The Autonomous Man is a Barbarian Text: Judges 21:25
Introduction: The High Cost of Playing God
The book of Judges ends with what has to be one of the most potent and damning summaries of a civilization in all of Scripture. It is a book full of gore, apostasy, and mayhem, and the Holy Spirit concludes it all with a final, inspired diagnosis. This is not just an epitaph for ancient Israel; it is a perpetual warning sign for every generation that follows. It is a warning that our own generation has taken down, thrown in the ditch, and is currently attempting to set on fire.
We live in a time that worships at the altar of the autonomous self. Our high priests in academia, media, and government all preach the same gospel: you are your own, your truth is your own, and your destiny is your own. The great sin is not rebellion against God; the great sin is to suggest that there is a God to rebel against. The creed of our age is simply the second half of this verse, chanted as though it were a liberation anthem: "everyone did what was right in his own eyes."
But they always forget the first half of the verse. They want the fruit of subjective morality without acknowledging the root from which it grows. The Bible here lashes the two clauses together with divine logic. The result, "everyone did what was right in his own eyes," is the direct and unavoidable consequence of the reason, "In those days there was no king in Israel." When a people depose their rightful king, they do not enter into a golden age of freedom. They descend into the chaos of a million petty tyrants, each ruling from the crumbling throne of his own heart.
The book of Judges is a horrifying travelogue through the landscape of human depravity when God gives a people over to their own desires. It is a repeating cycle of sin, oppression, crying out, and deliverance, with each cycle spiraling further into darkness. And this final verse is the key that unlocks the whole bloody mess. It tells us that the problem is not fundamentally political, or economic, or social. The problem is theological. The problem is covenantal. When you reject the King, you get the chaos. Every time. No exceptions.
The Text
In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
(Judges 21:25 LSB)
No King in Israel
The first clause sets the stage. It identifies the foundational vacuum, the central problem from which all the subsequent horrors flow.
"In those days there was no king in Israel..." (Judges 21:25a)
Now, on one level, this is a simple statement of historical fact. Israel did not have a human monarch at this point in their history. The formal monarchy would not be established until the time of Samuel and Saul. But the Holy Spirit is doing far more here than just giving us a historical time-stamp. The problem was not the lack of a man wearing a crown in Jerusalem. The problem was that Israel had forgotten her true King.
God Himself was their king. This was the entire point of the covenant established at Sinai. God had told them through Samuel centuries later, when they demanded a human king like the other nations, that in doing so "they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them" (1 Samuel 8:7). The period of the Judges was a long, ugly demonstration of this rejection in practice. They had a King, but they refused His rule. They had a law, but they ignored His statutes. They had a covenant, but they trampled it underfoot to chase after the pathetic, mud-pie idols of Canaan.
The absence of a human king was merely the political expression of a deeper, spiritual anarchy. When there is no acknowledged authority, no transcendent standard to which all men are accountable, then authority does not simply vanish. It atomizes. It breaks down into millions of competing sovereigns. Every man becomes his own king, his own lawgiver, and his own god. This is the very essence of the serpent's lie in the garden: "you will be like God" (Genesis 3:5). The book of Judges is Genesis 3 played out on a national scale.
This is why all attempts at secular conservatism are doomed to fail. You cannot have the order and stability of a Christian society while rejecting Christ the King. You cannot say, "We want the Ten Commandments, but not the Lawgiver. We want the Sermon on the Mount, but not the Messiah." It is a fool's errand. To reject the King is to get the chaos. When there is no king in the land, the land itself begins to vomit out its inhabitants.
Every Man a Law Unto Himself
The second clause is the direct, logical, and brutal consequence of the first. Because there was no king, a standard of absolute chaos prevailed.
"...everyone did what was right in his own eyes." (Judges 21:25b)
This is the biblical definition of anarchy. It is not simply the absence of government; it is the absence of God as the governor. This phrase is the mantra of expressive individualism. It is the creed of moral relativism. It is the foundational assumption of our entire modern project. And the Bible holds it up to us and says, "Look. Look at the rape, the murder, the idolatry, the civil war, the dismemberment, the sheer, bloody mess that this philosophy produces."
