Scandalous Scripture: The Bible We Don't Read in Church Part 11: Right in Their Own Eyes

Scandalous Scripture: The Bible We Don't Read in Church Part 11: Right in Their Own Eyes

 In Part 11 of Scandalous Scripture, the book of Judges reaches its darkest point. 
Israel still has priests, worship, vows, sacrifices, and religious language—but people increasingly reshape faith around themselves. Micah builds his own religion. Dan turns private idolatry into tribal worship. A Levite holds religious office while showing almost no moral character. Benjamin protects its own people instead of confronting evil. Israel tries to fix violence with more violence. 
And the book gives us the diagnosis:  “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” 
Jesus later confronts the same kind of religious hypocrisy in Matthew 23 and tells us in Matthew 7 to examine our own lives before becoming experts in everyone else’s failures. Paul says it plainly in 2 Corinthians 13:5:  “Examine yourselves.” 
The answer is not more image management, more religious appearance, or more confidence in our own judgment. We need a righteous King. And the good news is that in Jesus, we can stop pretending, bring the truth into the light, repent, change, and be free.

Reader's Version

Scandalous Scripture: The Bible We Don’t Read in Church 

Part Eleven: Right in Their Own Eyes 

Sermon by Gene Simco — Reader’s Version 

I just finished reading a strange book called How to Stumble Down a Staircase. It is a step-by-step guide. 

Speaking of step-by-step guides, have you ever ordered a piece of furniture that you had to assemble yourself? I mean the kind where, aside from chopping down the tree, it feels as though they expect you to manufacture the entire thing. And there is one question that tells you a great deal about a person: did you actually follow the instructions? If not, how many screws did you have left over when you finished? Did the furniture look anything like the picture on the box, or did you eventually stand back, tilt your head, and say, “Well… it looks right to me”? 

Welcome to the end of Judges. 

God has given Israel instructions. He has spoken. They have the covenant. They have priests. They have worship. They know the name of God. Yet by the end of the book, everybody is increasingly assembling faith, morality, and life according to what looks right to them. Judges eventually gives us the diagnosis in its final verse: “In those days Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes” (Judges 21:25). 

That is where the entire book has been heading. 

Last week we saw Judges repeatedly overturn human ideas of strength. Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Abimelech, Jephthah—God repeatedly worked through unexpected people, while powerful and arrogant people discovered that they were not nearly as powerful as they imagined. But beneath all of those individual stories, the cycle of Judges has also been getting progressively worse. Israel sins, oppression follows, Israel cries out, God raises a deliverer, there is rest, and then Israel turns away again. The pattern repeats, but it is not really a circle. It is a downward spiral. Each cycle deteriorates until, by the end of the book, the problem is no longer simply that Israel needs another judge. The whole culture is unraveling. 

Samson and the End of the Judges 

That brings us to Samson in Judges 13–16. Before we enter the final chapters, Samson finishes the actual succession of judges. Everybody knows the major pieces of his story: the miraculous birth, the Nazirite calling, extraordinary strength, Philistine women, riddles, foxes, the jawbone of a donkey, Delilah, the haircut, blindness, and finally the collapse of the Philistine temple. 

Samson is extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily undisciplined. He is set apart to God, yet he is continually attracted to the Philistine world around him. In many ways, Samson begins to look like Israel compressed into one man: chosen by God, gifted by God, set apart by God, yet constantly drawn toward the very culture from which he was supposed to remain distinct. 

At the end of his life, Samson pushes against the pillars of the Philistine temple and intentionally brings the building down upon himself and his enemies. His death is sometimes included among the suicides of the Bible, although that classification deserves some qualification. Samson knowingly dies, but he does so while carrying out one final act of judgment against the Philistines rather than simply taking his life out of despair. 

Samson dies in Judges 16, but the book does not end with him. The judges themselves are finished, yet five chapters remain. And those final chapters are important because they are probably not arranged in strict chronological sequence after Samson. One of the clearest clues comes in Judges 20:28, where Phinehas, son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron, is still serving before the LORD. We know Phinehas from Numbers, which places him much earlier in Israel’s history than Samson. 

So Judges 17–21 seem to function less like the final five events chronologically and more like a theological conclusion to the entire period. The writer has finished showing us the judges, and now he essentially says, Let me show you how bad things had really become. 

And the first problem is false religion. 

When Worship Becomes Something We Build for Ourselves 

Judges 17 introduces us to a man named Micah, and almost immediately everything is confused. Micah steals 1,100 pieces of silver from his mother. His mother pronounces a curse over whoever stole it. Micah then admits that he took the money and returns it. His mother responds by saying that she is dedicating the silver to the LORD. 

That sounds promising—until she uses part of the silver to make a carved image and a cast idol. 

