And I fear as fraught with danger as I preach it as trying to preach the Song of Solomon accurately in mixed company with children. But I have heard sermons on the Song of Solomon and I haven't even preached out of the Song of Solomon. I have never heard of sermon out of judges, particularly out of these chapters. As we come to our text, we leave behind the last judge, Samson. And now the narrative changes rather dramatically. These last chapters may not necessarily be chronologically after Samson. They may be, but we don't know that. What we do know was that at the beginning of this book, we saw how in one generation, God's people went from those who served the Lord, 2 verse 7, to by the end of 3 verse 6, those who served their gods, that is, served the gods of the nations around them. We've been looking ever since at the downward spiral of a people who did evil in the eyes of the Lord. And now we see in these last chapters the nature and the fruit of that evil. What was it really? We'll see it at the household level, at the tribal level, and ultimately as we press through at the national level. If you have your Bibles, again, we're working our way all the way through Judges 17 and 18. These first verses, the first six verses are printed for you in the bulletin, if you don't have a Bible with you. Hear the word of God. There was a man of the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Micah. And he said to his mother, The 1100 pieces of silver that were taken from you about which you uttered a curse and also spoke it in my ears. Behold, the silver is with me. I took it. And his mother said, blessed be my son by the Lord. And he restored the 1100 pieces of silver to his mother and his mother said, I dedicate the silver to the Lord from my hand, from my son to make a carved image and a metal image. Now, therefore, I will restore it to you. So when he restored the money to his mother, his mother took 200 pieces of silver and gave it to the silversmith who made it into a carved image and a metal image. And it was in the house of Micah. And the man Micah had a shrine and he made an ephod and household gods and he ordained one of his sons who became his priest. In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Pray with me, please. Lord, I pray for wisdom and grace. We ask, Lord, for the ministry of the Holy Spirit to open our ears and our hearts. Father, I pray that you would grant me the grace speak truth and discernment for these your children and servants to discern truth. So hear us we ask and pray in Jesus name. Amen. Six verses. Already our heads should just be spinning with all of the things that are wrong in this picture. And our writer has the distasteful task of setting before us these events at the end of Judges. Many years ago, I had one of those tasks. I don't know if likely you have had them too, a job you did not want to do. I had to tell parents that their daughter was in an illicit relationship with a man 20 years her senior. She was 17. I did not relish that job. And this author does not want this job. It's very clear in the way that he writes. He distances himself from the events that will take place. He will not take the name of the Lord on his own lips or in his own hands. The Lord, that is Yahweh, is only used by the people in the account, never by the writer himself. And what is set before us is free from commentary. except for, verse 6, in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. And one more time, at the beginning of chapter 18, again, there was no king in Israel. And of course, the second sentence would go right along with it. What he sets before us is the folly of religion, the failure of it, and of a false religion, what I will maintain is actually godlessness, the folly or foolishness, the failure, and finally the fruit of godlessness. And that, of course, is where this whole ending is going to lead, to that fruit. It's set before us in a cast of characters, if you will. We begin with the mother, who turns from cursing to blessing rather easily, I would say, Is there repentance on the part of Micah? Is he sorry for these things? I think what we see instead is a man who is superstitious and he hears a curse upon himself and says, whoa. So he's not afraid of God and the curse, as we'll see, of his activities there, but he's afraid of this curse. And so he gives the money back. She dedicates it all to the Lord. That's what it says. That's what she said. But you'll notice only 200 shekels go for the carved image and the metal image. The rest is kept back. She will call upon the Lord to bless her thieving son without any repentance or change. It brings us to the second character, and who I would call the main character, as the chapters really revolve around him and involve him almost from beginning to end. He is not a man who will live up to his name. His full name, used in verses one and four, is Makaiehu, or Micah Yehu, who is like Yahweh. That's what his name is. And for the rest of the time, it's just rendered as Micah. We begin, we see his character rather quickly. This is a, as I said, a superstitious thief. He's willing to steal from his own mother. He fears her curse, but not the warnings of the Lord. And he's obviously, it would seem, not repentant, though he does return the stolen money. What is staggering in the passage is the