Judges 19-21, How Low Can You Go?, part 2, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Judges 19 and the Perversity of a Sensate Culture

Judges chapter 19, hear the word of the Lord. In those days when there was no king in Israel, a certain Levite was sojourning in the remote parts of the hill country of Ephraim, who took to himself a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah.

And his concubine was unfaithful to him, and she went away from him to her father's house at Bethlehem in Judah, and was there some four months. Then her husband arose and went after her to speak kindly to her and bring her back.

He had with him his servant and a couple of donkeys, and she brought him into her father's.

House.

And when the girl's father saw him, he came with joy to meet him. And his father-in-law, the girl's father, made him stay, and he remained with him three.

Days.

So they ate and they drank, and they spent the night there. And on the fourth day, they arose early in the morning, and he prepared to go. But the girl's father said to his son-in-law, Strengthen your heart with a morsel of bread.

And after that, you may go. So the two of them sat and they ate and they drank together, and the girl's father said to the man, Be pleased to spend the night, and let your heart be merry. And when the man rose up to go, his father-in-law pressed him until he spent the night there.

Again.

And on the fifth day, he arose early in the morning to depart, and the girl's father said, Strengthen your heart, and wait until the day declines. And so they ate, both of them, and when the man and the concubine and his servant rose up to depart, his father-in-law, the girl's father, said to him, Behold, now the day has waned toward the evening.

Please spend the night. Behold, the day draws to its close. Lodge here, and let your heart be merry. And tomorrow you shall rise early in the morning for your journey and go home. But the man would not spend the night.

He rose and departed and arrived opposite Jebus, that is, Jerusalem. He had with him a couple of saddled donkeys, and his concubine was with him. And when they were near Jebus, the day was nearly over, and the servant said to his master, Come now, let us turn aside to this city of the Jebusites and spend the night in it.

And his master said to him, We will not turn aside to the city of foreigners who do not belong to the people of Israel, but we will pass on to Gibeah. And he said to his young man, Come, and let us draw near to one of these places and spend the night at Gibeah or at Ramah.

So they pressed on and went their way, and the sun went down on them near Gibeah, which belongs to Benjamin, and they turned aside there to go in and spend the night at Gibeah. And he went in and sat down in the open square of the city, for no one took them into his house to spend the night.

And behold, an old man was coming from his work in the field at evening. The man was from the hill country of Ephraim, and he was sojourning at Gibeah. The men of the place were Benjamites. And he lifted up his eyes and saw the traveler in the open square of the city.

And the old man said, Where are you going and where do you come from? And he said to them, We are passing from Bethlehem in Judah to the remote part of the hill country of Ephraim from which I come. I went to Bethlehem in Judah, and I'm going to the house of the Lord, but no one has taken me into his house.

We have straw and feed for our donkeys with bread and wine for me and your female servant and the young man and your servants. There's no lack of anything. And the old man said, Peace be to you. I will care for all your wants.

Only do not spend the night in the square. So he brought him into the house and gave the donkeys feed, and they washed their feet and ate and drank. As they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, worthless fellows, surrounded the house, beating on the door, and they said to the old man, the master of the house, Bring out the man who came into your house, that we may know him.

And the man, the master of the house, went out to them and said to them, No, my brothers, do not act so wickedly, since this man has come into my house. Do not do this vile thing. Behold, here are my virgin daughter and his concubine.

Let me bring them out now. Violate them and do with them what seems good to you. But against this man, do not do this outrageous thing. But the men would not listen to him, and so they seized the concubine and made her go out to them.

And they knew her and abused her all night until the evening. And as the day dawned to break, they let her go. And as the morning appeared, the woman came and fell down at the door of the man's house where her master was until it was light.

And her master rose up in the morning, and when he opened the door of the house and went out to go on his way, behold, there was his concubine lying at the door of the house with her hands on the threshold.

He said to her, Get up, let us be going. But there was no answer. And then he put her on the donkey, and the man rose up and went away to his house. And when he entered his house, he took a knife, and taking hold of his concubine, he divided her limb by limb into twelve pieces and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel.

