They’re going to be punished by Assyria, excuse me, and eventually exiled again. Although we’re not the Old Testament church, I mean, that is, we’re not the Old Testament church in civil form precisely. We don’t have a land as such that all Christians are going to go to.
Let’s all go to this promised land. But, like the Jews of old, we still have much in common morally with them because we live in the same moral universe as God. And so the layers you see in Micah of his admonition to Israel are admonitions not to Israel only as a church, right, but also as a nation, a nation-state, we’d say.
And that is not as highlighted in this section, but it’s still important nevertheless. The punishment they have and the victory they have are military victories, right? They are nation-state victories. As properly speaking even in the Old Testament, the priests weren’t the generals, right? They had their own law courts.
Corinthians 19, Chronicles 19 reminds us there are two different courts. In the one court, the court of the king, he has the sword. He has the power and he’s fighting.
So here you have fighting and victory over Syria. So that’s the church in the sense of everyone who’s a member of Israel is also a member of the state, and the church is victorious over their enemies. And although those two are more distinct in the New Testament, it’s still relevant insofar as we live in nation-states and have many of the same moral requirements.
This means, of course, we can separate the extraordinary from the ordinary as well. We don’t have prophets anymore wandering about the countryside as they had at the time. Here in Micah we read a series of prophecies and moral exhortations that still echo today.
When the church is disobedient, God will punish her. And that punishment may take the form of the nation that the church is in being punished. That’s where one of the parallels are.
We have to remember that. Churches are tied to their culture. There’s no way around it.
You’re going to be an American church, not a Japanese church. So you’re going to act like an American and have certain ways of doing things like an American, even American foods, as a church that you won’t as a Japanese. And so if something happens to America, it’s going to happen to the American church.
That’s the way God designed it. But even in the punishment, we know God preserves our souls and often our bodies and certainly brings prosperity to the end that we may glorify God, the prosperity of our souls above all, even in the midst of our punishment. So let’s see what this looks like here in this text.
And I take these two texts, verses 5-6 and 7-9, two different perspectives. One is the Old Testament perspective of the Old Testament church, Israel, in the Jewish form. And the second point is the New Testament perspective, so more of the spiritual reality of it.
Blessing Israel Against Her Enemies
And so the blessing of Israel against her enemies, verses 5-6. When the Assyrian comes into your land and when he treads in our palaces, then we shall rise against him seven shepherds and eight princely men. Here is a picture, first and foremost, as the first point emphasizes, of political or material differences in resistance and warfare and military prosperity over their enemies.
The military unity that they have in particular, probably an alliance they have with others. We know from the Bible history that they had some alliances with themselves, certainly because at times they were divided as a nation Israel was, but even with Egypt and others around them, Phoenicia and the like. And they tried, and thus the king of Israel did, against Assyria and then pulled back at the last minute when he saw things weren’t going his way.
Now certainly defense is a moral good. Defending the nation against an aggressor who wishes to murder you, murder your people, murder your family. In the Old Testament, we see only when God, through the prophets, told them not to resist, were they not to resist.
It was a given that they’re going to have defensive wars. We live in a fallen world and these things happen. And as you recall, Jeremiah told them, when Babylon comes, you shall not resist.
You shall submit and go into captivity. So they need a divine revelation not to resist, because ordinarily you’re going to resist, and you should. It’s a moral good.
And so for us today, of course, if we have an equivalent to Assyria, you know, some nation wishing to take us out, we shouldn’t sit there and become pious Christians and say we shouldn’t resist, this is God’s judgment on us. Judgment does not preclude resistance. In fact, judgment could include resistance insofar as you’re going to resist, some of you are going to die.
And death is a form of judgment, as it were. For the Christian, of course, it’s not the ultimate judgment, it’s the ultimate sanctification. Now it’s done with and you’re going to heaven.
So this moral good is important here. I don’t believe this is just a spiritual reality as though Assyria is a spiritual entity and that we fight back as a spiritual church. This is a military, physical, political, geographical fight.
And it’s a good thing that they’re defending themselves. Assyria was a bully nation. I went over that last time, right, how wicked and terrifying they were.
They would flay people, skin them alive publicly, the leaders, to terrify the next country they’re coming after. These aren’t nice guys. And so it’s good and proper for them to defend it as simply a nation-state, let alone God’s people.
Now the cooperation here, the number of seven shepherds and eight princely men, I don’t know of anybody who takes it as a literal number here, doesn’t attach to any historical event specifically that way. Probably the idea of perfection, they’re going to have a strong resistance to Assyria, and they certainly did. Israel was not wiped out by Assyria.
