In a particular class of people, it would seem to me, we often think of deprivation for only the poor among us. They don’t own a home, they don’t have friends they are taken advantage of and the like and that certainly happens and it’s bad. Yet the Bible is concerned with all injustices in society and we catch a glimpse of that here in Micah.
Not only here, we’ll see a little bit elsewhere with other rulers and what they’ve done to the people and devoured them and taken them apart when they should be shepherding them as a father. It takes care of the children, but they do not and so God judges them. We see here in the opening verse 1 of chapter 2, Woe to those who devise iniquity and work out evil on their beds.
Planning to Steal Land
At morning light they practice it because it is the power of their hand. This is a very graphic illustration, we see similar things there in the Psalms and Proverbs, of evil hearts, conniving hearts, planning wickedness and transgressions of God’s law. Here the picture is of the knights, it’s perhaps literal because that does happen often, we think about these that is the wicked who wish to steal, think about things when no one else is around them and bothering them.
In the middle of the day you’re busy, you’re working, you’ve got servants around you, in this case they appear to be the rich upper class who have the ability to buy lots of land and pay off perhaps soldiers to bully people around or whatever the case may be. And what we certainly see here, of course, is that an evil heart comes before evil actions. That’s assumed in the Old Testament and explicated a few times in the Proverbs, for instance.
And here it’s assumed as well, that evil hearts come before evil actions, sin and evilness and violations of God’s law and going after and tearing down our neighbors and the like proceeds from the heart. Right? That’s what it comes from, brothers and sisters. We should not forget that and belittle it.
You think about it first, which can lead to more thinking about it, thinking a little more about it and perhaps even meditating upon it and then eventually you hatch out a plan and you start scheming. That’s the word here to devise or scheme in the negative sense, sometimes it can be used positively to devise good things, but often it’s negative so it’s the idea of scheming. Obviously if it’s at night and no one’s around, what can I do? How can I work out stealing from my neighbor? Stealing from those around me so I can be a little more richer, a little more prosperous.
The scheming and planning to sin to work out the execution of transgressions of God’s law for their own gain. So we see here covetousness, don’t we? Remember God gave us the Ten Commandments and we go through the prophets and often they’re hammering home why you are violating and describing in graphic detail often the sins and violations of God’s people. And here it’s a certain part of God’s people that are covetous, that are greedy, they want more, they are not satisfied and so they perhaps even daydream about it throughout the day and at night they’re devising things before they go to bed to work out evil on their beds.
Now of course most large-scale crimes need some kind of scheming. It’s not like I gave the one scenario where you’re in the store and you see a freebie out on the counter and no one’s looking so you grab it and you walk out of the store. That’s a sin of opportunity we say.
That’s different than long-term scheming and conniving and conspiracies as we are discovering in our nation. Crimes of this magnitude where it talks about here in verse 2 coveting, desiring and going and lusting after fields and houses and taking them. Not just one but many.
And perhaps a lot of them as we see in Isaiah 55 verse 8 we’ll hear a little bit later. You take away lands, I would suggest to you the idea here is taking away lands while looking innocent and good before the world. You don’t need scheming if you’re just going to be a plain old tyrant and just hit them over the head because you have more soldiers than they do.
Or in this time they would pay off the neighbors to burn down the neighbor’s house and take over the land or something like that. No, this is more subtle I believe given what we see from other parts of the Bible. And so the idea is whose palms do we grease? What laws do we have to work around? What public rationalizations can we use? Who can we frame? Right? We see that in America.
Politics locally. Statewide. Nationally.
The lies and the conniving and the ways they can get around things so they can get more money and get away with it. Speaking engagements. No quid pro quo here, right? We see that in America.
They always try to make a facade. That’s why scheming. You’ve got to somehow work it out so you come out not looking too bad.
Even better you can look like the hero. That’s what you see with politicians and the crimes they try to pull off sometimes. No, I’m really doing the best thing there is.
Murdering and butchering and selling baby parts with a smile on your face. Now we’re blessed that we’re not a banana republic like you hear about down south where this stuff runs rapid. It’s everywhere.
They don’t even pretend. They don’t even pretend. There’s no scheming there.
They just grab the soldiers and come in and take what they want. So it’s not full tyranny I believe. One thing I want you to notice.
