Tear Down The High Places

Micah 1:1-7 (NIrV)

A message from the Lord came to Micah. He was from the town of Moresheth. The message came while Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah were kings of Judah. This is the vision Micah saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. Here is what he said.

2 Listen to me, all you nations! Earth and everyone who lives in it, pay attention! The Lord and King will be a witness against you. The Lord will speak from his holy temple in heaven.

The Lord Will Judge Samaria and Jerusalem

3 The Lord is about to come down from his home in heaven. He rules over even the highest places on earth. 4 The mountains will melt under him like wax near a fire. The valleys will be broken apart by water rushing down a slope. 5 All this will happen because Jacob’s people have done what is wrong. The people of Israel have committed many sins. Who is to blame for the wrong things Jacob has done? Samaria! Who is to blame for the high places where Judah’s people worship other gods? Jerusalem!

6 So the Lord says,

“I will turn Samaria into a pile of trash. It will become a place for planting vineyards. I will dump its stones down into the valley. And I will destroy it down to its very foundations. 7 All the statues of Samaria’s gods will be broken to pieces. All the gifts its people gave to temple prostitutes will be burned with fire. I will destroy all the statues of its gods. Samaria collected gifts that were paid to temple prostitutes. So the Assyrians will use the gifts to pay their own temple prostitutes.”

Sermon: “Tear Down The High Places”

Introduction

Many summers I’ve picked a shorter book of the Bible to preach from, often one that many people don’t know very well. I’m doing it again this summer with the Old Testament book of Micah. This is great news for anyone who is a bit nervous about being in church but not knowing the Bible very well – there probably aren’t too many experts on the book of Micah here so you’re definitely not alone!

Studying parts of the Bible we aren’t as familiar with helps us to have a more rounded faith. Coming to a lesser-known passage with fresh eyes and no agenda gives an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to show us something new, or remind us of something we had forgotten.

Doing this can also show us that, even though the Bible’s teachings come to us from a very different place and time, they are often very relevant to things that are happening around us today.

For example – do you feel like our world is kind of messed up? Are you concerned that it’s getting worse? Do you see how people in power are behaving and get mad? Do you ever look at today’s kids and youth and seriously worry about the world they are going to inherit? If that is sometimes true for you, the book of Micah has something to say!

Today I’ll tell you some things about Micah and the world he lived in, how God reacted to the state of that world, and some things it can tell us about how to live as people of pure faith in our world.

Why Is God Mad?

Micah lived in the 8th century BC, which is about 1300 years ago. He was from a small town called Moresheth, about twenty-miles from Jerusalem. This was in the southern kingdom of Judah.

At this time the Hebrew people – the twelve tribes of Israel – were split between two nations. Here it is on screen so you visual learners. Jerusalem was the capital of the Judah, in yellow, while the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel (in blue) was Samaria.

Micah was a prophet.

The role of a prophet in that place and time was to bring people messages from God. Usually these messages were not particularly good news – God never seems to commission a prophet just to say “Everybody is doing a great job, carry on!”

Instead, prophets often brought words of warning for those who were not living up to the Covenant agreement between God and His people.

The book of Micah is considered to be one of the minor prophets, which just means that it is a short book compared to the major prophets like Isaiah or Jeremiah.

When we read from the beginning of the book of Micah we see that he doesn’t waste much time before giving the message he believed he had received from God. There’s one verse of introduction and then Micah explains that God is mighty, and God is mad.

2 Listen to me, all you nations! Earth and everyone who lives in it, pay attention! The Lord and King will be a witness against you. The Lord will speak from his holy temple in heaven.

The Lord Will Judge Samaria and Jerusalem

3 The Lord is about to come down from his home in heaven. He rules over even the highest places on earth. 4 The mountains will melt under him like wax near a fire. The valleys will be broken apart by water rushing down a slope. 5 All this will happen because Jacob’s people have done what is wrong.

This is symbolic language – God wasn’t planning to physically melt the mountains, but it’s a reminder that God rules over everything and has the power to do anything – power that God was going to exercise because of the evil happening in the land.

So what was God mad about? According to Micah, two main things: worship and money.

Chapter 1 focuses more on the corruption of worship and chapter 2 starts to get into the issue of economic injustice. I’ll talk about worship today and get into money next Sunday.

The problem with worship was that many of the leaders and people of Israel and Judah were worshiping the gods of neighbouring nations and adopting their religious practices.

Who is to blame for the high places where Judah’s people worship other gods? Jerusalem!

The high places were spots, often up on hilltops, where people would go worship Canaanite gods like Baal or Asherah. And Micah says Jerusalem is to blame for this because that is where the king and religious officials lived and they were encouraging this worship of idols, or at least allowing it to happen.

And this corrupted worship was at least as big a problem in the north as it was in the south:

All the statues of Samaria’s gods will be broken to pieces. All the gifts its people gave to temple prostitutes will be burned with fire. I will destroy all the statues of its gods.

In some cases, like with the wicked king Ahaz, the kings abandoned God completely. Ahaz is said to have sacrificed his own son into fire, like a worshiper of a god called Molech.

But in other cases what happened was that the leaders would pretend that they were still worshiping God – the God of Israel – but they would change that worship to be more like the worship of other gods. They would introduce evil practices, like ritual prostitution, and tell people that it was OK.

I think this sort of corrupted worship is actually worse, because then some of the worshipers don’t even realize that they’re not worshiping what they think they are. At least if you say “I hate Yahweh and love Baal” you’re being honest. But instead people were saying “Oh, we still worship God, but we can also practice sorcery and worship golden calves and pray to Asherah to be blessed with many children…”

The leaders were willfully corrupting their nations’ religion, and the people were either going along with it or they didn’t realize what was happening.

What Is God Going To Do About It?

So, that was half of the problem – corrupted religion - and I’ll get into the other half next week. But we can still look at what God was planning to do about this. And that’s not pretty. These verses describe God displaying His power in response to what is happening:

So the Lord says,

“I will turn Samaria into a pile of trash. It will become a place for planting vineyards. I will dump its stones down into the valley. And I will destroy it down to its very foundations.

God had been enduring the sinfulness and rejection of His people in the land He had given them for about 500 years at this point – God is patient, giving many opportunities to repent. But now time was almost up. A few decades after Micah’s time as prophet the Assyrian Empire invaded Israel, razing Samaria, destroying other settlements, and occupying the land. God did not rescue them – He used these forces and events for His purposes.

If you read a little farther into this chapter Micah also describes how God feels about this:

I will weep and mourn because Samaria will be destroyed.

God wasn’t pleased at this destruction, but God does not let evil go unpunished, even when it is found among his own people.

It’s important to say that Micah’s prophesy wasn’t offered to give people a cruel look at their inevitable future. I think prophesies like this one are meant to convince people to change their ways. If Israel had heeded Micah’s words and tried to be faithful to God again things could turned out very differently.

That’s what happened in the southern kingdom. Jerusalem survived a hundred years longer than Samaria, largely because one good king – Hezekiah – restored his people’s loyalty to God enough to give them a reprieve.

Micah’s prophesy isn’t just about sin and the horrible things it can lead to. In different parts of this book are words of encouragement and future hope that I’ll focus on later in this series. But for today we’re pretty focused on the doom and destruction side of things.

What Does It Say About How We Should Live?

How can that help us live well as Jesus-followers in 2023?

My biggest take-away from chapter 1 is that God cares about the purity of our faith.

By “purity” I mean that the things we believe and practice are drawn from the right source.

For example, these are both glasses of water.

This one is distilled water, which makes it almost completely pure H20.

This one is tap water that’s had a run-in with some dirt from the back yard.

They’re both glasses of water, but one is nearly pure and the other is badly contaminated. And if you had to pick one to drink I don’t think you’d have to ponder that choice too long!

There are also many different versions of Christian faith. There are different denominations and different churches and individual followers of Jesus make different choices about how they understand God, the Bible, and how they should live.

And I’m going to have the audacity to say that nobody has it all right. There’s no perfectly pure version of faith among any one group or church, and no person who could practice it perfectly anyway. There’s some stuff floating around in every Christian’s belief and practice that doesn’t belong – impurities. Things that are not of God.

Instead they came from your family’s way of doing things, or your culture’s understanding of things, or a misguided Sunday school teacher’s lessons, or a preacher’s twisted understanding of some subject, or your misunderstanding of what the preacher was actually saying, etc.

Sometimes these are minor and fairly harmless, like the child who thought the three wise men came to visit baby Jesus with gold, Frankenstein, and Murray.

But sometimes these impurities are toxic. There are people who were given the impression that God hates them for their sin and that they are too far gone to ever be welcomed back to God’s family. There are people who were taught that living a certain kind of life makes them better than other people, and that they can pridefully look down on those who haven’t made the same choices. Or consider how, for generations, many Christians were taught and believed that slavery and segregation were OK and interracial marriage was wrong.

There is a new documentary series a lot of people are checking out right now called “Shiny Happy People” which is partially about the Duggar family who starred in the reality TV show about their life and their many, many children. But, more importantly, it also explores the teachings of a man named Bill Gothard, who founded something called the “Institute Of Basic Life Principles.”

This organization taught millions of Christians that there was a very specific way to live and to organize your family – one where the father ruled over the rest of the family who owed him their absolute obedience. Gothard also strongly encouraged homeschooling and taught that dating was wrong and that parents should essentially choose who should be allowed to court and marry their children.

Many people raised in families that adhered to Gothard’s teachings believe that these legalistic rules were harmful to them, promoting harsh and controlling behavior and making it easy for men to get away with abuse. I’ve heard a couple of horrifying testimonies shared by survivors of these situations.

Gothard himself, who never married or had a family of his own by the way, stepped down from running his organization in 2014 when he was accused of sexual harassment and molestation by 34 different women.

This is an example of corrupted religion – when you take a foundation of Christian belief but build all kinds of things on to it that move people away from the core of Jesus’ teachings. And corrupted religion leads to all kinds of ugliness and injustice.

People who want to abuse and oppress others will often use religious ideas and language to make themselves look respectable and shield themselves from scrutiny. When I learn about examples of this it makes me so angry, because something so as good and hopeful and healing as Christian faith is being corrupted and made to cause evil.