And Assyria was wiped out later by God. And Assyria withdrew from Israel and never fully conquered Jerusalem. The number of seven is typically of completeness.
When you add eight, it’s really complete. I mean, it’s done. Shepherd, seven shepherds and eight princely men, I take to be a parallel idea because the kings were pictured as shepherds in the Old Testament.
Again, the model of the ancient Near East and all the nations, including Israel, is that the leaders of the land, the political leaders, are fathers of the land. Like we have the father of America, George Washington. And in fact, the whole pantheon there of our founding fathers is the proper way of understanding and seeing them, morally speaking, with respect to the Fifth Commandment.
And so shepherd fits that way. He doesn’t mean shepherd as a pastor who feeds them the Word of God. That’s a different function, although you can use the same word, of course, for the pastors.
So this is Israel fighting back as a nation-state, certainly a sanctified nation-state. Praise be to God. They got over their differences and fought back against Assyria eventually.
Now we here today can fight back against those who wish to wipe us out. And specifically here in verse 6, they shall waste with the sword the land of Assyria, the land of Nimrod, and fight back against the enemy and the like. And thus he shall deliver us from the Assyrians, it says in the middle of verse 6. Changes speakers there, right? They shall lay waste, that is, Israel shall fight back and resist, in the land of Nimrod.
Thus he shall deliver us from the Assyrians when he comes into our land, when he treads within our borders. Describing the Assyrians treading out and trying to wipe them out. And he, that is Jesus, ultimately, God here in particular, as he speaks to his Jewish audience, reminding them that God’s going to deliver them.
In prior verses we read, he shall bring a ruler out of Bethlehem, right? That’s probably a continuation of that thought, although he’s moving on beyond that thought. He, at the least, God, shall deliver us. And so they’re going to thank the Lord, although they’re using their own swords, they’re using their own spears, and they’re using their own strategy to fight back against Assyria.
And that’s good and proper, using the means of Providence, excuse me, certainly the means of grace. They should cry out in prayer and in fasting when you’re going to go to war. Using these means, although we don’t have a prophet to speak for us if we go to war, we don’t have miracles if we go to war, we can still thank the Lord for giving us victory.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Our lives are saved.
Isn’t that worthy of thanking God? Thank you, Lord, for giving us a strong army and fighting back, I don’t know, Canada. I mean, we haven’t had a major existential threat in America for a couple hundred years. The closest was the War of 1812.
World War I and II, not really, those weren’t existential, they were still remote. They still had to get across the ocean. It wasn’t an easy thing, even back in World War II.
We’ve been very much blessed, so it’s kind of very theoretical for us, I suppose. But I want to remind us that it isn’t just spiritual, it’s a socio-political reality. There’s a morality to praising God for protecting us militarily.
It’s okay, because it’s preserving life, which is the Sixth Commandment. And the fulfillment thereof, just war, is a fulfillment thereof. Now, the military victory, they shall I waste with the sword the land of Assyria.
Now, of course, typically the Old Testament emphasizes war as a sign of God’s displeasure, right? This isn’t a good thing. And so, more or less, if they lost a battle, that means they were disobedient. Remember all those stories in the Old Testament? One story after another.
One defeat after another. So they knew they disobeyed God if they lost the war. That’s how God designed it, because there were children under a tutor, Galatians 4. This is one of the methods he used to teach them collectively, his displeasure of sin and of not being holy before him.
He used warfare and political issues to teach them to trust God. He told them, don’t accumulate horsemen, right, and chariots. Don’t count the number of the militia that you have, like David did.
You shouldn’t do that. Those are extraordinary commands. In fact, they’re there in the Bible as explicit commands.
God tells them not to do that, which is a strong indication, insofar as it’s against ordinary providence, that it’s a positive command. A positive command being that which God uses for a particular time and place, like children going to bed at eight. These are children who are told not to count their horses and their horsemen.
You’re supposed to trust in God. We’re not given such a command anymore as a church. We’re told to use common sense and count the number of men that you have so you know you can defend yourself, or if not, go, as Christ says, right, and count the cost before you go to war.
Maybe you want to have a treaty instead. So this reminds us, putting all this together, that to be careful in going to the Old Testament and seeing these wars and how the prophets interpret them as displeasure, and they certainly are. Dying is not a good thing.