And all who saw it said, Such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day that the people of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt until this day. Consider it. Take counsel and speak. May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word.

Chronological Snobbery and the Degeneration of Culture

Are we in decline? You know, the modern opinion is that everything is improving. It's like computers, cell phones, cars, TVs, medicine has improved. And so now, you know, all that is better than it was 10 or 20, 50 years ago.

So many people assume that, well, morals, culture, society has improved. All those things have gotten just better, it's kind of evolved. This modern feeling is what C .S. Lewis called chronological snobbery, the assumption that anything today is better than anything yesterday, that there's a kind of social Darwinism in which the best ideas thrive and so are adopted and so that we've evolved just morally superior people even without having to think about it.

We just got to get better naturally. Lewis, of course, did not agree. Neither did Russian-American sociologist Peter Sorokin, who described how societies degenerate and collapse. He said living societies, what he called supersystems, start as, if they're healthy, they start as ideational.

The ideational supersystem is, he said, quote, a unified system of culture based upon the principle of a super-sensory, means above our senses, beyond our senses, super-sensory and super-rational God as the only true reality and value.

That's the ideational. God is the truth, what he says is right, and societies that live according to that are ideational, and they're the ideal, he said. For Sorokin, the ideational was the pinnacle of civilization because it reached for aspirations beyond the mere satisfying of individual human desires.

The ideational, he says, cultures like that, supersystems, they tend to break down as they are compromised over time with humanistic demands. For example, something like marriage and divorce. You start with the ideational goal of following Jesus' commands, no divorce except for adultery, maybe abandonment if you assume the abandoning spouse has committed adultery, and of course, the law punishes adultery, but that's the ideational goal.

In other words, marriage is not necessarily about your own happiness, it's about obeying God, it's about your holiness, but it begins to break down. Then you compromise a little because life is complicated and people demand more laxity, and so there are more reasons allowed over time for divorce, and eventually we have no-fault divorce with widespread cohabitation, and then with chronological snobbery, you congratulate yourself for having created a more humane culture, never mind that child suicide rates have skyrocketed, like we talked about last week, because it turns out that these divorces of convenience, this instability, and the disintegrated families that they create are.

Horrible for children.

And that last phase, what culture degenerates into, is what Sorokin called the sensate, the culture that believes that true reality and value is sensory, it's what you can see and hold and hear and taste.

In the sensate culture, the chief end of man is to enjoy himself for as long as he can. Whatever helps him enjoy himself is good. What I can feel is the only true reality and value. Now of course, that's where we've arrived.

We're living in a sensate culture that assumes that my happiness is found in the senses, in what I feel. I feel happy in this, whatever this is. It's in my urges, whether bodily urges or psychological urges.

If I feel I need to do that, whatever it is, then I can do it. If I feel I am that, then nothing can say otherwise. My feelings reign, unless, of course, the one exception, if it conflicts with someone else's rights and feelings.

If it gives you pleasure, then it's good, unless it hurts someone else. Then it gets a little complicated for them. So no amount of reasoning with the sensate, no amount of truth, of facts, of science, or anything, can counter the sensate.

You can't argue that what you say you feel like doing, that that is unnatural. We can tell from biology, we can tell from anatomy, we can tell that that's unnatural. They'll just say, well, I feel like doing it, and that trumps everything else.

You can't argue that what you claim you are is false, that your feelings must be wrong. You claim you're a man, you claim to be a woman. We can tell, reality says that you're a man. And they would just say, well, I feel like a woman.

And for them, the ultimate reality in this sensate culture is their feelings. And there's no reasoning with that, because you can't reason about their feelings. The greatest value for them is satisfying those feelings.

The question isn't whether we're declining, of course we have. The question is, what comes after this? How low can we go until things fall apart in a sensate culture? The center cannot hold, because there is no center.

Everyone is centered on their own feelings. What you feel may be different from what I feel. Well, what comes next after this?

Chaos?

Mere anarchy loosed upon the land?

Dictatorship? Or revival?

A great awakening? Well, here at the end of Judges, we see how low we can go. We see it in three major parts, one per chapter. First, in chapter 19, the perversity. Second, in chapter 20, the catastrophe.

