Judges 18:1-31 In those days there was no king in Israel: and in those days the tribe of the Danites sought them an inheritance to dwell in… This story has but a faint analogy with what I wish to speak of — but yet it illustrates a principle applicable in all ages, that essential religion is some thing which cannot be stolen. Now there are all sorts of Danites — real hostile Danites, and men accounted such by timid souls who are not so at all. There are ruthless Danites, whose honest, or dishonest, aim it is to remove what they really seem to think religion is wrapped up in. And then there are friendly Danites, who would remove idol images out of a real love for a more spiritual and vital faith. But whoever the Danites be, this is true — that nobody is afraid of the Danites unless he has gotten a Micah religion; and nobody encourages the raids and raileries of the Danites — "What aileth thee?" — like the man who cries, "What have I more?" I. ANY RELIGION WHICH CENTRES IN A FORM OR ORGANISATION CAN BE STOLEN. This is only to say that external aids to devotion, and diverse organisation of God's host may be changed, and yet destroy none but a Micah faith which is wrapped up in them. But what has seemed so permanent and vital at different times, and to different souls, is just this very thing! The Micah faith of the Jews could be, must be, stolen away. But what was permanent? Reverence and worship of Almighty God. Again, take the New Testament. It was a zeal in God's name by which Jesus Himself cleansed the temple of His Father! And who ever stole away the Micah elements of religion as did our Lord Himself, in mingled love and indignation for God's eternal law? Again, have you ever realised that the great argument all through the Epistles of Paul is just this carrying-off process of that system, glorious in its purity and needed for its day, but now to pass, in its essential elements, into a different form of growth? His great contention every where is that there were shadow and substance both in the old Mosaic economy; that form was vanishing, its truth permanent; that Christ had fulfilled, or filled full, those great moral and spiritual needs of men which once were best fed by other means. Did He take away a single element that was permanent? II. STANDARDS OF WHAT IS RIGHT AND WRONG IN CONDUCT MAY BE STOLEN, and yet not carry off the eternal obligations of mortality. How often people have been trying to say that this, that, and the other thing is eternally right or wrong for everybody and all nations to do or not to do! It is this spirit which goes to the Bible, and in Leviticus and Ecclesiastes, as well as in John and Romans, would find, on one level of authority, some word to decide, as by a talisman, whether this or that is consistent for everybody everywhere to do or not to do. How this confuses and misrepresents the Bible! The Bible is a book of life, and so it has progressively changed and raised its forms of moral obligation from age to age. Right in the midst of the Old Testament, like a lighthouse in a storm, stand the ten commandments — true, not because they are there, but there because universally true; and yet even they are not true because that is the best or highest form of moral obligation; for Jesus says of that law, "It says so and so, but 'I' say" — carrying those same principles further and higher, and adding entirely new and deeper motives and sanctions. Negative "Thou shalt not" accomplishes for one man or one age what Jesus' positive "Thou shalt love" does for another — two forms of the same thing. See the progress in Bible standards! 1. Thou shalt not do wrong. 2. Thou shalt love God and man. 3. Love one another, "as I have loved you." There is a vast difference between these three ways of looking at one thing. III. What is true of forms of worship and standards of morals is true also of FORMS AND PROPORTIONS OF THEOLOGICAL ISSUES. Judged by the Micah creeds of men we might suppose the Christian world would have nothing left of faith after the Danites of each generation had carried away some things upon which every thing seemed to hang. We are living in a time when hosts of Christian people think the ark of God is in danger as it never was before. But when was there an age in which people did not say the same thing? This is said to be an era of readjustment and revolution. Yes; but so has nearly every age been accounted since Jesus came, if we may judge from the fearful auguries of every century. There are always some people perfectly sure if this or that doctrine is not held just as their fathers, or their Church or themselves hold it, that men are cutting loose from all sure anchorage. The reassuring thing is that that is just what men have always been saying, and yet despite dark doubt and augury, hostile Danites, and men so counted Danites in one age to be canonised in the next, have all stolen only what was either false or only one-sided and temporary. There is not a great fact or essential truth of Christian revelation which is not held as firmly this very day as ever before. (A. R. Merriam.) Parallel Verses KJV: In those days there was no king in Israel: and in those days the tribe of the Danites sought them an inheritance to dwell in; for unto that day all their inheritance had not fallen unto them among the tribes of Israel. |
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