10 Shekels and a Shirt (Paris Reidhead) | The Whole Counsel

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snider, and today I want to introduce you to one of the most beneficial and unusual sermons that I've ever had the opportunity to hear. It was preached by a man named Paris Reedhead, and it has a strange title, Ten Shekels and a Shirt.

It's taken from Judges chapter 17, and in this account we have a young priest, an idolatrous Jewish family, and the tribe of Dan. This will require more than one podcast for you to listen to, so we're only going to listen to the first half now, and then we'll return for the second half later.

So today I'd like to give you just a little background on Paris Reedhead, and next week we'll talk a little bit about the occasion of the preaching of the sermon. Born in 1919 in a Minnesota farming community, Paris Reedhead embraced Christ, and in his late teens he committed himself to a life of Christian service.

Now in 1945, in his mid-twenties, Reedhead took an assignment with the Sudan Interior Mission, and this involved him surveying and analyzing indigenous languages in preparation for evangelistic and educational efforts on the Sudan-Ethiopian border.

A spiritual crisis occurred in his life during this time, and he talks about that in this sermon. And the result was that he came to feel that much of Western evangelicalism had adopted a utilitarian or pragmatic and humanistic philosophy that directly contradicted the scriptures.

In 1949, Reedhead returned to the United States and took up work with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. This is the same denomination that A. W. Tozer labored in. He also became a pastor in New York City, and it was called the Gospel Tabernacle.

For the remainder of his life, Reedhead was involved with the Sudanese and other African groups laboring in various capacities to help impoverished people in these developing nations, to help themselves, and to rise out of their poverty.

He died in Woodbridge, Virginia in 1992. The reason I mention that last thing is because I think it's important for us that if we're going to listen seriously to a sermon that so strongly condemns humanistic approaches to religion, we want to make sure that the man we're listening to really cares about humanity.

It's easy to overreact and to become kind of indifferent and aloof. But Paris Reedhead does not do that. He goes into New York City, he becomes a minister there, and he continues the rest of his life working with national and international groups as a humanitarian.

But now it's different. His humanitarianism flows out of love for Christ. And that's what we want. We don't want to overreact and become indifferent to humanity. Another thing I want to say about the sermon, which I think needs to be said because of the passage of time between us and him, is that he will talk about the people in Africa, and he calls them monsters of iniquity.

And you might think that that is a strange statement from a man who went to labor among these people. Does he not care about them? Is it a racial comment? Well, it's not. His point was that in his day, there was the attitude that in the West, that those tribes in Africa who had not yet been Westernized were untouched by the vices of the West.

You know, the materialism and the greed. And when you went there with the gospel, they would just be so happy to have it. And he said he went there and he found out that they were just as sinful as the people in America.

They too were monsters of iniquity. I remember reading in 18th century sources when John Wesley was converted and George Whitefield as well. They both preached in England to good Englishmen who were members of the Church of England, and they called them monsters of iniquity, worse, they said, than the animals, worse than the devils.

Now that drew a lot of criticism in the 18th century. And here was the English criticism. You can't talk to good baptized church members in England as if we're savages. They said, you need to go speak that way to people out there, people outside of England.

I think it's a good point. And while it's a shocking way of describing humanity, it's a good shock. We are all, regardless of our education, where we grew up, what we look like, regardless of the surface that we put on in our religion, every man and woman and child, apart from the work of Christ in mercy, saving us, we are all monsters of iniquity.

And Reed Head points that out. I hope you'll listen closely to the first half of this sermon.

And there was a man of Mount Ephraim, whose name was Micah. A little background, if you please. There was a situation where the Amorites refused to allow the people of the tribe of Dan to any freedom, access to Jerusalem, and they crowded them up into Mount Ephraim.

It's a sad thing when the people of God allow the world to crowd them into an awkward position. And so they were unable to get to Jerusalem, and we find that out of this comes the problem for about six.

There was a man of Mount Ephraim whose name was Micah, and he said unto his mother, the eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from thee, about which thou cursest and speakest of also in mine ears, behold, the silver is with me.

I took it. And his mother said, Blessed be thou of the Lord, my son. 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 in the molten image.

Now therefore I will restore it unto thee. Yet he restored the money unto his mother, and his mother took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to the founder, who made thereof a graven image and a molten image, and they were in the house of Micah.

