You know what a cannibal is, Rene? It’s here in the Bible. What did we just read? We read about people eating other people. Now, in the Bible here, it means it’s a figure of speech to get our attention.
And we’ll talk about that. They’re not literally eating the flesh of Jews. Jews eating Jews.
They’re metaphorically, and yet, that graphic imagery shows us how much God hates it, and how terrible of a crime, of a sin, that these people are doing. In the military, while working on radar jamming equipment, that’s the stuff where the airplane can fly at a missile, and the missile would go stupid. It would jam the radar on the missile.
It was a fun job that way. Working on jamming equipment, radar jamming equipment, we would use spare parts from other equipment, similar stuff that was not fully functional anyway. That was called cannibalizing.
You would cannibalize for parts. You do that in the tech industry in general. It’s called cannibalizing.
You do that for cars. You go to a junkyard and cannibalize in the car, right? Taking pieces from the same class of things called cars, and bringing it to another car, and making it better. You don’t care about that part you’re cannibalizing.
It’s just junk. It’s never going to work. It’s missing important parts, or some parts are broken, but enough works that you can use it.
It’s what you can get out of it. And that’s the kind of cannibalism going on in Israel. The rich and the leaders, and the rich leaders as well, a combination of both, didn’t care about the poor and the middle class.
It’s what they can get out of them, and how they could use them, and feed upon them, socially and economically especially. They only cared about what they can get for their own gain and profit. And as we look around the church, and especially society, the next sermon will especially cover the church, where we talk about the prophets in verse 5 and following.
Here, it’s all the leaders in general, probably inclusive of the religious leaders, but we’ll be talking about society as such. We have the wicked rulers in verses 1-2, denounced by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of Micah. And I said that as Micah, Hear now, listen, heed.
Wicked Rulers Denounced
That’s the same word as Shema Yisrael. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. And that word, of course, is not just hear.
Okay, I hear you. That’s interesting, God. But heed, right? We say that to our children.
Did you hear what I said? What we mean is, are you heeding? Are you obeying? Are you processing through your ears and out your feet and your hands? That’s the same picture here. It’s the way the Hebrews used this word. Hear now, O heads of Jacob, and you rulers of the house of Israel.
This hear, this listen, or in this special case, right, repent, obey. That’s the implication when highlighting their sins. Isn’t that what he wants? Of course that’s what he wants.
He mentioned three times. We have three cycles here in the entire book, as you recall. And each one starts with hear, hear, hear.
And it has a lot of judgment. And then the one cycle ends with a slight picture of goodness and a beautiful glimpse of the future. And the next cycle does the same thing.
It’s a lot of bad judgment. And at the end, there’s a glimpse of the glorious future of Christ Jesus coming. And it gets brighter and stronger through the prophecy.
When God speaks these words through the mouth of men, because Micah was a man, we ought to listen. We shouldn’t say, ah, he’s just a man. He’s not the Bible.
If he speaks the truth of the Bible, as pastors are supposed to, as elders are supposed to encourage, and all of us, in fact, can do this, because Galatians tells us to admonish one another. With what? The truth of the Bible. Then we ought to listen.
And he speaks the truth, it’s clear truth, and they ought to have listened to him, because we know they make excuses elsewhere, Jeremiah and the like. Oh, you’re just a man. Who are you? You think you’re someone special? You who hate good and love evil, as he describes them.
Wicked Rulers Described
It is not for you. Is it not for you to know justice? So he sounds like probably he’s mocking them. You’re the leaders.
You’re supposed to be godly judges and rulers. You’re supposed to exercise justice. What’s your problem? Come on, you who know justice.
Yeah. Yeah, right. Do your job.
That’s what he’s saying. Do your job. Judges, kings, elders, priests, prophets, the fathers, fathers over the clans, and fathers over the households, which are within clans.
You’re supposed to exercise justice. Do it. Do your job.
