Life Verse - Part 7

"...everyone did what was right in their own eyes." Judges 17:6

I come from a fairly large family--mom, dad, eight children and Boozer (the family St. Bernard). Nice name for a dog, right?! Boozer died from liver damage (just kidding).

With a family of ten life can get pretty hectic. If there isn't some cooperation--some "pulling together" a family can get pulled apart. If everybody is intent on doing their own thing it won't take long for chaos to ensue.

To keep any cohesion in a group of people--whether it is a family, a business, a church, etc--requires a common mission with some common values. Without that people start splintering off in all directions.

Take my marriage, for example. If I have a totally different objective or goal for my marriage and a totally different set of values from my wife, chances are the marriage won't last. Thankfully Rose and I have been on the same page--although she still fails to see the redemptive impact of ESPN (still working on her). But when marriages, families, churches, businesses--even nations--start pulling apart, there are real and predictable consequences.

Go ahead and read through the book of Judges. You will find a recurring theme with a recurring statement: "everyone did what was right in their own eyes." Why? Because they took their eyes off God. Once they bailed on God's agenda--his purposes and priorities--it became a free-for-all. And the free-for-all always produced negative consequences. Israel, quite predictably, moved from apostasy (unfaithfulness to God) to moral decline to oppression from foreign nations (the book of Judges views this as divine chastening) to urgent appeals to God to deliverance through a judge/ruler.

And it didn't happen once, or even twice. It happened over and over and over. Each subsequent generation seemed to have to learn the hard lessons of the previous generation for themselves.

While there is a part of me that wants to say, "What a bunch of dummies!" there is another part of me that says, "I'm not so different." If there is a generation in American history that bailed on God in record numbers it would be the baby-boomers because, after all, we had it all figured out--sex, drugs, rock and roll and down with "the man." Now we boomers have raised Gen X and Y who, in huge numbers, have no spiritual roots or moral compass whatsoever.

The thing Israel had going for them is that when they were in trouble they were at least smart enough (or humble enough) to call out to God for help. I pray we will do the same. If we don't--if everyone does what is right in their own eyes; if we reject absolute truth (by the way, truth by its very nature is absolute) and mock any sense of a binding moral code we will get exactly what we ask for--everyone doing their own thing.

And the results, as the book of Judges attests, are quite predictable.

So what do you say? We who call ourselves followers of Jesus, let's submit ourselves to our leader, call out to him for divine wisdom and guidance, and DWJD (do what Jesus did).