What Happens When Everyone Does What’s Right in Their Own Eyes

“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” — Judges 21:25

Have you ever looked around and thought, “What is happening to the world right now?”
If so, you might understand the Book of Judges more than you think.

Judges is one of those books that’s raw and unsettling — filled with war, betrayal, heartbreak, and moral collapse. God’s people had lost their way. Everyone followed their own truth, and the result was chaos.

It sounds a lot like today.

We live in a world where right and wrong are blurred, where people do whatever feels good in the moment — and then wonder why everything feels so broken.

By the end of Judges, even God’s chosen people were in complete disorder. One of the most disturbing moments comes when, in a desperate attempt to keep their people from dying out, they took innocent young women by force — believing that forcing them into marriage would preserve their tribe. Those women were taken by force and made “wives,” meaning sexual violence occurred. It’s a horrific event that exposes just how dark the human heart can become when it drifts away from God’s truth and compassion.

It’s hard to read — and it should be. Scripture doesn’t hide the ugliness of sin; it shows us what happens when people replace God’s ways with their own.

And yet, even in that chaos, God was not absent. He didn’t endorse their actions — but He didn’t abandon His people either. Out of that same broken nation, God would one day raise up kings, prophets, and ultimately a Savior who would redeem every failure of the human heart.

That’s the message of Judges: not that evil is excused, but that grace refuses to give up. God works in ways we can’t see — even in the wreckage, even when it seems too far gone.

He takes what feels irredeemable and begins to restore.

He brings order from chaos.

He turns endings into beginnings.

So if your world feels out of control right now — if you’re watching things crumble and wondering where God is in it — remember this: He’s still writing redemption stories. And even in the darkest chapters, His mercy has not left the page.