Today we are seeing a resurgence of bleeding heart liberalism. Bleeding heart liberalism. Remember that old phrase? I don’t think we use it anymore.
We just talk about snowflakes. And they’re not all, of course, millennial snowflakes. They’re 60-year-old snowflakes.
People who wither under differences and disagreements. That’s what that idea is. They just fall apart into a puddle of water like a snowflake on a hot day.
The bleeding heart liberals of when I was a child and a young adult growing up, that old description, it means unduly or dangerously sentimental or emotional or too soft-hearted about alleged objects of misery. This is usually followed through with knee-jerk policies or actions that seem to be helpful but actually harm those who are to be helped. I’m not talking about politics.
I’m talking about the church. The history of liberalism and bleeding heart liberalism began and was accomplished simultaneously in the churches historically. And because of this mentality, this way of viewing problems in life, it becomes harder for people in the church to deal with judgment and wrath.
Sometimes people that we think we should be soft-hearted towards, we ought to give them instead over to God’s judgment. See, one of the old issues that the liberals dealt with was poverty. They said, well, they’re all poor, and they’re all deserving poor, and they all need the help that we’re supposed to give them.
Look at them. They’re starving in the streets. They have no roof over their head.
Don’t you have compassion for them, bleeding heart? I do. I have compassion, and I feel sorry for those who are in the street when they don’t have to be. You see, that’s the difference.
The liberals are like, no, no, no, they’re all deserving poor. No, they aren’t. You’ve heard my life stories.
As a child, when I grew up and my parents brought in people off the street, and all three different groups of people turned out to be a bunch of living off the system, undeserving poor. And it’s in the church, brothers and sisters. And this mentality, therefore, makes it harder for us to deal with judgment.
But God judges people, and He judges the church. And this is what we read about often here in the prophets of old. As I mentioned in the last sermon last week, we have a love-hate relationship with the prophets.
We love the parts about the coming Messiah and grace and mercy, not so much about the judgment part. You’ve got both of them. They’re both there, and we need both of them.
And so what I read here, what we see here in Micah, was that Micah, like us, was a man of like passions. And I’m sure, I can’t guarantee it, but I don’t doubt that he was tempted to be soft-hearted in that worst sense of the word and make excuses for his own people. These are his flesh and blood, right? And we have a similar thing in America.
We have a lot of overlap in history here. My family on both sides go deep into the South. And in the South, they have massive problems as well.
But he could not, as a prophet, and he would not make excuses. He uttered exactly what was coming, the coming doom upon the Old Testament church. And such doom comes not upon the Old Church only, but even upon us today, and I’d like to show that.
And although there is a particular sin here he emphasizes in verse 7, I’ll have another sermon on that, false worship, here the emphasis will be on just judgment. There is a judgment, and God judges his church. Judgment, the first point, against the Old Testament church.
Judgment Against Old Testament Church
We see here God, through the mouth of Micah, calling the world as a witness. Verse 2, Hear all you peoples, listen, O earth, and all that is in it. Not just the land of Israel.
Hear, O Israel. You hear that often, of course, with the prophets of old elsewhere. But it’s hear the whole world.
I want you to listen. God calls the world to witness his judgment against Israel. Why? Isn’t he enough? You only need God’s testimony that you’re wrong.
You have broken the covenant. I’m the other half of the covenant. We’ve made an agreement.
More precisely, I’ve made a unilateral agreement with you and brought you into it. Because the world is the Lord’s and all the fullness thereof. And they, the unbelievers, the goyim, have a conscience as well and know right from wrong.
But I think more specifically here with his audience, which isn’t the unbelievers, the non-Jews of the Old Testament, the witness is calling shame to Israel, who is favored of the Lord. But even the world knows how bad they are, how much they’ve broken the covenant. You claim to follow Yahweh, and God’s like, even the pagans, I call them as witnesses, they know you’re not following Yahweh.
