God's Word and I'm grateful that you even put on the English weather so that I would feel especially at home. Let us pray before the proclamation of God's Word. Oh Lord God and loving Heavenly Father, you are indeed a God who dwells in unapproachable light. You are transcendent, you are infinite, eternal. You are also all-wise and your providence is perfect. Yet there are passages in your Word that are dark and disturbing. As we read them, Lord, they are difficult to understand. We know that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful. for rebuking, for teaching, for upbuilding the saints, and yet some passages seem more troubling than others. We pray, O Lord, this morning that as we come to grapple with one of the darkest moments in the history of your people, your Holy Spirit, Lord, would indeed enlighten our hearts and minds that even in the depths of the depravity that is set out before us in Judges 19, we might see the glorious grace of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. For we pray these things in his name. Amen. It comes as no surprise, of course, that today there's a lot of criticism of the church. Whenever you switch on the news, there's always, it seems, some scandalous story surrounding somebody who professes to be a Christian or some church. What's interesting in the light of these kind of criticisms is that nobody, nothing is more critical, more pungent in its expose of the sins and the failings of God's people than the Bible itself. And that's why I've chosen this morning to speak on the passage Judges 19, because if you read scripture, It is very clear that Judges 19 is one of the most brutal exposes of the kind of sin and depravity that can exist within the people of God that has ever been written. It occurs, of course, in the context of the book of Judges. It comes towards the end of the Book of Judges. The Book of Judges really is the story of the steady corruption of Israel in the Promised Land until she is indistinguishable in the way she thinks and behaves from the nations around. We get hints of this actually in the very first chapter. If you go back this afternoon, perhaps to remind yourselves of the events of Judges chapter 1, we hear there about the defeat of the pagan king Adonai Bezek. And the punishment of Adonai Bezek is that he has his thumbs and his toes chopped off. And he makes this interesting declaration that, you know, as I've done with other kings, so it's now been done to me. And one of the ways one might be tempted to read that little scenario is saying, well, Adonai Bezek is getting his just desserts. Actually, it's more sinister than that. What we're being told is that Israel is handling her defeated enemies in exactly the same way as the pagans do. Adonai Bezek should have been put to death. When Israel merely amputates little bits of his body and mimics the practices of the pagan nations they're meant to be supplanting, we get a hint in the context of Judges as a whole of the basic dynamic of the Judges' story, and that dynamic is this. that Israel will increasingly come to be indistinguishable from the pagan nations around. When you look at the book of Judges, all the great heroes are flawed. It's actually, the big problem with the Book of Judges is actually Hebrews 11. Because Hebrews 11 tells you what a great bunch of guys the judges were. And when you go back and look at the Book of Judges, every single one of them is kind of deeply flawed. I suppose it's encouraging in a way that one can be deeply flawed and yet still a great exemplar of the faith. But when you think about it, think about Gideon. Gideon comes from a Baal-worshipping family. And if you trace the career of Gideon, yes, he sort of, he rescues the people of Israel, but then by the time he dies, he's become worse than that which he initially replaced. Jephthah makes a rash vow and infamously sacrifices his own daughter. Samson, perhaps the most remarkable hero of the judges cycle. born to be a Nazirite, born to be devoted to God, born as somebody whose life and behavior is to be especially corralled by specific legislation surrounding the Nazirite vow, has contempt for that vow almost from the first moment we hear of him. and ultimately, of course, inflicts a crushing defeat on the Philistines in a context created by his own unfaithfulness to God. And that sets the scene then for these final chapters. Just before this, we hear the story of a different man, Micah and his mother. That's a dysfunctional household. It fosters idolatry. And Micah hires a Levite called Jonathan to be his priest and to look after the idols that Micah himself has made. We then have the corruption of a tribe. The Danites come along, they steal the idols of this man Micah and his own personal priest in order to sort of institutionalize this corruption that's been born in one family throughout an entire tribe. And that brings us then to Judges 19. And really the last few chapters from the beginning of the Micah story to Judges 19, it's the final cascading collapse of morality within Israel. The plot is fairly straightforward. An unnamed Levite, there's nothing in the text to suggest that this is the same Levite that Micah hired as his own private priest. A named Levite and a woman described as a concubine. There is no modern American equivalent, I think, of being a concubine. It's a sort of second-class wife. Mistress, the old-fashioned term mistress, doesn't quite capture it. Mistress is a sort of girlfriend on the side. She has more status than that, but she's not the honored, valued wife that one would hope for in such an arrangement. And clearly, it's a dysfunctional marriage. She is unfaithful. She leaves him. She returns to her father. The Levite retrieves her, and then there is this semi-farcical account of the father-in-law in delaying his departure. One of the interesting things about this passage is, when I read it, it always reminds me of those, perhaps you've had the experience when you're watching a movie, and you think the movie's a comedy. First 