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I. Introduction
In the last year and a bit we have seen churches
banned from meeting, churches refusing to stop and getting raided by police,
street preachers challenging the authorities in provocative ways and getting
hauled off by the constabulary … and we’ve seen congregations of God’s people
losing their places to meet or suffering losses that mean they may not be
viable in future.
We are witnessing the RAPID decline of the
Christian church in our land as our public services have become private recordings
or amateur livestreams on the internet, and if the preacher blows a whistle to
call a scrum now … it remains to be seen how many will turn up.
The church in the UK has been getting winnowed.
What are we all supposed to make of it?
Let me introduce you to a prophet called Micah.
The overall theme is divine judgment and
deliverance, and Micah moves, pretty seamlessly, between the two.
The prophet Micah reminds us that even when God
seems distant and uninvolved, he still cares and offers hope to those who
choose to remain faithful to him.
So, Micah speaks to the people of Judah to warn
them that God’s judgment was approaching because they had rejected God and His
law - particularly in the realm of exploitation of the poor and corruption of
worship.
But Micah also encouraged the godly few, assuring
them that judgment would not permanently destroy Israel.
The nation would eventually be restored.
So this book balances God’s divine attributes of
justice and mercy, and Micah skilfully uses poetry to make his points,
deploying a lot of picture language and many figures of speech to make his
messages really vivid and to create a profound emotional impact.
Well, so much by way of introduction ...
II. Who is he and what's he about?
A. Name
Micah's name means ‘who is like Yahweh’?
The name , as it were, highlights the wonder of
the God Who can work out His plans and purposes behind the calamities that are
coming upon God’s people.
B. Identification: Moresheth
Most prophets are identified by their parentage.
Joel is identified as the son of Pethuel.
Hosea is identified as the son of Beeri.
Micah is identified as coming from a small town
in Southern Judah called Moresheth
Scholars say maybe his family weren’t very
prominent, so he wasn’t identified as the son of a known father.
But what you have here is a man whose ministry came
during the reign of these Judean Kings, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, but there’s
no reference to the Kings of Israel … only of Judah, which is where he came from.
And then at end of v. 1 it says Micah saw his
vision concerning Jerusalem (capital of the Southern Kingdom) and Samaria
(capital of the Northern Kingdom) but he is from a region called Moresheth
which is about 25 miles south-west of Jerusalem.
Micah is a witness of events in the Northern
Kingdom of Israel, but he is very much a man of the southern Kingdom of Judah.
When diod he happen?
C. Time
Micah 1:1 tells us that Micah
prophesied "during the time of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of
Judah"
That puts him as being active around the same
time as Isaiah, a little before Jeremiah ... same sort of time as Amos.
The northern kingdom fell to Assyria in 722 BC
and the southern kingdom fell to Babylon in 546 BC so Micah is ministering about
a time when the Assyrians were in power in the North about a similar fate
befalling the southern kingdom for similar sins to those that had brought
calamity to the north.
D. Setting
So, as Micah writes, the Northern and Southern
Kingdoms of Israel and Judah had split LONG ago, and both had been violating
their covenant with their God, so Micah warned that God would bring the evil
empire of Assyria to take out the Northern Kingdom and to savage the southern
Kingdom's capital of Jerusalem.
It seemed like calamity.
And he also warned that after Assyria, Babylon
would bring a more thorough destruction.
E. Mission, 3:8
Like all the prophets Micah spoke on God's behalf
and at first sight it looks as if he is just there to accuse Israel ... but
hold that thought.
Micah himself describes his mission for us pretty
well in 3:8 where he says:
"But as for me, I am filled with power,
with
the Spirit of the Lord,
and
with justice and might,
to declare to Jacob his transgression,
to
Israel his sin."
It’s almost like they’re in a court room (Micah
1:2)
“Hear, you peoples, all of
you,
listen, earth and all who live in it,
that
the Sovereign Lord may
bear witness against you,
the Lord from his holy temple.”
They are being summoned to answer a charge before
the presence of God, but God is the One Who is going to bear witness against them.
