Failure of Levi (Part 1)
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and today we’re discussing one of two narratives at the end of Judges that are about Levites.
I had pitched the idea to my co-hosts here, “What if we combined these two stories, because they’re very closely related. What if we did them in one episode?” and Greg reminded me that people often don’t know these stories, so we should probably take the time to tell each one thoroughly, even though they are very closely related and tell us one particular point about Levites in this day and age of Israel’s history. Is that a fair summary of our conversation?
We’re in Judges 17. We’ve just dealt with Samson, and chronologically speaking Samson is roughly contemporary with Samuel, is that correct?
Yeah, that’s about right, sometime after Jephthah, so we’re at the end of the period of the judges. Eli is a judge about the time that Jephthah and Samson are doing their thing. It’s also about the time Ruth is set, so there’s a lot of overlapping that we often miss because these stories are discrete in the Bible. They aren’t interwoven and they come in separate books, so when we come to the end of Judges we’re inclined to think, “Okay, so what happens next?” and it takes some reading to realize this is not what happens next. This is what happened first.
As we look at these two stories, we’re going to see that these are not things that followed Jephthah and Samson, things that belong to the days of Eli and Samuel. These are things that happened in the first generation or so, right after the conquest.
If we’ve made it through Judges this far we are probably bored and annoyed at the, “…and they apostatized again.”
It’s the same thing, only worse. One thing that does get worse is the days of oppression tend to get longer the further we go in, and Israel’s repentance is no longer exactly a guaranteed thing. Sometimes God just says, “Okay, enough of this nonsense. I’m just going to rescue them anyhow.” So there are subtle changes as we go in, but it is an annoying cycle that the writer announced to us in the very beginning.
He tells us I think in the second chapter that this is the pattern you’re going to see, and by the time we get here, thinking people are saying, “What’s with these people? Why can’t they break the cycle? Why can’t they transmit the faith to the next generation?”
One of the elders in my church many years ago now, about the time I was joining the church, was teaching Sunday School through Judges, and as he taught this he saw what we saw and did the whole class on this constant “things fall apart and we start over, and things fall apart…”
Someone came to him and said, “How does this square with your post-millennialism?” and he did something he doesn’t do often. He asked me, and I said, “Well, the judges aren’t Jesus,” and light dawned and he said, “Oh, of course.”
We’re seeing what happens with merely human saviors. We’re also seeing in these last few chapters what happens when merely human leaders don’t do their job. We’re looking here at the pastors, the teachers, the preachers, the people who are supposed to know the Word of God and communicate it to God’s people. What were they doing, or what weren’t they doing, that kept producing this generational slump?
God’s people would repent and they’ll serve him for a generation, then the next generation will fall away. We want to know what’s going on here. Why is this happening? Why can’t they break out of this cycle? Is this the way that true religion works? It never survives more than a generation and then you have to wait for a great revival before it comes up again, or is there something else going on here?
The author has put these two stories at the end, these two historical accounts. They’re both about Levites, and the Levites are mostly unnamed. One is completely unnamed, the other is named only at the very end of the story, and there it’s quite a revelation, but the author doesn’t hesitate to just call him a Levite.
This is like if someone were to say, “Well, there was this Presbyterian…” or “There was this Republican…”
Exactly, and we all jump and say, “That’s stereotyping,” except when God does it it’s not stereotyping. It’s very akin to what Jesus does when he says, “There was this Pharisee…” Remember on one occasion one of the lawyers says, “Hey, Master, when you say that, you’re indicting the lawyers, too,” and he said, “One of you lawyers…” Jesus did not apologize for making sweeping generalizations when they were true.
And for them to be true doesn’t require them to be true of each individual in that group, necessarily. A generalization can be true on a general level, which is what it’s designed to do. I have some friends who reject generalizations on principle, and I think that’s dangerous.
So we have these two stories and they both tell us something about the way the Levites – these particular Levites and presumably Levites in general – were acting. It’s flushed out when we get to Samuel, the next book, because we see that not only were these particular Levites, who were the common pastors of the villages and towns about Israel, but the priests too were doing exactly the same thing, only worse, which ends up in the loss of the ark, the priests committing abomination before the Lord, the desolation of his tabernacle, and eventually the shift to the Davidic covenant.
So these are not just random stories of, “Oh, who are these random people and why are they doing these random things and why is it so important?” It’s important because it answers the question of, “What’s going on here? What’s wrong?”
So with that as a background, as we look at Chapter 17 there’s a man of Mount Ephraim whose name was Micah. Now, we’ve had trouble with Ephraimites before. They are descended from Joseph – Joseph’s second-born but elevated to the status of first-born. They’ve kind of got a chip on their shoulders.
Are they the ones that are always not showing up to battle and then being like, “Why didn’t you call us? We wanted the glory of battle.”
Yeah, that’s exactly who it is. This doesn’t say a whole lot about that, but it goes out of the way to mention a couple times that this is from Mount Ephraim. His name is Micah, a shortened form of Michael, meaning “Who is like God?” – an interesting name – and we come in in the middle of the action.