25 minutes, there's a lot of farcical, humorous stuff going on, and then suddenly, something changes. An unexpected event happens, or the music changes, and you realize, actually, I'm not watching a comedy. The comedy merely set things up for the very sinister stuff that is going to unfold in the second half of the plot. That's kind of what this story is. We get this farcical presentation of hospitality and then suddenly the note changes. They set off home as night approaches. The party is near a city of Jebus. It's not a city occupied by the people of God. And so the Levite will not stop there. It's not an Israelite city. He wants to stop where he thinks he will be safe, within the bosom of God's people. And so he heads on to Gibeah, the city of the Benjaminites. And there he's offered hospitality by an old man, but interestingly enough, a foreigner. a resident alien, not a Benjaminer, but a foreigner. And while there, of course, the men of the city surround the house and demand that the Levite is thrown out so that they can assault and abuse him. The old man refuses, even offers his own daughter as a substitute. And finally, the Levite throws the concubine outside where she is brutalized to the point of death. Though, interestingly, another sinister aspect of this passage is you will search in vain in this passage to find the moment when the Levite's concubine is declared to be dead. Does she die as a result of the assault, or does she die as a result of the concubine, of the Levite, dismembering her? The story is horrifically ambiguous on that point. And that leads us to the final blood-curdling scene where the Levite departs and divides up her corpse, which he then sends throughout Israel as testimony to the crime. There is no more horrific story in terms of its human detail in the Bible than this. Crucifixion clearly is horrific, but we get less detail in some ways. on the crucifixion and the agonies and the pains that involve than we see here. So what are we to make of this? Well, the first thing I want you to notice about this passage is that which John has already drawn your attention to before he read the passage. That little phrase, there was no king in Israel. It's used numerous times in these last chapters. Now on one level, we could give it a very innocent reading. I think it has a certain innocent meaning in terms of it's a chronological statement. The kingdom has not yet been established. The kingdom will be established under Saul and then continue under David and Solomon and then of course get divided. The writer's making a chronological statement. There's no king in Israel at this point. That allows us to locate this chronologically. But like all great writers, He's not making a single statement, we might say, with the one statement. He's also making a moral point. All did what was right in their own eyes. It speaks of the people's rejection of the Lord as King. Remember later on when Samuel is approached by the people of Israel and they demand a king and Samuel is distressed because he takes this as a criticism of his own leadership of Israel and he goes before the Lord and the Lord says, you know, you shouldn't be distressed by this. It's not you they've rejected, it's me. Israel always has a king in a sense. The Lord is the king of Israel. And when the text here declares that there was no king in Israel, it's telling us essentially that the Israelites are living in a state of what in the 17th century would have been called practical atheism. They believe in God, they just live as if he does not exist. There is no king in Israel. And one of these things, one of the things that this passage will draw out is once God's kingship is rejected, Everything's up for grabs. Made in God's image, made to respond to God's word and God's commands. When human beings reject God, they reject that which ultimately divines who they are. We might say they dehumanize themselves in a profound and perverse way. If God is not king, we might say, we choose our own king. We can define ourselves in any way we wish. That, of course, is emblematic of the age in which we currently live. Every individual has the right to define themselves, seems to be their own king. What Churches 19 does, shows us that this is not actually a glorious and liberating thing. This is a terrifying and disorienting thing. It plunges Israelite society into a moral vortex. It shows what a world without God looks like. I'm reminded of the, can I quote the Rolling Stones from Jeff's pulpit? I remember the line in the Rolling Stones song, now that every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints. That's Judges 19. That's Judges 19. So the first thing then to notice is what we're getting here is the mask being torn off. The polite face of the rejection of God. This is what it comes to. Why does it come to this? Well, the second point I want to make is this. Notice Sin here defaces the image of God. You might say, well, what's new about that? There's no particularly great insight into that. But I want to suggest that we get a specific example here of a specific kind of defacing of the image. The lack of hospitality, that's critical to this passage. Hospitality is central to biblical ethics. For any of you who have traveled in the Near East or the Middle East, you will know how important hospitality is in Near Eastern, Middle Eastern culture. I remember backpacking with a friend through Turkey in the 1980s. I was 19. Seems insane now, because in those days when you went to Turkey, you just vanished for three months. You didn't text mum when you arrived. Your mum and dad just hoped you reappeared again at some point when your money ran out, which I did, thankfully. But one of the things that I remember about Turkey was the remarkable hospitality of the people there. Secular country, but they were mainly Muslims. saturated in Near Eastern and Middle Eastern culture. And the opening of the home and the sharing of meals was critically important. That world is a kind of vestige of what we see here in Judges 19. The Old Testament contains numerous commands. to care for and show hospitality to people, particularly to sojourners, strangers, foreigners. In Exodus 22 and Deuteronomy 10, it continues in the New Testament. It's one of the marks of the genuine people of God. Matthew 25, the Lord says this. Then the king will say to those on his right, come, you who are blessed by my father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me food. