Choices. We make them every single day. It’s a choice to simply get out of bed. It’s a choice to see the blessing or focus on what hurts us. It’s a choice to obey or disobey. A choice to sing or weep. To love or hate. To forgive or hold a grudge. To stick it out or run away.
Choices are endless. And some of them create consequences that can’t be changed. We simply cannot go back and undo what is past, but I suspect Dinah wanted to do so more than once.
Dinah’s story is another of those tragic tales in Scripture. She is one of a handful of women who were raped, and only a few of them were named.
Now I will never, ever suggest that rape is a woman’s fault. It’s a power play by an unstable man and so much more. The rape was not Dinah’s fault.
Going into the city by herself was. She chose to leave the safety of her camp and travel alone to visit a pagan city. Do you ever wonder why she did that?
We can speculate her reasons, but we need not speculate what happened to her because of that decision. She was like a lamb who wandered away from the flock and got caught in a lion’s jaws. She took a risk with her safety and to her great despair did not come out unscathed.
I feel sorry for Dinah because in her culture, the rape tainted her. It wasn’t her fault, but she was now defiled and no longer a virgin, and that meant her chances at marriage had just tanked. There is no biblical evidence that she ever married after that incident.
I remember a young girl who was in one of my classes in high school. She was very pregnant, and rumor had it this was not her first child. She had given at least one, perhaps two up for adoption. She planned to marry the father of this third one after graduation and keep the baby. I wonder what happened to her later in life. Her choices surely didn’t make her life easy.
Another memory involves a young man who got drunk (underaged) and got behind the wheel of his car and killed a man. When he disappeared from school, we discovered that he’d gone to prison for manslaughter. I don’t know how long his sentence lasted, but he would never get those years back. Or be able to restore the life of the person’s he took.
Dinah didn’t likely get a second chance to reclaim what she lost that day. Just as these two young people couldn’t undo their choices that led to some serious life changes.
And yet even our bad choices don’t have to define us for the rest of our lives as they did for Dinah.
We might not be able to fix it, undo it, change it, but we can seek forgiveness for our part in it. Our bad choices are really a result of our desires that go against what we know is right or true. And that comes down to sin against God even more than it is against our fellow human being.
When David sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah, his prayer for forgiveness stated, “against you, and you only, have I sinned.” He knew that his choices were made in rebellion against God – against what he knew God had said was wrong.
Dinah’s rape was not her sin of which to repent. That fell to the guy who raped her. She was responsible for running off unchaperoned to a potentially dangerous city. And I suspect she knew better. Like all of us, she didn’t want to be told “no” so she did what she wanted to do.
When people were told they couldn’t drink in the 1920s, alcohol consumption skyrocketed. Even people who might not have touched the stuff were making it in their bathtubs. That rebellious part of our nature does not want to be told we can’t.
I can. That can be both good and bad. Tell me I can’t and I’ll show you I can. Perseverance in a positive way. But tell me I can’t when I know I shouldn’t, and my spirit wants to push back against the restriction. Sin is like that. Our natures carry that within us, like it or not.
And He’s listening for us to call on Him. He promised to be there, to not leave us or forsake us. Our sin might break the relationship of closeness we could have with Him, but it only takes our willingness to turn around, admit our sin, and feel the grace of His love again.
Dinah’s choice to step away from her safety net cost her dearly. But that didn’t mean her life held no more meaning. It didn’t mean she couldn’t have had a great relationship with her God and her family and the people around her.
~Selah
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