Micah 6:1-8 "What does the Lord Require?"

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Intro:

Today we are going to step off now into the final cycle of prophecy in Micah, the final round of warning, judgement, and hope. In some ways we might be tempted to see this last cycle as somewhat anticlimactic, after all we have spent several weeks now working through the wonder of that day when the One who was to be born in Bethlehem would come and bring to the earth this wonderful kingdom that God had long promised would come. This messianic Kingdom presided over by this heir to the Throne of David which would expand across the earth and see Jews and gentiles alike welcomed into its citizenry accompanied with tremendous spiritual blessings as a truly righteous King reigns over His people along with faithful under-shepherds who would likewise lead in the plundering of enemy nations delivering the spoils of redeemed souls back to God the father as this kingdom and its victory spreads far and wide.
What could possibly follow something as glorious as that, albeit clothed as as have previously noted in the cruder garb of 8th century Judah but now made wondrously manifest through Christ and all that followed His advent into this world even up to our gathering this morning as a small but beautiful sliver of the fulfilment of these things.
We noted way back at the beginning of our time in Micah that the book is really framed to answer the questions that is posed in 7:18:

Who is a God like you,

Micah’s name means “who is like YHWH.” Which means that in a sense this book opens and ends with that same question. Who is like this God, our God, as the baptist catechism says the one living and true God. Micah has provided us with an answer by presenting God before us in some magnificent ways by showing us God’s working through history and driving us forward to what God will and did accomplish as He brought about the pinnacle of His plans of redemption through Christ and now we will continue to see Micah hold this very same God of inexhaustible wonder and glory before us for two more chapters as He continues to call out to his people with warning, judgement, and glorious hope!
PRAY & Read

6:1-8 Overview

Now today we are going to cover verses 1-8 of this 6th chapter. One commentator succinctly summarized what we read here as “the law court and the sanctuary.”
What we will see in these verses is reminiscent of an ancient legal proceeding where the aggrieved party calls the offender to answer for his crimes and then joined with this is what you could call an “entrance liturgy” where the conditions for entrance into the sanctuary or presence of God are discussed.
It is not hard to see how these two literary motifs fit together. For those in Micah’s day, the people of Judah, there was the ever present sense that they were God’s people and yet Micah has time and time again told them that they have so offended God that He is going to bring a judgement against them that is going to, for a time, cut them off from His acting toward them in grace and bring a time of justice and judgement. This then ought to have raised the question of how the people might again come back into His presence. If they had been cut off can anything be done to bring back the days of blessing and grace?

Plead Your Case

We turn first to the court proceedings. Micah calls the people to:

6 Hear what the LORD says:

Arise, plead your case before the mountains,

and let the hills hear your voice.

2  Hear, you mountains, the indictment of the LORD,

and you enduring foundations of the earth,

for the LORD has an indictment against his people,

and he will contend with Israel.

We know that this opening signals for us the beginning of this new pericope or cycle in Micah. Each preceeding cycle in 1&2, 3-5, and now here in 6&7 has begun with this same call and now here God uses the call to summon the people to their own trial.
Plead your case God commands them. The people have broken faith with God and so God calls them to bring before the bar their complaint against Him. In the covenant system that was so common in this time the call would have been, and is here, for the accused to show some sort of evidence that the defendant had failed to uphold their part of the covenant. If Israel had indeed broken faith they ought to be able to show that their breaking of faith had been the result of God’s first failing to uphold His end of the covenant. And so this is the evidence demanded. Plead your case God demands.
Now this divine court proceeding also has witnesses. But this is a divine court and so the witnesses that God calls the people to make their case before are not mere mortal human beings. No, the people are commanded to make their case before the mountains and hills. Now this use of mountains and hills as witnesses is actually intricately connected to Israels’s history. We read through this just a few weeks ago at our men’s breakfast. In Joshua 8 we read this: (After the defeat of Ai)

30 At that time Joshua built an altar to the LORD, the God of Israel, on Mount Ebal, 31 just as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded the people of Israel, as it is written in the Book of the Law of Moses, “an altar of uncut stones, upon which no man has wielded an iron tool.” And they offered on it burnt offerings to the LORD and sacrificed peace offerings. 32 And there, in the presence of the people of Israel, he wrote on the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he had written. 33 And all Israel, sojourner as well as native born, with their elders and officers and their judges, stood on opposite sides of the ark before the Levitical priests who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, half of them in front of Mount Gerizim and half of them in front of Mount Ebal, just as Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded at the first, to bless the people of Israel. 34 And afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessing and the curse, according to all that is written in the Book of the Law. 35 There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the sojourners who lived among them.