It’s certainly not a blessing, is it, going to war? And so I believe like our early fathers in early America, the Presbyterians and the like, when they called for days of fasting during the Revolutionary War, and they cried out for God’s mercy because he was judging them, and he was. But judgment on a mass scale is certainly a lot harder, as it were, to interpret than individually because you know your particular sin, right? Collectively, it’s this kind of you reach a threshold of enough of you do enough kind of sins, and so it’s not as an easy one-to-one in exactly what you do. So you can, what I’m saying is, be in judgment in war and still fight back and pray for victory.
It may seem kind of weird, but I think if you back up a little bit and realize, sure, why not? Because it’s not necessarily your particular sin. Are you going to put down your weapon because you feel guilty? If they’re going to come rape your family? I hope not! So this is where we are when it comes to collective moral issues, or, to use the vernacular of the day, social justice, which, as I said, I’ll touch upon because Micah touches upon it, one of his themes here. It’s a main strand, actually, in his book.
So this is a little bit of prep work for you before I get to those sermons. So, God gave them the prophets. He gave them specific orders saying, I know right now and here this sin is the cause of this war, for instance.
We have nothing like that. So we have to, as it were, react slightly different, still repent, and still defend ourselves. So we don’t have that today.
We still have God’s moral law to direct us, that there are things called just war. I taught my Sunday School series on that. And there are political issues that are answered explicitly by the word of God, others by good and necessary consequences, and yet others, yeah, it just depends on what you think the circumstances require of it, for instance, like speed limits.
Well, there’s nothing necessary out of it. So you have a lot of things in politics that are kind of, eh, we’ll just debate and vote on it and figure out as we go along. But God’s law is enough to show us our errors when we ignore God’s law, and enough to show us when to stand and fight.
The victory we can have, we can pray for deliverance for our family and our nations, the political, socioeconomic application of this text, because that’s one layer, right? Not just the church layer, it’s the nation-state layer, it’s the collective community layer. Pray for our nation. Pray for her safety, pray for her security, pray for our family’s safety and security, to use the means to have proper safety and security, to be wise of proper safety and security.
As we’ve discovered recently, you know, we have issues of the day, and one of the issues is women in combat. I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind, it comes to the military, and they had a big study about it in the Marines. It turned out women were twice as inaccurate as men shooting, and certainly couldn’t pull men off the battlefield.
I mean, that’s something to pray about. It’s foolish. Just the physicality of warfare, and women and physicality, there is no comparison when you’re looking for the best of the best.
If you have no military, sure, the women are going to pick up arms. No duh. They don’t want to die.
But if you’ve got a military, use the best men you can get. That’s something to pray about. That’s something to work towards.
It’s not the same, of course, I believe, as confusing politics with Christianity, because God informs us, as I say, about politics in many regards. In other regards, the information of it is just simply use Christian common sense and follow your leaders. Now, being a Christian is not reducible to the natural realm only.
That is, the natural realm that we share in common with unbelievers is there are nation states, there are families, there are leaders, there are schools and businesses. We do a lot of the same stuff, so we have that in common with them. That doesn’t change as a Christian.
When you become a Christian, you don’t stop becoming a family. You don’t stop becoming a woman. You don’t stop becoming a man.
You don’t stop becoming a patriot and a nation. It’s still there. These things shouldn’t change.
Nevertheless, the spiritual realm is important, and that is what has changed as a Christian. Now you’re alive to God, and you have new desires and new purposes as a Christian working in a nation, as a Christian American, as a Christian family member, as a Christian father, as a Christian child. Again, you can act very much the same way as an unbeliever because it’s God’s moral universe.
It’s the same moral laws, isn’t it? Be a man, leave the household. Be a woman, submit to the wife. None of that’s changed.
But you do it as a Christian. You do it in the context in the Lord. And so, therefore, here an application of 7 through 9 to switch it over to the spiritual reality.
Blessing the Church in Exile
We have spiritual victory through Jesus Christ. Often the military language of the Old Testament is picked up by the prophets to paint a picture of God’s kingdom, isn’t it? That he comes as a prince, as a judge, as a ruler, as a king to trample down his enemies. And we have that victory through Jesus Christ in principle and in practice.
In principle, objectively, outside of us. In Christ winning over sin and death and Satan and the flesh through his life, through his death, through his resurrection. They have no more ultimate control over you.
You are now a child of the King. A daughter and son of God. They will not determine your final destination in heaven or in hell.
God has done that through Jesus Christ. And yet we still struggle with sin. And yet we struggle for our good.
