…Not only is this true for technology advancements, I like my smart phone. The plenitude of food, the variety thereof, the clothing, the housing, but even with respect to war, perhaps you’ve not thought about that, I know there are over 100 armed conflicts in the world at any moment, but not so much in the West. Ever thought about that? Which is a large portion of the world, not the biggest, both geographically and even numerically.
Indeed, we are blessed. But is this relative peace compared to history where the kings would come out every springtime and go to war when the winter is done? Just what they did. Is this a fulfillment of Micah? Let’s look at it and find out.
Here, the first point, the material peace in God’s kingdom, verses three through five, the swords beaten into plowshares. That is weapons of destruction. The sword is clearly a weapon of war.
Material Peace in God’s Kingdom
It is not there to hunt game. At least you can argue today that your AR-15 or whatever can hunt game. The sword, not so much.
Come here, stand still. It’s a weapon of war. That’s what it represents.
That’s what it is. You’re not cutting carrots with it. And so when it talks about here, this famous passage you have heard, typically you hear of it in Isaiah.
It’s also here in Micah. Virtually word for word. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
Continuation of the prophecy I covered last time in verse one. It shall come to pass in the latter days. We are in the latter days, brothers and sisters, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established, shall be exalted, and peoples, nations, the goyim, the Gentiles, the non-Jews shall all gather together and flow into this mountain that is the rule of God and his worship.
And they themselves shall say, come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord. All of us, let us go to this place of the covenant-keeping God. Let us go to church.
And he will teach us his ways, and we’ll walk in his path. We’re gonna give up our old pagan idols because every nation had their gods, and if they won a war, their god was winning. That’s how they thought back then.
And there’s some truth to that. It’s what they do today. You’re beating down the Christians.
They say, oh, our God’s beating down the Christians, right? Whether our God is science or Muslims or whatnot. And it continues on here. But the word of the Lord shall come from Jerusalem.
That is, from God’s holy place among his people in particular, that is the Bible preached at the church. He shall judge many nations and rebuke them afar off. And they, these nations, the goyim, shall beat their swords into plowshares.
Their weapons of destruction shall become weapons of creation. They’re not gonna take the swords and chop carrots with them. They’re going to beat them down with heat in the furnace and melt them and form them into something more productive instead of destructive.
Plowshares, so they can farm. Swords, the spears, the chariots, the knives, the clubs, all of it, that’s the imagery here. Perhaps today we would say, well, we would start cannibalizing tanks and using electronics to build better tractors and scrapping the missiles and melting down the guns and using that scrap metal to make better equipment for farming and to help people and to have a prosperous nation.
To use it in the commercial realm, the farm industry, for creating and building up a nation instead of destroying and tearing down nations. That’s the imagery, a beautiful, wonderful imagery that he gives to the Jews, the early, the church at this time in the Old Testament. Remember, the broader theme of Micah is the Assyrians are coming, the Assyrians are coming, you’re going to be judged and you ought to be judged.
You better repent. He has three cycles of judgment and at the end of each cycle, he gives them good news. This is the end of the second cycle and he gives them good news of the future.
Not to the unrepentant, of course. To them, the good news is used and wasted so they can satisfy their belly. But to the repentant, they see this, they understand they’ll probably have to go through judgment themselves.
If you recall the other time in Israel’s history, at 70 years in Babylon, even the righteous, Jeremiah says, don’t resist, you must go under this judgment and accept the mighty hand of God. And so it’s the repentant who hear this message and are given this glorious picture of the New Testament era, the latter days when Christ comes in such glory and such magnitude, that the nations will come willingly to Jerusalem and they’re hearing this going, really? This same Jerusalem is about to get crushed by the Assyrian army? That Jerusalem? Not quite, since we know we are the true Jerusalem. Israel has now shed its husk and become, it’s shown the world the real people of God, that is the church in New Testament form and a mature form.
And with all these weapons gone and transformed from destruction to creation, there’s nothing left to use for war. And so it brings down the point harder. Nations shall not lift up sword against nation because they have taken their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.
And neither shall they learn war anymore. And it’s not just a particular list of weapons that are transformed, the entire nation’s approach to life has changed so much. They don’t teach war anymore.
There’s no more war schools and no more generals. It’s all gone. As this prophecy paints the picture of the future.
The ambitions, the aims, the desires toward destruction, usually, of course, for greed, we want your land, we want your money, we want your populace for slave labor, is now being redirected completely and utterly in this imagery towards peace and all the prosperity that comes with peace, right? The building up of a nation, the beating down of weapons of war into tools of peace come from people who no longer want war but want peace, who no longer learn war but learn peace. And the imagery continues on in verse four. But everyone shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid.