And the man Micah had an house of gods, and made an ephod, and a seraphim, and he consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest. In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

And there was a young man out of Bethlehem Judah, of the family of Judah, who was a Levite, and he sojourned there. And the man departed out of the city from Bethlehem Judah to sojourn where he could find a place.

And he came to Mount Ephraim, to the house of Micah, as he journeyed, and Micah said unto him, I am a Levite of Bethlehem Judah, and I go to sojourn where I may find a place. And Micah said unto him, dwell with me, and be unto me a father and a priest, and I will give thee ten shekels of silver by the year, and a suit of apparel, and thy vituals.

So the Levites went in, 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 I know that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest. 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.

And the children of Dan sent of their family five men from their coast, men of valor, from Zoran, from Esh-deol, to spy out the land and to search it. And they said unto them, Go, search the land, for when they came to Mount Ephraim, to the house of Micah, they lodged there.

When they were by the house of Micah, they knew the voice of the young man, the Levite. And they turned in thither, and said unto him, Who brought thee hither, and what makest thou in this place, and what hast thou here?

And he said unto them, Thus, and thus dealt Micah with me, and hath hired me, and I am his priest. And they said unto him, Ask, how shall we pray thee of God, that we may know whether our way which we go shall be proper?

And the priest said unto them, Go in peace, before the Lord is your way wherein ye go. And now if you will go over to the latter part of the chapter. 14. Then answered the five men that went to spy out the country of Laish, and said unto their brethren, Do ye know that there is in these houses an Ephraim, and Terahphim, and the graven image, and the molten image?

Now therefore consider what we have to do. And they turned thitherward, and came to the house of the young man, the Levite, even unto the house of Micah, and saluted him. And the six hundred men appointed with their weapons of war, which were of the children of Dan, stood by the entering of the gate.

And the five men that went to spy out the land went up, and came in thither, and took the graven image, and the Ephraim, and the Terahphim, and the molten image. And the priest stood in the entering of the gate, where the six hundred men were appointed with weapons of war.

And these went into Micah's house, and fetched the carved image, the Ephraim, the Terahphim, and the molten image. Then said the priest unto them, What do ye? They said unto him, Hold thy peace, lay thy hand upon thy mouth, and go with us, and be to us the father and the priest.

It is better for thee to be a priest unto the house of one man, or that thou be a priest unto a tribe and a family in Israel. And the priest's heart was glad. And he took the Ephraim, and the Terahphim, and the graven image, and went in the midst of the people.

So they turned, and departed, and put the little one in the cattle and the carriage before them. Well, there's the story. This isn't part of the actual history of the judges. This is a gathering together of some accounts that enable us to see the social conditions in that period when every man did as seemed right in his own eyes, and there was no king in Israel.

And so we understand that Micah was unable to get to Jerusalem, and perhaps for some kind of devout reason he decided he would build a replica of the temple on his own property. And so he built what he thought would be an appropriate building, and he made the instruments of the tabernacle, for this is part of the furnishing, the effort included among them.

But then he also gathered some of the things and the people around him, the Terahphim, the image of which God had forbidden. But you see, nevertheless, there was a desire to get along as best he could, so he took a little bit of the world and a little bit of Israel, of that which had been revealed by God, and he sort of mixed them up until he had something that he thought might please the Lord.

And then, of course, he was delighted beyond words when a wandering young preacher came along from Bethlehem, Judah. He was a Levite. His mother was of the tribe of Judah, though he himself was a Levite.

God had given permission through Moses that the Levites might marry into other tribes and they might join themselves to other tribes. So this young man didn't like the living, and every Levite was provided for, but he had wanderlust and an itching foot, and so he started off to see if he couldn't do better for himself than was being done.

He felt that being a Levite was good, but there should be opportunities associated with it. And so he came to the house of Micah, and there he waited. There he was invited in and asked to become the priest.

And Micah made a deal with him. He said, if you'll be my priest, be my father and priest, then I'll give you ten shekels and a shirt. It says a suit, but you understand that the people of the day wore what would be called a jalapeo, a long sort of an outsized, well, I was going to say nightgown.

