God feeds his people. We are now ending the second cycle of three cycles in the book of Micah. Each cycle presents judgment upon Israel and ends with good news.
In this cycle, beginning in chapter 3, we are nearing its end here, which presents a glorious future of Christ’s rule and protection. It is a picture of the times we live in today. It is also a picture of heaven, because what we have now is but a faint shadow of the glorious things to come, and that’s pretty common in the Old Testament prophecies.
It paints a black-and-white picture, from Isaiah to Ezekiel to Zephaniah to here, Micah, and elsewhere, of a glorious age, of a wondrous age, where the sword shall be hammered into plowshares, and there shall be prosperity and abundance. But even in the midst of that, such as the end of Isaiah, there’s indications in the text, stronger than hints, where it talks about the sinner will grow old in his sin. That’s not heaven.
That’s here on earth. So it’s a picture of heaven conflated with here on earth of the time of the Messiah, the New Testament age. And we have a similar occurrence here in chapter 5. The sermon is not about the glorious things to come, however, in the abstract.
It is about comfort and joy in the presence as we look to the future with hope. This is what we’re called to remember. The context of this great prophecy of Christ is to comfort the faithful in Israel during the coming judgment of Assyria.
The comfort is not, you’re going to win, because we know they’re being judged. We see that in the opening chapters of Micah. The comfort is those who are the remnant, those who have repented, those who are not following the crowd, those who are standing firm and tall like Daniel’s band, they shall survive and God will preserve them, and ultimately all of us will be brought to heaven.
The same is true today, that while we struggle with the world, we have food and shelter with our great ruler and king, Jesus Christ. The enemies attack God’s people, verse 1. Here we read, Now gather yourself in troops, O daughter of troops, and it seems to be a description of him talking of them, that is, the enemies, the Assyrian army that came together. And he’s telling them, Come, gather and do your dirty deeds, get it over with, it seems he’s saying.
Enemies Attack God’s People
They will lay siege against us, he or they, he switches back and forth sometimes, perhaps talking about the king, and other times talking about a collection of people. They will strike the judge of Israel with the rod of the cheek, they will appear victorious, they will have their effect upon Israel, which requires judgment from God, as we’ll read in the latter parts of chapter 5 in detail there. This Assyrian army is a cruel army, it is not a little thing, this is not a flippant response of Micah, I believe, he’s like, Oh, you know, whatever, we got the king of the universe, he’s our nuclear program here in Israel, right? This is what he was.
Just bring it, we’ll take you out. Now he knows what this means, they’ve heard the rumors, and here are the rumors that turn out to be true historically. The historian Simon Anglum writes, quote, The Assyrians created the world’s first great army and the world’s first great empire.
This was held together by two factors, their superior abilities in siege warfare, right, where you come up to the walled cities and you lay siege, you just sit there and you hammer and hammer, either you starve them out, you break down the walls or the gates, and their reliance on sheer, unadulterated terror. It was the Assyrian policy always to demand that examples be made of those who resisted them. This included deportations of entire peoples and horrific physical punishments.
One description from a temple in the city of Nimrod records the fate of the leaders of the city of Surah on the Euphrates River who rebelled from them and were reconquered by the king of Assyria. He says, quote, I built a pillar at the city gates and I flayed, that’s a technical term, right, I flayed all the chief men who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins. Some I walled up inside the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillars on stakes.
Such punishments were not uncommon. They were known for their cruelty and mounds, as I recall, piles of skulls they would line up to show you, this is going to happen to you if you don’t give in right now. So, imagine that surrounding Denver, okay? It’s not something you’re going to readily agree to greet and go out.
You’re going to be in fear. Imagine the fear you’d be in and the fear that they were in. This is the background when he says the Assyrians are coming, the Assyrians are coming.
They already have a reputation before them. You can’t, you can believe it that that’s going to spread like wildfire, those kind of atrocious activities to get your attention. Because it’s easier if the populace just gives up instead of fighting them, right? And this is their way to make it easy for themselves.
