Clough Judges Lesson 16

Judges 17

Judges 17; tonight we begin the last and final section of the book of Judges and this will not take too long to work through because the principle is one that is repeated numerous times throughout this section. But since we are moving to a new section of the book of Judges I want to go back and once again give you the big picture of this book. A lot of Christians consider this very dull reading and yet without understanding the mechanics of the book of Judges you cannot appreciate how history flows and particularly what is going on with our own country today. The book of Judges is very, very important.

Going back to when we started this book we said that the introduction, from Judges 1:1-3:6 dealt with the transition from Joshua’s day into the time of the Judges. On a time scale it would look like this: 1440 was the Exodus, they fiddle around for 38 years learning stuff that should have been learned before, and finally about 1400 begins the conquest, and there is a period of holy war that goes on, apparently, from the best we can discern in Scripture, for about seven years. So for seven years we have a conquest of the land of Palestine, very brilliantly executed and under the command of Joshua the armies first hit to the south, they get a beachhead around Jericho, they move south, they went to the center and then they went north. And by seven years they had not conquered every square of the land. They didn’t control every square foot of the land but they had broken the back of the resistance of the Canaanites.

But after Joshua died you had certain strange things begin to develop in the history of the nation and so from about 1390 BC on down to about 1050 BC you have a sad situation develop in that nation. This is the period of the Judges. During this time God offered the nation a perfect system of freedom. There was no highly centralized bureaucratic central government. There was no king, there was no [can’t understand word], there was a tremendous lack of bureaucracy and God offered the nation perfect freedom. But beginning in 1390 the nation was not spiritually up to having perfect freedom.

So if you just briefly turn back to Judges 2, this generation is summarized. The book of Judges was written after the time of the Judges. The book surveys this entire period of time between 1390 and 1050. During this time period of over 300 years the nation gradually but very definitely went into apostasy and the reasons for it are given. This is, you might say, a post mortem analysis of the fall of this particular phase of the nation’s structure. In Judges 2:6 it says, “And when Joshua had let the people go,” this refers to Joshua 24 and the covenant renewal ceremony at Shechem, it was thus, at Judges 2:6 which occurs right here in 1390, at that time it was theoretically possible, and I say theoretical, it was theoretically possible for the millennium to begin any time. How? By following out the dictates of the Word of God and by conquering the land, continuing the holy war that Joshua had started. And theoretically at this time they could have attained the kingdom. Now this doesn’t subtract from the supernaturalism, it just says that they could have attained the kingdom in a continuous thing by Judges 2:6.

However, in Judges 2:7-10 we have a brief section where “the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua,” and then it notices something in verse 10, after the burial of Joshua, “also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers,” this was the generation of the children who studied under the teachers of Joshua, “and there arose another generation after them, who knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which God had done for Israel.” In other words, this generation had cut itself off from history. And this always is a result; you can see it happening as clear as day today. A generation goes negative on history. See, this generation didn’t see the works of God; that was a matter of past history but because they had cut themselves off from history they lost the evidences underlying their faith and they were left with faith on the basis of sheer emotion. And that was all; they had no facts to support themselves. They couldn’t handle themselves and they became a very, very weak generation. And verse 10 is an explanation of why the nation went down.

Beginning in Judges 2:11-13 we have the three-fold cycle that we see repeated again and again in the book of Judges. Verses 1-13 deal with apostasy and we characterized that three-fold cycle that went on over and over as first the nation would go to apostasy, that’s negative volition toward the Word of God. The second time, the second phase of this would be that they would cry when God chastened them. So God would begin to chasten them, not because He hated them but because He loved them and since God loved them He chastened them, verses 14-15. He would always send some scourge to judge them. And then in verses 16 and following we have the final phase of the cycle which is deliverance or salvation in a physical sense. So apostasy, chastening and salvation—that occurs over and over and over again and the emphasis of the text is always on step three. You can tell this by reading the book of Judges and looking at how many verses are devoted to each phase. You can see the emphasis of the author is on God’s grace in saving the nation.