So within only a few verses we have theft, a curse, confession, dedication to God, and idolatry all mixed together. This is not atheism. And I want to be careful not to call the problem simply “religion,” because Scripture does not treat religion itself as inherently bad. This is false religion—worship reconstructed according to what seems right to the worshiper rather than according to what God has actually revealed. 

Micah then goes farther. He creates his own shrine, makes an ephod, keeps household gods, and appoints one of his own sons to serve as priest. Later, a young Levite arrives looking for somewhere to live, and Micah sees an opportunity. He hires the Levite to become his personal priest. Then Micah says something revealing: “Now I know the LORD will bless me, because I have a Levite serving as my priest.” 

Think about what has happened. Micah has idols. He has an unauthorized shrine. He has created his own priesthood. He has assembled a religious system around himself. And after constructing worship according to his own preferences, he concludes that now God must bless him. 

That is the danger. Micah has not simply rejected God. In some ways, that would be easier to recognize. Instead, he has redesigned the worship of God around himself. He still uses the name of the LORD. He still wants a priest. He still wants blessing. He still wants to think of himself as worshiping God. But he wants a version of God and worship that serves his own purposes. 

This is where Judges becomes uncomfortably contemporary. The danger is not always someone saying, “I do not believe in God.” Sometimes the far more subtle danger is saying, “I believe in God, but I want Him on my terms.” 

My version of Christianity. My preferences. My theology. My politics. My morality. My lifestyle. My church. My God—who conveniently agrees with everything I already wanted. 

We touched on this a couple of weeks ago, but Judges brings the problem into sharp focus. Micah does not begin by asking, “What has God commanded?” His question is effectively, “How can I arrange religion so that it will prosper me?” 

Those are two very different questions. 

Micah’s question is effectively, “How can I arrange religion so God will prosper me?” And Judges gives us its explanation almost immediately. Judges 17:6 says, “In those days Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes.” This becomes one of the great refrains of the closing chapters. The problem is not that Israel has no concept of God, worship, priests, or morality. The problem is that the individual has increasingly become the final authority for all of them. What seems right to me gradually takes the place of what God has actually said. 

That private corruption does not stay private for very long. In Judges 18, Micah’s homemade idolatry becomes institutionalized by the tribe of Dan. The Danites are looking for territory, so they send spies northward. Along the way the spies discover Micah’s house and recognize the young Levite serving there. Later, when a larger armed group from Dan passes through, they enter Micah’s shrine and take the carved image, the ephod, the household gods, and the cast image. 

The Levite asks the rather obvious question: “What are you doing?” Their response amounts to a promotion offer. Why remain priest to one man’s household when you can become priest to an entire tribe? Apparently the career advancement package is attractive enough. The Levite takes the religious objects and goes with them. 

Micah chases after the Danites and complains, “You have taken away my gods which I made, and the priest, and have gone away.” That sentence almost explains the entire problem by itself: “my gods which I made.” If you made your god, the relationship is backward. A god manufactured to serve our desires is not the God who commands us; it is simply another expression of ourselves. 

The Danites eventually reach the peaceful and relatively isolated city of Laish. They attack it, destroy it, rebuild on the site, and rename the city Dan. Then they establish the stolen image there as tribal worship. What began as one man rearranging religion inside his own home has now become an established religious system for an entire community. That is one of the ways corruption becomes normalized. First, “This seems right to me.” Then, “This seems right to us.” Eventually, nobody remembers the question anymore. It simply becomes, “This is what we have always done.” 

And then Judges gives us an embarrassing family connection. 

At the end of Judges 18, the Levite is finally named: Jonathan, son of Gershom. But the next name in the genealogy creates one of the most fascinating textual issues in the Old Testament. The traditional Masoretic text reads Jonathan as the son of Gershom, son of Manasseh, but the Hebrew spelling is unusual. The letter נ — nun, the letter that turns the name Moses into Manasseh, is written suspended above the normal line of text. Remove that raised letter, and מנשה — Manasseh becomes משה — Moses. 

That is not a modern observation invented by textual critics. Jewish tradition itself noticed the suspended nun and connected Jonathan with Moses. The traditional explanation was that the letter was inserted out of respect for Moses so that the shame of an idolatrous grandson would not be attached quite so plainly to his name. Several ancient textual witnesses support “Moses,” including the Vulgate and some manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint. Importantly, however, the Greek tradition is not completely uniform; some Septuagint witnesses also read “Manasseh.” The textual evidence therefore should not be simplified into “the Hebrew says Manasseh but the Septuagint says Moses.” It is messier than that. Still, many textual critics regard Moses as the earlier reading, and even the unusual form preserved in the Masoretic tradition seems to remember the problem. 

