“And the children of Israel did evil
in the sight of the Lord:
and the Lord delivered them
into the hand of Midian seven years.”
-Judges 6:1
Alrighty, let’s do a deep dive into verse 1 of Judges Chapter 6 because there’s a lot of profound theology we can extract from this one tiny phrase.
Following on the heels of chapter 5, we know Israel enjoyed a period of faithfulness and divine blessings.
But as time went on, the Israelites let their guard down and “did evil in the sight of the Lord”.
Now here’s what you’ve got to understand.
The opposite side of the coin of doing evil in the sight of the Lord is doing right in our own eyes.
Did you catch that inverse relationship?
Because of our rebellious natures, doing right in our own eyes more often than not equals doing evil in the Lord’s eyes.
It’s not like the leaders of Israel woke up one morning, gathered around and said enthusiastically among themselves “Hey, let’s go out and commit some great wickedness towards the Lord today!”.
In fact, they would have been both flabbergasted and infuriated if accused of sinful behavior.
They would have responded with a “What in the heck are you talking about homie?!”
I know I’m right because if you study the interactions between God’s chosen prophets and the Israelites, you’ll see that’s exactly what happened.
Whenever the Israelites were called on the carpet for their wickedness, they were as dumbfounded as I was when I first walked into a Japanese home with my shoes on and was called out on it (in case you don’t know, it’s a common custom to remove your shoes before entering a home in Japan).
See, here’s what we need to understand about the nature of evil.
Evil, when it overtakes us, never seems evil at the time.
It’s usually disguised as the right and practical thing to do.
Code words for evil are phrases like…
…”politically correct”…
…”for the sake of peace”…
…”just this one time won’t hurt” (um, yes it will hurt)…
…”those laws were only applicable during the ‘Old’ Testament times”…
…”we’re living in the 21st century man”…
…and so on and on.
Let’s not forget what happened during the era of the Judges is exactly what’s going on in our day and age.
Because the Lord our God NEVER changes, the pattern of how He will respond to our disobedience and the consequences we will have to pay also never changes
Without exception, whenever Israel sinned, God turned them over to their enemies to be oppressed.
And whenever we sin, we also will be turned over to our own enemies…whether those enemies be outside forces or the loss of Holy Spirit power to resist temptation and sin.
Here in chapter 6 the enemy appeared in the form of the Midianites.
Does that name sound familiar?
It should because Midian was the place Moses fled to after he killed that guard in Egypt.
It’s also the place where he found a wife and lived as a nomadic shepherd for 40 years.
However, Midian is probably most famous for being the place where the Burning Bushing incident took place when the Lord called out to Moses for the first time.
So we’ve come full circle back into nostalgic territory but with the circumstances being totally different.
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