Finally we left last time with Samson and in Samson’s day, we stopped right there at point 2; all during Samson’s ministry Samson was unable to deliver the nation. He began it, but he couldn’t finish it? Why? Because ecumenical religion combined with disarmament you have the people going on the completely negative attitude toward God and His Word and everything, just throwing the whole thing over and so Samson is unable to bring the nation around. And that was where it was left because actually the end of this book chronologically is the end of chapter 16, and it prepares us to understand why there’s going to come a man by the name of Samuel and Samuel will ordain or mashach, the Hebrew word from which we get Messiah, anoint, he is going to mashach a man by the name of Saul, who has great promise and later falls apart as a believer, and he is replaced by David. So this is a set up, you might say, for the kingdom.

But Judges 17 is another analysis parallel to the previous one, from Judges 3-16, except this analysis is no longer of God’s grace; this analysis is a detailed study of how the nation fell in the grass roots level. Before we dealt with the judges, in such and such a day God would raise up Ehud, God would raise up Shamgar, God would raise up Deborah, God would raise up Barak, it would always be the leader that was being emphasized. But you can’t always blame your leaders; you have to blame some of the Indians as well as the chief. So beginning in Judges 17 we have a complete attack upon the grassroots mental attitude of negative volition. And here we have the reason why these men were unable to deliver the nation in its entirety.

In Judges 17:1 we start with a man by the name of Micah and this has a pattern to it. Judges 17-18 deal with negative volition that leads to religious apostasy. Then Judges 19-21 deal with some of the most horrible things in all of God’s Word. There is no section of the Word of God that I know that is more gross, in all of its immorality and viciousness and violence than chapters 19, 20 and 21, and so here you’re going to have the resulting immorality. But I want you to notice how the author has carefully staged this. He has always showed that religious apostasy precedes immorality, never the other way around. Never! It is always a negative attitude toward God in the first place that leads to external deterioration of a society and here is evidence of it and in Judges 17 we have the first section. And we’ll only have time tonight to get down to verse 13, the end of this first short chapter. But keep in mind that Judges 17 and 18 form one unit, one unconnected unit and it has to do with how religious apostasy began and how it grew in the nation Israel.

Judges 17 starts off with a very religious person, he has a very religious name, his name in your Bible is Micah, but in the Hebrew it looks like this, Micahim, and this is not somebody from China but this is a Semitic name that has a definite meaning in the Hebrew. “Mi” is the Hebrew word for who; ca is the Hebrew preposition like, so “who is like” Yaho or Yahweh. And so he has a very pious sounding name, who is like the Lord, and isn’t the Lord wonderful, and so on. And all this religious façade is just summed up in his name. We’re going to see how he appreciates the Lord. He is going to use the Lord’s name, he is going to go through a great religious experience in this chapter, he is going to be a most exceedingly religious individual and yet it is this one man who is responsible for the fall of the nation. Motto of the story: always watch carefully religious people. The reason for this is that when you look at this, Micah is not some sort of an immoral person, he didn’t go around slugging people, he’s not the kind of a person the you would consider gross, he’s not the kind of person that you would consider to be public enemy number one, and yet because he has this outer façade of religiousness and self-righteousness, he becomes the source and channel of damnation upon the nation. And it’s very, very interesting to study how this develops.

Judges 17:1, “And there was a man of mount Ephraim, whose name was Micah,” the mountainous region, when you see mountain in the Bible remember it just means mountainous region, “And there was a man of the mountainous region of Ephraim, whose name was Micah,” drawing attention to, it was obviously they had preserved religious words. See, they kept the words and dropped the content, and even this lady named her son Micayaho or “who is like Jehovah.”

