Judges 19-21 | Losing Sight of the Savior Judge

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning.

Please take your Bibles with me to the book of Judges and chapter 19.

I want to welcome our guests this morning, especially new college students who are checking us out.

If you are visiting with us or checking us out, you probably need a word of explanation.

You're thinking, what's that text message that he said something about?

We are approaching the end of the book of Judges, which is one of the darkest passages in all of Scripture.

Under normal circumstances, I would not want to preach this text.

It's uncomfortable.

But that's one of the blessings of consecutive expositional preaching is that if you skip a passage, your people will ask you why.

And I don't want to have to answer that question.

Besides, God has given this to us for our edification and instruction.

The three final chapters of Judges reveal the horror of falling in love with the world and losing sight of God as the ultimate Savior Judge.

Judges paints the ugly history of a people initially devoted to God, who for one reason or another let the world draw their hearts away.

The narrative in this history book reveals that God's calling, God's setting his people apart for himself and establishing them as witnesses to the nations had unraveled because the world had captured the hearts and minds of his people.

By the end of Judges, Israel was indistinguishable from the nations all around them.

It's one of the reasons why in the book of Isaiah we see warnings about Israel being taken captive.

They did not stay devoted to the Lord their God.

And so this conclusion to the book of Judges, which is actually in two parts, helps us understand how far down the drain Israel had spiraled.

The first part of our conclusion is the account of Micah and the Levite that we considered last Sunday in chapters 17 and 18.

The second part of the conclusion comprises the last three chapters, 19, 20, and 21, with the kind of story that people and nations want erased from their national memory.

In other words, you don't want to remember that this thing happened.

It's shocking.

It's embarrassing.

It's tragic.

In many ways, it's incomprehensible.

On the one hand, the narrative of these three chapters could easily be rewritten into a modern horror movie script.

On the other hand, it's recorded and inspired scripture.

So it's beneficial for us.

What we are about to hear is not merely ancient history.

I'm here to tell you it's your story.

It's my story.

It's our story.

This is a warning to us to always keep sight of our Savior Judge.

This portion of scripture describes when the world and the love for the world draws us away from Christ so that no one can tell the difference between God's people and the rest of the world.

But enough introduction.

I won't read the entire account this morning for time considerations and for the makeup of our gathering this morning, but I will do my best to walk us through the history recounted here and its importance, hopefully without getting too much into sensational details.

But it's good for you to know that God doesn't spare details.

Judges 19 begins a three-part account.

The first part speaks to the life and hearts of individuals, which isn't that unusual.

We've kind of seen some of that in Judges.

Then it moves from there to the life and hearts of a community.

And then on its way to including the whole nation, we see something about a tribe, but that's just sort of a transition to get us to the whole nation of Israel.

So Judges chapter 19 relates a focused story about a man and his concubine.

Judges 19 · chapter mention

Now that needs a definition.

A concubine is a second-class wife.

She was expected to fulfill all of the expectations and the obligations of a wife without the status of a wife.

You might think of her more as a slave of her husband's passions than as a genuine wife.

Then we move in the middle of chapter 19 to enlarge the account of the man and his concubine, expanding it to an entire community.

The ancient Israelite city of Gibeah.

Chapter 20 then enlarges that even further by encompassing an entire tribe and moving all the way to the whole nation.

And this is to show a very particular reality.

What was true at the level of the individual was true at every other level of society.

Now please keep in mind, this is not talking about the United States of America.

But I think you'll find the parallel shocking.

And that is the primary application point.

Is that when a people, beginning at the level of individuals and progressing up the layers of society and culture, begin to turn away from the Lord their God and do what's right according to their eyes, it looks very, very similar to what we find here in these chapters.

Every level of Israelite society was deplorable.

From the individuals to the communities to the tribes to the whole nation.

They had become entirely Canaanite.

And to make matters worse, if they can, Levites were at the center of the spiritual and moral bankruptcy.

Who are the Levites?

They were the pastors of their day.

They were the people that God had set apart to lead the entire nation in their spiritual lives.

