June 12, 2025
Please use the comment section on this page to share insights from today’s reading OR your own personal Bible reading.
Reading along with us in Judges, Proverbs, and Psalms? Here’s today’s reading:
Judges 21 (NIV)
Wives for the Benjamites
1 The men of Israel had taken an oath at Mizpah: “Not one of us will give his daughter in marriage to a Benjamite.”
2 The people went to Bethel, where they sat before God until evening, raising their voices and weeping bitterly.…..Continue Reading
So the banner that hangs over the book of judges, “Israel had no king, everyone did as they saw fit”, reigns over this chapter as well. God protects us from rash and extreme vows and actions. Why would everyone in Benjamin be judged for the actions of some of them? Why would all in Jabesh Gilead be killed because no one represented them at this meeting? And how could they rationalize allowing women to be abducted from Shiloh and that being an escape clause to the oath they had taken? It is because they had the symbol of interacting with God rather than the truth of God controlling their lives. We have the opportunity to have the substance of God within us and thereby be transformed by it. Otherwise anything can sound good…
Judges 21
Judges 21
”In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.“
Judges 21:25 NKJV
I was thinking of the gift of rationality that we have been given from the Bible, proverbs and the coming of Jesus Christ. There are so many irrational, foolish things going on in our world right now that just negate common sense and rational thought.
What a mess of a chapter fitting to close out this book! Answer one bad decision with a worse one. Extreme vengence, death of so many inncoent people, and then finished by a mass kidnapping. The idea that “Israel had no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes” is so evident. When our eyes aren’t fixed on God, they see what we want them to see, we twist things to speak to our own truth rather than the truth of God. I always say there are 3 sides to every story; yours, theirs, and the truth because in our flawed, selfish thinking we naturally see everything from our own point of view that suits us best. The real truth is what God sees and knows, and that is what we should strive to see and know as well!
Judges 21; 2 Chronicles 13-14; 1 Kings 16