And he said unto his mother, The 1,100 shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou cursedst and spakest of also in mine ears…
So mom had a lot of silver, 1,100 pieces, and someone had stolen it and she had uttered a curse. This is not a modern American curse.
Yeah, she is uttering a religious sanction against the thief. She’s calling down the wrath of God on the thief.
Well, Micah is a very superstitious kind of individual, and having heard this he is now afraid of the curse and so he’s confessing, “The silver, I took it.” And his mother said, “Blessed be thou of the Lord, my son,” so she undoes the curse. So that’s kind of odd and weird and where is this going and what’s that all about?
And what lets her just undo a curse that she did? It’s like when I ask my 7th-grade math students, “So we have to isolate the variable,” and they’re like, “Right, so we divide it by 3,” and I’m like, “What lets you divide it by 3? Who gave you the right? You have to do it to both sides of the equation.” Sorry, continue.
Yeah, there’s a lot of arbitrariness and, again, superstition. Their religion operates by folk rules that they seem to know.
And when he had restored the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, 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…
“See, son, the reason I was so worked up about this and brought God in is because this silver was designed to go wholly to the Lord, to Jehovah, to make two idols, one graven, one molten,” or perhaps a molten one that’s also going to be graven – anyway, an idol of some sort.
“What? You dedicate it to God so that your son could make an idol for you to worship, and that’s why you were so upset and called God in to back you up?” but the son doesn’t blink at that. So she tries to give it back to him, but he gives it back to her. It’s like this hot potato. “You take it,” “No, you take it,” “I don’t want it. It’s hot. I stole it. It’s got God’s wrath on it. “Oh, okay.” Eventually though…
…his mother took 200 shekels of silver and gave them to the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image.
Remember that 1,100 shekels that she had wholly dedicated to the Lord? Only 200 of it made it into the idols. So much for dedicating it wholly to the Lord. She kind of had a change of heart it seems, and kept some of it – most of it, but given what she wants it for, hmm.
Yeah, they even cheat the false gods. So the founder makes the images and they’re in the house of Micah.
And the man Micah had a house of gods and made an ephod [a priestly garment] and teraphim [little household tiny gods like the images of saints that some people have on their mantles, or little buddhas and such, the little gods who help out the big gods], and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest.
Yeah, this wholly unholy. He’s making it up as he goes, and yet he and his mom are absolutely convinced that they are doing God’s service. This in itself is suspicious. Has no one explained to them the first and second commandments? Are they that ignorant?
Then the writer drops in something that becomes a refrain, mostly in this last part of the book.
In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
Some have read that as, “See? You need political centralized authority.” That’s not what it’s saying. It’s saying Jehovah is supposed to be your king and he’s not. You’re all doing whatever you please, and here is a great example of that – or bad example, depending how you look at it. So what does that have to do with Levites?
And there was a young man out of Bethlehemjudah of the family of Judah, who was a Levite…
So he lived in the territory of Judah, may have been married into it or maybe his mom was from Judah, but he stands in the true line of Levites. He’s a legitimate Levite and he’s hanging out there in Bethlehemjudah – the city where Jesus will be born.
Both of these stories involve Bethlehemjudah, and that’s interesting because Bethlehem does not come off well here. It’s supposed to be the House of Bread. That’s what the name means, and here’s a pastor from the House of Bread. Wouldn’t you think he’d have bread for God’s people? But not so much.
And the man departed out of the city from Bethlehemjudah to sojourn where he could find a place, and he came to Mount Ephraim to the house of Micah, as he journeyed.
Again, this is a little iffy. Now, in America we’re not completely surprised when a new pastor just shows up out of the blue and shops his talents around and says, “Hey, anybody need a pastor?” Or we would hope that maybe he might try to start a new work.
In Israel, Levites were assigned. There was some degree of communication and agreement as to who was where. You didn’t just pull up stakes and leave a town without a pastor and go someplace and present yourself as a pastor because you could be one and they may or may not have one, and they may or may not hire you. Again, it’s a really flakey kind of approach, but he comes looking for work and he meets Micah and Micah says, “Whence comest thou?” – Where are you from?
And he said unto him, I am a Levite of Bethlehemjudah, and I go to sojourn where I may find a place.
Dwell with me and be unto me a father [in the spiritual sense] and a priest…
Now, he’s a Levite. He’s not a priest, “But you can be a priest. You’re close enough.”
…and I will give thee ten shekels of silver by the year, and a suit of apparel [probably his vestments], and thy victuals [food].
That’s not a lot. This is not like, “I’ll give you a million dollars and a Lear jet.” This is enough to get by on, but it’s not a whole lot.
And the Levite was content to dwell with the man, and the young man was unto him as one of his sons. And Micah consecrated the Levite…
…and the young man became his priest and was in the house of Micah. Then said Micah, Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest.
