Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
The book of Judges is a thrill-ride. It's filled with the stuff of great storytelling: courageous heroes; despicable antagonists; amazing miracles; thrilling acts of valor; love and lust; honor and revenge; and, a faithful God acting in righteousness throughout.
It's also a tough read, because, for all the excitement and heroism, it manages to descend from its high points to some disastrous pits, with ugly portraits of human nature. There's no happy ending to be found in Judges. (That will come later, in books we call “gospels.”)
At some of those low points, we run into the repeated, thematic summary of the book: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”
This is sometimes used as a counter to the argument presented in my last column here. That was, that the system of government God installed in his holy nation was one based on individual self-government, with a system of courts (judges) to deal with actual crimes. This system had no king or princes. There was no executive authority.
“You see, pastor? Even if that really was the system God installed in Israel, it was not long before the nation descended into moral chaos. Doesn't the text point out the problem? There was no king in Israel, and this absence paved the way for outrageous immorality. Strong executive power is needed to keep people in line.”
This may be a reasonable inference, upon reading these things for the first time. However, we keep reading, and we get to Samuel, the last of the national judges. In 1 Samuel 8, the people get restless, upset with the current state of things, and they want Samuel to install a king for them. God had made an allowance for this in Deuteronomy 17, as we've seen here, even predicting the very language and reasoning the people would use.
God was not pleased, however. The move from self-government with judges to life under a strong executive didn't make Israel great again. The Lord called it rebellion.
This is key to understanding that thematic statement in Judges. That there was no king in Israel was not a critique of the governing structure of the day. It was about Israel's moral failure. That is, they had no king because they departed from their covenant with God.
God himself was the king prior to Judges. He had given his law for their flourishing. (See Deuteronomy 33:1-6, and the Psalms.) In Judges, God's rule was rejected in favor of “every man doing what was right in his own eyes.”
When they became dissatisfied with this new status quo, as no one can live with chaos, rather than return to God's kingship, they demanded a strong executive power. This was another bad move.
It still is. Things go haywire and our response is to seek a powerful leader, and not God. This is not a solution, but the problem. Samuel warned that the human king would breed the very chaos we all wish would go away. There is no human substitute for national repentance.
Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at: