When Every Man Does What Is Right in His Own Eyes

When the systems fall, the restraints often fall with them. Security, order, and the church as a community of mutual care.

“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”Judges 21:25 (KJV)

Up to this point, this series has dealt mostly with things: water, food, storage, gardens, medicine, tools, and the knowledge to use them. This part deals with people, and it is the hardest part of all.

Stored grain does not riot. A root cellar does not steal. Every collapse in history has been, at bottom, a human crisis. When the trucks stop and the lights go out, the real question is not only what is in your pantry. It is what happens on your road, in your town, and in your church when people get hungry, frightened, and tired.

Scripture does not flinch from that question. The book of Judges is, in large part, the story of what happens to a people after the restraints come off. It is also the story of how God raised up order, courage, and community in the middle of it.

---

The Thin Line

Ordinary civil order rests on two quiet assumptions: that tomorrow will look like today, and that wrongdoing will be met with consequences. Full shelves and working phones hold a great deal more of society together than we realize.

When the Late Bronze Age world came apart, those assumptions failed together. The groups historians call the Sea Peoples were not only invaders. Many appear to have been displaced, hungry people, uprooted by the same drought and famine that was breaking the empires. Desperation turned into raiding, and raiding turned into the burning of cities. The tablets from Ugarit, still in the kiln when the city fell, record a king begging for help that never came.

We need balance here. Researchers who study disasters have found, again and again, that the first response to a crisis is usually not panic or looting. It is neighbors helping neighbors. People pull each other out of floodwater, share generators, and cook for whoever shows up. That is worth remembering when fear tells you that everyone outside your fence is an enemy.

But a short emergency with help on the way is different from a long one with no end in sight. The days of the Judges were the second kind. Prolonged scarcity, with no authority to appeal to, wears down even decent people. Christians should be neither naive about that nor afraid of it.

What Judges Teaches About Breakdown

Deborah’s song gives one of the clearest pictures in Scripture of a society after the restraints are gone:

“In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through byways. The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel, until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.”Judges 5:6–7

The main roads were too dangerous to travel. Village life itself was failing. And notice what turned it around: not a wall or a weapon first, but a person who rose up to lead, under God.

The next chapter shows the Midianites, who waited until harvest and then swept in to strip the land. “They left no sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass” (Judges 6:4). In response, Israel “made them the dens which are in the mountains, and caves, and strong holds” (Judges 6:2). And when the angel of the LORD found Gideon, he was threshing wheat in a winepress, “to hide it from the Midianites” (Judges 6:11).

Three lessons sit right on the surface of those chapters:

• Raiders follow visible wealth. The Midianites came at harvest because that was when the food was out in the open.
• Concealment is not cowardice. Gideon threshing in a winepress was practical wisdom, and God did not rebuke him for it. He called him a “mighty man of valour” while he was doing it (Judges 6:12).
• The deeper problem was spiritual. Judges 21:25 is not only a political observation. “No king” meant no shared standard, and Israel had already forgotten its true King. Lawlessness in the land grew out of lawlessness in the heart.

Archaeology adds a small, striking detail. Some of the earliest Israelite hill villages from this period appear to have been built in a ring, with the backs of the houses joined to form an outer wall and the livestock kept in the open center. The village was the fortress. Security was not one man’s project. It was the shape of the whole community.

---

The Watchman Principle

The best biblical model for security in unsettled times is Nehemiah. He was rebuilding Jerusalem’s wall surrounded by people who wanted it to fail. Watch the order of what he did:

“Nevertheless we made our prayer unto our God, and set a watch against them day and night, because of them.”Nehemiah 4:9

Prayer first, then the watch. Not one without the other. And when the threat grew, Nehemiah organized the people so the work and the guarding went on together:

“They which builded on the wall, and they that bare burdens, with those that laded, every one with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon.”Nehemiah 4:17

He placed families together along the wall (Nehemiah 4:13), set a trumpeter to call everyone to wherever trouble broke out (4:18–20), and told the people what they were actually guarding: “Be not ye afraid of them: remember the Lord, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses” (4:14).

Deter, detect, delay, respond

Professional protective security is often summarized in four layers. They map onto Scripture, and onto an ordinary household, surprisingly well.

Deter. Most trouble goes looking for an easy target. “When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace” (Luke 11:21). A home that is lit, locked, occupied, and part of a watchful neighborhood is simply less attractive than one that is not.