This reminds me of Huckleberry Finn, where he’s got all of these different superstitions and everybody’s got a different superstition and, according to one of these ways of thinking he’s gotten some bad luck. But he’s like, “But I know the widow was praying for me, so maybe that will work out to be good luck.” It puts it all on the same level.
Yeah, it’s all ways the universe randomly works. There’s good magic and there’s bad magic, good luck and bad luck. “I want to be on God’s side. I’m sure God would like this and that, maybe some of that. And you think that would offend God?”
“I don’t think so. I think he’d be fine with that. If I were God, I’d be fine with it.”
The level of superstition and religious and moral ignorance is incredible at this point. And what we should note is that the Levite isn’t helping any. He’s supposed to be a teacher of God’s Word, but what is he doing? He’s selling out for room and board, basically. It’s not a lot of money.
We kind of get it when someone gets into say a television ministry or radio ministry or some huge kind of ministry project and the money starts rolling in, and the opportunities abound, and you can make appearances before international audiences, and everyone knows your name, and we can see how that might tempt people to follow the money and tone down the message, pretending they’re doing God’s service by making it more user-friendly.
This guy is not getting much of anything. If he’d just go out and get a day job he probably would have done better. Certainly morally he would have done infinitely better, but there you go.
Micah talks about the Lord doing him good, but the Lord is not his king, nor is the Lord the king of this Levite. This Levite is autonomous. He’s doing his own thing in the religious realm to make a quick buck and, Schaeffer’s term, “personal peace and affluence.” Sometimes the levels of both don’t have to be very high for people to sell out the gospel.
Now we come to the Danites. Let’s include many tribes here so we can see how wide-ranging this kind of thing is. One of the ways whereby we know that this is an early story is because it’s told way back in the tales of the original conquest when Joshua was still alive, so we’re going back to the beginning here.
The children of Dan have received their inheritance like everybody else, but they find out that the Canaanites who are in their valleys are just too strong for them, and they don’t want to go down and fight them. So instead of that, they send out a scouting expedition to find some other place that would be easier to conquer and would be nice and safe and cozy and all that.
So they send out of their family five men of their coasts, men of valor, and they send them to spy it out and see what they can find. Along the way they pass through Mount Ephraim and they find Micah. They don’t know Micah, but they actually know the Levite. They recognize his voice, so this Levite has been getting around.
They say, “What are you doing here? What brought you here and what’s your gig? What have you got going on?”
“Well, it’s this, and here’s the thing. Micah has made me his priest and he’s hired me,” he says. Hired pastors – not good.
“Oh, so you’re doing the pastor thing. Will you inquire of God for us, whether or not we will be successful in our venture?”
“Okay, I can do that. Uhhh, yes, go in peace. Before the Lord is your way. That’ll be $10.”
So the men go on and they go up to the northern boundaries of the Promised Land, beyond that which God actually allotted them, just a little bit, a ways over the border, and they find a town called Laish that’s far from everywhere. They don’t really have much in the way of a constable. There’s no magistrate in the land, no police department, no judges. They don’t have any business with anybody. They’re Canaanites, compared to the Zidonians, but they don’t really have any business even with them. They’re just out there in the middle of nowhere doing their own thing, laid back, and their land looks nice.
So these Danites say, “Wow, we could conquer this really easily. No one will help them, and they’re not ready for an attack.” They go back and tell the tribe of Dan what they found. They tell them, “This is great. Don’t be slothful. Let’s go possess the land, for God hath given it into your hands.”
Some of the tribe of Dan – not all of it, because some of it stays where it is, and that’s where Samson comes from – but some of these people just don’t want to fight the battles of the Lord so they’re going to go up and fight their own little private war. They send out 600 men armed, and along the way they come back to the house of Micah.
Remember, an ephod is not only the priestly garment, but remember from the story of Gideon the original ephod came with the Urim and Thummim, which allowed the wearer to get yes or no answers from God.
No doubt this thing had something similar – not divine but faked, black and white stones or something, dice you could toss, something – so basically it’s like, “We have a Ouija board and we have teraphim. We have our little household gods and a graven image and a molten image. Now therefore consider what you have to do.”
Anyplace else in the Bible, “Consider what you have to do” – these are idolators and these are idols. What do you have to do?
Destroy them – easy peasy. This requires no mental effort and very little spiritual effort to at least decide, “These are false gods and God said they should be eliminated. Are we going to do it?” but at least they should all say, “We should really do something about this.”
So they turned thitherward and came to the house of the young man, the Levite, and saluted him. The 600 stood by the gate guarding it so that no one interferes, and the five men come in and they take the image and the ephod and the teraphim and the molten image. The priest is there and says, “What are you doing?” and they say, “Shut up. Put your hand on your mouth and you come with us. We’re kidnapping you. Is it better for you to be a father and a priest to a whole tribe or just to one man?”
“Cool, I’m with you guys. Let me get my hat,” so Micah, who’s treated him like a son, he’s ready to abandon because now there are more financial assets and influence and all that available, because now he’s going to be a “priest” for an entire tribe.