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. You might say, I was a sojourner, and you gave me hospitality. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me. Hebrews 13, as the writer of the Hebrews says, do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers. for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." So hospitality, key part of biblical ethics, carried forward into the New Testament. It's one of the qualifications for eldership, of course. My own take on the qualifications for eldership is this, with the exception of teaching, none of the qualifications for eldership don't represent behaviors or character traits that shouldn't be normative for all Christians. I think what the elder is, is to be that guy in church that you can point your kids to and say, when you grow up and be a Christian, you want to be like him. You want to run your household like that guy does. You want to reflect the way that guy treats people. Hospitality is key to being an elder, because hospitality is supposed to be key to being the people of God. And that's because it's part, or I would say, or reflects in some mysterious way, the nature of God himself. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God in Trinity. Persons of the Trinity take constant delight in each other in an eternal relationship of love. They relate to each other continuously in an open and delighting way. Hospitality is rooted in God's character as it manifests itself in history. Deuteronomy 10, for the Lord your God is a God of God and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who is not partial and takes no bribe. Then we come to the character of God. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and he loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. And that becomes the foundation, then, for the ethics of the people of God. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in Egypt. This chapter, from beginning to end, is all about hospitality, the absurd hospitality of the father-in-law and the complete lack of hospitality in the city. It's ironic, isn't it? that the Levite avoids Jebus, because he fears he will not find hospitality there, because that's not where the people of God are. He goes to Gibeah, where hospitality should have been part of the intuition of the way people lived, and he finds no hospitality at all. In some ways, the moment we know everything's going horribly wrong, in the narrative is when the man is in the town square and nobody opens their home to him. That's the moment when, if this was a movie, the music suddenly changes key from a major key to a minor key. It's when it becomes not so much a situation comedy as something very, very sinister indeed. It's a challenge for us, of course, isn't it? If the church is the place where heaven breaks in to this earthly sphere, if Christians are those in whom the image of God is being restored day by day, week by week, through the Holy Spirit, through the ordinary means of grace, then hospitality should be a hallmark of the church. Elders are to set an example in this. They're to, as I say, to represent the normative aspirations of every Christian. It's a challenge to those of us who are elders, who do hold ordained office in the church. Are we hospitable? Can we be more hospitable? And it's a challenge to everyone in the church. Not everyone has the same resources as everybody else. But are we hospitable and welcoming? not just to those of our own number, but to the sojourners in our midst, the outsiders. Isn't it funny how objects of hospitality always remember it more than subjects of hospitality? What do I mean by that? I was speaking in London last year, and the gentleman I was speaking to, when he contacted me, he said, I noticed we were both on the faculty at the University of Nottingham in the early 1990s. He said, but I don't think we ever met. And I emailed him back, and I said, oh, we did meet. Because when I started at the University of Nottingham, and my wife was finishing out her teaching contract in Scotland, and I was all on my own, on the first Sunday, I attended your church, the church where you worshipped, and you and your wife invited me back for lunch. You never forget, as the object of hospitality, the kindness of the person who gave it. It didn't surprise me that he didn't remember me. He'd probably given his hospitality to hundreds of people over the years. But to the one who receives hospitality, it makes all the difference, all the difference in the world. Let us not neglect being hospitable. Let us not underestimate the power of hospitality in drawing people into the kingdom. Next notice. I'll put this rather bluntly. Sodom is alive and well in Israel. If you are familiar with your New Testament, which I assume many if not all of you are in your Old Testament, many if not all of you are, you will know there is an analogous passage in Genesis. Genesis 19, the experience of Lot in Sodom. What is interesting is that a lot of the language of Genesis 19 is picked up and dropped down in Judges 19. In other words, the writer of Judges, by the way he constructs the text, wants you to make that connection. We read Judges 19 in the context of Genesis 19. Why? After 18 chapters in Judges, we have reached the point where there is no difference between Israel and Sodom. We have reached the point where Sodom is not somewhere out there, it's somewhere in here. That's the point that the writer is making. The people of God can and do become indistinguishable from the pagan nations around them. That is a terrifying and tragic