Good morning, brethren. Let's
be turning to Judges chapter 17. Judges 17. Now, coming to this
chapter, we've just finished Samson, but now beginning with
this chapter and going to the end of the book of Judges, You'll
notice that the book takes a very different tone. Things change. It seems, well, it follows Samson,
and so it would seem that chronologically it comes after Samson. It comes after what we've seen
with the judges. But whether it is or isn't, whether
it's something that's a backdrop or not or follows Samson or came
before the judges came, that's really not the important thing
here. What we do see is a horrific
plague of sin in the heart of man. That's what we see here
from this chapter on to the rest. Jeremiah the prophet said, the
heart is deceitful above all things. Who can know it? Who can plumb the depths of just
how wicked this heart is? This heart of mine, every sinner
says. And so we read in verse six,
it talks about this a little bit. Verse six, in those days
there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which
was right in his own eyes. And there's something about that
statement that speaks of Christ, that speaks of our need of the
Lord Jesus Christ, because the natural man says, we will not
have that man. We won't have this man to reign
over us. Jesus. My king? My lord? No. No, I'll take it from here. I got this myself. I'll do it
myself. I'll do what I want to do. I'll
do what's right in my own eyes. And that's the natural heart
of man. That's the natural heart that
every one of us comes into this world with until the Lord is
gracious to us and gives us a new heart. and humbles us, and conquers
these wicked, rebellious hearts, and gives us His Spirit, a new
Spirit, a new man, a new man of faith that cries for Christ,
that looks for Him, that believes Him, and cries to Him for mercy
and grace. And so what we're seeing here
From this chapter on to the end of the book is a description
of the evil that rages on in the heart of the natural man. This is what's going on in the
heart of every man, woman, and child and testifies to our need
of Christ. We need a Savior. We cannot save
ourselves. We cannot deliver ourselves from
this because we don't even know just how much evil, how evil
we are and the sin that plagues our hearts and minds. What we're
seeing here in this chapter is anarchy. It's just a mess is
what we're looking at. Sin is abounding. There's no
instruction from the priesthood. There's no government to deal
with the sin and the wickedness of the people. And so these things
are what we see in Israel, who are supposed to be the people
of God, but we see this sin and rebellion in them. And so these
things began to be the norm in Israel sometime after the passing
of Joshua. Joshua being a type of Christ,
that we see that when Christ is not ruling in the heart, there
is all this manner of sin and disarray. Everyone's doing what
they think is the best thing for them, and that's what they're
pursuing, and that's what they're building up, and those are their
works. But after Joshua passed away, Well, when he was there,
the land was ruled well, and there was peace in the land,
and people did what they should do. There weren't issues, and
there wasn't all this rebellion and sin in the land, a picture
of Christ. There wasn't this anarchy. Look
back at Judges 2. Let's go to Judges 2, verses
6 and 7. And when Joshua had let the people
go, the children of Israel went every man unto his inheritance
to possess the land. And the people served the Lord
all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders that outlived
Joshua, who had seen all the great works of the Lord that
he did for Israel." So when Joshua's in the land, there's peace. And
when Joshua's not in the land, there's no peace. So remember
that the scriptures are teaching us. We're seeing the testimony
of scripture which hath concluded all under sin. The Lord is instructing
us here, not how to save ourselves, but that all are under sin. And so in this brief chapter,
it's only 13 verses, We see sin and idolatry plaguing Israel,
plaguing the heart of man, highlighted in one family. And this family
is typical of the whole family of Adam. This is what plagues
our heart. There's a phrase that's been
consistently coming up in the book of Judges, which says, the
children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the Lord. It's in chapter 3, chapter 4,
chapter 10, chapter 13. It just keeps coming up that
the children of Israel keep doing evil in the sight of the Lord.
