Judges 17

Hey, hey, good morning, good morning. Welcome to Coffee and Devotions. This morning we're going to be talking about Micah and what this dude does. That's pretty sad and it's an introduction to what I think is the most famous phrase in the whole book of Judges. And everyone does what was right in their own eyes. It's the first time that it actually shows up in the book of Judges, but it kind of... Well, it's repeated a few times after this, but people often think like, oh, this is what the Book of Judges is about. But this is actually the first time that it's come up in the Book of Judges. So let's go ahead and have some coffee. We'll pray and we'll get into God's Word.
You want coffee, right? Nope, not someday, but someday. All right, pray. Father, thank you so much for this day. Thank you for the blessing it is to get to read your word. Father, we pray that your Holy Spirit would please teach us what we need to learn. Please let us walk in your ways. Please help us to. Lord, help us to put away the distractions of this world and the cares of our own lives. Lord, we know that. Our adversary would love to just keep us thinking about other things. So we need you, God, to help us to pay attention and to learn from you in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, Judges chapter 17. We'll just go paragraph by paragraph.
Now there was a man from the mountains of Ephraim. His name was Micah, and he said to his mother, The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you and on which you put a cause, even saying it in my ears, here is the silver with me I took. And his mother said, May you be blessed of the Lord, my son. So when he had returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver from my hand to the Lord for my son to make a carved image and a molded image. Now, therefore, I will return it to you. Thus he returned the silver to his mother. Then his mother took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to the silversmith. and he made it into a carved image, a molded image, and they were in the house of Micah. The man Micah had a shrine, a maize, a shrine, a shrine, and maize and ephod, and household items. Micah created one of the sets who became his priest. In those days there was no king in Israel.
Everybody did what was right in his own house. Now there was a young man from Bethlehem in Judah of the family of Judah. He was a Levite, and he was staying there. The man departed from the city of Bethlehem in Judah to stay where he could find a place. Then he came to the mountains of Ephraim, to the house of Micah, as he journeyed. And Micah said to him, where are you, or where do you come from? So he said to him, I'm a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah. and I am on my way to find a place to stay."
Micah said to him, dwell with me, and be a father and a priest to me, and I will give you ten shekels of silver per year, a suit of clothes, and your sustenance. So the Levite went in. Then the Levite was content to dwell with the man, and the young man became like one of his sons to him. So Micah consecrated the Levite, And the young man became his priest, and lived in the house of Micah. Then Micah said, Now I know that the Lord will be good to me, since I have a Levite as a priest. Well, we've got our three questions to ask ourselves.
A. What is this about?
B. What's the best part of the sermon? And C. What are we supposed to do? Alright, so what's this section about? It starts off with Micah and money, money being stolen. All right, so Micah is mama and the money, right? And so there's this idea, it's somewhat a little bit difficult to follow, right? He said to his mother, 1,100 shekels of silver that were taken from you and on which you put a curse, even saying that in my ears, here is the silver with me.
I took it. right so somehow yeah this is a hard one right so this is this is silver taken from you and there's a curse on this silver and he's heard these things with his own ears it says he took it so I think it's almost like he stole it from his mom maybe yes this is a hard a hard little bit of a section to work through well what's his mom say in response to that Apparently he gives it back and she says, well, I'll give it back to you and make a molded image for you. Yeah, right.
So, yeah, so he, she says to him, right, may Jehovah bless you, my son, when he had returned all this money to his mom. And his mom says, right, well, I had wholly dedicated all that money from my hand to Jehovah for my son. Who's her son? My God, right?
To make a carved image and a molded image. Now, therefore, I will return it to you. So it's like this. Well, I took it from your mom. Mom's his wife, gave it to the Lord because of you. So she gives it back to him. But interesting, she had to dedicate it to the Lord, to the God of Israel, Jehovah. She uses the Tetragrammaton, the divine name here. But what was she going to do with it? She's going to use it to make a molded image. I thought God in the second commandment had said not to make molded images, to bow down to them, nor worship them, nor serve them.
Yeah. Yeah, right. The commandments are way gone by this point, aren't they? Yeah. Okay. Well, uh, thus he returned the silver to his mother. Mom took 200 of the shekels of silver and gave them to the silversmith. And he makes a couple of things. Right. What's he make? The very last part of verse four. A default and a household. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't know.