Anyone with social and political power, I would argue. Even if it is an official position. So today, the closest of that idea, of someone who’s unelected, would be the Hollywood stars, right? You’re supposed to, as you can, be a good example.
Do your job, especially those who are elected in society, with people under them, either in business or in government. Exercise justice for the poor, the needy, and anyone else. I know the Old Testament emphasizes the widow and the orphan and the like, because, of course, they’re the ones that are easy to get trampled on, because the rich can pay off the judges, and, in fact, you have that in the next few verses, in the next section, where their bribes are being taken.
The poor people can’t do bribes. But, the justice of the Old Testament isn’t, oh, therefore the poor are always right. It just means, before the courts of the law, they shouldn’t have everything stacked against them.
It should be even, whether you’re rich or poor. Justice is the blindfold holding the weights of justice. So, don’t abuse power over those who are underneath you, is the general idea here.
You who hate good and love evil. What a terrible way to describe somebody. Think about that.
Would you want someone to tell you, you, young man, young lady, are someone who loves evil and hates righteousness, hates goodness. No, that’s a serious accusation. Micah, through the Holy Spirit, is making serious accusations to the leaders of Israel.
You hate good and love evil. What is your problem? Such wickedness. Everyone, of course, is a sinner, but some sin more than others.
And if it’s so bad that these people can be described, in general terms, as loving evil and wrongdoing, that’s a lot of sin indeed. So, these are not just passing crimes. Every society has problems, of course.
You can never have enough good laws, because there’s always going to be wicked people. But the wickedness is so bad, that he just describes whole classes of the leadership as under this wicked desire to go after wickedness and evil and to hate, not just love the evil, but to hate the good. I don’t want to do good.
I hate that path. Who wants to help the oppressed? Who wants to help the poor? Who wants to help God’s people? Not me! He denounces them, in no uncertain terms. And they ought to be quaking in their boots, these so-called leaders who are supposed to dispense justice and are supposed to love the good and hate the evil.
We ought to pray. That’s why I have that in the title, right? Every commandment has the opposite by implication. And here, every denouncement has the opposite of we should be encouraging the right and denouncing the wrong.
We should be encouraging the opposite of this in our leaders, right, in society, our judges, our rulers, our sheriffs, or whatever position of authority it is. Then he describes exactly what the problem with them is. Not exactly.
There’s not a lot of detail here. It’s quite gruesome. You who hate good and love evil, who strip the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones, who also eat the flesh of my people, flay their skin from them, break their bones, and chop them in pieces like meat for the pot, like flesh in a cauldron.
Eating people as an everyday meal, that’s the picture here. And that’s what you do. You make your pot, chop up your food, and you throw it in.
We’re ready to eat. You take the animal, you skin it, you take the meat off the bones, you prepare it, chop it up. That’s what it’s describing here, except with humans.
It’s not a picture of someone stuck on a desert island and having to choose, should I eat somebody or die? This is just happening every day in Israel where the rich are sleeping on their bed at night, not fully, half-awake, contemplating, how can I strip the skin from my neighbor tomorrow morning? They devise wickedness on their bed, it says, in Micah 2.1, as you recall. And wake up in the morning and use their power for evil. And at morning light, they practice it.
This is repulsive. This is disgusting. And it should be.
Reading this passage, that’s pretty gruesome. That’s fairly graphic. That’s what Micah wants you to get from this.
He wants you to be repulsed. He wants you to be even angry with righteous indignation. How can people do this, devour one another? This is, of course, hyperbolic metaphor.
Hyperbole is the obvious and intentional exaggeration in extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as in the phrase, to wait in eternity. We know that. What I always say is, you exaggerate for effect.
And it’s intentional. You’re not lying. Everyone knows you’re not lying.
And the prophet here is not saying people are actually eating flesh at this time, although it does happen with the fall of Jerusalem, by the way, when they are locked up and can never escape Jerusalem. They’re there for months on end until they just eat one another in 70 A.D. No, that doesn’t happen. It happened in the Old Testament as well, as a matter of fact.