Well, they start off. Micah eventually comes home or finds out what’s going on and he and a bunch of his household and friends go out and cry after them.
There’s a little bit of humor here. We’re told in verse 21 that as the Danites are leaving they put their children and the cattle and all of that in front, so if you looked at this from a distance and you saw them going into battle, all the big strong men are in the back and all the children are leading the way, and that’s supposed to be a joke. But the practical reason is they know the dangers can come from the back. What if Micah and his friends decide to try to take it all back? Well, Micah considers it but …
They cried unto the children of Dan. And they turned their faces, and said unto Micah, What aileth thee, that thou comest with such a company? And he said, Ye have taken away my gods which I made…
Yeah. “You’ve taken away the gods I’ve made.” Yeah, Augustine, because no one says it better.
“This was my whole religion, my whole heart, my whole life, and now you say ‘What aileth thee?’”
Let not thy voice be heard among us, lest angry fellows run upon thee, and thou lose thy life, with the lives of thy household.
“Oh, okay.” Realizing he can do nothing, he turns around and goes back, and that’s the last we hear of him.
You’d think this story is over, but there’s a little bit left. The Danites go up to Laish, they conquer it, burn it, take it over, and there’s no deliverer and no one to help them, and they build a city and they call it Dan. And throughout the rest of the Old Testament, when we want to describe the entire extent of the Promised Land, we will say “from Dan to Bathsheba.” Dan is the northern extremity, Bathsheba is the southern. Bathsheba is in Judah. So they name it after their father.
And the children of Dan set up the graven image, and Jonathan, the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh, he and his sons were priests to the tribe of Dan until the day of the captivity of the land.
First of all we get the priest’s name, and I’m going to talk about that in a second, but they set this shrine up over against Jehovah’s shrine at the tabernacle, which at that time was in Shiloh, and it becomes the official state religion of the tribe of Dan, the worship of this image. Again, they say they’re worshiping Jehovah, but they’re worshiping him under the form of an idol.
They have their own priest, who was not authorized by Jehovah. He is a Levite but he is not of the Aaronic family. He has no business offering sacrifices or doing anything in any way. It’s not even Jehovah, it’s an idol, it’s a rock, it’s a piece of stone or whatever it was, and it’s there until the day of captivity of the land. The question becomes which captivity?
Because we’re contrasting it with Shiloh in the next verse, it may mean when the Philistines took over everything, if their reach was that great, which would still be about 100 years or so. If it means the captivity of the land, if this was inserted by a later editor under divine inspiration, then it could mean that this cult thing went on all the way till the Assyrians carried the northern kingdom captive.
In favor of that is that when Jeroboam I wanted to set up his fake gods, the golden calves, he put one in Bethel and he put the other in Dan, and this is it. Whether this was still standing at that time, then it got added in or assimilated. If it had already been destroyed, it was still a fresh breeding ground for more idolatry.
As far as the tribe of Dan goes, yes, we have the one bright light, Samson. But by the time we’re done and we get to the book of Revelation and God lists the 12 tribes of Israel, two tribes are missing. God does some creative juggling.
He reinserts Levi, who is often not recognized among the list because Levi didn’t have any established territory, and he brings back Joseph and sets him beside Manasseh, and he eliminates two tribes – Dan and Ephraim. Dan, who began idolatry here, and Ephraim, who continued it after all their opposition of the judges. Ephraim was the tribe of Jeroboam, who set up the idols at Dan and Bethel. Bethel was in Ephraim. This is a thing with a long, long shadow.
They set them up, Micah’s graven image which he made, all the time that the house of God was in Shiloh.
Micah’s graven image – how much do you want to be the guy whose name goes down in eternal history as “they worshiped Micah’s idol for decades.”
You’ll be remembered forever as the guy who in your superstitious ignorance made an idol and it became the thing that seduced an entire tribe, or whereby they seduced themselves and gave way to their spiritual lusts.
There’s one last thing. We got a name, and the name is deliberately saved to the end. At first glance it doesn’t seem – “Okay, so Jonathan [gift of Jehovah] the son of Gershom [stranger in a strange land, that should ring a bell] the son of Manasseh.” There was a Manasseh who was the son of Joseph and there are later Manassehs in scripture, but there’s something weird that happens in the Hebrew text at this point.
The Masoretes have copied in the letter n, but it hangs above the consonantal text, the way we use a carat and write a letter up above to say “This goes here.” That’s how this is. The n is not in line with the other consonants. It’s inserted above as if to say, “Include this when you pronounce it.” If you don’t include it, though, you get a different name. The name you get is Moses.
Who had a son named Gershom. In other words, here’s the big reveal. This Levite is Moses’ grandson. Wow. That’s no blame on Moses, but it says an awful lot about his grandson. He knew. He’d heard. He’d been there, and he didn’t care. He was going to take his cheap religious heritage, which he valued cheaply, and he was going to parlay it into bed and board.
