65,000

Judges 20:46 On that day twenty-five thousand Benjamite swordsmen fell, all of them valiant fighters.

Wars don’t make sense. This link will take you to a video that visually represents the numbers of deaths by country for WWII. Eighty five million people died as a result of that single war. 85,000,000. That is about three people every second for a year. That is a lot of death.

So when we read in the Scriptures about 65,000 dying, maybe we shouldn’t be so shocked. It is just 65,000. WHAT! “Just 65,000!” Yikes, to even put it this way is obscene. That is 40 minutes worth of WWII’s totals.

But of course the world of 1000BC probably had a population of between 50 & 100 million people. That is far fewer than the 2.3 billion around 1940. WWII cost the lives of 1 in 27 people on the planet. The 65,000 battle cost 1 in 1540 people. We are a much more efficient mass killer than they were!

All this said to make a point. We gasp at the high numbers of deaths in battles in the Scriptures, but think nothing about the mass killings of our own time. We should be much more shocked about our own hearts than about the ancient’s hearts.

The 1,100 slaughtered in Israel in November would be 38,000 US citizens if the same percentage of the population was killed. How would you feel if 38,000 American’s had been killed in a single attack. Remember when we had 2000 killed on 9/11? Fourteen times more that that horrible world-changing day. We had better stand with Israel.

The tragedy of our text is that those killed in this battle were all Israelites. It was relatives killing relatives. During the Civil War somewhere around 700,000 Americans were killed by other Americans. War stinks. And family wars are the worst.

And what caused this ancient battle? Men’s lust! That is right. Men, who couldn’t control their sexual appetites and their need for control, violated a woman. And the woman’s husband called the nation to action. And they acted.

The cost of sin is much more than we could ever imagine. It cost a life.