Whose Land Is It?
Tuesday, March 18 -
Whose Land Is It?
Judges 11:26-28
“While Israel lived in Heshbon and its villages, … 300 years, why did you not deliver them within that time? I therefore have not sinned against you, and you do me wrong by making war on me. The LORD, the Judge, decide this day between the people of Israel and the people of Ammon.” But the king of the Ammonites did not listen to the words of Jephthah that he sent to them.
Let’s talk about the enigma of property rights for a moment, friend. Say you’ve got a deed from your local municipality that says you own that house on that half acre lot, but what if a gang of thugs shows up demanding you hand over the land, and one of the gang members is the local sheriff, and another is the mayor, and another is the district attorney, and another is a judge? Your deed won’t mean anything in a corrupt town like that, will it? Now widen the view a bit further. Say the French Government suddenly decided that Thomas Jefferson had ripped them off in 1803 when purchasing 828,000 miles of land for 4 cents per acre, and wrote a letter to Congress threatening a full-scale war if the land was not immediately returned? Well, we’d be on the verge of World War III by tomorrow morning. See, even in a fallen world, men who recognize the moral law, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ create systems to preserve property rights—like deeds of ownership during transfers and treaties during wars and Bills of Rights for basic governance. But those pieces of paper are only as strong as the integrity of those holding them up.
The fact is, this king of Ammon has zero claim to Israel’s land. Even by the standards of the ancient world, his suggestion that Jephthah owes him property that his people lost in a war they provoked three hundred years before is an inane position by any ethical metric. Oh, but covetousness doesn’t really care about being in the right, does it? It’s a thief and a thug, seizing what rightfully belongs to others through the only argument it knows how to make: a show of force.
Friend, consider that being righteous and being reasonable go hand in hand in the life of faith. If your ambitions are not grounded in reasonableness today, your actions won’t be in the right.