The eleven hundred pieces of silver which were taken from you, about which you uttered
a curse in my hearing, behold the silver is with me, I took it."
Now by this statement we're given a little background of what happened.
His mother had some money laid aside.
Now we learn from verse 10 that apparently about ten pieces of silver was a year's wage.
So when you have eleven hundred pieces of silver you understand the value of this savings
that she had.
And it disappeared, someone stole it.
In response to that she uttered a curse upon the person who took it.
Now what is a curse?
What would be your understanding of that?
When she uttered a curse.
She was born in the first year of college, she was born for separation from her mother
in law.
Alright.
Asking God to bring down a punishment.
Alright.
It is exactly what you've described.
It is a judgment that is wished upon the head of the one that you're after.
I've been thinking about this because as you know in recent months we've had curses placed
against our church by the Satanic coven.
And so it's been interesting to study this word in light of that.
It is a desire for judgment, for trouble, for punishment in the life of the person you
place the curse against.
Now the curses work.
Well, often they are merely statements of emotional disgust or desire.
We hear people damning others rather frequently.
God is a curse by the way to dam someone.
Curses however do have power.
And especially when they are tied in to the dark side, to the power of Satan.
They are able to bring about results.
I don't know whether you've experienced those in the tribal setting Mary where you and Steve
have worked but there are many missionaries in tribal settings who have experienced the
power of the curses of witch doctors to actually kill people.
And so here is a mother in Israel who pronounces a curse upon the person who took her money.
And when her son, by the way let me just finish up on that a little bit, what is the opposite
of a curse?
A blessing.
A curse is not always tied in with Satan.
God pronounced curses or judgments upon those who disobey his law.
You remember when the people of Israel got into the promised land, Joshua took them to
Mount Ebal to Mount Gerizim and there on the two mountain sides they pronounced the curses
and the blessings of the law on either side.
We are commanded in the law not to curse God in Exodus chapter 22 nor any of his leaders.
Now why does it say that?
Well when one places a curse upon another one is placing himself in the place of judgment
saying, I am the judge.
And when one curses God he is saying, I am greater than God.
I can curse God, which is a foolish thing to do.
So the command in Exodus 22 is do not curse God.
Well here we see this mother who did bring a curse upon whoever took her money.
The son heard this statement, took it very seriously.
And so he went to his mother and confessed that he was the one who took it.
Now she turned right around and said, blessed be my son by the Lord.
And so she was attempting to counteract this curse that she had uttered before by saying
blessing.
You see it is the opposite of the curse.
May good come.
She is speaking low on his behalf.
Blessed be my son by the Lord.
And he returned the 1,100 pieces of silver to his mother.
And lest you get too excited about the godliness of this woman, it says the mother said, I
wholly dedicate the silver from my hand to the Lord for my son to make a graven image.
So here is a mom who is pretty mixed up.
And she has tied in somehow with the Canaanite religion and thus the curse that she had spoken
was probably uttered with that kind of understanding, an idolatrous pagan understanding of what
a curse is all about, even though she turns around and blesses in the name of Israel's
god.
But now she is so confused that she dedicates this silver to the Lord so that her son can
make a graven image.
Turn back to Deuteronomy 27 for just a minute and look what it says there.
And she has just gotten rid of a curse, she thinks.
And Deuteronomy 27, 15 says, cursed is the man who makes an idol or a molten image, an
abomination to the Lord.
And so in doing what she did she brought curse again upon her son by saying that he could
make this graven image and a molten image.
Now therefore she says, I return them to you, that is the pieces of silver.
So when he returned the silver to his mother, his mother took 200 pieces of silver and gave
them to the silversmith who made them into a graven image and a molten image and they
were in the house of Micah, her son.
And the man Micah had a shrine.
The word literally means a house of gods.
And it says that he made an ephod, which is a priestly garment of some sort.
And household idols, these are mentioned rather frequently in the Old Testament.
The Canaanites had them.
Archaeologists have dug them up.
They vary in size from rather small to several inches high.
These were gods that people made and put into their houses for their families.
And he consecrated one of his sons that he might become his priest.
So here's a guy who sets up his own religion.
Now he does it in the name of Yahweh and yet he brings in all of this stuff from the Canaanites,
the idolatry.
He establishes his own priesthood using his son.
And the writer says, in those days there was no king in Israel.
Every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Now there was a young man, we're going to get another piece of the story here, from
Bethlehem in Judah, in the family of Judah, who was a Levite.
