Micah 6:1-8 (Immerse Prophets p. 51-52)
“God’s Case”
September 6, 2020 – Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Your dog bit the neighbor’s child. Now you are in small claims court. The neighbor presents her case to the judge. Your dog was loose without a leash. Her 10-year-old son encountered the dog on their own property. The animal bit his leg and necessitated a trip to the emergency room to clean the wound and get antibiotics. She also had to contact animal control and have them get proof from you that your dog had its rabies shot. She’s seeking the cost of the hospital visit, compensation for pain and suffering for her son, loss of time from work, and court costs.
You present your case, but you know it’s not very good. Your pet was fenced in your backyard, but managed to dig underneath the fence and get out. You know your dog would never bite anyone unprovoked, so you are sure the neighbor kid was teasing your dog, pulling its tail or something like that. But you can’t prove it. In any case, keeping the dog on your own property, either fenced or leashed, was your legal responsibility. You’re going to have to pay for failing in that responsibility and compensate your neighbor.
As our text from this week opens in Micah chapter 6, page 51 in Prophets, God is having His day in court with a case against His people, against Israel and Judah. He is explaining how He has been personally injured by them. His case is also something like breach of contract. God has more than fulfilled His end of an ancient contract, a covenant He made with Israel, but they have failed to perform their end of the deal. As we read on in the text we find Micah wondering for his people how to make restitution to God, how to compensate Him for His losses.
Micah was a prophet from the southern kingdom, Judah, from the western town of Moresheth. It is possible his community was one of those captured by the Assyrians as told in II Kings 18, when they invaded Judah after destroying the northern kingdom of Israel. King Hezekiah’s trust in God ultimately proved correct and the Assyrians were turned away from Jerusalem and left. But their attacks on the surrounding area, on western fortified cities like Micah’s Moresheth, were devastating.
So it is not surprising that Micah has a lot to say about his country’s military and economic policies and the troubles that came from them. In the first three chapters of his book, pages 43 to 48, he prophesies that what Assyria did to his area of Judah was one day going to happen to Jerusalem itself. The problems at the heart of those troubles, the sins of his people, were still there in Judah. They may have had a good king, Hezekiah, but they had not become good people. God would punish them for it.
Part of their sin was unfair housing practices. At the top of page 45, chapter 2 verse 2, Micah talks about how people defrauded each other to steal land, how they took away people’s homes by fraud and violence. Over on page 46 he tells them they “steal the shirts off the backs of those who trusted you,” and “You have evicted women from their pleasant homes and forever stripped their children of all that God would give them.”
In the middle of those warnings, at the bottom of page 45, chapter 2 verse 6, Micah tells how he hears people telling him, “Don’t say such things,” and “Don’t prophesy like that. Such disasters will never come our way!” In the middle of page 46, the prophet suggests that maybe they would like to hear someone “preach to you the joys of wine and alcohol!” Micah says, “That’s just the kind of prophet you would like.”
Following those warnings and biting sarcasm, chapters 4 and 5, pages 48 to the top of 51, are more hopeful, more encouraging. There is a prophecy of Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, being lifted up as a blessing for all the nations. And there on the bottom of page 49, the beginning of chapter 5, is the precious verse which says how out of one of those western towns the Assyrians overran, out of Bethlehem, will come a new ruler of Israel, one who is truly a Shepherd for His flock, for His people. We, of course, know that was ultimately fulfilled by Jesus when He was born in Bethlehem.
Yet for right then, in Micah’s own time, God had business with Judah, had a case to litigate against them. Near the top of page 51, the first verse of Micah 6, God invited them to stand up and state their own case against Him, to offer any reasons for all the evil they had done. As ancient witnesses of everything that had happened there, God calls the mountains and hills to be “witness to your complaints.”
We don’t actually get to hear Judah’s response, their side of the story. We should probably assume they were forced to plead guilty or nolo contendere, “no contest” to the charges against them. So in verse 2 we hear God ask the mountains to listen to His side, to His complaint, to the “case against his people. He will bring charges against Israel.”
As I said, God’s case is based on a contract, the covenant He has had with them going back to Abraham. If they would worship Him and obey His commands, if they would forsake other gods and treat each other with love and justice, then He would bless them, care for them, give them a home in this world. So God begins by rhetorically asking them if He has kept His end of the bargain:
“O my people, what have I done to you?”
