So we are near the end of the Old Testament book of Judges, which we've been talking about.
And this book, it doesn't get any stranger at the end, but stylistically it almost gets more difficult.
It's like the the writer just tells stories but doesn't like weigh in too much with actual lessons.
So uh it's it's actually kind of odd to even get sermons preached from the end of the book of Judges, but since we're working our way through the book, we're gonna make a go at it and we're gonna cover two chapters today.
So uh wild man Samson, who we looked at the past few weeks, he died last week, uh, and he took out 3,000 Philistines when he died, if you remember that.
So for the entire life of Samson, the Philistines were the enemy.
I mean, the Philistines oppressed and enslaved uh the people of Israel.
So they were the enemy, but then all of a sudden, as we get into Judges 17, the Philistines are gone.
So the enemy is gone.
And the story brings front and center the question what if we are our own enemy?
Because suddenly there's no them, it's just us.
And of course this happens, right?
Because we continue to be uh quick-tempered or resentful or lustful or hasty or quietly resentful or passively angry or anxious or controlled, or something.
I don't know.
You can fill in the blank.
We could go around the room.
On Sunday mornings, I always wake up a little more kind of antsy and anxious than the other six mornings of the week because I know that you like sacrifice time and energy to come here, and I want this to mean something for you.
I like our church to run like really, really smoothly if you haven't picked up on that, and Annie does also, so that's why we work well together.
We like it to all work smoothly, and I want it to work smoothly.
And I can begin to cycle a little bit.
Um, am I gonna hold my theology together?
Because some of you are smarter than me.
I've picked up on that over the years.
Some of you really know your theology, and like, am I gonna be able to hold that together?
And sometimes I say words in my life I shouldn't say, like I stub my toe and I say a word.
You don't know those words, I know you don't know those words, and you don't say those words, but sometimes I say those words just happens.
And I don't want to say it up here.
I don't want you to know I know those words, but it does happen, and I don't want that to happen, so I can cycle with that, like I don't make that kind of mistake, that'll be horrible.
You know, just will I do a good job?
Like, will I do a good job, you know, for you and for us and for our church?
And I can kind of cycle with that, and sometimes if I cycle too much in that, and I I'll call my friend Kurt and I'll say, and Kurt's a minister also, so that's helpful as he knows these feelings, and so I'll call him and and I'll just kind of say everything I just said, and he'll say, Russ, did you preach the gospel from a passage of scripture?
And I'll say, Yeah, I did.
Uh, did you serve the sacrament?
Yeah, I did.
What else were you wanting to do this morning?
Like, yeah, yeah, you're right.
Right, and he's right, right?
Like, and that's just my little circumstance.
Most of y'all don't feel that circumstance.
But I can become my own enemy, right?
And you know that feeling in some way.
We can future trip on events that haven't even happened, right?
And just cycle, a future trip.
Or something has happened and we just kind of like live cycling in that.
We can cycle like frantically about uh how somebody views us, do they affirm us?
Do they approve of us?
What do they really think?
I know they said that, but what do they really think?
And we can cycle in all these ways, and the Taliban doesn't do that to us.
Like, they're not the Taliban's not doing that to us.
Taliban's doing other horrible stuff, but they're not doing that.
Not to me this week.
Like, that's us.
That's us being our own enemy.
And then we get into Judges 17, Philistines are gone, that outer enemy is removed.
And the narrator, the writer, takes us into a story about one man who's his own enemy.
There's nobody else to blame.
So Judges 17, 1 through 6, I'll reread what Jan read for us.
There was a man in the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Micah, and he said to his mother, the 1100 pieces of silver that were taken from you, about which you are to curse, and also spoke it in my ears, behold, the silver is with me.
I took it.
Okay, so Micah stole from his mom.
And then his mother's replies, This blessed be my son by the Lord.
And he restored the eleven hundred pieces of silver to his mother, and his mother said, I dedicate the silver to the Lord from my hand for my son to make a carved image and a metal image.
Now therefore I will restore it to you.
So when he restored the money to his mother, his mother took two hundred pieces of silver and gave it to the silversmith, who made it into a carved image and a metal image, and it was in the house of Micah.
And the man Micah made a shrine, and he made an ephod and household gods and ordained one of his sons who became his priest.
In those days there was no king in Israel.
Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
So Micah makes all these little idols out of precious metal.