And the evil that they practiced appears to be idolatry. And then all that evil just flowed
from their heart and manifested itself in the worship of the
gods of the people around them. It was just a false god. It was a lie that they trusted
him. At least that's what we see in Judges 10. Let's go to
Judges 10 and look at verse 6. And the children of Israel. did
evil again in the sight of the Lord, and served Balaam, and
Ashtoreth, and the gods of Syria, and the gods of Zidon, and the
gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of Ammon, and the
gods of the Philistines, and forsook the Lord, and served
not him. I have little doubt that they
were using the name of the Lord. They were using the name of Jehovah. It was on their lips, but not
according to grace, not according to the grace and mercy of God. It was all idolatry. And so when
you read this chapter, and we're not going to look at every verse,
but read it, I encourage you to read it later, today or this
week, and you'll see that there's all manner of errors and contradictions
throughout. And so when you're reading it,
if you think that sounds odd, well that's because it is. It's
sin. It's wickedness. The contradiction you're reading,
and you're saying, this doesn't sound right, that's because it
isn't right. It isn't. It's sin. It's darkness. And everything in this chapter
is man's own understanding of righteousness. It's a reflection. It's a mirror for what's going
on in our own hearts, by nature. where we try to establish our
own righteousness before God. And what the Lord is saying is
that if you will be justified with God, what you're going to
do is you're going to be made by grace to look to the Lord
Jesus Christ, to know that Jesus Christ is the very righteousness
of God given to save your souls. He's the deliverer. He's the
one who brings peace in the heart of his children. You're going
to look to Christ, and you're going to forsake those things
that are wicked works and false ways, and you're going to follow
Christ, believing him by faith. He is the righteousness of God,
witnessed by the law and the prophets. That's what the Lord
is showing us. And so I've titled this message,
Delivered from the Curse. Delivered from the Curse. And
we're gonna begin in verses one and two. We're gonna begin in
verses one and two. And there was a man of Mount
Ephraim, whose name was Micah. His name is Micah. Now, interestingly,
this is the first name of someone in Ephraim, isn't it? All this
time, we've been seeing these judges raised up in all these
other tribes, and Ephraim was always getting upset because
they were being passed over and no one was giving them the respect
that was their due. Well, now they get someone named,
only he's not a judge. He's not a judge, he's a wicked
man. He said unto his mother, verse
two, the 1100 shekels of silver. Now, we heard 1100 shekels of
silver, that's what the Philistine lords each gave to Delilah. I don't know, is this the price
of betrayal? I don't know, I don't know. It
was the 1100 shekels of silver that were taken from thee. about
which thou cursest and spakest of also in mine ears. Behold, he says, the silver is
with me. The silver is with me. I took
it. And his mother said, blessed
be thou, the Lord, my son. So this man is a wicked man. But you'll notice that he's very
superstitious. He's very religious. but he's
a wicked man. But that doesn't stop him from
being religious. That doesn't stop him from trying to work
a righteousness for himself. No doubt he wanted to be justified
by the Lord. No doubt he wanted to be justified
by the Lord. And he believed that his justification
was the result of his own works of righteousness. He thought,
God's going to justify me by these good works that I'm doing. God's going to justify me by
those works. And you'll notice when you read
this chapter that there's many irons in the fire for righteousness.
He's stoking this thing, he's stoking that thing, all trying
to produce good works for himself so that God would justify him
that he is righteous. He trusted many things. When
I was a younger man, I worked with a friend, and we used to
buy dirt from this guy. And he would mix this dirt. He'd
filter out rocks and mix in some clay and sand with it. But that
isn't all that he did. He had work over here. He had
a truck business. He had other delivery services.
He had all these different things so that he always had something
that was making money for himself. Well, that's how Micah was with
his works. That's how he was in religion.
He had a lot of different things that he was trying to do so that
God will look at him and say, you're a righteous man, you're
justified, you're a good man, I will bless you. Now, I bring this out because
everything that he did, everything he did, you'll see that he was
trying to be justified by God. Look down in Judges 17, verse
13. Then said Micah, now know I that
the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest. And so this was just one of the
many things that he had done to try and earn the favor of
God, to get himself in God's favor. Now, every one of us should
want to be justified by God. It's one thing to be justified
by man who is a sinner just like we are. It's a whole other thing
to be justified by God. It's a whole other thing to be
justified by God. Job asked, how then can a man
be righteous with God? Or how can a man be justified
with God? A man that is born of woman. A man that is born of Adam's
corrupt, defiled seed. How can a man be justified with
God? This man Micah, he acts like
he wants to be justified by God. He's trying to justify himself
before God. He's trying to earn God's favor
by his religious good works. This is a picture of every one
of us by nature. That's how we come forth thinking
that if I do what's good and right, that God will justify
me. That's what man tries to do.
