Listening is Not Risk-free

By Daniel Cain (David's brother)

Read the episode in the Bible from Judges, chapter 9, and see if you aren’t shocked as I was. I was expecting to read about another person in the line of the judges, who according to a children’s song was known for “helping Israel fight her battles, and led them back to God from sin.” But the judge named Abimelech was not a great person—not in any sense, and much less anyone who should have been in a leadership position. So how does a person like Abimelech get into that position in the first place? He persuaded people to listen to him, and appealed in such a way that they failed to notice the bad acts he committed, or maybe they just figured that any bad act was just to be expected given the stakes that were involved. After all, no one gets to be a leader without running over top of someone along the way, or doing something that would be questionable behavior otherwise, right? That’s another technique used, I think, in persuading people to ignore bad actions. In today’s vernacular, it’s the language of trying to normalize behavior that should clearly be out-of-bounds, and unacceptable—to anyone.

 

The problem in this situation was not just Abimelech. He was a terrible person. The Bible makes that clear. But somebody also enabled that person by the simplest action possible. They listened to him, and then reacted with wholehearted and implicit trust – ‘He is our brother’ (Judges 9:3b, 18b). If you think just listening is risk-free, consider this earlier episode in history:

 

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” [Genesis 3:1; NIV] (See here the 15^th/16^th Century masterpiece artwork [part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling] by Michelangelo showing this episode.

 

The key to the above verse is how “crafty” the serpent was. Another translation states the matter more directly, at least in terms of the listener, saying the serpent was “more able to fool others” [New Century Version] than anyone else God had created. I’m not sure listening can be called a sin, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need to be careful when we do it.

 

The episode from Judges 9 about Abimelech is not just a story. It’s history, and it’s uncomfortable history because it has Abimelech as one of the judges, who are supposed to be the good guys. Our American history is no less uncomfortable when we look at some who have been elected as president of the United States. While we can’t escape what’s happened, take a lesson from Judges 9. Be careful what you listen to, and who you’re listening to. If we choose to listen to someone who is like Abimelech, at some point we’ll have to face the truth, that it’s not just Abimelech that’s a problem. It’s us.

 

See information on the artwork here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo_S%C3%BCndenfall.jpg … This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer. {{PD-1996}} – public domain in its source country on January 1, 1996 and in the United States.