Judges 17:2, “And he said unto his mother,” now evidently this is kind of a sad situation but here he is, evidently able to make all sorts of decisions, and he lives with his mother, so he says to mama, and between him and mama we have a real good religious apostasy begin. So he “said unto his mother, The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou cursed, and spoke of also in mine ears, behold, the silver is with me; I took it. And his mother said, blessed be thou of the LORD, my son.” Now this is more than a lot of sweet language, there’s some principles involved here. Number one, it shows you that religion never stops immorality, pseudo-religion, I’m using the word religion tonight in its bad sense, and the reason for that is that religion always substitutes morality for spirituality. In other words, spirituality is your relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and the filling of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Holy Spirit moment by moment in your life. In other words, spirituality involves a personal relationship. And so this is what we have when we become Christians and when we walk according to His will. Here we have spirituality.

But religion always cancels that out and replaces it with an impersonal code; in other words, if you just live up to this impersonal code, if you are fine, moral and ethical, great, and what happens is that God becomes a means to another end and so no longer do you have God out here as the final end. Instead of that you have moral code out there and God is the means for getting there. But God is never used; God does not allow Himself to be used. God is always the highest end, never a moral code. The moral code should be underneath God; this is the way it should be, moral here, God above moral. It doesn’t mean God is above in the oriental sense, it just means that God is the One who decrees these morals. But the legalist always wants to make the moral code minus personal relationship with God the issue. And you notice what happens, under pressure a religious person always breaks down. Legalism always breaks down. The reason is that it’s always imposed by custom; it’s always imposed from the outside by tradition.

Little Johnny grows up in his moral middle class environment, etc. and little Johnny goes to college and all of a sudden little Johnny is taking drugs and his parents are shocked. And little Johnny goes into the service and he can’t stand it, or he finds the discipline to severe which means that he never got it at home in the first place. So he has all these problems and this comes out in his life and his parents, well what is wrong with my little darling. What is wrong is that all his growing years, for 18 years when he was in the home, instead of giving him the principles of spirituality you tried to shove morality down his throat; you gave him legalism, legalism, legalism, legalism and now you have got an individual who on the inside is negative toward God and yet he has inherited a certain set of moral standards on the outside.

And this will last only so long, and obviously, as we can see in Judges 17:2, evidently Micah who had this wonderful name, “who is like the Lord,” didn’t follow that name out too carefully, he got in a jam and needed an extra allowance so he stole from his mother. And so when pressure mounted up off comes the religious façade and so now we have the religious man standing naked without his moral façade, and that’s the situation we have here. But notice something else, evidently when his mother lost this money she issued… now she’s not a person that goes around swearing here, this is a formal oath that she said, “may the thief that took this be damned,” and evidently she said it loud enough, and maybe she suspected that her son was involved, but she said it one time and she said “may the man who took my money be damned,” and Micah is standing there and all of a sudden he hears his mother say this, and that not only doesn’t sound like mother but he knows that he is the thief and he knows therefore that the curse goes to him.

And he just can’t stand it, so poor little Micah comes to mama and this is what leads him in verse 2 to confess, but notice again, he doesn’t confess out of a personal spiritual interest in the Lord. In other words, he’s just threatened by the curse. So under the threat he confesses. Now he isn’t doing this out of a love for Jehovah, out of property rights, “thou shalt not steal,” and so on, protecting the individual’s freedom. He doesn’t do that because of any concern for God, he just does it because he’s afraid of mama’s curse. Evidently he’s mama’s boy all the way, we have no unusual thing in the Hebrew because in the Hebrew usually a son is always with his father, and for a son like this to be raised by his mother and able to make the kind of decisions he has indicates that he is mama’s boy all the way, never cut the apron strings and he lets his mother make decisions for him and so forth. So in verse 2 she comes back and she says “Blessed be thou,” in other words, she tries to reverse the curse.

Judges 17:3, “And when he had restored the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said,” in the King James there’s a slight translation change here, “I now wholly dedicate the silver unto the LORD,” this is a Hebrew perfect, it also is preceded by the infinitive absolute which indicates an intensification of mood and it means she certainly, this moment, now dedicates the silver unto the Lord, very pious see, religion fills this house, a very religious house, “I will dedicate the silver to the LORD,” and then she spoils it by adding, “from my hand for my son, to make a graven image and a molten image….” It’s all one image that’s made here, the graven refers to the wood or stone parts and molten refers to the bronze or copper parts. And I’m going to make this image, “now therefore I will restore it unto thee.”

