Micah 3

Intro

Its good to have folks getting back into town! As we open up Micah this morning we will do a little bit of review before we jump into our text for today just to help folks get caught up a little.

Micah we have seen was a prophet during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, we are actually reading through the accounts of these kings in the 5 day bible reading plan right now. Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah and was likely a bit younger that Isaiah as Isaiah’s ministry started one king earlier in the days of Uzziah, in fact it is likely that Micah may have been a disciple of Isaiah or was at least very influenced by Isaiah. Commentators have noted that Micah is almost a little Isaiah in its content. Many of the themes and concepts that Isaiah expounds on are also found in Micah. Most notably is the theme of the coming messianic figure who will bring about the cleansing of Israel and usher in an age of faithfulness for a remnant that is to be gathered after the coming judgement.

Micah has much to tell us about the coming of Christ. Micah is where we find the well known verse that the scribes reported when Herod asked where the messiah was to be born upon the visit of the wise men from the east.

English Standard Version Chapter 2

6  “ ‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,

are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

for from you shall come a ruler

who will shepherd my people Israel.’ ”

We also know much about the time when Micah ministered. He ministered under three kings and two of those kings were faithful kings though as we have seen before in the prophets, a faithful king does not necessarily mean that the hearts of the people are truly changed, many in Judah seem so simply go with the flow as the nation swung between religious reforms and idolatry. In fact while the kings were generally faithful it seems as though the other leaders both political and spiritual were less than exemplary as Micah finds much to chastise them for, we will see more of this today.

Micah was a prophet to Judah though he does speak some to Israel to the north and ministered during the time when Assyria finally came in and destroyed the northern 10 tribes as a judgment from God for their idolatry. This idolatry which was rank in the north, we saw, had begun to seep down into Judah as well as the people mingled the true worship of YHWH with the worship practices of the nations around them.

They weren't so much simply worshiping the false gods as they were appropriating that worship style and practice and adding it to the worship of YHWH

We noted that this is called syncretism and it is deadly! The tendency to add to the worship that God requires of us has been and continues to be a very dangerous error that continually faces God’s people. (EXPOUND) This is one of the reasons that the regulative principle is so important to worship!

As far as literary structure goes we have noted that the book divides up into three oracles that all begin with the call to “hear.” Each oracle contains three basic elements. Warning, Judgement, and Hope. It can be difficult to draw a nice line between the passages of warning and judgment but we see all three of these elements to varying extents.

Doug Wilson this is a law/gospel pattern, and it gives us an example of how it is that we are to take the message of the gospel to those around us, warn, make the judgment known and then share the good news not just share the good news and leave out the sticky parts, not just God loves you

In the first oracles which we have covered in chapters 1 and 2 we saw that the hope portion of the oracle was only 2 verses at the very end of chapter two. This will be turned on its head now in this central oracle as the warning and judgement are found in chapter 3 (our passage for today) and then the passage of hope will stretch for two chapters through 4 and 5! This is also where we will find so much of what points us to Christ.

But for today we are going to seek to cover here in chapter three the second round of warning and judgment that Micah issues to the people. So lets take a moment to pray and then we will jump in.

Pray & Read

The central theme of these indictments is to be found in verses 1, 8, & 9. Justice. Micah in these warnings and judgements is going to speak to the rulers of the people and also to the prophets who were aiding the rulers in their wickedness and his central theme is going to be their neglect and disdain for justice.

Justice has long been a central concern for mankind and it was no less so in the days of the bible. Many of these ancient people groups saw the bringing and maintaining of justice as the primary role of a king. The code of Hammurabi states that the role of a king was:

The Lexham Bible Dictionary Justice in the Ancient Near East

“to cause justice to prevail in the land (and) to destroy the wicked and the evil (so) that the strong might not oppress the weak”

No one likes to be taken advantage of, no one likes to be mistreated and wronged. It is a fact of life that quite often there is always someone more powerful or more able than you, even if you are the most powerful person at them moment, there is always someone, eventually, who is going to be able to mistreat you. The scales are perpetually out of balance. And as we see in our world today, often times efforts to righten the scales only seem to push them more and more out of balance! How then are we to find justice?

In the ancient near-east it was the word of the king issued through his laws that was to be the source of justice and in the light of that background we have now the people of Israel who have received not the words and laws of a human king but of the very God of creation!

The Lexham Bible Dictionary tells us:

The Lexham Bible Dictionary Justice in the Old Testament

Whether justice is served by punishing oppressors or by vindicating the oppressed, there is always the concept of returning humanity to שָׁלוֹם (shalom), an equilibrium in which wrongs have been made right and the impoverished have been restored to prosperity.

God’s desire was to bring to His people this shalom, this peace. If they followed his perfect law they would find that there would be no mistreatment, no injustice among them!

It is then in light of this background that Micah issues his scathing indictment!

English Standard Version Chapter 3

Hear, you heads of Jacob

and rulers of the house of Israel!

