…and it started out, perhaps, in verse 8 all the way down to the end here. Some of the commentators believe it is a hymn with stanzas where we have the triumph over God’s enemies. Verses 8-10, the rebuilding of the temple of his people, the rebuilding of his people, not the temple.
Verses 11-13, and then the marvelous deeds that God will pick up. Of course, we know that was accomplished in Christ Jesus, verses 14-17. And then here we have the remission of our sins.
There’s a lot of actual things being said here. It’s not just the remission of our sins, but the conquering of our sins as well, which is what I emphasize here, God’s powerful mercy. Not just his mercy, but his powerful mercy.
The last stanzas of this hymn of praise are profound and powerful. With all the judgments that were pronounced, and all the woes that were uttered by Micah, one would expect more bad news here at the end of the book. But what we have instead is more good news.
An overabundance of good news. Enough good news to overcome the grief and worry of God’s elect that were listening to Micah all these many years. They have indeed transgressed God’s law.
They are full of iniquities. They lie and are without mercy towards one another. They are unjust.
But God will pass over these transgressions, subdue their iniquities, and give them, instead of lies, the truth and more mercy upon his people, his remnant. This is the hope that Micah gives in the midst of all this negative denunciation, which is certainly necessary in the house of God at times, and they needed to hear it. Not just the non-elect, but the elect as well, because the elect will hear, and they will repent.
God uses means. One of the means to bring repentance is to tell you, You need to repent. You are sinning.
You need to flee to God. You need to flee to Christ. So here we’ll see in particular what is being spoken here of the good news in the form of the Old Testament language.
God will pass over our transgressions. He will pass over your transgressions. Verse 18, Who is like you, God? Who is like this God? How is he comparable? No one is like him.
God Will Pass Over Our Transgressions
What exactly does this mean? Is he saying no one forgives other people, only God forgives? We know we forgive one another. I’m sure some of the Jews forgave one another. Even pagans forgive, but of course, at the end of the day, whose forgiveness really counts? God’s.
Because even in the case of breaking the second table of the law, where you sin against one another, that’s the second table. The first table is against God. Sinning against one another is also a sin against God.
You break the second table, you’re also breaking the first table, every single time. So God’s always in the picture when it comes to sin. It’s unavoidable.
What he’s really comparing God to, of course, is like to all the other gods. Who is a god like you? Right? How are these pagan gods and Baal and all the other ones, Ashtaroth, that Israel is worshiping in their past and perhaps here in Micah in his lifetime? How can you compare these gods to the great god of the Jews, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The quality of God’s forgiveness is incomprehensible and incomparable, as well as the quantity of the sins that he pardons. This is the kind of god we have to deal with, and this is how he describes it.
Who is a god like this? He pardons iniquities. He passes over transgressions. He doesn’t retain his anger forever, and he casts our sins into the ocean.
Elsewhere we read, as far as the east is from the west. It will never be brought to God’s mind again. This pardoning power of God, a god no one else like him, the forgiveness that he offers is incomparable.
The pagan gods required, no, yeah, rather they demanded perfection of some sort, or heroic deeds even. That’s what you get in the case of some of the Greek stories, as you recall. They did it to appease the gods sometimes.
No, our god will pardon our iniquities, even though we can’t be good enough, even though we can’t do enough heroic deeds. Pardon. It’s a known fact by now.
His audience has heard this before in Exodus 34.7, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin, and by no means clearing the guilty. He keeps mercy, he forgives iniquity and transgressions and sins. That word there, forgiving, is the same one here.
He will lift up the burden of sin that is upon our backs. That’s what that word is, to lift up. The pardoning power of God, he pardons iniquity.
He will lift up the burden that is upon your shoulders, brothers and sisters, as he promised here and as he does through Christ Jesus. The pardoning iniquity is also a passing over of the transgressions. Which seems to be a clear allusion to the Passover.
Again, God forgives sins and he forgives sinners as well, but here it is more narrowed. It is the passing over of the transgressions, of the sins, of the violations of his audience then and there. It wasn’t just the non-elect that sinned, the elect sinned as well.
We don’t know how much of these sins, but enough that they had to hear the message as well. But he passes over only some of them, over the remnant of his heritage. The remnant, there’s that word again.