Now they’re going to strike God’s anointed king, the enemies of God will strike the judge or governor of Israel, the ruler at the time, that is the king. It says judge. They will strike the judge of Israel, but the judge of Israel would make sense in this case to be the king because the king was a judge.
This is a common understanding of Israel as well as the nations around them. Again, they didn’t divide the three branches like we’d have the three branches divided at the time. So this is the judge, the head of the king of Israel.
And when they do that in their mind, of course in the mind of everyone else, they’ve been conquered. Their God is better than our God. That’s what happens in a war in the ancient Near East at the time.
If you lose the battle, that means the conqueror’s king, and not only his king, but the God whom he sacrificed to was greater than your God. So it’s a shame. It’s a humiliating defeat even to have the king stricken on the cheek to be within striking range.
To attack the central authority and the protector of the people is what’s happening here because the king is looked at in the Old Testament and again all throughout ancient Near East, and in fact all leaders and all societies at all times, in my understanding, had been viewed as fathers. Even today, I can’t say even today, when I was growing up, we would have the picture of Washington as what? The father, the founding fathers is even the word perhaps they use now, I don’t know. So there it is.
This is a proper mindset, I believe. It’s a better mindset to have your leaders think that you’re your father than they’re your master. Thank you very much.
I don’t believe this is a picture of anybody striking Christ. I think this is the immediate historical description of the king there. We get Christ next in verse 2. Now the enemies of the church are real.
And are many. And although we’re not being attacked by Syria or Canada, there are Christians in Canada being attacked by the government. Not physically attacked, but legally attacked.
I read about it recently. He gave out literature on a parade or whatever. And he’s gonna face the jail time.
We don’t know yet, but it looks like he’ll face jail time for up to two years for hate crime. The cops treated him like dirt. Relative, again, this is not Middle East, but they didn’t feed him for 24 hours.
They threw him in the same bin with the loony people, the drug addicts, and whatnot, for 36 hours. And they made fun of him and sneered at him and whatnot. Those are the enemies we have in many ways.
I’m glad that’s our enemy right now as opposed to something else. But I don’t want even this. I don’t want this for my children because it’s not gonna stay that way.
The enemies of Christ hate us like the Assyrians hated the Jews. I don’t know, they won’t flail us. They may flail us with their words and use the law to their advantage as much as they can.
I don’t know. We’ve seen some of it. We have flesh and blood enemies that indeed do hate us.
I know often, growing up I always heard, we wrestle not against flesh and blood. I don’t believe Paul is saying that in a literal absolutist term, but a relative description to emphasize the spiritual realities behind the physical problems we have. We have real enemies.
We shouldn’t be downplay that any more than we downplay other physical realities that God has created that we live in. They wish to destroy you and your family. You’ll see this on my Facebook page to remind Christians when I have some of these news, I’ll put them up there on our right.
They hate you. They hate your family. And they want you gone.
If you don’t have a sense of that, I want you to have a sense of that. Because I want you to prepare accordingly, both spiritually, as Paul reminds us, and even physically you ought to prepare yourself accordingly. And I’m not the expert on that matter, but as your friend and pastor, I think it’s important that you know these things.
They want to, of course, destroy the church, which is what we represent. All of them are as conscious and aware. There’s different levels of awareness of unbelievers, just like there are for believers on issues at hand.
And they intuitively hate God, and they therefore hate anything associated with God, and that’s his people, our culture, and anything else like our Christian history, which is frankly being attacked and torn down in some places. It doesn’t have to be a physical hot war, but a cultural and political cold war, which is what we are in now. I have no other description for it.
It’s been that way for a while. But whatever the outcome in the physical realm, we have, as emphasized here, the spiritual lordship of Jesus Christ. There is no guarantee, not a postmill, no guarantee of physical protection from our enemies.
The Old Testament had that, more or less. God used it as a lesson. He gave him the blessings.
He said, look, you go in the land, you do what I tell you, and I will be your nuclear bomb. I’m doing this because you are like, what, children in the Covenant, as Galatians 4 reminds us. They were children under a tutor.