God had commanded the people, on their entrance into the promised land, to stand before these two mountains and to recite before all of the people the blessings and the curses of the covenant. This was to create a lasting impression. Mountains do not soon pass away, for as long as these mountains stood they would, in a sense, bear witness to what they had seen and hear that day, that Israel had covenanted with God upon His fulfilment of His promise to give them a land that they would on their part live faithfully to his covenant and thus would be open to the blessings that God had promised for faithfulness but also to the curses that would result from unfaithfulness. And so the people are called to bear witness before these mountains that had long ago witnessed their renewal of the Covenant there as it were in the entryway of the promised land.
Verse 1 though ends in silence! We read of no case being brought. There is no case to bring! Let the hills hear your voice God calls and yet no voice is heard!
As a result God takes up His end of the case. God has an indictment to make against these people. They have been unable to raise any objection to God’s own faithfulness and so now He will raise their unfaithfulness to Him.
We see God’s indictment in verses 3-4 .

3  “O my people, what have I done to you?

How have I wearied you? Answer me!

4  For I brought you up from the land of Egypt

and redeemed you from the house of slavery,

and I sent before you Moses,

Aaron, and Miriam.

5  O my people, remember what Balak king of Moab devised,

and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him,

and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,

that you may know the righteous acts of the LORD.”

God opens his indictment with a question, a question which again puts the impetus on Judah to answer for their acts of unfaithfulness. “You have been unfaithful” God in a sense says, “What have i done that has caused you to be unfaithful?”
God then rehearses before them four areas from their past that exhibit His faithfulness to them. These areas are all found at the very beginning of their history as a nation, acts of God’s on faithfulness that had led to their forming of the very covenant that they have now broken.
God brings up His delivering them from Egypt and slavery. There is a word play here. the word for wearied in the previous verse and fro brought up here sound very similar. In other words rather than weighing them down God has actually worked to lift them up!
He also set before them righteous leaders. he uses Moses, Aaron, and Miriam to represent three categories of leadership. Moses had been the agent through whom God had delivered them from Egypt, their identity as a nation, as God’s people was tied to Moses. Aaron had been the first of the High Priests, the ones graciously granted by God to mediate between the people and God. He had not left them to wallow in their sins but had provided a way that a continual covering could be placed over them as it had first been applied in Egypt at the passover so that through the blood of the sacrifices, carried by the High Priest into God’s presence, they could find God’s judgement restrained as He time and time again passes over their sins. And finally Miriam who led the people in song after they had crossed the red sea represents the poets and prophets who continued to lead the people back to and in worship to God. Was it for any lack of leadership that these people had broken faithfulness with God?
Thirdly we see the account of Balaam raised. God had turned the efforts of the King of Moab to curse Israel into blessings. Had God ever failed to turn their enemies desires to bring ruin to them into blessings for Israel?
And finally what happened between Shittim and Gilgal? If you had a map you could note that these are the two towns that res on either side of the Jordan valley where Israel entered into the promised land. They had last camped at Shittim and then we read in Joshua 3 that they pack up and are miraculously brought through the Jordan river into the promised land and camped next at Gilgal. We read the close of that story in Joshua 5:

19 The people came up out of the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and they encamped at Gilgal on the east border of Jericho. 20 And those twelve stones, which they took out of the Jordan, Joshua set up at Gilgal. 21 And he said to the people of Israel, “When your children ask their fathers in times to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ 22 then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground.’ 23 For the LORD your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over, as the LORD your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we passed over, 24 so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the LORD is mighty, that you may fear the LORD your God forever.”

Gilgal, there a pile of stones had been erected that we to forever stand as a monument to the faithfulness of their God. In ending here God brings this monument of stones to bear against this peoples unfaithfulness!
Now as we have seen before the inclusion of these acts of faithfulness in no way means that this is an exhaustive list. God goes here to the first acts of faithfulness to them as a nation as a way of saying “show me from the first to the last any place where you can find me to have been unfaithful to you, any place where I have failed to uphold my end of this covenant that you have broken.”
The result again? Silence! There is of course not one single event to which these people can point! They are silent as we read all of humanity will be in the book or Romans:

every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20

These peoples mouths have been stopped, they are and will be held accountable for their unfaithfulness!
Gospel! This is a great reminder for us, none of mans sinful excuses for not submitting to the rule of God will amount to anything in that day when God judges all of mankind! In the divine law court before that great throne of judgement all of humanity will be indicted and all who have not submitted to Christ Jesus as their Lord and savior by faith will be soundly and for all of eternity condemned! There will be utter silence before that throne as all are forced to bow the knee to the One whom they have rejected.

How can we enter?

This trial then leads to the second part of this passage. What you could call the entrance liturgy or the grounds for gaining access into the presence of God. This has a ring of Psalm 15 to it where we learned over the Summer that we find the requirements for access into the presence of God, requirements that we find are only met by and enabled for us through Christ Himself, He was and is we saw there this man of Psalm 15, the Man who has a right to enter into the presence of God.
Now here the same question is raised. And it is here that the people now begin to talk, they have not been able to raise an objection to God’s accusations against them but now they come to the most important question that anyone can ask.

With what shall I come before the LORD,

and bow myself before God on high?

