You’ll usually make it worse, and it won’t even fix the real problem.
The end of the Book of Judges is a long, ugly chain of decisions that all trace back to one moment.
Israel made a vow not to give their daughters in marriage to the tribe of Benjamin. At the time it probably felt justified. Benjamin had done something so evil that the other tribes went to war over it.
Then the war ended, and the consequences of that vow became clear. Benjamin wouldn’t recover. An entire tribe of Israel would disappear, not because God commanded it, but because of something they said.
They saw the problem, but they wouldn’t deal with it directly. They could have admitted the vow was wrong and broken it. That would have cost them, mostly in pride, but it would have been clean.
Instead, they started working around it.
There was a town that hadn’t joined the war, so they attacked it, killed the inhabitants, and kept about four hundred young women alive to give to Benjamin. That solved part of the problem, if you ignore what they had just done to get there.
It still wasn’t enough, so they came up with something else. There was a festival at Shiloh, and they told the men of Benjamin to hide nearby and take the women when they came out to dance. That way, technically, Israel wasn’t “giving” their daughters.
They stacked one decision on top of another, each one designed to protect the original vow, and each one making things worse.
Most people don’t go that far, but the pattern isn’t hard to recognize.
We don’t like admitting we were wrong, so we adjust instead. We explain it, justify it, and look for ways to clean it up without ever backing up and saying it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
That trade almost always goes the same way. A smaller, honest wrong gets replaced by something bigger that’s easier to defend.
The instruction from Jesus is simple. Confess.
Not manage it. Not reframe it. Not work around it.
Confess, and He will forgive you.
Even the mess you made trying to fix it.
The sooner you set aside your pride and say it plainly, the less you usually have to clean up later.
Or you can keep digging.
P.S.-If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.
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