To sit under a fig tree, a picture of peace, not just peace between the nations but peace within the nation. So every neighbor is at peace with themselves sitting under their fig tree and their vine, a picture of prosperity, right? They’re prosperous farmers and they’re not doing a lot of work. You’re just sitting there relaxing and enjoying the shade of this prosperity that comes so much more natural when you’re not wasting your resources going to war and killing all the farmers because you’re going to war all the time.
Economic self-satisfaction is the picture here because peace often brings, if it’s productive peace of course, tranquility, social tranquility, economical tranquility and peace. Because the flip side here in this imagery of peace is war which takes manpower, which takes money, which takes time, which takes resources away from building up your own nation. Maybe there’s a lesson there on the side for our own nation.
But peace takes the same thing, manpower, the money, the time, the resources and gathers it towards itself as a nation to strengthen it, to give it peace and prosperity. And it’s of course everyone. It’s nation shall not lift up sword against nation.
The goyim, the Greek, Paul uses that word sometimes, he’ll say Jew and Greek, equivalent to goyim, that is the unbeliever. That doesn’t mean literally just the Greeks and forget the Turkeys and forget the Egyptians. No, it’s shorthand for goyim, the Old Testament language and New Testament language there, Greek.
A nation shall come to the house of the Lord all across the face of the earth. This is the imagery, the beautiful picture he’s painting to the scared church at this time. A serious coming, but behind a serious destruction is a glorious, beautiful age, an age of peace and prosperity as far as the eye can see.
It’s a wonderful dream, a wonderful vision. We all want peace. They want peace certainly for very selfish reasons as we want peace for very selfish reasons.
It’s okay to want to live and not die, not want war. But it even specifies here, no one shall make them afraid. No more fear of war is obviously the imagery here.
And with that, no more fear of economic heartache because war can hurt the economy. Perhaps even crime and the like. You’re not going to be sitting on your fig tree if you have bandits going across the country taking you out.
So it’s not just war. I think it’s the picture of all peace, all kinds of tranquility and opposite to all kinds of destruction and bad things and conflict, the effects of sin upon this world. So he’s taking one of the worst effects that you see, the gross, the most obvious example, war and destruction and swords piercing bodies and saying all that’s gone away with and not just that narrowly, but everything associated with it.
It’s like heaven on earth. It’s like a new Eden. And you see this picture often painted in the Old Testament along these prophecies.
Isaiah has similar pictures. It’s a beautiful picture and a wonderful future to have no more wars, to have eternal peace, to turn our technology and energies towards creation instead of destruction. Isn’t that what we’ve been hearing all these generations in America? If we just but did it the right way, if we followed the right party, if we had the right philosophy, as they’re celebrating one philosophy of a man born in 1818, his philosophy killed 100 million people in the world in less than 100 years.
Marx. Him and a host of men like him want to have heaven on earth. And by golly, they’ll have it even at the end of a gun.
Now, I don’t know exactly how the Pope wishes to pull this off. The wily old goat, the Pope, declared the quickest path to peace in a tweet earlier this week, or was it late last week? “‘Do we really want peace?’ he wrote. “‘Then let’s ban all weapons “‘so we don’t have to live in fear of war.'” And you hear that, and I heard that, and I thought, well, that really ties in with Micah 4 through 5. He’s not a fool.
He’s wicked, but he’s not a fool. He has a brain. He’s perhaps thinking of Micah and Isaiah and the like, and he’s certainly using it to his advantage.
There are plenty of Christians who look forward to a golden age as well. Postmills, even premills, as it were, have a golden age before it gets really bad. You remember in Sunday school class.
I don’t think any of them, however, advocating for gun control as though that’s gonna usher in the new era. We don’t see that here. What you see in Micah is what? A volley of voluntary nations willingly leaving their gods and walking and marching to Jerusalem, saying, let us go, not grabbing a sword and poking them, saying, let’s go, let’s go to Jerusalem, rather taking those swords on their own and exercising peace.
But that’s another argument another day. But even the prophecies themselves, as I said here, indicate it’s not forced here. But whether forced or not, there are those who believe that there is gonna be a future golden age, or in fact, we are in the golden age.
But I don’t believe that. I believe we are in the millennium. I’m not gonna go into the details of that.
We’re in this big age, a thousand years is shorthand for a very long period of time between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ. And that the prophecies of the Old Testament is like looking at two mountaintops from a distance, one behind the other. To them, Isaiah, Micah, and those who heard them, it looked like what event? Christ is coming, the Messiah is coming, and it’s clear roads all the way to there.
And from there on out, it’s heaven on earth. And when you realize, looking at it sideways, oh, it’s two events. Christ is coming a second time, and that’s the last time.
