GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
JUDGES 17:3-4
3 He returned the eleven hundred pieces of silver to his mother, and she said, “I completely dedicate this silver from my hand to the LORD for my son to make a carved image and a silver idol.”
“I will give it back to you.”
4 So he returned the silver to his mother, and she took two hundred pieces of silver and gave it to a smith. He made it into a carved image and a silver idol, and it was in Micah’s house.
There is uncertainty at the end of verse 3 as to who is speaking in the final sentence. Does the mother say “I will give it back to you” to the Lord? Was it already set aside to be a gift to the Lord? Could she possibly be saying that she was going to give it back to her son? Or is the son speaking? If so, is he saying that he will give the silver back to his mother now? The question is not much helped in this case by the gender of the final pronoun, since it is on the one hand a feminine “you” (lach, לָךְ) (which would indicate that he is talking to her), but it’s also the final word in the verse and therefore it is drawn into a pausal form by the accent silluq, so if it were supposed to be a masculine “you” (lechah, לְךָ) it would become lach anyway because it is to be read “in pause” (that is, with a prolonged accented syllable which means that a short vowel is lengthened into a long vowel). In this rare case, it leaves us with this question as to a male or female “you.” You can take your pick. There is no doctrine affected by this little conundrum.
Micah’s mother was creating her own religion; commissioning a cast idol just like Aaron falling into his sin generations before. “At Horeb,” the Psalm reminds us, “they made a calf and worshiped an idol cast from metal. They exchanged their Glory for an image of a bull that eats grass” (Psalm 106:18-19). Even though the ark of God was at Bethel (Judges 21:2) and the tabernacle and altar were at Shiloh (Judges 18:31), both at most a five mile walk from where Micah’s mother lived, she wanted something all her own. She was like Henry VIII breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church for all the wrong reasons.
More than that, Micah’s mother was like so many people today who decide to drift away from their own churches making excuses that they want to worship God on their own terms. Although that might sound perfectly modern and in keeping with the independent spirit of America or a grand world view, it flies in the face of Christ himself. It means pursuing God apart from Christ, who said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Jesus commanded us—commanded, mind you—to go and make disciples by baptizing and teaching, not by staying at home or by hitting the golf course every Sunday. Jesus began the church by gathering followers who became his congregation of disciples, and he sent them out draw more and more together into the Church. He uses the word “church” in his instructions, building the church on Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah (Matthew 16:18) and commanding that a sinner be brought before the church if they refuse to confess and continue to live in a sin (Matthew 18:17). So those who really do try to view religion on their own terms apart from Christ or his church, are in danger of rejecting the Bible entirely out of misuse.
Such people inevitably end up calling themselves “spiritual,” which is really the antithesis of “material.” Being spiritual may seem like a path of someone who does not want to be trapped by greed—a very Christian thought (Matthew 23:25) but if it’s a path taken apart from Christ, then it fails to be Christian, and becomes a new law without any gospel. It becomes a religion without Jesus, and that doesn’t lead to heaven.
In those cases, one individual is led astray (along with her family and descendants). But there is a larger error. When whole church bodies, either single congregations or groups of congregations, desire to set aside the body of biblical teaching (Christian doctrine) and form some new union on the basis of what they call “the simple Gospel,” then what is lost? They inevitably fail to come to agreement on the most elementary and important teachings of the Bible: Who is God? What is sin? What is the solution to mankind’s sin? Who is Jesus Christ? What has Jesus done for us? Whenever this happens, every single time it happens, new denominations are formed. There is the unionized church, but then there are the dissenters on one or more sides, and splinters go flying off in every direction like a salad tossed by a toddler. What proof do I have for this statement? The proof of history throughout the whole history of the church, but more importantly, the rest of chapters 17 and 18 of Judges, when this one woman’s decision to make her own church led her son, her family, a Levite, a family and later a whole tribe away from the one church established by God at Mount Horeb.
Get into your church and into your church’s Bible classes, and find out what is really being taught there. It is the Gospel of Christ? Who is Jesus? Is he present in the Lord’s Supper? What does baptism do for a person? Is baptism preached and applied as the forgiveness of sins (the pure gospel), or are there rules around it that turn it into a law that must be kept? Does indignation grip you because of preachers who have forsaken God’s word (Psalm 119:53)? Find out what your church really teaches. You won’t know if you don’t ask, and you can’t really ask if you don’t show up. And if your church teaches forgiveness through Christ in lock step with everything the Bible teaches, then stay in there! Support the ministry there. Volunteer to help out. Encourage a teen to be faithful or even to consider preaching or teaching. And encourage everyone there including your pastor by being faithful in your attendance.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota