Daily Devotion

September 26, 2016

What Have We Become?


Judges 19 is a story about a wife who left her husband and returned to her parent’s home. Determined not to give up, the husband pursued her and eventually she decided to return home with him. As they traveled, they became exhausted and decided to stay in a home that was graciously offered to them for the night.

 

Evil men came to the home later that night and demanded to have sex with the Levite man but ended up taking his wife instead. Before the night was over she had been beaten badly, raped again and again and was left for dead.

 

With her last bit of strength she crawled all the way back to the home they were staying in. When her husband opened the door, he found his wife dead with her lifeless hands clinging to the threshold of the house.

 

The husband’s grief turned to outrage, not just at what had happened to his wife, but at what had happened to his nation, his people and the depravity that had come to the doorstep of the home where he was staying.

 

The man’s outrage caused him to do something that, at first glance, will sound morbid and even gross. He was determined to take a drastic action that would soon be a defining moment for his nation. He chopped his wife into 12 pieces and sent one piece of her body to each tribe in the nation of Israel.

 

His message was:

 

Nothing like this has ever happened or been seen from the day when the sons of Israel came up from the land of Egypt to this day. Consider it, take counsel and speak up!” -Judges 19:29-30

 

This defining moment stirred 400,000 fighting men to action. One man’s question, “Is this what we have become?” ignited change, in his nation.

 

What has our nation become? Today people go to great extremes to defend a woman’s right to kill innocent babies. School administrators go to great lengths to be sure there is no mention of God in graduation speeches.

 

When businesses like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A are being sued for millions of dollars and persecuted by a liberal media that attacks anyone who stands up for what they believe, we cannot simply sit out and think someone else will fight the battle. We are the “someone else.”

 

Each of us should be outraged enough to say, “I’m going to act. I’m going to vote. I’m going to stand for what the Bible says.” This is a crucial time for every citizen to decide what we are going to do with a nation whose hands are on the threshold of the church.

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