But listen, according to the scriptures, If you would be justified
by God, you must be perfectly holy. You must have no sin, no
iniquity, which means no inequalities. You must be perfect in all your
ways, having never trespassed against God, having never transgressed
against God's holy law. You must have no history of sin. If God's going to justify you,
you must be as perfect as God is perfect. If you look at your
Bibles, you notice that on one side of the page, it's very straight,
and on the other side of the page, it's just as straight. There's not letters and other
symbols going outside the lines. They're perfectly justified. So that the right side is as
justified as the left side. Move your eyes that way. It says
they're even. They're even. That's what the
Lord is showing us from his word. You must be as perfect as God
is perfect. Are you perfect? Can you say
that you have never sinned? I can tell you right now, I am
not perfect. I am a sinner, a sinner saved
by the grace of God. The Apostle John said it this
way in 1 John 1.8, if we say that we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves and the truth is not in us. But it gets worse than
that. The Apostle John goes on to say,
if we say that we have not sinned, we make God a liar. We're saying,
God, you're saying I'm a sinner, but I don't have sin. So that
we call God a liar, and his word is not in us. So that you that
would defend yourselves and call God a liar to justify yourselves,
he's saying, you don't have the light of God in you. You don't
know the truth of God. You're a sinner and you think
that you're justified. Is God going to justify you for
your works of righteousness? How then can a man be justified
with God? A man is justified, a woman is
justified by the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. He was sent of the Father. He's
perfect in all His ways. He died on the cross, shedding
His blood to cover the sins of His people. so that we are righteous
before holy God in Christ. He's the sinner's righteousness.
He's the sinner's hope of glory to stand before holy God. That's how our sins are washed
away. By the blood of the Lord Jesus
Christ. He died as the substitute of
his people to satisfy the justice of God. and to make his people
righteous by his blood. Let's turn to Galatians chapter
two. Galatians chapter two, verse
16. And we're gonna hold our place
in Galatians, because we're gonna look at a few scriptures here.
knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but
by the faith of Jesus Christ. Even we have believed in Jesus
Christ." Paul the Apostle saying, even we, we apostles, we're believing
in Christ for our justification. We're not coming to God in our
own works of righteousness. Even we believe in Jesus Christ. that we might be justified by
the faith, the faithfulness, that faithful work, that sacrifice
of the Lord Jesus Christ, and not by the works of the law.
For by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." God's
not going to justify anyone for their works in the law, for their
good works. Drop down to verse 19. He says,
For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live
unto God. Now he explains to us how that
a child of God, how a believer is dead to the law and made righteous
by Christ. Look at verse 20 and 21. He says,
I am crucified with Christ. When Christ hung on the cross,
I was in Him, like Noah in the ark. I was in Christ, so that
I too was crucified on that cross, so that I died in Christ to the
law. That's not my righteousness.
That's not my holiness. Being good under the law is not
my hope. I must be perfect, and I am perfect, in and by the Lord
Jesus Christ. I'm crucified with Christ, he
says. Nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth
in me. And the life which I now live
in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me.
a sinner, and gave himself for me, an enemy of God, a man born
in wickedness and sin. But he loved me and gave himself
for me. And he goes on to say, I do not frustrate the grace
of God, for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ
is dead and vain. That's a bold thing to say. If
righteousness comes by the law, then why did Christ die? He didn't
need to die. I could have just made myself
righteous by the law. Yet Christ did come. It was necessary
for him to come because we cannot save ourselves. And that's what
the scripture is showing us. He's teaching us you cannot save
yourselves. Now hold your place in Galatians,
because we're coming right back to it, but I want you to look
again at verse 2. Judges 17, verse 2. This man Micah said unto his
mother, The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from
thee, about which thou cursest and spakest of also in mine ears."
Right? What he's saying is, I heard
you, Mom, cursing the man that took this. Whoever it was that
took this, I heard you call down curses from God upon him. May
he be destroyed. Wipe him out. May his kids have
no father. May they have no family. Let
him come to an end. Put that, curse that person who
stole this money from me. He said, I heard you. I heard
you say those things. Behold, the silver is with me. I took it. I took it. So that all those curses you
pronounced came upon me. You cursed me, mother. And so,
what's going on? This man, who's been laboring
to make a righteousness for himself, he's now afraid, because he's
heard this curse. He's thinking, uh-oh, I've done
all these good works, and they're going to be undone by the curse. They're going to be undone by
the curse. That curse that you pronounced
against me, Mother, it's now on my head. And it's going to
render every good work I've done to be a curse. And God's not going to receive
it. That's a picture of us under the law. You see, the natural
man, all of us by nature, we spend a lot of time trying to
do good works, trying to make ourselves pleasing to God. When someone comes to hear the
word preached, they're thinking, I'm doing this because this will
get me some extra brownie points with God. God will be pleased
with me. He'll give me a little blessing
for the day or the week. God will be pleased with what
I'm doing. And so the natural man thinks,
if I do good, God will bless me. God will show favor to me. I'll earn God's good favor if
I do what's good and right. And so then we start doing those
things, and we get good at looking at others, and seeing the faults
in others, and pointing out the errors of their ways, and we
think, well, I'm pretty good. I can see that's wrong, what
they're doing. And so we think, well, God's
really blessing me now. I'm doing really good. I'm figuring
it out. And my works are good. But let's
go back to Galatians 3. Let's go to Galatians 3 now,
verse 10. And then again, keep your finger
there in Galatians. We'll be back. But it says, verse
10, for as many as are of the works of the law, to all of us
who are trying to work goodness and make ourselves righteous
before God, he says, you are under the curse. You're under
the curse, for it's written, cursed is everyone that continueth
not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do
that. Our Lord is putting it in our
face to hear and to know, are you righteous? Are you keeping
the law? Have you kept the law of Moses
civilly, morally, ceremonially, perfect in all things and never
ceased from doing them? Are you perfect before the law?
