No such deed

And so it was that all who saw it said, "No such deed has been done or seen from the day that the children of Israel came up from the land of Egypt until this day. Consider it, confer, and speak up!" – Judges 19v30

As they say on television, if you have small children you might want to send them out of the room for a few minutes.

We look around us today and we read of horrible acts going on around us. There is no need to recount them here. We read our papers and watch our televisions and browse the internet and pretty soon it becomes obvious that cruelty and violence are rampant. Sometimes we might think that things are so bad today that nobody ever could have been like this in the past.

Or, some may argue the opposite, that man is not really so bad. We were interviewed on the radio a few weeks ago and one of the questions asked was about why we had such a focus on man’s sinfulness. My response was simple – ‘look at our track record!’

And yet, here in the time of the judges, when there was no king in Israel, we have a situation. It was so bad that the Bible tells us that no such deed had been done since Israel left Egypt. Here is the story in a nutshell.

A certain Levite had a concubine who had proved herself unfaithful. She has wandered off so he went off to get her and bring her back. As night fell they found themselves in Gibeah, in the land of Benjamin, where an old man convinced them to spend rhe night in his house. A little while later the men of the city came and demanded that the Levite be sent out so that they could have sex with him. Instead the old man offered his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine. The attackers didn’t like it, but the Levite threw his concubine to them. The men raped her to death and she made her way back to the doorstep where she was found the next morning. The Levite was so angry that he cut her body into twelve parts and sent one part to each tribe of Israel to stir up anger against the men of Gibeah and to prompt retaliation against Benjamin.

Pretty sickening isn’t it. There is so much wrong with this story that I am not going to dig into it. It is enough to say that we would not be shocked to read this story in our newspapers. It is sad that this sounds almost normal after our diets of CSI and Criminal Minds and any other number films and programmes that are rampant today. What draws us to this? What makes this kind of lurid story so fascinating?

There is no one that does righteous, no, not one. All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. There is no one that does not sin.

Praise God for our Redeemer, for mankind would surely never find deliverance for himself.