-- Saturday, 9//4/10 -- TWO WRONGS - Judges 21
J.R. & Bonnie Ricks
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TWO WRONGS – Judges 21
Israel had nearly wiped out the tribe of Benjamin. Just in the nick of time, the men of Israel realized they'd better stop killing Benjamites or there would be none left. Now only 600 Benjamite men remained. No women. No one to assure that the tribe of Benjamin would continue. The men of the other tribes were in a pickle. They had taken two oaths, both in a fit of anger… both without thinking through to the consequences. And now they were stuck with them. First, they had sworn they would not give up any of their own women to be wives for the tribe of Benjamin. Since Israelites could not marry the women of Canaan, that left no available women for the Benjamites. Also, Israel had sworn to kill anyone who did not join in the fight against the tribe of Benjamin.
Ahah! There was the solution! They sent 12,000 men over to Jabesh Gilead – a town that didn't send anyone to fight – to wipe them out. They killed all the men and every woman who was not a virgin. The leftovers came to 400 virgins from Jabesh Gilead, but that meant 200 of the Benjamites wouldn't have wives. Oh, wow. They were still in a predicament, weren't they? But they came up with a "perfect" solution. They told the Benjamites to go up to Shiloh at the time of the annual festival of the Lord and hide in the fields. When the virgin girls of Shiloh danced by, the Benjamites should grab the ones they wanted and head home. Then when the girls' fathers complained to their leaders, they would be asked to forget it. The Benjamites needed wives, and these men had not "given" them their daughters. So everybody was clean, right?
How many times do you and I do the same thing? We make a mess of something, then do something else wrong in the process of correcting it. We commit this wrong and this wrong and that wrong, hoping that somehow the sum total will end up as a "right". But it just doesn't work that way. We need to concentrate on staying away from the "wrongs" altogether, but if we do commit a wrong, we must remember that compounding the situation with other wrongs doesn't make it better.
Remember when you were a kid and you did something you knew your parents would be furious about? So you lied to them about it? But your lie conflicted with something else, so you had to tell another lie to smooth it out? And then it seems that the two lies combined created a situation that made it necessary for you to beat up your little brother? Even though he hadn't done anything?
Get the picture? Adding another wrong action to what is already a bad situation usually appears to be the easiest and most expedient thing to do. And, many times, it may seem to be the most logical. But it's never the right thing to do. Instead of alleviating the problem, adding wrong to wrong will always compound it in some way. So the next time you're tempted to take the easy way out, remember that Jesus' way is the only truly easy way.
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