It’s good to have you here today. I am glad you all braved the snow, the terrible weather. I have a question for you. Did Punxsutawney Phil see his shadow or not? Not. Now that’s a good thing, right? Because that means early spring. Well, that’s good. Anyway, today we are going to be talking about worship again. When we think about worship in Bellevue Christian Church, we mean Christ-centered worship. Worship that is focused on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We believe that as we exalt Christ up, as we lift Christ up, that all men and women will be drawn to the Father, will be drawn to the Father through Christ. So we are a Christ-centered church. One thing that we know, though, is that all throughout history, people have not been focused on worshiping God. Or they were focused on worshiping God and, for some reason, they have strayed from the worship of God and the result being a lot of spiritual and moral decay.
Today, we are going to look at the Book of Judges because Judges actually gives a nice picture of what I would refer to as a cycle of disobedience. Some of you know the story of Judges. Basically, it chronicles a time between the conquest of Canaan, when the Jewish people came into the Promised Land, and then about 400 years which ended in the establishment of Kings. We think about Judges we think about courthouses and things like that. These Judges were really military rulers but they were referred to as Judges because they would make decisions on things. Anyway, they entered into the Promised Land, and the first thing they were supposed to do, the Israelites, was to get rid of all the pagan gods because the Canaanites had a way of worshiping a lot of different gods, but they didn’t do that. They got a little bit lazy. They quit following the God of Yahweh, the God of Creation, and they began to turn to other Gods, resulting in sin.
I think the best way to explain this is by a graphic that I think kind of shows what is going on in the Book of Judges. This constant, what I would call, cycle of disobedience. It starts really with just complacency. Again, they were worshiping the God of creation when they entered into the Promised Land, but like a lot of people, they became complacent. They fell into idol worship, which as we will talk about, is a form of sin. Oftentimes what would happen, especially we see in Judges, God would give some sort of a judgment on the people, which often involved allowing the enemies to come in and bring their military in and destroy a lot of the people, kill people and that sort of thing. Then what would happen was the people would cry out and they would repent. They would turn from their ways. They would go back to God. He would deliver them. He would reach down and basically free them from the hands of their oppressors by sending in a new judge, and then there would be a period of peace restored where everything would go fine for a few years, and then they would get complacent again, and the cycle would begin again. That is really a picture of what is going on in Judges.
In today’s reading out of Judges 17:1-13, to me we see a picture of how bad things often got when they were in this cycle of sin or cycle of disobedience. I am going to read through Judges 17:1-13, and then I’ll come back and try to put it in a modern context. Reading from the New International Version Judges 17:1-13. (Scripture read here.)
Now there are a lot of problems in this particular passage. This is a very strange passage. One that I actually forgot even existed. It is an interesting story. To quickly summarize what is going on here, again you have a point in history where people have gotten complacent and are falling back into sin. They are all surrounded by these different gods out there, and so you’ve got this blending of the God of Israel blending with all these other different gods out there. So the story goes this mother, this lady apparently had some silver stolen, 1,100 shekels which I guess is equivalent to about 28 lbs of silver, which I am not sure what the equivalent today is. But she had the silver stolen and, as pagan people often did, she puts a curse out on the person who stole the silver, not knowing that the person who stole the silver was her very son. Somehow the word got out to Micah that the mother had put a curse on him, so he returns back and goes back to the mother, admits that he had stolen the silver, and the mother is upset now because she knows she has placed a curse on the person who stole the silver. In an effort to reverse the curse, you have to invoke a blessing on that person. What she does, she invokes a blessing on him and gives him 200 shekels of silver, which is equivalent to about 5 lbs and takes that money and goes to a silversmith who produces a nice silver cast idol. As we know, that is not a good thing to do. In fact, it is a violation of several laws that are found in the Old Testament starting with out of the Book of Exodus where it says, “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.” (Exodus 20:14) You just don’t do that. It is a violation of the decree that every good Jewish person was brought up to recite, which was known as the Shema. The Shema basically just means “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:4) The reason that these laws were so important was because God knew that they were going to go into a foreign land that was going to be occupied by all these people who followed all the pagan gods, in particular the Canaanite gods which included a sun god, a god of the sky, a god of the river, and included gods of livestock. It included a number of fertility gods, gods of agriculture. All these gods were there, so they had to know that when they come into this land, there were no other gods out there. There was one God. That is who you need to keep your focus on. As we see, we see how bad things had gotten because Micah had just lost that focus. He became complacent and his mother and began to follow other gods. He set up this little shrine basically in his house. Not just one god, but several gods there. And to make matters worse, what he did was he got his hands on a priest who helped administer his little chapel, his little shrine. Not just any priest but a Levite priest. The Levites were supposed to be dedicated to be priests of the temple of God, of the One God of the universe, of creator God. Apparently he had originally started with his son as a priest and that didn’t work out, and so this Levite is coming along and he invites him to come in and administer his little shrine, and he offers to take care of him, give him a little money for food and clothing and a little salary on the side. That again is a violation of so many different laws there.
