The Compass That Points to Itself

In 1707, four British warships struck the rocks off the Scilly Isles, drowning nearly two thousand sailors in a single night. The fleet's navigator, Sir Cloudesley Shovell, had been so confident in his own calculations that when a common sailor dared offer a correcting reading, Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny. The admiral trusted his own reckoning over every other voice — and steered an entire fleet into disaster.

The book of Judges tells a similar story across an entire nation. Israel's downward spiral — from Othniel's faithfulness to the horror of a civil war over a dismembered concubine — traces what happens when a people abandon their true North. The final verse lands like a verdict: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes."

Notice the text does not say they did what was wrong. It says they did what was right — in their own eyes. That is the deeper danger. They were not rebels who knew they had wandered. They were navigators certain of their own calculations, each one steering by an internal compass that pointed only back to themselves.

The writer of Judges wants us to feel the ache of that absence. Without a King — without an authority beyond our own preferences — even sincere people wreck themselves and everyone sailing with them. The good news the whole Old Testament leans toward is this: a true King is coming, one worth surrendering our own reckoning to follow.