And third, in chapter 21, the quandary. In those days, when there was no king in Israel, there was perversity. How low can they go? Well, they'll go as low as the city in Genesis 19, we're in Judges 19 here, but they'll go as low as the city in Genesis 19, whose sin, God said, was very grave.

The city that became a byword for perversity. We found that out because of what happens to a Levite and his concubine. The Levite originally lives in Ephraim, north-central Israel, just north of Benjamin, and his concubine, sort of a second-class wife.

She was from... Verse 2 says the concubine was unfaithful to him, probably unfaithful by doing what she does next, which is run away. She runs away back home to her father's house, and she was there for four months by the time the Levite came to fetch her, to speak kindly to her.

In verse 3, literally means to speak to her heart, to woo her back. And notice, by the way, that he is capable of speaking kindly when it's to his advantage. Then for verses 3 to 9, we're given this extensive description.

Sometimes you want to read the Bible, you spend so much time on things that we would not think we should spend time on, this extensive description of how hospitable and generous her father is, just repeatedly urging the Levite to stay another day, you know, eat together, chill.

The first one is, you know, take a morsel of bread and relax in the morning. This morsel of bread took him all day to eat, so I don't know what's going on there. Anyway, they have a feast, and he's just very hospitable.

He's very generous. Now, you might wonder, why are we given about seven verses describing all that? It shows what hospitality should look like. So we'll understand, by contrast, at least part of what's wrong in Gibeah.

And so they started out from Benjamin, south of what will become Jerusalem, now it's still Jebus. They start out in the afternoon because he kept them at least through the morning. And as they get to Jebus, the sun is starting to go down, and the servant says, you know, let's go to Jebus, still a Canaanite city, in verse 11, but the Levite refuses to go there.

They're foreigners, he calls them in verse 12. They do not belong to the people of Israel. He's expecting more hospitality and welcoming and protection from fellow Israelites. Who knows, he's probably also thinking, you know, who knows what kind of horrible things could happen to us in a Canaanite city.

And so they press on to Gibeah or Jebus. By getting, the sun is starting to go down. They go on a little further to Gibeah. And now it's getting dark, and they go into the town square. And then is the first sign of trouble.

No one asks them to stay with them. No one invites them in to their house. Decent people in their culture were expected to show hospitality to traveling strangers, take them in, give them protection and a meal.

There's few, if any, hotels in those days. And so travelers depended on the kindness of strangers. But for some reason, the people of Gibeah don't show any kindness. One old man, however, does see them and he offers them hospitality in verse 16.

But he's not from Gibeah, he's from Ephraim, and he's just staying there temporarily. He sees the Levite and he asks, where are you going? Where are you from? In verse 17, the Levite answers and notes in verse 18, no one has taken me into his house.

He's kind of amazed at this. Why are these people so inhospitable? He's struck by the lack of hospitality. And he emphasizes that he has all the provisions he needs. Notice that I have plenty of hay, plenty of food for my donkey and our own.

In other words, he's saying, I'll be no burden to you. And so the old man invites him to stay with him, stressing in verse 20, only, the old man says, only do not spend the night in the square. He knows this down pretty well.

Now, at this point, the story has begun to sound very similar to the story in Genesis 19, where two men, who really turned out to be angels, come to Sodom and they don't find any hospitality there either from the residents.

They find only some from a foreigner in the town, Abraham's nephew, Lot. And similarities don't stop there. In fact, the author's writing judges intentionally by the words he chooses, making us recall that story from Genesis.

Just like in Genesis 19, they feast and are enjoying their meal together when the house is surrounded by men from the city. Here in verse 22, he calls those men worthless fellows, literally sons of Belial.

In both Genesis 19 and Judges 19, the men demand that the travelers be brought out so that, same phrase in both chapters, we may know them. That term often used in the Old Testament for sex. They were demanding to have homosexual sex with the travelers, and that's the perversity.

In both cases, the host, Lot in Genesis, the Ephraimite man here, they go out to the crowd to beg them not to, using the same word in both chapters, not to act wickedly or do this vile thing. It's actually translated differently in the ESV, but it's the same word in Hebrew.

