The books of the prophets have a mixed relationship with Christians today, and it may be so with you. We love the prophecies of Christ and the promises of a better tomorrow, and maybe you’re excited to know that we live in the midst of the fulfillment of prophecy. Christ talks about the Gentile nations coming to Jerusalem, and that is an Old Testament picture of a New Testament reality of them coming to the church that is now across the face of the earth.
We are the New Jerusalem in that sense. But we’re less in love with the prophecies of destruction and judgment. That’s the other part of the prophets.
But we need both. We know we need both. You know how stubborn you can be about your pet beliefs and practices, your ignorance, your blind spots.
You know how you can be just as stubborn as the Jews of old. And because of this, you know that we need the harsh hand of God upon us at times. It is easy to say, because it’s so pleasing to our flesh, we just want to hear good things all the time.
I know I’m a sinner, but I need the comfort because I know I’m a sinner. Do you know you’re a sinner? I don’t always know how well you know you’re a sinner. God knows, of course, and God knows them of old, and they needed the law to smack them around.
Even as Christians, we need the law to smack us around. Fear is still part of the Christian existence. Being saved has not eradicated that.
We need the books of the prophets. God knew that. That’s why he gave it to us and to your children and your children’s children.
That’s why he wrote it down for our benefit. There’s a lot more, as perhaps you thought about before or not, that they have given other prophecies that are not written down. God gave us what we needed.
Micah’s case apparently was perhaps about 40 years or so of a prophetic ministry reduced to seven chapters, like this. That’s it. It’s a booklet.
You can make it a little booklet, maybe a thick pamphlet. But it was sufficient. It’s sufficient for us today.
The booklet is divided into three cycles, they are called in literature. A lot of it is poetic in form. A lot of the prophets prophesied in their writings are in poetic form, not the form of most of the Pentateuch, such as Genesis, which is a historical form.
It’s written differently. This guy happened, and then that guy, and this thing happened, and that happened here, and that happened later. This is a lot more of a poetry.
So you have three cycles here. They are three cycles of judgments, end-capped with salvation or redemption or good news, each beginning with the word here. Chapter 1, verse 2, hear all you peoples.
Chapter 3, verse 1, and I said hear now all heads of Jacob. And chapter 6, verse 1, and the pages are all stuck together, it says here again. So you can see that pattern for yourself.
And your Bible may give that to you if you have a studied Bible. Some may disagree with that order. I think it’s a helpful order.
It makes it succinct and to the point. And you can obviously see that pattern here, here, here, three times. And at the end you’ll see of the judgment is a blessing.
Then it starts again here, and there’s judgment, and then there’s blessing. The pattern is there. And so, God wrote through Micah the prophet, this book of the Bible for you this evening, brothers and sisters.
All of it, the happy and the sad, the joyous and the grievous, the salvation and the judgments, it is for your good. And let’s see how and why. The word is from God, the first point.
The Word is from God
The word of the what? LORD, all caps, right? Yahweh, Jehovah, the covenant-keeping God that comes from I am that I am in Exodus when he meets him at the burning bush. Because God is saying, I am faithful to my covenant. I’ve come to you after 400 years to fulfill it, to bring my people out of the land of Egypt and deliver them.
I promise that I am that I am. It assumes, that is the word of the Lord is assumed in Old Testament times. The Old Testament and even the New Testament, to some extent but to a lesser extent, did not have an explicit doctrine of the Bible.
It was assumed in a lot of ways. It’s spoken of, we can find and gather the data, but you don’t have it written down in the chapter, you know, 1 of Micah. Micah’s going to say, I’m going to explain to you what the word of the Lord is.
They already had a history of it by this time, in the 700s. David’s about the 900s, and several hundred years earlier than that, they crossed the Red Sea. So, it is assumed, that is the word of the God is assumed, the word of the covenant keeping Lord.
God’s word was from heaven and before the prophets, or in dreams, this is what God wishes to say to them. The word of the Lord, the command of God, the prophecies, whatever it is, it’s from God. Good, bad, it’s His word.
And whatever and however form it came to them, audibly, it seems often in dreams, as I said, or from heaven and the like, it came clearly, and it came with understanding. Because you can be very clear and enunciate and have the words, and you’re like, I don’t understand a word you’re talking about. What are you saying, it’s in their language? They know the import, even if, like in the case of Micah, they don’t always understand exactly a lot of the details of the prophecy, what does this look like in the future, but you get the overriding sense of judgment, that’s for sure.