I don't know if that's exactly what it is, but it's appropriate at least, something like that. And so he gave him a suit of clothes or a change of apparel and his food and ten shekels a year. This was pretty good living for him, and so he decided that he would stay there and enter into the mixture of idolatry and so on that was in the house of Micah.

But the people of Dan came along. They were supposed to have driven out the Amorites, but the Amorites were too difficult, so they wanted to find someone that was a little easier to get out, to move. And they came to Juhred, to Micah's house, and the Levites told them to go ahead.

And then you find that they discovered that there were some people, after the manner of the Zigonians at Laish, and they were peaceful and no one was there to protect them, so they figured this would be a very good place to take some land for themselves.

And when they came with the men that were set out to conquer this area, they figured that since they'd found the land through the young Levites, it would be splendid to have his assistance. And so they went into the house of Micah, took all the things that he had made, and it cost a good bit of money, because at least two hundred shekels had been given for this one piece of furniture.

And so they just took it all, made it theirs, and took the Levites. It was rather hard on Micah, but you'll notice that the young Levite was able to adjust himself to this. It was amazing how flexible he was, and how easily he could accommodate himself to such changes when there was a little rationalization along the way.

As soon as he could begin to see that it was far more important to serve a tribe than a one-man family, and he could minister to so many more, why, he could see the wisdom of this, and he could justify it.

And so, with no real strain of conscience, he could make the adjustment, hold his hand over his mouth while they took the furniture out of the little chapel that Micah built. But he was a wise man, nonetheless.

Rather than go along at the front, which put him in a place of danger, or at the rear, which put him in a place of danger, I say he was a wise man. He put himself right in the middle, so that if Micah sent any of his servants to get him, he was safe with soldiers on every side.

What can we call this, and how will it apply to our day and generation? Would I be out of line and order if I were to talk to you for a little while about utilitarian religion and expedient Christianity and a useful God?

I would like to call attention to the fact that our day is a day in which the ruling philosophy is pragmatism. You understand what I mean by pragmatism. Perhaps pragmatism means, if it works, it's true.

If it succeeds, it's good. And the test of all practices, all principles, all truths, so-called, all teaching, is, do they work? Do they work? Now, according to pragmatism, the greatest failure of the ages has been some of the men God has honored most.

For instance, whereas Noah was a mighty good shipbuilder, his main occupation wasn't shipbuilding, it was preaching. He was a terrible failure as a preacher. His wife and three children of their wives was all he had.

Seven converts in 120 years, you wouldn't call that particularly effective. Most mission boards would ask the missionaries to withdraw long before this. I say as a shipbuilder he did quite well, but as a preacher he was a failure.

And then we come down across the year to another man by the name of Jeremiah. He was a mighty effective preacher, but ineffective as far as results were concerned. If you were to measure statistically how successful Jeremiah was, he would probably get a large cipher.

But we find that he lost out with the people, he lost out with royalty, even the ministerial assassination voted against him and wouldn't have anything to do with him. He had everything and everything failed.

The only one he seemed to be able to please was God, but otherwise he was a distinct failure. And then we come to another well-known person, the Lord Jesus Christ, that was a failure judging from all the standards.

He never succeeded in organizing a church or denomination, he wasn't able to build a school, he didn't succeed in getting a mission board established, he never had a book printed, he never was able to get any of the various criteria or instruments that we find and are so useful.

I'm not being sarcastic at all, they are useful, and our Lord preached for three years, healed thousands of people, fed thousands of people, and yet when it was all over, there were 120, 500 that he could reveal himself after his resurrection.

And the day that he was taken, one man said, if all the others forsake you, I'm willing to die for you. And he looked at this one and said, dear, you don't know your own heart. You're going to deny me three times before the cock crows this morning.

And so all men forsook him and fled. And by every standard of our generation or any generation, our Lord was a signal failure. The question comes then to this, what is the standard of success? And by what are we going to judge our lives and our ministry?

And the question that you're going to ask yourself is, is God an end, or is he a mean? And you have to decide very early in your Christian life whether you're viewing God as an end or a mean. Our generation is prepared to honor with signal honor anyone that's successful, regardless of whether they've settled this problem or not.