I think the best way to sum up what was going on is a passage in Judges 17:6. It says, “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.” In other words, there was chaos going on. There was no king. There was no God and there was no earthly king. There was no heavenly King and there was no earthly king so basically there was chaos. Everybody was doing whatever they want. As I thought about this passage, I said, man, this looks like America today doesn’t it. It really does. You can’t deny the fact if you look around. At a minimum you have moral decay. At a maximum you have spiritual decay. It is not a good situation out there. I think a lot of it has to do with that we, too, have distanced ourselves from our Creator God. We have. You can say anything you want about the separation of Church and State, but this country was founded on the belief in one God. This country was founded on the Christian principles related to that. If you don’t believe that, just go to Washington, D.C. and walk through some of the monuments and look at the inscription and you see God almost every other word in there. Look through the documents of our Founding Fathers. You constantly see the mention of God. If you don’t believe that, just pay attention to the Pledge of Allegiance. As far as I know, I think it still says One Nation, Under God. Not over God, under God. If you don’t believe that, pull out your wallet and look at a dollar bill, and I believe it still says In God We Trust. You see, the Founding Fathers knew the importance of worshiping the one God, especially as they were coming in to establish a new country. They knew they had to keep all the people, their eyes fixed, on the worship of their Triune God because if they were to take their eyes off it, they would have disaster. Granted, the establishment of the country was not perfect, but all in all, I think that we can still say we were a Christian nation. That the fathers believed that we were wired for worship or made for worship, just like that video said, but we got our eyes off that. Because we were wired for worship, even though we quit worshiping the God of the Universe, we are still going to worship something because again we are wired to worship. So we are going to turn and worship something, and the only things we can worship are the things around us, the creation around us. Some of you are old enough to remember Bob Dylan. Anybody know Bob Dylan? He is 72 years old. He is getting old and so are we. But anyway, he did this song and he says, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes you’re gonna have to serve somebody, well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord but you’re gonna have to serve somebody. – Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan was a prophet before his time. It was true. He knew it. The whole song talks about you have to decide who you are going to worship. Everyone is going to worship someone or something. When we are not worshiping the God we were designed to worship, we are going to turn toward the created things. Maybe we aren’t going to worship the little statues, the wooden statues. We aren’t going to worship the silver statues or stone or whatever. Our gods, our idols have become a little bit more sophisticated, but there is still a commonality there. The commonality is that we have taken our sight, our focus off the God who created us and put it on created things.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize what some of those things are. The most obvious thing being technology. Technology has become a god. I suspect that most people in this room have a computer. Some of you have a Kindle. Some of you have an iPad or an iPod and some of you are lucky enough to have an iPhone. I have this portable little god that I carry around. That is really what it is. It is a portable little god. It is very convenient. It is very pretty. It is very useful. And it is very, very smart. In fact, it can even talk to me. In fact, I can ask her some questions and see if she will answer right now. What is your name? “My name is Siri.” Here is a good one. Listen to this one. Who do you like in the Super bowl today? “The Ravens/49ers game starts at 6:30 p.m.” Who is going to win the Super bowl? “I don’t have the line on this one, but the 49ers have the better record.” Anyway, this iPhone is a nice little goddess. It’s portable. It’s pretty. It’s cute. It answers all my questions and I suspect that, if Micah and his mom were alive today, when Micah came home and admitted he stole, she wouldn’t have given him $200 shekels of silver, she would have given him $400 bucks and said go buy an iPhone 5. Right? Really, that is what is going on here. Unfortunately, parents do that nowadays. Just give them technology and that will take care of them. But as I thought about it, this is not really a god, a goddess, an idol, or whatever you want to call it. This really serves as the priest. Remember I talked about how Micah couldn’t have access to the gods unless he had the right connection. So really this is nothing other than it is the priest that facilitates access to all the other gods that are out there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are a lot of gods out there in cyberspace. Some of the gods are good and some of the gods aren’t too good. Some of the gods give the appearance that they are good. Things like online gaming. Give you some free chips, play a little poker. What harm could that be? Look at a little pornography. Look at this. Look at that. Before you know it, you are sucked into it. Look at these online games. The fantasy games that allow you to get into an entire world. Those look good on the surface, but many families have been destroyed by them.