“Oh, and I can do even more with it? I can become a religious leader for an entire obscure part of a tribe? Okay, that sounds good,” and it’s going to be a snare to the entire nation and get this tribe’s name eliminated from the roll of God’s people. “But, ya know, I’ve got my steak on Fridays, so I’m good.”
Again, the point is that although this was a special case, we do get this guy’s name and the emphasis throughout has been that he’s a Levite and we’re to say, “This is what the Levites were like?” Yeah, because when we get to Samuel this is what the priests are like.
Hophni and Phinehas are not teaching the law of God. They’re not being faithful to worship. They’re defiling worship. They’re raping the nuns or maidens who gather before the tabernacle. They’re making God’s worship abominable, and when God’s people create abomination before him, he brings in Gentile armies to desolate the sanctuary. So this is a direct line into Samuel and it prepares us for what’s coming, and it shows us what’s going on.
Now, stepping back, as we look at our own age and our own nation in particular, but probably it’s a rather universal phenomena – you’re both a bit younger than I am, so I don’t know how well you remember, but back in the ‘80s or so how many major television ministries fell apart, not simply because they were preaching false doctrine but because of the lewd lascivious character of the preachers that came out in the open. We found out that these men’s concern was not preaching the gospel. In fact, much of what they preached was health and wealth.
I was thinking too of the news that came out not too long ago about Ravi Zacharias.
Oh yes. We’re saddened, especially when it’s someone who seems to have actually stood for the faith. The guys back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, not so much. They did some good, no doubt, but there was a lot of moralism, a lot of legalism, a lot of flash and show and charisma, but to call people to take up their crosses and follow Jesus was not exactly high on their agenda.
Their doctrines were not pure. They were not confessional. They were not creedal, and they pretty well played to their audience. “What will make us popular? What will bring in the bucks?” and American churches continue along this line – user-friendly. What will bring people in? What will make people happy? What will get us a bigger community?
In the beginning – and you probably both remember something of the whole seeker-friendly trend, which is not completely dead but it’s suffered a bit – the argument was always, “Well, you can’t preach to them unless they’re here, so we’re going to be friendly and get them in, people who think they’re interested in religion. They may not have a clue what it’s all about, but we’ll get them in and we’ll be nice to them and we’ll love on them, and then we can tell them the truth.”
“But that will scare them away and then they won’t be here anymore, and then you can’t preach to them anymore.”
“But if you start talking about sin and challenging them about their sins, then they’re going to go away and we won’t be able to minister to them, so we need to just work it in a little more slowly.”
Yeah. Somewhere in the small groups they’ll get it, except the small group leaders aren’t getting it. It’s not showing up in your regular services. It’s not showing up in your pastor’s preaching. The thought was that somebody somewhere at some point is surely going to share the gospel with them. We’ll get them here and our people somehow will do this good work at some level, we hope, but don’t offend them. We don’t want to lose them.
That, coupled with the modern American idea that love means total acceptance and never critiquing or criticizing anybody, led to more and more churches flooded with not even nominal Christians but blatant unbelievers, who simply found that Christians are nice people to hang out with.
You buy them Starbucks and sing some cool songs that sound an awful lot like what’s in the Top 40, except they’ve got these weird religious words I’m not sure about, but the music has got a good beat and the entertainment level is high – a lot of good light shows and smoke – and the gospel is lost.
You want to know how to derail the Kingdom of God in your generation? Stop teaching the truth. “But the truth is divisive and offensive!” Yeah, and it always has been. Nothing new. The Reformation did not come because Protestants wanted to make the Roman Catholics feel comfortable.
To set father against mother, husband against wife, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law. The gospel is an offensive thing. Now, that doesn’t mean we have to be jerks and make it more offensive, and some people do that, but in some ways that’s a minimal problem until you try to craft your whole religious denomination along those lines.
There are some who have done that. “Our entire denomination is devoted to the idea that we will not talk to anybody until they have good haircuts, smell nice, work at good jobs and don’t use bad language and don’t listen to rock and roll. Then we can win them to Christ.”
Side story. My previous church years and years ago was without a pastor for a while. I was doing some of the pulpit supply, but there was another man who was doing it, too, and he had been preaching multiple sermons on how we ought to be evangelistic. Good for him.
Then it came my turn to fill the pulpit and I said, “I’m going to show you how Jesus evangelized and who he evangelized.” Oh wow. The woman at the well, the woman who washed Jesus’ feet, the first one, the sinner, Matthew and his friends – I just went down the list of who Jesus evangelized, and when I left I got some rather rude comments that amounted to, “So I guess we can all hang out with whores, right?”
One gentleman who had at one time had been a pastor in another denomination said, “Well, I guess I can renew my subscription to Playboy.” I had no idea what he even meant. “What are you talking about?” It took me a long while to figure out, “Oh, you belong to one of those denominations that thinks that you are so holy that you can’t even sit in the same room with someone who’s a sinner or you’re compromised. Well, guess what.”