He makes the ephod.
He does all this stuff that God had said, don't do.
Don't do it this way.
Don't worship me this way.
It's Old Testament worship.
But Micah wants to do it his way.
He has his personal preferences.
Story goes on.
Micah then eventually he goes out and he gets a Levite priest and he asks this guy, he said, Hey, will you come be a priest in my little set up my own little personal like worship thing going on?
Not how God's revealed to us to worship, but my own thing.
Will you want to come and be a priest?
And the priest, okay, the priest signs on for that.
So the priest is there ministering in this kind of like false God messed up temple thing.
And then Micah justifies the entire thing and kind of stamps God's approval on it.
Listen to Judges 17, 13.
Then Micah said, Now I know.
Alright, so like the priest came.
And so because the priest came, Micah's gonna, he's gonna interpret all of this as all of this is wonderful and good, and God's approval's on it.
Now I know the Lord will prosper me because I have a Levite as priest.
Here's point number one.
We are called before the scriptures with beloved and open hearts, so a loved heart by God.
But we need an open heart for teaching, correcting, resetting, and training.
And I totally stole that from our family worship.
Those of you that come, first hour of family worship, because we memorized this verse, 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, with our children last month.
Here's the J.B.
Phillips translation.
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching the faith and correcting error, for resetting the direction of a man's life and training him in good living.
The scriptures are the comprehensive equipment of the man of God and fit him fully for all branches of his word.
So what this is saying is as we are welcomed and secure in Christ, the Holy Spirit uses that gospel, that good news we're fully known and fully loved, to create courage in us that we might be wrong.
Like we can actually become courageous enough to be wrong in front of the scriptures and to be corrected and reset and trained.
So in this way, growth in grace is us learning to become vulnerable because we're secure.
If we're insecure in Christ and that's questionable, and we gotta get our behaviors all perfect and then we're secure enough.
If we're not secure, how can we come open in front of the scriptures to be wrong?
How could you risk that?
But if we're fully secure because of Jesus' work for us, we can come before the scriptures and say, show me where I'm wrong.
I need to know where I'm wrong.
And that is growth and grace for us to be that vulnerable before God and the scriptures, is so that we can joyfully and we can freely pray, God, help me to not be like Micah.
Even though I'm like Micah, help me to not be like Micah.
Help me not to just like stamp your approval onto anything I just want to do or any opinion I just happen to have.
A few years ago, my sister Sherry, she called it in the evening, and she calls, I pick up and I put her on a speakerphone, and Christy was nearby, and she is dying laughing.
And her husband, Steve, my brother-in-law, he is dying laughing.
And she says, You won't, you won't believe what Steve thinks.
You won't believe this rust.
You know the song from Annie.
Some of you have heard me tell this story because it's so funny.
I tell this story all the time.
You know the song from Annie?
My sister says, You know the song.
It's a hard enough life for us.
A hard enough life.
And I said, Yeah, of course I know that song.
She said, You won't believe it.
Steve thinks it's hard knock life.
And I start dying laughing.
I'm like, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life.
What does hard knock even mean?
I don't even know what that means.
And I'm laughing.
She's laughing.
We're laughing at Steve, having a good time.
And then Christy starts laughing.
But she ain't laughing with us.
She's laughing at, she's laughing at me.
So I do a quick Google.
Yeah.
You know.
For 35 years I didn't know.
Just been singing, having a joyful time.
Hard enough life.
It ain't hard enough life.
Is it?
No.
You knew.
Hard knock.
Didn't know.
I didn't know.
It's not subjective.
It's in the song lyrics.
Song lyrics didn't ask my uh opinion, my background, my experiences.
Song lyrics didn't care.
So the hard truth, right up against my opinion, my hard enough life.
And what gets to win in this moment?
Well, truth.
Truth wins.
Which means, oh, like you have to like humbly rearrange.
Right?
You have to like go from laughing at Steve to laughing at yourself.
So for 30 years, I was hearing, 35 years, I was hearing and singing hard enough life.
And I've been rebuked by the song lyrics.
Reset, trained, no, it's hard knock life.
That's what it is.
Doesn't matter what I feel about it.
We have to do this.
We have to do this with song lyrics.
We have to do this with how we handle relationships and conflict and communication and how we handle forgiveness, how we handle moral issues and societal issues, spiritual issues, parenting, work ethic.