Because if you're not, He says you're under the curse, the curse
of the law, which requires payment at your hand. You must then pay
God with perfect righteousness. And we're not perfect under the
law. We have many faults, many blemishes, leprosy, many diseases
and sicknesses. We're full of sin and full of
darkness and have no righteousness of our own. What the Lord is
showing us by telling us this, by making us to know what we
are in ourselves, that we are sinners, It's to stop. It's for us to stop trying to
work a righteousness for ourselves. Stop trying to please God and
earn His favor by what we do, and look to the Lord Jesus Christ. Believe Him. Call upon Him for
mercy and forgiveness of sins. Ask for His grace and mercy. Lord, save me, a sinner. I can't
save myself. Help me, Lord. That's what the
Lord is showing us this for. All are under sin, so stop trying
to work of righteousness and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. That's why the Father sent him,
to save his people from their sins. We're under the curse of
the law. Micah here in Judges 17 is trying
to earn God's favor, and he's come under a curse by his mother. picturing the curse that we're
all under by the law. When we're trying to be a good
person, when we're trying to do religious things, and we're
trying to make right what we've done wrong, the Lord's saying,
you can't. You can't do it. We've all come
short of the glory of God. Every one of us is a sinner by
nature. He tells us those things that
we're doing that we think are our righteousness are filthy
rags. The prophet Isaiah said it this
way, we are all as an unclean thing, every one of us, the pastor
included, every one of us is an unclean thing and all our
righteousnesses, our good works, are as filthy rags. Their filthy rags and our iniquities,
like the wind, have taken us away. So just like you see that
green leaf which dries out in the fall and then blows off that
tree in the wind, that's our good works. That's our righteousnesses. It's like having greasy, dirty
hands and taking a rag that's been soaking in grease and trying
to wipe the grease off. All you're going to do is just
keep smearing the grease around. When I painted a room in my house,
I got paint on my hands. I tried to wipe it off, but there
was paint on the rag, so that it just added more paint to my
hands. That's what we're doing when
we're trying to work a righteousness, thinking, God will bless me now
if I just do this, and I stop doing that, and I start doing
this now, God will bless me. No. You're not looking to Christ. You're trusting your own works
of righteousness. Salvation is not by works. If you would be clean in the
eyes of God, you must come to God believing Christ, that He
is our acceptance. He's the sinner's acceptance
with God, the Lord Jesus Christ. Salvation is not by works, it's
by faith. Faith, believing Christ is my
forgiveness and my acceptance with God. So back in Galatians
3, Galatians 3 verse 11, But that no man is justified
by the law and the sight of God, it is evident. For the just shall
live by faith. And the law is not of faith,
but the man that doeth them shall live in them. He's got to keep
doing perfectly under the law to be accepted with God in the
law. But here's the good news, the
good news of the gospel. Verse 13, Christ hath redeemed
us, his people, those who believe him, he's redeemed us from the
curse of the law being made a curse for us. For it is written, cursed
is everyone that hangeth on a tree. And Christ was hung on a tree,
what we call the cross. He bore the curse. He became
a curse for his people, meaning he died the death that we earned
by our wicked works. Christ died as a substitute for
his people to satisfy the justice of God, to deliver us from death
and ruin so that we are now accepted and received of God in the person,
in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's how God saves
His people. That's how, why He's merciful
and just to forgive us our sins for those who come to Him in
Christ, not their own works. They come in Christ. He said,
He did this that the blessing of Abraham might come on the
Gentiles, that is all believers, through Jesus Christ, that we
might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. through
faith, not through good works, but through faith which he gives
to his child in mercy and grace, delivering them from trusting
false works, wicked works, thinking that what I did is gonna please
God and earn me salvation. Not at all, not at all. He says,
put that away. Now, one final thing from our
text. you'll notice that the works here are full of hypocrisy,
they're full of idolatry, and you'll notice they don't think
anything's wrong with it. They're that blind. They're that
blind thinking that their goodness is what brings them to God. When
Micah confessed his sin to his mother, she said at the end of
verse two, Blessed be thou of the Lord, my son. That's capital
L-O-R-D, meaning Jehovah. That's the name of the God of
Israel, Jehovah. All right, so she's calling on
the name of the Lord, but look what she says in verse three
and four. When he had restored the money to his mother, the
1,100 shekels of silver, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated
the silver unto the Lord from my hand for my son to make a
graven image and a molten image. Now, therefore, I will restore
it unto thee. So already you're thinking, well,
that's odd. I thought the second commandment
was thou shalt make no graven images of God, of things in heaven
or things on earth. and thou shalt not bow down to
them and worship them. Well, yeah, they're breaking
the second commandment. They have no issue with this. Yet, it says in verse four that
Micah restored the money unto his mother. He didn't want it.