And you’ve got to repent now, and that God will fulfill His covenant promises. He has a remnant, ideas such as that. No prophet was in doubt that it came from God.
God didn’t leave them confused. He’s not the author of confusion. So-called prophets today, John Piper is a big name in some circles.
He’s up in Michigan, he’s retired now. He’s a charismatic. People like that are dangerous, frankly.
And he believes you can have a prophet who’s not quite sure he’s got a word for the Lord, or he thinks he’s got a word for the Lord, but you may not get access to it because he’s kind of infallible. That is, he can make error in transmitting God’s word. No, no, no.
The prophets of old, you go through it, you know your Bible, you see them talking, they know it. And the ones who try to hide from God are punished by God, aren’t they? God said, no, no, you can’t run from my infallible word. You can’t bury it in the ground.
You can’t go into the ocean, into a whale even, and hide it. I will bring it out and people will know. When Moses wrote this down in the Old Testament, they knew what it was and took it seriously.
They wrote things down. They wrote the Word of God down. You had the Book of the Covenant, if you call that phrase in Deuteronomy and elsewhere.
Moses wrote the Pentateuch. And David in Psalm 19 writes, the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
He’s talking about the Word of God, the Bible, things from the Lord himself. By law and statue, he means the Pentateuch in particular, written down. That’s what he had.
He didn’t have Micah yet and he’s before Micah. He had Exodus, Deuteronomy. He said, these are good things.
I know they’re from God. I’m not going to sit there and have a debate with a liberal and say, is it really from the Lord and how can we scientifically prove this? It’s just assumed. I mean, when you live in a time of miracles, there’s not a lot of doubt when you’re a believer.
It’s very clear and it was everywhere. Again, the ancient Near East in many ways is advanced compared to us because at least they believed in the supernatural and acted on it, even the pagans. Today we say we believe in the supernatural and we don’t act on it in America.
We live like rank atheists. By the time of Christ, the Jews had their Old Testament books pretty much all lined up. Christ quotes from the Old Testament, most of the Psalms, Isaiah and Deuteronomy.
I mean, how does that fit into the liberal model, right? I mean, if Christ is our model because Christ is all about love, love, love, and that’s what we like, tolerance and love. He quotes the Old Testament because he takes it seriously. If he’s God Almighty, why does he quote himself? And the temptation, isn’t that fascinating? He doesn’t say, let’s say of the Lord, that’s me.
He quotes the Bible. He does it for your sake to tell you this is what we have right here, the Bible. The Bible is from the Lord himself.
The Pharisees assumed its authority, quoted it, and expected Christ to deal with it. We have the Bible, what are you going to say about it? That’s what the Bible says in the Old Testament. Of course, Christ shows them that they misunderstood it, they twisted it and the like.
The New Testament took God’s word seriously, the word of the Lord, and it becomes further developed and explained in explicit form now in the New Testament. By the time of Paul, who wrote 2 Timothy, we know that passage, right? 3.15, 2 Timothy 3.15. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. Not a few, not some, but every good work.
And not until about the 1800s did enough people start questioning this. You always had heretics and whatnot. Now in the 1800s it started spreading like cancer.
Evolution came along and this got worse in the mid-1800s. And now we’re drowning in a sea of skepticism. In particular, as we drill into the idea of the word of the Lord, so the first five words of Micah 1.1 we’re still on, the word of the Lord, the word of the covenant-keeping God, it’s inspired.
In 2 Timothy 3.15, the word he uses there is all scripture is given by inspiration of God. It’s kind of a weird way of how the English comes out because the Greek is an N, it’s X. God breathed is what the word is. God breathed.
God breathed and gave us the Bible. Okay? It didn’t inhale it, inspire, which is which kind of perhaps getting the English there from that word, but you know, English is weird. That makes us stronger, doesn’t it? Wow, it’s God breathed.
And that fits the pattern of the Old Testament. 2 Samuel 23.2, for instance, here we’re speaking of David who, in case you forgot, was a prophet at times. You might have forgotten that.