Who they are stealing from in verse 2. They covet fields and take them. Also houses. What? They’re coveting houses and they steal them? Who are they coveting? The poor? Do poor people have houses and fields where they can farm? It’s the middle class.
Isn’t that interesting? I saw that in one of the commentaries. I had not thought about that before. That’s, I can’t say anything else around it.
It’s the rich and maybe close to being rich are politicians who have power and influence who want to be even richer going after the middle class. They want the houses and they want the land. I mean frankly what are you going to steal from a poor person? Not a house and not land.
Don’t forget, remember poverty back then. I mean that was poverty. Not like what we have today.
So, the rich can protect themselves from other rich typically. They can have walls. The houses back then if you had the money you’d have a wall and you’d have some of your own servants who have a little bit of experience with a sword or a spear as we see with Abraham for instance.
That brings us to point 2. Stealing land is oppression. Verse 2. What they are scheming is to steal from others. It looks like the middle class to me.
Stealing Land is Oppression
We all remember the story of Ahab and Naboth. Right? This sounds just very much like that. It’s not a lot of detail as I said.
They don’t tell us the machinations going on behind the scenes and I just gave you a little snippet of it because we have a picture of that there in the Bible where a rich king who is greedy wants the vineyard and his wife does what? She makes up charges. She didn’t just go over there with soldiers and take the land. There was still enough as it were civic righteousness people aren’t going to put up with that, that she had to put a facade upon it, right? That’s what I think is going on here.
Otherwise the people would probably grab arms and just go after them. You can see back then they didn’t have a standing army in the way we have a standing army today. The average man could have a sword and a spear just like the average soldier.
And even a shield. And most of the fighting men came from the middle and the lower class so they already knew how to fight. As we see with, I mean David was a kid taking out lions.
What do you think the adults did? So you put all the pieces together, oh wow, there’s a lot of machinations going on here and scheming and planning when we understand the society at the time very much like today. Right? Very much like today. It’s quite astounding.
Now the text here gives no details as I say so I grant I could be wrong in some of this but it certainly fits the pieces together when you see the story of Ahab and Nabal where he was lied about and they brought up false charges and they took him away and killed him and took his land. This text gives no details. It mentions violence that’s the closest you get.
It doesn’t tell you anybody died. It could be physical violence just beating up the neighbor perhaps, like I said, paying off some soldiers to come by and rough the guy up until he just gives up and sells the house. I don’t know.
We don’t know the particulars. But we have a glimpse of what the Bible calls oppression. The text here calls it oppression.
So, in verse 2, they oppress a man and his house or his household, his family. Oppression. That word in the Hebrews, acts of abuse of power or abuse of authority, the burdening, trampling and crushing of those lower in station to whom much is given, much is required.
And the rich or the politicians or a combination of both, whoever it is here must not burden or unduly burden trample and crush those of lower station who are not as rich as they are don’t have the connections, aren’t leaders in society. Right? So here we have what oppression looks like. It’s oppression upon the middle class.
I didn’t plan this scenario to mess with the parallel society where we are today where all this talk of oppression doesn’t follow that pattern. They don’t think about the middle class being oppressed in our society. I don’t know how to get around it.
There are people with houses and lands and they’re losing it. And God calls that oppression. It’s an injustice whether you’re rich, poor or indifferent.
God takes it that way and we ought to take it that way and not take our cues of what oppression is defined as by our society. You see that? You see how it bleeds into our churches? Into our minds. We’ve never thought about it before.
I have and I certainly thought it was wrong what’s been going on. But these verses here cement and bring it to clarity, I hope. Unjust enclosures and depopulations.
Now that’s not in the text here, those words. I get this out of the larger catechism from the Puritans in the 1640s which is part of our confession of what we tell the world we believe the Bible says. So this is larger catechism question 142.
I commend it to you on the 8th commandment Thou shalt not steal. What does that mean? What does that look like? If you’re curious, read larger catechism question 142 and you’ll see all the proof texts given to you. And one of the proof texts for oppression and specifically unjust enclosures and depopulations is this text right here as well as Isaiah 5.8. Put that in your footnote if your Bible doesn’t have Isaiah 5.8. There it says, Woe to those who join house to house, they add field to field, that there is no place where they may dwell alone in the midst of the land.