Now what about the Levites?
What do you know about them?
They were the priestly tribe, weren't they?
They were for the service of the tabernacle.
And this young man was staying there.
Then the man departed from the city, from Bethlehem in Judah, to stay wherever he might find a
place and as he made his journey northward, he came to the hill country of Ephraim to
the house of Micah.
Now there weren't holiday ends.
People stayed with other people who had an extra room, kind of a bed and breakfast sort
of situation.
So he stayed there and Micah said to him, where do you come from?
And he said, I'm a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah and I'm going to stay wherever I may
find a place.
Now we're just going to skip ahead for a moment, look in chapter 18 verse 30 for the name of
this man.
You see that his name is Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh.
Now actually most scholars believe that this is a misreading here, that the Masoretts went
to this word and in order to spare any association of idolatry with Moses, put an extra little
mark there in the Hebrew text to make it Manasseh, pretty certainly what they ought to say is
Jonathan the son of Gershom the son of Moses.
So who is this young man who has come to stay with Micah?
He is the grandson of Moses.
So this tells us this is early in the period of the judges when this young man would still
have been alive.
And it tells us that Moses' family, Gershom's son, had a problem as we're going to see.
Let's go back now that we understand who he is.
I just thought it might be interesting to bring that in at this point in the story.
And he says, I'm going to stay wherever I may find a place and Micah then said to him,
be well with me and be a father and a priest to me.
The word father here is a title of honor.
He is saying take an exalted place of honor and my household be a priest to me.
You see he's established a priesthood already, a pseudo priesthood, using his son as priest
but he's not satisfied with that.
He decides he's able to get even better in his religion that he's creating.
He's going to get a Levite now who's from the legitimate priestly tribe of Israel to
fill that role.
So he says, dwell with me, be a father and a priest to me.
I will give you ten pieces of silver a year and a suit of clothes and your maintenance.
And so the Levite went in.
You see he found a job, that's what it was announced to.
And the Levite agreed to live with the man and the young man became to him like one of
his sons and Micah consecrated the Levite.
He put his hands on him.
He establishes him now as the priest of his religion.
And the young man became his priest and lived in the house of Micah.
And then Micah said, now I know that the Lord will prosper me seeing I have a Levite as
a priest.
And so he's still going back to Yahweh and to the God of Israel and yet he has created
a synchrotistic religion which has embraced not only the idols of Canaan but also a priesthood
that he himself has created.
He is a mixed up man.
So that gives us a little bit of background here.
Now, it says in those days there was no king in Israel.
Here's that statement again.
And in those days the tribe of the Danites were seeking an inheritance for themselves
to live in for until that day an inheritance had not been allotted to them as a possession
among the tribes of Israel.
Turn back with me to Joshua chapter 19 for a minute.
Joshua chapter 19 and verse 40.
The lots are being given for the land and it says the seventh lot fell to the tribe
of the sons of Dan according to their families.
And it gives the territory.
Verse 47, the territory of the sons of Dan proceeded beyond them.
For the sons of Dan went up and fought with Leshem and captured it.
They struck it with the edge of the sword and possessed it and settled in it and they
called Leshem Dan after the name of Dan their father.
This was the inheritance of the tribe of the sons of Dan.
But now we learn in Judges that they have no allotted possession.
What's happened here?
Well, I think we get a bit of the story if we look back in Judges now in chapter 1.
We understand better what's happened to Dan, the people of Dan.
Judges chapter 1 verse 34.
Then the Amorites forced the sons of Dan into the hill country for they did not allow them
to come down to the valley.
Yet the Amorites persisted in living in Mount Haras and so on.
So what that tells us is that although the tribe of Dan had been given this piece of
land which is roughly down in the Geza Strip area, where some of the trouble is right now
over in Israel.
It's between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea.
If you have a map in the back of your Bible that talks about the days of Judges, you might
even want to look back there and see where that tribe was located.
What this tells us is that the Amorites, and we know from other places, that the Philistines
who lived in that area as well, put pressure on the people of Dan so that they never did
really possess what was given to them.
They fought initially for part of it, but they didn't persist.
They were not bold and strong in their faith.
They did not follow through with what God had given them, and the result of that was
they were rather dispossessed.
They were homeless people, so to speak.
And now they are migrating.
And what this chapter 18 tells us is that they were migrating to the north and looking
for a place where they might settle.
Now eventually they end up way up north, as we're going to see, but right now they are
coming up through the middle of Palestine in their migration.
