Judges 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Some are old enough to remember the old Mad magazine which began publication in the 1950s. Mad was essentially a parody of life, parody ads, parody movie reviews, parody articles. It occurs to me that more and more today there is less and less humor. We are a humorless society. Parody is dying because absurdity is dying; it doesn’t exist. If there is no absurdity, something that is absurd or not according to the created norms, then there ceases to be humor. That is why you can watch situational comedies from the 1960s, and the things that would have been humorous then, like interpersonal relationships based on God’s created order, do not seem humorous now. There is no absurdity because everyone does that which is right in his own eyes. Anything goes and therefore nothing is apart from the norm.
In Judges 17 and 18 you basically have a collection of stories that amount to the Mad magazine of Bible stories. These stories are God’s account of things that actually happened, and although they are bizarre by nature, their bizarre nature is precisely the point. They make a very clear point precisely because of the bizarre nature. We do not have time to look at the actual stories in these two chapters, but suffice it to say people in Israel were making their own gods. They were making their own religion. They were hiring their own priests instead of submitting to God’s ordained order at that time. Judges 17:6 says, “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Chapter 18 reaffirms, “In those days there was no king in Israel.” There are a number of other verses that bear this out.
You come to a very important conclusion from reading these bizarre stories: without a common authority all that is left to govern our society is raw power and individual ambition. When I say society, I mean a social group of people, whether a family, a community, a church, a city, a county, or a nation. Without a common authority, whether the Constitution or the Word of God, all that is left to govern a society is raw power and individual ambition. My greatest authority is the Word of God. When you lack that, all you have is a country, you don’t have a nation anymore. For many years Israel was a nation, a group of people with a common authority, God Jehovah, who were seeking a country. We talk about the land of Canaan; that was a country.
At this point in Judges 17-18 they were more like a country, they occupied common ground, but they didn’t have a common authority. They had forgotten God and had made gods out of whatever they wanted, hired their own priests, and so on. They ceased to be a nation and became a country without a nation. I’ve sometimes been in churches that are bursting the seams of the building they are renting with a hundred people, but I’ve also been in auditoriums that could seat a thousand people but held only a hundred. I’d rather be a church seeking a building than a building seeking a church.
Today, you need to decide what your authority will be. The Bible is the authority that gives guidance for life because it is God’s Word and God’s mind on our every matter. So when you come to Judges 17-18, there are some bizarre stories that don’t really make sense and are complicated, but they make for a very clear point: without a common authority all that is left to govern society is raw power and individual ambition.