If that’s how I feel when I learn about a few examples of this happening, imagine how much grief and anger it must cause God to know about every example of this. I’d melt the mountains too, and I wouldn’t wait.

But I’m glad God is patient, because I’m guilty of this too. My faith isn’t pure, and neither is yours.

So how can we develop a faith that is as pure as possible? In good Baptist form I have three things to offer here:

1) Be Discerning

I was going to say “be critical”, but discerning is a less negative word. Either way I mean to test things, to not assume that what you’ve been told is always correct, and to question your understanding and motives.

We should be discerning about the beliefs and accepted practices of our wider world and not simply accept everything that is popular or culturally accepted. And we should also be discerning of the books and radio programs and famous preachers and ideas floating around in Christian culture – they can also be corrupt.

For example, beware the term “Biblical” when it’s attached to one thing or another. Bill Gothard considered his teaching to be the “Biblical” way to live and raise a family. But just because you have drawn certain things from the Bible doesn’t mean that what you created is good, or that it even aligns with the most important things the Bible teaches.

Tremendous damage can be done by bad “Biblical” teaching when you convince people that this is what God commands you to do.

Here's something Biblical: 1st Thessalonians 5:21-22 says: test everything that is said. Hold on to what is good. Stay away from every kind of evil.

2) Be committed

The best way to end up with a corrupted faith is to have an inactive faith.

I came across some research this week that was very interesting. It was a study that looked at how the wives of different groups of men – religious and non-religious – rated their husbands in various categories. And, contrary to what some people might expect, University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox found that “Conservative Protestant married men with children are consistently the most active & expressive fathers and the most emotionally engaged husbands.”

Compared to every other major group they were also the least likely to divorce and had the lowest rates of domestic violence.

But this was only true when these Christians were sincere and active in their faith – they went to church regularly with their wives, for example.

But the study also found that men who identified as Evangelical Christians but didn’t attend church or have an active faith were the opposite – they were the worst husbands and fathers and most violent men in America.

It’s hard to know exactly why this would be, but it may have something to do with these men taking in toxic messages about male superiority from the wider world or certain parts of the Church and then justifying wicked behavior through their religious ignorance.

I found that to be a striking example of why it matters that Christians are serious about living out their faith. Go to church. Read your Bible. Pray. Serve and participate in the life of your religious community. Get yourself situated so that you are getting a regular flow of good teaching and positive examples, and have people around you who might be able to see and warn you away from anything corrupt.

“let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings… Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another” - Hebrews 10:22-25

3) Filter Things Through Jesus

Christians have a huge advantage when it comes to figuring out what is good and right. We don’t just have a religious text full of rules and commands, we also have the life and example of Jesus.

Ephesians 3:17, for example, says “Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him” and Paul’s letters often talk about Christ being in us. Jesus is alive, and He is present and active in the lives of His followers.

And that presence – the life of Jesus – empowers us to live in the example of Jesus. The Gospels show us how Jesus treated people, how He spoke and acted, and how He responded to people. A really good test of our purity of faith is to make sure that what we do and say is consistent with what Jesus did and said!

There’s a reason that people will label corrupt and self-serving things with that word “Biblical” but they don’t use “Christ-like” or “Jesus-inspired” or anything along those lines. That’s because when you hold up Jesus next to corrupt things it becomes obvious that they are impure! When I hear Christians saying questionable things I often find myself wondering “can they imagine Jesus saying what they just said?” And I suspect it never occurred to them to think about that.

Jesus is the ultimate filter to keep out impurities and toxins – we need Him in our lives and His example foremost in our thoughts. Biblical isn’t good enough – it must be Christ-like.

Conclusion

I believe that nobody gets away with anything. Ultimately God is going to hold everyone to account, even if they die before facing proper justice in this world. But God’s law of reaping what you sow catches up with most people in their lives, too.

If you practice corrupted religion it will poison your soul, push away people in your life and cause you to mistreat others. It will even undermine your community and nation. Micah shows us what it looks like when this corruption gets bad enough. And this first chapter can act as a call for us to seek to be people of a pure faith.

To seek that purity of faith we can grow our discernment, testing everything and keeping what is good.

To seek that purity of faith we can be committed, making sure that we are actively doing those core things that Christians are called to do in worship, prayer, and spiritual community.

And to seek that purity of faith we can be careful to filter things through Jesus. Am I handling this the way Jesus might? Are these words that Jesus would use? Is this the way Jesus would think of this group of people?

So let’s turn to Jesus – whose life is joined to ours when we follow Him – to ask for help in being people of pure faith:

Lord Jesus, help us to recognize and even be angry when we see faith being misused or abused for evil purposes. Give us discernment to recognize this in the world, in the Church, and in ourselves. Help us to persevere in faith, appreciating the value of the Church, which is a gift you have given us so that we can serve, grow, and form bonds of love with one another. And help us to listen for your voice, speaking from our hearts, so that we speak and act like you more and more. Pure faith can change a family, a church, and even a community. Help us to radiate such a faith into our broken world, for your glory. Amen.