No, that’s not what’s going on here. It’s a common occurrence in the Bible. And, in fact, Christ does it.
He uses hyperbole. Can you think about where? First thing that always comes to my mind. Pluck out your eye if it offends you.
I remember being 12 or 13, reading this going, What in the world? That’s Jesus talking about. It’s hyperbole. He’s exaggerating to get your attention.
He’s saying, Sin is so bad, you better be paying attention. What are you going to do to avoid the circumstances, cause, means, and occasions that lead to your sin? An example I always like to use is, Will you throw the TV out the window if you have to? That’s the kind of stuff Jesus is talking about. Not literally maiming yourself.
So, the point, of course, the cannibal metaphor, which is what this is, is to get their attention. I think I got it. Got my attention.
Got a few people on Facebook, like, Oh, what an interesting title, Cannibals in America. It highlights how heinous their social sins are. These aren’t just spontaneous sins or small sins, cause there are small sins and big sins.
We all understand this. These are heinous, widespread, terrible social oppression. And it highlights how traitorous they were against their own nation.
You know, the imagery here isn’t they’re doing bad things, they’re spearing one another like an animal. No, it’s you’re eating one another. You see, so it’s your own family feeding upon itself.
That’s the worst kind of betrayal, right? Someone you know, yes, even my dear friend has betrayed me, as the psalmist points out, right? That’s the most harmful kind of sin. And that’s what we have here, where it’s not these men, these wicked rulers and wicked rich people in cahoots with the rulers, ripping off Egyptians. That’s wrong, and that’s bad.
It’s worse than that. They’re ripping off their own people. Or you should have more mercy.
We talked about this when I had the Sermon on Love. You take care of your own people first. You have to prioritize.
And you do. You have to prioritize all the time. We only have so much time and talents.
And the same here. And so this brings in yet another layer. It isn’t just simply they’re doing bad things.
It’s who they’re doing bad things to. They’re doing it to each other. It’s supposed to be God’s people.
What kind of a church is this? In the New Testament, James warns them, don’t eat and devour one another, right? Remember that passage? He uses the same language here. What exactly is going on? What is this cannibalism upon their own people? We see in verse 7 of chapter 1. Idolatry. And all her pay as a harlot shall be burned with the fire.
All her idols I will lay desolate, for she gathered it with the pay of a harlot. Chapter 2, verse 2. Oppression. They covet fields and take them by violence, all houses and seize them, also houses and seize them, so they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance.
Thievery, verses 8 and 9 of chapter 2. Lately my people have risen up as an enemy. You pull off the robe and the garment from those who trust you. As they pass by like men returned from war.
The women of my people you cast out from their pleasant homes. For their children you have taken away my glory forever. That’s how they are cannibalizing one another.
They cover up greed and they covet here in verse 11 of chapter 2. If a man should walk in a false spirit and speak a lie saying, I will prophesy to you of wine and drink, you’re going to have prosperity. Don’t worry about all these crimes and problems. We’ll cover it up with lies.
In verse 5 and onward, threats and extortions we see. These prophets who chant peace while they chew with their teeth, but who prepare war against him who puts nothing into their mouths. You’re not going to give me what I want.
I’m going to prepare war against you. The picture of the mouth is devouring your lusts and your desires down into your belly. Those are threats and extortions.
Bribes. Verse 10. Her heads judge for a bribe.
Her priests teach for pay. And her prophets divine for money. That’s how they are cannibalizing one another.
They have cheating business practices. Chapter 6 verse 11. Shall I count pure those with the wicked scales and with a bag of deceitful weights? Deceitful practices in general.
Verse 12 of chapter 6. For her rich men are full of violence. Her inhabitants have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth. You can’t trust them.