The remnant theology, we say. This doctrine, this belief that not all Israel is Israel, and not all the church, even today, is the church. But those who trust in Jesus Christ and flee from their sins.
God’s redemptive salvation was never for every person, man, woman, and child on earth. This text here tells us there’s a limited atonement. The transgression, the passing over, the parting of iniquity is for the remnant, not for every one of his heritage, but the remnant of the heritage of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Because it is Jacob that I loved, and Esau that I hated, God tells us. Even in the Old Testament. It’s a fading anger as well.
You can, I think, see and understand by now. This is a triple parallelism, right? The parting, the passing over, and not retaining the anger. Expressing the same thing in different ways.
God pardons, God passes over sins. If that were not encouraging enough, and it ought to be, his anger does not last forever. It will fade away.
It does fade away. Toward his heritage, towards those chosen by his sovereign almighty power, they will be forgiven. His wrath will not abide upon them forever.
But God’s wrath shall abide, of course, upon those who are not his remnants, those who will not repent. He does not retain his anger. It fades away like the anger of a father.
We’ve all experienced this. The anger of a mother. Come upon you to catch you in your sin.
You’re smacking your sibling around. You’ve broken the vase because you’re roughhousing in the house when you weren’t supposed to. Whatever it is.
And it’s not the first time you did it, nor the second time you did it, but the fifth time you did it. How are your parents going to react? Oh, all sweet and nice. They’re like, look, you’re not getting the message the first four times.
This is why I have to be more strict with you. That’s the wrath. That’s what we’re talking about here.
But more, of course, higher and greater than that, because it’s the wrath of a judge upon sin. But that’s covered by Jesus, and the picture here is more of the father upon the remnants, perhaps. This picture of a father who has this anger upon his remnant.
His anger does not last forever, because a father is a father first before he’s a judge. And that’s the picture we have again of being redeemed by him, and he is no longer our judge in that sense anymore. So the anger fades away.
The wrath of God does not abide with us forever, although it may feel like it when you are disciplined by his providence. In fact, it goes further than this. Not just pardoning, not just passing over, not just fading away of his anger, but he delights in mercy! He wants to be merciful to you, to his remnant, to his chosen, to his children.
He delights in it. He delights in covenantal faithfulness. Chesed.
That’s the mercy there. Or, as you recall before, loving kindness. KJV combining those two ideas together.
Of course, it may not feel like it in the case of Israel with Micah and the judgment coming upon them. You delight in mercy? Really, God? Why are the Assyrians coming down to beat us? Well, because you need the discipline. And it’s a function of my mercy to discipline you, not leave you in your sins.
To teach you to flee from your sins, to purify you from your sins. Individual Jews, of course, were struggling with sin, and they had the same question. You have the same question when you feel chastened of the Lord by his providence or through the church or through a family member who catches you in sin.
But it won’t last forever. God delights in mercy. This valley of tears will not last forever.
God delights. He rejoices. He wants to.
And he shall give you mercy. He has given it to you, and the promise of justification that you cling to here and now, and the promise of sanctification that you also have, but in part, yet really and truly, in the here and now till full glorification, because God delights in it. Keep that in mind.
You’ve heard many times that God pardons, that God passes over, and even that is wrath as anger fades away. But have you been reminded, have you clung to this and memorized that God delights in giving you mercy? Maybe that’s what you need to hear. God delights.
Who is like our God? The pagan gods of old, as I said, they did forgive. When you paid them enough, blood money, sacrifices of some sort, or some great amazing feat of what they call the heroic act, not much of a pardon, not much delights in pardoning there is there. The atheist gods, the man’s capriciousness, not just because the atheists have a god, it’s man, mixed with chance.
Man’s capriciousness wrapping itself in so-called science. They don’t forgive so easily. They just don’t.
They don’t tolerate Christians. They don’t like us. They won’t forgive us.
The social justice warrior gods have a list of unforgivable and unpardonable sins, as we hear about now and then in the media. The entire book of Micah could be confusing and could be confused with social justice warrior themes, except they would continue to condemn the people until they died. There is no redemption outside of Christ Jesus.
There is no pardoning of sins. There is no delight in mercy. But every small little infraction, whether in there or socialism, or even in godless, priceless capitalism, there’s no true forgiveness.