He didn’t have the formal office. He was a king, that’s his formal office, but once in a while he spoke as a prophet because the spirit moved as he willed, even in the Old Testament. It says, the spirit of the Lord spoke by me and his word was on my tongue.
You know, the word spirit there is also the same word for wind, or you can even make it breath. The spirit of the Lord. Okay? God breathed, even in the Old Testament.
They knew the intimate connection between the spirit and the giving of the word to the prophets. The implications that it is, that is the word of the Lord that comes from God, God’s going to take care of it. He’s not going to just throw out there willy-nilly, I don’t care, whatever, whoever happens to hear it.
If it gets confused and lost in translation, no, God cares. He’s going to preserve it and hold together and give it to us, and that’s why we have the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible, the infallibility of the Bible. So inspiration leads forth these doctrinal views.
And errant means does not err. Does not err with what it speaks of when it speaks of things that are true. To have no error doesn’t mean that there’s no poetry.
In poetry, oh, that’s an error. She doesn’t have a gazelle neck. No, I understand that.
That’s not what that means by inerrancy. That’s a metaphor. We all know what metaphors are.
There’s lots of them in the Bible. It means there is no error. It’s without error.
Infallible means it cannot err. What? Why do we have to come up with these distinctions? Because of unbelief. That’s why.
Because the liberals, blame the Germans in the 1800s, were like, well, maybe in the future we’ll find out some known fact and discover that David really didn’t exist. No, it can’t even err. It does not have error, and it cannot err.
Okay? Because it’s God-breathed. Unless you have a wimpy God, this is what the doctrine you’re going to have. God holds His Word.
He will give it to us so that we will have the comfort we need of the Gospel. We know that we err, and so we’re cautious with each other and with our words. Less so, of course, with family members and people you know after a long time because you see a pattern.
But with God, right off the bat, you don’t need to see a pattern. God is true, and everything He says is true, and it makes every man a liar, those who go against Him. He cannot err, and we can therefore depend upon it.
The doctrine of inspiration, the doctrine that takes this phrase here, the Word of the Lord that came to Micah, that comes from God to Micah, taking that as serious doctrine is a comfort. We’re no longer walking around in darkness groping and looking for the truth. We have the truth, as much truth as God deems we need, and that is enough for us.
And that is, in particular, the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In short, the Bible is God-breathed. If it is the Word of the Lord, not in some vague metaphorical sense, but in a real metaphysical sense, then it’s authoritative.
The Bible is authoritative. You know the mind of the Lord, and you can go to the Bible to find it, because there is no error. The Word of the Lord, the covenant-keeping God who does not leave you alone, not just the Word, but it’s the Word from not just Baal, our Master.
He could have called himself Baal here. He is called Baal elsewhere in the Bible. You don’t see it in English.
Or Elohim. It’s Yahweh. He’s emphasizing, I’m uniquely yours and nobody else’s, and I’ve given you my Bible.
He gave it to the Old Testament church, and he gives that to you today, and we ought to stand in awe of this, in amazement, because it is evidence of his love for us. The Word is from God, and the Word is through men. And of course, by that we mean the instrumentality of man.
And this, again, blows the liberal minds. How can this be? How can an infallible God use fallible means? Because he’s infallible and he’s sovereign, and he can do these things. It’s not a contradiction.
It may be impossible for you to figure out, but it’s not a contradiction. The inspiration is through the men, from Adam onward. There is knowledge of God and his Word.
Adam, it seems to me, must have told his children about the fall and God and everything else, because we see up before Abraham, there’s a godly remnant. They know something. You cannot have a godly remnant in ignorance.
Don’t forget that. They had knowledge. There’s a little more going on than what we realize.
There must be at least minimally an oral history from Adam onwards. And although there’s much silence for a long time, Abraham comes on the scene, and the Spirit, that is God, communicates more frequently to him up through Moses and to his posterity and the like, and about 400 years, it’s quiet again in Egypt, and Moses comes on the scene, and more revelation comes to God’s people. God speaks, and God has spoken often, and he speaks through men.
In Moses’ case, he says, I will put my words in your mouth. That’s pretty strong. That’s pretty detailed there.
I’m not going to just give you an overview, but my very words, the Spirit of God will be upon you, so that what you utter is divine and infallible and inerrant, and people better listen as though I am talking to you, because I am, but just through a mouth of clay. And that offends people. They don’t want to hear that.
