God told the Jews, listen, if you follow me, here are the blessings that I'm going to put on you. But if you start messing around with me and trampling my word and the covenants that we have together, this is what's going to happen to you. One of the prophecies or judgments was insanity. God says, you're going to go insane. And today, to this day, many Jewish people believe in the most foolish things that are against them and their nation.
And you just ask, why do you vote for these people? This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Rick is currently teaching through the Book of Judges.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in Judges chapter 17 as he continues his message, Spiritual Derangement. So when he had returned the 1100 shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver from my hand to Yahweh for my son to make a carved image and a molded image.
Now, therefore, I will return it to you. And I tell you, it just gets more bizarre. This is spiritual derangement.
They're spiritually, when it comes to God and religion and faith, they're out of their minds. If he would steal from his own mother, what would he do to others? Well, we won't talk about that.
That's my boy. And so his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver from my hand to Yahweh for my son. And her dedication was a waste of time, like many today who think that they're dedicated to God, but it's the wrong God. The facts don't agree with their conclusions. Just because they appoint this thing in their imagination as God doesn't mean it's true. Consider Islam.
Islam has no, there's no spiritual feature to the Qur'an or their other writings. There's no, there are no miracles, there are no prophecies. There's just, here's what I say and it's impossible to challenge me without being violently attacked. That's their approach.
How convenient. I'm going to create a religion that makes it impossible to question. Christianity rolls back the curtain and says, go ahead, question all you want. Bring your Bibles to church, ask questions, get to the bottom of it.
And the world hates that about us. And so here she is, oh, let God bless our disobedience, our flagrant disobedience, I might add. And it is said, what she says here, that she was going to dedicate this silver to this idol. She says this without shame, without hesitation, without reason, without obedience, without God. Zephaniah the prophet will come along, long after these, and he will talk about those who worship the fake gods and then worship also the real God. Zephaniah chapter 1, those who worship the host of heaven on the housetops, worshiping the stars, not only the stars. Those who worship and swear oaths by Yahweh, but who also swear by Milcom, which was a pagan god. So that's, they mingled it in together. When they were strictly forbidden not to do this, you would think, they would say, okay, Judea, the law of Moses does not permit me to do this, but I want to do this, so I'm going to leave the law of Moses and go become a full-blown worshipper of Bala, whoever else.
You would think they would do something like that. No, no. We're going to stay amongst the people of God. We're going to then add the gods from the other peoples, and we're going to insist we be left alone. This is what evil does.
This is invasive. And to this day, you think that people would go start their own church? No. I mean, what's up with the Satanists? Where do they get the idea of Satan? Well, they get from the Bible. Well, you would think if they believed that part, if they believed the name of Satan, you would think they'd believe everything else. It's sort of like eating the stem of a banana. It was stupid. Throwing away everything else.
And I don't even eat bananas, but I wouldn't eat the stem. Well, again, her child was more important than God. It was an insult to God, and a sin for her. When you insult God, the sin is on you. The atheists would think that I'm getting even with him. I'm showing him I'm not looking in his direction. I had a cousin in high school.
I mean, a good cousin. I love him. He's with the Lord now. But in those days, when he would get really upset with you, he would ignore you for like three days. He wouldn't speak to you.
You could set the house on fire. He would just ignore you. And then he'd snap out of it. And we accept that that's how he was. Of course, I was perfect, and I had no problems. I'm sure times he hated my guts.
But anyway, it's part of growing up. Deuteronomy 28. When God told the Jews, listen, if you follow me, here are the blessings that I'm going to put on you. But if you start messing around with me and trampling my word and the covenants that we have together, this is what's going to happen to you. One of the prophecies or judgments was insanity. God said, you're going to go insane. And today, to this day, many Jewish people believe in the most foolish things that are against them and their nation.
And you just ask, why do you vote for these people? Deuteronomy 28, 28. Yahweh will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart. We have watched this happen. So that tells us that if God does that to his covenant people, he is certainly capable of doing it to anybody else.