And one of the lessons is the lesson of faith and trust. And he did that in a very overt manner, right, by giving them these miracles and the like. And frankly, as a New Testament church, we should have outgrown that.
This church isn’t charismatic. Most of the church isn’t charismatic, although a big portion is, and influenced by them. And God has treated the New Testament church more like adults, frankly.
And we don’t need all these miraculous signs and the like, but to persevere and to use the means God has given us for physical protection as well, and especially for spiritual protection, which is what I will emphasize here. Part 2, point 2, God’s King from humble origins, verses 2 and 3. But you, Bethlehem, Ephrathah, though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to me the one to be ruler in Israel, whose going forth are from of old, from everlasting. You probably recognize that verse, don’t you? Right out of Matthew, where he uses that as proof that this is the Messiah.
God’s King from Humble Origins
Matthew’s audience are Jews, and so he brings up a lot of Old Testament prophecy saying, look, and here, and over here, this is evidence that what I’m writing to you isn’t made up stuff. We have these eyewitnesses, a host of them, and it fulfills Old Testament prophecy. That’s not chance.
That’s not an accident. And this is one of the texts he quotes early on in Matthew. It’s here we read, then, an overthrowing of worldly expectations.
The Messiah will come from the least expected place. That’s the imagery here. That’s the point.
Bethlehem here, it gives the full name. Ephrathah, you can see something like this in Genesis 35-19, was labeled this in order to distinguish it from other Bethlehems, which means the house of bread, such as the one in Zebulun. It was situated a few kilometers south of Jerusalem.
The thousands of Judah may refer to a large number of cities, towns, and villages in Judah, or to the fact that Bethlehem’s contribution to the military unit in thousands was very small, or that it could be equivalent to family and tribes, as one commentator notes. Whatever the point is, whatever it’s specifying, just numerical numbers being small, cities being small, or military prowess being small, it’s small. It’s small in all three dimensions, isn’t it? It’s insignificant.
You wouldn’t expect much coming out of it. This is the Old Testament version of Paul’s theme, where he talks about, in Corinthians and elsewhere, the wisdom of God is foolishness to the world. That God’s strength is weakness to the world, right? They mock God, they mock his church, they mock his Christ, and they consider it insignificant and small.
And so did the Pharisees. Did anything good come out of this place? Out of Galilee, they said? Out of Brooklyn? Out of Pueblo? I don’t know. That’s their mindset, just arrogance.
And so Paul, and here God, the Holy Spirit through Micah, is hammering, even in the actual circumstances of Christ, coming to earth as a man, and undermining this arrogance. I emphasize that because it’s not a spiritual lesson that we look for the best pastor in the worst places. That’s not the point of prophecy.
That’s not the point of God saying, when I speak wisdom, it’s foolishness to the world. You know, that your riches are but poverty to God. You know, all those literary ways of emphasizing God’s wisdom, and also our humility and the like, is not to be a lesson of, look, the more poor you got, the more godly you are, or something like that.
The smaller you are, the more godly you are. That’s not the point. That’s not it at all.
It’s the opposite point to show that those who put their trust in horses, put their trust in big men with big names, big institutions, instead of God, will be humiliated. And same especially with the gospel. We put our trust in ourselves to save ourselves.
We put our trust in our institutions. We put our trust in our families, perhaps. And God says all that is nothing when it comes to spiritual life.
We often do see, however, that we fall for the trap of picking the rich because we want their wealth, picking the strong because we want their respect, and overlooking those who may be better fit for office, for instance. That’s a concern. That can happen.
Now, this judge, this leader that comes out of Bethlehem, with the implication, of course, since it’s God who’s setting it up, this will be the judge that will protect us from Assyria. Isn’t this great? This is good news. This judge, it says, the one to be ruler in Israel, whose going forth are from of old, from everlasting, shall be God himself.