We hold an issue, a motive, a behavior so sacred, maybe we've even stamped God's approval on it, and then all of a sudden you come up face to face with truth from the scriptures.
And can we become in front of the scriptures?
Can we come in front of them and say, God, open my heart to that?
I would be open to be wrong.
Because I don't want to live in falsehood.
And I don't want to live in delusions.
Like I want to live in line with your truth.
But for Micah, just stance God's approval on this whole temple thing, shrine, zone, ephod.
I mean, everything that Deuteronomy said, don't do that, don't do it that way.
He's going to do it that way.
Because for him, apparently, in some way, this is about him just worshiping out of his personal preference and then sort of like getting stuff out of God, right?
I mean, that's what he said in 1713.
Now God will prosper me.
So to some end, this is his motive to get stuff out of God.
And to that degree, this is religious idolatry, right?
The last few weeks we talked romance idolatry, uh, what else was Sam's?
Romance, idolatry, power, idolatry, Delilah was money, idolatry.
And here we have we have religious idolatry, which says this.
Religious idolatry works like this.
When it's inside of our hearts in terms of our motives.
If I don't adhere, this is what this idol, how it would work in our hearts, if I don't adhere to those religious activities, I won't be okay or enough.
Alright, so if we flip it around, this idol in our heart with religiosity, it would say, I only have meaning.
Or maybe I'm only accepted with God if I observe a particular set of religious activities.
And now, usually, because we love a sense of control and self-saving, rather than the humility of receiving the gift of Christ's forgiveness and righteousness, and we don't have to add on to that, we like to form our own little checklist, don't we?
Because then we're in control.
And to some degree, we do kind of what Micah did, like we create a transactional God, which means if I do A, then He'll have to give me B, and we can be able to say, like Judges 17, 13, well, now the Lord will prosper me.
Look, I checked it off.
But it doesn't work that way.
We all know it from experience, but we still do it because we love control.
Point number two is this religiosity is trying to squeeze out of God what we think he should give us.
Gospel or Christian faith is receiving the revelation of God, his ways for us, and his heart for us.
And that way we live in a receiving posture.
Christian faith is revelatory in nature, it's revealed to us by God to us.
Now that's recorded in the scriptures and that meta-narrative of the scriptures from Genesis to Revelation, making himself fully known in Christ, and I get it, the Bible's big, it's meta.
It's hard to comprehend.
I'm just beginning to get my mind and heart around it.
But Jesus we can comprehend.
Like Jesus is concrete.
And that's kind of the point of Jesus was God making himself fully known so we would actually know what he's like.
So if you're scratching your head over the complexity of the Bible at times, you can say, well, at least I can look at Jesus.
Hebrews 1, 1 through 4 says this about Jesus.
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.
But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
He, that's Jesus, is the radiance of the glory of God, in the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power after making purification for sins.
So that's my sin and your sin.
He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is much more excellent than theirs.
So as the story unfolds in Judges 18, there's still no king.
And thus there's no real order.
And this tribe of Dan sends five spies into a new land.
They're looking for some new land, some better land.
And on their way, they swing by.
These five spies swing by Micah's place, Micah's house.
They talk to the Levite priest, they inquire, hey, like, is our mission to go find new land?
Is this gonna work out for us?
And the Levite priest says, go in peace.
The journey on which you go is under the eye of the Lord.
I don't know.
I don't, like, I don't know.
I don't know if I trust the Levite priest at this point, to be honest.
Like he's like signed on to like ministering in this false temple situation.
So, like, maybe that's a legit comment.
Maybe he's just like kind of like a bless your heart moment where you just say it, you don't care.
You're just like bless your heart, you know, and like on you go.
I don't know, but that's there.
Five men go, they spy out the land, it's really good land.
The people in that land, they're like, man, these people won't even see us coming.
So these five spies, they go back to their people, and then they send 600 men of Dan.
They come, they swing by Micah's place, steal the priest, steal all the idols and all that stuff, is it's worth a lot of money.
Take all that.
Micah and his guys don't really even do anything, shows you the extent of which they're really convicted upon this stuff.
And Dan shows up, these people of Dan show up into this quiet town, these unsuspecting people, this is all Judges 18, just wipe them away, burn their city.
And then these people just build a new city, like right on top of these people's city.