You get
this theme picked up again in Chapter six … the first few verses there:
“‘Stand up, plead my case
before the mountains;
let the hills hear what you have to say.
‘Hear, you
mountains, the Lord’s
accusation;
listen, you everlasting foundations
of the earth.
For the Lord has a case
against his people;
he is lodging a charge against
Israel.”
Micah 6:1-2
The substance of the charge takes root in an
allegation of idolatry and pagan worship, and then secondarily the social and economic sins and
the sins against integrity flow out from that:
“Look!
The Lord is
coming from his dwelling-place;
he
comes down and treads on the heights of the earth.
4 The mountains melt
beneath him
and
the valleys split apart,
like wax before
the fire,
like
water rushing down a slope.
5 All this is because
of Jacob’s transgression,
because
of the sins of the people of Israel.
What is Jacob’s
transgression?
Is it
not Samaria?
What is Judah’s
high place?
Is it
not Jerusalem?
6 ‘Therefore
I will make Samaria a heap of rubble,
a
place for planting vineyards.
I will pour her
stones into the valley
and
lay bare her foundations.
7 All her idols will be
broken to pieces;
all
her temple gifts will be burned with fire;
I will
destroy all her images.
Since she
gathered her gifts from the wages of prostitutes,
as the
wages of prostitutes they will again be used.’”
Micah 1:5-9
For all her apparently
holding to the Jerusalem Temple and the teaching of the Law (which were openly
stepped away from by the Samaritans and people of the separated Northern
Kingdom of Israel) the Southern Kingdom is now being accused of an idolatry as
shocking and as dreadful as the north.
They’ve looked as if they
were faithful … but beneath the appearance of religion they are apostates and idolaters.
Weeping and mourning will be the result
"Because
of this I will weep and wail;
I will go
about barefoot and naked.
I will howl
like a jackal
and moan
like an owl.
For Samaria’s plague
is incurable;
it has
spread to Judah.
It has reached
the very gate of my people,
even to
Jerusalem itself.”
Micah 1:3-9
But notice that it is not
as if Judah has ABANDONED God completely.
It is rare that such a
thing happens.
It’s rare that people say
‘I’m going to stop believing in Jesus’.
What happens is not
atheism but adultery … syncretism – they’d go on making their sacrifices and
doing their rituals up at the Temple, but alongside that they are also
following other pagan ways.
Eighty per cent, perhaps, of Micah is judgement –
BUT … it’s a lament on judgement we hear from the Lord, not sheer vengeance.
vv. 8-9 are a lament about the unfaithfulness of
Israel uttered by the One who has been spurned.
III. Structure of the Book
A. Accusations, warnings and hope 1:1 - 2
1. God appears over Israel
There's quite a dramatic picture painted of God
appearing over Israel JUST as He did at Mount Sinai when Israel received in the
first place the covenant they've broken.
(See Exodus 19-20)
There's fire and smoke and earthquake just as
there had been on Mt. Sinai.
But God hasn't come to make a covenant this time.
Instead He's come to bring judgement on Israel
for over 500 years of rebellion against the covenant they already have.
And the judgement proclamation is specific,
naming a list of towns in Israel and proclaiming that God is coming for them,
by name.
2. Who is He coming for & why?
a. Leaders
Micah picks a fight with Israel's leaders ... and
this is interesting to us ... he say that they have become wealthy through
using their position to give free reign to their acquisitiveness and greed.
That theme obviously comes up in our politics but it's going to come u again ... that theme recurs in Micah: the double-headed monster of theft and greed.
Micah alludes to the story of Naboth's vineyard
which was stolen from him and his family by bad King Ahab in 1 Kings 2.
But it's not just Israel's leaders Micah exposes.
It's also Israel's prophets.
b. Prophets
It seems these prophets were quite happy to give
promises of God's protection to anyone who could afford to PAY them.
These are the preachers of smooth things.
Now, our times are no different.
We don’t want a preacher who challenges our
behaviour, we just want a preacher who says nice things to us and who will
accommodate and leave us to do the things we want to do.
“If a liar and deceiver comes and says,
“I will prophesy for you plenty of wine and beer,”
that would be just the prophet for this people!”
