Mike’s Bible Reading Journal
April 2, 2026 — Days 81–84 of 365
Everyone Did What Was Right in Their Own Eyes
Judges 10–21 — The most honest book in the Bible about what the human heart produces when it has no true king — and one of the most insistent that the true king is coming.
The Texts
“And the angel of the LORD said to him, ‘Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?'”
— Judges 13:18
“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
— Judges 21:25
The Observation
I finished the book of Judges across four readings — I am still catching up on my reading plan this week, and once I do these entries will cover less ground and be shorter. It begins with Israel failing to drive out the Canaanites as God commanded. It ends with Israel organizing the mass abduction of young women from a religious festival at Shiloh — at the feast of the LORD, from the daughters who were dancing before him — in order to preserve a tribe that had nearly been exterminated in a civil war that started because of what was done to an unnamed woman on a threshold in Gibeah.
The narrator ends the book four times with the same line. In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. He trusts the line to carry the weight of everything he has just recorded. And it does.
The question I kept coming back to across these readings is whether God is present in any of it. Whether the one whose name is Wonderful is still moving toward his people even when his people have become what they were supposed to replace.
He is.
What Came Out of Studying It
Jephthah. Jephthah makes a rash vow — whatever comes out of my house first to meet me shall be the LORD’s and I will offer it as a burnt offering (Judges 11:30–31). His daughter comes out first. The Mosaic law provided for redeeming vows (Leviticus 27). Jephthah did not apply it. A young woman bore the full cost of a decision made by a man who would not seek counsel or take back what he had said. Hebrews 11:32 includes Jephthah in the roll call of faith — genuine but compromised faith, operating without the full wisdom faith is supposed to produce.
Later, Jephthah handles the Ephraimites’ provocation with technical correctness — I called you and you did not come — where Gideon had handled the same provocation with wisdom (Judges 8:1–3). Technical correctness applied to wounded pride produces escalation. Forty-two thousand dead at the fords of the Jordan over a question of pronunciation. The orphan heart cannot absorb a slight because it has no Father whose approval makes the slight bearable. The son can let it go.
The angel of the LORD and the name Wonderful. In the middle of all of this — between Jephthah and Samson, between the massacre at the Jordan and the story of Micah’s idol — the angel of the LORD appears to the wife of Manoah and announces that she will conceive and bear a son. Manoah asks his name. The angel says — why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful? (Judges 13:18).
The word is peli — beyond understanding, incomprehensible, set apart. The same root Isaiah uses in Isaiah 9:6 — his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. The name that cannot yet be given because the categories do not yet exist to receive it is the name the whole Old Testament is moving toward.
The Reformed tradition has consistently identified the angel of the LORD in passages like this as a Christophany — an appearance of the pre-incarnate Christ. Calvin, Owen, and the Westminster tradition all recognized that these encounters carry a weight that exceeds any created angel. The one speaking here receives worship, accepts sacrifice, and ascends in the flame of the altar — things no ordinary messenger does. The ancient Targums pointed in the same direction when they rendered the angel of the LORD as the Memra of the LORD, the Word of the LORD. When John opens his Gospel — in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1, 14) — he is identifying the Logos with the one who had been appearing throughout Israel’s history. The one who appeared at Manoah’s altar has become flesh.
Manoah’s wife was the more theologically steady of the two. While Manoah panicked — we shall surely die for we have seen God — she reasoned from the character of the one they had encountered. If the LORD had meant to kill us he would not have accepted our offering or shown us these things (Judges 13:23). She met him before she had words for him. She trusted him before she could explain him. That is faith operating before the full name is available.
God is faithful through the whole long descent. The one whose name is too wonderful to give at the altar would one day descend as a child in a manger, and his name would finally be spoken.
Micah’s idol and the Danites. A man named Micah makes an idol from silver his mother dedicates to the LORD, sets up a private shrine, installs a hired Levite as priest, and says — now I know that the LORD will prosper me (Judges 17:13). He is trying to worship the right God in a completely wrong way — and he cannot feel the wrongness of it. That is what sin does. It blinds. The Danites steal the idol and the Levite, use them to claim divine endorsement, and put the quiet, unsuspecting people of Laish to the sword. The idol corrupts worship and it corrupts sight. You worship a thing that diminishes the human person and you lose the capacity to see the human person clearly.
The religious corruption comes first. The social horror that follows in chapters 19–21 is downstream of it. When the worship goes wrong everything else follows.
The concubine of Judges 19. The narrator gives her no name. He gives her a father who loved her. A house in Bethlehem she ran to when things went wrong. A father-in-law who kept finding reasons to delay their departure — as if he knew what waited at the other end of the journey.
The Levite chooses Gibeah over Jebus because Jebus is a city of foreigners. His own people will be safer, he reasons. His own people are the danger. The concubine is pushed out into the dark. In the morning she is found at the door with her hands on the threshold. He says — get up let us be going. There is no answer.