Judges 17:4, “Yet he restored the money unto his mother; and his mother took two hundred shekels of silver, and gave them to the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image: and they were in the house of Micah.” So here we have mama making all the decisions and mama is going to make an image, and not only is mama going to make the image but mama is going to give it to her son for a birthday present. And so she gives this image to her son.

And there’s a little note which you can’t get in the English but it’s very interesting in the Hebrew in verse 5 because in the English it reads, “And the man Micah had an house of gods,” and it sounds like it just flows right along, but that’s not true at all. In the Hebrew we have things called circumstantial clauses, and they’re easily spotted once you understand the language, and it’s just a flag, in other words what it means is that verse 5 describes the situation that is going on while verses 1-4 are going on. In other words, Micah had his own temple, that’s what verse 5 is saying, before he had this molten image for his mother. Mother has just added to his collection, some people collect stamps and coins, this boy collected statues of gods and mama thought it would be a nice present since her darling little boy gave back all of the money and he was such a nice little boy that she went out and she bought him a nice new idol for his house.

Now in verse 5 you’ll see certain indicators that show that this man was very heavily involved in religious apostasy because the word “house of God” means temple. You don’t catch the blaspheme until you realize, do you know what he’s saying, Micah had a house of the gods, literally, and the word “gods” is the word for Elohim, the same word. This indicates something; the fact that he has a temple indicates he rejects the temple that is authorized, namely the tabernacle.

Now what’s a parallel modern day to get this across? What does it mean to reject the tabernacle and set up your own mode of worship? What was the tabernacle in this day and age? What function did the tabernacle perform? The tabernacle was the place where men met God. In other words, you didn’t go trotting in on God at any point in space even though He is omnipresent, though men could pray to Him and so on. The authorized entry to God was located at a geographical point and God Himself authorized that and He did not authorize anything else. This man defies this order from God and says all right, I’m going to set up my own point of meeting God. That’s the significance of that word, “house of gods.” And you can begin to see, this is not just something funny, this is not just an innocent little hobby this man has. He already is on negative volition of a very extreme and dangerous sort because in rejecting the place of meeting God would be analogous in our day to rejecting the Word of God.

We meet God only through the Word of God. Some of you who have been influenced by Pentecostal teaching, I am sorry to report to you, you do not meet God apart from the Word of God. Now you have a personal relationship and so on but John makes very clear in 1 John 1 that our fellowship is with the writings of the Apostles first and when we have fellowship with the writings of the Apostles, then and only then do we have fellowship with God. So it would be analogous today to someone who says I don’t want the Word of God, that’s not important in my life, I’m going to invent my own religion, etc. I’m just going to go my own way and I don’t care two cents for the Word of God. I never go to Bible class, I’m not interested in reading the Bible, and I’m not interested in getting on tapes or looking for books or some source for the Word of God. I don’t care; it doesn’t mean that much to my life, I can get along without the Word of God. This is the same attitude that Micah had; you watch this. The man is still religious. You don’t catch it unless you see the fact that he is still religious yet he despises the Word of God. Now it’s very possible, in fact all people basically who are intensely religious despise the Word of God, they’re more interested in their emotions than they are the Word of God.

So he does something else here in Judges 17:5b, he “made an ephod, and teraphim,” now what is an ephod? An ephod was the garment worn by the high priest, it was originally worn by women in the ancient world, and then it was taken over and used as a priestly garment, the significance of which we don’t want to go into at the moment. But the ephod was made of five colors; each one of these colors of the ephod spoke of the work of Jesus Christ. The ephod by and large was white; this always speaks in Scripture of cleanliness or the absolute righteousness of God. It had red on it, partly red; the red speaks of the shed blood of Jesus Christ. It had blue on it, speaking of heaven; the Word of God comes from heaven. It had gold on it which always speaks of deity and it had purple on it which always speaks of royalty.