They’re buying up houses and lands until they’re running out of places to buy and live in anymore. So this is kind of an expansion of this idea of unjustly taking the land but even worse than that, you’re buying so much, what are you going to do with it? Land upon land, house upon house, they’re butt up to each other because you have more than you really need. You’re being greedy and taking away all the land and the prosperity from others.
Perhaps the word is monopoly. I don’t know. I’m not necessarily saying we make a straight connection to economics which is not my forte but I’ll tell you, economics interplays with society and this is obviously a social issue he’s dealing with here.
And we should not be blind to investigating these matters and applying God’s word as we are able in good conscience. We can disagree of course. Now when I talk about unjust enclosures and depopulations, my thought was when I went over the law of God a few years ago, and we’ll go over it again, I think we’re going to go over it again this year, what in the world were they talking about? That old KJV language, right? So God gave us the internet.
Now he gave us the internet but the internet isn’t for everyone. You have to know where to look and how to look and know the sources you’re reading are good enough sources. And there’s a place called books.google.com which I highly recommend to you if you like reading historical books and like reading original sources.
They scan stuff from the 15th, 16th, 17th, 1800s. Original books scanned online. And since it’s all digital, you can do word searches.
And I looked up the word enclosure. And I looked up depopulation. And I found a law book from the early 1700s defining what those words mean.
Isn’t that great? I don’t have to find a PhD to do all this for me anymore. Some specialist somewhere. So enclosures and let me tell you, their spelling back then is atrocious.
They’re not even consistent. So it makes it hard to do word searches. Enclosures are the fencing in of farming land.
Right? Enclosing the land. Usually for animals. Now this makes sense in an agrarian society which is about, I don’t know, 98% of the world for the last 6,000 years.
So this is a serious social concern. We need arable land. Land for food.
And here you are if you know some of the old western stories between the farmers and the cowmen. Right? The cowboys. Hey, we need all this land to graze.
No, we need the land for the farm. That’s the debate here. You see that? Depopulations is pretty much what it says.
You’re shrinking the population because you’re enclosing the land about it. And I’ll show you here the Law Dictionary of 1708. Depopulations.
And decay of towns for wherein some towns 200 persons were employed and lived by their lawful labors by converting tillage for the land, farming land, into pasture only 2 or 3 herdsmen are now maintained. I would say going from 200 people in a town to 2 or 3 would be called a depopulation. You don’t think that’s a social concern back there in England? Whoa, what’s going on? Were these people going to work now? What’s going on here? They had big poverty.
I’ve studied some of that in my own historical research on Christian education where they would educate the poor kids for free and house them for free. There was just poverty everywhere in England in the late 1600s early 1800s. So, it’s quite a conundrum.
Think about it. All the scenarios you’d run across. Now, the Confession is clear about this.
It says unjust enclosures. It’s not saying whenever you enclose it’s always wrong, whenever you fence off. And the resultant depopulations, the original Confession uses that language.
That is when it leads to bad effects. And you lose enough people that’s going to affect you, isn’t it? Where your resources are going to come from. Because no man is an island, especially in our day and age, the problem is more acute in many ways, interestingly enough.
At least back then, a lot more people were farmers. You can try to find a farmer down a few miles down the street. We don’t have farmers.
We just got whatever we happened to have, transportation, to get the food to us. So, that’s unjust enclosures and depopulations. And this text here gives us the principle of that importance there.
That the coveting of fields and taking them by violence of course is thievery. But the greater effect is there’s a lot of this going on. And we see with a couple of those AF5A where they’re buying up houses where are people going to live with one or two people buying up all these houses now? And taking up all the fields.
Depopulation is the implication there. Land was important back then for two reasons. One, it’s always important in all societies everywhere because you can grow things on it.
You can live on it. You can put your house there and sustain yourself and have a good little family and carry on with life. That’s good.
The second reason is God gave it a specific signification. Religious or ceremonial is probably the best language. Reasoning behind it because remember they come into a promised land and what’s the first thing God tells them? You must divide the land by lot.
And every family or clan in the tribes gets some land. And what happens every 50 years? Any land you sold or rented out goes right back to you. Remember that? So everyone comes back to their original inheritance.
