Saturday - Judges 17 - Supreme Confusion

This section of Judges seems to be primarily intended to show us how people's doctrines and practices can become very strange indeed when those people do not have a good strong leader showing them the right path. Truth is, if you end up confused and with more questions than answers while reading these passages, well, that is apparently the whole point. Israel sank into an amalgamation of deep sin and spiritual ignorance.  These chapters give a few illustrations of just how bad it got.

In this chapter a man named Micah took a large sum of money from his own mother, but when he admitted to her that he was the culprit, she blessed him in God's name and told him that she had dedicated it to God for the construction of an idol. What? That makes no sense at all. And, of course, it shouldn't! Micah was polytheistic and lost. He was ill informed and superstitious. He "made" one of his own sons a priest and then later hired a stray Levite as his priest. Is that the way priesthood works? Hardly! The culture was a strange mixture of truth and error, monotheism and polytheism, sin and religion, good and evil, kindness and cruelty.  Supreme confusion in Israel.  How sad.