Year 4, Day 280: Judges 19

Theological Commentary: Click Here 

Discipleship Focus: Authority

• Authority: Our calling.  This comes from God as king.  Because He calls us as His representatives, He gives us authority to go and do His will.

I have always been disgusted with this Levite in this chapter.  He should know God’s ways – although it isn’t fair for me to expect him to live up to them perfectly.  But he should at least know God’s ways.  He should know about God’s love and God’s ability to keep His promise to be with us.  He more than anyone else in the story should be able to reflect God’s ways and understand what a godly response should look like.  He should be able to live out of the authority that God our King gives to us.

But he doesn’t live out God’s love in any dimension in his life.  Take a look at this woman around whom the story sets up.  Here is a man who has a concubine.  He should know what godly marriage looks like.  He should know how much importance God places upon marriage.  But he doesn’t have a wife, he has a concubine.  Although note that he does have a father-in-law.  So we can understand that this is a political and social marriage, not a union of love.  This is never clearer in the story than when he pushes his concubine out of the house at Gibeah in order for her to be raped and abused by the men of the town.  He has God-given authority to demonstrate love into the life of the woman who should be his wife.  Instead he chooses to treat her like an unimportant concubine.

This expands into a larger issue with the Levite.  As a religious leader within Israel, he should have been an example of godly living.  He should be a part of the group that sets the bar for what morality and ethic look like among the Hebrew people.  But what does he do?  He expects the people of Gibeah to act morally without considering his own morality!  He judges the people of Gibeah and makes sure to declare the amorality of the people of Gibeah throughout the nation.  Don’t get me wrong.  What the people of Gibeah did was wrong.  But it is not in the authority of the Levite to judge them.  There is always a danger when we act out of God’s authority in judging others without first taking a hard long look into our own life to judge ourselves, too.

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