Or they were supposed to. Now that’s a problem. God made that a rule for them what they call positive law like going to bed at 9 o’clock at night.
It comes and it goes. We don’t have a jubilee as such although there’s perhaps things we can learn from that like not be so greedy with our land and growth. But behind that is still the idea here of just stealing.
Just forget the jubilee and all that. That’s as it were a layer over the moral law. Take the layer apart.
That’s what I’m looking at. What’s the law? Thou shall not steal. What does that look like? The 8th commandment.
What does that look like? So enclosures that lead to depopulations. This is their thinking. This is their experience from the 1500s that I can find and onwards.
I’m not an expert so they maybe had it even later than that. I would suspect they did. Here we have for instance in the Journal of the Parliament in 1682 for enclosures of grounds brings depopulation and we saw that.
200 people down to 2. Oops. Which brings forth idleness. People have no job.
They’ve got nowhere to live. Secondly decay of tillage so the land’s no longer being used for food. Thirdly subversion of houses or households.
Decay of charity. If you’re not working and you’re idle and you’ve lost your job you’re not going to give charity to the poor people. You are poor and therefore charges to the poor.
Fourthly impoverishing the state of the realm. So it affects the whole society if you get enough of this. It becomes critical mass as we say.
It happens in small scale. That’s going to happen. You can’t micromanage the world but enough of this happens.
It becomes a problem back then in England. Here we have in the history of King Henry VII written by Sir Francis Bacon in the late 1500s. He talks about open fields and enclosed fields there to help maintain that is a good balance.
Remember not all enclosures are unjust. Just unjust enclosures that lead to bad effects. And they were struggling with this.
So Sir Francis Bacon describes part of the struggle and how they made a balance between the open land, the tillage, and the enclosed land to this end. But they, he says, took a course to take away depopulating enclosures. This did wonderfully concern the might and mannerhood of the kingdom.
It affected the kingdom for good. To have farms sufficient to maintain an able body out of poverty and did not amortize a great part of the lands of the kingdom unto the hold and occupation of the yeomanry or the middle class or middle of people of a condition between gentlemen and cottagers and peasants. In other words, to help maintain the middle class.
This is, I mean, maybe I’m weird. I thought that was absolutely fascinating. And then, you know, I already saw, before I looked up what these words meant, that this text, it seems to me is the rich are going after the middle class.
They’re buying other houses. Too many houses. By violence.
So they’re not doing it legitimately. There’s something going on behind the scenes. Scheming and the like.
And there’s apparently an old political theory about that. You hurt enough of the middle class, you’re going to end up with an oligarchy. Too many rich people overruling the poor.
Or revolution, because the poor people aren’t going to put up with it anymore. And at least with the middle class, the poor people can kind of go, that’s something I can shoot for. And it is in America in particular.
It has been for a long time. But if you just go poor and have the straight jump to rich, rich, you’re not going to get there. You’re not going to get there in your lifetime.
So it’s quite fascinating that way, where we are in our society even. Three, losing inheritance as punishment, verses three through five. Therefore, thus saith the Lord, behold, against this family I am devising disaster.
Losing Inheritance as Punishment
You’re going to steal from people? I’m going to take away your land as well. What we call poetic justice, right? Poetic justice. They devise, God says, I will devise disaster.
In verse one it says, woe to those who devise iniquity. You see, you can hear it in the English and it’s the same in the Hebrew. To play on words.
You’re going to devise things and scheme things? I’m going to devise and scheme things and you’re not going to like it. I’m coming down on you and I’m taking your land from you. They lose their inheritance, verse four.
Divided our fields, it says. We lost them. They lost them to strangers.
A strange nation, right? The Assyrians are coming along and taking it from them. The judgment from God and the form of war wasn’t just only, you’re going to die? Because it’s war. But you’re also going to lose your land, even if you do survive.
Why? Because you went after your own people. That’s why I have that as part of the point. Stealing is bad, but you steal from your own people.
What in the world? I’m going to have strangers come along and steal your stuff. It’s a national loss of land stolen by the Assyrians, as I said. This national calamity that comes upon Israel for various and sundry reasons, but one reason is here.
The deprivation, the suppression and stealing of people who have a few houses and a few homes and you’re taking them all up. Isaiah 5.8, don’t forget, was a contemporary of Micah. Isaiah was.