Even without the New Testament, there’s plenty of Old Testament evidence that there’s a second member of the Trinity, and that second member of the Trinity is deity, whose going forth are from old, from everlasting, the ruler from the tribe of Judah, the Lion of Judah, will be eternal. This echoes Isaiah 9.6. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government that is the rule will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. If his goings are from of old, yes, even from everlasting, it cannot be anything but God.
That’s all there is to it. The Old Testament is different from the New Testament in a number of ways, of course. The language, the metaphors at times, the Hebrew culture was much more concrete, not as abstract as, say, the Grecian culture, the way Paul talks sometimes.
Or writes. And the way that’s also expressed is here. It doesn’t sit there and say, this man, this judge, this ruler who comes out of the least where you expect it, is going to be deity.
It says it in a poetic way, as many of these prophecies are in a very poetic way. But the meaning is just as clear, isn’t it? Whose going forth is from of old, from everlasting, and everlasting, without end? Well, that’s only a picture of deity. Now, another thing here, besides the deity, is this one word, the one to be ruler in Israel.
Ruler. Many of the Old Testament prophecies, if you slow down and think about it, highlight the rule of Jesus Christ. That he is prince, that he is king, that he is judge, that he is ruler.
All those nouns describe a king, a ruler, a sovereign lord. The prophecies are teeming over with these descriptions of the New Testament era. Of course, Isaiah 9.6 says that government will be upon his shoulder.
That is, he will have the responsibility therein. Jesus Christ is the king of Israel. He’s the king of the church.
He’s the king of us, brothers and sisters. And this is why the church requires Christians to confess that Jesus is not just their Savior only, but also the Lord and Master. We teach that.
We believe that. It’s part of Christianity. It’s part of our tradition, our Christian tradition, and many Christian traditions.
And we ought to preach that. That should be part of our instruction of our children alike, not to so emphasize the love of God that we forget that God is also our judge, that is, our ruler, our king. And that has certain descriptions that go with it, certain responsibilities.
When the Old Testament says, your king is here for you, I’m your king, I will judge you, it’s a picture of one who protects you, one who feeds you. And we’ll read that in verse 4. And so, in times of difficulty, as Israel had here, facing the Assyrian army, that if he grabs their leaders, he may flail them alive the encouragement being that you can stand with God, that God is your ruler. In fact, in this case, he will bring one who shall be a ruler of Israel who is going forth from old, and he shall protect you.
The ruler isn’t just simply one who tells you, go here and go there, although that’s part of it, but go here and go there because it’s good for you. I do this and direct you because I’m your protector. I’m the one who feeds you, as well as who rules over you.
Therefore, he shall give them up until the time that she who is in labor, the verse says here in verse 3, has given birth, then the remnant of his brethren shall return to the children of Israel. And so, the Old Testament church, until that time, she who is in labor shall give birth, it’s probably a picture of the church in Israel, perhaps giving birth to the Messiah, that is, Jesus comes from the midst of the church, the Old Testament church, Israel. And the giving birth to Jesus, the metaphor here, the picture that Christ will come from from them, is also the picture of labor, the difficulty, and they have lots of difficulty between now and Micah to the time of Christ, about 600 years of difficulty.
But in the perseverance of that labor, of Christ finally coming in the New Testament era, the remnant of his brethren, that is the brethren of Christ, shall return to the children of Israel, that is, they shall be ruled by Christ himself, and the remnant shall be protected. There’s always this picture of the remnant in the Old Testament, picked up here in Micah, the small group. The emphasis isn’t, hey, the smaller you are, the more holy you are, I mentioned that before.
But that relative to the rest of Israel, a remnant, a small group, a part, maybe it’s 40 percent, that’s still small, but still pretty big, I would say, but not the majority, shall persevere, shall be truly repentant, and God will protect them. That’s the remnant. We are the remnant.
In the New Testament, that theme is picked up and brought forth to fuller fruition, that not all Israel is Israel, for instance. Even today in the church, not all who are in the church are of the church. That’s the equivalent.