On the other hand, that was a sermon or message after which I got more encouragement from people who had never talked to me. People stopped me in random places and said, “That was one we needed to hear. Thank you,” so that was encouraging.
This reminds me of a conversation I was having with David recently. We were just chatting, thinking about the difference between media and interactions with people. There’s lots of people on Instagram and Twitter and YouTube for the purpose of being a Christian presence in those places, and nothing against being on Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. There’s lots of good reasons to be there.
But I was thinking how long is it before someone says, “Well, I need to be a Christian presence on OnlyFans” or a worse website, and that’s not what Jesus did. He didn’t set up shop in the red-light district. He met the people and he ministered to the people. That requires interacting with them. That doesn’t require engaging in their platform.
Now, if you want to go to the red-light district and get a street corner and start denouncing prostitution, and particularly the men who use the prostitutes, and start pointing them out by name, that might be acceptable. But going there and bringing the prostitutes tea – let alone their customers – is not what Jesus did. As you said, he ministered to people who were sinners, like we all are.
This Levite that we’re looking at here, he was in it for the money, plain and simple. Again, I keep saying, it wasn’t much money. You don’t have to surrender a whole lot for a whole lot to betray the kingdom of Christ. The question is what are your motives? What are you in this for? Are you going to stand for the truth?
You talked about going on some platform as a Christian presence. Fine. Christian presence means you are with love going to tell the truth that’s relevant to that situation. “Do you know that that doctrine is humanistic, self-centered, unloving, and an attack on women, Jews, black people, white people?” Call it like it is.
“But that will start a controversy.” Yup, it sure will. Remember John the Baptist before Herod? He was a Christian presence in the very throne room and it got him in jail and got him beheaded eventually. Let’s understand what a Christian presence means. It doesn’t mean you just hang around and emote Christian ways. “Did you feel the Christian vibes in this room?”
You actually have to speak the truth, and again in love, but love does not mean total acceptance. It means you’re seeking the spiritual wellbeing of the person.
Also bringing in something else I’ve been thinking about. This is just an etymological notice at first here. We call it Simony, after Simon in the book of Acts, and we don’t call it Micah-ny. Maybe it just sounds better, Simony.
But then also there’s been an interesting byline. I am a Christian presence on Twitter. I don’t make it my full-time job, obviously, but it’s been interesting. There’s been a particular byline that I’ve seen argued, that I think I mostly at least agree with in principle. It’s you’re setting yourself up on Twitter as a theologically conservative voice to speak out against modernism/liberalism/feminism, whatever it is that your particular niche is designed to be on the platform, and that’s great. If you’re doing that, it’s great. I also think if you can make money while doing that, that’s also great.
The thing that has been really weird, and this is the byline that I’ve seen argued from other people, is putting your Patreon link in your bio on Twitter. It just hits me wrong.
Patreon is a website where people can subscribe to support what you’re doing, and they get some perks. Like if you really like a podcast and they have a Patreon – I can use that example because we don’t – you can set up different tiers for people to support you at different levels, and you get more perks the more you support them.
You pay $5/month to support them so that they get money from the things that they’re doing for their community or whatever they’ve developed that follow them.
It’s kind of a return to the ideal of artistic patronage, with varying degrees of success.
It’s a great idea, especially for things that are more actually a commodity, like if you’re watching someone teach you how to cook random kinds of food on YouTube and you’re like, “This guy gets 30 cents per year from YouTube putting ads on his videos, so I’ll go support that so he can continue getting paid to do this thing that I am benefiting from.”
But I also think it’s a little weird when you end up doing that in a theological sense, because it doesn’t always have to end up being Simonistic, but that definitely is the danger with that because eventually your bottom line, your income, your motivation for saying or doing or confronting things is determined by demos, by democracy, by who’s paying you. And I don’t mean to disparage anyone, but here goes. 90% of people are stupid, and I’m in the 90%. Don’t think this is elitist.
That’s just a modern example I could think of, but throughout this whole story I’m just thinking Simony. It’s 100% the throughline of this story, where money/mammon is someone’s motivation for breaking the commands of Yahweh.
We see it in the first story with the son. “Oh, thank you, mother. This metal, 1,100 pieces to Yahweh for me to build an idol,” and he puts 200 toward it and presumably pockets the rest or uses part of it to pay a metalsmith and pockets the rest of that. There’s no honor in that. There’s no truthfulness. There’s no justice. It is purely money being the driving motivator.
You said to break the commandments of Yahweh, and I would add in one thing, in the name of Yahweh.
“I’m going to take money to break God’s commands, to break Jesus’ commands, and I’ll do it all in the name of Jesus, and that makes it better.”
I can think too of individuals, and I remember seeing someone like this back when I was a member of the Reformed Pub. To their credit, all of the admins that were there were all arguing with this guy and saying, “No. Don’t even consider this as an option.” The individual was basically saying, “Abortion is so evil that I will throw away my life to bomb a clinic and take out the people who are murdering innocent children.”