Uh, well, there's two there's two there's a carved image and a molded image It's cool just like with it just like it's with silver right so just like with a chisel it's a soft metal Yeah, silver and gold are very soft, right and so that's why you're able to like stamp silver and so one of them is carved one of them is molded right so melted down and Are you doing a Rubik's Cube behind your back? Give me the Rubik's Cube. He loves his Rubik's Cube. He's sitting there fiddling with the Rubik's Cube.
I wasn't! That's fine. Alright, well anyways. Yeah, right, so there's two different images he makes. So Micah takes it into his house, and guess what he's got in his house? Verse 5, what's he got? A shiny bunch of other stuff. He's got a shrine. He makes an ephod. He makes a little house for the idols. He makes one of his sons a priest. Why does he do all this? Because wouldn't it be good in God's eyes? Is this how you'd be good in God's eyes? No. So why is he doing it? He thinks that's how he does it.
No. It's very easy for us. I think as humans we're made in the image of God. It's weird. Creative people right we want to do these things, but we often He tells us one way and we just kind of go and do our own thing And so no no right doing whatever is right in his own eyes. There's no king in Israel There's no way to enforce God's law. There's no big teaching the the commandments and the decrees and so Mike is just doing what he thinks is good. I think he's sincere about this. Yeah Sincerity though. It doesn't make it right. Can you be sincerely wrong? Sometimes am I sincerely wrong? Yeah. All right.
Well, the story kind of changes and we introduce this new guy, verse 7. What's particular or peculiar about this new dude? He's a Levite. He lives in Bethlehem? Judah? Yeah, so he's leaving Jerusalem, maybe like people aren't supporting the temple like they should, right? We know that that later on was going to be one of the charges that God brings against his people is that they refuse to listen and they refuse to bring their sacrifices and so they're neglecting the Levites. So maybe, I don't know, that's just speculation. But anyways, he goes up north, he goes just a little bit into the mountains of Ephraim and his house does stumble upon.
Are you a priest? A priest of what? Priesthood. Of God. But I thought you had images. That's what it meant. I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking, are they images? Lots of times what you hear is images of the Lord. This is where the human heart often messes things up again. There's two things, right?
Molded images and carved images could be a bulls, an ox, a goat, and they could be, or any other number of things, right? And they could be representing something else, all the other, not God himself, but some, some idol deity, right? So like, so they could make an ash or a bull, right? The ash or a bull represents something. Bull is just wood, it's worthless, it's useless, right?
But people put a lot of significance to that. Bull, because it means something to them. I think often, even in Christian circles, we'll find this, right? Certain Christians who will, they'll have certain things that are meant to represent God. They'll say, God? And they'll say, no, no, no, I'm not bowing down to that. It just represents him.
That's why most churches, that's why in most of the reformed Presbyterian, we don't have the classes. Yeah, right, so we would be considered iconoclasts, right? We don't think we need icons. We don't need images of God. We think that's actually specifically prohibited, outlawed in the second commandment, right? That's why we don't have crosses and crucifixions and stuff like that, typically.
Some people take the iconoclastic maybe a little bit too far, right? They kind of go, you know, too beyond with that and they're almost like anti-superstitious everything and so it's kind of like okay hold on here right but the point being is i think he's actually trying to make images of god i mean he makes him a father and a priest to him and he he's setting up essentially a duplicate system but is there any image of god in the temple No, there's images of the seraphim, or the cherubim, right? There's all sorts of palm trees and things like this.
Well, the temple's not around yet, but the the tabernacle. But they're not going to them. He's not going to the tabernacle. Why isn't Micah going to the tabernacle? Isn't that where God said they were supposed to go worship? So why isn't Micah going there? At this point, the nation's kind of doing I mean, pretty practical, isn't it? Pragmatic. Why go all the way down to Jerusalem?
He could pay a priest to live with him. He could make a Levite a priest himself. He could consecrate him to that. He could ordain him to that. Who gave Micah the authority to ordain him? Nobody. Did God institute that? You see, it's just this man-made religion doing what's right in his own eyes. He's got no king in the land. That's clearly that the Lord isn't his king, right?
So yeah, so this is a hard part, right? This is challenging. So, all right. The very end of it gives us kind of Michael's adaptation of this. Go ahead and read verse 13. What's he think as he concludes? Now I know that all of it will be good to me since I have been invited to be here. Now it's just not like me having my son do it. My son's not even actually fighting. Not actually.
