30Everyone who saw it said, “Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do!”
This chapter begins with the words, “In those days Israel had no king.” And it ends with the words above. In between is the account of moral degradation and brutal rape. These things are not just repulsive to our ears, but they were repulsive to the people of God during that time as well. Just as now, there can be pockets of extreme evil in a society. Sometimes the evil is hidden behind a closed door. Sometimes it is out in the open, but tolerated by the society at large. In this country we embrace “tolerance” as the highest moral value, so we don’t dare point out obvious evil, being afraid we will be labeled “intolerant”. If you are “intolerant”, so the storyline goes, then you are a bigot and racist, and must be silenced. So we tolerate the moral decline of society. We wonder how rape is rampant on college campuses and blame the colleges rather than blaming the society at large, or even our own moral choices. We glorify “College Girls Gone Wild” but then condemn with our voices sexual exploitation. We know all the right things to say, but our actions betray our own lack of inner moral compass. We are no better than
The Arnold Journey 