And the first time was under the cross and the crown, and the second time is in glory and publicly announcing who he is, and the world shall know, and every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess whether they want to or not that Jesus Christ is Lord. And one reason why I don’t think we have here a picture of a golden millennial age and the strictest sense of the word is certainly here in verse five. For all people walk each in the name of his God, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God.
In this imagery, and you see this also in Isaiah where it talks about the old sinner, the sinner growing old with age in that imagery, that’s certainly not heaven. There are no sinners in heaven. So this golden age is something on earth.
So it’s not as golden as it sounds that there are sinners there. If there are people still walking each in the name of his God, that would be the nations, the goyim still. And so this prophecy then is a broad painted brush saying this era of the New Testament will be so glorious, it will look like you’re in heaven compared to what you have in the Old Testament because Christ will come in the flesh and he’ll bring nations and they themselves will voluntarily submit to Jesus Christ.
Because at this time, they’re not called, remember, up until the New Testament, the Old Testament church is not called to go out to the highways and to the byways and preach the gospel of the coming Messiah and urge people to become Jews or Old Testament Christians. It’s just not there. That happens incidentally, as it were, to the mission of the Old Testament church as Israel.
And we see that, of course, with Nineveh and Jonah. He’s like, what? They should be coming to us. Why am I going to them? Is essentially what’s behind that.
And so that has changed. And that’s a magnificent change that Peter couldn’t wrap his head around, right? So you have a whole chapter there in Acts 10. With all the miracles to get the point across, Peter, things have changed.
The goyim are coming, yes, not to be Jews. They’re still going to be goyim, but now they’re going to be saved goyim. They’re going to be saved Gentiles.
They still get to be their own cultural differences and they don’t have to act like a Jew. You can act like an American. That is the best of an American.
You can act like a German. The best of the Germans, right? Can act like an African, whatever it is. And be saved.
And that’s something they just couldn’t understand. So he’s explaining in their language, look, it’s going to come to Jerusalem. That is to the source of where God is.
Now that of course is the church, wherever she may be in the world, which is now across the whole face of the earth. It’s not just them coming to Jerusalem. You could obviously immediately read that in a physical sense.
He means in a spiritual sense, ultimately, because wherever the church is, there they are in Jerusalem. They’re with God. They don’t physically go anywhere.
We’re going to them. That’s the Great Commission, right? Physically, they’re not moving anywhere. We are going to them, the churches, from the New Testament era until Christ comes.
And so this clearly, this prophecy, is not to be taken in this physical, literal sense, but are strong imageries of the Old Testament to grab their attention and their imagination and show them how wonderful, I know it doesn’t feel wonderful to you sometimes, but how wonderful the ages in which we live now. We are in the latter days. I went through those texts last time.
Peter says, this is that. The prophecy of Joel is now being fulfilled right before your eyes in Pentecost. We are in the latter days and shall be until Christ returns when he wills.
And so with that in mind, we understand that ultimately it’s about spiritual peace in God’s kingdom. The second point, verse five. As I said, all the people will walk in the name of his God, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God.
Spiritual Peace in God’s Kingdom
And walk there means, of course, the walk is to obey and go down the path of righteousness, to take God’s covenant, the covenant law, in particular the Ten Commandments, seriously. And mold ourselves to the image of Christ, which is the mold to holiness, which is the law again. You’re able to do that because you are saved unto holiness, unto righteousness.
A physical metaphor, ultimately, for heaven. So you can say there’s a third mountaintop. And when Christ comes back, that mountaintop is heaven, isn’t it? Say that’s the second one or there’s a third one behind it, however you want to look at it.
And we have a taste of that now. Just a taste of it. There are physical ramifications.
We’ll talk about that a little bit. So the political and economic prophecy here is ultimately about spiritual realities. And we know some of that, of course, by the New Testament, where Paul quotes things of the Old Testament and shows, look, they’re really about the church.
It’s really about you here and now and your relationship with God. The spiritual reality of our individual salvation, the spiritual reality even of our collective salvation, that you’re not just saved by yourself, but we’re saved together. That’s why the language here is of nations, of groups of people, and being delivered as the Scottish forefathers were, the Picts and the like in Ireland.
Whole tribes were converted, the Germanic tribes, for instance, in the 400s, in fulfillment of this prophecy. The bringing of the Gentiles, peace even among the Germans and the French, the English and the Scots, not as a nation as such, but to the extent that they are converted and they are Christian, they’re going to be at peace with one another, aren’t they? They’re not going to be interested in trying to kill each other because they’re part of a new and greater kingdom, the kingdom of God. The Jerusalem that they are part of is a Jerusalem that covers the whole face of the earth, wherever God’s people are.