They can read the Deuteronomic Code, the Bible, the Old Testament. And so it’s a slap on the face of the Jewish, the Old Testament church. This covenant-keeping God in particular is the witness.
Listen, O earth and all you peoples, let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from heaven and his holy temple, for the Lord is coming out of his place. It’s against you, Israel and Judah, the Old Testament church. The covenant-keeping God is saying you’re not keeping the covenant.
You’re disobeying, you’re breaking the law and the things that I’ve told you, and I have put up with it long enough. This is during the time of Isaiah. As you recall, Micah overlapped Isaiah.
Isaiah was a prophet amongst the rich people. He had a more exalted background, whereas Micah did not. He was among the more humble and the middle class as well.
But it doesn’t matter. All of society needed to hear this judgment. The time to be a Jew, to be a national Jew, is also to be a religious Jew.
It’s not like that anymore. Most of Israel is just full of secular atheists. Now, the judgment from God, the covenant-keeping Lord, who is coming against his people, is from the holy temple.
We see in the latter part of verse 2, the Lord comes from his holy temple. The temple, of course, represents the seat of God’s rule among his church in the Old Testament. And in fact, in prophetic imagery, the center of the whole world.
He rules through his church and his kingdom. And because it’s from the holy temple, the emphasis there, of course, is on his holy wrath. The impending judgment here sounds familiar there in the temple in verses 3-4.
For behold, the Lord is coming out of his place. He will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. The image I have is of God, the conquering king and judge.
You remember as a kid, perhaps you heard your father say, don’t make me get up and get you, and come get you. That’s what you have here. God’s like, I’m going to arise, I’m coming up, and I’m going to come down upon you hard.
The hammer is coming down. For behold, the Lord is coming out of his high place. He will come down.
His anger is aroused. And he leaves his holy abode to come deal with stubborn Israel. And to tread on the high places of the earth, verse 4, the mountains will melt under him, and the valleys will split like wax before the fire, like waters poured down on a steep place.
This imagery is of a coming king. It’s used elsewhere in ancient Near Eastern literature. When the king’s coming to bring destruction and nothing will stay in his way, the mountains will not stand in his way.
The valleys will not slow him down. They all just melt before his presence and collapse. And he walks straight towards his task, straight towards his goal, which is to bring impending doom upon the Old Testament church.
And this is the prophet speaking truth and love. Right? As you heard me say before, he’s not very winsome. Because there’s a time not to be winsome.
There’s a time to be winsome. There’s a time for mourning. There’s a time for laughter.
And here in Micah, and I think we are seeing increasingly in America, there is less time to be winsome and less time for rejoicing. In the church of God, even, I fear. The mountains and valleys will not slow down God.
How can Israel’s puny walls or prosperity protect them? That’s perhaps one way of looking at that as well in verses 3 and 4. Now, in verses 5 and 6, we have the beginning of the explanation of what exactly is wrong with the church at this time. What is the problem? And this is for the transgression of Jacob, for the sins of the house of Israel. We have a case against the church.
Verses 5 and 6. One side of conversation, it seems, of someone perhaps asking, what is the transgression? And so he answers, what is the transgression? You are asking me? Is it not Samaria? And what are the high places of Judah? The Jews are asking God, or the prophet, as he pretends he’s having a conversation with those who certainly are not listening to him. Are they not Jerusalem? Now, to understand this again, let us not forget, we have one child, but some of the younger adults may have forgotten the children, that Jacob is another name for Israel, where his name changed. But, interestingly enough, by this time, after Solomon, Israel is the northern part of Israel, and the southern part is called Judah, with Benjamin, the largest tribe, one of the smallest tribes.
So you have the southern tribes and the northern tribes, and north is called Israel, last Jacob, and the southern is called Judah. The northern has Samaria as its capital, and the south still has Jerusalem. This was the split, Rehoboam-Jeroboam after Solomon, and it stayed that way for a long, long time.