Detect. The watchman’s job was to see the sword coming and blow the trumpet (Ezekiel 33:6). Early warning is worth more than almost anything else. Neighbors who know each other notice strangers. Dogs, gravel drives, simple alarms, and people taking turns on watch all buy time to think.

Delay. Nehemiah ordered that the gates not be opened “until the sun be hot” and that they be shut and barred at night (Nehemiah 7:3). Good doors, good locks, fencing, and a little distance between the road and the house slow trouble down. Delay turns surprise into a decision.

Respond. Abram rescued Lot with “his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen” (Genesis 14:14). Trained, not merely armed. A response that has been talked through and practiced ahead of time is calmer, safer, and far less likely to hurt the wrong person.

Do not show the Babylonians your storehouse

When envoys came from Babylon, King Hezekiah, flattered by the attention, gave them a full tour: “there was nothing in his house, nor in all his dominion, that Hezekiah shewed them not” (2 Kings 20:13). Isaiah’s answer was blunt. The day would come when everything they had seen would be carried off to Babylon (20:17).

The modern version is posting your pantry, your stockpile, or your security setup online for strangers to admire. Be generous, but be quiet. Gideon threshed in the winepress for a reason.

The question of force

This deserves an honest word, because believers land in very different places on it. Scripture makes room for defending the household. The Law treated a nighttime break-in differently from a daylight one (Exodus 22:2–3), which shows both a right of defense and a demand for proportion. Nehemiah armed the builders. Jesus told His disciples to carry a sword on the road (Luke 22:36), yet rebuked Peter for using it to stop the cross (Matthew 26:52).

At the same time, Scripture firmly forbids vengeance. “Recompense to no man evil for evil… If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men” (Romans 12:17–18). Protecting the innocent is one thing. Retaliation, intimidation, and taking the law into our own hands are another.

The patriarchs give us a pattern worth copying. When strife broke out between his herdsmen and Lot’s, Abram said, “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee… for we be brethren” (Genesis 13:8), and gave Lot first choice of the land. When the Philistines contested Isaac’s wells, he moved on and dug another, until he could say, “For now the LORD hath made room for us” (Genesis 26:22). Walking away is often the strongest move available.

So, practically: if you keep firearms, get real training, know your state’s laws on self-defense, and store them securely, especially in a home with children. Learn to de-escalate before you ever need to. “A soft answer turneth away wrath” (Proverbs 15:1) is not only a verse about family arguments. The goal of every security measure is that nobody gets hurt.

---

The Church as a Community of Mutual Care

The answer to “every man did that which was right in his own eyes” is not every man for himself. It is a people bound together under God. That is exactly what the early church became:

“And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”Acts 2:44–45

A few chapters later, Luke can say, “Neither was there any among them that lacked” (Acts 4:34). And in Acts 11 we find something that belongs in every church’s thinking about hard times:

“…and signified by the Spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world: which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar. Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judaea.”Acts 11:28–29

A warning of famine. A plan made before it arrived. Giving according to ability. Relief sent to where the need was greatest. That is church-wide preparedness, in the New Testament itself.

Order in the household of faith

When scarcity came to the Jerusalem church, so did complaints. The Grecian widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution (Acts 6:1). The apostles did not ignore it. They set apart men “of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom” to oversee it (6:3). In hard times, fairness matters as much as supply. Nothing breaks a community faster than the sense that some are being fed and others forgotten.

Jethro’s counsel to Moses points the same way. Moses could not carry the whole nation alone, so he appointed “rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens” (Exodus 18:21). Small units, with someone responsible for each, are how people actually get cared for when the larger systems fail.

For a congregation, that might look like:

• A skills inventory. Who is a nurse, a mechanic, a gardener, an electrician, a welder, a teacher, a cook? Knowing this ahead of time is the Part 6 lesson applied to a whole church.
• A check-on list. Widows, shut-ins, the elderly, single parents, and the disabled should each have a name next to theirs: someone responsible for checking on them first.
• Communication that does not need a cell tower. A printed contact list, an agreed meeting place, and possibly radios. GMRS and amateur radio both require an FCC license, so look into that before you need it.
• Shared resources. A tool library, a seed exchange, a shared pressure canner, and a benevolence pantry that is restocked in good seasons.
• Small groups with a shepherd. Groups of ten or so households, each with someone who knows who is in it and what they need.

Generosity with wisdom

When four starving lepers stumbled into an abandoned enemy camp full of food, they ate and hid what they could, and then their conscience caught up with them: “We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace” (2 Kings 7:9). Christians cannot sit on a full storeroom while the people around them starve.