Now, in the previous account, in chapters 17 and 18, we saw a Levite serving as a priest when God had not given that responsibility to his side of the Levite family.

To refresh your memory, there were two brothers, right?

Moses and Aaron.

The priestly responsibilities went to the descendants of Aaron.

In chapters 17 and 18, that Levite was a descendant of Moses.

He wasn't a priest.

He was to help the priests.

But instead, he did what was right in his own eyes rather than following God's structure.

So in this era of her existence, Israel had no leadership, no spiritual guidance, no moral boundaries, and no clear identity.

Now in these last three chapters, no one even has a name.

They have become nameless, evil people who have lost sight of what is right and wrong.

Chapter 19 begins at the individual level with a focused story about two people.

The Levite and his concubine.

And we are told at the very beginning that in those days there was no king in Israel.

Which, in summary, says there's no guidance, there's no direction, there's no leadership, there's no structure, everyone's doing what's right in his own eyes.

And there was a certain Levite.

Not going to tell you his name, the historian says, but there was a certain spiritual leader who was sojourning in the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, who took to himself a concubine from Bethlehem and Judah.

Now there is a ton of history right there in that single sentence that is too complex for us to unravel this morning.

But we can gather this much.

The Levite doesn't have a wife but a concubine.

He has a second-class wife.

It's one man living his way, and he isn't performing his duties as a Levite in spiritual service to God.

He's not living with the other Levites as God had ordered, nor was he structuring his life in the Levitical way because he was out in the wilderness on his own in a remote part of the world.

He was doing what he wanted to do.

He does life his way for his pleasure and his comfort.

This spiritual leader isn't serving God but himself.

And in serving himself, we immediately see a consequence of ordering our lives apart from God's ways.

When we live life according to our ways rather than God's ways, it will have denigrating effects on those around us.

The woman isn't a helper and a partner with the man as God had intended in Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

Instead, she's only being used.

One option suggests that this woman was either prostituting herself or was being prostituted by the Levite functioning as a pimp.

As a result, she got fed up with that and she went home to her father's house.

The other option is that the Levite was not treating her properly.

He was mistreating her.

And her only option was to, again, flee, to run back to her father's house.

Either way, neither option is good.

It shows the result of the Levite functioning in his world to please himself, not to please God.

And the result is that this woman is left denigrated, squashed, mistreated, and her only option is to flee.

Either way, some four months later, some four months later, the man decides to win her back.

Verse 3, he went to speak kindly to her, to speak to her heart, it says.

Over and over again, beginning in verse 4, he says, Listen, make yourself happy.

Do what pleases you.

Let's have a good time.

Day after day, the father presses the Levite to enjoy himself.

That's an ambiguous statement.

Make your heart happy, literally, is the Hebrew text.

Make your heart happy.

Enjoy yourself and stay a while.

Now there appears to be very little kindness in the Levite's home, but it's way over the top kindness in the father's house.

And our historian paints a picture of enjoying oneself as the height of hospitality.

But strangely, it's only the Levite who is urged to please his heart.

The woman isn't urged to please her heart, nor is the servant who's with them.

It never says that the father enjoys his heart.

And strangely, the father doesn't seem to want the man to leave with his daughter.

What's up with that?

We aren't told why.

But there is this strange elevation of the Levite enjoying himself while everyone else is left out or maybe even suffering.

And we're left with this feeling that something just isn't right here.

And then in chapter 19, verse 9, we read something odd.

When the man and his concubine and his servant rose up to depart, his father-in-law, the girl's father, said to him, Look, the day is waned toward evening.

Please spend the night.

The day is drawing to its close.

Lodge here.

Let your heart be merry.

Tomorrow you can get up early and go home.

But the man would not spend the night.

He rose up and departed and arrived opposite Jebas, that is, Jerusalem.

If you're going to go on a long journey, do you leave at about three or four in the afternoon?

Not unless you're intending to drive all night.

And he's not going to drive all night, but he's leaving in the afternoon.

And the father-in-law knows this is not the normal time to leave, but at this point in time, the man leaves.

That is a little odd.