If that reading is correct, let the implication sit for a moment. Within only a few generations of the Exodus, Moses’ own grandson is serving as priest for an idolatrous shrine. The man through whom God delivered Torah has a descendant helping institutionalize the very kind of worship Torah prohibited. The connection is especially plausible in the literary setting because, as we will see later in Judges 20, Phinehas—the grandson of Aaron—is also still alive. The narrator is showing us that Israel’s collapse did not require centuries. It could happen frighteningly quickly. 

Dan’s association with idolatry does not end here. Centuries later, after the kingdom divides, Jeroboam sets up golden calves at Bethel and Dan (1 Kings 12:28–30). Dan therefore develops a particularly dark biblical reputation as a center of false worship. 

That makes another biblical curiosity worth mentioning, although we should not pretend Scripture explains it explicitly. In Revelation 7, when John lists the twelve tribes among the 144,000 who are sealed, Dan is missing. Manasseh is included, and Joseph is included, but Dan is not. Interpreters have proposed several explanations for the omission, and one longstanding suggestion is Dan’s notorious association with idolatry beginning here in Judges 18 and continuing through Jeroboam’s sanctuary at Dan. Some scholarship continues to defend an idolatry connection, but Revelation itself never tells us why Dan is omitted, so this should remain an interesting possibility rather than a doctrine. 

What we can say with certainty is that Judges 18 shows how quickly false worship can grow. Micah begins by constructing something that seems right to him. Dan discovers it, adopts it, enlarges it, and eventually gives it institutional permanence. 

Private compromise has become public religion. 

And all of it is happening among people who still know the name of the LORD. 

Israel Becomes Sodom 

Next we come to Judges 19, one of the darkest chapters in the Bible, and it is deliberately written in a way that should remind us of another story: Sodom. Except this is no longer Sodom. This is Israel. 

A Levite is living in the hill country of Ephraim with a concubine from Bethlehem. Their relationship breaks down, and she returns to her father’s home. Eventually the Levite travels to bring her back. Her father receives him with repeated hospitality and keeps delaying their departure until, finally, they leave late in the day. 

As evening approaches, they come near Jebus, the city that would later become Jerusalem. The Levite’s servant suggests that they stop there for the night, but the Levite refuses because he does not want to stay among foreigners. Instead, he insists that they continue to Gibeah, a city belonging to the tribe of Benjamin. The reasoning is simple enough: they will be safer among God’s people. 

They are not. 

There is an uncomfortable irony here if we remember Joshua. In Joshua 9, Israel was deceived by the Gibeonites because the leaders trusted what they could see and “did not ask counsel from the LORD.” Now, in Judges 19, the Levite makes another assumption based on appearances: he refuses to stay among foreigners in Jebus because he expects greater safety among his own people in Gibeah. Gibeon and Gibeah are different places, but the contrast is striking. In Joshua, outsiders fooled Israel but were eventually brought under Israel’s covenant protection. In Judges, an Israelite city—full of covenant people—will behave worse than the foreigners the Levite was trying to avoid. Once again, what looked obvious was not true. 

They sit in the town square, and at first no one offers them hospitality. Eventually an older man invites them into his home. Then the story begins to sound disturbingly familiar. The men of the city surround the house and demand that the Levite be brought outside so they can sexually assault him. The host pleads with them not to commit such wickedness, but then offers his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead. 

Judges 19:25–26 says, “But they wouldn’t listen to him. So the Levite took hold of his concubine and pushed her out the door. The men of the town abused her all night, taking turns raping her until morning. Finally, at dawn, they let her go. At daybreak the woman returned to the house where her husband was staying. She collapsed at the door of the house and lay there until it was light.” 

At dawn she lies collapsed at the doorway with her hands on the threshold. The Levite comes outside, sees her there, and his response is chilling: “Get up. Let’s go.” 

There is no answer. 

He places her body on his donkey and takes her home. Then, instead of burying her, he does something almost unimaginable. Judges 19:29–30 says that he cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends one piece throughout the territory of Israel. Everyone who sees what has happened responds in horror: “Such a horrible crime has not been committed in all the time since Israel left Egypt. Think about it! What are we going to do? Who is going to speak up?” 

This is truly scandalous Scripture. 

But we cannot miss what Judges has done with the story. Israel entered the land to confront the wickedness of Canaan, and now an Israelite city behaves like Sodom—and perhaps, in some ways, even worse. The parallel with Genesis 19 is unmistakable. In Sodom, the men of the city surround the house and demand that the male guests be brought outside. Judges 19 intentionally echoes that scene, except now the city is Gibeah in the territory of Benjamin. 