But it’s not only the things that we know that are obviously bad and we can sucked into, it is actually the good things out there. Things like Facebook and this thing called Pinterest. You notice it is all women. How do you explain it? Would you say it is a cyber-bulletin board? Just think of a big bulletin board out there somewhere. So when you are out there surfing the internet, that’s looking up websites for you older folks, and you find something you like, whether a nice recipe, a travel site, some ideas for your kids’ birthday party, you pin it to your bulletin board. Then the idea is that you have all these people that are following you that like what you pin and when they see something on your bulletin board that they like, they can re-pin it to their bulletin board. Isn’t that cool? It’s very addictive, but I realized I think I’m the only guy on Pinterest. I want to get off but Debbie said I can’t because I have all these ladies following my recipes. They are re-pinning my recipes, and if I don’t pin a recipe tonight, they are going to have nothing to make for supper. You’ve got these sites out there where you can list crafts or you can list these party ideas for your kids. They have these phenomenal parties that include everything from balloons to a tent to Ronald McDonald coming and the Muppets showing up and everything else. After a while, it starts looking more like a circus than a birthday party. Of course, you’ve got to pick that because you have to demonstrate that you, too, are kind of cool. What it does, it creates this pressure on you. If you do not conform, if you don’t create that type of birthday party or that experience for your child, you are less than the other mothers out there. So as good as those things can be they can be very detrimental to your mental health and not to mention your time. And Facebook, you know, I’m on Facebook, a lot of you are on Facebook, and I think Facebook can be a great tool. It can be an incredible waste of time, but if it’s anything, what it is it gives you the opportunity to be or set up or own personal space so that you can be god. Really, when you think about it. You set up a profile. You begin to list links to all these cool things that you’re reading, all these wonderful things that your kids are doing, and by the way, we really don’t care, and you are putting all these pictures up. I’m reading these great books. I’m quoting these great things. I’m watching the right news articles. What you are doing is you are hoping that people are going to ‘like’ them because when they start liking them that kind of puffs up your status. Before long, you’ve exalted yourself above God. Again, these things are not bad in themselves. When it becomes bad is when the interest in these things becomes an obsession, and then it becomes an idol. So you need to be sensitive to that.
Now I know there are some people sitting back there saying, you know what, that is why I don’t get on the internet. There are other reasons you don’t get on the internet, but this is a reason I don’t get on the internet because I don’t want to mess with Facebook. I don’t need Pinterest. I don’t need any of that stuff, so I don’t have to worry about getting sucked into these gods and goddesses out there. Well, that’s wrong because, you know what, I guarantee that you have a TV, right? Some of you not on the internet, you’ve got access to cable and the cable becomes the priest that gives you access to all sorts of stuff again 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are 24 hours a day of sports. Some of you people spend too much time on sports. You can have access to any sport, anyplace in the world, anytime of the day. Some of you are into shopping. You’ve got access to the shopping network. Some of you are into soap operas and reality shows. You have access to those shows 24 hours, 7 days a week. Again, those interests can become idols. Why? Because it’s addicting. Those things get you and they begin to lure you in with some form of advertising or whatever and before you know it, you are sucked into the whole thing and you are spending more time on it than you should. I have to admit that, Debbie and I, we like to watch a little TV but most of the TV we watch is on Sunday night. We get home and we just like to veg out. I take my powernap for about three hours, have a nice dinner, and we are going to watch some great series out there like “Swamp People” or something like that, the really classy stuff. But we graduated from the classy stuff, and we went to this thing called Downton Abbey. Anybody into that? It is a cult is what it is. Or if you are from Pittsburgh, it’s called Dahntahn Abbey, right? It is really about an aristocratic family and their servants and all the drama that goes on between about the early 1900s. We made the mistake of just beginning to watch it. I guess it is on season 3, and we started season 1. It was through Netflix so we watched it. We watched the seven episodes in about three weeks, and it was just addicting. Then we had to find season 2. We had to find it and we couldn’t find it. It wasn’t free. It wasn’t on Netflix. What are we going to do? We started getting the shakes. Pretty soon we found it. I asked all over Facebook. We found it. You know how we got it? Amazon prime 30-day free trial so we got season 2 free for 30 days. They’ll hook us into something else there. But anyway, I was hooked. I had to know, man, is Mr. Bates going to come back and marry Anna? I had to know that. Are Lady Mary and Matthew finally going to get together? Is William going to make it safely home from the war? Are they going to fire Ms. O’Brien and Thomas? You can’t stand those two people. But I was hooked. We are hooked on that. Again, it is an interest that, if you’re not careful, can become an obsession that can become an idol.