I want to see God, some say. That’s usually the charismatics, and God will strike you down. God says be satisfied with the Bible, which is a means.
The Word is through Men
When we have God, he gave us the Bible, and he gave us a Bible written by men, means using means, instruments for instruments. Samuel, as a side note, seems to be one of the first, as it were, formal, official prophets of the Old Testament. Micah, let’s look at Micah.
The Word of the Lord was given to him as one of the instruments of God. His name is short for who is like Yahweh. He is from Moresheth that is near Gath on the foothills of Judah.
So he’s in the southern tribe. Remember the division, Rehoboam, Jehoboam? The northern tribe said, we’re going to go on our own way. That’s ten tribes, two more down south, which is Benjamin and Judah children.
That’s where the more pure worship is, frankly. Although, they hardly had any righteous kings. The list of kings is, I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s massive of wicked kings compared to the ratio of godly kings.
As one commentator points out, Micah was a younger contemporary of Isaiah. Isn’t that interesting? Living at the same time with Isaiah. And prophesied to both Israel and Judah during the time of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, the kings of Judah, and of Pekah and Hosea, the last two kings of Israel.
That’s the northern tribe. It’s kind of strange, perhaps, for the kids. The north was called Israel and the south was called Judah.
That’s the biggest tribe. He, that is Micah, sympathized deeply with the common people being moved by the social wrongs of his time. We’ll see that in chapter two and three.
And became the people’s advocate and defender as well as their accuser. He clearly sets forth the wickedness of Judah and Israel, their punishment, their restoration, and the coming of Christ. As compared with Isaiah, he was a simple countryman, born of obscure parentage, and recognized as one of the peasant classes.
While Isaiah was a city prophet of high social standing and a counselor of kings. You wouldn’t probably think about hanging out with Isaiah too much, although I’m sure he was very humble. But that’s where he, where God put him.
And Micah was put elsewhere, and he was satisfied with his lot in life. The historical context of the book of this Bible, Micah is of those kings that are mentioned there, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, which were kings of 750 to 686. That’s the overlap.
Since we don’t know exactly when Micah lived, we don’t know where his line of overlap is. But he overlapped three kings, so he must have hit the middle king full on the whole length. This is also during the Assyrian expansion, not to be confused with Syria, but Assyrian expansion, that went into the northern kingdom and took out Samaria, the capital of Israel.
The fall of Samaria was in 722. We had to memorize that in seminary. 722.
And, as an encouragement, because these prophets needed lots of encouragement, just so you know, Micah’s word was efficacious. It didn’t fall on deaf ears completely. A lot, but not completely.
In the case of Hezekiah, as we see in Jeremiah 26, 17 and following, Hezekiah did repent and change, because of the word of Micah. So God will not have his word returned to him void. Since God in his mercy gave us his word in our own language, as he did to Micah and his people, the Bible has genres.
Ways of communicating in human language. Categories we call genres. I mentioned the historical genre of Pentateuch.
You have poetry of Proverbs and Psalms. And then you have the prophets, which mix historical with some poetic forms and the like. And the epistles is another genre as well.
Those are written in a different way, for instance, in a more personal, obviously dealing with in-house matters in the church and the like. And that means you come to each of the genres a little differently. You go to the historical expecting some historical sequence.
And the prophets, eh, not so much. To the prophecies, you’re like, whoa, what’s he saying? It seems out of order. A lot of overlapping of ideas and a colorful collage that can be very confusing.
And so when you understand that, you don’t fall into the trap of the dispensationalists who take everything literal and expect out of, what, Revelation, a seven-headed beast to rise out of the Pacific, I guess, or maybe that’s the Atlantic because it has to be by Israel, right? No. No. It’s all metaphorical.
And it all makes sense when you realize, oh, God can use figures of speech too. Wow, amazing. I’m sorry, it sounds mocking, but it’s that bad.
I grew up in those circles and it’s terrible. It’s a terrible way to live. Reading the Bible in a wooden fashion as though there are no metaphors and no genres is a terrible way to live as a Christian.
I did. And God helped me out of that. So, figures of speech.
Of course, you’ll have them in the historical accounts at times. We do that in our historical accounts. We just throw them in there without even thinking sometimes.