So going back now to Judges 18, 2, it says, the sons of Dan sent from their family five
men out of their whole number, valiant men, from Zoha and Eshtiol.
That's the area where Samson later would come to power.
They sent them out to spy out the land and to search it.
This kind of reminds you of another period, doesn't it?
When the people of Israel were down in Kadesh Barnea, and God told them to go into the land.
They said, well, we're going to send spies in, we'll search it out.
And in that case, the majority of the report was, we can't do it, it's too great.
And so they went into the wilderness.
Here we see five spies sent out among their own people to find a place.
And they said, go and search the land.
They came to the hill country of Ephraim, to the house of Micah, and they lodged there.
When they were near the house of Micah, they recognized the voice of the young man.
Now this is Jonathan, Moses' grandson.
Now when it says they recognized his voice, it doesn't necessarily mean that they had
known him before and said, oh, I know that guy.
What it probably means is that they recognized his accent, a Judean accent, which was different
than most of the people who lived in the hill country of Ephraim.
And they turned aside there and said to him, who brought you here?
And what are you doing in this place?
And what do you have here?
Oh, they're kind of nosy, aren't they?
And he said to them, thus and so has Micah done to me, and he has hired me, and I have
become his priest.
And he said, inquire of God, please, that we may know whether our way on which we are
going will be prosperous.
And so they said, hey, you're a priest, let us know what's in the future for us.
Well, this is not probably a genuine asking of what God wants, but it's more of a superstitious
thing.
And the priest said to them, go in peace, shalom.
Your way in which you're going has the Lord's approval.
Well, we have no record here that this man ever searched the mind of God for this answer.
He just seems to have immediately responded in the way that he did.
And he was undoubtedly incorrect.
They didn't have the Lord's approval because they were not going to God's assigned place
for them, which we've already noted was down toward the Mediterranean Sea.
They did not take what God had given to them.
And the place where they are going and will eventually establish themselves is a place
that becomes a center of idolatry in Israel for generations to come.
So the journey thereon does not in fact have the Lord's approval, although this young
man said it did.
Well, the five men departed and came to Laish and saw the people who were in it living in
security after the manner of the Sidonians, quiet and secure.
There was no human ruler humiliating them for anything in the land.
And they were far from the Sidonians and had no dealings with anyone.
And just a small marked difference in this text would say, and had no dealings with Syria.
So that's probably the better rendering of the Hebrew text here.
The one word means Adam, had no dealings with any man, Adam.
And just a slightest remark makes it Aram, which is Syria.
So what these men found out in Laish is that they were in a very secure area.
They were tucked up into a valley with mountains on either side of them.
On the one side the Sidonians didn't bother them, Sidonians over next to the Mediterranean
Sea.
On the other side the Syrians didn't bother them because of Mount Hermon.
They were in a very pleasant situation in that valley.
And if you want to look again at your map in the back of the Bible, you will see that
what I, look at map four, do you have that?
If you have a map that says Canaan as divided among the twelve tribes or something like
that, you may notice, you notice the dead sea there toward the bottom of the page and
the Sea of Galilee up from it, up the Jordan River.
You just keep going straight north from the Sea of Galilee and you come to an area that
may be titled Dan in your Bible and there is the city of Dan, or maybe it even says
Laish, which mine does.
That's the city.
And if you have any kind of markings in your Bible for mountains, you may even be able
to see the mountains on either side of this very pleasant area.
So that's what they spied out.
That's the land these five spies said, hey, this is for us.
And so they came back to their brothers at Zora, it's not Zoro, you know, it's Zora
and Eshtiol.
Their brother said to them, what do you report?
They said, rise, let's go up against them.
We've seen the land, it's very good.
And will you sit still?
Do not delay to go, to enter, to possess the land.
When you enter, you shall come to secure people with a spacious land for God has given it
into your hand.
I don't know where they got that idea.
A place where there is no lack of anything that is on earth.
So the family of the Danites from Zora and from Eshtiol, 600 men armed with weapons of
war set out.
So this is the advanced party going before the rest of these migrants.
600 warriors are going and you can tell from the number that they didn't expect a huge
battle when they got there.
Now they went up and camped at Kiriath Jireem in Judah.
That wasn't very far away from where they had started.
It seems to be the gathering point where they came together before they started this march.
And the writer here notes that this is to that very day when he was living, 300 or so
years later, still called the Camp of Dan.