And eventually we will die as a final act of our sanctification. And so that leads us not just to the principle of our justification, the principle of our position in Christ Jesus, of our adoption in him, of being saved, but in practice, in our lives. The victory of sin over sin and death that’s secured in Christ works out in our lives so that we fight against the remnants of sin within us.
We’re alive now that is aware of violations in a way we never were before we were saved. And we hate it. And we fight against it.
Now, the emphasis here in this prophecy, in this picture of God’s people, is not on the subjective but the objective collective existence of God’s people. And so there are practical effects of it, Micah tells his audience. So they’re going to have victory over Assyria, the very Assyrian army.
God told them was their judgment, right? God’s going to bring Assyria to punish you because you’ve been disobedient. But you’ll fight back and eventually you’ll win. And of course people are going to die, you’re going to mourn, and that’s a very sad thing.
That’s part of judgment. But even then, the remnant of Jacob, verse 7, shall be in the midst of many peoples like the dew from the Lord. The remnant of Jacob, verse 8, shall be among the Gentiles.
That’s clearly a picture of Israel, more precisely the church, the remnant, that’s the remnant theology of the Old Testament. That theme that’s there and developed and grows into the New Testament. Among the Gentiles.
If you recall, again, how earth-shattering that would be to a Jewish audience at the time. We see in the New Testament they hated Peter and Paul for saying that. There’s nothing special about being a Jew anymore.
And that’s almost, this is one step from that. It’s saying you’re not going to be in the land anymore. You’re going to be dispersed among the Gentiles.
And their first thought may be, well, that’s judgment. I mean, obviously God’s blessing is we have Canaan. That’s a clear outward sign.
In fact, I would argue it’s a sacrament. It’s a sign and seal of God’s grace upon them to be in the land, to be given the priesthood, to be given the temple. All that’s tied together as a means to strengthen their weak faith.
That’s what a sacrament does. And they’re going to lose all that. No more temple.
No more priests. We’re going to be hanging out with the goyim. The dogs, they would even call them.
How is that good news? And now we’re going to defeat the Assyrians. What’s going on here? And he continues on and says, You shall be like the dew from the Lord, the covenant-keeping God, like the showers on the grass. You’ll even be like a lion.
Verse 8, see 7 and 8 parallel each other very strongly. Among the beasts of the field that passes through the flocks and treads down and tears to pieces, tears to pieces the sheep. So the first picture of dew seems to be not a picture of multiplication, but a picture of blessing.
Because water and dew in the morning is a good thing to have in a semi-arid, even arid land, where water is precious. So there’ll be a blessing upon the Gentiles. And that has certainly been the case with the remnant church of all time.
Whatever Christians have gathered, they have been a blessing to one degree or another, if they’re obedient to God. And if they’ve gathered enough in society, they certainly affect society, such that we see the raw paganism of the first few hundred years of Christianity in Rome finally erode away, a little here, a little there, into Constantine. Paganism exhausted itself as a cultural force, and Christianity came in to fill the gulf as that which brought the glue together.
There was a lot of problems, to be sure. People were like, OK, now the new power source is Christianity. Look, I’m a convert now.
Yeah, sure. But I tell you, that’s better than raw paganism, as we’re finding out on the other side of the coin. And so the raw paganism, as you recall, for example, left toddlers on the roadside to die and be eaten by the wild animals.
Did you know that? We do it in nice, pleasant buildings, hide it somewhere in the city, and slaughter them before they even come out. And there they went out and said, the father had this kind of power, the power of life and death in Roman society. I don’t like this kid.
He has one more mouth to feed. Take him out to the roadside. He’s on his own.
Christianity changed that. Christianity, by God’s providence, became a do, a positive effect, something good upon society, upon the Gentiles, like showers on the grass. Christianity grew in Europe, especially against, again, a pagan tribalism.
They were fighting, and they were, if you know some of the stories, the Germanic tribes coming into, in the 400s, to Rome, to sack Rome. You had the Picts in Ireland and the like. They’re just raw pagans, worshipping nature, worshipping the sun, stonehenge and the like, and terrible practices.
Christianity came along and cleaned that up, by conversion, certainly. They weren’t all converted, but enough were converted that they started acting differently. And now I’m going to sound like a postman.
No, I’m not. And in God’s providence, many times, I can’t say always, certainly, not always, I can’t even say 50% of the times, but enough that Europe was, better off, Christianized, however you want to define that, as not pagan. And that’s what you have in the so-called Middle Ages.
It wasn’t the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. It’s just the Middle Ages. The Dark Ages, as a name, was brought about by pagan historians who didn’t like the Christian influence.
