“The Regret of Out of Control Passions” – FBC Morning Light (4/27/2023)

Well, a good Thursday morning to you. Hope your week is going well, and today is kind of a special day in our household. It's my wife's birthday. I won't tell you how many there are, but she's younger than I, and so we're celebrating that day for her.

The Destruction of Benjamin and the Regret of Out-of-Control Passions

Well anyway, in our Bible reading today, we're reading in Judges chapter 21, John 16, and the 84th Psalm, and I want to wrap up the the last chapter of the book of Judges. The last couple of days in that book have probably been a little bit, yeah, distressing, as we've looked at the spiritual decadence in chapters 17 and 18, and then the moral decadence in chapters 19 and 20.

Chapter 20 records how, after that Levite did what he did with his concubine's body, sending parts of her body out, that Israel all came together and attacked the Benjamites, and basically wiped out all of the Benjamites except for a few hundred men, and they killed their women and their children.

I mean, it was just just awful, what this all led to. You see in chapter 20 the effect of passions that are out of control, just total destruction of Bethlehem, the residents of the city, and the people killing all these people in Bethlehem.

And there's just a few hundred men of Bethlehem left, and so when you come to chapter 21, after the passions have cooled, it leads to regret. How often is that the case, isn't it? That passions get out of control, we respond in anger, we lash out in anger, we say and do things in anger, and then when the passions cool, we regret it.

We regret it. It reminds me of an old song, I think it was Charlie Rich that sang it back in the 70s, and it had something to do with, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world? If so, tell her I miss her, tell her I love her, something like that, and the reason for the song is that he got mad and said some things, and now comes the heartache that the mourning brings.

Well, that's what chapter 21 is all about. They got mad and did some things, they killed a whole bunch of people, they killed all the women of the tribe of Benjamin, all the wives and all the children, and yet there were a few hundred men that escaped.

These men now don't have wives, and they don't have any opportunity to procreate, they don't have any way to keep their family line going. So what do we do? You remember yesterday I talked about the horrific attitude toward women displayed in chapters 19 and 20, particularly chapter 19, the Levite and his attitude toward the woman, the concubine?

Well, you see the same horrible attitude displayed toward women in chapter 21. So what are we going to do for wives, for these Benjamites? Because all of the rest, the Israelites who all went to war against the people of Benjamin, they said, you know, we're not going to give our daughters to these Benjamites in marriage, we're not going to do that.

So what are we going to do now? The Benjamites, the tribe of Benjamin, has no women and only a few hundred men, so what are we going to do? So they come up with a plan. They find out, are there any cities that weren't represented, any cities in Israel that weren't represented in this battle against the Benjamites?

And they check it out and find out, sure enough, there were some that didn't come. And so they say, here's what we're going to do. And the residents of Jabesh Gilead, they didn't send any representatives to the war, so they said, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to go and strike the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead with the edge of the sword, including the women and the children. Are you getting this? And this is the thing that you shall do. You shall utterly destroy every male and every woman who has known a man intimately.

So they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh Gilead 400 young virgins who had not known a man intimately, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh and gave these 400 young women, probably like teenage girls, 13 years old, 12, 13, 14 years old, who had never known a man, and they take those 400 girls and give them to these men of Benjamin.

Well, there still weren't enough girls to go around, so they came up with another plan. They talked about, in verse 19, this feast to the Lord in Shiloh, where young virgins come out and they do this little, you know, festival dance or whatever.

So the men of Israel said to the Benjamites, here's what you need to do. Go hide in the vineyards, and then when the girls come out to do their dance, then come out and grab them and kidnap them and take them home to be your wives.

That's exactly what they do. And the men of Israel say, if their fathers object, we'll intercede and, you know, we'll make it good for you. That's exactly what they do. Now, as bad as all that is, and it's horrible, it's just absolutely horrible, I thought about this, I read about this, and I thought, can you imagine how these young girls felt?

Do they even care? Has the society become so decadent that they don't care whatsoever about how these young girls felt? They didn't realize that for the rest of their lives, those, quote-unquote, wives are going to have bitter resentment toward their husbands.

You talk about a toxic environment for perpetuating families. There's just so much about this that is just so wrong. And how did it get to be so bad? Well, the book of Judges ends with verse 25 that tells us, in those days there was no king in Israel, everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Listen, when a society reaches the point where there are no moral standards, there are no standards whatsoever for righteousness, and everybody is left to do what's right in his own eyes, there is no telling where that'll take you.

Just look around. Our Father and our God, we are grieved when we look in our own society, and we see so much of this same problem, same attitude, that everybody can do what's right in his own eyes. So therefore, we kill children before they're born.

We have dysfunctional, broken, broken homes simply because people are doing what's right in their own eyes and not caring about their responsibilities or their commitments or anything like that. Lord, our society is a mess.

People's homes are a mess, families are a mess, lives are a mess, because people are just doing what's right in their own eyes. Oh, how we need your Word. I pray that we would proclaim it faithfully. Now Lord, take these thoughts and challenge us with them today, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Closing Encouragement and Sign-Off

Alright, well listen, have a good rest of your Thursday, and I promise tomorrow the devotional will be a little more pleasant, I trust. Alright, have a good day. God bless.