Confusion in the Home (Judges 17:1-6)

2/24/2010 8:44 AM

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY

 

My Worship Time                                        Focus:  Confusion in the home

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                        Reference:  Judges 17:1-6

 

            Message of the verses:  “1 ¶  Now there was a man of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Micah. 2  He said to his mother, "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." And his mother said, "Blessed be my son by the LORD." 3  He then returned the eleven hundred pieces of silver to his mother, and his mother said, "I wholly dedicate the silver from my hand to the LORD for my son to make a graven image and a molten image; now therefore, I will return them to you." 4  So when he returned the silver to his mother, his mother took two hundred 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. 5  And the man Micah had a shrine and he made an ephod and household idols and consecrated one of his sons, that he might become his priest. 6  In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

            This begins the third to last chapter in Warren Wiersbe’s book “Be Available,” his commentary on the book of judges.  I have been using Warren Wiersbe’s “Be Books” to help me understand the Scriptures for over ten years, and as one of my friends commented on his writing “he puts the cookies on the shelf where you can reach them.”  I owe a great deal to the teaching of Warren Wiersbe, along with John MacArthur, whose study Bible I have used for many years too.  David Jeremiah is another of my favorite authors      who has taught me many things too.

            The title of chapter eleven in “Be Available” is “THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD,” and Wiersbe gets the idea for this title from a poem that is written by an Irish poet William Butler Yeats who wrote a poem entitled “The Second Coming.”  Yeats writes in this vivid description of civilization during the time of the second coming “Things fall apart the center cannot hold.” 

            Dr Wiersbe seems to always give a short outline in his beginning commentary of each chapter, and he writes the following that makes it easier for me to understand this difficult section of Judges:  “The events described in chapters 17-21 took place earlier in the period of Judges, probably before the forty-year rule of the Philistines.  The movements of the tribe of Dan would have been difficult and the war against Benjamin impossible if the Philistines had bee in charge at that time. The writer departed from historical chronology and put these events together as an ‘appendix’ to the book to show how wicked the people had become.  In three major areas of life, things were falling apart:  the home, the ministry, and society.”

            Verse six of chapter seventeen seems to be a major theme of the book of Judges as the author writes “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

            This section of Warren Wiersbe’s commentary is priceless to me as I will quote several portions of it for this SD.  First I want to say that after reading that this was an “appendix” to the book of Judges it began to make sense to me, for there are times, in fact many times when the Bible is not in chronological order, and I am speaking of the history portion which goes from Genesis to Ester. 

            Way back in the beginning of Genesis when God was the One who married Adam and Eve God established the family or home, and then He established human government, and finally the worshiping community, the covenant with Israel in the OT and the church in the NT.  This first portion of Judges Seventeen speaks of the problems that were occurring in the home during this most difficult time of Jewish history. 

            Without going into a lot of detail about this text I do want to point out some of the obvious things that are seen here and none of them are good.  Dr. Wiersbe writes the following to describe this section pretty well:  “Breaking seven of the Ten Commandments without leaving your home is quite an achievement.”  That is what Micah and his family did.  He goes on “Because Micah and his family didn’t submit to the authority of God’s Word their home was a place of religious and moral confusion.  But their home was a good deal like many homes today where money is the god the family worships, where children steal from their parents and lie about what they do, where family honor is unknown, and where the true God is unwanted.  Television provides all the ‘images’ the family will ever want to ‘worship’ and few worry about ‘thus saith the Lord.’

            “I recall hearing Vance Havner say, ‘We shouldn’t worry because the government won’t allow children to have Bibles in school.  They’ll get free Bibles when they go to prison.’”

 

            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  While reading about the sins of Israel in the book of Judges it is far too easy to be critical of them, but that is not the reason that I study the Word, to be critical of the sins of the people in the OT.  I study the Bible to receive my daily food and marching orders and to learn from the sins of the people in the OT so that I won’t commit the same sins that they did. I have been convicted for some time now about the amount of TV that I watch and have cut it down a lot lately.  This is a good thing for it gives me more time to read some good books and to study for Bible Study on Friday.

 

My Steps of Faith for Today:

 

1. Not watch so much TV and study more of the good things in God’s Word.

 

2/24/2010 9:50 AM