Judges 21:25

Moses instructed the people about how they were to live once they had taken possession of the land. He said plainly, "You shall not do according to all that we are doing here today, everyone doing whatever is right in his own eyes" (Deut. 12:8). Three hundred years after this warning we find the people in the land. But the closing chapters of Judges record them in a low moral condition, marked by gross corruption and violence. Two causes lie behind that low condition. First, they had thrown off the authority of God as their King; secondly, as a result, every man was doing what was right in his own eyes.

The time had not yet come when Israel would say, "appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations" (1 Sam. 8:5). Until then the people had the LORD as their king. Now God was forgotten or set aside, though Israel had not yet set up a kingship like that of the nations. The people had abandoned God's system of government, and they had not yet declared the world's system either.

They had, as in the present day, the reign of liberty of conscience. Each claimed to have the "light of his conscience" for guidance, while they set aside the true light of the word of God and no longer turned to it... Conscience, despite its immense value for man, is not a guide but a judge — a wholly different thing. Man does not listen to this judge, yet pretends to honour it by making it his guide. But how can it lead him, when it may fall asleep, grow hard, or even lose all feeling?... They followed the impulses of their own hearts, as long as they thought they were doing right. This plunged them into frightful wickedness.

They forsook the LORD, the God of their fathers, and served the gods of the surrounding nations. They ignored the code of righteous laws Moses gave them for an orderly national life that God could accept. Lawlessness prevailed throughout the twelve tribes. In short, the final sentence of this book sums up the moral condition of Israel — a people redeemed to be a model of righteous government in the eyes of all other nations.

God did not change that deplorable state of things; He simply states the fact. But He led His own away from the confused light of conscience, which judged them yet never guided them. He brought them back to the pure light of His own infallible word. That word was able to lead them, to build them up, and to give them "the inheritance among all those who are sanctified" (compare Acts 20:32).

What a world of longing there is in that expression, "there was no king in Israel." How it tells of the only hope there could be for God's people. It was to have His King. God Himself surely wanted to be their king, would have been their king, but they refused Him... At last God gives them, as a picture, the man after His own heart. David in that way surely points to the coming King for Israel — the King the nation still waits for, though it does not know it.

Is God defeated? No — Ruth follows Judges. There we find humble and obscure people in whose hearts God has worked, and who are altogether delightful in their setting. We get Naomi, Ruth, Boaz, and the line set for David — and in truth for David's greater Son, the Lord from heaven.

These words also describe the whole history of the Christian world. Perhaps the cause of every evil division is just that — the failure to truly acknowledge the Lordship and authority of Christ, in the fear of the Lord. Where that is missing, every man is sure to do what is right in his own eyes — his own will.