So the very garment that this man is counterfeiting not only had he departed from the Word of God but that garment depicts the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. He had appropriated this whole design to himself and as a result he basically has the initial stages here of the antichrist. In other words, religion never is content with denying the Word; religion always goes another step and tries to counterfeit the Word. So here has his counterfeit savior and his priest, his counterfeit priest is going to wear a garment that looks much like the high priest, it is an ephod. And the teraphim are basically small figurines that have been found in archeological sites throughout Palestine, little things, sometimes they are only two or three inches tall, other times they’re about six or seven inches tall. And these are just used throughout all apostate religions but should never have been used in Israel because they violated the second commandment.

So we have more apostasy; not only has he departed from the Word of God by creating his own temple, he has now tried to counterfeit the work of Jesus Christ by manufacturing an ephod and teraphim, “and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest.” And that is in defiance against the Levite law, only Levites could be priests. So he has gone completely on negative volition. You can have a person using the name of the Lord and masquerading with Christian names and using the name Jesus Christ and he is just as much on negative volition as Micah here. No difference. So we have religion and the heart of it.

Judges 17:6 is an editorial remark, just to remind us of something, “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” That’s a reminder that the weaker court system had failed. In this particular situation any time you make an idol which is the epitome of treason in the nation Israel, it was the death sentence. That was capital punishment right away. That was an act of high treason because when you took an idol you were saying I do not want Jehovah as number one, I give and swear my allegiance to somebody other than Jehovah and it was considered a capital offense. So idolatry was not punished and so the reads who read this later on…remember the readers of Judges are people who lived under David’s ministry, and they say boy, how could this ever happen. If this happened in David’s day David would go down there and they’d be executed. So this notice is that just remember, this was never prosecuted in the lower court. In other words, already the lower courts are not controlled by the Word; they’d probably done away with the death penalty, like we have, and so they don’t bother to consider these crimes worth killing anybody for.

Beginning in Judges 17:7 we have a young man coming and here’s the last part of this mans apostasy, “And there was a young man out of Bethlehem-judah of the family of Judah, who was a Levite, and he sojourned there.” The reason why you have Bethlehem dash Judah is because there were many Bethlehem’s in Palestine. This one is located in the province occupied by the tribe of Judah.

Judges 17:8, “And the man departed out of the city from Bethlehem-judah to sojourn where he could find a place, and he came to mount Ephraim to the house of Micah, as he journeyed.” Now I want you to notice something because there’s another lesson to be learned from verses 7-8 and that is here you have another sincere religious person. See what’s wrong here? What’s worse than one religious sincere person? Two religious sincere people and so now we have Micah with his very pious name, he’s on negative volition; he’s busy creating his private little sanctuary, and along comes this Levite. Now you don’t catch this until you ask yourself, wait a minute, what was the Levite supposed to be doing? A Levite was supposed to be the Bible-teacher. Not only was he a priest who aided in court decisions and so on but the Levite was the method by which the small towns and the rural areas got the Word of God. So here you have a Levite whose job it is to mediate the Mosaic Law, to explain it, exegete it and so on, to open Bible classes in these rural areas, and who of all people in verse 8, he goes out and he’s seeking a place of ministry. There’s nothing wrong so far, but watch how he does it. He says I’m going to go out, I’m going to let the Lord lead, and then he wanders around and the text would indicate wherever he gets lodging that’s fine, that’s the Lord blessing. And immediately he has done something, he has used divine guidance like a lot of Christians minus Bible doctrine.