spiritual ignorance or arrogance. Did he not know that the Lord his God is one? Did he not ever hear the commandments? Could he not understand that the law could be reduced, as it was by Jesus in Matthew, to loving the Lord your God, heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving neighbor as yourself? He was far from worshiping God as he prescribed. And so we see he has set up his own personal family worship center. He doesn't need to go all the way down to Shiloh, where God had placed his tabernacle, because Deuteronomy 12 tells us that God will choose the place where he will be worshipped. But I don't have to go all the way down there. He makes an idol, his own personal gods. Is he ignorant of the second commandment? And his worship center is made complete He's had his shrine. He has his household gods. He's made an ephod. Remember Gideon who made the ephod so that people could come to him and require of the Lord? He does the same. He can discern the Lord's will. All he needs is a priest. So, well, I'll just ordain my son and I have a priest. Go back and read Numbers 3.10 and see who can ordain those priests and what happens to those who would usurp. in that position because they are to die. Everything that Micah has done should result in his death. But it seems that he's already dead spiritually. So apparently the house church movement was alive and well in the days of judges. We don't need a church. We don't need Shiloh where the Ark is. We don't need Israel's priests or those leaders. and overseers that the Lord chooses. No, we can just make up our own. We'll be our own authority. We don't need his. And of course we'll be blessed. Because surely the Lord is blessing him. The Lord brings a Levite to be his priest. Verse seven, now there was a young man of Bethlehem of Judah, in Judah, of the family of Judah, and he was a Levite, and he sojourned there. And so the passage goes on. He comes to Micah. Oh, you're a Levite. Why don't you stay here and be my priest? And you can be a father to me that is a spiritual father to him. And he promised him a pretty good living. I'll worship my way and the Lord will bless it. And so at verse 13, at the end of the chapter, we read, then Micah said, now that he has his Levite priest who was not a priest, but Micah made a priest, Now I know that the Lord will prosper me because I have a Levite as a priest. Hey, it can't get any better than this. I've got everything going for me. Do we see the problem? I think there's a danger to the church today in this regard. We must always, always be asking the question, Is the worship that I offer what God has prescribed? Or is it what I find appealing, satisfying, enjoyable? Now, if we offer what he prescribes, I can promise you that it will be fulfilling and rich, and it will nurture us. We can know that it will please him and so bring true blessing to his people. Its substance will be Christ-centered. It will be Word-centered. Why are we preaching through judges? Because it is His Word. And because it causes us to think about things and ponder things that otherwise we could readily escape, not spend any time on at all. I can't tell you how many cards I get in the mail from churches who tell me that I need to go there because it's such a wonderful place and I will hear encouraging and uplifting messages. Notice it doesn't say sermons. Notice it doesn't say preaching of the word. It says encouraging, uplifting messages. They ain't preaching this. Because what goes on here is not encouraging or uplifting. I pray that it will be fruitful and profitable for us. But these are hard, hard words. And there are times when our lives are hard. And we need to hear the truth of Scripture and the power of Scripture to hold us, to help us. We don't just want somebody to say, they're there, it's going to be all right. We need the truth. And I'm not talking about form, whether we use overheads or bulletins, whether we sing praise songs or use hymnals, whether we have a formal liturgy or an informal liturgy. That's not the issue. Are we coming to worship with reverence, with wonder, with awe, as God has prescribed, with prayers and offerings, making use of the means of grace, confessing our sin, acknowledging, confessing our faith, coming together like Leviticus 23 calls us to do, to come together in a holy convocation that God has set apart for His glory by His word for our good. And so Hebrews 10 tells us that we are not to forsake the gathering of God's people. A house church doesn't do it. There's no holy convocation there. And oh, how careful we need to be. Chapter 18 introduces the next cast of characters, the Danites. And what we discover as we read chapter 18 is they're just like Micah, only it's a whole tribe. Just as dishonest, just as arrogant or ignorant of the word of God and the truth of God. Just like Micah, seeking God's blessing by their own means. We learn early on the problem that the Danites have. In verse 1, there was no king in Israel. And in those days, the tribe of the people of Dan was seeking for itself an inheritance to dwell in. For until then, no inheritance among the tribes of Israel had fallen to them. So the people of Dan sent five able men from the whole number of their tribe, from Zorah and from Eshtaul, to spy out the land and explore it. Go and explore the land. So there they are, five men sent out to explore the land. Now, there's a problem here, because they have no inheritance. They still don't have their inheritance. They failed to secure any of the territory that was allotted to them as they came into the land. Not one single square foot belonged to them. They weren't even people that were shoved into the mountains. They had nothing. But the problem we hear here is that Zorah and Eshtoal, well, guess where they are? Right in the center of the land that was given to the Danites. And they've never taken a square foot. And now they're looking around, and the author, the irony is just amazing here in chapter 18, because every time he names these 600 men who are now coming to take, we'll see in a minute, a new place, they're described this way. The tribe of Dan armed with weapons of war. The tribe of Dan armed with the weapons of war. The Danites armed with the weapons of war. But listen to what they do. So they come. They're scouting, heading north and west. And they come to the house of Micah on their scouting mission. And they stay with Micah in their search. And in the process, they recognize the young Levite who is now a priest. where it says in verse 3, when they were in the house of Micah, they recognized the voice of the young Levite. And they turned aside to him. Who brought you here? What are you doing in this place? What is your business here? Oh, well, I'm a priest now. I'm not just a Levite. And so they, of course, inquire of the priest, are we going to have a successful mission? And any priest will do, even this non-priest, because This priest, as a reliable prophet, as any for-profit priest should be, says, blessing, absolutely. Verse 6, go in peace. The journey on which you go is under the eye of the Lord. Now, let's talk about double entendre there, shall we? Oh yes, the Lord's eye is on them all right. And what they will do and what they will set up will bring judgment upon them. Grave judgment. And the kings that come from them and the first tribe to be overrun and carried off into captivity in the days to come. Oh yes, the Lord had his eye on them all right. But there my idea was, hey, success. And they found success. They found the Sidonians. Quiet. unsuspecting, lacking nothing that is in the earth and possessing wealth, and how they were far from the Sidonians and had no dealings with anyone. This is what we're looking for. Forget trying to take our land. We can strut around in our armor and our weapons of war, but we're sure not taking on the folks who are in our land. Let's find an unsuspecting, quiet, unprotected people who have no one to help them and no one to defend them. That's where we'll go. So it's back to get the rest of the troops so they can decimate a quiet unprotected people. Now on their way back up with their 600 Danites armed with weapons of war, they come to Micah's house and the 600 guys stand at the gate while those spies go back in and they've decided at this point, well, We need a place to worship, too. So Micah's got it all set up. We can take what he stole and steal it ourselves. And so they take everything. They take the carved image, the ephod, the metal image. They take the priest. And of course, the priest has realized this is, this Levite says, this is a much better offer. Now I get to be Verse 20, his heart was glad. He took the ephod and the household gods and the carved image, and he went along with the people because, as they had said to him, better for you to be a priest to the house of one man or to be a priest to a tribe and a clan in Israel. Oh, I'll take that job. More status. And they head off to butcher the Sidonians in Lesh, and they set up their own little place of worship. They certainly aren't going to travel all the way down to Silo. They have everything they need, and God is pleased with them. Oh, they know God is really pleased with them, because it turns out in verse 30 that their priest is actually a descendant of Moses. What could be better? Oh, how God has blessed us, is their mind. Such brave men, the passage almost mocking in the way this author portrays them, armed with their weapons of war, but they're thieves and they're robbers and they're cowards. And oh, so much like Micah. Micah comes after them after they've stolen his goods and tries to take them on, but they turn around and say, well, complain all you want in terms of what we took. Do you want us to take your life too? And he just turns around and leaves after crying, you take away my gods that I made, you take away my priest and go away, verse 24. And what have I left? And the Jews and we should be laughing at this point. Everything I made, you took it all away. The God that I worship is one that I made. The priest who serves me is one that I made. Everything that I had, everything that I made, you're taking it all away. Oh, I did it my way, all right, Micah had said, but it didn't go his way. And once again, the Jews would be just, they had to be shaking their heads. Anyone who's ever read Jeremiah 10 shakes their head. That's where it talks about cutting down the tree, carving the image, maybe even covering it with molten metal and things in order to shape it, and all of the shavings and everything else you're going to burn in order to cook your food or to keep your house warm, and you're going to worship that little thing