There you just suffer under the forces of the market. And that’s very unforgiving. There’s no forgiveness ultimately outside of Jesus Christ.
And God above delights, enjoys, and wants to be merciful, and is merciful to you. God will subdue our iniquities as well. Verse 19, he’s not done describing what kind of a god this is that no one else compares to this god.
God Will Subdue Our Iniquities
He will again have compassion on us and will subdue our iniquities. The compassion that he has is yet again. He’s done it before.
Why? Because he delights in mercy. He’s going to do it again. Why? Because he delights in mercy.
He won’t give up on you. And we need these reminders. And they needed the reminder.
And he ends the book on this high note. Compassion upon you like a mother to her child. This particular word seems to be closely associated with things that we have in nature that we take, like family relationships and compassion that we have.
A mother has compassion of a child. A father has compassion of a child. Because they understand the situation of what it means to be a child.
God understands the situation we are in. And of course, it’s a compassion, not an ineffectual compassion. Right? Not a weak compassion.
But a powerful compassion. It’s accompanied with God’s almighty power in salvation. Our salvation to the utmost means more than pardoning iniquities or passing over iniquities, but conquering iniquities, brothers and sisters.
And he will subdue your iniquities. Of course, it’s a figure of speech. It’s not as though your iniquities are hanging out here like some kind of troll and God’s going to beat the troll up.
He’s saying he’s going to conquer you. Because you’re the one exercising the iniquities, right? It’s not like, oh, it’s out of control. What am I doing here? No, it’s you.
He’s conquering you. And therefore, everything that’s at the effect, all the negative effects that come away from you, your sins, he’s going to conquer you. It’s interesting here, the word subdue.
The verb and its derivatives occur 15 times in the Old Testament. It’s not a lot, this particular word. It is evidently related to the Akkadian.
Akkadian word to tread down. It’s a stamp or press in the Arabic. In the Old Testament, it means to make, to serve by force if necessary.
It’s used in Genesis 1.28 to subdue the earth. Which means, in that context, of course, it’s going to take a little work. You know, subdue things that give in real easily, don’t you? They just roll over.
No, God’s saying it takes work. You have to tread it down to make, to serve by force if necessary. I mean, man had to work in the garden.
It wasn’t a paradise in the sense of, hey, I get to go to the Bahamas, and I don’t have to do anything for the rest of my life. I can sit on the beach and have some fun. No, they had to work before the fall.
It was a work not affected by sin, of course. And here, God says, I’m going to be the one doing the work. I’m going to work on you.
I’m going to mold you, and I’m going to subdue you. That’s the kingship of God. God as our king.
That’s the language here of a king. He subdues the enemies, and he’s going to subdue our enemy, the sin that remains within us. Romans 7, right? And he does.
That’s the daily sanctification we have, and the call that we have to fight that. And this is our Savior. Our Savior is our king.
It talks about that in our confession, because the confession takes the entirety of the Bible, and it says, why is he our king? Because he’s our king because he subdues us. It’s the word they use. Here it is.
He subdues us and our iniquities, and that’s a good thing. That’s the work of God as our king, our king father, right? It’s an important and essential theme, because sin is not passive but active in our life. Justification is a passing over of our sins, even declaring us righteous in the law courts of heaven, but it’s only part of salvation.
Salvation is broader than justification. It includes sanctification, and part of sanctification includes subduing our sins, mortifying them, killing them. And we do that because God promises to do that through us, as he promised to the Old Testament church, he promises to the New Testament church.
The same principle of sanctification that God subdues us is almighty power, powerful, sovereign grace of God subduing us and our sins to make us pure. Of course, sometimes you feel like a child in these cases who was grabbed by the parent and dragged off to the tub to be washed off. You don’t like it.
It pulls you by your ear, but at the end of the day, you’re thankful, you feel better, because your parents know best. Sometimes they have to subdue you pretty hard, don’t they? And God does that to us. Afterwards, we will feel better.
God casts away our sins, he says here, at the end of verse 19, into the depths of the sea. This is still the same idea. What kind of a God is this? Who is a God like this? How is he comparable to anybody else? He isn’t.
There is no other God out there that does these things. He casts our sins into the depths of the sea, which is to say he’ll never see them again, right? He’s not going to go down to the sea and pick it up and bring it back to shove it in your face. Christ Jesus has died for your sins.