They leave to return to the Levites' home late in the afternoon, meaning there's not much daylight left for travel.

And so we're told in verse 10 that they made it as far as Jebas, the city later called Jerusalem.

Now, the servant boy with them, who again doesn't have a name, thought that Jebes was an excellent place to spend the night.

But what does a servant boy know?

Levite wouldn't have it.

He says in verse 12, oh, we're not going to turn aside into the city of foreigners who do not belong to the people of Israel.

We're going to go on to Gibea.

Why would we do that?

Why would we ever spend the night in a pagan city?

We wouldn't do that.

So the account shifts here from the two primary characters to a community.

It's no longer a focused story about two people, but it's a flagitious account about a city.

Now I hope I caught your attention with the word flagitious.

It's hard to say.

Don't try to say it fast.

It doesn't work.

I'm not merely trying to have fun with alliteration.

It comes from the Latin word flagidium.

Now, flagitious criminals were considered the worst of the worst.

A prisoner in a maximum security prison locked away for 24 or 23 hours a day, rarely seeing the light of day, would be a flagitious criminal.

The worst of the worst.

It describes people who were over the top in their wickedness, but it's not just speaking about their wickedness, because the word flagitious refers or infers actions that are not only evil, but shameful and scandalous.

Phlagitious is the perfect word to describe the depravity recounted in the second half of Judges 19.

You see, the Levite believed that the Canaanites, the peoples of the land, the non-Jews, were the worst of the worst.

They were people without God and without hope in the world.

And we're led by our storyteller, by our historian, to think that Jebas, a flagitious city, is overflowing with evil and shameful things.

The Levite wants to avoid such a city even as nightfall is nearing.

He would rather keep on traveling to be able to spend the night in a Jewish community.

The Levite should be a man who was familiar with the Word of God.

So he should have been familiar with the truth that God has given us his word to speak the truth about others and ourselves.

But our thinking becomes twisted when the world impacts our minds more than scripture does.

And when our minds begin to be twisted, we begin to live according to our own ways.

And living according to our ways leads us to believe that others are worse than me.

I'm not that bad.

My people are not that bad.

So thankful that my community isn't like that community.

I'm so thankful that my church isn't like that church.

Sadly, the reality can be far different because our hearts are desperately wicked.

And it will not be long before our perspectives are twisted.

If we drift away from Christ toward the world.

See, what is right quickly becomes wrong.

And when your minds are twisted, what is wrong becomes right.

When people do what's right in their own eyes, they are the self-determiners of what is right and what is wrong.

And in Judges, people had forgotten what God had done for Israel.

They left off from Joshua at the beginning of the book.

There's a new generation of people who did not remember any of the things that God had done for them in the Exodus, carrying them through 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, and before you know it, they're failing to follow God's instructions.

They forgot him, then they failed to follow his instructions, then they rebelled and did what God didn't want them to do.

He told them not to intermarry with the pagan nations, not to have anything to do with them.

And before you know it, they're intermingling and intermarrying, and there's no difference between them.

And the savior judges that God gives them are also doing what's right in their own eyes.

That downward progression wrecks the mind.

The world's mindset reconfigures the mind.

We begin to think that those who are still following Christ, and maybe even those who are still living in the middle, are wrong.

Because I'm right.

We can't be wrong when we're doing what we believe to be right, right?

And others, then we think are wrong for questioning us when we're doing what is right.

Or are we doing what's right?

Are you confused?

Good.

That's what happens when you live in the middle and you slowly drift towards the ways of the world.

That's why Romans tells us that we are to renew our minds with the scriptures.

But back to our account.

The Levites believed that, or the Levite, pardon me, believed that the Canaanites were worse than the Israelites.

But he didn't realize that we are no different from the world when we do what's right in our own eyes.

Because our mindset has deceived us into thinking that we are better than others.

It blinds us to our own condition when we think, I'm so glad that I'm not like that.

And in the mind of the Levite, the citizens of Jebas were falicious, while the Jews were morally and spiritually superior.

