17:2 Micah and his mother seemed to be good and moral and may have sincerely desired to worship God, but they disobeyed God by following their own desires instead of doing what God wanted. The attitude that prevailed in Micah’s day was this: “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (17:6). This is remarkably similar to today’s prevailing attitudes. But God has given us standards. He has not left our conduct up to us and our opinions. We can avoid conforming to society’s low standards by taking God’s commands seriously and applying them to life. Independence and self-reliance are positive traits, but only within the framework of God’s standards.
17:4, 5 Micah may have felt religious because of his collection of idols, his confession of wrongdoing, and the appointment of his son as a priest. He obviously wanted to maintain a religious influence in his home, but he went about it the wrong way. His apparently good intentions were not enough; he needed to follow God’s laws and not his own ideas of what was right. If Micah truly loved God, he would have desired to know what God had communicated to his people and what he should do about it. Instead, Micah set up his own religious system for his own benefit. Don’t think sincerity and good intentions are enough. Everyone, no matter how sincere, needs instruction from God’s Word and other believers.
17:6 Today, as in Micah’s day, everyone seems to put his or her own interests first. Time has not changed human nature. Most people still reject God’s right way of living. The people in Micah’s time replaced the true worship of God with a homemade version of worship. As a result, justice was soon replaced by revenge and chaos. Ignoring God’s direction led to confusion and destruction. Anyone who has not submitted to God will end up doing whatever seems right at the time. This tendency is present in all of us. To know what is really right and to have the strength to do it, we need to draw closer to God and his Word.
17:7-12 Apparently the Israelites no longer supported the priests and Levites with their tithes because so many of the people no longer worshiped God. The young Levite in this story probably left his home in Bethlehem because the money he received from the people there was not enough to live on. But Israel’s moral decay affected even the priests and Levites. This man accepted money (17:10, 11), idols (18:20), and position (17:12) in a way that was inconsistent with God’s laws. While Micah revealed the religious downfall of individual Israelites, this priest illustrated the religious downfall of priests and Levites.