What have I done to make you tired of me?”
Answer me!”
There was no answer, just like before. God’s people know they have no case against Him, no defense for the charges He is making. So God begins a brief and interesting list of just a few, three, of the ways He has kept His promises, fulfilled His part of the covenant with Israel, starting with bringing them out of slavery in Egypt.
The next two ways God says He cared for Israel are more obscure. Micah is the only prophet to mention the foreign prophet Balaam, who was hired by the king of Moab to curse Israel. God prevented that and forced Balaam to bless His people instead. Even a talking donkey got into the act.
The final reference is very vague. God just reminds them of Israel’s “journey from Acacia Grove” (Acacia Grove in Hebrew is “Shittim”—you can see why our translation changed it), “from Acacia Grove to Gilgal,” and what He taught them there about His faithfulness. Gilgal was Israel’s first camp in the Promised Land. There they raised a monument, accepted circumcision for a new generation, and kept the Passover, recognizing that God had brought them all the way.
That’s God’s case, the record of what He did for them. He only leaves implied all the various ways in which they failed Him: their idolatry, their injustice. As is frequently the case, the focus of the prophets is on what God has done rather than on what humans may or may not do.
Again, there is no defense to God’s case. Though Micah and the other prophets record some of the rebellious things the people say, like telling him not to prophesy all those mean things, they have nothing to offer which stands up in court. So in the next paragraph on page 51, verse 6 in a traditional Bible, Micah takes the place of his people and asks how they can make restitution, what fine they must pay for their breach of contract. Literally, Micah asks, “What can I bring to the Lord? Should I bring him burnt offerings?” But our translation wisely realizes he is speaking for everyone and makes it “What can we bring to the Lord? Should we bring him burnt offerings?”
In recognition of the gravity of the charges, of the sweeping extent of the damages to God, Micah proceeds then to name a series of overboard offerings and sacrifices, asking if these would be enough “to pay for our sins.” He starts with an offering of “calves,” which are already more than the usual lambs, then goes on to “thousands of rams,” and “ten thousand rivers of olive oil.” Finally, he even wonders if God could be compensated by human sacrifice, the offering of “our firstborn children.”
As Christians, you and I might come to the end of that list and recall that it did, in fact, take the offering of God’s own firstborn Son dying on the Cross to pay for sins. But of course such an offering on our part would do no good, and God has never asked human sacrifice, except once as a test, of anyone and has never required it.
After that impossible and horrible list of suggested sacrifices, we may come with relief to the end of our text today at the bottom of page 51 and top of page 52. Micah tells us, “No, O people,” no the Lord is not asking any of those extreme sacrifices from you. He explains that they already know “what is good, and this is what he requires of you:
to do justice,
to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God.
That’s a verse some of us know well. On Amazon you can buy a T-shirt or license plate frame or a coffee mug with those words inscribed on it. After all those horrendous and expensive sacrifices, they feel sweet and comforting. “All” God really wants is for you and I to be nice people, to be a little generous, to not get too full of ourselves. It sounds almost easy after all those dead animals and buckets of grease.
I’m afraid that our Prophets translation makes it sound even easier by making the first bit not “do justice,” but “do what is right.” It is true that another word in Hebrew means both what we would call “justice” and what we would call “righteousness,” social morality and personal morality. But that should show us that the two concepts cannot be separated. And in any case, this is not that Hebrew word. This word is mishpat and it has to mean “justice” in English. It’s about how people treat each other, about giving people what is due them, about dealing with people equally in regard to law.
As Tim Keller points out, that Hebrew word mishpat in the Bible is almost always mentioned in association with how certain classes of people are being treated: widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor. This “quartet of the vulnerable,” he says, were the people in ancient society who were absolutely powerless, completely at the mercy of the society around them. Keller wrote, “The mishpat, or justness, of a society, according to the Bible, is evaluated by how it treats these groups.”[1]
If you read on in the rest of this chapter in Micah, the rest of page 52, you can see how the prophet focuses in again on injustice in the form of dishonest business, cheating the poor and using extortion and violence to get rich. Suddenly that comforting call to do justice and love mercy is more challenging, more damning, if you will allow me. It’s God saying that His people and the society they have created have much deeper and more pervasive flaws than can be fixed by paying some penalty. What needs to happen are changes in both individual persons and in the society in which they live.