And so, this language here of judgment upon them, with the specific punishments listed a little later. Now, when he is talking to his audience, as it were, having a conversation with himself, what is the transgression of Jacob, you ask? Is it not Samaria? And what are the high places of Judah? Remember, the high places are the places of false worship that Israel fell into real early on in their life, in the land of promise, where they’d offer to the Baals of the time, or the Ashtoreths. Are they not Jerusalem? So what he’s saying is, you want to see what the real problem is, what the real transgression, the violation of my covenant and God’s law? Look to the capital cities.
Look to the cities. The leadership has fallen, and the people have followed the leadership, is the implication, it seems to me. We’ll see that later in these chapters, where God goes after not just the prophets, but the leaders of Israel.
Not just the false prophets, and the priests, and the leaders. They led the people down the wrong path. When public leadership and capitals, Samaria, Jerusalem, D.C., lead this way, the people are like, well, they can do it, and they can get away with it.
Why can’t I do it, and I can get away with it? That’s how people think. That’s how sin thinks. And it happens in the church.
We’re not immune to this. The audience, of course, knew what their sins were. They’ve probably had Isaiah for a little bit, and they know their own consciences.
Verse 7 finally makes it clear. All their carved images shall be beaten to pieces, and all her pay as a harlot shall be burned with fire. And all her idols I will lay desolate, for she gathered it from the pay of a harlot, and they shall return to the pay of a harlot.
The specific problems we have here with Israel, in these verses, more is listed in other verses. The specific problem we see here is adding to God’s worship, that which he did not add, murdering children for worship. I told you Ahab the king murdered his firstborn, offered him up on an altar for worship.
It was for worship. Don’t forget that. Here, the idea of harlotry is probably spiritual, but not necessarily.
Pagans had harlotry for worship. What’s the theme? False worship. Whatever they did, it doesn’t matter if they add to or take away from the worship of God.
It’s false worship. That’s what he hammers here in these verses. So that’s the case in the judgment against Samaria and Jerusalem, particularly Samaria here.
As I said, they were bad. Their kings compromised from the beginning, not being satisfied with the Davidic line of God’s rule. But, of course, Jerusalem was bad because they should have known better, and they had high places when they should not have.
They’re both problems, and God’s going to deal with both of them. In particular, the punishment upon Samaria. Therefore, in verse 6, I will make Samaria a heap of ruins in the field, places for planting a vineyard.
I will pour down her stones into the valley. I don’t think I need to describe any of this to you. It’s going to be wiped out such that you can even start planting and be a farmer there because everything’s going to be wiped out.
The stones will be uncovered down to the foundations. That’s the imagery because, typically, cities are built on other cities, and they just build layer upon layer upon layer. And God did that.
It became a heap of ruins, 722. God destroyed Samaria. Assyria came along and brought her under bondage, took down the capital.
She loses her idols and, therefore, has the evidence that God is real, and the idols are not. Your idols are lies. Your carved images shall be beaten to pieces.
What kind of a god do you worship that can be beaten down by another man? And the pay of the harlot, that is, not just the monies but things related to idolatry, worship all her idols. I will lay desolate, in verse 7, in the pay of spiritual harlotry, all the gold that was passed on and the like. They’re going to lose it all.
It’s all going to be taken away from them, and it was. This is the punishment and the judgment God has upon the Old Testament church. And He still exercises such punishments.
Judgment Against New Testament Church
We see judgment against the New Testament church. That is, in the New Testament, even against the New Testament church. In the New Testament era, we see during the time of Christ, He warns the church of that time, the Jewish church of that time, judgment is coming.
He sent John the baptizer first, saying, I am going to lay the axe at the root of the tree. It’s coming. Judgment is coming.
Don’t think you’re special because you are the children of Abraham. Christ said, I can raise up these rocks and stones right now and make new children of Abraham. Don’t be so arrogant and flippant.