That’s how they are consuming one another as cannibals. Also more idolatry. Verse 16 of chapter 6. For the statues of Omri are kept.
All the works of Ahab’s house are done. And you walk in their councils. They were, of course, known as the wicked kings who brought more idolatry to Israel.
Chapter 7. You have conspiratorial fraud. They all lie in wait for blood. Every man hunts his brother with a net that they may successfully do evil with both hands.
The prince asks for gifts. The judge seeks a bribe. And the great man utters his evil desires.
So they scheme together. That’s how they consume one another as cannibals. And then lastly, this brings the undesired effect, of course, of widespread dishonesty and fear.
Chapter 7, verses 5-6. Do not trust in a friend. Do not put your confidence in a companion.
Guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your bosom. Your own wife or son’s dishonored father. Daughters rise against mother.
Daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemy are the men of his own household. Does that sound bad? Or does that sound bad? Cannibalism.
They’re devouring and destroying one another with all these sins so widespread, so deep, so prevalent, that Christ, that is the Holy Spirit, sends the prophet and warns them in no uncertain terms and paints them in a terrible picture as a bunch of cannibals devouring one another. That’s exactly what they’re doing. I count just at least 10 different overlapping sins to one degree or another.
And there’s more. There’s just general descriptions of inequality and lack of justice abounding in Israel at this time. What does this look like? Well, the leaders of a church, how do they feed on their people? How are they cannibals upon their own people? That will be a little more in the next sermon as I point out here.
Leaders of Israel could include prophets and the like. As I mentioned, bite and devour one another, as mentioned in James. False shepherds eat the sheep of their livelihood.
That’s pretty clear today, where you have these so-called prophets on TV or Facebook now and YouTube and the like saying, give me money and I’ll bless you. You see? So they’re devouring the sheep. They’re taking their money in that case.
They’re eating up their money with false promises and false claims. And the worst, of course, type is to leave the sheep starving in their soul. They devour them with false teaching and false doctrines.
Well, one church I know requires their members to pay, or at least they did at one time here in the Denver area, to pay members of the church. You, if you wanted counseling, marriage counseling, you would have to pay a counselor. The church wouldn’t give it to you.
I can’t help but think maybe that falls under this category. They’re devouring their money. They’re taking your tithe, and what are you getting out of it? You’ve got to pay more for counseling.
That’s terrible. I just don’t understand that. I don’t think the pastor is all competent when it comes to counseling, but to the extent that he can, he should.
Poor widows and orphans, of course. I don’t think that’s especially a big issue in conservative circles or even quasi-conservative circles. Most people pretend they’re conservative.
We’re so wealthy in America, the problem would be fleecing of the ignorant, perhaps older people, maybe not so older people, and the like. That’s the various and sundry ways in which false shepherds feed upon the people of God. What we have, however, a lot of the descriptions I have there, of the ten, two mention idolatry, one by implication, one explicitly.
The other eight aren’t. They are social, that is, economic and political sins. Sins of the law courts, for instance, and bribes.
What we have then, the parallel today, is political and social leaders in America feeding on their people. You can feed on the people in a two-layer sense. Don’t forget this, right? In Israel, you have two things going on here.
Every member in Israel is a political entity, right? They’re members of this nation state called Israel, but they’re also members of the church. In America, it’s not the same thing. We don’t have that.
They are divided. Nevertheless, both layers are here, and to be unpacked properly, you have to understand the sins are against people in general. Just Americans have these problems, these sins upon them.
They’re devouring their fellow Americans with these sins. But it also falls upon Christians as well. If we had Christian leaders doing this upon us, that they were political and social leaders, they would be devouring Americans as well as Christians.
How does this happen in America? Well, 2008 comes to mind. What was that? Was that just an accident and a flux in the market? It always goes up and down. No, it was a crash in the market.
We know why. They were giving out money to people they shouldn’t have. And one of the big lenders here in Colorado, remember this to this day, admitted we were giving loans to people we shouldn’t have.
