Judges 20-21

What a beautiful day. Hope you got to enjoy it.  Tomorrow is Girls Scout Sunday.  I know that we will have some guests as a result.  I hope you will be in attendance to help me make them welcome.  Hospitality is an important biblical mandate.  Much of this lurid story found in the closing chapters in Judges is the result of Israel failing to remember that they were once aliens in a foreign land and of course failing to keep God's commandments as well.  I have read all three chapters for today, including Ruth 1, but I am only going to comment on the last 2 chapters of Judges.  I will address the entirety of Ruth tomorrow.  By the way, if you have never read Ruth, welcome to one of the great love stories of all times.

Isn't this an incredible story?  What does God want us to learn from this passage of scripture?  A sin so vile and a guilt so deep, what is its purpose here in the pages of the Bible?

The Levite who has dismembered his dead concubine and sent twelve parts to the twelve tribes of Israel has so offended the sensibilities of Israel that a great meeting of all the tribes is called and they gather to determine what must be done.  There is sin in the camp (remember Ai following the great victory at Jericho).  It must be removed.  The tribes invite the tribe of Benjamin to participate in the solution but they refuse.  The refuse to turn on their brothers in Gebeah.  The remaining tribes go before the Lord and ask if they should go against Benjamin and utterly destroy Gibeah.  God tells them to go.

What follows is a bitter battle that sees Israel lose the first two days of battle and in the process 40,000 men.  If God has sent Israel to destroy Gibeah for its great sin, why the first two days of defeat?  Why the great loss of human life?  Could it be that it wasn't until the defeat that Israel finally prostrated themselves before the Lord with contrite hearts and confessed their own sin and their complicity in the sin of Gibeah.  Sin does not grow in a vacuum and all of Israel had strayed from God's purpose for them.  Gibeah was put to the sword and burned to the ground but more than Gibeah paid a great price. 

The tribe of Benjamin defended their brothers in their sin and in so doing nearly caused their tribe to become the lost tribe of Israel.  Every man, woman and child was destroyed except the 600 warriors that had escaped into the mountains.  Can you see the price of sin unrepented?  It always takes you places that you did not intend to go, it keeps you longer than you ever intended to stay and it costs you more than you will ever be able to pay.

The rash oath that the remaining 11 tribes make to withhold their women from the remaining 600 Benjaminites leads to further inane actions on the part of Israel.  The 400 virgins are given in marriage and then permission is given to kidnap other you maidens from Shechem.  Can this be the will of God?  Let me say, I emphatically do not believe so.  Remember that the motto for this chapter is the found in the failure of Israel to remember who their King is and to be obedient to the way that he has called them to live.  "In Israel there was no king and everyone did as he saw fit."  The great sin was living as though there was no standard for living.  Everyone did as they saw fit is not the call for those who follow God.  There is a standard against which everything is measured.  There is right and there is wrong.  Israel has failed to love God with their whole heart, soul, strength and mind.  God is going to have to come up with a new plan if Israel and we are to be saved from our own evil ways.