Micah 4.6-13

painful restoration

Micah 4.6-13

Jason Procopio

Welcome back to the book of Micah! I started preparing this sermon a couple weeks ago, and I want to explain the particular mentality I was in when I began.

We had just moved into our new apartment, which is nice of course—we love the place—but anyone who’s moved knows how exhausting it is. That week I had been painting, and assembling furniture, and unpacking boxes. Both kids got sick, which of course means I got sick too. So I wasn’t feeling well, and I wasn’t sleeping well. On top of all of that, I’m still feeling the accumulated weight of the last two years, which have been very heavy, for a variety of reasons.

Needless to say I wasn’t in the best frame of mind when I sat down to begin working on this sermon. And as I read the text, as I started to get into it, I felt like God was winking at me, like when he inspired Micah to write these words so many centuries ago, he knew that one day I’d be sitting here, I’d be feeling like this, and I’d have to prepare to talk to all of you about it…which was of course perfect. He knows what he’s doing.

Because in this text, we see God make some pretty incredible promises to his people…but the fulfillment of those promises may not be what his people want to hear. Everyone in pain hopes to be delivered from that pain, and that’s normal. But we have an idea in our minds of what that deliverance should look like, so when God goes about fulfilling his plan, and he does things differently than we had hoped, we’re disappointed, as if he wasn’t delivering us at all.

So God gives us texts like this, to show us that deliverance may not be what we thought or hoped it would be…but that it is good. Better than what we would have chosen. God is compassionate: sometimes he swoops in at just the right time and gives us the miracle we wanted. But he also knows what’s better for us, so far more often, he chooses a process, rather than a single moment where everything changes, and he calls us to be patient with the process, to accept the process, because the process is actually better.

That’s what we’re going to see today. But before we jump into it, just a quick review of where we’ve been so far (because we’ve been out a month). 

In the book of Micah, God promises judgment against his people for a variety of different reasons. He promises to judge his people for their idolatry, their attempts to make God cohabitate with other, foreign gods. He promises to judge them for the oppression their social and religious leaders practice against the weak.

The judgment he is promising is exile: Assyria and Babylon are going to come and defeat both the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah, and exile the people there. They will be far from home, far from the temple of their God, and they will feel as if God has abandoned them.

But, as we saw last time at the beginning of this chapter, things will not always be this way; judgment will not be unending. At the beginning of chapter 4 God gives this beautiful picture of where all of human history is heading—at the return of Christ, he will establish peace amongst the nations of the world, and God’s people will be united as one under him, and will learn from him and love him forever.

So you see, he has set up two realities for us: the present reality of imminent judgment for God’s people, and the future reality of perfect peace in the new heavens and the new earth.

The question, then, is this: what can we expect in between? What will the process of getting from this present to this future look like? What does restoration under God look like? 

Restoration from Pain (v. 6-8)

I grew up hearing the story of my dad’s brother, Tony. When my dad was two years old, his mother had left (I’ve still never met her), his father had been arrested, so Dad and his four brothers were shipped off to live in an orphanage in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lived for the next seven years. When Dad was four, and his brother Tony was two, Tony was adopted. When my grandfather finally took Dad and my uncles back, Tony was not with them.

I grew up hearing about Tony, about how he looked the last time my dad saw him. It was a constant source of pain for him, for the next thirty-seven years.

Then, when I was seventeen, Dad got a phone call from a woman in Florida, saying she was looking for the family of a young man adopted out of Saint Mary’s in Memphis, Tennessee. She gave his birth name (Tony Procopio), what little personal information she had, and sent him a photograph in the mail (this was before email). I was with him when he opened the envelope and saw the photo: he gasped audibly. It was a picture of Tony, taken the day of his adoption, and it was exactly the image Dad had described to us all my life.

To make a long story short, a couple weeks later, Tony and his wife drove up to Tennessee to see us. My grandfather came from Baltimore with one of my uncles. When Tony walked in our front door, the family resemblance was unmistakable. My Dad hugged him, and everyone cried, and it was beautiful. A few years later, Tony and his wife Trish were at our wedding.

This is the kind of miraculous, instantaneous restoration from pain God gives sometimes. At just the right moment—even at an unexpected moment—he comes in and gives us what we’ve been praying for so long.

That’s what we see in v. 6-8, much as we saw in the five previous verses. God makes a promise for the day of Christ’s return, when he will gather in his people and establish them as a strong nation, dwelling with him forever, and reigning over the entire renewed creation.

