Judges, Wickedness, and Hollywood

When I think about the book of Judges, my mind is immediately reminded of the movie "The Book of Eli." After an apocalytic disaster, the few people left on earth began anew, without government and society. In the movie, Eli is given the mission of bringing the only copy of the word of God to a safe haven where it can copied and made available to mankind once again. However, Eli faced much opposition including men and woman that lived by the code of "survival" rather than upholding any form of morality. The people took as they wanted, killed others as they needed, and even used women as "traps" on the road for travelers to fall prey to highway gangs.

In the book of Judges, "every man did what was right in his own eyes." After the death of Joshua, the people replaced Yahweh with ideals and such began the horrible dissent into a wicked existence. The perdicament could be described as a vicious cycle in which the spiritual state of Israel spiraled out of control, despite God's provision of the various judges.
The story of the Levites in chapters 17-21 really illustrate how bad things had gotten. One Levite essentially became the personal priest of Micah, not a priest of Yahweh, but of an idol. He then jumped at the opportunity of becoming a priest for the Danites once they took the idol. He was a priest for hire as it were. The other Levite found himself staying the night in Gibeah, with his concubine. The people in this city demanded that they have their way with him, but he gave them his concubine instead. She was raped and killed by the entire city. The Levite then chops her up into 12 pieces and sends them to the various tribes, communicating his anger.

Things had gotten bad! Yet, I can't help but to think about how if we peal back the layers of our world, we might find that we have the same potential for evil. Granted for those of us in Christ, we are new creatures, but our fallen world on whole stands in rebellion against God. Truth be told, our society is truly wicked; just consider the moral travesity of abortion for instance. However, many times we use things like civility, the illusion of control, government, and comfort to fool ourselves into thinking that we are above such practices as that of the people of Israel at the time of the Judges. BUT, if we took away all the structure, technology, and politics, I think we would find that society's "heart" is the same as that of Israel.

Sure things like government, civility, technology, etc are good things, but we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by them. OUR society needs God, just like Israel needed. All these other things are secondary (and possibly the product of the pursuit of God). Ultimately, we are the same as the Israelites because of the human condition; we just have found a new way to package society that is prettier and makes us feel better about it. I think this is what makes "The Book of Eli" such a good movie-- it is frightening because we don't think that it is some fantastical scenario that would never happen. Even Hollywood recognizes that mankind's spiral into a wicked and depraved state is absolutely feasible!