And we're looking at it. We're looking at a world of insane people who just, they have no agenda but to cause anarchy, which is to cut your nose off to spice your face. And then the people join them, and for what? I think that people have too much time. We need to get them washing pastoral pickup trucks and stuff like that. Young folks need to do something. Well anyway, this spiritual derangement, it's happening.
It's not unnoticed. It's spreading in this home from mom to son. Where are they right now?
Where is this mom and this son right this moment? Did they get out of this idolatry and become righteous? Or did they go to their grave mocking God with the way they lived? There's no way to smooth over what they were doing. There's no way to downsize it.
There's no plea bargaining. James chapter 3 verse 1, and just the interesting thing about James and Jude, the stepbrothers of Jesus Christ according to the flesh, both of them in their short letters. Their short letters are loaded with the Sermon on the Mount. You can't top the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount makes everybody pay attention. That's its beauty.
It's not grace. It's truth. It's raw truth from God. And it gets your attention so that at the end people say, never anyone spoke like this with such authority. He didn't speak as the scribes. He spoke as one with authority, as though he came from the throne of God as the idea. Well James says, for where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and everything will be there.
And that's what these two were guilty of. He was seeking her silver and she was seeking just a blessing on her son no matter what he did. He could be cutting out her heart with a knife and she'd be saying, bless you, my son.
She's lost her mind. Okay, that might be a little extreme, but it is possible. Alright, let's move on. It says to make a carved image and a molded image. Let's keep that in context of the verse. So when he had returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, his mother said, I will wholly dedicate the silver from my hand to Yahweh for my son to make a carved image and a molded image. Now therefore I will return it to you. You gave me back the money you stole.
I'm going to take some of that money and I'm going to buy you a cursed blessing. That's what it comes out to. The carved image, that's a handmade god out of clay or stone or anything you can carve. The molded image, of course, is something that's cast in metal or plaster, cast into a mold. This likely refers to a carved image overlaid with the silver that she dedicated. And that was a economical way of having a precious idol. I'm just an oxymoron because there's nothing precious about an idol. Now therefore I will return it to you. I'll make an idol from silver, my boy, the silver you stole, and I'll give it to you.
And you can enjoy the madness of the idol. Verse four, thus he returned the silver to his mother. Then his mother took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to the silversmith. And he made it into a carved image and a molded image. And they were in the house of Micah. She donated more than 10 percent to her idol. Yet the temple at Shiloh just sat there neglected. The Levites were so neglected they had to move out of their allotted cities to find a way to live.
We're going to get to one of them in a minute. Long after this Ezekiel will say to the people who had the book of Judges in their possession, he will say, God speaking through Ezekiel, how degenerate is your heart, says the Lord Yahweh, seeing you do all these things, the deeds of a brazen harlot. You're not ashamed, boldfaced sin, flagrant sin right out in front of everybody. Ezekiel 18 31, cast away from you all the transgressions which you have committed and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit for why should you die, O house of Israel? God says you're all messed up on the inside. You need complete renovation.
You need to gut the thing out completely and redo it. Like Tozur says, grace will save a man, but it will not save him and his idol. He just had that with Vance Havner and A.W. Tozur. Vance Havner would make you chuckle.
Tozur would make you close the book and think about yourself. Both of them powerful men of God. He says here, and they were in the house of Micah.
This is his domestic demon network. He had a bunch of little figurines. He had a little shrine. We're going to get that in the next verse. Remember, one man can hold more demons than 2,000 pigs. A great lesson from the scripture.
Man's capacity for evil. Verse 5, then Micah had a shrine and made an ephod and his household idols, and he consecrated one of his sons to become his priests. Who became his priests? Well, the word there translated shrine in the Hebrew is house.
The idea is a dwelling place within the house. This chapter completely mocks Deuteronomy 12, where all of these violations they are guilty of are covered. I'll take two verses from Deuteronomy 12 at the moment. Verse 4, you shall not worship Yahweh your God with such things.
Yet there he is doing it. According to Deuteronomy 12, Shiloh was the place where God was to be publicly worshiped. You could worship the Lord at home.
You could not bring sacrifices to him in the home. They were doing it. They had the ephod there.
They tried to get into it. It wasn't the same ephod in this context as the garb of the priests. It was a pouch of his eyes. It was likely somewhere where they held the bones that they would read or some form of trying to tell the future.