These are covenant people. They possess Torah. They have priests. They have the Tabernacle. They know the name of God. Yet they have become the very thing they were supposed to resist. You can possess Scripture and still become indistinguishable from the culture around you. 

There is another uncomfortable part of the story as well. The Levite himself holds religious office, yet look at his behavior. He pushes the woman outside, shows almost no concern for what happens to her, and later, when he tells Israel what occurred, he emphasizes the wickedness of Gibeah while saying considerably less about his own role in handing her over. 

That matters for where the book is taking us, because religious people can become very good at identifying somebody else’s sin while minimizing their own. Hold onto that thought. 

When the Tribe Becomes More Important Than What Is Right 

Judges 20 begins with Israel receiving the pieces of the woman’s body and gathering in horror. The Levite tells his story, and the nation demands justice. They send word to Benjamin and insist that the wicked men of Gibeah be handed over. 

Benjamin refuses. 

Instead, the tribe rallies to defend them. 

Think carefully about what has happened. The text does not present Benjamin making a moral defense of what the men of Gibeah did. Their instinct is to defend their people, their tribe, their side. Tribal loyalty has become stronger than righteousness. 

That is a dangerous moment for any community. Once the question stops being, “Is this right?” and becomes, “Is this one of ours?” we are already in trouble. 

Civil war follows. Israel gathers against Benjamin, but the first battle is disastrous. About twenty-two thousand Israelites are killed. Israel seeks the LORD and returns to battle, only to lose another eighteen thousand men. They weep, fast, offer sacrifices, and inquire of God again. 

And notice who is serving before the LORD at this point: Phinehas, son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron. This is the same Phinehas we met in Numbers 25 with Zimri and Cozbi. He has already seen covenant rebellion threaten the community, and his presence here gives us another reason to recognize that the closing chapters of Judges are functioning as a literary and theological conclusion rather than simply following Samson chronologically. 

God tells Israel to go against Benjamin once more, and this time Benjamin is defeated. The destruction is catastrophic. Almost the entire tribe is wiped out, with only about six hundred men surviving. 

Israel has dealt with the wickedness of Gibeah, but in doing so has nearly destroyed one of the tribes of Israel. 

Then they realize they have another problem. 

Fixing Evil With More Evil 

Judges 21 begins with an oath Israel had made: none of them would give their daughters in marriage to Benjamin. Now Benjamin is almost extinct, and Israel grieves over the possibility that one of the tribes could disappear entirely. 

How are they going to preserve the tribe they have just nearly wiped out? 

This is where Judges becomes almost impossible to believe, because the solution to catastrophic violence against a woman becomes more catastrophic violence against women. 

Israel asks which community failed to appear at the national assembly, and the answer is Jabesh-gilead. Soldiers are sent there, and the inhabitants are killed except for four hundred virgin women, who are then given to the surviving men of Benjamin. 

But there are about six hundred Benjamite men. They are still short two hundred women. 

So Israel needs another solution, and somehow it gets worse. 

There is a festival at Shiloh where young women come out to dance. The remaining Benjamite men are told to hide in the vineyards, watch the women, rush out, seize one for themselves, and take her home as a wife. 

Why this bizarre plan? Because Israel had sworn, “We will not give our daughters in marriage to Benjamin.” 

Technically, they did not give them. 

Benjamin kidnapped them. 

Problem solved—except nothing is solved. 

Look at the moral insanity of the situation. Israel is concerned with preserving the technical wording of an oath while arranging the kidnapping of two hundred women. They are keeping the letter of their vow while violating justice in the process. That is religious hypocrisy. 

And now the final verse of Judges lands with its full weight: “In those days Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes” (Judges 21:25). 

That is not merely the conclusion of chapter 21. It is the diagnosis of the entire book. 

Micah had constructed religion around himself. Dan took that private false worship and institutionalized it for an entire tribe. The Levite demonstrated that a person could hold religious office while lacking moral character. Benjamin placed loyalty to its own tribe above righteousness. Then Israel attempted to correct evil and ended up creating more evil in the process. 

What makes all of this so disturbing is that religious language never disappears. They continue to inquire of God. They make vows. They offer sacrifices. They have priests. They speak the name of YHWH. The problem is not that Israel suddenly became atheist. The problem is that people increasingly made themselves the final authority while continuing to be religious. 

They still had the vocabulary of faith. They still had the institutions of faith. They still had the practices of faith. But they were increasingly deciding for themselves what faithfulness should look like. 

That is why the refrain at the end of Judges says so much with so few words: 

Everyone did what seemed right in their own eyes. 

Jesus Has Seen This Before 

When we get to the New Testament, Jesus has seen this problem before. In fact, it brings us directly to some of His strongest confrontations with false religious people in Matthew 23. Jesus is speaking to people who know Scripture, teach Scripture, practice religion, and appear righteous. Yet He repeatedly exposes the distance between what is happening on the outside and what is happening on the inside. 