The spiritual leader, quote unquote, was blind to the condition of his own heart and ignorant of the condition of Israel's heart.

And as a result, he ignores his servant boy and keeps on going past Jebas to the community of Gibeah.

Now there were no hotels then.

And hospitality was and continues to be a major priority in that part of the world.

In many ways, it was an integral part of Jewish religious heritage.

God had said, you were sojourners, you were wanderers for a while, so you make sure you take care of the wanderers.

So Jewish folks reading this for the first time would have nodded their heads in appreciation of the father-in-law and his over-the-top hospitality to the Levite.

That's good, that's right, that's appropriate.

Yay for him.

He did a great job.

And so we expect then, if we're in that mindset, for these travelers, these three people, to receive a warm welcome when they enter the Jewish city of Gibeah, to be welcomed into someone's home, given places to rest, given a meal, given great hospitality.

They get there, and no one welcomed them in.

Verse 15.

No one took them into his house to spend the night.

They walk into the Jewish city that they're expecting to be a godly city, and they enter the town square where most of the people are going to interact with one another, and they're just looking around.

Doesn't somebody notice that we're out of place here?

Welcome us home, and nobody does.

Finally, just as darkness settles, they're invited into the home of an old man.

It's not just not just any old man.

He's a sojourner.

Meaning he's a temporary alien.

He doesn't belong there.

It's not his home.

He's visiting too, but he's visiting long enough to have his own home.

Yeah, some churches you can come and be a part of the church and be there for 30 years and you still don't belong.

It's just the way it is in some churches.

It's kind of the way it is in this community.

We don't know how long this old man's been there.

Has he been there since the time he was a young man but still doesn't belong?

We don't know.

Our historian just tells us this is an old man, not a young family man.

This is an old man who doesn't really belong to this community anyway, and he's the only one that welcomes them in, and he only welcomes them in as a last resort.

And we're beginning to wonder now, is this really that different than Jebus?

Would it have been different in the pagan city?

The town's residents don't invite him in, but it's an old temporary alien.

The Gibeites treated the Levite as he expected the Jebusites to treat him.

It would be like an Evangelical Free Church of America pastor traveling through Grand Forks, needing a place to stay, and we tell him, Welcome to town.

The homeless shelter has a few beds.

What?

Really?

That's kind of low.

That's pretty low, actually.

See, Jewish hospitality was supposed to be different from that of the Canaanites.

But the Levite is only beginning to see how plagetious the Israelites at Gibeah were.

I won't go into the details, but you need to know that you can take this account in the end of chapter 19, and you can set it side by side with God's rescue of Lot from Sodom and Gomorrah.

And you will see many parallels.

Horrific parallels.

As the men in Sodom sought to rape God's messengers, rescuing Lot, the men of Gibeah sought to rape the Levite.

Like the men of Sodom, the men of Gibeah refused to control their passions.

Like the men of Sodom, the men of Gibeah did what was right in their own eyes.

What was utterly evil had become what was right.

Now the angels protected Lot and his family by striking the men with blindness.

Knowing that history, we can anticipate, oh, okay, what's going to happen here?

Well, there's protection that happens all right, but it's not the kind of protection that we would imagine when things are right.

Instead, it's the kind of protection that we would imagine when what is wrong has become what is right.

Because the old man and the Levite protect themselves by first offering the concubine and the old man's daughter to the passionate crowd of men.

And then the historian tells us that it got so bad that the Levite shoved his concubine out the doors into the arms of the despicable men while they shut the door and went to bed.

There's no hospitality, there's no protection, there's no safety, there's no laying down one's life for another, there's only indifference.

And the Levite and the old man go to bed without a care about the abusive night ahead for the concubine.

And after that evil night, the woman tries to reach safety, but she collapses on the doorstep as if her fingers were reaching out for hope.

Now, undoubtedly, the the Levite, the religious leader, he would care for her like a good Samaritan, right?

Yeah, no, not in this world.

When she didn't respond to his order to get up and move in the morning, he slung her over a donkey like a piece of luggage and went home.

Our historian doesn't tell us if she was alive or not.

