No Different
I am blessed to write for the devotional magazine Living Life.
Each month, a group of us are assigned passages from scripture as we work our way, book by book, through the Bible. What I like about writing for Living Life is the challenge of being assigned a passage and asking God, “What in the world can I say about this?”
Recently, I was assigned to write a devotional on Judges, chapter nineteen. It is a bizarre story, definitely NOT one of the well-known stories we associate with the book of Judges. I encourage you to read it for yourself, but the long and short of it is this - Some wicked Israelites, from the tribe of Benjamin, violently rape a Levite’s concubine. The Levite cuts the dead concubine into twelve pieces and sends them to all the tribes of Israel in a call for action and justice. The entire story, from beginning to end, will make your blood curl. It’s an ancient horror show!
Anyway, I’m reading this story and thinking to myself, “How cruel, crude, and crass can you get?”. Another part of me is thinking, “What kind of devotional can I write about this? They are all a bunch of pagans!?!”. Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I’m saying to myself, “I’m glad we’re not like that today!”.
It was late at night when I first read the passage, and I decided the best thing for me to do was to sleep on it. Pleasant dreams!
The next morning I woke up and opened my Bible for my daily reading. The passage was Romans 3:10-18. I’ve included the entire passage below -
As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
(From Bible Gateway, NIV)
That’s when I realized how hard-hearted and scripturally ignorant my thoughts of the previous night had been. The result was this brief essay, written for the readers of “Living Life” . . .
There is a tendency to regard some of the most horrendous events in history as anomalies or exceptions, if you will, to human nature in general. It’s not that we don’t believe in the sinful nature of humanity. As Christians, we certainly do. But the problem is we fail to recognize how totally depraved we are.
In his novel, The Lord of the Flies, William Golding describes a group of well-educated, well-mannered British boys who have been shipwrecked on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Against the backdrop of this island paradise, the boys, over time, become increasingly tribal and savage. They engage in brutal murders of their own. They torture those who refuse to cooperate with their tribe. In short, they descend into complete savagery.
The Lord of the Flies is fiction. The book of Judges is not. It is the unvarnished truth of God’s Word. And as much as we may be repelled by what we read in Judges, we must never lose sight of the fact that in ways we’d rather not admit, we’re no different from those found in its stories. In the New Testament book of Romans, Paul paints a graphic picture of the sinfulness of humanity: Their throats are open graves, the poison of vipers is on their lips, their feet swift to shed blood. Given the right circumstances, these words describe you and me, all of us. So, while what we read in Judges may leave us horrified and appalled, let’s never forget apart from God’s grace, we are no different.
The sin nature is an ugly root in the lives of all human beings, whoever they are, wherever they live, whatever the circumstances of their times. Remove a few restraints, and you have chaos and bedlam.
Is that what is happening in our nations and world today - are the restraints being removed? Seems like it. But before we start pointing fingers at those to the Left or Right of us, we need to recognize and embrace our own culpability, our own propensity for wickedness. Only then can we find healing and wholeness. And that healing and wholeness come through Jesus Christ.
In Christ,
Dan
You can find my podcasts at Church on the Edge and my books on Kindle.