking a concubine’.

Personal sin always affects others – it damages our character, so we fail to do justice to those we interact with. Some people justify personal sin by claiming it is only harming them, not anyone else, but if we wilfully choose to sin, we are damaging our very humanity. Every day I am either growing in Christ or walking away from Christ. If it is walking away, then I am bringing disgrace to His name and reputation and undermining the character of Christ he has designed me to express.

Remarkably or maybe inevitably, his concubine proves ‘unfaithful to him… and went back to her parents’ home in Bethlehem’ (v2). The relationship was clearly empty and meaningless. After four months the Levite returns to her family home with the intention of persuading her to return to him. In the process her father ‘prevailed on him to stay’ longer than he intended and when eventually they left (on the fifth day) it meant that their journey would require an overnight stay. The obvious place was Jebus (later to become Jerusalem) but not willing to risk staying with foreigners they went on as far as Gibeah (in the tribal territory of the Benjamites). There they are hosted by an old man from the hill country of Ephraim (v16-21).

2. Sexual sin – sexual sin always deteriorates and always multiplies (see Rom 1:18-32).

Having been provided with hospitality by the old man ‘wicked men of the city surrounded the house… pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house “bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him”’ (v22). This is the inevitable consequence of having no king and everyone doing what they saw fit. When we reject God’s presence, there are no moral boundaries left and as Paul declares in Rom 1:24-27 ‘God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another… even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones… in the same way men abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lusts for one another’. In this instance there is a decline from personal sin to aggressive homosexuality to violent rape and ultimately to murder. We are seeing the same deterioration in our world today – even if in our more ‘civilized’ society we just put it on the movie screen for entertainment!

The response from the host and the Levite was horrific – the host offered his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine as substitutes for his guest ‘to do to them whatever you wish’ (v24) which they did ‘they raped her and abused her throughout the night’. We should be shocked and outraged at this – and yet there is subdued and only tentative condemnation of exactly the same kind of behaviour perpetrated on Oct 7 th last year by the Hamas terrorists in Southern Israel!

Incredibly it seems that while this was happening, both men simply slept (which is matched by the tepid response from the Western nations to the massacres and rapes in Israel). In the morning the Levite finds his concubine ‘fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold’. She died abandoned to her fate.

The Levite put her body on his donkey and returned home. When the Levite reached home, he ‘took a knife and cut up his concubine limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel’ (v29). It is important to note that his anger is not because he cared for her personally (he had agreed to handing her over to the men of Gibeah!) – rather it was because his ‘property’ had been damaged. This reveals and confirms the callous hardness and self-centredness that personal sin produces.

3. Rampant evil – what started as one person’s sin has now expanded to impacting the whole nation. Just as the one sin of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:6 becomes ‘every inclination of his (men’s) hearts was only evil all the time’ Genesis 6:5). As we noted earlier unresolved sin always runs rampant like a virus. All the tribes came together in Mizpah to attempt to find out the reason for the Levite’s action and resolved to punish those in Gibeah (of the Benjamite tribe) who were responsible. But ‘the Benjamites would not listen to their fellow Israelites’ (20:13) which led to a national crisis and the near elimination of the whole tribe of Benjamin. Only God can resolve evil – human solutions always fail and cause greater problems.

To their credit the tribes inquire of the LORD ‘who of us shall go first to fight against the Benjamites?’ (v18) but the battle was not straightforward and there was much loss of life. Only when ‘the Israelites went up to Bethel…sat weeping before the LORD… fasted… and presented burnt offerings and fellowship offerings’ (v26) did the LORD respond ‘Go, for tomorrow I will give them into your hands’ (v27). Entrenched sin in a society is not easily removed.

As we hopefully know, a change of leader (Prime minister/President) or even whole governments can never resolve the true destructive issues in our nation. We need to truly repent as individuals and as a nation. The Benjamites were finally defeated, and all the inhabitants of their towns were put ‘to the sword’ (v48). There is no indication at all that this was God’s will – it was sheer vindictive revenge. Only six hundred men who had ‘fled into the desert to the rock of Rimmon’ survived.

‘Now the Israelites grieved for their brothers, the Benjamites’ (21:6) – they lamented the fact that nearly a whole tribe had been wiped out except for the 600 men. They had made an oath at Mizpah that none of their daughters would be permitted to marry a Benjamite and so it seemed as though there would be no future tribe of Benjamin, but then ‘they discovered that no-one from Jabesh Gilead had come to the assembly’ (v8) and so they put to the sword all those living there including the women and children. The result was that they ‘found four hundred young women who had never slept with a man’ (v12) who they gave to the surviving Benjamite men as wives. But there were still two hundred men without wives and so they set up an ambush during an annual festival at Shiloh and instructed the two hundred Benjamite men to ‘rush from the vineyards and each of you seize a wife from the girls of Shiloh and go to the land of Benjamin’ (v21).

So, the tribe of Benjamin continued and later on provided Israel’s first king (Saul) and later queen Esther and Mordecai, who God used to save the nation from annihilation. Paul the apostle was also a Benjamite so we can be grateful they survived.

This whole tragic episode borders on the farcical but graphically illustrates the incapacity of mankind to function without any recognition of or submission to our Creator/Sustainer God. When we decide there is no king (ie no higher authority) and do that which is right in our own eyes we are doomed to self-destruction and failure. Praise God we do have a Saviour who is also King of Kings and who will reign in us individually as we repent of our sin and trust his work of saving grace. He will also reign over all on earth when he returns and then forever in heaven.

As Psalm 96:10-13 tells us:

  Say among the nations, “The LORD reigns.”

    The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved;

    he will judge the peoples with equity.

  Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;

    let the sea resound, and all that is in it.

  Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;

    let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.

  Let all creation rejoice before the LORD, for he comes,

    he comes to judge the earth.

He will judge the world in righteousness

    and the peoples in his faithfulness.

Overall Lessons:

1. Spiritual failure leads to moral failure – they are intrinsically linked and you can’t be spiritual without moral fruit – God hates ‘religion’ that is superficial (Is 1:10-15)

2. It is very dangerous and ultimately self-destructive to distort and corrupt God’s revealed ways (2 Peter 2:10-20)

3. There are no human solutions to spiritual or moral problems – only God can deal with the fundamental crisis in the human condition (James 4:1-10)

4. The alternative to moral failure is not legalism or asceticism (depriving self of pleasure) but a living faith in the presence of the Lord Jesus in our lives (Prov 3:5-6)

And remember there is always: ‘God’s Grace… in Hard Times’