He’s complaining about a similar thing there, with a different description. This greed, never being satisfied. I’ve got to be bigger.
I’ve got to be a global, a trans-universal business, perhaps. No, you don’t have to grow forever. You can stop.
It’s okay. In fact, you should. So, this national calamity comes upon them.
We see the poetic justice, evil nations today. We’ve seen poetic justice where they wish to live by the sword like they did in World War I or World War II, and they lost because they died by the sword. That’s a common theme in life and in the Bible.
And as we see the judgment come upon this nation, perhaps we can work backwards if we wonder exactly what our sins are and by how we are being punished. What of justice today, brothers and sisters? First, justice is not universally enforced. What I mean by that was Israel of old, which was not only a church but also a nation.
Do not forget, the two were not confused. 2 Chronicles 19 reminds us there are two different courts. The court of Yahweh, it says, of God, and the court of the king.
Yahweh was centered in Jerusalem with the priests, and the court of the king was centered in the throne room. Two different courts. They overlapped.
The membership was the same in the church and the state. That’s true. That’s a different question.
But it was two different entities, a church and a state. And that’s significant for our evaluation of the Old Testament and applying God’s law today. To what extent is this applicable to the church, and to what extent is it applicable to society? You see that now? Instead of this old, well, yeah, the church and Israel were just, the church and the nation were just one thing, and you can’t really distinguish between the two, and so nothing’s really applicable.
No. No, no, no, no. A thousand times no.
There is a thing called a nation. It was the nation of Israel, and they had laws common with many other nations, as perhaps you remember in Deuteronomy. And so, I point this out, that Israel was not running around enforcing God’s law upon other nations.
That’s what I mean. And again, hence in my subject line for the sermon, especially against your own people, stealing from your own people. We are not called to go to Africa and make them American.
We deal with our own problems, and we have enough problems, we’ll always have problems. As Christ reminds us, what? The poor you will always have with you. Let’s take care of our own poor brothers and sisters, and our own middle class.
Secondly, unity of a nation is implied in Micah. Israel is not a singular nation church, as I said, but it is a nation. And love, therefore, is local.
I preached on that. Local physically, and especially relationally. That is, nearness relationally.
And local, which again for thousands of years was pretty much the same thing. You never left the orbit of ten miles at most. Anybody ever did.
Very rare. And so you love, you love things and people closest to you. And you see somewhat of a pattern perhaps here in the background, or at least I see it, and you’ll see it now too.
You see in verse 2, 3, and 4 the social background assumed here. Two, it talks about the houses and the homes. The oppressor man and his house or his home, bet.
You’ve heard that perhaps in Bethlehem. Three, we talk about a family or a clan. Behold against this family, it’s a different word.
I am devising a disaster, or clan sometimes is translated. And four, the people or the nation shall suffer. And then finally at five, the assembly of the people of God in verse 5, where they have no longer an inheritance.
This is a layering of society by groups, which is what we roughly have in all nations everywhere. We have our family, the usually extended family until perhaps the last hundred years or so. We have our clan, which would be a larger almost like tribe, which are small countries like Luxembourg perhaps.
Our community we would have in America, we would have our local community which would be a lot of people who have a lot of commonality, maybe even family commonality remotely. And then of course the people or nation. That’s just how things work biologically and geographically.
It’s just the nature of all nations to one extent or another. And so stealing from a family member, brothers and sisters here, not only in the Lord, in the assembly, but just naturally by being in the same nation. Stealing from your family member is worse than stealing from a stranger.
Do you ever think about that? Why would I say that? What would make that crime more heinous? Who took care of you? Who took care of you? Your parents took care of you. And your siblings to some extent, usually the older siblings or the younger siblings protected you, played with you. I mean if you have a sibling they’re playing with you.
That’s taking care of you. We need play. We need times of prosperity and relaxation, feeding you, clothing you, and rearing you.
So it is a worse crime. It is a worse sin. And I think the same holds true by general moral parallel with nations.
And so these people are stealing from their own people. The rich people from the middle class people. Ultimately of course their judgment upon them is that they are punished by losing their place in the church membership of the covenant.
Verse 5, therefore you will have no one to determine the boundaries by law in the assembly of the Lord. You’ll have no inheritance in the land of promise. Oops.
