Passage is Judges 18:21-31.
The Danites leave Micah’s house with their children, animals, possessions as well as Micah’s idols, ephod and Levite. Micah pursues them until they threaten him. The Danites slaughter the people of Laish and burnt their city, which they rebuilt and renamed Dan. They set up the idols and worshipped them, making the descendants of Moses priests. The Ark was in Shiloh.
Why do the Danites worship Micah’s idols? Why does Micah chase after the thieving Danites?
When the Danites take his idols and his priest , Micah is right to ask, “What else do I have?”
He knows there is nothing more important than God.
His problem is that he’s worshipping idols instead of the Lord.
And the Danites are right to want to have God to worship and a Levite to lead them in worship, but they’ve got things mixed up, too.
Like Micah, they’ve fallen away from the true worship of God, even though “all the time the house of God was in Shiloh” (31).
They’ve naturally become possessive of their own idea of God and don’t want to share it.
They are trying to control God for their own prosperity.
I asked repeatedly asked Micah’s question during my time of loss because I lost just about everything over a period of a few years.
First, death took a friend, then I lost my blindness to my first wife’s alcoholism, them I lost my wife to death, then I lost my career job, then my hoped-for new life with a new woman and child, then my books, then my car, then my dog, then my temporary job, then my money.
At each loss I asked, “What else do I have?”
And every new loss showed me what I once had.
There was always something more to lose.
I sometimes wondered if my life would be the next thing to lose.
But I didn’t lose that.
What I did lose five years after the losses began was something similar to what Micah lost.
I lost my false understanding of God.
I was so used to that view of God that I thought at first I has lost God himself.
It felt worse than losing my life.
It felt like I’d lost my soul.
The emptiness of losing people, goods, and fantasy hopes was nothing compared to losing my God.
But I needed to lose that God because he was a shrine and idol and ephod I’d built over the twenty years since Jesus called me to faith in him.
I first met Jesus in poverty, pain and suffering. I needed to meet him again in pain, suffering and poverty because I’d left him in Shiloh.
God was gracious enough to do that for me.
Like Micah, I called out in anguish and I chased after the losses like he chased after the thieving Danites.
To try to get that God back would have been my spiritual death.
I needed to go Shiloh.
And the start of that journey to clearer understanding of who God is in my life began when the Lord told me to love the woman who is now my wife.
Love was the key. My view of God that I lost had very little love in it.
I needed to change my point of view.
The pain of loss upon loss did that for me.
In the emptiness of loss I found the God of love.
Application: In the midst of judging others, stop, and look at them with God’s love.
Lord, examine me daily with your Spirit, convict me of my sin, and lead me to your repentance of love.