These sins now, the sins in the future as well. He will never remember them again. Why should we? And then, lastly here, God will give us truth and grace.
God Will Give Us Truth & Grace
Verse 20, You will give truth to Jacob and mercy to Abraham, which you have sworn to our fathers from days of old. I just need a new body. Salvation always involves mercy, of course.
It’s the word again, God’s covenant of faithfulness or loving kindness. And truth and mercy go together. You cannot be saved, you cannot know about the mercy, the love, that God delights in giving you salvation unless you hear that, unless you’re given that as a truth, as a proclamation, whether in the word read as you read it at home or preached from the pulpit.
Truth and mercy go together. The truth of who God is, the truth of who he saves, the truth of how he saves. It doesn’t specify, it’s all the truth, everything that’s relevant to bring about this fact that full salvation and deliverance is coming in the form of Christ Jesus, both in the first coming and the second coming, collapse into one stanza, one part of the hymn.
Grace and truth is the other way we hear about this. In John 1.17 we read, For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth come through Jesus Christ. And has always come through Jesus Christ, even for the Jews of old.
It doesn’t say it never came, because Jesus predates John, doesn’t he? Of course, he’s the promised Messiah. They looked towards him for truth and grace. They never trusted in the sacrifices.
That has never been the case. Here it reminds us that Jesus Christ is the grace and truth that we need. The promise of grace and truth here in Micah was fulfilled in Jesus Christ for all of God’s people for all time.
And to thank the Lord, therefore, for the truth given to us through the Bible and through the Spirit, for the mercy given to us, the loving kindness that surrounds us every day, brothers and sisters, as prophesied here. We are living in the fulfillment of these prophetic words here and now as Christ came 2,000 years ago. But God has bound himself to this covenant to you and to our children.
And that’s why we have here the covenantal promises spoken in different ways. We read, You will give truth to Jacob and mercy to Abraham, which you have sworn to our fathers from days of old. He’s hearkening back to the covenant of grace very clearly by naming the patriarchs of the covenant of grace, Abraham and Jacob.
And it’s not just Abraham and Jacob. It’s Abraham and Jacob and all those, their prosperity, the seed that the promise has been given to. And thus it goes down, generation to generation, down to this audience here in Micah and to us and to our children and their children’s children.
We are bound. In fact, the other way of looking at it, the better way of looking at it as we see here is God has bound himself to us. That’s the kind of God.
He delights in mercy. He delights to bind himself into a covenant. Not as though he limits his sovereign power, but now he’s saying, I’m focusing my love, the compassion and the mercy I have upon you.
And you are weak. And so I’m going to explain this to you in terms you can understand. I’m making a covenant with you.
It’s a promise. And you’re part of this. It’s hearkening back to this wonderful promise of God that the truth of salvation was given not just to Jacob, of course, but to all that he represents and all his children.
Mercy, the covenantal faithfulness of God to Abraham as you read in Genesis 15 and 17 where he passes through the broken animal parts saying, that’s going to be me. That’s Christ. He’s going to take the curse of the covenant like these animals.
They understand all this. It all brings up and evokes this imagery to them and all this theology built up over time until we get to these latter prophets near the end of the Old Testament history. Which you have sworn, what? God has sworn to our fathers, to your fathers, brothers and sisters, from days of old that he has not given up because he delights in mercy.
The promise of the covenant of grace was made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to their seed. And we are the seed. We are the true Israel of God.
If our hearts are circumcised, we follow him. All our sins and transgressions and lies that weigh heavily upon us are pardoned, passed over, and cast into the sea forever and ever. And our iniquities are being subdued by his powerful grace.
Rejoice, brothers and sisters, the prophecy has come true and is continuing to be true and unfolding, budding forth in beauty until Christ returns. Rejoice, children of God, he has not forsaken you any more than he has forsaken Abraham and Jacob. And one day Christ shall return and his almighty mercy shall utterly subdue our sins and bring us into the full truth and mercy of heaven forever and ever.
Amen. Let’s pray. These are wonderful words, God, that you will give truth to Jacob and mercy to Abraham, which is to say to us and to our children’s children, which you have sworn to our fathers from days of old.
May we trust and rest into that reality, God. Amen and amen.