In Matthew 23:25–28, Jesus says, “What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy—full of greed and self-indulgence… You are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.” 

That is the problem Jesus keeps exposing. They can become meticulous about religious details while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. He gives them the absurd picture of straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel. 

That sounds a lot like Judges 21. Israel says, in effect, We cannot break our oath and give our daughters to Benjamin. Fine. Then they massacre one town and arrange for two hundred women to be kidnapped instead. 

Technically compliant. Morally bankrupt. 

Jesus describes people who are deeply concerned about keeping the outside clean while corruption remains underneath. Judges gives us an Old Testament version of the same thing. 

And here is where we need to be careful, because after reading Judges 19–21 it would be very easy to walk away saying, “Yes! Look how horrible everybody else is.” 

That would be exactly the problem. 

Jesus gives us a picture of this in Luke 18 with the Pharisee and the tax collector. Two men go to the Temple to pray. The Pharisee stands by himself and begins listing everything that separates him from the people he considers sinful. He thanks God that he is not like robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even the tax collector standing nearby. He fasts. He gives. He is religious. And his prayer is basically a spiritual résumé built by comparing himself with someone worse. 

The tax collector does something entirely different. He will not even lift his eyes toward heaven. He simply asks God for mercy because he knows he is a sinner. 

And Jesus says the tax collector goes home right with God rather than the Pharisee. 

The Pharisee can see the other man’s sin perfectly. 

He cannot see his own. 

That is exactly where Judges is taking us. 

Examine Yourself First 

Jesus gives us the corrective directly in Matthew 7:1–5. He begins, “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged.” That sentence is often quoted as though Jesus were forbidding Christians from ever making moral judgments or exercising discernment. 

But keep reading. 

Jesus immediately gives the picture of someone noticing a speck in another person’s eye while somehow ignoring the log sticking out of his own. He asks how someone can say, “Let me help you with that speck,” when he cannot even see past the plank in his own eye. Then Jesus says something extremely important: 

First. 

First remove the log from your own eye. Then you will see clearly enough to deal with the speck in your brother’s eye. 

Jesus is not banning discernment. In the same chapter He tells us to recognize false prophets by their fruit. We have already seen that kind of fruit language in Galatians 5, where Paul contrasts the works of the flesh with the fruit of the Spirit. Paul also says explicitly in 1 Corinthians 5 that the church is responsible to exercise judgment concerning serious sin among those who claim to belong to the church. 

So the problem is not seeing sin. 

The problem is becoming an expert in everybody else’s sin while remaining blind to our own. 

Even Matthew 7 itself makes that clear. Immediately after the speck-and-log illustration, Jesus says not to give what is holy to dogs or throw pearls before swine. Whatever else we say about that image, it certainly requires discernment. You have to recognize whether continuing to press something valuable upon someone is actually wise. Sometimes even when we believe we have something true and good to say, wisdom may tell us not to keep forcing it upon someone who is only going to trample it and turn on us. 

In other words, “Do not judge” does not mean, “Turn off your discernment.” 

It means start with yourself. 

Paul says the same thing very plainly in 2 Corinthians 13:5: “Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine. Test yourselves.” 

Examine yourselves. 

Test yourselves. 

That is almost the exact opposite of the closing diagnosis in Judges. Judges says everybody did what seemed right in his own eyes. The Gospel tells us not to make our own eyes the final standard at all. Let God examine us. Let Scripture examine us. Let the Spirit confront what we would rather not see. 

So before we set out to fix everybody else, we need to practice biblical self-examination. Not vague guilt. Not self-hatred. Not endlessly staring inward. But allowing Scripture and the Spirit to confront us honestly. 

Defending It Because It’s Mine 

One of the first questions we should ask is, What am I defending simply because it is mine? Benjamin is the obvious warning. My family. My church. My denomination. My friend. My favorite teacher. My political tribe. My side. Would I call this wrong if the other side did exactly the same thing? If my answer changes depending on who did it, I may not be defending righteousness at all. I may simply be defending the tribe. 

Star Wars Tribalism 

Before we get too serious about Benjamin, it is worth admitting that human beings will become tribal about almost anything. Take Star Wars. People from my generation tend to defend the Original Trilogy—Episodes IV, V, and VI. Millennials seem much more emotionally attached to the Prequels—Episodes I, II, and III. Then a younger generation grew up with the Sequels and somehow has to defend those. And once something becomes our tribe, we develop an amazing ability to explain away things we would immediately mock if they belonged to somebody else. 