He warns them. Christ had a lot of judgment. People like to skip those parts of Jesus’ teaching and ministry.
So He gives them a warning that His day is coming, and it does. The fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Christ warned them.
He prophesied it and explained it very carefully. Axe. We see that Christians are killed on the spot for lying and stealing.
What would you call that? That’s right, judgment. Does it make it any easier if I explain to you that judgment is the judgment of a father? I’m telling you, I was scared of my dad. We ought to be scared of God.
Enough. As they say, scared straight. Not scared stiff, but scared straight down the narrow path.
A holier motive, of course, is to do it because you love God, but fear, God will accept that in His people. In fact, He calls for it. And here’s the interesting thing as we go through Revelation.
In Ephesus, so chapters 2 and 3, you don’t have to go there. You probably remember this. You can read it tonight if you wish.
We have in Ephesus that they lost their first love. God says, I have done a lot of good things, and you’re zealous and do good works, but you’ve lost your first love, He says. You better repent, else I take away the candlestick from your midst.
And then there’s Pergamum, allowing wicked practices among you. How can you put up with such things? You better repent, He says. Or what? I mean, what’s the implication? Their judgment’s coming.
And then Thyatira, tolerating Jezebel. He’s using, obviously, Old Testament imagery to describe a woman or a party, probably a woman, including a party of so-called Christians in their midst with spiritual idolatry and wickedness and even fornication. He says, do something about it.
Oh, I’m going to do something about it. Sardis, repent for spiritual deadness. And it continues, but a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, he lists.
So, like some of the other churches, they are mixed. Some people doing wickedness are enough that gets God’s attention, and others who have not soiled their garments, that is, they are obedient and holy enough. We read of Philadelphia and Smyrna, only of praise.
No warnings. No, oh, I caught you, you better stop doing that. He praises them.
That’s it. And then Laodicea, those whom I love, he warns them, I reprove and discipline. So be zealous and repent.
And that’s Revelation 3.28. The end of the admonitions of the seven churches, probably presbyteries. He talks about the angels, that means messengers, so probably ministers. He was giving the message to the ministers of those cities.
The cities were large enough to have multiple churches. We know Ephesus had multiple, and Jerusalem as well. So it’s probably regional churches or presbyteries.
And he warns them. He praises them. But what do they have in common? What do all seven of these churches, regional churches, have in common with God’s exhortations and condemnations? What they have in common is that they are given to the entire body.
The warning is given to the entire church. The praise is given to the entire church. Now, do we think that the warnings given to the entire church therefore means every man, woman, and child had that specific sin? I don’t believe that.
It certainly doesn’t fit everyday experience. But enough of them do that God, through John the Apostle, warns the entire church because the entire church has a responsibility to keep itself pure. And you see that in some of the other churches, of course, in which God tells them, for instance, why are you tolerating Jezebel? What do you mean tolerating? He’s saying they’re not supposed to tolerate.
So although they’re not participating in the sin of Jezebel, they are materially cooperating with them and helping them and letting them come along when they should not be. They should say, uh-uh, our hands would be clean with this. We want no association with you because you’re going to be wiped out if you don’t repent, and it’s going to hurt us.
So there’s an organic relationship is what I’m saying. So although you may think to yourself, well, I don’t have those sins. Yes.
But if you go to a church that does have those sins, you’re going to get hurt too. Fire coming down from heaven. Use a metaphor.
Some of them may lick up your feet and burn your backside. Is that what you want? I know I don’t. That’s what these warnings are.
And if you’re not convinced that they didn’t all sin, I think the other way is to flip it around. Philadelphia and Smyrna only pray so there were no sinners. Not a one.
Those are the perfect churches. Woo-hoo! Let’s all go there. Of course there were sinners.
It’s just that God said it wasn’t of such a nature, and it wasn’t so widespread, and such a problem that I have to say something publicly about it. Right? Of course not. There was sin.
