God uses shock therapy. The generality of men and women are in such a state of spiritual and moral depression that there is often no other way that He can treat or cure us.
We have just read Judges 19 and 20. What a barbaric tale of blatant gender discrimination, rape, sodomy, self interest and violence! It is for all the world like a modern “adult” video, “requiring parental guidance”! The Levite declares that he is on his way “to the house of the LORD,” yet he and his host in Gibeah lock themselves in while his girlfriend is left out in the street to die a horrifying death at the hands of a brutal gang of sexual perverts. No wonder the writer of Judges comments, In those days everyone did just as he pleased or whatever was right in his own eyes. What else could he have told us?
However, even this selfish Levite was appalled at the moral and spiritual depths to which God’s holy people had fallen. “When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine [girlfriend], limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel. Everyone who saw it said, `Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do!” Imagine the gruesome, grisly procedure. There was no refrigeration. The twelve broken, mangled, rotting, stinking, body parts were shared around the twelve representatives of Israel.
Truly this was shock therapy, and it worked. It “worked well.” “Then all the Israelites came out as one man and assembled before the LORD.” At last, united! After decades, maybe a century, of division and fraternal strife, they were one at last. Prophetic words had fallen on deaf ears. The priests had failed hopelessly. It took a bloody, broken body, shared around, to unite them.
The last supper represented the Lord’s greatest use of shock therapy: a desperate, caring attempt to cure his followers of their fatal disunity. Disunity is a fatal disease: make no mistake. It seems only shock therapy can cure it. As our Lord shared the symbolic body and blood, he appealed to the weak, half-converted twelve. “Share it among yourselves ” Then he prayed: “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:23).
Will the shock therapy of the Lord’s table work for us, his 21″ century people? As we now pass around the symbols of broken body, and the poured out blood, will it really be true for us that “we come out as one man and assemble before the Lord,” after years of disunity and unseemly strife? How powerfully does this table speak! Look at what wicked men and women did to my Beloved Son! For you it is my Son’s battered, abused, crucified body, oozing blood from head, back, hands, feet and side. It is very rarely that we read Lamentations 3:1-26 in preparation for the emblems. Next time you preside, read it. It is shock therapy. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?”
Judges 20 tells us that maybe God’s shock therapy will work, even though nothing else will. Perhaps that is the answer to the terrible questions: Why did Jesus have to die? Why was he crucified? Maybe this will unite us, so that all men will know that we really are the true body of Christ. With our stiff necks and hard hearts, is it true that we must see the stark reality of a bleeding body, broken and cut up, then passed around the tribes of spiritual Israel before we unite as one man in worship and service? Perhaps.
So, as we pass around the emblems of bread and wine this morning, may God shock us all into true contrition. For remember, like the Israelites in the days of the Judges, and the twelve with Jesus at the Last Supper, we all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way: and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One