But what I want to especially emphasize, as the Bible especially emphasizes, not a Golden Age, not, hey, if we’re all converted enough, we’ll get rid of all of abortions, which would be great, and that may or may not happen. But what will happen is 2 Corinthians 2.14, brothers and sisters, that the gospel do upon nations. Now thanks be to God, who always leads us to triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of his knowledge in every place.
For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma of death leading to death, and to the other an aroma of life leading to life. The dew is now an aroma, a fragrance, of the gospel.
For the greatest blessing Israel of old had, the remnant of Jacob, we are the remnant of Jacob. The greatest blessing of dew that we have upon the nations is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now dew is good for those who want it and want to use it, but it’s not good for those who hate it and refuse to use it and die from a lack of water.
And that’s what we’re seeing in the West. We’ve been a blessing, we’ve been a dew upon the many Gentile nations as a remnant of Jacob, the church, the New Testament, for centuries. So we’ve been a fulfillment of this prophecy, I believe, insofar as we are the dew of the Lord, the gospel through us, like showers on the grass, a refreshment that tarry for no man that God will bless regardless.
And indeed a lion among the beasts of the forest that tear into among the flocks of the sheep. The gospel can be pictured as a lion devouring the wicked who don’t repent but converting the souls of those who do. It destroys our old life, a lion that tears up what we used to be and gives us life in Christ Jesus.
To live is Christ and to die is gain. The gospel is a dew of life, and we have to use the imagery here for those who are being saved. And that’s always the case.
We will always, wherever the church is, where the church has been exiled, as Israel was of old, and the times have been exiled, and then the persecution, if you know some of the history, that’s why I go through history and sentencing class, the Huguenots is a good example that comes readily to mind. Call it what it is, it’s a form of discipline, it’s not a good thing to be slaughtered or to be chased out of your own country. But God used that as a blessing nevertheless.
They came to America, they were part of the middle colonies, and helped create the nascent Christian nation. I use that in the best sense of the word. Christian as in there’s lots of Christians, and Christian like laws, Christian in the sense of all natural law is Christian law, that’s what I mean.
Thou shalt not murder, it’s written on the hearts of unbelievers, they know that. But that’s the law of our king, it’s not their king though, for them it’s whatever, it just works because it’s pragmatic. For us we have a new heart and a new reason to obey those laws.
And the Huguenots, although disciplined by God I believe, were still a blessing by God as they were spread across, they estimate a couple of million over an 80 year period, leaving France and going elsewhere. It was the middle class, it was the merchant class, a lot of them. And many of them were pious, at least pious enough to be an influence for good among nations.
A disciplined church can still be a blessing, that’s the context here, don’t forget what we’ve covered in the prior parts of Micah, God’s going to discipline Israel, He’s going to discipline the church. God disciplines the church today in various forms, and I think we’re under that here in America with all the chaos that we’re having and the confusions and the problems that we have. Nevertheless, even in the midst of that, if we but repent, as His audience is supposed to, with a heavy heart, and still stand for the Christ, stand for the gospel, and support the ministry, we can be a blessing even in the midst of discipline.
The blessing of the dew of the gospel, a fragrance to those who are living unto Christ and are repentant. The text shows us that the Old Testament God, He punished His church with the Assyrian army, even as He delivered the remnant for His glory and used them to be a blessing upon the Gentiles. And we are those Gentiles, aren’t we? Not just material blessings, as I’ve talked about, but especially spiritual blessings.
There have been many a nation that have great blessings without the gospel. That is material blessings. That’s not the point.
The point is the saving of souls. And we can be that today. We pray that Christ would indeed return, that He would restore us whole, that even now we pray that God’s enemies would be thoroughly routed as the Assyrians were thoroughly routed, and His people fully delivered from sin and the effects of sin, and that the discipline He brings upon us would bring us to greater maturation, the church would be purified, and we would indeed be a dew upon this nation of America for the saving of many souls.
Let’s pray. Gracious Lord and Savior, we thank You for this encouraging word as we heard about this morning. And although I’m not a Barnabas, I believe in preaching what the text says.
And it tells us, Lord, this is a good thing, that the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many peoples, the Goims, the Gentiles, as do from the Lord as showers on the grass, which are good things, Lord, a positive image of the blessings, not material blessings, although that has come and gone, but especially spiritual blessings of redemption found in Jesus Christ. May indeed we all have those spiritual blessings, Lord. We pray for the purity of the church.
We pray for the Prince of Peace to return. Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Amen.