In other words, entire communities can be praised or judged by God. They can be praised or judged as a whole without having to explain that not every, each man, woman, and child did that good or did that evil. You just don’t have to talk that way.
And in fact, here with respect, more precisely, with respect to these communities, the entire community or church may be judged because of this. But it’s not my sin. It’s the other 90% of the people, all those Jezebels.
But God’s telling the entire church, you need to purge those Jezebels. You have to do something about it. I am dealing with the whole church as a whole unit.
It’s not this American individualism. Revelation 2.14, But I have a few things against you, because you have here those who hold the doctrine of Balaam. Thus you have also those who hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate.
Repent, or else I will come to you quickly, and I will fight against them with the sword of my mouth. He’s going after them, not you. He’s going after them, those who follow these heresies and lies and false practices.
But he tells all of them to repent. Why? Because they’re tolerating it and living with it. When the hammer of judgment falls upon them, it will affect the entire church, the innocent included.
We know that just from history. The Old Testament church, I mean, when Micah’s preaching to these people, we think every single one of them was blind. Of course not.
We know some of the prophets complained. It’s just me. Whoa, God, I’m the only righteous one here.
No, no, there are several hundred more that are righteous as well, but they’re in the church, and guess what? Guess who goes to Babylon? Jeremiah. What did he do? Nothing. So don’t think it can’t affect you.
Don’t think it can’t affect you, what’s happening in this nation and upon these churches. If there are enough sins in a church and if they’re of such quality, a problem, judgment could take the entire church out completely. Where’s the church of Philadelphia and Smyrna? Where are they? Why are they gone? You know, the promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against you is not given to any particular church.
As such, churches come and go. Why do they come and go? Often because of judgment, I believe. We’re not in a perfect world.
Sometimes, of course, it’s just a matter of there’s a small town, the town kind of dried up and the church dries up. Sure, that happens. But even then, that’s a form of judgment.
I mean, if there are people and there’s no church, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a bad thing not to have the church of God in the midst of people, even if they don’t take advantage of it. It’s better to have that than no church at all. They have no light of the gospel, even close to you.
So in that sense, it is a judgment. We’re all interconnected, brothers and sisters. That’s my point.
Judgment Against American Church
Judgment against the American church is real. It’s something I’ve struggled with for many years. I’ve seen it in my own lifetime, as I point out, just from the late 60s to now.
The amount of social transformation is absolutely historically without precedence, as far as I know in history. Absolutely incredible. Oh, sure, they had these problems in divorce and other kinds of problems in Rome, but it was a small minority at the top who had the money to do it.
The rest of the people are busy being slaves and working hard, even if they were lying and cheating to each other. It wasn’t the kind of wickedness, as I’ve read it, we have as widespread and pushed today. We have the tools to really push the wickedness, don’t we, and promote it amongst the middle class instead of just the rich and wealthy who have the money to act wickedly.
Why should we assume the American church is beyond judgment? Not because we’re better than the Old Testament church, not because we’re better than Philadelphia and Smyrna, who are now gone, by the way. We have false worship, like in this text. We have additions to worship.
We have plays and rock bands and female pastors and teachers. Don’t think it’s just the activity of worship itself. It’s also the elements of worship.
If you have a female teacher, you don’t have public worship. You have false worship, because God doesn’t want a female teacher. It’s not what he wants there.
And that doesn’t even count the doctrine. Some churches don’t even preach. Other churches don’t administer the sacraments.
Can you believe that? The goal! The absolute goal! Christ is pretty clear in the Great Commission. Baptized! Remember when we were in Christ, remember that, honey? This church doesn’t baptize. At least pretend, you know? Well, maybe not.
It’s greater judgment if they’re pretending, right? We do not have these problems I listed and other ones in our tradition. Although, I mean, it’s easy for me to say, well, we’ve got other problems. Of course, I know we have other problems, and we have personal sins and the like, but we have to compare quality, right? I mean, when you have a rock band and rock singing and worship that’s a guy preaching about how wonderful you are and God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, you don’t have worship.
