Rotten to the Core
Rotten to the Core
Judges 18:3-6
When they were by the house of Micah, they recognized the voice of the young Levite. And they turned aside and said to him, “Who brought you here? ...” And he said to them, “This is how Micah dealt with me: he has hired me, and I have become his priest.” And they said to him, “Inquire of God, please, that we may know whether the journey on which we are setting out will succeed.” And the priest said to them, “Go in peace. The journey on which you go is under the eye of the LORD.”
To borrow a humorous analogy, I recently heard from an auditor who found layers of fraud in a supposedly humanitarian agency. Parsing out the problems exposed in this dialogue between Danite scouts and Micah’s hireling is like cutting through an apple to find a worm, only to discover that the whole thing is just a ball of worms in an apple’s skin.
This whole endeavor is a bundle of compromises posing as successes, a ball of moral failures rolled up into a religious enterprise, a series of sold-out motives intertwined into a farce of faith and virtue. Again, the fact that this Levite can stand here boldfaced and effectively answer, “I’ve got a great gig, guys! Micah offered me lodging, clothes, and ten silver shekels for my service, so I’m his priest now,” is still a shocker. Isn’t there a Tabernacle standing at Shiloh that God specifically ordained for sacred ceremony? To me, that’s the big worm at the core of the apple that attracts all the others: that a priest of Almighty God, consecrated for service to Him, is prostituting his vocation while maintaining a veneer of divine authority. Yet, these Danites are none the wiser because they’re just as compromised. They’ve got their own veneer of righteousness. The reason they fail to question the Levite’s practice is because they’ve stopped questioning their own. Ultimately, they’ve got a piece of land they really want, and they’ll find justification for taking it one way or another, regardless of what God truly desires.
Friend, in the counsel you provide today, be true and impartial, always full of mercy but never compromising the truth. And, likewise, as you seek counsel for your own decisions, listen to the Word of Truth rather than religious yes-men, and be willing to change course if the Spirit tells you that you’re on the wrong track.