When judgment is good
and how our own "outside" status invites us to re-see others
Warning: This is the last post in a four-part series on two stories in the Hebrew Scripture that are horrific to read, particularly the second one. They are stories of violence and sexual abuse. If you need to skip this series, please do so.
The past three posts in this series have walked us through the stories of Genesis 19 and Judges 19. We’ve looked at comparisons and contrasts in the stories and talked about the added horror of the second story happening among the people of God. They were called to be different, to represent God in the world. Instead, they acted like people who did not know God. Then we paused on two themes noticeable in the stories.
In this post, we are going to look at the last two themes that resonate through these stories. We are not going to answer all of the questions that we have about these stories. We are going to ask more questions, think broadly across Scripture, and finally wonder what these stories reveal about God and about ourselves.
Again, I encourage you to go read through Genesis 19 and Judges 19 for yourself. Read slowly. Invite God into your questions. Lament where you see brokenness. These stories invite us to think deeply, but they also invite us into a new way of living openly in the presence of God. We need habits of carrying hard things straight to God.
As we wrap up this series, I’d love to know if this has been thought-provoking for you. While the material was weighty and not at all pleasant to research, I did love diving deep into the stories and considering them in the light of the whole Bible. Would you like to participate in more work like this?
Theme 3: Marginalized others
Lot and the homeowner in Judges are “resident aliens” who seem sympathetic to the plight of others like themselves.1 They both took in people who were not from their city, people marked by their otherness. It is worth noting that Lot was a foreigner with power. He was sitting in the city gate.2 This was a double-edged sword for him because the people thought him arrogant when he attempted to defend his guests; they accused him of trying to force his customs on them.3 He only had power and influence when he agreed with the majority.4 But in both cases, they used the safety of their own homes to provide hospitality to marginalized strangers.
Being outsiders had made these homeowners compassionate to others in the same situation. However, their otherness had to be perfectly matched. They could not be prevailed upon to offer the women that same protection or compassion. They had walled themselves off from the women’s plight for reasons that are not listed. These stories are designed to make us sit and meditate so I tried to make a list of reasons for their unwillingness to offer the women the same safety that they wanted. I only came up with one: they did not see the full humanity of the women.
They seemed unable to believe that the women had the same rights that they do (they probably legitimately did not believe this actually), that they would suffer the same way the men would, that they deserved to live unmolested. They did not see the humanity of the women. This is often the case with us still. In these stories, we see a stain on these people that often lives in our own hearts. We do not think others are as human as we are. It’s probably a different group of people for all of us: the people of the opposing political party, immigrants, people with disabilities, criminals. We do not think they deserve the things that we deserve. We do not think that they want the same things that we would want. We trample on them because we believe there won’t be enough for both of us. We refuse to put ourselves in danger to keep someone else from danger. These stories indict us for how we treat others who are not like us. The danger of “othering” people has not gone away. Like Lot and like the homeowner in Judges, we can express sympathy for people who are like us and walk right over the needs of others.
I hope that these stories compel us to consider whose humanity we are dismissing. Who are comfortable reducing to a caricature? These stories offer us a place of lament and repentance.
Theme 4: The judgment of God (and why we actually want it)
One of the biggest complaint about the story in Judges (besides that it is horrible) is that there is no condemnation of the story. The narrator never says “and this is awful and God hated it.” We want the bottom line, but the Hebrew Scriptures are designed to make us think. We should know that God hated it because God judged Sodom and Gomorrah so completely. We should not be able to think about the Judges story without recalling the Genesis story, but often we do and that causes us problems.
Despite our cultural discomfort with the idea of judgment, we want the judgment of God. We see evil and we demand to know where God is. People will leave the faith because a “good God should do something about this evil.” We beg God to do something about the evil that we see. The conflict comes because we do not want to be told we cannot do whatever we want and we ourselves do not want to be objects of God’s judgment. Those tensions prevent us from seeing God’s judgment as good.5
Michael Reeves writes that God’s wrath is “how the God who is love responds to evil.”6 Just as I would be wrathful toward someone who was harming my children, God should be wrathful against those who would harm creation. It is God’s love that insists that sin be answered for and not ignored. This is part of the good news of Jesus. We are reconciled to God AND sin is dealt with.
Here is a lengthy quote from N.T. Wright. Every word is needed.
We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgement is a good things, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.7
Meditating on these stories allows us the space to reckon with the horror of the world. We can long for God’s judgment. We can pray Psalm 10 over and over, both with this story and with our own headlines. We can be drawn to repentance in our own personal lives and for the collective life of our own people.
These stories offer us space to consider our own hearts and how we are living. May we accept that invitation.
Susan Niditch, Judges (2008): A Commentary (La Vergne: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 192.
Susan Ann Brayford, Genesis (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 317.
Ibid, 319.
If we are grasping for position, we often find ourselves in the same situation.
I would also argue that (white) believers in America are most often on the side of empire and judgment never looks good to the empire, only to the oppressed.
Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 2012), 118.
N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: Harper One, 2008), 137.
I have so appreciated this series, Lisa. I would love to see more deep dives like it. Over the past several years, I’ve been so blessed by the way you approach Scripture with curiosity and display comfort not finding immediate or pat answers. Thank you for all you do.