Judges 17:7-13 – True worship is God-centred and Word-based

Micah started on the wrong footing. His downfall began the moment he stole eleven hundred pieces of silver from his mother. Without realising that her son had stolen them, his mother pronounced a curse on whoever the thief was. And she did it in Micah’s full hearing, who then quickly admitted to the theft and returned the silver. Realizing that it was her son whom she had just cursed, his mother tried to undo the scourge by pretentiously dedicating the eleven pieces of silver to the Lord. So, she handed 200 pieces of the silver to Micah for a silversmith to make a graven molten image. In what this pair of renegade mother and son did, they had unwittingly represented the invisible God with a cultic idol. To compound the problem, Micah took the idol home, built a shrine for it and consecrated one of his sons as a priest. Didn’t they know that God had strongly denounced all these in the book of Deuteronomy? If they knew, then they obviously couldn’t care. If they didn’t then they were not as devout as they ought to be. What they had just done was a downright and blatant denial of God’s written laws. This was a reflection of the decaying state of affairs in the community of God’s people at that point in time. Had Micah and his mother loved God, they would seek to know His Word and obey them. Then all their sacrilegious deviation would have been avoided. But obviously, they were people who lacked the knowledge of God and His Word. From their lives, we learn a lesson. We must love God and take time to carefully examine His Word and make it our business to obey Him.     

Judges 17:7-13, briefly describe for us a travelling Levite from Bethlehem of Judah. He journeyed to Ephraim and there he spent a night in Micah’s house. When he told Micah that he was a Levite from Bethlehem, he was immediately offered employment by him. Micah wanted to add to his repertoire of errors, a spiritual father and a priest, As if the wrong of making the idol and building a shrine was not bad enough, he now wanted to complete it by adding a priest and a spiritual advisor to his whole cultic setup. The Levite was offered ten pieces of silver a year complete with maintenance and a new suit of clothes. Micah must have assumed that God would be pleased with him now that he had secured the service of a Levite, hailed from the priestly tribe of Israel. He was probably overjoyed to think that he had secured a qualified person to attend to the worship activities in his house.

Micah had mistakenly made worship a private matter. He had no regard for what God had prescribed in the books of the Law. And he was unconcerned about how true worship should be. Pandering to his own ideas, he failed to comply with God’s Word and way. While he seemed to have God in mind, his methods were all wrong. Borrowing ideas from pagan worship he supposed he would be appeasing God, albeit in all the wrong ways. We must not emulate Micah. While we may not make an idol for worship but if our worship is not God-centred, we have journeyed into a spiritual cul-de-sac. True worship must be word-based, and Christ-centred. Pleasing God must be our prime objective and inner desire. We can never please God if we violate His instruction and ignore what His Word has prescribed for true worshippers. God is looking for people who would worship Him in spirit and in truth. Such people, we must desire to be.