that you made? We ought to see the irony, the foolishness, the absolute folly We're getting a picture of what the Lord meant when he said they did evil in the sight of the Lord. No one is righteous. No one is seeking God according to the word of God and the command of God. They claim to be worshiping Yahweh. They use his name throughout. How the Lord is pleased with them, how they are serving the Lord, how this idol or this image is going to express and show them the Lord. But the God they follow, they serve, they worship is actually a God who was made. He's actually no God at all. The language that is used verbatim in terms of the carved image and the molten image comes right from Deuteronomy 27. If you read Deuteronomy 27, there are a list of 12 separate desperate curses. Things that will cause the curse of God to fall upon them. And first in the list is to make pesel and maseka. Carved image, metal image. First on the list. And the language is exact every single time it's used in these chapters. You see, we've already looked with the children at the problem with gods who are made. There's a good reason for prohibition against those images. They cannot possibly adequately represent God. Show little bits maybe, but it stunts our understanding of who God is. And that's only part of the problem. The physical limitation is only the tip of the iceberg. Of course, the bigger problem with images is that it allows us to shape God, to define him as we would have him be, to make God more accessible. to make him more palatable maybe. We can make a God who makes us and helps us to be more comfortable. Micah and the Danites decided that they knew how to get God to bless them. They could multiply images so that they wouldn't miss anything. And we look around our culture today and we see the same thing going on. We're surrounded by people who form God in their own particular image. I doubt there are a few of us. How do I mean that? I doubt that many of us have not had the contact or the response, well, my God would never. Or, I don't think of God like that. Your God seems to be so whatever, judgmental or this or that. I don't think of God like that. I believe in a God who that I've fashioned myself, that I've ordered and gotten it into the package that I'm comfortable with. That's the God I believe in. But as soon as we reject the God of the word, the God of reality, the true God, the God who has made all things, who is distinct from that which has been made and who still rules over what is made, as soon as we reject that God or as soon as we alter him in some way. We alter what the Bible says about God, what he's revealed in some aspect of his holiness or justice, his righteousness, his power. Then we've made an idol. We're no longer worshipping the true God. And if you are not worshipping the true God, you are not worshipping God. It is godlessness. when we change who he is, to reject what the Bible says about life in the womb, to reject what he says about how we are made in his image, male and female, when we reject the teaching that God is distinct from his creation above it, that he made the heavens and the earth. They did not just kind of get themselves here. We've made God in our image. As soon as we can add, well, I worship the Lord while I am. I don't need the body. I don't need to be in fellowship. I don't need to be around in the Lord's day. I can worship God when I'm on the hiking trail. I can worship God on the rink. I can worship God when I'm out in the fields. I can worship, you know, whatever fields. We've made God into our own image. We've rejected or we've altered who God is. We don't worship the Lord. To reject what the Bible says leads to godlessness. We reject what he's revealed about himself in the Word. So if we read something in the Word that we don't like, brothers and sisters, we need to wrestle with it to understand why God commands and demands such of us. We need to read it carefully so that we don't, and clearly, And we can't say, well, I don't believe that. If I do, I'm following an idol, a god I've made. And I've had those conversations, too, showing someone very plainly what the word says. And they can look at it and say, well, I know it says that, but I don't believe that. My god, that's not my god. Well, then it's not the god. It is no God. There's the failure of false religion. And believe me, I'm not going to take as long on these next two. We may see success, but is it blessing? Micah saw success. I got everything I wanted. God must be blessing me. It doesn't matter that I'm a thief. It doesn't matter that I'm superstitious. It doesn't matter that I'm violating everything that his word says about true worship of God. It doesn't matter. I'm blessed because I've succeeded. The Danites did the same thing. They defined their blessing. They took what Micah had made, and they were thrilled with their success. They got the God they wanted, the shrine, the hardware, the priest. They had it all. And when Micah tried to take them back, he was spurned because they were stronger. Oh, the Lord has given it into our hands. They said, verse 10 of 18, the land is spacious for God has given it into your hands, a place where there is no lack of anything that is in the earth. Wow. They stole the images that Micah had made out of stolen goods. They stole a priest who was no