The opening words of the chapter help us see how this chaos is possible among God’s people: in those days, when there was no king in Israel. That is not merely a historical note, that we are before the time of the kings. Because Israel did have a king. God is the King of Israel. So the narrator is making a theological point. God’s people have rejected his kingship. God’s Word calls for much higher standards of morality, but Israel has degenerated into of deep depravity where lewd behaviour dominates, and no one is doing what is right in the Lord’s eyes, whether the Benjamite mob of rapists, the inhospitable townspeople, the old man, the father of the concubine, or the Levite. The rejection of God’s kingship means that each person can live by his own rules. And disorder dominates. Marriages are a sham. Women are expendable, exploited, and exterminated. Levites use their positions for personal agendas. Israelites act worse than foreigners. It is no wonder that the prophet Hosea viewed the events at Gibeah as the epitome of Israel’s corruption (Hosea 9:9; Hosea 10:9). This is what the people of God are capable of when they let go of the Lord and his standards.

The first readers of this story had a king. This was written in the monarchy. But having an earthly king means nothing if you reject the divine king. And so this passage is for the church of all ages. We may be repulsed at this passage. But what do we see of ourselves in it? Are we not also capable of anything once we throw off or ignore God’s rule? If even a society like Israel, with all their instruction from God and all their blessings of being his children, could become this kind of society by abandoning faithfulness to his Word and accommodating themselves to the values of the world around them, so can we. We are capable of doing what is right in our own eyes. It does not have to be the particular sins of Judges 19:1–30. But God can allow the church to behave in a Canaanite way. This passage is a warning for the church not to get proud. It is a call for us to examine our own hearts, to see what sin is there, and to admit that sin, at any level, obstructs communion with God and our neighbour. Sin breeds enmity, separation. And the text calls us to see that sin lusts for more. Even a covenant child is able to commit the vilest offence once he ignores God’s instruction and makes himself accountable to nobody but himself, when he does what is right in his own eyes.

This is the point of the narrative. The inhospitality, the attempt at homosexual rape, and the abusive violation of male strength—it is our instinct to see that the story is primarily about these problems. But these are actually instrumental in exposing the ultimate wrong in the narrative: running your life by the principle of personal advantage, instead of by God’s ethics. One example: that old man’s hospitality was promising, until the dogs showed up. Then his reaction is determined by convenience, and by the culture of the day. He knows the wrongs of the abusers, but the concubine is not as important as his male guest. So instead of doing what is right in God’s eyes and running the risk of personal disadvantage and disaster, he does what is right in his own eyes, what is culturally conditioned. This is the kind of thing we can do when we substitute ourselves for God. And those closest to us can suffer massively. When we do not use the glasses of Scripture to view God, ourselves, and our neighbours, this is the kind of thing we are capable of.