A Forgery of Faith
A Forgery of Faith
Judges 17:1:3b-4
And his mother said, “I dedicate the silver to the LORD from my hand for 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.
Where do we lay the blame for this woman’s graven misconception of worship? Does she know the Law of Moses like the back of her hand, but, like so many others before her, she thinks she can just offer to God her sacrifices in her own way, at her own convenience, by her own standards? Or is she mostly ignorant of the Ten Commandments, such that her sacrifice of 200 shekels for this pseudo-spiritual enterprise is, in her own heart, akin to those two little mites that the widow in the New Testament offered at the tabernacle? Is her blasphemy here more an indictment against the failures of priests and elders and judges over the previous generations to herald God’s Law and ardently teach it to younger generations, or has she simply disregarded the warnings?
I can’t help but think of Josiah, that young king who’ll be zealous for God’s glory, who’ll tear through idolatrous high places like an elephant through a pumpkin patch, until discovering the scroll of the Torah in the tabernacle, reading it for the first time, and realizing just how far he and his people had fallen from God’s covenantal standards due to years of negligence from leaders. So regardless of where we lay the blame in Judges 17, this mom’s confused zeal, as well as her son’s eagerness to produce the idol and keep it in his home, serves as an indictment against a world where men follow their own understanding rather than God’s ideal. If left to our own devices, we make a mess of the world while attempting to clean it up, and a farse of religion while attempting to uphold it, and ourselves more egregious sinners while attempting to become more saintly.
There’s a little house somewhere in the hills of Ephraim where a cold hunk of silver stands on a mantelpiece as a sacred shrine, and it’s a sad picture of the cold, motionless life that compromised faith boils down to.