(Micah 2:11)
They want to hear a preacher who is going to
commend the way they want to live their lives and not disturb them in their
violation of God’s covenant of blessings AND woes.
So, says Micah, you are NOT doing OK.
In fact, it is on account of these things which
violate His covenant but that your prophets soothe your consciences about
without calling for repentance, God has withdrawn His covenant protection from
Israel.
And yet … and this is characteristic of Micah … the
prophecies of judgement keep getting interspersed with prophesied grounds for
hope as the covenant keeping God holds out the fruit of His faithfulness to His
people, fruit that the faithful remnant of His wayward people will ultimately
see.
You've had in those first parts of chapters 1 and 2 the judgement ... but then hope breaks out.
3. Hope, 2:12-13
The Shepherd Who will gather His flock
Now, that's a very stiff warning, but it is not
the final word ... and this is true for each judgement section in this book.
First in Micah 2:12-13 we read:
"‘I will surely gather all of you, Jacob;
I will
surely bring together the remnant of Israel.
I will bring them together like sheep in a
sheepfold,
like a
flock in its pasture;
the
place will throng with people.
The One who breaks open the way will go up
before them;
they
will break through the gate and go out.
Their King will pass through before them,
the
Lord at their head.’"
God is pictured in the role of a shepherd king who
will break through the wall of the fortress and open the gates to lead His
people out to freedom.
How God operates as a shepherd comes up numerous
times in Micah, and in the prophets and ultimately takes us to John 10 where
Jesus is supremely revealed to us as the Good Shepherd.
This book is clearly about Jesus and redemption ... it is NOT here to be understood in a
merely moralistic way!
He will rescue, gather and shepherd the faithful
remnant of His people, bring them back to good pasture and become their King
once again … and Jesus is his Name!
Now in the second section of accusations in Micah
3-4, Micah describes in more detail how the sins of Israel's leaders and
prophets have given rise to grave injustice.
B. Unjust economic practices of the leaders and hope, vv. 3-4
They run the land by bribery, they bend justice
to favour the wealthy and the poor are deprived of their land, their security
and their hope.
Please
notice that Micah started out in chapter 1 spelling out the sins of the people
as being unfaithfulness to God but that immediately by ch. 2 leads into the
exploitation of the poor, failure to maintain justice and so on.
This
book is about apostasy – spiritual adultery – mixing paganism with your Bible
faith, not a social or political morality primer.
The
spiritual adultery has social and financial implications, but it is the
spiritual adultery that Micah is really on about.
What flows from that spiritual adultery?
1. Selling off the land of the poor
Repossessing
things that belonged to debtors was totally lawful.
But
Micah is getting at those who used the system to benefit themselves, using
their power for their own economic gain not to help people who are in need.
It’s
characterised as oppressing a man in his home and in his inheritance.
And this violates the covenant settlement.
2. Violates the Covenant settlement
This is not just simply unjust, it violates the
Torah which made it illegal to sell land that belongs to families even if they are
poor.
(See Leviticus 25:23 and Numbers 36:7).
3. The consequence
On account of all of this disaster is coming.
“Her
leaders judge for a bribe,
her priests teach for a price,
and her prophets tell fortunes for money.
Yet
they look for the Lord’s support and say,
‘Is not the Lord among
us?
No disaster will come upon us.’
Therefore because of
you,
Zion will be ploughed like a field,
Jerusalem
will become a heap of rubble,
the temple hill a mound overgrown with thickets.”
Micah 3:11-12
An enemy from the north is coming to conquer the
Northern Kingdom and to devastate Jerusalem AND its Temple, reducing it to
ruins.
Both.
But it’s worse than that.
“Then they
will cry out to the Lord,
but he will not answer them.
At
that time he will hide his face from them
because of the evil they have done.”
Micah
3:4
Now,
those people who make social justice the point of their Christianity and just
embrace this world’s idea of social justice … they need to reckon with the fact
that: in THAT, there is no possible forgiveness.
Not so here where Divine Justice is concerned, because even in that situation God turns again from accusation to restoring hope.