Is it not for you to know justice?—

2  you who hate the good and love the evil,

The very people who had been charged with enforcing and promoting the adherence to the law of God which was to bring perfect justice and shalom to the people had become the very people who now hated doing good and loved doing evil. They were to know, to be intimately knowledgeable of justice and its demands through meditation on and love of God’s perfect law. They were to reflect David as we saw him last week extol the wonder of God’s law in Psalm 19 but they were anything but!

Amos in addressing a very similar situation in which the people he was speaking to were negligent in acting justly had called them to: (Amos 5:15)

English Standard Version Chapter 5

Hate evil, and love good,

and establish justice in the gate;

The rulers of Judah were doing exactly the opposite! As a result we find that they:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

tear the skin from off my people

and their flesh from off their bones,

3  who eat the flesh of my people,

and flay their skin from off them,

and break their bones in pieces

and chop them up like meat in a pot,

like flesh in a cauldron.

These rulers are devouring the people. The word for tear in the Hebrew has the connotations of social oppression. They were oppressing their own people. They were using their positions of power and authority, positions that were entrusted to them as avenues of upholding justice and the law of God, they were using these positions rather to fleece the people. The imagery is intentionally shocking. Their greedy injustice is cast in the light of cannibalism! Ripping their very flesh off their bones, flaying them, breaking bones, chopping the meat into a pot and consuming them.

It leaves no doubt of how it is that God views injustice!

Again, behind many of these judgements we need to ensure that we use them as a conduit to place the character and nature of God before our eyes! In a world that so longs for justice we proclaim the gospel message of a God who is perfectly justice, that upholds justice and who will at the end of all things bring the world and all that is in it back into perfect equilibrium, back into the state of shalom, peace, perfect justice!

This is one of the reasons that Paul labors in the book of Romans to prove that at the cross God became both just and the justifier for us!

Now, of course that message is not going to land well in the fleshly ears of unbelievers because in actuality they don't truly desire God’s perfect justice, they want God to right every injustice but the ones that they themselves are guilty of! They would have God judge everyone else but not themselves!

However, we take that message to the world just the same because it has please God through the seeming folly of this message to reach out into this world and save people!

Micah then warns these rulers in verse 4 of what their failure to act in justice will mean. There is a day of recompense coming when they will cry out to the Lord and they will find that He will not answer them.

The irony is that:

The Books of Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, and Micah a. Against the Courts (3:1–4)

The term cry out is a technical one for appeal to a judge for help against victimization.

These people will be victimized but God will not listen to their please for justice just as they had been deaf to the please of their own people for justice. God will in fact hide His face from them.

We need to understand the full context of the phrase. God had promised that if these people followed Him rightly that He would make His face to shine upon them. This then is a reversal of that blessing, God would no longer be turned toward them in blessing, He is now removing His hand of blessing from them because they have made their deeds evil!

As I was studying this I could not help but think of the prosperity gospel and its proponents! Sometimes we think that these things are long behind us but yet here in these men and women we find people who are twisting the word of God to defraud others and happily taking all that they have to provide for their own lives of luxury! Micah shows us just how much we ought to repudiate that kind of thing and that movement and any other like it that would seek to consume others!

We also must be ever on guard in our own lives! It i rather easy, at least for me and likely for many of you, to look at the errors of the prosperity movement and see the correlations here but we all, as a result of our sinfulness, have a tendency toward injustice toward mistreating others and using our means and power, however much we may have, to serve ourselves rather than to serve others.

Verses 5-8

Micah then turns to the prophets of Judah. It is interesting to note that as he turns to the prophets he uses a turn of phrase that would have been very common to these prophets, “thus says the Lord.”

He means to arrest their attention.

They are guilty of leading the people astray.

They were in the habit of twisting God’s prophetic words to give good words to those who lined their pockets and to mistreat those who could not pay.

Now the most difficult thing about this passage is that Micah seems, and I believe this is correct, seems to be here speaking against true prophets. These weren't false prophets who did not receive true words from the Lord but rather faked their visions and oracles. These are true prophets who receive visions and words from the Lord but have taken to twisting them to suit their own purposes, to enhance their own financial position.

We can determine this from the judgment that God levies.

English Standard Version Chapter 3

Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision,

and darkness to you, without divination.

The sun shall go down on the prophets,

and the day shall be black over them;

7  the seers shall be disgraced,

and the diviners put to shame;

they shall all cover their lips,

for there is no answer from God.

This judgement makes no sense from a position of false prophets. A false prophet already lived in darkness, they didn't have the word of the Lord coming to them, there would have been nothing to take away! They are to experience night without vision! God is no longer going to give these people visions! They are going to be in the dark! Disgrace is going to come upon them as they have no answers any longer.

