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In the 1990s, one of the cable networks created a movie series entitledMovies for Men Who Like Movies. The series featured action-packed war stories and westerns, high adventure tales, and cops ’n robber flicks. Our favored plots celebrated the classic triumph of good over evil, where the good guy, against all odds, triumphed over the bad guy. Heroes showed character, standing for and always winning righteous causes.

Beginning in the 1970’s, though, another genre appeared in film: the antihero, a main character who not only lacks conventional heroic qualities, like idealism and morality, but usually shows some unsavory traits, like greed, nastiness, and a total lack of scruples.

But did the antihero originate in amoral, mid-twentieth-century fiction?

Not really. We find antihero-types throughout Judges, characters like the self-serving Micah from today’s passage. How do we profit from considering this anti-heroic Micah and others like him within the context of faith and devotion?

A starting consideration, I believe, is to recognize Micah’s antiheroic nature as potentially our own, because If we look around us, we recognize self-serving, self-interested, crooked-minded Micah-types everywhere. They’re the skin-flints who hold their thumb on the butcher’s scale; cheaters who exploit our children on the playground; liars who ruin reputations by spreading falsehood, gossip, and innuendo; loan sharks who rip off the disadvantaged; charlatans who usurp power to manipulate courts and civil proceedings; and even false prophets who corrupt the pulpit by proclaiming a false and perverted gospel that serves their vaunted egos rather than holy truth.

Let’s remember that if we walked through our lives as these, captive to mankind’s fallen condition and ignorant of grace, we would rise no higher in character than these unprincipled anti-heroic types.

But we glory in Jesus. His grace enables us to star not as anti-heroes—but asheroes— in the real-life series He created for us,Movies for People Who Love God. He has cast us in lead character roles as stars of His glory.

And as stars of His glory, we rise!