4. Hope: there'll be a New Jerusalem, 4:1-7
One day God is going to restore His broken
Temple, He's going to restore the ruined city and fill it with the remnant of
His people.
And what that amounts to is that God's purpose is
tp make His temple the meeting place of Heaven and Earth once more.
And because of THAT, because of His presence, all nations will stream to
Jerusalem where God will become the King of all the nations bringing peace to
the earth beneath His reign.
That vision introduced briefly at the end of each
of these two judgement sections now gets expanded upon in 4:8 - 5.
So here comes a beautiful poetic section on ...
C. The future hope of Israel and the
Nations, 4:8 - 5
1. Assyria - Babylonian Exile -
Restoration
We learn that after the Assyrian attack, Israel
will be conquered thoroughly and exiled to Babylon.
But we also learn that from Babylon God will
restore His people and bring them back to the Land.
But it gets better, because in the New Jerusalem
a new Messianic King from the line of David will come after their Exile, to be born in Bethlehem
and then rule in Jerusalem over the restored people of God.
Nobody’d think anything good would possibly come from
Bethlehem … too small to be numbered amongst the clans of Judah.
But – hey – His origin is 'from of old.'
Term used only twice elsewhere in the Old Testament – once in Habakkuk
1 and Deuteronomy 33 ... it has this meaning of being eternal.
Mary had a son that was older than she was.
But it says in 5:3 that He’d be born physically
by the normal means.
And He’d be the Shepherd King
“He will
stand and shepherd his flock
in the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And
they will live securely, for then his greatness
will reach to the ends of the earth.”
Micah
5:4
Now if you can’t see Jesus in the pages of Micah,
you’ll need more than a visit to Specsavers to help you!
The
future hope of Israel and the Nations must take these people by Assyrian and Babylonian
exile to the Messianic King from Bethlehem and the new people of God.
2. Messianic King from Bethlehem to rule
in Jerusalem over the restored people of God, 5:7-14
There will be trouble ahead, but finally, in this
new Messianic Kingdom of God, the restored people of God will become the
blessing to the remnant of the Nations ...
But at the same time, God will bring His FINAL
justice and remove evil from His world.
3. The new people of God is the source of
blessing to the Nations
The final section of the book in chapters 6-7 returns
to warning, and we’re back at the indictment in a legal case, followed again by hope ... the third cycle.
D. Warning and hope (again): Unjust economic
practices of the Leaders, (again), chs.
6-7
Here we go:
“‘Stand up, plead my
case before the mountains;
let the hills hear what you have to say.
‘Hear, you
mountains, the Lord’s
accusation;
listen, you everlasting foundations
of the earth.
For the Lord has a case
against his people;
he is lodging a charge against
Israel.
Micah 6:1-2
In
the firing once again are …
1. Unjust economic practices of the leaders
Micah exposes how this behaviour is destroying
the Land and its people and violating the covenant of God.
2.
Ritualistic religion instead of concrete lived faith
6:8 sums it up
"He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And
what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to
walk humbly with your God."
That is EXACTLY what they have NOT been doing ...
and so they are going to come to ruin.
Now,
you need to start at v. 6 so you understand this in context.
Taken in cintext Micah
is saying that you can do all this religious stuff but if you neglect the love
and help of your neighbour … it amounts to nothing.
But …
then we can move to reading v. 8.
That ‘to
act rightly’ is the opposite of what they were doing.
Justice
is not simply about judgement … punishing wrongs.
But
justice is much broader than that in the Bible.
It’s not
just giving wrong doers their due … it’s giving those who can’t stand up for
themselves their due as well. And that arises from a walk with God that is faithful and true.
But again,
alongside the prophecies of judgement come the powerful notes of messianic
hope.
3. Powerful note of hope, 7:18-20
Here really we now come to the
main message of the book.
A.
Plea
for restoration and mercy
Israel is
pictured as a suffering, defeated individual whose circumstances have brought
them to their knees pleading with God for restoration and renewal.
But after all
that’s gone on, why would God grant that heart-felt plea?
Fundamentally,
the individual says, for two reasons:
Firstly …
1.
God's
character,7:18
“Who is a
God like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?”