So you’re going to murder people to stop murder? That’s doing wrong in the name of right, and it doesn’t work that way when you’re not a duly appointed minister of God’s justice.
So that’s why this story is here. I love the fact that you called it Simony because I’ve never actually used that word when telling this story, and yet of course that’s exactly what it is. And the question, “Why isn’t it called Micah-ny?” I don’t know, but it is one of the traditional dangers and vices of the ministry. Will you sell out the truth for – I like your word – mammon, in whatever form it takes for you?
If you do, then the next generation isn’t going to know the truth. They’re going to know what’s convenient and what feels warm and good and soft and cozy and familiar and, as in our generation, God will more and more become your friend, your pal, your divine psychotherapist, your holistic medicinal practitioner. He’s going to put your life back together for you.
There’s no discussion of sin, of guilt, of atonement, of justification. It all just becomes, “What can your God offer me for $95.99, because that’s about what I’m willing to spend on this.”
Next week we’ll see the other thing that caused the transmission gap, the generation gap that echoes through the book of Judges.
No, it’s not, and children are often like, “That’s in the Bible?” Yeah. I’m sorry your parents didn’t read it to you, nor your Sunday School teachers apparently. So hang on, kids. You get to hear a real fun story next time.
Let’s find some good things to talk about. Do you guys have any recommendations?
I read a book this past week, because with the lead-up to the wedding and getting settled as a married person I’ve had very little time for that, and I finally got to finish a book which I really, really enjoyed. It’s called The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, who despite his name is actually English. His parents were immigrants there.
It’s a very interesting slower-paced novel, and I think the best exemplification of how slow the pace is is that the main characters are an elderly British couple, both in their 60s, who are traveling along the roads to visit their son’s village, and it’s great.
It’s in sub-Roman Britain, shortly after the days of Arthur. The kind of main plot MacGuffin is a mysterious mist spreading over the land that is making everyone just forget things. Little things, big things, it doesn’t matter. They all seem a little bit forgetful.
Anyway, it’s very good. If you’re expecting it to tie into any recognized orthodox Arthurian legend, you’re not going to get that but it is very good. If you can understand that it’s going to be slow and more philosophical in its ending and application and stuff, then I think you might enjoy it. That’s The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Cool. I’m also going to recommend a book that I finally had time to read, and that is The Velveteen Rabbit. It’s not as sophisticated as Bryan’s recommendation maybe, but if you haven’t read it in a while but kind of vaguely remember there’s something about being real and a rabbit and a skin horse – that’s weird, why do you have a skin horse in your nursery, and what is a skin horse…
Yeah, all these questions. I have so many questions. But we re-read this book. It was given as a baby gift to us, so we’ve had the opportunity to review some of our childhood favorites and some new books that have been given to our unborn child that we are excited to share with her when she arrives. This is one of those given to us and we thought, “It’s time to read this again.”
It’s delightful and it’s profound and I thought it was going to take a turn. I hadn’t read it since I was very small, and something happened in the story and I was like, “Oh no. I see where this is going,” and it did not go that way, and the story was better for not going that way. That’s the no-spoiler Emily review of The Velveteen Rabbit.
I told Bryan and Emily earlier that I’ve actually been reading again, which is fun, but they were all books I’d read before and unfortunately they were all about UFOs, two of them by Christian authors. It’s a fascinating field but I don’t recommend it as a study for anyone, unless you find yourself on the fringes of that weird world on occasion.
So I’m going to go in a completely different direction and I’m going to recommend Christmas music. In the classroom I have this computer that has access to my music and YouTube, and thus the music of the world. My daughter today tapped Pandora and it came up with a playlist called Christmas for Old People.
I was not surprised to find Dean Martin, Perry Como, and Frank Sinatra on there. I was a little surprised to find The Eagles on there. As my girls have been playing Christmas music, I find myself listening to it, walking in on the middle of a song and thinking, “That’s very pleasant. That’s a good rendition,” and asking who did it, and it’s some rocker out of my generation who never did anything normal or nice. And yet here Christmas brings something good out.
But in recommending Christmas music I want to recommend both Christmas music, which to my mind is music that is deliberately evangelical and worshipful – that is, it’s Bible-centered. It preaches the gospel, and there are some Christmas carols that don’t. They borderline on Gnosticism. I will not offend everybody or our listeners by telling you which ones.
So that’s one thing, and we don’t want to diminish those. Certainly the more those are heard in public, even if they’re being used to manipulate people into buying more junk at Wal-Mart, still if people hear the gospel that’s not in and of itself a bad thing.
I also want to stand up for holiday songs, and by holiday songs I mean songs that celebrate ordinary life in the midst of Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year holidays. There’s nothing wrong with these songs, at least as a general category. They say something about an America that by and large we’ve lost, and in that sense they’re a tribute to the Christian heritage, when people self-consciously celebrated Christmas without apologizing, without fear of offending somebody, and acknowledge, even if their songs are not specifically about Christian traditions or the Christian message, it is most clearly a Christian holiday they’re talking about. They do so with a good deal of nostalgia, a good deal of emphasis upon family.
