Sermon Tone Analysis

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.

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:

“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:

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!

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)

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:

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 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.”