You have something that’s heinous in God’s sight. That’s very bad. And I don’t think we’re arrogant here, and I don’t think I have to beat you over the head saying you’ve got to be humble and always remind yourself of your own sins.
Thank the Lord we don’t have that kind of worship. Do you thank God for that? I do. I grew up in that kind of worship.
You don’t grow in that worship. You starve. These are the churches that attract Christians and non-Christians and everything in between.
People pretend they’re Christians. They just do, right? When the American scene we have is how are you going to attract and grow a church? What’s the shortest distance between two points? The path of least resistance. The path of least resistance to give people what they want to hear.
Fun and excitement and loud. Whatever. And they grow.
So their false worship affects us, doesn’t it? You see that now? Their false worship. How does it affect us? These people are not coming to our church. You see, if all the churches were serious about God’s worship, they’d have no church to go to or kind of be forced to go to a good church.
Think about it. But we don’t have that. Now, humanly speaking, we’re competing with people with better tools than us.
I speak as a man in terms of the flesh and getting people’s attention. So, the other part of being affected by such churches, and it’s a judgment upon them. I mean, having false worship is not a blessing.
Doing bad things is not a blessing. And so, one way God heaps judgment upon people is giving more of what they want. They want more false worship.
God gives it to them. So that affects all of us. God is not pleased with the American church when it has this kind of worship.
Spiritual harlotry. Pretending it’s a God you’re praying to when it really isn’t Him. It’s a false God.
It’s a false ideal. It’s your made-up Santa Claus in heaven. But it affects all of us.
The bad parts, like the bad parts of Samaria and Jerusalem affecting the entire church. And the rest are, oh, we don’t have false worship, God. We’re one of your own.
I know, but it’s all of a piece. This is how God does it. That’s what I was talking about when I was wrestling with this for the years.
What does this mean to have judgment? How do we identify judgment when lots of bad things are happening? Because we don’t believe things are done by chance. And although I don’t believe there’s a one-to-one correlation, if I’m 90% obedient, then I get 90% goodies. Or if I’m 90% disobedient, I get 90% discipline.
Right? One-to-one is what I mean. There comes a point where it should be pretty clear there’s something seriously wrong. And I think we’re beyond that point now.
And we ought to warn one another and ourselves, we are in judgment. We need to pray out to God to protect us and protect our families and our churches. It affects us.
It affects our church. It affects our children. I have it here in my notes.
I need to add these notes later. And they influence our children as they may wonder why our church is so different and small. Right? Because they’re grabbing all the people with their false worship and their false doctrine and their false practices.
I mean, one of the easiest things is they don’t take the Sabbath day seriously. Ah, it’s another fun day. Be with your family.
You guys are so down to the mouth. That affects our kids. It affects you.
Judgment upon churches is real. We are seeing it here in America and our churches. The causes aren’t the exact here in terms of detail, but similar enough, as we’ll see through the rest of Micah.
For now, brothers and sisters, for now, pray. Pray earnestly. Pray without ceasing, brothers and sisters.
Not only for yourself, but for our children and our children’s children, that they will have faithful churches to attend. Pray for those confused and disobedient churches. You want to be concerned about being arrogant? Well, pray for them.
Don’t just forget about them. Oh, whatever, you know. And pray that God would be merciful to us and our children.
Amen. Let’s pray. Indeed, God, we cry out for your mercies.
We pray, Lord, and implore you to protect and watch over us as you protected the several hundred, nine hundred, seven hundred prophets, God of old, in the caves. And although we may not be in a cave, we may be in similar situations of being small and cramped and uncomfortable places, Lord, but we do it because we wish to have a pure worship, a pure teaching, pure practice. Help us, God.
Watch over us, we pray. Have mercy. Amen.