That was the name of it.
It's west of Kiriath Jireem he says.
And they passed from there to the hill country of Ephraim and came to the house of Micah.
So now we come back to Micah.
And it says that the five men who went to spy out the country of Lesh answered and said
to their kinsmen, do you know that there are in these houses an Ephraim and household idols
and a graven image and a molten image?
Now therefore consider what you should do.
And they turned aside there and came to the house of the young men, the Levite, to the
house of Micah and asked him of his welfare.
And the 600 men armed with their weapons of war who were with the sons of Dan stood by
the entrance of the gate.
Now the five men who went to spy out the land went up and entered there and they took the
graven image and the ephod and the household idols and the molten image while the priest
stood by the entrance of the gate with these 600 soldiers.
And when these went into Micah's house and took the image, the ephod, the household idols,
the molten image, the priest said to them, what are you doing?
And they said to him, be silent, put your hand over your mouth, which is a way of just
kind of reinforcing, don't say a lot of words here, and come with us.
And be to us a father and a priest.
So they make a proposition to them, here you are, we're taking away the instruments of
your religion.
You're going to be out of a job, fella.
You're going to be on unemployment real soon.
So why don't you come with us?
And is it better for you, they say, to be a priest to the house of one man or to be
a priest to a tribe, to a family?
We've got a promotion for you too, if you'll take us up on it.
You'll have a whole, you'll have a big place.
You'll have a lot of people who'll look up to you.
And the priest's heart was glad, didn't yours?
I mean you get a promotion here, right?
What's an offer in your career that you just couldn't refuse?
This is what this fella had.
He may not have been able to refuse it for a couple of reasons.
But one of them was that it was a big opportunity.
His heart was glad he took the ephedra, the household isles, the graven image, and went
among the people.
And it says, then they turned and departed and put the little ones and the livestock
and the valuables in front of them.
What they're doing here is they're turning around.
Before the soldiers seemed to have been going first.
And now they've turned around.
Most of the migrants, the families with their livestock, they put first.
And the soldiers are coming behind.
Why?
They're expecting to be chased.
They're anticipating what does happen.
It says, when they had gone some distance from the house of Micah, the men who were
in the houses near Micah's house assembled and overtook the sons of Dan.
So this alarm went out.
They said, hey, we've been robbed.
And so they took off after this migrating tribe.
And they cried to the sons of Dan, who turned around and said to Micah, what is the matter
with you that you've assembled together?
As though they didn't know.
And he said, you have taken away my gods, which I made.
Isn't that an ironic phrase?
I mean, you're in bad shape and you've got to make a god.
And yet isn't that the heart of man to create his own religion?
To create god in his image?
He said, you've taken away the priest.
And they've gone away, and what do I have besides?
It shows the poverty of his life.
They took everything he counted worthwhile when they took away his religion.
So how can you say to me what is the matter with you?
And the sons of Dan said, do not let your voice be heard among us.
He says, you better talk quieter, lest fierce men fall upon you and you lose your life with
the lives of your household.
Do you see any threat there in that verse?
I think so.
So the sons of Dan went on their way, and when Micah saw that they were too strong for
him, he turned and went back to his house.
He had no choice.
Then they took what Micah had made and the priest who had belonged to him and came to
Laish.
So now they're continuing on north.
Micah's out of the picture now, but they have his religious items and they have his
priest and they journey on, they migrate on to the north, and they come to this city that
they had spied out to a people quiet and secure and struck them with the edge of the sword.
And they burned the city with fire.
Now this is what God told them to do in Joshua when they went into the land.
And so they may have felt that they should do this in order to comply with what God had
ordered years before as the people went into the land of Canaan.
It was a slaughter is what it was.
And they burned the city and there was no one to deliver them because it was far from
sight and they had no dealings with any man.
Again, I say it's probably Syria.
And it was in the valley which is near Bethlehem and they rebuilt the city and lived in it.
So the Danites then built a new city on the ashes of the old one and they called the name
of the city Dan.
Not too surprising, that's the name of the father of their tribe.
However, the name of the city formerly was Laish and the sons of Dan set up for themselves
the graven image.
And Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Moses, he and his sons were priests to
the tribe of the Danites until the day of the captivity of the land.
Now the question arises at this point, what is this captivity that is spoken about?
There are several suggestions and I'm not sure it's real clear as to which one is in
view.
If it were, then there wouldn't be several suggestions I suppose.