The Prequel people are especially good at this. I know, because whenever you point out something that makes no sense, there is already an explanation waiting. They have read the Reddit threads. They have watched the six-hour YouTube breakdown. They know some paragraph from a novel published fifteen years later that supposedly fixes the whole thing. Fine. Some of those explanations are even reasonable. 

Take C-3PO. If you ask why he does not remember Tatooine, Anakin, Obi-Wan, or anybody else, the answer is easy enough: his memory gets erased. That happens to him constantly. By the time we get to the Sequels, he is on Kijimi with Babu Frik and Keri Russell getting his brain wiped again so he can translate a Sith dagger. At this point, C-3PO is basically the galaxy’s perpetually factory-reset British butler. Fine. I will give you C-3PO. 

Obi-Wan is a little harder, but the defenders will say he is being coy when he tells Luke he does not remember owning a droid. Technically, he never owned R2-D2. Fine. I will even let you have that one. 

But then there is R2-D2. 

R2 remembers everything. 

He served Anakin. He knew Padmé. He knew Obi-Wan. He knew Yoda. He knew what happened to Anakin. He was there through the Clone Wars. He knew who Luke and Leia were. And unlike C-3PO, nobody erased his memory. He is rolling around the galaxy carrying the entire Skywalker family history while everyone else pretends they have never met. 

Then somehow everybody winds up back on Tatooine. 

This may be the worst witness-protection program in galactic history. 

Luke is being hidden from Darth Vader, so naturally they send him to Darth Vader’s home planet, put him with Darth Vader’s relatives, and let him keep the name Skywalker. Then Uncle Owen buys C-3PO and R2-D2—the same bizarre pair of droids tied to his family years earlier—and apparently recognizes nothing. Luke later wonders whether the droids might have been stolen, and there really should have been a moment when Owen looked at him and said, “Yes. From me.” 

And R2 is still saying nothing. 

He knows the whole story and just keeps beeping. 

You can explain some of that away if you really want to. Human memory is imperfect. Protocol droids may all look similar. Obi-Wan may be deliberately vague. Fine. The tribe can keep working. 

But then the Prequels start doing things that are harder to defend. 

When the Explanations Start Getting Worse 

The original films gave us the Force as something mysterious, spiritual, almost religious. Then the Prequels arrive and suddenly we need a blood test. 

Midi-chlorians. 

The Force goes from something mystical that requires faith, discipline, and surrender to something you can apparently measure in a laboratory. Your tribe took the great spiritual mystery of Star Wars and turned it into a science experiment. Apparently the first step toward becoming a Jedi is getting your blood work done. 

Then we discover that Anakin has no biological father. 

So now Darth Vader has a virgin-birth story. 

We can just let that one sit there for a moment. 

Somebody looked at the character who will eventually become one of the greatest villains in movie history and thought, “You know what this story needs? Something that sounds suspiciously like Jesus.” 

Then Padmé dies because she has “lost the will to live.” This happens in a civilization with hyperspace travel, artificial intelligence, advanced medical droids, mechanical limbs, and the ability to deliver twins in outer space. But apparently once someone has a broken heart, medicine simply throws up its hands. 

And then we have the great duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin, one of the most consequential battles in the history of the galaxy, and somehow the decisive strategic advantage becomes: the high ground. 

Again, there are explanations. 

There are always explanations. 

That is what tribes do. 

But eventually you get to the point where the explanations stop helping. 

And then there is Jar Jar. 

Jar Jar is indefensible. 

At some point you have to stop explaining and simply admit that your side did something wrong. 

Before I Get Too Proud 

Of course, this is where Matthew 7 becomes inconvenient, because it is very easy for me to see the speck in the Prequel tribe’s eye while ignoring the plank in my own. 

My tribe is the Original Trilogy, and I will still argue that A New Hope is one of the greatest movies ever made. But then we get to The Empire Strikes Back, where Leia very enthusiastically kisses her brother. 

And R2 knows. 

He knows exactly who both of them are. 

He says nothing. 

Apparently the little trash can decided this was a family matter. 

Then we get to Return of the Jedi, and suddenly the fate of the galaxy depends upon a group of furry little creatures defeating an empire with rocks, sticks, logs, and what can only be described as organized woodland violence. 

So yes, my tribe has Muppets and murder-bears. 

We defend those too. 

We explain them. 

We tell ourselves that the Ewoks represent the underestimated defeating the powerful, which is technically true, but also sounds suspiciously like the kind of explanation the Prequel people give me about Jar Jar. 

That is the problem with tribalism. When the flaw belongs to somebody else’s tribe, it is obvious. When it belongs to ours, we become attorneys. We explain. We qualify. We find context. We invent theories. We defend things we would never defend if the other side had done them. 