“There's a birthday party at the home of Farmer Gray
It'll be the perfect ending of a perfect day…”
And it goes on to describe what it used to be like when family got together to celebrate holidays, and that’s a valid thing. It’s something to remember what we’ve lost, and there’s also a lot of good trivia for the holidays you can pull out of those.
Yeah, and “I met a man from Tennessee and he was going – where was it and for what?”
There you go, see? This is part of our cultural heritage and it’s a shame to lose it on the younger generation. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard my students talk about Grandma being run over by a reindeer. That’s about as broad as their cultural non-church Christmas traditions go, and it’s really pretty disgusting, but if we don’t stop and share the music and explain what this meant and why it was important and how it recorded the sentiments and feelings of earlier generations, I think we do them a disservice.
No, it’s not a replacement for [inaudible 56:21] by any means, but it is an overflow and an outpouring of common grace, if you will, of what effect Christ’s coming into the world has had. Even people who don’t believe in him once a year stopped and did homage to him. Even some of these Hollywood stars and Broadway greats, who themselves had lives that were a moral mess, calmed down themselves and sang tributes to the King of Kings. I think it’s okay to encourage people to listen to that.
I still have trouble listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing any Christmas hymn or anything whatever, because I’m not sure what God they’re singing to.
Especially when they slightly change a lyric and you go, “Why did they change that one?”
A perfect example of what you’re talking about I think is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. They have some musically fantastic Christmas albums, sort of rock opera style, and it’s super fun music. I love to play it. I got some of the piano songbooks, and they draw on a lot of classical sources, so you get rock versions of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and things like that, but they are self-consciously creating Christmas myths that are secularizing Christmas on purpose.
I like that I’m aware that that’s what they’re doing so that I can enjoy their music and then think, “Yes, this is not for church.”
I remember listening to one of Enya’s Christmas CDs and it was beautiful. Of course, a lot of it was Celtic so I didn’t understand a thing they were saying, but I did notice that at one point in What Child is This the lyrics were shifted just subtly –
It took me a long time to realize, “Wait, why don’t they say the virgin? Oh, that would be acknowledging the virgin birth.”
There’s another group that does that, too, and I can’t remember the carol that they take, but [Bastille? 58:39] in the opening of one of their albums they do that. It’s got to be Joy to the World, it’s the only thing I can think of – where basically instead of saying, “Praise, Praise the King of Earth and Heaven,” something else vaguely moralistically-happy sounding. You just hear it and go, “Oh, those are different lyrics. Oh, right…”
I sort of respect that they’re just coming straight out with it, but I don’t have to be happy that that’s what they’re doing.
No. You can respect the honesty, but you can also say, “You know, I understand why you don’t want to say that. You don’t believe it. That’s good. Pick a different song. Pick a different venue. You don’t have to sing non-Christmas Christmas songs. Sing a holiday song.”
Right. The Christmas songs that we have are powerful because of the truths that they convey. Those are powerful truths because we serve a powerful God.
You don’t get to just cut out the parts that make it powerful because you have a philosophical disagreement with what underpins that.
And then they rewrite it with something and it’s like, “Okay, this would be powerful if it meant anything at all.”
On the other side, I can recommend – and I’m sneaking in a last recommendation here – two bands that do actual Christmas music in cool ways, The Oh Hellos and The Last Bison.
The Last Bison is pretty cool. I was recommended them and started listening to them over a summer between years of college. It was someone I didn’t know who was pretty much unconnected to the rest of my life who recommended this to me, and I started listening to it and I really loved it, so then I went back to school and I was like, “Friends, listen to this because it’s awesome!” Then everybody was like, “Oh yeah! They’re great.” I was like, “Why didn’t you share this with me?”
They have kind of the intensity of metal, but with bluegrass instruments, is how I kind of see it. That’s how I think of them.
You’ll come back to that sticky note later and go, “What in the world was I thinking?”
I really like their songwriting. Not all of their songs make any grammatical or other kind of sense.
So it’s post-modern dark Calvinist folk? We keep piling on adjectives here and we’ll get someplace close?
Just listen to it and draw your own conclusions, as Peppy says in Shop Around the Corner.
I kind of have a similar feeling when it comes to The Gray Havens. The way they write their poetic verse is like all the pauses end on the end of a line, but the thought goes through to the next line and you’re like, “That doesn’t make any sense by itself. The end of that doesn’t make any sense as a start to a…what is happening?”
Fun stuff. Anyway, we should wrap up because we are over time. Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure, even though it’s kind of a downer story, but we had fun at the end there. Thank you so much also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
Thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. We bought some nice editing software to work with and that helps us out a lot. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, which is anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. As before-mentioned, we don’t have a Patreon but we do have this, so hopefully that’s not Simony.
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