As long as they can get things done, or get the job done, or, well, it's working, isn't it? Then our generation is prepared to say, well, you've got to reckon with this. And so we've got to ask ourselves at the very outset of our ministry and our pilgrimage and our walk, are we going to be Levites who serve God for ten shekels and a shirt?

Serve men, perhaps, in the name of God rather than God, for though he was a Levite and performed religious activities, he was looking for a place, a place which would give him recognition, a place which would give him acceptance, a place which would give him security, a place where he could shine in terms of those values which were important to him.

All his whole business was serving in religious activities, and so it had to be a religious job, and he was very happy when he found that Micah had an opening. But he had decided that he was worth ten shekels and a shirt, and he was prepared to sell himself to anyone who would give that much.

Somebody came along and gave more, he'd sell himself to them. But he'd put a value upon himself, and he figured then that his religious service and his activities was just a means to an end, and by the same token, God was the means to an end.

Now, in order to understand the implications of that in the twentieth century, we've got to go back a hundred and fifty years, a hundred years at least, to a conflict that attacked Christianity just after the great revivals in America with Phineas, the spirit of God having been marvelously outpoured upon certain portions of our country.

There came an open attack on our faith in Europe under the higher critics. Darwin had postulated his theory of evolution, certain philosophers had adapted it to their philosophies, and theologians had applied it to the scripture, and so about 1850, you could mark the opening of a frontal attack upon the word of God.

Satan had always been insidiously attacking it, but now it was open season on the book, open season on the church, and Voltaire could declare that he would live to see the Bible become a relic and just have its place only in museums, that it would be utterly destroyed by the arguments that he was so forcefully presenting against it.

Well, what was the effect of this? The philosophy of the day became humanism, and you can define humanism this way. Humanism is a philosophical statement that declares the end of all being is the happiness of man.

The reason for existence is man's happiness. Now, according to humanism, salvation is simply a matter of getting all the happiness you can out of life. If you're influenced by someone like Nietzsche, who says that the only true satisfaction in life is power, and that the power is its own justification, and that after all, the world is a jungle, and it is therefore up to the man who would be happy to become powerful and become powerful by any means he can use, for it is only in this position of ascendancy, or as we saw last night in the worship of Moloch, that one can be happy.

And this would produce, in due course, a Hitler who would take the philosophy of Nietzsche as his working operating principles and guides, and would say of his people that we are destined to rule the world, and therefore any means we can use to achieve this is our salvation.

Somebody else turns around and says, well, no, the end of the being is happiness, but happiness doesn't come from authority over people. Happiness comes from sensual experience, and so you would have the type of existentialism that characterizes France today, that's given rise to beatnikism in America, and to the gross sensuality of our country.

That since man is essentially a glandular animal whose highest moments of ecstasy come from the exercise of his glands, the salvation is simply to find the most desirable way to gratify this part of a person.

And so, this became the effect of humanism, that the end of all being is the happiness of man. And John Dewey, then an American philosopher influencing education, was able to persuade the educators that there were no absolute standards, and children shouldn't be brought to any particular standard, that the end of education was simply to allow the child to express himself, and expand on what he is, and find his happiness in being what he wants to be.

And so, we had cultural lawlessness. What every man could do seemed white in his own eyes, and no God to rule over it. The Bible had been discounted and disallowed and disproved according to what they said, and God had been dethroned.

He didn't exist. He had no personal relationship to individuals. Jesus Christ was either a myth or just a man, as so they taught, and therefore, the whole end of being was happiness as the individual would establish the standards of his happiness and interpret it.

Now, religion then had to exist because there were so many people that made their living at it, and so they had to find some way to justify their existence. So, back about at that time, in 1850, the church divided into two groups.

The one group was the liberals who said, who accepted the philosophy of humanism, and tried to find some relevance by saying something like this to their generation. We don't know that there's a heaven.

We don't know that there's a hell, but we do know this. You've got to live for 70 years, and we know that there's a great deal of benefit from poetry, from high thoughts and noble aspirations, and therefore, it's important for you to come to church on Sunday so that we can read some poetry, that we can give you some little adages and axioms and rules to live by.

And we can't say anything about what's going to happen when you die, but we'll tell you this. If you'll come every week and pray and help and stay with us, we'll put springs on your wagon and your trip will be more comfortable.