So the ruler, the king, and Jesus is our ruler and our king, and we can take courage, even amidst of our travail, and our labor, and our difficulty, even though we’re not giving forth a child, like a mother is, it can still feel that way. And we ought to have the comfort that Jesus is our ruler, not to come, as this prophecy is, but has already come, and shown with greater evidence than these Old Testament saints had ever had, that he rose from the dead, has power over sin and the world, and he is your protector, which brings us to verse 4. And he, that is Jesus, the ruler, shall stand and feed his flock, and the strength of the Lord, and the majesty of the name of the Lord his God, and they shall abide, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth, and this one shall be peace. Feeding.
God Feeds His People
Feeding is a tender role, the picture of a shepherd, again, the kings of old were also pictured as shepherds, a fatherly image, one who cares for his own people. In this case, he feeds them. It may be literal, of course, in the times of starvation, when the government would come along and feed the people, because they had the power and the money to make the silos and the like, and gather all the food together, right? But here, it’s especially, I believe, not physical feeding, of course, but spiritual feeding, feeding them with justice, feeding them with truth, the Word of God, both the law and the gospel, the gospel for a new life, where justice has been satisfied, the law for the direction of life, where it teaches us what justice looks like and what it is in our life.
This is the feeding of Jesus Christ for you, brothers and sisters. In your time of travail and difficulty, it is good to know God has given you the infallible Word, you’re not in a sea of confusion and doubt and wondering, what is right and what is wrong, and how shall I live my life, what then shall we do? But rather know Him giving us His Word is evidence of His love for us as a shepherd, as a ruler who feeds us, gives us direction, and gives us the gospel. And He does this in the strength of the Lord, that God as ruler and King should comfort you, it’s in the strength of the Lord, that is the strength of the covenant-keeping God, all-capped Lord.
He’s keeping His promise by bringing the Messiah who shall be the Ruler, capital R, to rule over you, to judge over you, to protect you, to feed you as a shepherd. All these roles combined into Jesus Christ in the greatest display of power and love for His people, for you. He has the power to preserve your soul and bring you to heaven, brothers and sisters.
Here He says, in the majesty of the name of the Lord His God, His strength and the like, and they, that is you, shall abide, for He shall now be great to the ends of the earth. Why do you persevere as a Christian? Why do you get up in the morning and still believe in Jesus Christ, and desire to conquer your sins, and to be obedient, to do a good job at home and at work? Because Jesus Christ, your ruler, in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty, in the might, in the name of God, supports you, and you shall abide. Therefore you shall abide, and you shall always abide in the peace of Jesus Christ, the peace of conscience, and ultimately the peace of our life and our body, when He shall return, brothers and sisters, and bring heaven to earth in the second coming of Jesus Christ.
When you feel overwhelmed at work, when you feel overwhelmed at home, I mean spiritually overwhelmed, not overwhelmed because you didn’t prepare for school, or you didn’t prepare for work. That’s a different problem. The domain we’re talking about is a spiritual domain of obedience, isn’t it? And of sin, and of wrestling with the principalities therein.
When you feel overwhelmed, when the Assyrians are at your door, renew your trust and rest in Jesus Christ, and rest upon His kingship and His rule. He is not just and simply and only, although wonderfully, your Savior. He is also your Lord, your Master, your King, your Ruler, and your Judge.
He will feed you with His Word. He will protect your body, but especially your soul. And He shall return again to wipe out the Assyrians and everyone else who will not bow their knee to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
And you shall be established forever and ever in peace with Jesus Christ. Amen. Let us pray.
We long for that day, God. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. You brought the peace between us and God the Judge.
That is the peace of our conscience, the peace of being justified, the peace of being redeemed. We long, Lord, for that to finally work out in full fruition, of the peace of our body, the peace of health, the peace of security, the picture we have in Isaiah, Lord, of perfect heaven forever. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, we pray, and protect us.
Meanwhile, encourage us that You are our King, Jesus. You are our Ruler, and You will protect us to the end. Amen and Amen.