Preface

As in the Days of Gibeah

Updated 2/4/11

Hosea 9 : 7 - 9 - "The days of punishment are coming, the days of reckoning are at hand. Let Israel know this. Because your sins are so many and your hostility so great, the prophet is considered a fool, the inspired man a maniac. The prophet, along with my God, is watchman over Ephraim, yet snares await him on all his paths, and hostility in the house of his God. They have sunk deep into corruption, as in the days of Gibeah. God will remember their wickedness and punish them for their sins."

This is what happened at Gibeah.

Judges 19 : 20 - 26 - "'You are welcome at my house.' the old man said, "Let me supply whatever you need. Only don't spend the night in the square." So he took him into his house and fed his donkeys. After they had washed their feet, they had something to eat and drink. While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, "Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him." The owner of the house went outside and said to them, "No, my friends, don't be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don't do this disgraceful thing. Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But to this man, don't do such a disgraceful thing." But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight."

Fast forward to the fall of 2009; it's been reported that allegedly a young woman in Northern California was lured by a friend to a place on her school grounds where ten people beat and raped her for over two hours while ten others watched and cheered. The young woman has been described as a "church goer" so it's likely that she's a Christian who was different simply because she was trying to be faithful in her walk with her Lord.

This is what we've become, like those of Gibeah; not from just one isolated incident, but as part of an adulterous and sinful generation. Clearly, this did not happen overnight. It's been a long slow gradual decline of mankind's billions and billions of selfish individual choices and little compromises that have sunk us into this moral abyss. Wickedness all around us, and running so deep that we've embraced it and no longer even recognize it for what it is. We are all responsible for what we've become both through our actions and through our silence, and now that we're here, the days of punishment are coming, and the days of reckoning are at hand.