Related to that is this idea of celebrity worship. We tend to worship certain people out there. There are people that follow celebrities a little bit too closely. There are people who know more about Beyoncé and who she is marrying or divorcing than they do about their own kids. That is not a good thing. Same with sports celebrities or sports teams. There are people out there that follow the sports players. They know their batting average from little league all the way up to the majors. And really, you don’t need that much information. And to be honest, not that many people care about it. Again, it’s okay to have an interest, but that interest, if you’re not careful, can flow over into an obsession and turn into an idol.
Even as the video implied, family and relationships can become an idol. How does that happen? Aren’t we all about family? We are all about family. We are. I love my family. I would die for any member of my family. But you know, there are people that get too obsessed with family. They spend all their waking hours trying to keep the family together, trying to focus on the kids and all their activities while ignoring the larger family of God, really the body of Christ, and even ignoring their relationship with God. That is often fine and good until what happens? You have a crisis in that family. Maybe you have a possible divorce or a death or some crisis with your kid or whatever. Before you know it, you’ve lost that person or whatever and you don’t have a relationship with God and you don’t know how to get through the situation. Family is important, but family is always second to God. God is number one. I’m not just saying it. You know Jesus said it. The story in Luke where Jesus is walking along doing some teaching, and he turns to someone and says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26) That is strong language, isn’t it? And that is Jesus using what is called hyperbole. He is using a form of exaggeration to get his point across; that God needs to be first. If you make God first in your life, the other things tend to work out. Even the family relationships. All those types of things tend to work out. I know there are people here today who are here alone. They are married, but they are here alone because their spouse is at home maybe watching TV, reading the paper or whatever. They are struggling here thinking should I be here, should I be back with my spouse, should I stay at home with him? You are at the right place. Because you are sending a message off to your family, to your spouse and even your kids, that God is the most important thing in your life. God will honor that if you do that. Those who honor God, he will honor. Trust me on that. You’ve got possible family-type idols that could occur.
Then, of course, there are the job and career idol which we talked about last month. Tomorrow, many of you are going to get in your cars and begin down the highways toward the idols downtown, those big skyscrapers. Idols that represent power and prestige and wealth and all that kind of stuff. Really what you are going down to are the Towers of Babel. You get down there and you go into these towers and you give 8, 10, and in some cases 12 hours a day of your life to earn a paycheck. It’s okay. Again, we all have to earn a paycheck. That’s not bad. We all have to have an occupation. But what happens is sometimes that occupation turns into an obsession which turns into an idol. It turns into an idol and before you know it, you are trying to seek something from that job that God is only equipped to give you and that is a sense of self-worth and a sense of significance. You cannot get your identity from your job because if you try to get your identity from your job and that job is suddenly pulled out from under you, you’ve lost not only your job, you’ve lost your esteem, you’ve lost your identity. To be honest, I worked in the business world for 20 years. And as much as we like to think we’re all so important, you’re all just a line item on a payroll register. That’s all you are. And when you are gone that line will be erased. That is all it is. What I am saying is don’t allow your occupation to turn into an obsession to turn into an idol. It’s not worth it.