You were devouring the people. You were cannibalizing your own people because you wanted their money. And the banks didn’t care because they would just get the interest.
You never pay back. You’re in debt with us for the rest of your life. We don’t care.
Of course, the way out of that is bankruptcy. But they shouldn’t have to go to that extent. If they were honest men, they would say, no, what is it, 35% or more to buy a house is the rule of thumb for your debt.
You shouldn’t go over that. And they’re pushing away over that limit. They should be honest and say, no, this isn’t for you.
No, they want their money. They’re greedy. They’re devouring their own people.
Cannibals. Is it para? Para, right? Retirement for the teachers. That’s a little more subtle way of, in this case, Colorado leadership for several decades now devouring the inheritance, our children’s money, it’s unfunded liability, billions.
I want to say $10 billion. And they don’t know what, they keep shuffling it around. I know this because I go to the Monday morning Men’s Republican meeting, right, and the Secretary of State has spoken there.
I’ve seen her, I’ve listened to her. And they’re playing the shuffle game, right, and moving it around and no one wants to adjust it. They’re devouring our inheritance of the future.
Where’s the money going to come from? Our children. When it shouldn’t have. They gave promises they couldn’t fulfill.
They’re devouring their own people. Grand juries can be easily abused. The way the system is, there’s no perfect system.
But I know a Christian lawyer, a Calvinist Christian lawyer, as a matter of fact, and I gave him some paperwork on it. He goes, oh yeah, he’s a defense lawyer. He goes, oh yeah, it’s easy to abuse a grand jury.
You can convict a ham sandwich, as they used to say, with a grand jury because the threshold is so low. The grand jury is before the real trial, right? Is there enough here to have a trial? And we see some of that on the federal level as of late. They eat and devour God’s people because if you have to go to court under such flimsy parameters, you’re like, well, I hope I’m innocent and at the end of the day you come out fine.
No. You’ve got to spend a lot of money. And then your reputation’s dragged through the mud publicly, right? They devour their own people for their own gain.
They’re cannibals. Predatory lending. I mentioned that in 2008 as well.
That is not only them giving away money to people they know who can’t really pay it back, but they confuse people by their language. They’re up in laws trying to cut back on them. That’s good.
Taking more money than they can afford for the house and the like. Encouraging needless debt to make more money off of bad decisions. Trade deals that devour the middle class.
I was reading about that in the last several weeks because we have a lot of social issues here in the book of Micah. And the middle class has been gutted. They’ve lost money since like 1972 since I’ve been born.
Their net worth in 2015 is $16. You’re not getting anything. And part of that is the trade deals we’ve had with other nations to their advantage and to their fattening of their pocketbook.
However you think it should be fixed is not the question here. The fact is there are rich people here in America. It’s not like it happens in Israel.
They do these things. They make PACs, conspiracies as we saw in a prior verse with politicians so they can get cheap labor for instance, et cetera, et cetera. And get a better deal.
It’s always about the bottom line. Don’t forget we live in a Christless capitalism. We used to complain about what? Godless communism.
What’s up with those godless communists? That’s what I heard growing up. Now we have Christless capitalism where it’s all about the money. Money, money, money, money, money, money, money.
They’re going to devour their own people. That’s what Planned Parenthood does. They’ve reached out and expanded their services.
Why? Because they really care about those poor women? No. Money. Because now they’re getting a little less from the federal government.
Oh, that’s terrible. Because they would devour their own people for money and gain. Lobbyists pushing politicians to allow obscene money off of addicts, for instance, the opioid crisis, which also hit the middle class.
It was something like $5 million worth of opioids to a small town of 1,000 people over 15 years. No one suspected anything wrong there? The company was completely ignorant of that? Really? Or is it just money, money, money? They devour their own people. Cannibals, brothers and sisters, living in America.
We must be aware of these things. The wicked rulers are ultimately punished by God. They’re caught red-handed, so they cry for mercy.