Scripture also gives the shape of that generosity. “Let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). Provide for your own household first (1 Timothy 5:8). Expect those who are able to work to do so (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Plan to give. Store some on purpose to share. And where possible, give through the church or another central point rather than from your own back door. That keeps distribution fair, reaches the people who are easiest to overlook, and avoids announcing to the whole road what you have stored.

Seek the peace of the city

God told the exiles in Babylon to do something surprising: “seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace” (Jeremiah 29:7). Believers are not called to retreat into a bunker and wait for the world to burn. We are called to be the stabilizing presence in our communities.

The early church did exactly that. When plague swept through the Roman world in the third century, Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria wrote that Christians stayed to nurse the sick when others fled, and some died doing it. A century later, the pagan emperor Julian complained that the “Galileans” supported not only their own poor but the pagan poor as well. The world noticed. It always does.

Hebrew & Greek Word Study

יָשָׁרyashar · straight, upright, right

The word behind “right in his own eyes.” The tragedy of Judges is not that nobody had a sense of right and wrong. It is that everybody had his own. The same root appears in Proverbs 3:6: “In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths,” that is, He will make them straight. Order is restored when people stop being right in their own eyes and let God make the path straight.

שָׁמַרshamar · to keep, guard, watch

Adam was placed in the garden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15), so guarding was part of our calling from the beginning. The same word gives us the watchman of Psalm 127:1, who “waketh but in vain” unless the LORD keeps the city. And it gives us the promise behind every watch we set: “he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4).

κοινωνίαkoinōnia · fellowship, sharing, partnership

The “fellowship” the early church continued in (Acts 2:42). Paul uses the same word for the “contribution for the poor saints” in Jerusalem (Romans 15:26). In Scripture, fellowship was never only a feeling or a potluck. It was shared life and shared provision, and it is what turns a crowd of frightened households into a community.

What Jesus Taught About the Days of Breakdown

When Jesus described the days ahead, He named this very danger: “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved” (Matthew 24:12–13). Lawlessness does not only threaten our property. It threatens our hearts. The greater danger in a collapse is not that someone will take your food. It is that fear will turn you into the kind of person who would let your neighbor go hungry.

The Good Samaritan’s road, from Jerusalem down to Jericho, was a known robbers’ road. The priest and the Levite had every practical reason to keep moving. The Samaritan stopped anyway, bound the wounds, and paid for the man’s care (Luke 10:30–35). Jesus did not tell that story to make us reckless. He told it to keep our love from going cold on dangerous roads.

“Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). In a time when every man does what is right in his own eyes, a people who keep the commands of their King, guard one another, and share what they have will stand out like a city on a hill.

---

Where to Begin

• Know your neighbors now. Names, phone numbers, who has children, who lives alone, who has medical needs, who has useful skills. Trust built before a crisis is worth more than any lock.
• Walk your place like a stranger would. What can be seen from the road? Where would someone approach? What is unlit, unlocked, or easy to carry off? Fix the simple things first.
• Keep your storehouse quiet. Stop posting your preparations publicly, and teach your children not to talk about them at school.
• Talk to your pastor. Ask whether your church has a plan for hard times: a skills inventory, a check-on list, a benevolence pantry, a way to communicate if the phones go down. Offer to help build one.
• Set up communication that does not depend on towers. A printed contact list and an agreed meeting place cost nothing. Radios are worth exploring, but learn the licensing rules first.
• If you keep firearms, take it seriously. Get trained, learn your state’s laws, and store them securely.
• Learn to de-escalate. The ability to calm a tense situation will likely be needed far more often than any weapon.
• Pray for your town by name. Seek its peace. In the peace thereof you will have peace.

The days of the Judges were dark, but they were not hopeless. God kept raising up people who would stand: a mother in Israel, a farmer hiding wheat in a winepress, a man rebuilding a wall with a trowel in one hand, a weapon in the other. And through all of it, He was preparing the way for a King who would rule in righteousness. That King has come, and He is coming again.

“The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.”Proverbs 18:10

Lord, You are the Keeper of Israel, and You neither slumber nor sleep. When the restraints of this world give way, keep our hearts from growing cold. Make us watchful but not fearful, prepared but not proud, strong but never cruel. Bind Your church together in true fellowship, so that none among us lack. Help us seek the peace of the places where You have put us, and let our homes and congregations be refuges for the weak and the overlooked. Raise up leaders who fear You, and teach us to do what is right in Your eyes, not our own. In the name of Jesus Christ, our King, Amen.

To God be all the Glory · Maranatha

T