If the result of the trial has been their conviction, and it has been, then the next thing that follows is the question of weather reconciliation is possible? Can these covenant breakers come back into the presence of God and if ti is possible what might He require them to bring that they can enter again? This is the gist of the question though you will likely find as you read it that it has a sarcastic tone to it.
Does God require burnt offerings?
Does God want thousands of these offerings?
Maybe God might even want them to suspend the prohibitions against offering children and have these people offer their own children to make atonement for their sins?
Boy that escalated quickly!
Now on one hand the answer could be yes, the covenant itself had prescribed the exact sacrifices that would be required to make atonement for their sins. Even that last line about children can be seen reflected in the covenant. God had laid claim to all of the first born but He had provided a sacrifice that parents could bring in place of their firstborn child. This was why Mary and Joseph had to go to Jerusalem after Jesus was born and offer their sacrifice for Him.
The whole thing rings with the sentiment of “what do you want from me?”
Now what is wrong with their question? The big problem for Israel is found in their failure to learn the truths behind passages like Psalm 40:6-8
Psalm 40:6–8 ESV
In sacrifice and offering you have not delighted, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, “Behold, I have come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me: I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.”
and Psalm 51:16-17
Psalm 51:16–17 ESV
For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
They are under the impression that there is some sort of religious ritual that can cleanse them from their sin, some tenant of the law that they can enact that would so move God to rid them of their transgressions and sins.
God’s response to this is similar to these Psalms:

8  He has told you, O man, what is good;

and what does the LORD require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?

Now as we look at this response we need to see a really important, vitally important truth. God in this response does not provide them with a way to deal with their sin and iniquity! The answer to Israel’s question about entrance into God’s presence, on their part, is not primarily a questions about dealing with sin but rather about dealing with their hearts.
This is vital to our understanding of the covenant law in general. Often times we think that God gave the law to Israel to redeem them from their sins, that following the law was a way from them to have their sins, or properly sneaking the punishment for their sins averted. However, as we have seen this morning at the very outset God had told Israel what the blood of these animals was sufficient for. In Egypt the blood that covered them by being painted on the lintels and door posts of their houses had caused the angle of death to pass over them. Nowhere do we read that the blood actually paid any part of debt that they owed for their sins, no the blood of those lambs only formed a temporary covering that allowed God for a time to pass over their sins.
We see this truth clearly conveyed in the Palms and the prophets. That God Himself would have to do something to actually remove Israel’s sin from them. David cries earlier in Psalm 51 that God might “Have mercy on Him”

according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

blot out my transgressions.

2  Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

and cleanse me from my sin!

Isaiah who prophesied during Micah’s days had told the people of the coming Servant of God who would Himself bear their sins and Iniquities:

4  Surely he has borne our griefs

and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken,

smitten by God, and afflicted.

5  But he was pierced for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

and with his wounds we are healed.

6  All we like sheep have gone astray;

we have turned—every one—to his own way;

and the LORD has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

Micah is not telling them here to suspend their sacrifices, he is telling them that they can not rely on religious ritual to find forgiveness, that they must rather return to faithfulness to God and when their hearts are right with God as shown by actions flowing from their lives that are in line with these verses then they can trust by faith that God will do the work required to give them access into His precedence. Faith is at the root of it all, faith in God that trusts Him to deal with our sin and faith that works in the faithful servant a life that is pleasing to God.
This for faithful Israel was the ultimate purpose of the law in the first place to aid in their faith enabled joyful obedience to the Lord their God. As one commentator put it so well:
Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah (1) A Divine Covenant Lawsuit (6:1–8)

The law therefore was given to the redeemed people of God as a means of expressing their love to God as well as a means of governing their relationship to God and to each other. The law “was not a way of salvation but a way to enjoy an orderly life and God’s fullest blessing within the covenantal, theocratic arrangement. Thus God’s grace precedes the covenantal law he gave to his people and represents a use of salvation history to inspire grateful obedience.”

Micah exemplifies this truth! The law was not a way of salvation! These people thought that some form of following the prescriptions of the law, offering the right sacrifices could save them but God says no, trust in me and live a life of joyful obedience to me, the faithful are the ones who have gained this access because of the work that they trust that God will do for them, or in our case has done for us, and for the faithful lives of joyful obedience marked by these things, a love for and pursuit of godly justice, not mistreating each other. Loving kindness, some places translated mercy which is really Hesed the covenant term for faithful covenant love, in other words expressing the same kind of love toward others as God has shown to you. And finally to walk humbly with God. Translators have a hard time with this wording because this is not the typical word for humble. It likely means to walk carefully, walking before God constantly holding him in the right rearguard and understanding our proper place as His redeemed subjects being careful not to drift back into the errors of sin and seeking to make our own way.
What is the requirement for entrance then? A faith enabled joyful obedience to God! This is what Micah is calling the people to and he has really done so throughout the whole of this passage, even back into the legal proceedings that we saw earlier by doing exactly what the book as a whole was ment to to, by showing them very clearly, “Who is like our God?” Beholding this God with faith filled hearts is what will enable all of these things!

Close

An encouragement to do this ourselves. Our small group study on Thursdays has done a great job of showing just how connected our obedience and faithfulness are with our rightly beholding our God!
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