priest. They stole a town, a home from helpless, gentle people. They stole the worship of God at the place to which he had called them, and they claimed that God had blessed them. No, their God is no God. Everything Micah trusted in was snatched away. Everything that the Danites would trust in would be snatched away as well. And we are witnesses in this passage and what follows to what godlessness looks like. It looks like, well, it's surely right in my eyes. This is what I want. It covers all the bases spiritually. Stealing what they wanted, it was right in their eyes. Worshipping where they liked, the way they liked, right in my eyes. destroying the gentle, the unprotected in order to get what they wanted right in their own eyes. And so we see the fruit, some of the fruit of godlessness. We don't live among a religious less people, brothers and sisters, just a people more willing to make God however they like him. the godlessness that we've been talking about seeing here. It's all around us, calling evil good and good evil, carving up the word or ignoring it altogether. And it will bring its ultimate fruit, judgment. We'll even see a taste of that in the chapters to come. If Israel was going to worship false gods or worship the Lord by turning him into a collection of their own ideas of God, then they would feel his wrath and destruction. And the curses against disobedience would fall upon them, as they had already been experiencing repeatedly through the history of the judges. Without repentance, without true worship of the only eternal, living, holy God, an eternity in judgment would await. and awaits many around us even this day. They will get what they want. If they do not come to the true and living God, they will get an eternity of godlessness. And we will see what that looks like in the weeks to come, where there is no hope of deliverance from that fruit of godlessness. And as I said, the only commentary in this passage is essentially, there was no king in Israel. They did what was right in their own eyes. Personally, I think the writer of the Book of Judges was close to the period of the judges. But he would write in a time when he saw a king who would rise up who would be used of God to protect, to instruct the people of God, to protect them from themselves in some way. A king who would hold up the law of God, who would lead them in true worship, in a place that God would choose, so that he would dwell in their midst. Even a king who would dwell in their midst. He could call people by his words and by example to obedience. And for a brief moment in their history, Israel had a semblance of such a king. Hardly perfect, mind you. But look at the way Israel looks back, in the Old Testament, looks back upon David because of the promises made to God, because of the servant that he was whose heart was after the Lord. And this man wants a king like that. But even David could not fulfill that role. Israel would look for such a king to protect them from their enemies without, but more from the enemy within their sinner's heart, to deliver them from that curse of the garden. As we continually try to make God in our image. But there's only one king who can truly deliver us from our sinful hearts. In the larger catechism, the Westminster larger catechism, in one of the questions it asks how Christ executes the office of a king, because we recognize biblically that Christ serves as a king of the line and lineage of David, but one who represents, who indeed embodies the living God. How does he exercise that office? Calling out of the world a people to himself. giving them officers and laws and censures so that he can govern them, bestowing saving grace upon his chosen ones, rewarding their obedience, correcting them for their sins, preserving and supporting them under all their temptations and sufferings, including the temptations to move to idolatry. Restraining and overcoming all their enemies, powerfully ordering all things for his glory and their good and taking vengeance on the rest who do not know God, who do not obey the gospel. Such is the king that God gives us that we might find true religion, that we might know God and not make him something that he is not. It's only in Christ, as I said, that we get that genuine representation of the living, eternal, holy God, the one who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn, of all creation, the one in whom all the fullness of God dwells bodily, who is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature. This is the one in whom we rest and trust. It is Jesus who will guard and protect you. There is no other. Hear that. There is no other save God. Come to us in Jesus Christ to deliver us from godlessness, to deliver us from the idolatry that will destroy us. There is none but the Lord Jesus. Lay hold of him that we might be delivered from the death of the godless. to the life, the eternal life of his children. Father, hear us. Hear us. Oh, that we would see Jesus. And so, Lord, like Philip, know that as we see Jesus, we have seen the Father. We cannot make an image. We can't comprehend it, Lord. but we can lay hold of the one whom you have given to make yourself known. Bring us into that joyful, loving, faithful obedience and deliver us, Lord, from hearts that would do it our way. Hear us, we ask and pray in Jesus' name. Amen.