The praying person seems to know that God’s wrath
remembers mercy.
And the second reason God should hear this prayer
for mercy is found in God’s promises.
2. God's Promises, 7:20
“You will be faithful to Jacob,
and show love to Abraham,
as
you pledged on oath to our ancestors
in days long ago.”
These are
consistently across Scripture the clear, known things about the Lord that faithful
people going through trials and testing plead with God.
His character …
which He will not change.
His promises … on
which He will not renege.
We are faithless,
but He is faithful and will be consistent with His revealed character and
unchanging in respect to His promises, His given word.
These, not our
wants, perceived needs or (far less) the merits of OUR case, our deserts ... those are
the things we may resort to as we try to sway the hand of God.
B. The Message: Israel will bless the
Nations, but needs purifying first
This prayerful reflection in v. 20 all
reflects on and alludes to God’s covenant promises to Abraham way back in
Genesis 12, 15 and 17 that all nations will be blessed through him … and then
through Abraham’s family.
But in the current situation, to be that
blessing to the Nations, Israel must return to being faithful to her God.
And THAT’s what explains this going back
and forth between judgement and hope in the book of Micah.
For God to bless the Nations through them,
God must confront and judge the evil that had taken root in His people.
The judgement LEADS TO hope, because God’s
love and His promise weigh more heavily in His heart and motivations than the
affront of Israel’s sin and covenant unfaithfulness so his ultimate purpose is
NOT to destroy, His will is to save and redeem.
That is NOT to say His people’s violations
of His gracious covenant with them are small matters to Him.
On the contrary.
They break His heart and rouse His
righteous anger.
But His mercy works out greater than His
wrath.
As the concluding lines of the book
express this:
“Who is a
God like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You
do not stay angry for ever
but delight to show mercy.
You will again have
compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
You will be faithful
to Jacob,
and show love to Abraham,
as
you pledged on oath to our ancestors
in days long ago.”
He delights in covenant love, so He will again show compassion.
He WILL
trample on His people’s evil.
And He
will toss their sins into the depths of the sea.
Both things.
Conclusion
The people of God in Micah’s time had not abandoned the God of Abraham, Isaac ad Jacob so much as tried to mix the faith with a seasoning of what was actually idolatry and ritual from the culture around them.
This came laced with things that appealed
to their carnal nature, and once they had shifted across their centre of
decision-making gravity to focusing on self-pleasing … the rot was truly setting
in.
From that point the leaders had no problem
using their office to distort and disrupt proper legal processes to make
themselves rich, and their prophets saw no problem in saying what people wanted
to hear rather than what God wanted them to say to the people, because that’s
the way their bread was buttered … because that’s where the money and the ‘prospects’
lay for those so-called prophets.
Well, eventually rotten structures fall, and so must
Israel-Judah, and be carried into Exile.
They were given the land to be the
faithful covenant people of God in it and a light to the Nations.
They had abandoned the covenant so they
would lose the Land, because there was no chance that their purpose of being a
light to the Gentiles would be fulfilled the way things were with them.
But God REMAINS faithful to His promise
and His purpose.
He will have His way and His glorious
plans to rescue humanity will be fulfilled once judgement and Exile have purified
a faithful remnant that will return to God, to His covenant, to the Temple and the
King Messiah.
Now, we know from the Gospels that this
was fulfilled in Christ – the Good Shepherd prophesied by Micah – through the
New Jerusalem (His Church) and the New Temple (the gathering of believers
indwelt by the Holy Spirit) … but from Micah’s setting in time and space, this
was as yet a long way off.
The principles to be drawn out from this
book for us seem pretty plain.
If people shift their motivational centre
just a short distance from the heart-felt desire to be faithful to God
regardless of their cultural and carnal pressures to self-pleasing, they will
in no time create situations of great seriousness where leaders exploit the led, and prophets tell people what their itching ears want to hear not what their
souls need to know … all for personal betterment and financial gain.
God MUST judge that.
God must purify that out of His people.
And He
must do so precisely BECAUSE His eternal purpose, faithfully and consistently
worked out, is to redeem … and He cannot do that through an unfaithful church.
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