Year 4, Day 270: Judges 9

Theological Commentary: Click Here 

Discipleship Focus: Competency

• Competency: Being able to accomplish what one is called to do.

Joshua 9 gives us a break from the typical judge stories so that we can remember what it looks like to have a man of utter incompetence in charge.  Abimelech – a name that means “My Father is King” – is utterly destructive as a ruler.  The question we should all ask upon this realization is what about Abimelech makes him such a bad ruler?

I think the answer is fairly simple.  Abimelech is only concerned with his needs and his desires.  After all, who goes and kills their whole family except the person who is so concerned with legitimate rivals legitimately laying claim to the kingship that Abimelech wants?  Who sows salt into a perfectly good field – effectively making the soil unable to sustain life – except the person who is solely concerned with hurting the people to whom the field belongs and not concerned about the other effects of their destructive choice?  Time and time again Abimelech makes choices in which the only person that he considers is himself.  He is self-centered to the core.

It is this that makes him utterly incompetent as a leader.  Yes, leaders do have to make hard decisions.  Furthermore, very few decisions will make all of the constituents happy.  There will always be people who grumble against any decision.  But the truly poor leader is the leader that only makes decisions based on their own desires and their own interests and their own whims.  The more self-centered we become the less competent we are for leadership.

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