What do you call it? Omens and things like that. Verse 5 of Deuteronomy 12, But you shall seek the place where Yahweh your God chooses, out of all your tribes, to put his name for his dwelling place, and there you shall go. So here Micah has a dwelling place, a shrine in his home, but the law explicitly says don't do this.
He believed he had a relationship with Yahweh by violating the strict and clear commands of Yahweh. This is insanity. There's no sense in that. There's no way to justify that.
Indefensible position. He says, and made an ephod and his household idols plural, and that's his domestic demonic network that he has in home. You know, you have a router at home, a modem. He had a shrine full of idols. Now when you look at your modem, you're going to stand behind me you iodine. Okay, and he consecrated one of his sons to become, who became his priest. Well only Aaron's descendants were supposed to be priests in Israel. There were supposed to be no other priests.
Anybody else was to be killed. No priest, true to their calling, would have tolerated this. So if he, you know, if he was a real priest, as soon as he made him a priest, he said, I can't be a priest and I rebuke you for making me one.
Numbers 18, we're going to get this because we kind of cover it more as we move forward. He says, Therefore you and your sons with you attend to your priesthood for everything at the altar and behind the veil, and you shall serve. I give your priesthood to you as a gift for service, but the outsider who comes near shall be put to death.
It was a capital crime to impersonate a priest. If you were not from the line of Aaron, even if you were a Levite, if you were not from the line of Aaron, you were not to be a priest. But you see, the high value God puts on the priesthood to serve, he says, and you shall serve. Well we are a royal priesthood. We are supposed to take the meanings, the value of what's behind this high calling and apply it to what we do as Christians. Preach Christ, which has everything to do with saving souls from an eternal hell.
Certainly Micah knew all this. Anybody outside of Aaron's family serving as a priest was to be killed, but he did not honor it. To them, going contrary to God's word, somehow was not going contrary to God. To them, going contrary to Yahweh was somehow not going contrary. You see how just people become deranged. Spiritually deranged, which is what every person who is rejecting Christ is.
But we're getting to see an extreme case put in front of us. If you took this to someone, you say, you read this and tell me what's wrong with this story. Even if you read it as literature, you'd have to come to the conclusion that these people are not stable.
And yet, many people would read it, come to that conclusion, and then go ahead and repeat it. Because sin is that deadly of a thing. It is violently deadly.
It's invisibly deadly. How many Christians, and I would say all, can't stand their carnal nature, their fallen nature. That part of us that wants things it shouldn't have. Even another donut can become a big problem. Not the donuts.
Yeah, after about eight of them, you know, it's now becoming a little greedy in one sitting. Anyway, verse six, in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Well, there's another indication that the book of Judges was put together during the time of the kings or approaching that time. Maybe he was lobbying, you know, I'm part of the movement to get a king in Israel, not a judge.
Can't say for sure. But we do know he's looking back, and he's saying, and the kings, remember, as bad as the judges were, or not as good as they should have been, the kings were worse overall. I mean, with the exception of a few, the kings were just far worse. All the kings of the northern kingdom were diabolical. Anyway, the context that Israel's kings, this context says that Israel's kings were to have, to make a great contribution to the spiritual state of the people. The king was to influence the people. He's saying there was no king then, that's why these people behaved this way. There was no one at the top influencing the land, pointing to God, upholding the righteousness of the law.
That's what he is saying. There was no Moses figure. It's supposed to be the pastor. You say, well, that gives a lot of authority to the pastor.
No, it does not. It gives the authority to the body of Christ. So a righteous pastor is only in front of a congregation by consent of the congregation.
It is a body thing. It is an appointment by Christ. But it goes both ways. The congregation can consent to a heretic in the pulpit, and it often happens. But this church gets enough of that.
We'll be getting more of it come Sunday from Jude. But back to this, in those days there was no king. The context says there was no king then. That's why they behaved this way. Had there been a king, this apostasy would not have been running so unchecked throughout the land as it did. No religious authority. He says everyone did what was right in his own eyes. What was right in their eyes was wrong in God's.