One possibility is that it is talking about the time when Tiglath-Palazer of Assyria came
about 732 and attacked northern Israel, took some people away.
Others say no, it was ten years later when the Assyrians took away the northern kingdom
altogether, shut it down under the judgment of God.
There are others who believe that it may be some lesser captivity when the Philistines
perhaps attacked Israel.
In fact, in 1 Samuel chapter 4 and verse 11 you see the Philistines attacking even that
far north and they took the Ark of God, do you remember that?
And it could be that that is the occasion that is spoken about here.
But the point that I want to make is that when they got to this place they established
this apostate religion that Micah had created.
And they adopted it, adopted it I should say, and established it then in that city of Dan.
And so they set up for themselves Micah's graven image which he had made all the time
that the house of God was at Shiloh.
Now that's an interesting phrase or idea there because it gives us a little piece of information.
Shiloh is about 20 miles north of Jerusalem and it is the place where Joshua had the tabernacle,
the house of God established after the people entered the land.
Later on Dan became a site, a shrine for the worship of the people of Israel.
You recall that the Kingdom of Israel once unified under Saul and David and Solomon,
split didn't it?
The nation divided into the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom.
The Southern Kingdom followed the descendants of Solomon and his son Rehoboam.
The Rehoboam was not a very nice king, he was a very wicked king in fact.
And the Northern Kingdom rebelled against him and they followed another bohem, what
was his name?
Jeroboam.
And Jeroboam, because he had no access to Jerusalem and to the worship there, Jeroboam
established idolatry in the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
Now he did that for practical reasons among others because religion is a very powerful
unifying force among the people.
Now they were cut off from Jerusalem that belonged down here to the Southern Kingdom
so he had to do something to create religion up here in the North to unify his people.
And so he established Dan as one of two sites where they would worship.
And there in the city of Dan, for generations to come, they went to worship the idols, probably
some of these very same idols of Micah.
And so it was an abomination in Israel, this apostate religion hung around for generations
and generations and ultimately it brought the destruction of the Northern Kingdom that
was named Israel or Samaria.
Well we meet some interesting characters in this story.
On the scum chart, who do you think ranks worse?
Micah?
Jonathan?
Or the Danites?
What do you think?
Why would you say the grandson of Moses, Paul?
He forsook his ancestry, didn't he, too.
Any other thoughts?
Had he been faithful to God, he could have put Micah in his place and that would have
then changed the whole story if he had been willing to do that.
I would tend to agree with you, I think he's on the scum list the worst.
What does those days in Israel tell us about these days?
Pardon?
Deja vu.
When everyone did that, which was right in their own eyes, it was a culture of relativism
like ours today, people making their own religions.
Secularism hasn't worked in our culture.
Secularism and humanism basically have failed.
They're still out there, they're still enemies of the truth, but they've failed.
People are not turning back to religion but not to the truth.
They're turning back to a syncretistic kind of religion and there are churches that have
the name Christian on them, but they've adopted also New Age ideas, some of the philosophies
of the East, demonic teachings, and so they're creating religion.
I think it might be argued that we are becoming more religious in the day in which we're living
in this nation because irreligion hasn't worked.
It has led to despair.
It has led to an age of despair.
So people are seeking reality elsewhere.
The problem is that they're being deceived.
Doesn't this fit in well with what Paul said the last days would be like with the doctrines
of demons and people turning away from the truth, the adoption of rigid external rules
even perhaps, forbidding to marry, to eat certain foods and so on?
That is creating religion, creating a fleshly kind of religion that appeals to humanity
and says that humanity is wonderful and doesn't need God.
Find religion in yourself, in your own consciousness, and then you just create.
They had idols of wood and molten metals, but today people have idols that are of their
own hearts.
It's just as false and it leads to disaster, just like the idolatry did then.
Some lessons we can learn from the days of judges.
Well, thanks for being here tonight in our study.
It's not exactly an exciting, wonderful study that sends you away just feeling great, does
it?
I mean, you study this and say, oh my goodness, these people really got screwed up, and they
did.
They messed up bad.
The only way we can stay straight is to stick to the book, the book of God.
Let's pray together.
Father, I pray that that will be what we do.
Find in some arrogant way that we can boast about, knowing some narrow way in which we
prove our points by proof texting.
For rather, may we truly search out the truth and follow it faithfully.
And in this day, like that of the judges, this day of apostasy among those who name
God, may we stand true and faithful.
In Jesus' name, amen.
God bless you.
Have a good week.