The text does not say she was dead when he found her. It says there was no answer. And when the Levite tells the assembled tribes what happened he frames it as an attack on him, omitting that he pushed her out the door, omitting that he slept. The tribes rise as one man. Nobody asks the obvious questions.
The pattern runs from Adam in the garden to Lot in Sodom to the Levite on the threshold. The covenant head who was supposed to stand between the vulnerable and the threat positions the vulnerable between himself and the threat. God consistently refuses this move. He goes to the woman. He sees Hagar. He hears the daughters of Zelophehad. He appears first to Mary Magdalene. He knows the name the narrator did not give.
The daughters of Shiloh. The elders construct a legal workaround to preserve the tribe of Benjamin. Tell the Benjaminites to hide in the vineyards at Shiloh. When the daughters come out to dance at the feast of the LORD — snatch each man his wife. At the feast of the LORD. From the daughters dancing before him. Institutional compassion without personal justice. The tribe is preserved. The twelve remain. And the book ends.
What This Means for Me
Judges is the story of a people in full rebellion against the God they belong to. The rebellion is deep. It is willful. It produces Jephthah’s rash vow and the concubine on the threshold and the daughters snatched from Shiloh. Every cycle descends further because the heart producing it is a heart that wants what it wants and will use God’s name to get it — Micah’s idol, the Danites’ stolen endorsement, the elders’ legal workaround at the feast of the LORD.
The book ends without resolution. Every man went to his tribe. Every man went to his inheritance. The daughters of Shiloh went with men who took them from their dancing. And the narrator wrote his verdict one last time.
In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
Israel needed a king whose reign produces justice from the inside out — whose Spirit circumcises the heart, whose law is written on the heart, whose people genuinely see what he sees — the widow, the orphan, the concubine, the daughters dancing before him at Shiloh.
That king is coming. Ruth begins in the same period — in the days when the judges ruled — and shows grace breaking through from a completely unexpected direction. A Moabite woman. A kinsman-redeemer. The line of the true king taking shape in the ruins of everything Judges has documented.
The book of Judges is so dark that the only thing I can imagine darker is the cross of Christ itself. And reading it days before Easter, I find myself longing — for the resurrection, for new life, for the Ascended King, for the Spirit of his Son crying Abba! Father! in my own heart.
Jephthah’s rash vow. Micah’s private shrine. The Danites claiming divine endorsement for slaughter. The elders engineering a legal workaround at the feast of the LORD. Every one of these is a way of burying God under a concept, shoving him away, using his name while escaping his grasp. Jack Miller often repeated a quote from J.H. Bavinck’s Science of Modern Missions that reads like a commentary on the book of Judges:
“It is not easy to have real fellowship with God. We can much more easily bury Him under a concept, shove Him away to an endless distance, dissolve Him in all sorts of secular realities, and make Him into a nice fairy tale of boundless beauty. Anyone who knows himself to any extent knows the finesse with which man can escape from God and wrestle free from His grasp. To be really able to convict anyone else of sin, a person must know himself, and the hidden corners of his heart, very well. There is no more humbling work in the world than to engage in elenctics (unmasking). For at each moment, the person knows that the weapons which he turns against another have wounded himself. The Holy Spirit first convicts us, and then through us, He convicts the world.”
I recognize too much in these pages to keep them at a distance. I see it in the church, in my country, in myself — the nonlistening, disobeying, unbelieving heart that knows exactly how to wiggle free from what God is saying. The Holy Spirit first convicts us. That is where I sit this week, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. And then through us, the Holy Spirit convicts the world. Come Lord Jesus, come.
Key Scriptures
Judges 11:30–40 · Judges 12:1–6 · Judges 13:2–23 · Judges 17:1–13 · Judges 19:1–30 · Judges 21:20–25 · Leviticus 27 · Isaiah 9:6 · Galatians 4:4–6 · John 1:1, 14 · John 20:19–20 · Romans 8:32 · Hebrews 11:32
Prayer
Father, I have read the book of Judges and I do not know what to say. I see my own heart in it — the momentum that stops asking you, the reasoning that honors the letter and eviscerates the spirit, the capacity to push the vulnerable out the door and sleep. I am worse than I knew.
Thank you that the angel whose name is Wonderful was present at Manoah’s altar in the middle of the descent — because you were faithful through the whole story even when it looked abandoned. Thank you that Easter is days away.
I pray for my country. We are doing what is right in our own eyes and calling it freedom. Lord, open our eyes. And I pray for the war — for the families in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, and across the Middle East, for our troops, for the displaced and the grieving. You know their names. Bring this to an end.
Amen.
Pray for the vulnerable — the ones whose names are not given, whose voices are not heard — that God would see them and that we would see them.