There is a real peace that the world cannot grasp, the first peace, of course, being the peace with God and a peace of a good conscience, as we heard this morning, and what flows out of that by practice in our lives, the fruits of the Spirit. So Micah is not about the relative peace, excuse me, the physical peace, but first about spiritual peace, but not in exclusion to physical, earthly, material manifestations of that peace. Regeneration of the soul brings about, certainly, regeneration of the soul, but from the powers of the soul come what? The use of the hands, the use of the mouth, the use of the feet, for what? For good, and you’ve got enough of those people doing good things together, as defined by God’s law, it affects society, it does have fruits to one degree or another we see typically in history.
That’s why I don’t think it’s an accident and I pinpointed Western civilization as blessed by God because of the gospel, because the church has taken the law seriously and built it into society, that God has not separated judgment and negative consequences from actions. They’re there. On the flip side, the fruits, the blessings of doing some good, I know sometimes you don’t feel like you’re doing good, but you can as a Christian.
By God’s mercies and strength, and there are some fruits from that. We have that collectively. I like to call it the bell curve, as it were.
If you get enough Christians together on the main in history and time, you’ll see net positive effects. We’ve seen that in the West, and yet we’ve also, of course, seen much wickedness. So, this prophecy is ultimately about heaven.
Secondarily, the manifestations of spiritual reality in our lives, in our hearts, working out in the here and now. Walking with God, but we will walk in the name of the Lord, the covenant-keeping God, forever and ever the world follows their so-called gods, of course. Money, fame, toys, games, entertainment, sports, politics, and then all the false religions.
But we, but you, will walk with our covenant-keeping God. We will walk in the name of the Lord, our God, and his path of righteousness forever and ever. That’s what we are called to do.
And he says here, we will do that forever and ever. So, he’s blending in clearly heaven, where we will be perfect with the here and now, that is the millennium where there’s still sinners and people repenting, and there’s still some judgment there. But compared to the Old Testament, where the glories of the gospel were dimmed and held tight in the small country of Israel, and the rest of the world was dark, wasn’t it? Just simply dark.
Like I said, they just went to war every spring. We had World War I, yes. We had World War II, yes.
But we weren’t going to war with each other every spring. Things have changed. And it’s slightly reflected in a slight, as you can say, a secondary manner of being fulfilled in these prophecies that ultimately point to our souls being united with heaven that is being saved.
The peace that we have with God is ultimately a spiritual peace that spills over in God’s providence, when he will, and when and how he wills. Sometimes he doesn’t will it like in the case of Job. So, don’t let the emphasis on the spiritual and the non-material distract you from the full truth that there will be a new heaven, and there will be a new earth, which includes the physical realm.
And why do I believe that? Because we believe in the resurrection. And what is a resurrection but the bringing up again of a physical body. When Paul, the Holy Spirit speaks to Paul there in Corinthians, he talks about having a spiritual body.
What he means is animated by the spirit towards spiritual ends. Not as though my physical body is now a soul or a spirit. That’s a contradiction in terms.
It’s not a soul spirit, it’s a soul body, or a body spirit. One’s immaterial, one’s material. That’s a contradiction.
You can’t do that, that’s gibberish. Paul’s emphasizing all the powers of the soul and of the body will be directed towards holy ends, the glory of God and his kingdom in heaven, fully and forever. We’re perfect.
Isn’t that great? We have a physical body, and I think we’re gonna do physical things. I don’t know what it is. I really don’t know what it is.
But I believe it to be soul, because we are a body-soul complex is yet another argument. It’s unnatural for our soul to be separated from our body. That’s what sin did.
Or another way of saying it, we’re not gnostic. We will have full peace in our soul, now fully manifested in our body and all our relationships with each other, which would be what, economic, financial, everything. Whatever that looks like in heaven, I don’t know.
This is our picture. This is the closest picture. Well, not quite the closest.
We have yet one more picture, remember? Heaven is more than we can imagine, and yet the Bible still paints it in physical terms to give us a little glimpse. And we read at the end of Revelation. And he showed me, John, a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
In the middle of its streets, on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore 12 fruits, each yielding its fruit every month, the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him. They shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads.
There shall be no night there. They need no lamp, nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light, and they shall reign forever and ever. Amen.
Let’s pray. We read this prophecy, God, and we don’t want to destroy the fullness of it. There will be a time when all the nations shall come together in peace.
And on either side of this kingdom is a kingdom of darkness and destruction, also painted there in Revelation, of dogs and of sorcerers and of liars and of cowards who are ever and forever tormented, never with peace, always in destruction, never in creation. But praise God, Lord, we shall have and be on the other side, we pray, all of us, Lord. In a day and age when heaven and earth shall be one, there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and all sin shall be utterly eradicated.
And we will walk and live in the name of the Lord and reign with him forever and ever. Amen.