Sometimes the honest answer is simply: 

That part is indefensible. 

When Tribalism Stops Being Funny 

With Star Wars, this is funny. Nobody gets hurt because Millennials defend the Prequels or because I insist the Ewoks were a mistake. 

But what happens when we do the same thing with morality? 

What happens when we do it in church? 

What happens when we do it in politics? 

What happens when something is clearly wrong, but instead of asking, “Is this right?” we ask, “Is this one of ours?” 

That is exactly where Judges 20 takes us. 

Benjamin is confronted with what happened at Gibeah—one of the most horrific and indefensible acts in the entire book. Israel demands that the guilty men be handed over. 

Benjamin now has a choice. 

They can ask whether what happened was evil. 

Or they can ask whether the people who did it belong to their tribe. 

They choose the tribe. 

And once tribal loyalty becomes stronger than righteousness, people begin defending things they would immediately condemn if the other side had done them. 

That is funny when we are talking about Jar Jar. 

It becomes terrifying when we are talking about sin. 

We see this kind of tribalism in Christianity. We see it in politics. We see it anywhere people become more committed to protecting their group than to telling the truth. We can know that something is wrong and still feel pressure to excuse it because we like the preacher, the ministry, the worship band, the movement, the denomination, or the political side associated with it. Judges forces us to ask whether loyalty to the group has become stronger than loyalty to what is right. 

Another question is, Have I given a Christian name to something I simply want? 

Micah does exactly that. His idols are dedicated to God. His shrine uses religious language. His priest makes the whole arrangement feel legitimate. Then Micah concludes, “Now the LORD will bless me.” 

That is religion built to serve the worshiper. 

And again, I want to be careful with the word religion. There is a popular Christian slogan that says Christianity is “not a religion,” as though Scripture itself treats religion as a bad word. It does not. James speaks positively of pure and undefiled religion before God in James 1:27. The problem is not religion. The problem is false religion, hypocritical religion, or religion reconstructed to serve us rather than God. 

That is where Judges becomes uncomfortable again, because we can do exactly what Micah did. We make the decision first and then go hunting for a Bible verse to baptize it. The danger is not always saying, “I do not believe in God.” Sometimes it is saying, “I believe in God, but I want Him on my terms.” 

My version of Christianity. My preferences. My politics. My morality. My lifestyle. My church. My God—who conveniently agrees with everything I already wanted. 

So ask the harder question: Am I submitting my desires to Scripture, or am I recruiting Scripture to defend my desires? 

Then ask, Am I more disturbed by their sin than mine? 

The Levite can tell all Israel exactly what the men of Gibeah did. He is considerably less interested in discussing what he did. He can describe their wickedness while minimizing his own participation in the tragedy. 

That brings us right back to Matthew 7. The speck. The plank. Jesus says: start with your own eye. 

Before we become experts on what is wrong with the culture, the church down the street, the denomination we dislike, the political side we oppose, or the person sitting across from us, we should ask: 

What is happening in me? 

And one more question becomes unavoidable: Do my methods contradict the righteousness I claim to defend? 

Israel is legitimately outraged by what happened in Gibeah. The outrage itself is not the problem. What happened was evil and demanded a response. 

But then Israel responds to violence against women with more violence against women. 

A righteous cause does not automatically make every response righteous. 

Being Right Does Not Give Us Permission to Act Wrongly 

A righteous cause does not automatically make every response righteous. We saw this back in Numbers with Moses. Moses was right that Israel was rebellious, but his anger still caused him to misrepresent God. We have talked about this before in relation to things like picketing and public outrage. Sometimes Christians expose one sin of the flesh by responding with another sin of the flesh. We may condemn sexual immorality, homosexuality, or some other behavior Scripture identifies as sin, and then respond with hostility, dissension, division, or an outburst of anger as though our reaction somehow becomes righteous simply because the thing we oppose is wrong. 

But Galatians 5 does not give us that option. Outbursts of anger, hostility, selfish ambition, dissension, and division are themselves works of the flesh. James says it even more plainly: “Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires” (James 1:20). It is entirely possible for the behavior we are confronting to be sinful and for the way we confront it to be sinful too. Are we arguing online in ways that misrepresent Jesus? Are we supposedly defending Christianity while making Christianity less attractive because the fruit people actually see from us is anger, contempt, and division? Being right does not give us permission to act wrongly. 

Are We Corrrectable? 

That brings us to another question that may be even more important: are we still correctable? Everyone who does what is right in his own eyes eventually becomes very difficult to correct, because if I have become the final standard, anyone who challenges me must be wrong. Biblical humility says something very different. My tradition can be wrong. My interpretation can be wrong. My tribe can be wrong. My instincts can be wrong. I can be wrong. That is why Paul tells us to examine ourselves. 