You know, they’re out on the porch shooting the breeze. They were doing what? They’re having a conversation about the weather. About what? You know, how many depths of figures of speech that we have we don’t even think about.
And the Bible has a lot of that to be certain for us today. And, of course, a lot of the illusions, which can be very tricky for us because they’re agricultural illusions. What about serpents? I’ve never seen a snake in my life.
I’m a city folk. So, those things are very helpful from commentaries that give you a lot of those details. Now, God giving us his word is accommodating us.
This is a popular theme of Calvin’s. God accommodates for us because of his love. That’s evidence of his love.
He didn’t have to do that for us. What are we but worms in his presence? So, he speaks to our language like babies. He speaks in our language the truths that we need to hear that make a great impact upon us.
He knows how stubborn and blind we are and that natural revelation is not sufficient given our current state of affairs. And he’s given us the word. The word of the Lord of Micah for you.
Having the word of God with you now, of course, is a blessing inestimable. Our brothers and sisters outside of Western civilization can attest because they struggle to find Bibles. And we have so many in our house, we forget how many we have.
And then we have how many digital ones? Nigh-infinite if we want. While we sit fat, drunk with prosperity, the wise in the use of the computers, wise with our clothes and coordination, makeup and history and politics, prayerfully we’re not ignorant of Bible truth that we ought to hear. To be humbled by the fact that God has given us this word and has accommodated to our fallen nature and given it to us in words and imagery that’s very lively and catches our imagination so that we pay attention.
It’s for you. Instruct your children so they may know more than you did, brothers and sisters, that we may submit altogether to his word, the Bible, the Bible that is from God, through men, for you. Which is the last point.
The Word is for You
It’s for you. It’s for the church today. One of the themes in Micah here is the oppression of the poor and the middle class.
Too bad this isn’t a video, you can see my face. Wow, what? Yeah, the middle class. It says you’re losing, all the land’s being taken.
Read it in chapter two. Go read it in chapter two, you’ll see it in verses four and five. The poor don’t have land.
I’ll let you chew on that for a while and see. Landlords, we’re taking it in verses one through five, so the middle class is highlighted in verses eight and nine of chapter two. And the landlords who were supported by the rich and corrupt political and religious leaders, chapter three.
And of course bad leaders affect the people bringing judgment upon the entire nation, chapter six and chapter seven. How God raises empires and uses war as judgment upon his people. That this judgment upon the Old Testament church is for breaking the covenant, he mentions in chapter six in particular.
But of course there is grace. Each of the cycle, although there’s a lot of judgment, ends with grace and mercy. God is faithful to his word and will preserve his remnants and will raise up a ruler from Judah, chapter five, verses one through five, as we know as Christ.
So these are the sub-themes. And this grace is a sovereign grace, not dependent upon our good works. You could see there’s no good works going on in Israel in the time of Micah and Isaiah.
That’s why they were given these prophets. Church leaders are mentioned here in the book. Jotham, in this verse here, is the father of Ahaz, the next king.
Jotham was considered a righteous king in the eyes of the Lord. However, he also failed to cleanse the temple of its pagan influence, 2 Chronicles 27 in particular. Jotham is listed as an ancestor of Jesus Christ in Matthew’s genealogy.
So this is the connection here we see. Ahaz, his son, allied with the Assyrians and perverted God’s worship. The three main accounts of Ahaz in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles treat him as one of the most evil rulers of the southern kingdom of Judah, as you recall.
He erected images for Baal and gave human sacrifice of his own son. Hezekiah, the king after Ahaz, although he did listen to Micah not fully, he rebelled against Assyria. If you recall, a number of times the prophets tell him, don’t fight against the pagan kings, you’re supposed to be punished.
Don’t fight the weapon, it just makes it worse. My father used to say. God does the same thing to his people, to us.
What about us? Are you humbled by the gift of God’s word, the Bible here, even Micah? That you have multiple copies of it? Do you use it? Do you memorize it? I know you try to and you ought to continue and not give up. May we heed the word of the covenant-keeping God, because where there is judgment, there is also redemption for those who are his people called according to his name. Let us pray.
With these words in the opening verse of Micah, God, may we come with the right mindset to learn from the book of Micah for ourselves, but also in the context of our society and our churches. Help us, Lord, that we may grow thereby for your glory alone. Amen.