Judges 21:24-25 “At that time the Israelites left that place and went home to their tribes and clans, each to his own inheritance. In those days Israel had no king, everyone did as he saw fit.”
The background of the story is a civil war against the tribe of Benjamin because of its immoral behavior. A homosexual mob had raped and killed an innocent visitor and that was the “norm.” The tribe of Benjamin had become a strong, wealthy, war-like group of people tolerant of wicked behavior. They completely tossed God out of their thinking. They were disgusting to the rest of the nation. The downward progression of the nation was: taking God out of the picture, ignoring Godly judges who represented God, disobedience to the word of God, deciding right and wrong on their own. In a word, they adopted relativism.
Principle: To have laws or ethics with no relationship to God’s Word will create a dangerous place to live.
C.S. Lewis said you have to know what a straight line is before you know what a crooked one is. Ethics without God, without an understanding of the Bible, is like measuring something with no marks on it. We cannot decide what is right or wrong without accountability to the Bible.
Adolph Hitler knew that he could not accomplish his evil ends without destroying the influence of Bible on the world. Priests, pastors and rabbis became targets of his wrath. Then he went after behavior modification in the educational world which is a propaganda push-over when the Bible is abandoned. In the end, fourteen million people died in concentration camps.
Stalin systematically eliminated his enemies sending some thirty-five million people to their deaths in Gulags. Dialectic materialism was the god of the day when the God of the universe and His Word were banned from society. Few objected.
On a personal level we need to let God control our personal and business behavior and be accountable to the Word of God and Jesus Christ in everything we do.
