A Lawless Life

A Lawless Life

The latter chapters of the book of Judges are described by a recurring indictment of the times: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.” This lament is dispersed throughout some of the strangest and darkest narratives about life in Israel that occur anywhere in the Bible. The idea seems to be that if a king reigned in the land, much bizarre behavior as well as much descent into decadence might have been avoided.

One representative story occurs in chapters 17 & 18. The stories of Israel’s great judges have all been told. Sadly, it seems that no matter how great a deliverance of the nation might be secured by some great warrior judge, the people would soon abandon loyalty and gratitude and slide deeper into spiritual darkness. The chapter begins with a tale of a most egregious sin. A man named Micah steals a large sum of money from his own mother. He overhears her pronounce a curse on the dirty so-and-so responsible, and in his superstition, he panics and comes clean. She responds with a forgiveness that is sentimental, but in no way redemptive. She dedicates her money to the LORD, which may appear good at first glance, but she then instructs her thieving son to carve an image and cast an idol to the LORD, a gross abandonment of the Law of God.

What follows, far from honoring the LORD, is one step after another away from God’s expressed will. A homeless Levite (evidence of the breakdown of worship and obedience to the Law of Moses on a national scale) wanders by the home of Micah looking for a place to stay. Micah hires the man to be his priest for the little shrine he has established. This Levite was not from the priestly line of Aaron, but Micah must have figured, “Close enough.” The shrine, with its bogus priest become a bit of a community worship center for Micah’s neighbors even though the Tabernacle of the LORD is in another place called Shiloh.

The tribe of Dan never did trust God enough to dislodge the Canaanites from the land allotted to them. In their quest for an alternate piece of real estate, they passed Micah’s house and inquired of his priest. He promised them success. They scoped out a nice piece of land with a town called Laish and decided to set up their own town in its place. They returned to Micah’s house, stole away his idols and effortlessly convinced the “priest” to sell his services to them. The Danites then returned to the land they had seen earlier, slaughtered the citizens of Laish, identified as “a peaceful and unsuspecting people” and leveled the city. They rebuilt the city and named it Dan. They established their bogus priest and his children as a priestly line and continued to worship with the idols they had ripped off from the shrine of Micah.

And all of this, they justified as having been done for the honor of the LORD!

Sin, sentimentality and ultimate saturation in error; that’s what happens in the name of religion when everyone does as he sees fit. The verdict of the author of Judges was that this all transpired because Israel had no king. Could a king, in fact, have really prevented such a sorry state of affairs? Israel demanded a king before God was ready to give them one, and Saul was as much of a free-wheeler in regard to obedience to the Law as was Micah, his bogus priest or the murderous Danites. We need to examine the kind of king God desired for His people and, no doubt, the kind of king for whom the author of Judges yearned.

The Law of Moses foresaw kings in Israel. Such a king was to be a national Israelite, a man who would not obscenely enrich himself and a man who would not take many wives. But most importantly, he was to be a man who governed not according to his own whim, but according to the Law of God:

¹⁸When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law, taken from that of the priests, who are Levites. ¹⁹It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the LORD his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees ²⁰and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel. – Deuteronomy 17:18-20

The key to a successful monarchy in Israel was not monarchy per se, but that the king would honor the Law of God in His own life and hold the people accountable for doing the same. Every time we see that lament in the book of Judges about the absence of the king and every one else being a law unto himself, it can be construed as a lament about the barrenness of lives not governed and guided by the Word of God.