God has established three institutions in society: the home, human government, and the worshipping community—Israel under the old covenant and the church under the new covenant. The first of these, in both time and significance, is the home, because the home is the basis for society. When God wedded Adam to Eve in the garden, He laid the foundation for the social institutions humanity would build. When that foundation crumbles, society begins to fall apart. “If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Ps. 11:3).
The name Micah means “Who is like Jehovah?” but the man certainly didn’t live to honor the Lord. He had a family (Judg. 17:5), although nothing is said about his wife, and we get the impression that his mother lived with him and that she was wealthy. The “extended family” was normal in Israel.
Somebody stole 1,100 shekels of silver from Grandmother, and she pronounced a curse on the thief, not knowing that she was cursing her own son. It was the fear of the curse, not the fear of the Lord, that motivated the son to confess his crime and restore the money. Then Grandmother joyfully neutralized the curse by blessing her son. In gratitude for the return of her money, she dedicated part of the silver to the Lord and made an idol out of it. Her son added the new idol to his “god collection” in his house, a “shrine” cared for by one of his sons whom Micah had consecrated as priest.
Have you ever seen a family more spiritually and morally confused than this one? They managed to break almost all the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:1–17) and yet not feel the least bit guilty before the Lord! In fact, they thought they were serving the Lord by the bizarre things they did!
The son didn’t honor his mother; instead, he stole Disorder: Israel sinks into anarchy from her and then lied about it. First, he coveted the silver, and then he took it. (According to Col. 3:5, covetousness is idolatry.)
Then he lied about the whole enterprise until the curse scared him into confessing. Thus he broke the fifth, eighth, ninth, and tenth commandments, and he broke the first and second commandments by having a shrine of false gods in his home. According to Proverbs 30:8–9, when he stole the silver, he broke the third commandment and took the name of the Lord in vain. Breaking seven of the Ten Commandments without leaving your own home is quite an achievement!
The man’s mother broke the first two commandments by making an idol and encouraging her son to maintain a private “shrine” in his home. According to Deuteronomy 12:1–14, there was to be but one place of worship in Israel, and the people were not permitted to have their own private shrines. Furthermore, Micah’s mother didn’t really deal with her son’s sins; his character certainly didn’t improve by the way she handled the matter. But she was a corrupt person herself, so what else could he expect?
Micah not only had a private shrine, but also he ordained his own son to serve as priest. Certainly Micah knew that the Lord had appointed the family of Aaron to be the only priests in Israel, and if anybody outside Aaron’s family served as priests, they were to be killed (Num. 3:10).
Because Micah and his family didn’t submit to the authority of God’s Word, their home was a place of religious and moral confusion. But their home was a good deal like many homes today where money is the god the family worships, where children steal from their parents and lie about what they do, where family honor is unknown, and where the true God is unwanted. Television provides all the “images” the family will ever want to “worship,” and few worry about “thus saith the Lord.”
I recall hearing Vance Havner say, “We shouldn’t worry because the government won’t allow children to have Bibles in school. They’ll get free Bibles when they go to prison.”
But today our prisons are so crowded that the government doesn’t know what to do. If every family would make Christ the head of the home, we could stop some of the nation’s crime right at the source. Godly homes are the foundation for a just and happy society.