I think that one commentator did a great job of applying this to our own day, he writes:

Jonah & Micah The Consequences of False Prophecy

Something similar happens today in churches where God’s Word no longer is faithfully taught. In liberal churches, worldly theories about the Bible spread from academia into the smooth rhetoric of pulpits. The people are taught that the Bible must be interpreted to fit with current ideas of God, truth, morality, and salvation. In increasing numbers of evangelical churches, a man-centered or political agenda takes the place of the biblical gospel. In either case, the pulpit inevitably loses its power to effect true salvation, becoming a place for displays of personality rather than divine proclamation. The church becomes increasingly irrelevant, saying nothing different from what is heard elsewhere in the world. No longer able to rely on the Holy Spirit to draw believers to God’s Word, such churches suffer the shame of having to market their music programs, exciting worship experiences, and other worldly goods and services. The prevalence of this trend has accelerated the disgrace of the whole church in society so that a land filled with Christian institutions suffers a famine for hearing the Word of the Lord.

While we are not prophets we do have the word of God and preach the word of God and share the Word of God with those around us and we must concern ourselves immensely with handling that word rightly and never seek to justify or defend our own wrong, improper, or unjust behavior with that word! It is easy to do, I am sure that each of you can think of an instance of that happening and probably even an instance of doing that yourselves if you are honest. We must be in guard against this!

True vs. Twisted Prophets

We must be like Micah!

In verse 8 and following Micah contrast himself with these twisted prophets! First in verse 8 by describing his character as opposed to theirs that he has just judged and then in 9-12 by delivering the message that these twisted prophets would refuse to deliver because it was against the very people who kept food in their mouths and coins in their pockets.

We read in verse 8 of Micah:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

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

and to Israel his sin.

Like Jeremiah Micah has recieved a word and he must deliver it. He is filled with power, with the Spirit, with justice, and with might!

Central in this is the Spirit and Justice. This message Micah reinforces is not his own, his is God’s message and God has filled him with His Spirit that he can carry it forth and centrally Micah tells us that His message, contrary to the message of the twisted prophets, and contrary to the ways of the rulers of the people, his message is one of justice. He shows no favoritism, no partiality, he is not as he continues, going to shy away from plainly declaring to the people their sinfulness, his is a hard message not a soft and blunted message. And note well, he delivers this message fearlessly and with great conviction!

We ought again do well to take not of Micah and seek to exemplify his godly character as we meet our world in our day!

Micah’s Message

Micah now issues the judgement that follows all of this warning them against their wicked and unjust behavior.

English Standard Version Chapter 3

9  Hear this, you heads of the house of Jacob

and rulers of the house of Israel,

who detest justice

and make crooked all that is straight,

10  who build Zion with blood

and Jerusalem with iniquity.

11  Its heads give judgment for a bribe;

its priests teach for a price;

its prophets practice divination for money;

yet they lean on the LORD and say,

“Is not the LORD in the midst of us?

No disaster shall come upon us.”

12  Therefore because of you

Zion shall be plowed as a field;

Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins,

and the mountain of the house a wooded height.

It is interesting to note that this is the message that saved Jeremiah’s life. (Jeremiah 26) We saw this in our intro to the book; around 100 years after Micah, Jeremiah came against the king and people of Judah with a similar message, “Jerusalem will be destroyed” and when the king is going to put Jeremiah to death for this message he is reminded that King Hezekiah did not put Micah to death when Micah had delivered this very prophecy against the rulers and against Jerusalem in his own day.

One thing we can take away from this is that you can never know just how far through time any act of faithfulness that you do will reach! Micah had no idea that his faithfulness in delivering this message would reach forward 100 years and save the life of another prophet and yet that is just what God saw fit to do with it! Man, if we could live always with that kind of knowledge in mind! Again, how amazing is the God that we serve, the God that does these kinds of things!

Of the message though you can see it is pretty straight forward. They have detested justice and have twisted and made crooked all that is straight including the very visions that they had received from the Lord, they take bribes, they teach not to lead the people in righteousness but to line their own pockets and yet, and this is the most crazy thing of all and we have seen this before, they do all of these wicked things and yet still believe that thy are the blessed people of God!

At times I am prone to wonder how it is that the liberal progressive church can read their bibles and think that God would still be please with them and bless them with the cacophony of egregious and wicked twisted errors they proudly promote?! How can they think that? The answer has to at least be that this has happened for a long time. In their sin these people imagine that they are still God’s people and that He is going to bless them.

NOT SO! Zion plowed, jerusalem in ruins, the mountain where the temple sits, a forested hill. Total destruction!

Conclusion

As we close I simply want to encourage us to make this our prayer, that we might be more like Micah. It is not hard to draw parallels between Micah’s day and our own. The unfaithfulness, the hostility toward the gospel and the word of God, the twisting of God’s word and precepts to validate and even promote all kinds of wicked and evil behaviors and the seeking to shut out and cut off anyone who might seek to shine a light on these errors and rather call those in the world to faithfulness to God. Micah’s time like ours is a dark time a hard time and yet a time much in need of a courageously and clearly spoken word from the Lord! God gave Micah his message and he was faithful in proclaiming it with clarity and conviction, we too must grab hold of the message of the gospel that we have been given and seek to proclaim it to those in our day with the same clarity and conviction that has animated Spirit filled men and women of God, like Micah, throughout history. We can also take great comfort and hope in seeing just that one simple way in which God caused the faithfulness of this prophet to ripple out and have profound effects in the world long after he had passed on into glory!