Ogilvie tells as that “Writing in the British press, the bishop of Worcester characterized the moral climate in one pithy sentence. He said we live in a society where ‘it doesn’t matter what you believe, so long as you believe that it doesn’t matter.'” You couldn’t describe the culture during the period of the book of Judges any better than that. Two things dominated the era. They are the same two things that dominate much of the mass media in our day: sex and violence.
Judges Chapter 19 is a gruesome story of rape and dismemberment. The society had exchanged God’s perfect plan regarding love and marriage between two equal human beings to seeing each other as objects of pleasure. When the physical dominates everything people become plastic. They are used, broken, and discarded.
But God has not made us that way. Ogilvie concludes, “No one can walk away from the deepest act of physical union between two people totally unchanged by it. That is why we see so many people, who drift in and out of relationships, who are ultimately unable to give themselves to any lasting relationship of trust and commitment at all. There is a price to pay for jettisoning God’s laws—emotionally, psychologically, and physically.”