I see this more often, people are passive, they say well, God’s will will happen, and so they’ve very passive. If they walk out of here and their Bible falls in the dirt, or if someone steals their Bible or something and they say well, it’s God’s will that I not study the Word of God, completely passive to the circumstances. The car won’t start so it’s God’s will that I don’t come to church today. In other words, circumstances are 100% indicators of God’s guidance. No, this man is going to get a fantastic set of circumstances come and he is going to say well, God must be leading me, look at all the blessing I’ve got; surely God must be blessing me, He’s opening doors. And here is where a Christian, a sucker, who doesn’t know the Word of God goes by the open-door technique; God is going to open the door. Now isn’t that sweet, except Satan is the one that opens the door. Now that’s the point. How do you know who’s opening the door, you don’t just walk through an open door; if you were on the 5^th story of a building and the door opened would you walk through it? You look before you walk through the door. So it’s not the idea that you’re guided by open doors, but watch how the Levite does it.

Judges 17:9, “And Micah said unto him, Where do you come from? And he said unto him, I am a Levite of Bethlehem-judah, and I go to sojourn where I may find a place.” In other words, any place is fine, wherever God opens the door. [10] “And Micah said unto him, Dwell with me,” see, the door’s open, “and be unto me a father and a priest, and I will give thee ten shekels of silver by the year,” watch what he did, see this is the open door, guaranteed salary, the second thing, “and a suit of apparel,” and the Hebrew word for suit means a tailor-made suit, and this was very, very high status in the ancient world. To have any kind of clothing in the ancient world was high status and to have this kind of privately tailored clothing was something else, so you can’t get the idea of how valuable this would be to someone until you realize that clothing was a very expensive item in the ancient world and was guarded day and night, people slept in their clothing. I don’t know what they used for deodorant but they slept in their clothing because they were worried about somebody stealing it while they were sleeping. So he promises him a guaranteed annual wage, “and a suit of apparel, and thy victuals,” except the Hebrew doesn’t say victuals, it says total sustenance. I promise to provide you with everything. In other words, this is an open door. A lot of Christians go by this as an open door. I don’t care for the Word of God, we don’t bother with that, we just go by open doors, it’s more spiritual that way, moment by moment leading of the Lord, etc. “So the Levite went in.” So we have this man going through the open door.

In Judges 17:11 and following, “And the Levite was content to dwell with the man; and the young man was unto him as one of his sons,” that means by his own volition he decided this was from the Lord. For the Levite, we know from the Law required guidance from the Lord, his job was be guided by Jehovah into areas of the nation that needed ministry. Now God probably guided this man part way, because this part of the country really needed the ministry of the Word, except this man was so out of it and his training so bad that when he got into the situation, he didn’t recognize it, couldn’t distinguish truth from error and as a result made very, very bad decisions. This man’s decision is so bad and the result so horrible that you are going to be amazed as we read the next few chapters and begin to see the result of this thing.

But this chapter ends with Judges 17:12-13, “Micah consecrated the Levite; and the young man became his priest, and was in the house of Micah.” And look at this, this summarizes his attitude, [13] Then said Micah, Now know I that the LORD will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest.” So he’s got it made, he’s got his own private temple, rejecting the place, the location of God’s authorized meeting, rejecting the Word analogous today, he has got a priest’s clothing which are blasphemous because they simulate the work of Christ and in this he is setting up an antichrist situation, he has a man who willingly cooperates with it, he has now a fulltime professional clergyman on his side.

And this particular chapter, though only 13 verses, represents one of the lowest points in the nation because after this chapter you’re going to see how one tribe comes in and they take this seed form of apostasy and it grows and it grows and it grows and it grows and finally it tears the nation apart because the glue that holds the twelve tribes together is their common allegiance to Jehovah and when that common allegiance is destroyed, the nation is destroyed.

Applications to the believer would include the following: number one, when you see a religious person who is always emphasizing the emotions of the present moment and never gets into the Word of God, beware, you may be facing one of these situations.

The second application of the Word is beware of people who have come out of religious backgrounds of training, such as the Levites, who are going along with this. Just because so and so is identified with the movement doesn’t mean a thing. Some of you get appeals for money and on these appeals you have so and so on there, and you look at that and say he’s a sponsor of this organization, then this organization must be good. No, no!

Next week we’ll begin with Judges 18.