Then they will cry to the Lord, but he will not hear them. They are like Esau, who cried out for repentance, but it wasn’t a real repentance, was it? And so it’s doubly hard here, because again, this is the people of God. You’ve got that overlapping categories there.
It’s bad enough, they do it. God’s law is clear. It doesn’t matter if you’re a believer or not, you shouldn’t be devouring your own people this way with these heinous crimes.
But it’s God’s people, so it’s even worse. So God will not hear them. They cry out to God, and he will not respond to them.
The Lord, capital L-O-R-D, Covenant-Keeping Lord, he turns his face from them. And that’s one of the worst punishments you can get. And that’s what they’re getting.
These so-called leaders who are supposed to love justice and take care of the oppressed and the poor, yes, even the middle class, from the rich, who have all these advantages, which they are unfortunately using wrongly. God says, I will not hear them. God does not hear the prayer of the wicked, he says, elsewhere.
And these men are wicked. He will even hide his face from them. That’s clearly showing a sign of discontent.
He’s not favoring them any longer. They are under judgment, brothers and sisters, because they have been evil in their deeds, not just passing evil, not just occasional evil, not just small evil, widespread, rampant destruction and cannibalism of their own people, especially the people of God. And they are judged and disciplined.
Wicked Rulers Disciplined
Their prayers bounce off the ceiling. The Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous, he says in Proverbs 15. How do we have discipline of rulers today? Where is justice today? Well, for rulers who are not Christians, of course they’ve already lost favor with God.
They’re not Christians. And to the extent that they do good, it’s in spite of their good, actually. It’s God working through them through his providence.
If we had a Christian society, then the favor of God upon the church pours over into lives, so God is good to them, to our leaders. We’ve been given leaders who are unbelievers who’ve done a lot of good things for the church of God, whether intentional or not. God does it for our sake.
Christian leaders and the like, so we have a mechanism to deal with this in politics, and it seems to be somewhat broken at times, and perhaps this last election it seemed to be very much a big problem. At the end of the day, of course, we have to cry out to God, and we have a picture of that in Micah where there will be a day where their oppression will be completely eradicated, and poverty is all snuffed out, and that’s when Christ returns. That’s what we pray for and long for.
We do what we can in our society. We cry out to God and pray that he would come quickly. And the Christian church, of course, Christian leaders, if we had them that pray upon their people, that’s even worse, and prayerfully there would be churches that would discipline.
I think we had judges and mayors and the like who were doing these crimes. It doesn’t always happen, unfortunately. I heard recently, surprised, that a Roman Catholic bishop was excommunicating some politicians because of abortion.
Wow, that’s great. Finally something’s happening there. These things can be done, but again, even in the churches, although we have mechanisms if we but exercise them, you don’t have perfect justice.
It’s not going to happen. This cannibalization will happen to one degree or another in society until Christ returns, brothers and sisters. But that doesn’t mean we should not be praying against it, fighting against it, even with zeal when the time is appropriate.
Pray, brothers and sisters, pray that the rulers over us, both Christian and non-Christian alike, or those in society who have power to stop cannibalism upon Americans would exercise that power, especially upon the children of God. Let us pray. Precious God and Savior, Lord and Master, we are thankful that you are a God of justice and that these things disturb you and you will bring justice, God, ultimately through Christ Jesus.
We ask, God, for all those who have not repented that they would repent. These rulers, these leaders, both the local mayors and the governors and the sheriffs and the judges, God, that they would repent and trust and flee to Christ Jesus before he returns with his mighty sword to slay them. Have mercy upon your church, God, here in America in particular, that the leaders would indeed protect us.
Of course, we wish they would protect us for good, godly causes, but in one sense it matters not. Precious Lord, be with us in our churches as well that we would not bite and devour one another and become cannibals, but rather, God, the world would see our love and patience for one another. Amen.