I think that's on purpose.

It's to help us feel this tension of what's what's right and what's what's wrong.

What's true.

The Levite has sunk to the level of doing what's right in his own eyes.

And the woman suffered the consequences of the Levite's actions and suffered the consequences of his own beliefs that others are more wicked than he is.

Friends, there are always, always consequences to doing what is right in our eyes.

And sometimes others pay the price for us believing that the wrong thing is right.

Now we know there are always consequences, right?

Every action has a reaction.

There are consequences to everything, but don't you think that God's people should prefer the consequences of doing what is right in God's eyes rather than the consequences that come from doing what is right in our eyes?

Now, we might think that the Levite isn't all so bad because he took his concubine home and he used her body as an object lesson by sending parts of her body to every tribe in Israel.

A horrible action was somehow right in his mind.

Scripture says that we tend as human beings to think better of a person who steals a loaf of bread when they're hungry than someone who steals when he has a full stomach.

We understand that a starving person is driven by hunger.

It doesn't make it right, it just means that we understand it.

So we might think that the Levite was driven by some kind of righteous anger when he did this flagitious deed to the body of this woman.

But if that's what we hope, our hopes are soon dashed.

When we listen to what he says.

Because we are shown the depths of losing sight of God as the true Savior judge when we listen to the lips of this Levite.

Of course, never before in Israel's history had a dismembered body ever served as a call to arms.

This level of wrong had never before been right.

So the people come out en masse, demanding an answer.

Listen to the man in chapter 20.

Verse 3, the people of Israel said, Tell us, how did this evil happen?

Notice that the evil is not defined.

To what does this refer?

Is it the death of the woman or is it the dismemberment of the body?

Who knows?

They don't know what's right and what's wrong.

The Levite answers, here's what happened, verse 5.

Verse 4, I'm sorry, I came to Gibeah that belongs to Benjamin, I and my concubine to spend the night.

Innocent situation, right?

Everything's good.

And the leaders of Gibeah rose against me and surrounded the house against me by night.

They meant to kill me, and they violated my concubine, and she is dead.

So I took hold of her and cut her in pieces and sent her throughout all the country of the inheritance of Israel.

For they have committed abomination and outrage in Israel.

What is the abomination and outrage in Israel?

Is it that they tried to kill him?

Because he made it all about him.

Me, me, me.

And oh, by the way, this happened.

Did you hear what is not in his answer?

He didn't mention the unwise choice to leave his father-in-law's home late in the day.

He didn't mention the passionate homosexual desire of the men of Gibeah.

He didn't mention that he was the one, the text makes clear, he was the one who shoved his concubine out the door into the hands of evil men while he went to sleep.

The Levite did everything right, and the men of Gibeah were worse than he.

At what?

Who knows?

All of it.

Some of it.

It's just kind of all ambiguous.

It's just a terrible, no good, very bad situation with no particular details, and it's just what happens.

And somehow that kind of feels like our world, doesn't it?

It's a terrible, no good, very bad situation, and it just happens.

Everybody does what's right in their own eyes.

Tribes of Israel become enraged.

They go to war against Benjamin.

God says, I'm judging both of you.

So thousands of people died on both sides, and the tribe of Benjamin was literally almost destroyed.

And so the people, after the Civil War, realize, uh oh, we did something with a consequence that we didn't expect.

Surprise.

It's kind of what happens when you do what's right in your own eyes.

The consequence that they didn't expect is we almost wiped out one of the tribes.

And we promised to not give any of our daughters to them in marriage.

So that tribe is gonna die out.

What do we do now?

So they come up with a flagitious decision to undo the consequences of their civil war.

Here's what they decided.

Alright.

One of the communities of Israel didn't join us in the civil war.

So let's all go to war against that community and let's wipe it out.

Except for all the unmarried girls.

Then we're gonna take those unmarried girls and we're gonna give them as wives to the men of Benjamin that don't have any more wives.

It doesn't matter what they think, what they feel, what their families want.

We're just gonna do this deed to fix what we did.