And in both cases, the perverse crowd will not listen, and in both cases, tries to pound down the door to get in the house. In both cases, the host offer their women instead. Here in Judges, the Levite man grabs his concubine and throws her out to the crowd of perverts, and that too is perverse.

Husbands are supposed to love their wives and give themselves up for them, not give them up for their own skins. The Levite shows his own perversity. The sins here are all perverse. That is meaning unnatural.

It's opposite of the way that God has designed things in every way. It's a violation of hospitality. The townspeople should be offering the Levite safety, and instead of they attack him, homosexuality is perverse.

Now, some people try to claim that the Bible doesn't condemn homosexuality, that the sin here and in Genesis 19 is merely a lack of hospitality. They are perverse. They're trying to twist Scripture to make it not say what it clearly does.

Homosexuality is the acting wickedly, the vile thing that the host, in both chapters, denounce. Would it be sinful if there were no violation of the travelers? See, the way we read this, we tend to focus on the violation of their bodily autonomy, of their freedom to do what they wanted.

Would it be sinful if there was no violation of the travelers? If in both Genesis 19 and Judges 19, if the travelers, the men of the city came and kind of proposed, made a proposal, and the travelers got wanted to engage in homosexuality, would it still be sinful then with no violation of rights?

Yes, it would still be wicked and vile and perverse because it's unnatural. We don't understand that in our sin-safe culture because we think the only sin really is violating someone's free choice. And if you're not violating anyone's free choice, then what you do is no one else's.

Business.

That's the way we're kind of taught to think now. And so we see the Levite's sin is violating his wife, second class, if there is such a thing, by handing her over to the rapist against her will. And that is perverse.

Don't misunderstand me. That is what he did.

It was perverse.

Violating her rights was perverse. But we miss the Levite's perversity that he should be willing to fight and, if necessary, lay down his own life for his wife. And no, there aren't any second-class wives, either wife or not.

There's perversity all around here. Our sin-safe culture only sees the violation of rights, not the failure to fulfill responsibilities. The Levite husband is perverse because he doesn't fulfill his responsibilities, not just because he violated the concubine's rights.

Now, both are true, but not just because he violated her rights. The crowd of men from Gibi is perverse not just because they violated rights, that is wrong, of course, the Levite's right to bodily autonomy, but they're also perverse because what they want to do is unnatural, whether or not he consents.

The sin-safe culture says the ultimate value is fulfilling sensual desires. And if no one's rights are violated, nothing is wrong. The ideational culture says the ultimate value is a super-sensory, a beyond-our-senses God who has said this is vile, whether or not people consent.

So, the concubine is abused all night, only as the dawn begins to break, they let her go, it says in verse 25, and then as morning appeared, she staggered back to the house that her perverse husband sheltered in, fell down at the entrance with her hands stretched out on the threshold.

She was either dead already or she died of her wounds on the donkey ride back home. Her husband comes out and shows us, shows everyone, how much of a total jerk he is. No wonder she ran away from him.

Seeing her lying there, he says in verse 28, not kind words, but, get up, let us be going. Cold, callous, he's the sin-safe man who only cares about his own feelings. He takes her body away and when he gets back home, he cuts it up into 12 pieces, sending a mushy, bloody, stinking package to each of the 12 tribes, in verse 29.

Everyone who saw it couldn't believe it. He said, such a thing has never happened or been seen from the day the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt until this day, in verse 30. Now, they had heard about this kind of thing and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sodom was the archetype of corruption and perversity. You couldn't get any lower than Sodom, and now a town in Israel has gotten that low. Consider it. Think about what it means that we've sunk this far.

Take counsel, he says. Discuss what to do before God does to us what he did to Sodom and speak or pronounce a decision about this perversity. How low can you go? Now, in chapter 20, they consider, they take counsel, and they act.

And the result is a catastrophe. Well, first, they consider the mushy, bloody, stinking packages distributed throughout all Israel. They got a lot of attention. Men from all over Israel, it says, from Dan to Beersheba.

There's that phrase, remember, from last week, including people from Gilead, east of the Jordan River. So, from all over Israel, they assembled to the Lord. So, they're seeking the Lord's will, it says in verse 1 in chapter 20.