We see the opposite attitude frequently in Christianity. People who have never actually read the Bible all the way through will make absolute statements about what Scripture teaches and then tell you they will never change their minds. I cannot count how many times I have carefully explained a position from the text only to have someone reject it because it differs from what his or her tradition has always taught. I understand that instinct because I have had to confront the same problem in my own life. 

Before I was a pastor, I spent a season in the martial arts industry, which is actually where Heather and I met. I had already earned a black belt in another style of jujitsu and had considerable experience in several martial arts. Then I walked into my first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school. At the time, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was still relatively new in the United States. It was the art that had helped launch the UFC and had proven extraordinarily effective against other styles, particularly before the sport developed more rules, rounds, and time limits. Its effectiveness became so well established that forms of it were eventually incorporated into modern military combatives training. 

I did not really know Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu yet, but I walked into that school wearing the confidence of someone who already held a black belt. I did not see any black belts there. There was one blue belt teaching and a room full of white belts. Since blue belt is only the first colored belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I assumed that when it came time to spar I would naturally be paired with the highest-ranked person in the room. 

Instead, they put me with a white belt. 

I was insulted. We slapped hands and started sparring, and within less than a minute I found myself tapping out. I assumed it was a fluke, so we went again. It happened again. Here I was, a black belt, being submitted by someone wearing a white belt. 

That was embarrassing, but embarrassment gave me a choice. I was running a martial arts school. I could go back to my students, pretend that nothing had happened, and continue teaching as though my previous rank automatically made me qualified in this entirely different system. Or I could be honest about what I had just learned. 

I will admit that I did not take the black belt off immediately. It took some time. But eventually the contradiction became impossible to ignore. I took it off. I lost students. It cost me money. I had to start over. From that point, it took me another ten years to earn a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. 

That was the right thing to do. 

The easier thing would have been to preserve the appearance. People do that in martial arts all the time. They avoid the people who exposed their weakness, find another school, protect the rank, and pretend the test never happened. Unfortunately, people do the same thing in church. Someone held a title somewhere else. Someone was a deacon. Someone taught a doctrine for twenty years. Then they enter a church that is heavily focused on Scripture and discover that perhaps they do not understand something as well as they thought they did. Suddenly there is more at stake than simply asking, What does the Bible say? There is now a title, a reputation, a history, and an identity to protect. 

Sometimes we simply do not want to take the black belt off. 

But if we cannot be corrected, we cannot grow. 

Stop Managing the Appearance 

This theme has been running underneath both of our messages in Judges. Abimelech dies worrying about what people will say about him. At the end of Judges, religious forms remain while moral reality collapses. Even the textual tradition surrounding Moses’ family appears to preserve ancient embarrassment over associating his name too directly with the idolatry of his grandson. Again and again, human beings become concerned with preserving appearances while something much more serious is happening underneath. 

And maintaining appearances is exhausting. Trying to look right all the time is exhausting. Protecting the reputation, explaining everything away, hiding weakness, managing what people think, pretending that everything is fine—it takes enormous energy. 

The good news is that you can stop doing that. 

Bring the truth into the light. Confess what needs to be confessed. Repent where you need to repent. Let God deal with the real thing instead of spending your life maintaining the appearance of the thing. Embarrassment does not have to lead to cover-up; it can lead to freedom. Grace means you do not have to pretend. You can give God the truth and let Him change you. 

So before we look at everybody else, examine yourself—not so that you can live under endless guilt, but so that you can stop hiding. Stop managing. Stop defending an image. Stop doing what seems right in your own eyes and come under the care of the King who already knows the truth about you. 

Judges ends by telling us that everyone did what was right in his own eyes, and these final chapters repeatedly remind us that there was no king in Israel. But the Gospel gives us something better than self-rule. It gives us a righteous King. So let Jesus correct you. Let Scripture challenge you. Let the Spirit convict you. And when He shows you something, you do not have to hide it. You can give it to God. You can repent. You can change, and you can be free. 

Judges shows us where doing what is right in our own eyes eventually leads. The Gospel gives us something better: a King worth following and grace that lets us stop pretending. His name is Jesus. 

David gives us an appropriate prayer with which to end in Psalm 139:23–24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.” 

That is a very different prayer from asking God to show us what is wrong with everybody else. It is the prayer of someone willing to be known, willing to be corrected, and willing to let God deal with what is really there. 

Search me. Know me. Correct me. Lead me. 

That is where freedom begins. 

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©️Copyright 2026 Gene Simco Most Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Scriptures in brackets reflect the original Biblical languages.

Scandalous Scripture: The Bible We Don't Read in Church

Part 11: Right in Their Own Eyes

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