So they did that, and then they realized, hey, wait a minute, there's still a couple hundred men who don't have wives.

What do we do now?

There's no more women left.

And so they said, okay, you know what?

There's this yearly festival where a bunch of people get together and celebrate what God has done.

Let's let these couple hundred men camp out in waiting.

And while the young women are out celebrating what God has done, let's let them go in and kidnap them and take them home for their wives.

Sound good?

Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

Does it sound good to you?

Let's use people as we see fit.

My friends, living according to our ways leads to warped thinking.

It twists your brain.

When we set aside our first love and we align ourselves with the world around us, suddenly wrong seems right.

And right seems, why would we do that?

The Israelites were just like the Canaanites, if not worse.

And so the last words of the book are, in those days there was no king in Israel.

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Other than the tribal names.

The major characters here are not named.

They're nameless.

Identity is lost.

Any significance that existed because of God's work is absent.

The woman is nameless, as is the Levite, the father, the servant, and all the others.

Oh, but wait.

There is one, one named individual.

Practically in the middle of this last section, in chapter 20, he is another Levite.

Another Levite, and he is a priest.

And more than that, he is the high priest.

Look at chapter 2 and verse 26.

Then all the people of Israel, the whole army, went up and came to Bethel and wept.

They sat there before Yahweh and fasted that day until evening and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before Yahweh.

In other words, it's feeling bad and saying, God, we did a really dumb thing.

Will you please forgive us?

And the people of Israel inquired of Yahweh, for the ark of the covenant of God was there in those days.

And Phineas, the son of Eliezer, the son of Aaron, ministered before it in those days.

In the previous account, the Levite who transgressed God's pattern for his side of the family was the grandson of Moses.

Now the Levites, under whose watch all of Israel had lost sight of their divine Savior, Judge, was the grandson of Aaron.

Even those whom we would least expect to drift have departed from God's ways and become like the world.

Friends, our historian is trying to warn us.

This is the destiny of all people and all nations that drift away from God's word toward the middle and ultimately become like the world.

This is our story.

It's the story of you, of me, of this church, of our community, of our states, of our country, and of our world.

We are the woman when others do what is right in their own eyes and we suffer the consequences.

We are the man, the city, and the nation when we do what is right in our own eyes.

Judges details a lack of concern for God's thoughts and God's ways, which leads to a twisted thinking that inverts what is right and wrong and blinds us to the state of our own hearts.

And so judges end with this implied cry for a king, a righteous judge and a godly king who will turn people's hearts back to God.

Because crushingly, no descendant of Moses and no descendant of Aaron could save the people or guide their hearts in the right direction.

Left to ourselves, we will.

All drift away from God's words and God's ways.

We need a new judge.

And we know, sitting here today, that only one Savior, Judge, can give us new hearts to love Him and follow Him and obey Him.

Judges says, here is the path that will come if you depart from the living God.

And it causes our hearts to yearn for our true judge, the judge who evaluates even the thoughts and the intentions of our hearts.

Yet that judge isn't one who merely stands in judgment over us.

He is the judge who rescues us from the sin death that we have earned by bearing our judgment himself and so saving us.

Not to do what's right in our own eyes, but to take up our crosses and follow him in obedience to him, doing what he has said is right.

And so the end of judges is a call to abandon your own wisdom, to turn to Christ as your judge and savior.

It's the only way.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we come and we bow before you, asking that you would open our hearts and our minds to see you.

Oh Lord, in many ways we've all departed, we've all walked away and lived in the middle and maybe even further towards the ways of the world.

Oh Lord, rescue us.

Let not one of us make our way to the world like those in judges.

Hold us fast as we've already sung.

But more than that, cause us to come before you in humility and to recognize we've gone our own way.

By the power of your spirit, grant us eyes to see that we sit in judgment for doing things our way.

And open our eyes to see you as our judge and savior, so that we with the Apostle Paul might say, Who will rescue us?

Thanks be to God for Christ Jesus our Lord, who has saved us by bearing the penalty for our sin.

And not just that, but as one whom we can trust to guide us in the way of wisdom according to your word.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

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