They gather together, they're soldiers, they're chief men from each tribe, a town called Mizpah. It's near Benjamin, very close to Gibeah. Despite the fact that a town in Israel has gotten as low as it could go, there is hope that the rest of Israel shows signs of moral health.

They're outraged. Outrage, outrage is kind of like a gag reflex. You know, if you ever start to drink some spoiled milk, you know it's spoiled, and you got a gag. That's because you're healthy, and your body is saying, no, we're not going to allow this in.

Outrage is like that, like that this is perverse, we're not allowing this in to us. The one good thing in these chapters, the one good thing, perhaps, in these three chapters is that Israel is outraged by what happened in Gibeah.

Assembled together, they asked the Levite what happened. He tells a condensed version of the story. He conveniently leaves out that he threw the concubine out to the crowd to save his own skin. He just says in verse 5, they meant to kill me, and they violated my concubine, and she is dead.

Kind of passes over the facts that don't make him look so good. He concludes in verse 6, they have done evil and a vile thing. Same word, that vile thing is the same word that old Ephraimite man used to the mob in Gibeah when he told them, don't do this vile thing.

Same word Lot used to the men of Sodom, don't do this vile thing. And so they consider as one man in verse 8, meaning that they were united, they were agreed. They agreed that they're not going to go home.

They're going to act immediately. First, they'll send out 10 of their men to go out and get provisions for the war. They're getting stocked up if necessary, a long war. And then at the end of verse 10, they will repay Gibeah, Benjamin for all the outrage.

There's that word again. Translated as vile thing when the old Ephraimite man says it to the mob. Here, the outrage that they have committed in Israel. So they're all outraged as they should be, and they're united against this one town,.

Gibeah.

Now, all of them except Benjamin. Benjamin got their mushy, bloody, stinking package, and they weren't outraged. Maybe they know what's kind of been going on in Gibeah all this time, and they've been putting up with it.

Maybe a generation or two earlier, they were outraged, but they've gotten used to it by now. They've declined. They didn't come to the meeting at Mizpah, and so the rest of Israel sent representatives throughout Benjamin calling them to join the rest of Israel in their outrage and to help them join with us, they say, to purge evil from Israel.

Notice first that Israel wanted only a surgical removal of this moral cancer of the worthless fellows in Gibeah. They were not looking for a civil war. They appeal in verse 13, give up the men, the worthless fellows in Gibeah.

That's all.

Give them up that we may put them to death and purge evil from Israel. So they're right to be outraged, and they're wise to be focused only on the worthless fellows of Gibeah. They're not overreacting yet.

But for Benjamin, blood was thicker than covenant. They respond with tribalism. My tribe, my people, my race, or my country, or my state, whether it is right or wrong, standing by, like the slogan, something is patriotic.

My country, right or wrong. Well, it may be your country, whether it's right or wrong, but whether you support it, whether you fight for it, should depend on whether it is right or wrong. It's not like many Southerners in the Civil War, many white Southerners in the Civil War, who thought, you know, many of them were thinking, and they were thinking, I don't support slavery personally.

I don't agree with it. I don't like slavery. But is my country, which they thought was their state, my country, North Carolina, or my country, Virginia, right or wrong? I'll choose to fight for it. And so they chose to fight for their state.

James Fenimore Cooper, at about that time, decried, quote, the patriotism which shouts, our country, right or wrong, regardless alike, of God and his eternal laws. But the Benjamite said, my tribe, right or wrong.

Now, sure, the punks of Gibeah shouldn't have done that, but who are these other Israelites to tell us what we can do with our town? It's like the parent who thinks his little darling, okay, shouldn't have shouted profanities at the teacher, but he'll get angry at the teacher or the principal or the coach that disciplines that brat.

My child, right or wrong. Benjamin responds with tribalism and so ends up fighting for Gibeah. That's the cause of the catastrophe. So Benjamin got his troops out alongside Gibeah, including a regiment, and chapter 20 describes, I think, 600 men, are left-handed slingshotters.