indictment. It raises an interesting question, of course, doesn't it? So why does God not destroy Israel, or at least the Benjaminites, in the way that he destroyed Sodom? Well, we can speculate about that. We can never exhaustively probe the mind of God and know things that he does not reveal. But as you read this passage, it's hard not to have your mind drawn to, well, what is the significance of Benjamin? Well, Benjamin, of course, gives us the first and rather disastrous king of Israel. Some people say the book of Judges is actually written by somebody who definitely wants to sort of downplay the importance or the righteousness of Benjamin because of what happens later. But Benjamin is also mentioned in the New Testament. Philippians 3, Paul says this, if anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin. Paul is a Benjaminite. Think of the significance of that. Let that sink in at this point. I'm guessing that pretty much all of us here are probably what we would call Gentiles in background and probably came to the faith either because our Gentile parents catechized us and brought us up in the faith or we heard the word preached by a Gentile somewhere. We are all the fruit of the mercy of the mission to the Gentiles. Ultimately, we might say, in terms of our spiritual genealogy, we all track back to Paul. Had the Lord destroyed Benjamin on this day, there would be no Paul. Yes, you can imagine, every fiber in the being of the parents of this poor woman who was slaughtered in such a horrible and callous way would have wanted vengeance on the Benjamins. they would be less than human if they did not want that. It might have seemed unjust that God did not wipe the Benjaminites off the face of the earth. And yet in the grand scheme of history, it comes to make a kind of sense. The Benjaminites will be punished, but they will not suffer the fate of Sodom. And as a result, we can sit here today and call on the name of Christ for salvation. The passage also, I think, points us finally to the nature of love. There are many things one could say about the crime the Benjaminites commit. And indeed the The assistance they're given in a strange and perverse way by the Levite. One of the things I think that we can draw out without getting into the gory details is this. What are we seeing here? We're seeing those who think of other people as objects. They think of other people as things. The Benjaminites con themselves into thinking they are God. Everybody else becomes a thing, an unworthy of respect. The Levite clearly thinks of his concubine, his second-class wife, as a thing, as ultimately he offers her up to save his own skin. that shows the level of dysfunction in their marriage and shows what he thinks of love. famous speech made in the British Parliament in the early 1960s when the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sacked a large number of important members of his cabinet in order to save his own political career. Michael Foot, a Labour MP who was also a great public speaker, stood up the day after and in a speech criticising the Prime Minister he said this, greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life. that captures the Levite here, greater love hath no man than he lay down his wife for his life. What can we say in response? Love looks on others as people, not as things. Maybe you're a young girl here and a guy asks you out on a date. You don't want to look into that guy's eyes and see that he's just seeing you as an object that he can use. You don't want to see that. You don't want to date a guy like that. You want to look into his eyes and see that he sees you as a person worthy of the respect of which persons deserve. Think of the description of husbands and wives in the New Testament. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. This is the last lesson we learn then from this passage, judges. It's about true love. What we see here is not love. It's the degeneration of human beings, the point where they see others merely as objects. It's fascinating in the last 12 months the number of books written by atheist feminists have emerged, arguing that the sexual revolution was a really bad thing for women. Why? Well, you could summarize their arguments by saying because it taught men that they could get away with treating women as objects and not as persons. That's the lesson of Judges 19. I texted a friend and said, I've just read this book. Should we perhaps point out to this person that Christians have been saying this for hundreds and hundreds of years? That's the lesson of Judges 19. When the image of God gets defaced, other people become objects. And when other people become objects, we feel justified in treating them abominably. What should we therefore do as Christians in response? We should remind ourselves of the love of God. How does God demonstrate His love? He does not see the Church as an object for His manipulation. He sees the Church as His bride for whom He should sacrifice Himself. What we see here is the exact opposite of the drama of the Gospel. Here we have human beings setting themselves up as kings and destroying others. We see the depth of human depravity. We see the distortion of God's image. And when we set this passage against the glory of the gospel in the New Testament, we come to understand even more. the depths, the glorious depths of the grace of God shown forth in the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us pray. Lord God, we do thank you that your ways are not our ways. Your foolishness is much higher than our wisdom. We ask, O Lord, that in our day-to-day lives we might continually come to you, bow the knee, acknowledge you as our King. and that your Holy Spirit might work within us to restore your image that we, Lord, might become to mirror in our relationships, in our marriages, in our friendships, in our hospitality, the great and glorious character of our merciful God. For we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. We will now sing Psalm 94, section A.