That's the end of the story.
That's Judges 17, 18.
It's kind of an odd couple chapters.
I mean, the narrator like doesn't bring it to like a redemptive end.
There's no redemptive narrative arc, you know, like it's just like a Netflix series stopped right in the middle, like halfway through, and you're like, thanks, appreciate that.
I mean, it just kind of leaves you feeling unsettled.
He almost doesn't weigh in at all, except there's like there's two hints, two little subtle hints in the entirety of the two chapters.
And here they are Judges 17, 6, two places he actually weighs in, the writer weighs in apart from the story.
In those days there was no king in Israel.
Everyone did what was right in his eyes.
And then again in Judges 18 1, in those days there was no king in Israel.
Repeats himself.
It's like it's his way to say, man, this is all messed up.
Like it's all messed up.
And I'm just gonna tell you the story of what happened, and it's messed up.
And for him and for the Israelites, they were always wanting a king to solve their problems.
They thought if they could only have a human ruler and a king, everything would be okay.
So, of course, this writer, this is how he's writing it.
He's saying, Oh, if we could have a king, there'd be order.
Now, God would later send prophets, right?
Prophet after prophet to say, like, hey, the king ain't gonna solve all your problems.
Right?
Stop looking to human rulers to solve your heart issues.
That's still a good lesson for us today.
Here's the good news.
Point number three.
In Christ, we are beloved people to an endeared Almighty King.
Back in Judges 1, I know you've forgotten because I'd forgotten about this until I studied.
The people danced, so that people, remember, they came down, sent the spies, 600 men came, wiped away the people.
They wanted better land.
The reason why they wanted better land is back in Judges chapter 1.
They failed to fight to come into the land and get good land back when their nation was fighting.
So they ended up living this kind of like nomadic life up in the mountains.
They had bad land, and so they were just on the search looking for land.
They were still restless, they're still looking.
And this way we can we can really associate with these people.
Maybe we can't associate with wiping away a whole village in the area, but we can associate with the feeling of like we haven't settled.
Right?
Like you're never quite at rest.
Like just still looking.
And Dan was using self-rule to bring a wholeness to the heart that only living as a creation to their creator can actually quench and provide that home.
You're never quite at rest when you're self-ruling and self-saving because you're at work, you're earning your forgiveness, you're earning your own righteousness, your position with God.
For me, this song from a praise song, I used to sing this praise song in the ministry I led like 10 years ago.
We'd sing it all the time.
It's four lines, this praise song.
It's a prayer.
This week it came to me when I was studying this.
Make my heart your throne.
I've been ruling kingdoms that are not my own.
I bowed down at your feet.
I am yours and yours alone.
Make my heart your throne.
The good news is we have a king.
He's not waiting to rule you with a fist.
We need a king.
The narrator was right.
We need a king.
We're a mess.
We're a lot more like Micah and a lot more like Dan than we wish.
We need a king.
We just don't need a human king.
We need our creator to be our king, and he's not waiting to rule us with an iron fist.
He actually incarnated himself and lived amongst us and died for us.
And embraces the broken and the weak.
Maybe you remember the Scotty Smith prayer I read over you last year.
It's probably been about a year.
You can either close your eyes and pray it or you can just read along.
Since the gospel is true, we don't have to feign sufficiency, medicate foolishly, or blame relentlessly.
Thank you for both your invitation and provision.
With hearts open and palms up, we trust you for the rest you alone can give.
Rest from fear, fatigue, and worry mulling.
Rest from taking on more than you've given us.
Rest from the lies and accusations of the enemy.
Rest from the idolatry of capability.
Rest from vain regrets, false guilt, and real shame.
Rest from the uncertainties of the future.
Rest from, like Martha, choosing irritation over adoration.
Rest from focusing more on what we don't get from people than what we do have in you.
Jesus, you are our perfect righteousness and deepest peace, our loving spouse and reigning king.
Heavenly Father, we come before you and we confess we're more like Micah and Dan than we wish to be.
We're more restless than we wish we were.
We have more religious idolatry inside of us than we wish, relying upon activities and religious structures rather than the simplicity of receiving the sufficiency of Christ's death and resurrection and victory for us, given to us.
Help us to live more in the receiving posture of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone.
Help us free us into greater surrender and less control that we may walk with you in great freedom.
In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.