And so, we can't guarantee anything about what's going to happen when you die, but we say that if you'll come along with us, we'll make you happier while you're alive. And so, this became the essence of liberalism.

It has simply nothing more than to try and put a little sugar in the bitter coffee of the journey and sweeten it up for a time. This was all that it could say. Well, now the philosophy of the atmosphere is humanism.

The chief end of being is the happiness of man. There's another group of people that have taken umbrage with the liberals. This group of my people, the fundamentalists, that say, We believe in the inspiration of the Bible.

We believe in the deity of Jesus Christ. We believe in hell. We believe in heaven. We believe in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. But remember, the atmosphere is that of humanism. And humanism says the chief end of being is the happiness of man.

And humanism is like a miasma out of a pit. It just permeates every place. And humanism is like an infection, an epidemic. It just goes everywhere. So, it wasn't long until we had this. The fundamentalists knew each other because they said, We believe these things.

They were men, for the most part, that had met God. But, you see, it wasn't long until, having said, These are the things that establish us as fundamentalists, the second generation said, This is how we become a fundamentalist.

Believe in the inspiration of the Bible. Believe in the deity of Christ. Believe in his death, burial, and resurrection, and thereby become a fundamentalist. And so, it wasn't long until it got to our generation, where the whole plan of salvation was to give intellectual assent to a few statements of doctrine.

And a person was considered a Christian because he could say uh-huh at four or five places that he was asked to. And if he knew where to say uh-huh, someone would pat him on the back, shake his hand, smile broadly, and say, Brother, you are saved.

And so, it had gotten down to the place where salvation was nothing more than an assent to a scheme or a formula. And the end of this salvation was the happiness of man, because humanism has penetrated.

And so, if you were to analyze fundamentalism in contrast to liberalism of a hundred years ago, as it developed, where I'm not pinpointing it in time, it would be like this. The liberal says the end of religion is to make man happy while he's alive.

And the fundamentalist says the end of religion is to make man happy when he dies. But again, the end of all of the religion that was proclaimed was the happiness of man. And whereas the liberal says by social change and political order, we're going to do away with slums, we're going to do away with alcoholism and dope addiction and poverty, and we're going to make heaven on earth and make you happy while you're alive.

We don't know anything about after that, but we want you to be happy while you're alive. They went ahead to try to do it, only to be brought up with a terrifying shock at the first world war, and utterly staggered to the second world war, because they seemed to be getting nowhere fast.

And then the fundamentalists along the line are now tuning in on this same wavelength of humanism, until we find it something like this. Accept Jesus so you can go to heaven. You don't want to go to that old, filthy, nasty, burning hell when there's a beautiful heaven up there.

Now come to Jesus so that you can go to heaven. And the appeal could be as much to selfishness as a couple of men sitting in a coffee shop deciding to go to rob a bank to get something for nothing. And there's a way that you can give an invitation to sinners that just sounds for all the world like a plot to take up a filling station proprietor's Saturday night earnings without working for them.

Humanism is, I believe, the most deadly and disastrous of all the philosophical censures that crept up through the grating over the pit of hell. And it has penetrated so much of our religion, and it is in utter and total contrast with Christianity.

And unfortunately, it's seldom seen. And here we find Micah wants to have a little chapel, and he wants to have a priest, and he wants to have prayer, and he wants to have devotion, because I know the Lord will do me good.

And this is selfishness. This is sin. And the Levite comes along and falls right in with it, because he wants a place. He wants ten shekels and a shirt and his food. And so, in order that he can have what he wants, and Micah can have what they want, they sell out God for ten shekels and a shirt.

And this is the betrayal of the ages. And it's the betrayal in which we live. And I don't see how God can revive it until we come back to Christianity as in direct and total contrast with a vengeful humanism that's perpetrated in our generation in the name of Christ.

I hope you'll be able to join us for the second half of this sermon. It's in the second half that Reedhead really speaks so directly to the American evangelical. It's actually quite a hit, but it is a blow that comes from a friend.

If you'd like to know more about Paris Reedhead, there are three books that he wrote, Beyond Petition, Six Steps to Successful Praying, Beyond Believing, and Getting Evangelicals Saved. And there's also a website dedicated to his teaching.

And all of that you can find in our show notes.