Left-handed gives them a little advantage, I guess, over right-handed men. They said they could hit a hare, such good shots. Benjamin may be outnumbered, but they're apparently better fighters. So the surgical strike, what they hoped was just a surgical strike against the worthless fellows of Gibeah, has turned out to be an all-out civil war.

Now, Israel does the godly thing and seeks the Lord's guidance in nearby Bethel. They ask God, in verse 18, who should go up first to fight against the people of Benjamin? And the Lord tells them, Judah should go up first.

So notice, they seek the Lord's guidance, how to run this war. The Lord gives them instructions on how to prosecute this war, and they follow it. And a strange thing happens, very strange. If you think that if you follow God, you follow God's word, you sought God's will, you do what he says, and the result will be immediate success.

That success is the sign of having followed God's ways. We assume that God will lead us into victory, and nothing but victory, just victory, blessings, growth, profit. But here, Israel twice seeks the Lord's guidance for the battle.

You know, they're properly outraged at sin among God's people. They've wisely begun only dealing with the worthless fellows of Gibeah. They've done everything right up until now. They hear God's instructions, they follow them, they sought the Lord, they put it into practice, and the result is twice defeat.

The first time Israel attacks Gibeah, following God's command, they lose 22 ,000 men, in verse 21. Men still outraged, they took courage, they encouraged themselves, in verse 22, getting ready for another attack.

First, they do the right thing and inquire to the Lord, in verse 23, asking God, you know, shall we, again, draw near to fight against our brothers, the people of Benjamin? Now, notice, they're not acting on their own.

They're not just kind of presumptuously assuming what they think is God's will, and then they find out that it's not because they've gone the wrong way. No, they're seeking God's will, and they are told, go up against them.

They obey. The second time, they lose 18 ,000 men, in verse 24. Now, the question is, why did Israel lose twice, following God's word? That's a difficult question. If you assume that following God will always result in immediate success, that if you get guidance from God, you follow it, then you will have success.

You'll have victory and wealth and health right now. Well, that's what the sensate demand. The ultimate reality, the sensate think the ultimate reality is their comfort, their blessing, their success, their being wealthy or healthy.

And the reason they follow God, the reason they go to church, the reason they read the Bible, the reason they do all, they pray, the reason they do all that is to get that stuff, to get the money or the health, whatever the blessing they think is promised.

And if you're a sensate person, you can believe in God, but you'll believe in a therapeutic God, a God who exists to give you that success, that money, that healing, that happiness, those good feelings right now.

He certainly doesn't exist to twice lead you into a catastrophe. For the third time, Israel seeks the Lord about whether to go to battle against Benjamin. This time in verse 28, not only are they told to do it, but promised, I will give them into your hand.

Notice that their success depends on God giving it to them. I'll give it into your hands. Victory is in his hands. Our obedience, that is our outrageous sin, our willingness to do church discipline, to follow his word, do what he says, that should be taken for granted.

We should do that whether or not we are promised success for it. Whether or not we succeed or not depends on God giving it to us. Well, here God gives them success, and he does it through strategy. Now, some people would think, well, God's promised us success, so we're just going to go out there, not going to worry about anything.

We don't want to march in order. We're just going to go out there and have our success. No, God promises them success, and they come up with a strategy. They apply themselves. They think they plot an ambush, like Joshua did against Ai, drawing out the Benjamites from Gibeah with a feigned attack that they kind of retreat from, and that draws them out of the city as a distraction for 10 ,000 men to attack Gibeah from the other direction, and they set it on fire, and they'll have the Benjamite soldiers then caught in between them, the two now two Israelite armies.

Benjamite soldiers will now know that they're defeated because they'll look back and their city's on fire, the one they've been fighting for, and so they'll be discouraged, and they'll run away, and they'll get caught, and Israel then kills Benjamin's troops, who are twice, by the way.

Benjamin's troops are twice in verses 44 and 46, called men of valor. It means they're noblemen. They're men of courage, of skill, who have trained themselves for battle. They're self-disciplined men who taught themselves to be good soldiers, but they applied their skills and their character and their virtues in support of evil, kind of like the brave, selfless, skilled, hardworking German soldiers of World War II.