As followers of Jesus, we are definitely called to be just individuals and to show mercy to individual people around us. Our Gospel lesson from Matthew 18 also pictures a kind of court scene, where one Christian believer is bringing a case against another. Jesus outlined a whole procedure for being just and for offering mercy to one another. Next week we will hear Him particularly emphasize for Peter that need for mercy, for forgiveness.
Yet we cannot let the prophets’ message about justice devolve into some sort of separation between personal justice and social justice. Micah and the other prophets wouldn’t have understood what we were talking about if we put it to them that way. Are widows being evicted from their homes? Were foreigners being cheated when they went to buy food? Were the poor having what little they had extorted from them? It would not matter to Micah or to Hosea or to Isaiah whom we began reading last week that you or I were not personally responsible for those evils. If we are part of a society where it happens, then we are guilty. As we heard Isaiah say to God on page 68 of Prophets in our readings this past week, “I am doomed, for I am a sinful man. I have filthy lips, and I live among a people with filthy lips.”
We cannot evade responsibility for social justice by pleading some kind of personal justice. That’s not going to hold up in God’s court. That humble walk with God, which is also required, is, at the least, an admission before Him of our own complicity in the evils of the culture in which we live and our own failure. Like Israel, we’ve failed to keep our end of the covenant of mercy He made with us by paying for our sins on the Cross.
You and I as Americans cherish our freedom. We don’t want to be coerced to do anything. So we’ve convinced ourselves that the Christian idea of giving, of sharing what we have with those in need, is purely voluntary. It’s optional. So when we do give and share and help others, we can feel good about it. We’ve gone above and beyond what is required. But that’s not what God said through Micah. It’s not what Jesus said. Justice and mercy are not optional. They are required. They are restitution we owe to God and to our neighbor for His judgment against us for all our sins.
Three siblings in the fourth century of Christianity understood God’s requirement of justice and mercy. One of them, a bishop named Basil, said to his people that all the extra belongings they had but did not use or need belonged to others. “The bread in your board belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your wardrobe to the naked; the shoes you let rot to the barefoot; the money in your vaults to the destitute.”[2] Basil’s brother Gregory said that Christian justice required the freeing of slaves and the end of the whole institution of slavery upon which Roman society and economy was built.
The brothers’ sister Macrina looked at the social practice of putting unwanted babies out to die by the road or on garbage heaps and set about rescuing those infants and caring for them. By example and witness she called her fellow Romans, especially Christians, to quit killing newborn children. Those brothers and their sisters understood that Christian morality was not some private activity of the heart. It was meant by God to change the way human beings live in society with each other, just as the prophets and Jesus Himself taught.
God’s case against Israel was airtight. So is His case against you and me. As the book and video series some of us will talk about this week argues, we are unjust people. We have been complicit and compromised with racism. We who are white have benefitted from it. We have also benefitted from economic and social practices which hurt the poor. If our schools were or are partly funded by state lotteries, then we’ve taken money from the hands of the poor to educate our children. If those us who are older men worked in companies or professions where women were paid less than men for the same work, then we took home money which might have gone to help a single mother pay her bills.
God made His case back then and He keeps on making it against His people down through the ages. Are we going to keep trying to plead not guilty? Or will we more wisely, like Micah pictured in our text, stay silent, accept our guilt, and then seek to do what our Lord’s court demands of us? Will we take up again the responsibility of doing what our Lord requires: justice, mercy, and a humble walk with Him? May the grace to do that better, and the gracious mercy of His Son Jesus Christ when we fail, be our only pleas.
Thanks be to God that the gracious mercy of Jesus is more abundant than our own injustice and lack of mercy. Our Lord constantly spreads His Table with more than enough to share with everyone who comes. As we eat and drink today and remember His new covenant with us, let us do so in humble fellowship with Him and with each other. Let us be made ready again to do justice and love mercy because we have received mercy.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] “What is Biblical Justice?” in RELEVANT magazine, August 23, 2012.
[2] Quoted in Tom Holland, Dominion, from Basil of Caesarea, Homily 6: “I Will Pull Down My Barns” (Rhee, Wealth and Poverty, p. 60).