Notice the standard: "what was right in his own eyes." The standard of righteousness was located behind each man's eyeballs. Truth was privatized. Morality became a matter of personal preference, like choosing a flavor of ice cream. But when morality is a matter of preference, and my preference collides with your preference, the only thing left to adjudicate the dispute is raw power. The man with the bigger sword, or the louder mob, or the more compliant bureaucracy, wins. Might makes right.
This is not liberation; it is the most savage form of bondage. It is the tyranny of the subjective. When every man does what is right in his own eyes, no man is safe. Your property is not safe, your wife is not safe, your children are not safe, because the objective standard that would protect them has been jettisoned. The guardrails have been torn down, and the whole society is careening into the abyss.
We see this today in every direction. When a society decides that a man can be a woman if it is "right in his own eyes," it abolishes the very concept of womanhood. When a society decides that a child in the womb is not a person if it is "right in the mother's eyes," it sanctions mass murder. When a society decides that marriage is whatever anyone wants it to be because it is "right in their own eyes," it destroys the foundational institution of civilization. This is not progress. This is the demented, downward spiral of Judges.
The King We Need
This final verse of Judges, then, is meant to leave a profound longing in the heart of the reader. It is a dark backdrop against which the light of the gospel will one day shine with breathtaking glory. The book ends in darkness precisely to make us desperate for the dawn. The story of Israel's failure is meant to make us cry out, "Who will save us from this body of death?"
The entire Old Testament is groaning under the weight of this problem. Israel's sin shows us that the problem is not a lack of information. They had the law. The problem is the human heart, which is a factory of idols and a throne room for a usurping king called Self. The solution, therefore, cannot be another law, another program, or another human king. The kings that Israel eventually got, with a few notable exceptions, simply ended up doing what was right in their own eyes on a much grander and more destructive scale.
No, the solution had to be a King of a different sort. We needed a King who would not just rule over us, but who would remake us from the inside out. We needed a King who would not just give the law, but who would be the law, incarnate. We needed a King who would crush the serpent's head, forgive our treason, and give us new hearts that desire to do what is right in His eyes.
Christ Our King
And this, of course, is exactly what we have in the Lord Jesus Christ. The gospel is the announcement that the true King has arrived. The refrain of the New Testament is "the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark 1:15).
Jesus is the King who perfectly did what was right in His Father's eyes, not His own. He is the King who, instead of serving Himself, served His people by going to a cross. He took the anarchy of our sin upon Himself. He suffered the divine judgment that our cosmic treason deserved. On the cross, God demonstrated what He thinks of a world where everyone does what is right in their own eyes. He poured out His wrath upon His own Son, who stood in our place.
And by His resurrection, God the Father vindicated Him, installed Him on the throne of heaven, and gave Him all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18). The age of anarchy is over. The King is on His throne. There is no longer any excuse. The central political fact of the universe is that Jesus is Lord.
Therefore, the question for us is not whether there is a king. The question is whether we will bow to the King. To repent and believe in the gospel is to renounce the pathetic, tin-pot dictatorship of the self. It is to abdicate your own throne and to gladly bend the knee to your rightful Lord and Maker. It is to stop consulting your own eyes as the standard of right and wrong, and to begin consulting His Word.
The chaos of Judges is the default state of fallen humanity. But the good news is that the King has come to establish His beachhead. Through His church, He is extending His righteous rule, pushing back the darkness, and bringing order out of chaos, one saved soul at a time. He is building a kingdom where His people, liberated from the tyranny of their own eyes, joyfully do what is right in His.
"For He has rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." (Colossians 1:13-14 LSB)
The world still rages. Men still imagine that they are their own gods, doing what is right in their own eyes. But they are ghosts at a banquet. Their time is short. The King has come, and He is putting all His enemies under His feet. Our task is to live as loyal citizens of that coming world, right here in the ruins of the old one. We are to be an outpost of His kingdom, a colony of heaven, a people who have a King, and who therefore live, not by the light of our own eyes, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.