That’s a serious thing back then, isn’t it? You have no place in God’s kingdom, he’s saying. Unless of course they repent. Oppression of the middle class is I believe a clear application of this text in Isaiah 5.8 in accordance to our Puritan tradition.
If we take the historic understanding of the Puritans, the concern of losing the middle class is a real concern. It’s real today. You’re probably not aware of this because the mainstream media doesn’t care or even rejoices in the loss of the middle class, which has been happening for the last 20 years.
Where now it’s become so bad that there’s an opioid crisis and a drunkenness and suicide crisis among the working middle class in America. The only thing, they’re just dying. This generation is the first time there’s more of them not being more prosperous than their fathers.
All the way up until perhaps the 90’s or so. Every generation I’ve seen the numbers. Every young man at 20 had as many opportunities and more than his parents for generations.
It’s now lost. It’s gone. We used to call it the backbone of America, didn’t we? And they’re dying right before our eyes.
Lands perhaps being stolen. I don’t know about that in particular, but my point being that the middle class is a concern in our nation. Oppression of the middle class should be a concern.
The oppression is more indirect, in my opinion, through trade deals we’ve done for 25 years. Again, the numbers. I’ve looked at them again.
If you want them I can find them for you. I’ve looked at the original numbers. And the manufacturing business went out.
It’s gone. Boom. 20 years.
And it’s not as like, the young people forget this, all those 1 in 5 people want to be communists. When you’re 40, you don’t just turn on a switch and get a new job. Especially one that pays well.
For one thing, employers don’t want to hire you. They’d rather hire someone cheap and young. And that’s not taken into consideration in our nation because it’s very much every man for himself.
We don’t think in terms of a society anymore, or community anymore. It’s been broken down. And that’s another sermon.
Another Sunday school class. So there’s three particular oppressions I’d like to highlight. One, lying about the middle class and saying they’re all a bunch of racists.
Brothers, sisters, it’s true. That’s what they’re saying. The media says it and the media rejoices.
I’ve seen them. The headlines. People have nice little collections.
I’ll tell you one thing about Facebook. Memes are helpful because they can pump a lot of headlines and a little bit of meme there. So what they’re doing is stealing the good reputation of men and women.
You see that? They’re stealing their good name. Two. Oppression two.
Abuse of imminent domain. Right? Abuse of imminent domain. Usually it’s the poor middle class neighborhoods that have to lose their land for a Walmart.
Not the rich neighborhoods. Not the politicians. That happened in Nevada as I recall about four or five years ago.
It was unprecedented in Colorado as I recall reading into it. Usually it’s historically been common services like a park we can all participate in. As opposed to a paid service like Walmart who all of a sudden gets a good boost of money for themselves.
The rich have influence in politicians and if you don’t know that yet, please ask some of us and we’ll show you to avoid imminent domain problems in their neighborhood. Oppression three. Misuse of rezoning.
Ever thought about that? Rezoning is a quite fascinating issue with respect to stealing and the like in our nation. Rezoning is typically given to the local authorities. People close to the matter.
And it should be because they ought to live in the same neighborhoods they’re rezoning. And you don’t want a rezoning of what? Oh I don’t know a prison across from your neighborhood? How’s that going to help your property values? Let alone your safety and security that you’re concerned about. And so rezoning can be used in an oppressive manner towards low income housing and even middle class people as well.
Rezoning is quite an interesting issue and that’s where we are today. Someone’s got to decide what to do with the land and consider the best for everyone involved. Not just for one person who’s got a lot of money and reach and wealth.
Pray for justice brothers and sisters. Pray for good leaders. Preferably Christian of course.
But if not still there are good leaders out there. Pray for the rich to repent. They are greedy and we are all rich historically.
Perhaps we need to repent ourselves. And resist the temptation to ever want more and never be satisfied. Devising in the middle of the night.
Pray for our poor and our middle class neighbors brothers and sisters that they be not oppressed. Let us pray. Our God above as we meditate upon these words and the details here God and think about our nation.
We do pray for them Lord. We don’t desire their oppression. We desire their prosperity but especially the prosperity of their souls.
May Lord the gospel of Jesus Christ be brought to them we pray. Amen.