A Family Business
A Family Business
Judges 17:5-6
And the man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod, and household gods, and 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.
I usually try to reserve judgment on ancient biblical characters, giving the benefit of the doubt when motives are difficult to discern. Such was the case with Noah, when he followed up watching God destroy the whole earth with a season of drunken PTSD. And such was the case with Esau, who, despite his name being used symbolically throughout certain Scriptures as a spiritual outcast (similar to how the name Rahab is symbolically used), his loving, forgiving embrace of Jacob serves as a poignant illustration of divine redemption. Yet, here in Judges 17, upon reading this string of sacramental abuses produced one after another by this man, Micah, I feel compelled to say that he’s the most pernicious sort of charlatan a man can be. These trespasses here are of a darker sort. They aren’t born out of human weakness but out of a devilish desire to deceive. This is the difference between Adam and Eve eating forbidden fruit, and the serpent luring them into eating it.
I think this Micah is the serpentine type—the Pharisee type—the Sanhedrin type—the cult-leader type who exploits religious fervor in others, forms a religious system, and places himself at the center of the sacred operation, all for his own selfish gain. The type who turns the sanctuary of the living LORD into a den of thieves, padding his own pockets as tithe-collector-and-chief, with no regard for how his falsity destroys those who come to him for help. He isn’t a man who eats forbidden fruit once in a blue moon and repents of it. He’s a man who builds a treehouse in The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and diets on the fruit from sunup to sundown, and opens up a little market below to sell fruit to others.
But by far the saddest part of Micah’s long string of compromises here is expressed by the final thread, “and (he) ordained one of his sons.” Be warned by that today, friend. In the depths of our deviancy, when unrepentance leads us to the bottom of corruption’s pool, we turn back around to drown others.