That's what matters. Well, how would I know that when I come to the Scripture? This is the only way. There is no other way. You cannot just say, well, I just have a deep suspicion.
Well, that's not good enough. It might be right, but it has to be founded on the Word. Because when you do things that is right in your own eye, in the heart being deceitful and desperately wicked above all things, you end up lying about God.
The facts become wrong. You cannot guess with God. It's not almost right or almost there. That's good, again, and horseshoes and hand grenades being close enough, but not when it comes to doctrine. Not the essential doctrines. There are many points in the Scripture that are debatable.
But there are others that are not. The doctrine of salvation is simple as anything. You are a sinner. Christ is the Savior. He's the Son of God. He died for you. He'll never get to heaven without him. Even the unborn don't get to heaven without the blood of Christ.
He's got it all worked out. When David said, I shall not, he shall not come to me, I shall go to him, that whole situation is arranged by the blood of Christ for that to come to pass in heaven. David could go to Sheol, but he could not get to the Father's throne without the blood of Christ. Anyway, to go through life with what's right in your eyes might be abhorrent in God's eyes. And we come across this all the time. People say, well, I think God is.
They just make up something. And it's wrong. And it's harmful. And it comes from the underworld. It comes from Satan. Wrong ideas about God are not generated from the throne of God.
And because it is harmful to human beings, it is very important. And there are hordes of churchgoers who do their own thing while putting Christ's name on it, just like this couple here that we are considering. Jeremiah 10, and of course Jeremiah, just what a ministry. And I say I would not want to be one of the pastors in Corinth in the day that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. I just would not want a church of those type of believers because I would stumble. I would go into the pulpit with tomatoes and just say, yeah, I know what you believe in.
Okay, that's a bit much, but it's my fantasy. Jeremiah had a worse ministry, is what my point, and he made it to the end. And he kidnapped them in the end. Then you would go to him at one point and say, Jeremiah, just tell us what God says.
Whatever it is, whether we like it or not, we're going to submit to it. And Jeremiah says, okay, come back in 10 days, I'll tell you. He tells them, and they said, we don't like that.
Then he turned on him. Jeremiah writes, oh Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself. It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps. And that's what's being brought out in this verse 6 that we're looking at. Again, Jeremiah 13, this is the one with the sash. Jeremiah, go buy yourself a nice sport coat sash in his day, but in our day. I wouldn't, you know, if God said buy a sash, I'd go buy a sport coat and say, can I use this instead? Because I look kind of goofy walking. Imagine getting gasoline at the station and wearing a sash.
It's like, maybe in some South American countries you can wear one and get away with it, but here it's not really. Anyway, I'm restraining myself. Just give me a minute. Verse 13 of Jeremiah, chapter 13 Jeremiah 4, As a sash clings to a man's way, so I have cause the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah to cling to me, says Yahweh, that they may become my people for renown, for praise, and for glory, but they would not hear. So it was an object lesson that Jeremiah took an object and he put it on you. See how this sash clings to me? This is how we're supposed to do it to Yahweh. We're supposed to be wrapped around him like this.
But no, you don't want that. Bizarre. He broke 60% of the Ten Commandments without even leaving home. This one Micah, idolatry, fashioning images, stealing, lying, coveting, Commandments 1, 2, 5, 8, 9, and 10. What an indictment.
That's a rap sheet. She broke 20% of them without leaving the home of the Ten Commandments. Israel became bored with God. Israel became bored with the faith. Israel became bored with an invisible God.
So they wanted to make one up that they could see like everybody else. And we have Christians who do similar things. They become bored with the scripture. They start reading other things.
And they get in trouble. Because, listen, being a Christian is hard. Not being one is harder.
Is it worth it? That's the question you have to answer for yourself. All right, it's hard being a Christian. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio for this study in the book of Judges. Cross Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel in Mechanicsville, Virginia. If you'd like more information about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. You'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick available there. And we encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. By doing so, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross Reference Radio. You can search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app or just follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. That's all the time we have for today. Join us next time to continue learning more from the book of Judges, right here on Cross Reference Radio.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-12-28 11:44:25 / 2023-12-28 11:54:13 / 10