He wasn't taking it. And his mother took 200 shekels
of silver and gave them to the founder who made thereof a graven
image and a molten image, and they were in the house of Micah. Now, remember, you're thinking,
wait a minute. I thought she said she dedicated 1,100 shekels
of silver. But now she decided, you know
what? It was missing. I got it back. Instead of being
happy and really giving it, because she had lost it anyway, she said,
you know what? I'm just going to give a little over 10%. I'm
just going to give 200 shekels of silver instead. And then verse 5 shows us that
Micah, the man Micah, had an house of gods and made an ephod
and teraphim and consecrated one of his sons who became his
priest. And so you're thinking, wait
a minute, this guy has a house full of gods, and he consecrates
his son, who's of Ephraim, not a Levite, and he's the one doing
the consecration, not a Levite, and so this whole thing is just
full of sin and full of confusion, idolatry, it's all over the place. And so when we sit here and look
at it, we think it's very clear. This man's a wicked man. How
does he not see this? Everything he's doing is falsehood,
it's lies, it's sinful, and he thinks he's going to come to
God in his own works? But understand, that's exactly
what we are by nature. Because we justify our own works,
and we condemn others for the same things that we do. And we
can't see it. By nature, we don't realize how
blind, how foolish, how ignorant I am. I'm the sinner. I'm the one that needs salvation.
I'm worried about this person condemning them and feeling good
about myself when I'm doing the same thing and I can't even see
it. I'm utterly blind to it. I'm
trusting my own works and not trusting Christ. Isaiah said
it this way in 4420, he feedeth on ashes. A deceived heart hath turned
him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not
a lie in my right hand? I can't even see that I'm trusting
a lie by nature. I need salvation, I need deliverance. We're just like Micah, because
by nature it says in verse six, in those days there was no king
in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own
eyes. And that word right means pleasing. We do what pleases us so that
we feel good about it and think, God will do me good. He'll do me a favor of mercy. And so we see the lie in Micah,
but we don't see the lie in ourselves. Our Lord has shown us by nature
we are ignorant of the righteousness of God. And we go about to establish
our own righteousness because we haven't submitted to the Lordship
of Christ. We haven't submitted to the righteousness
of God, who is the end of the law for righteousness to them
that believe. I'll close with this. How is
Christ the end of the law for righteousness? He tells us that
if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus Christ,
and believe in your heart that God hath raised him from the
dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth
unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made
unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever
believeth on him will not be ashamed. All who come to God,
trusting in their good works, they'll stand before the throne
of God ashamed of themselves, because they'll see their own
nakedness in that day. They can't see it now, they're
blind, but they'll see it then, standing before the all-seeing
eye of the brilliant glory of God. They'll know it then. All
who trust Christ and put aside, don't trust their own works,
trust the righteousness of Christ, they will never be ashamed. They
shall be received of holy God, who will say, well done, thou
good and faithful servant. You looked and trusted my son,
you believed my word. welcome into everlasting life,
and so will be received. So that's the gospel. That's
the gospel. I pray the Lord bless that word
to your hearts. Let's close and be dismissed
in prayer. Our gracious Lord, we thank you for your grace and
mercy. We thank you, Lord, for opening
your word and showing us not only the folly of the sin of
Micah, but that we see and are shown again that by our own works
of righteousness, which we do, Lord, We cannot be righteous
in your sight. Lord, deliver us from trusting
a lie. Deliver us from trusting our
own righteousness. And Lord, give us faith to look
to the Lord Jesus Christ alone, to believe him, to hear this
word. Lord, don't let it be taken from
our hearts. Don't let us turn aside. Save
us, Lord. Have mercy upon us. me a sinner. Be gracious to me for Christ's
sake. It is in Christ's name that we pray and give thanks.
Amen.