Judges 21:25 is a famous verse and it well sums up the character of the Nation during that period: “Everyone did that which was right in his own eyes.”
Without an absolute authority we live in a world of competing systems of ethics. What’s wrong for one might be OK for another. What’s right for me may not be right for anyone else. Thus the sexual values of the day are subject to one’s own discretion. The basis of competition seems to me to be pragmatism. Whichever one accomplishes what I want at the moment is the system I’ll subscribe to. But Paul says that the obvious moral struggles in the pagan world prove that man is searching for real guidance in the affairs of life. God did not leave us in this world to fend for ourselves. I like the way The Message puts it. “…God’s law is not something alien, imposed on us from without, but woven into the very fabric of our creation. There is something deep within them that echoes God’s yes and no, right and wrong.”
We need to stand for God’s yes and no, His right and wrong or we will end up like the Israelites at the end of the book of Judges, “There was no King in Israel, so every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” The phrase “lex rex” means the Law is King! This was the very basis of the reformation as it swept across Europe and England. They well knew there was a standard to live by. That standard is applicable to all, it is God’s Word.