As I try to begin to wind up here, what I’m saying is you’ve got to be careful that we somehow don’t get pulled into worship of creation in any form it takes over the worship of the Creator. We see that time and time again in history. The apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans, he was speaking of this. He was speaking about how bad things got. In the first chapter he goes on to write he is speaking about how bad the people got. He says, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:25) That is what is going on. They exchange the truth of God for a lie. In other words, all these things of the earth that make all these promises, they are lies. They can’t pan out. They can’t give you what only God can give you. Only God can give you unconditional love. Only God can offer forgiveness of sin and the freedom that goes with it, all the baggage that is taken away with it. Only God can give you the sense of identity so much so that he refers to you as a child of God, a child of the King. Only God can give you the thing that each person longs for the most; eternal life. That this is not the end of it. That there is more to come and the good stuff is about to come. What is the answer? Really, the answer is quite simple. It is going back to what was going on in the Book of Judges. Going back to that circle that I showed at the beginning. You see, what has happened in our world, the United States in particular, I think, although we started worshiping the right God, we got complacent. So we fell into sin over the last 50-100 years or whatever, and began to worship idols. I like to think that kind of it was going to stop there, but I think we have been in this period of sin for so long that it’s possible we could be entering into the period of judgment. Now I am not the doom-and-gloom-type guy, an apocalyptic thinker or whatever. But you have to admit that the world is on shaky ground right now. Look around. The wars overseas. Look at the economy overseas and now in America. Look at the chaos in the politics. Look at the lack of morals in the school. Look at the spiritual decline. Look at all that stuff and you’ve got to say, man, something is not right.
Then you start looking at something like the weather. I don’t know about you, but the weather is kind of weird lately. Was it last night we had that big storm or a couple nights ago? At one o’clock in the morning, the winds came in, followed by the snow, followed by thunder. I mean it was weird. The thing I notice about weather is don’t you feel kind of out of control. You can’t do anything. With all the different things, all the different applications or whatever in the world, they haven’t figured out an app to control the weather have they? So you wonder. You start thinking, well, is God doing something through the weather. Obviously you’ve got Hurricane Sandy. Out West you’ve got one day it is 80 degrees in Colorado. The next day it is down to 20 and it is blizzard. You’ve got the thunderstorms and the tornados in the Midwest. You’ve got all these things happening. Last Monday, I think it was in the news, in a city in Australia, the whole town was covered with sea foam. This is a picture from it. The whole town got covered by sea foam. Now how often does that happen? You’ve got stories about birds dropping out of the air. You’ve got all this stuff. Something is happening in the world.
Now, again, I am not going to suggest that it is God’s judgment coming upon us, that his wrath is being poured out, but I would suggest that maybe he is pulling back His grace. That we lived in a period of grace where we received what he wants to give us. We welcomed Him into our lives. We welcomed Him into our homes. But we have turned from Him and so what He is saying is like, if you don’t want the grace, I’m going to pull it back, and you’re going to see a crazy world, and that is what we are in now. The economy, the weather, the kids, no sense of morals. It basically reminds me of that passage back there that we talked about in verse 6 that said they had no king, so they did whatever they wanted. We don’t have a king now. We don’t follow King Jesus. We don’t have a king, consequently what we have is chaos.
So the answer again, as we go back to that circle, we just have to follow the circle around, we should be at a time of repentance. Now repentance is a churchy word but originally it wasn’t meant to be a churchy word. It just means turn around. You are going this way, now turn around and go that way. That’s what we need to do. If we do that, we can claim the promise or believe the promise that we find in second Chronicles where God says, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:13–14) That is the answer right there. So it begins with turning around. It starts with the individual. It starts with each of us taking the time to examine our lives and making sure that we have created no idols in our personal lives. Again, examining something that has been an interest turned into an obsession that may be looking like an idol because it has basically displaced God from the center. Then collectively as a church, we need to always examine whether or not we have turned to idols. In churches out there their idols are things like church attendance and programs and buildings and finances. You know, we are supposed to be out expanding the Kingdom of God on earth. If we aren’t doing that, we could be operating in a form of idol worship. Finally, what we do is we begin to go out in the world and we begin to show them the error of their ways. Not in an in-your-face or turn-or-burn-type mentality but just come alongside them and as you see them engage in these sorts of activities, you start just talking about it and say, you know, I notice you spend a lot of time on online gaming or this fantasy world or whatever. How is that working out for you? It’s destroyed your marriage. It’s destroyed your finances. It’s destroyed your life in many cases. What you want to do then, you tell them this is the way I used to do it, but I realized that I needed to have God first in my life. Can you come to church with me and I will begin to show you how to do it. Ultimately, what you are trying to do is you are trying to get people back to the place that they have been designed to be all along since the beginning of time, at a posture of worship, a posture of praise. I end by the Psalm that speaks to this. Psalm 138 that says “I will praise you, O LORD, with all my heart; before the “gods” I will sing your praise. I will bow down toward your holy temple and will praise your name for your love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word. (Psalm 138:1–2)