I have an actual yeah right so it's almost treating God like a totem type thing right but here it's it's he's not being generic right once again he invokes the tetragrammaton yod-heh-vav-heh then Micah said now I know that the Lord God's covenant who's recording judges many people think it's Samuel who wrote judges I just like wonder like how somebody would try to like figure out how...it almost sounds like...it almost sounds like Old Testament Luke.
Well yeah. To figure out just what happened. Yeah, right, so I think... So there's, again, it's not signs saying, I Samuel made a careful inquiry, but the Jewish people think that it was Samuel who wrote this. So it's very possible that there's this guy, he's very invested, he wants to know what's happening.
So what you're asking is a higher question, right? so Yeah, he thinks like the Lord's favor is with him getting the Lord's favor is gonna shine down upon this type of thing No No, right this isn't going to turn out is he doing whatever is right in his own eyes rather than listening to the Lord Well, let's go ahead and if you had to summarize, okay, so you have one or two sentences.
Your mom says, Bubba, I'm tired. Give it to me in seven words or less. What was it about? God's man-made religion. Okay. I would say Micah invents his own religion. Let's go ahead and talk about best verse. What would you underline as the best verse to summarize this section? I'm going to say Okay, yeah, I can see verse six I have verse three or sorry verse 13 Underlined in my Bible, maybe like 12 and 13 because it's like actually Micah what he thinks he's doing But but you're right sixes is the first introduction of that Yeah All right. Let's let's talk about see calling What's this call to do you to do? I'll just tell you about sin. You need to confess out as Christ pointed out in this what's the covenant of grace like Where do you find yourself in this?
I think it's... I think it's kind of like... We like to... It's like a really deep, deep pit where, like, cults come from. We just... We just change this. Like, it doesn't follow the Bible, but it's better. It's better this way. Just changing it, changing it, changing it. And then after a while... It's so off from the Bible, but it's... That's just what we do. Yeah, I can see that.
I think as humans, we always kind of think we know what's best and do what's right and are nice. I don't naturally want to follow God's ways. I want to do what I want to do. So remembering that specifically, it's not just that there was no king in Israel, right? That was supposed to be it. Not following his words. Wait a second.
If Samuel was... If they think Samuel was writing this, then there wasn't Edward. What do you mean? Saul was the first king and Samuel was writing this. So Daniel's writing this at the end of his life. There was no gap. There wasn't really a gap between Saul and David. So this was they never actually had a king.
Well, they would have a king God specifically would tell Samuel later They're not rejecting you, but they were rejecting me and he goes and he tells Samuel to anoint Saul as king and then later tells him to go anoint David as king So no, there really was a king But the king was supposed to represent God in heaven I never knew.
I always thought he didn't have a king Oh no, David was very much a king. Right? Being anointed as a king. I didn't mean David. I thought before Saul they didn't have a king. No, they didn't have a king. They had Shefatim. They had judges. But that's what I'm saying. There wasn't a king back then. No. And so, when it says there was no king, it was, they didn't follow God. Yeah, they weren't following God, but there was no king like King David or Saul who would enforce God's law either.
The tribes and the people were doing their own thing. And that was initially supposed to be good. Let's go back to the The tabernacle, that's where they were supposed to worship. They were supposed to, the Levites were supposed to teach them the law. Recon had instituted this system and it's almost like as soon as they get into the land, start kind of doing whatever they want. Intermarrying, creating their own religion, doing their own stuff. That's the sad kind of picture that is painted for us here.
So, yeah, I need to be careful about my own heart. Even thinking about myself as an elder, I have a say in what happens in worship. My mind and my conscience must be bound by the word of God. This is why we actually hold to what we call the regulative principle of worship. I can't assume that I'll always want to follow God's words, but I got to always ask myself, hold on, is what we're doing what God's told us to do? Because there's too many stories in the Bible of people making whatever they want to do. And there's too many stories in church history since the end of the New Testament where people just decide to do whatever they want to do. So, I need to keep myself in submission to the King of Kings.
So, you ready to pray? You want to pray? You want me to? Okay. God we pray that you would forgive us even though we may come to corporate worship and do as you've commanded us to do. Yet God we know that in our lives we so often don't want to do what you've called us to do. So Father we pray that you would give us your Holy Spirit that we might look to Jesus Christ, our King, our Master, our Lord, and not do our work with others. Father, we pray that you would please teach us to walk in your ways, to worship you in spirit and in truth, in the beauty of holiness, in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, may the Lord bless you. May the great shepherd of the sheep watch over your soul. And we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Push the button.