What can God do when people walk right up to the truth, take a good look at it, and then turn away from it?
Is God willing to allow people to live with such destructive deception?
What corrective actions will God take to address perverted worship practices and gross injustice toward others?
When God can’t use established prophets and priests because they are as corrupt as the society they serve, who will He send to speak the truth?
God brought a small-town prophet with a name that meant, “who is like Jehovah,” to declare His answers to these questions.
The word of the Lord that came to Micah of Moresheth in the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem (Micah 1.1).
God is Coming
God’s love is so profound that He is “not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).
He is not willing to allow humans to live with the kind of deception that is inherent in perverted worship practices and injustice.
God sends prophets to announce His intentions with the intent that people hear them and change their behavior.
Micah’s message was that God was coming to Israel to correct their attitudes and actions.
Hear, you peoples, all of you;
listen, O earth, and all that is in it,
and let the Lord God be a witness against you,
the Lord from his holy temple.
For the Lord is coming out of his place
and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.
Then the mountains will melt under him,
and the valleys will burst open
like wax near the fire,
like waters poured down a slope. (Micah 1.2-4)
In the eighth century, the high places were mountains where the worship of Baal was blended with the worship of Jehovah.
When we blend the worship of God with nationalism, materialism, or any other substitute for God, we lose the true meaning of our relationship with Him.
The “mountains” of economic prosperity and national pride seem quite formidable. In the presence of God, they melt away into insignificance.
We do well to consider the message of the prophet and to evaluate our worship. I think most of us will recognize that we have blended our worship with some ideology that is wrong to some degree.
The best thing we can do is to read the Bible with an open heart that says, “God please speak to me through your word and adjust my attitudes and actions to conform to your character.”
What’s Wrong?
Micah is best known for his prophecy of the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem. Passages like the next verses are more difficult to discern in modern times, but they were obvious to his readers.
All this is for the transgression of Jacob
and for the sins of the house of Israel.
What is the transgression of Jacob?
Is it not Samaria?
And what is the high place of Judah?
Is it not Jerusalem?
Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country,
a place for planting vineyards.
I will pour down her stones into the valley
and uncover her foundations.
All her images shall be beaten to pieces,
all her wages shall be burned with fire,
and all her idols I will lay waste;
for as the wages of a prostitute she gathered them,
and as the wages of a prostitute they shall again be used. (Micah 1.5-7)
God’s people walked up to a “no trespassing” sign and believed it didn’t apply to them. That’s the meaning behind “transgression.”
Samaria was the worship center of the northern kingdom of Israel. Their temple to Jehovah included a golden calf that was dedicated to Baal.
The temple in Jerusalem, the capital of the southern kingdom, didn’t have a golden calf. Nevertheless, the behavior of the temple officials was as corrupt as their northern neighbors.
God’s judgment uncovered the “foundations” of what was wrong with their worship.
Baal was believed to be the god who controlled fertility and the weather. Instead of fully relying on God for their provision, God’s people gave loyalty to Baal as well as to God.
They believed rain, good crops, and fertility were the “wages” that Baal paid them in response to their devotion.
God saw their wages as those of a “prostitute,” because they were grossly unfaithful to Him. They served Baal because they believed they could manipulate him through sacrifices to give them what they needed.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus addressed our needs. He told us to not be anxious over basic necessities but to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness (Matthew 6.33).
When we are focused on our needs and wants, we will be tempted to find ways to tip the scales in our favor. Blending materialism or nationalism with the worship of God are two of the primary ways Americans resemble the ancient Israelites.
The best thing we can do is to follow Jesus’ message. We can place our full trust in God, seek to live by His rule, and exhibit his character (righteousness).
YouTube Video
Rudy Ross and I discuss this passage on YouTube today. It is on the Bob Spradling channel.
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