V. 6:  

6  In that day, declares the Lord, 

I will assemble the lame 

and gather those who have been driven away 

and those whom I have afflicted… 

(It may be hard for us to know what to do with this… God is not saying here that he sinned against the people; the Bible declares over and over that God is holy, and that there is no sin in him. He’s saying that the pain the people has been feeling was his doing. Ultimately, it’s not the Babylonians, or the Assyrians, or any other people who were the main cause of their pain. God is sovereign over all things, including things which are difficult for us to deal with.)

7  and the lame I will make the remnant, 

and those who were cast off, a strong nation; 

and the Lord will reign over them in Mount Zion 

from this time forth and forevermore. 

8  And you, O tower of the flock, 

hill of the daughter of Zion, 

to you shall it come, 

the former dominion shall come, 

kingship for the daughter of Jerusalem. 

Imagine being among the people who were hearing Micah’s words and despairing over the imminent threats against their nation. What should their reaction be to these words? How good should these promises sound? What a relief it should be to hear that yes, you’re suffering now, and you’re suffering because of what you have done…but one day, all this suffering will end. 

This is exactly what will happen on the day of Christ’s return. All sin will be judged, and cleansed from the earth; everything killing our world now will be removed, and the earth healed of its wounds. Everything wrong will be made right. Everything that is hurting us today will be neutralized; every source of every pain will be removed. It will happen in an instant, and it will be everything you’ve ever prayed for, and more. 

And in that perfect peace, God’s people will reign with him—that’s what all those mentions of “Mount Zion”, “daughter of Zion”, “daughter of Jerusalem” are referring to. Mount Zion is a name for God’s kingdom, and its “daughters” are those who live there. God’s people will live with him in perfect peace and reign over this perfect, new creation for all eternity. 

This is the best thing anyone could imagine, and it will happen in a moment. 

Let’s be honest: when we pray, this is the kind of thing most of us pray for: one striking event that will upend all of our grief and finally make us happy. So what would your reaction be, if you’ve had this one prayer request for years, and you get a message from God saying that the answer to your prayer is coming, just as you hoped it would?

Restoration in Pain (v. 9-10)

The proper reaction  would be relief, and gratitude, and joy at the prospect. But oddly, that’s not how the people react. In fact, they’re not even thinking about these promises, or about the goodness of the God who promised them (even though they have ample reasons to believe that God really is good). 

Despite God’s faithfulness to them in the past, they are acting as if he’s not even there, as if he’s already abandoned them.

In part, this is why they fell into the idolatry and oppression we saw in the first three chapters: when you assume God isn’t really there, you have no problem going against his will. So the judgment against their sin remains. V. 9: 

9  Now why do you cry aloud? 

Is there no king in you? 

Has your counselor perished, 

that pain seized you like a woman in labor? 

10  Writhe and groan, O daughter of Zion, 

like a woman in labor, 

for now you shall go out from the city 

and dwell in the open country; 

you shall go to Babylon. 

Stop there for a moment. For the first and only time in this book, we find out the name of the judgment that is coming. Babylon would come in about a hundred years later, defeat Judah and bring the leaders of the people and a large portion of the population into exile. Judgment is coming, and now it has a face.

But the interesting thing about this is that after repeating the promise of judgment to come, Micah describes it almost as setup for the rescue, like the mise en scène before the dénouement. He says, “you shall go out from the city and dwell in the open country; you shall go to Babylon,” and then in the second half of v. 10 he says: 

There you shall be rescued; 

there the Lord will redeem you 

from the hand of your enemies. 

He doesn’t promise them protection from all judgment or pain. He doesn’t promise them that all will be forgotten, that the consequences of their idolatry can be brushed aside. Rather, he promises that there will be pain, but that the pain will be the place of rescue.

So you see, he’s starting to get to the heart of a problem for many of us. There’s always that moment in the movie when the main characters are in the gravest of danger, and suddenly, at just the right moment, a hero swoops in to save the day. That’s what we want. We want the miracle. We want the sudden arrival of the rescue that will keep us from feeling the pain that’s threatening us.

But God doesn’t promise that. The pain we’re feeling, we’re feeling it because of sin. Sin has corrupted the world God created, and as much as we’d have liked him to just come in right after the first sin in the garden of Eden, right after Genesis 3, and fix everything then…that is not what he ever intended to do. 

This makes us uncomfortable, but we have to affirm it if we’re going to be faithful to the Bible… When sin infected the world, it brought with us sickness, and death, and decay, and every possible source of every possible pain. The continual pain of sin’s presence in this world is God’s judgment against sin, and that judgment is right. Because of their sin, God promised Adam pain in his labors, and Eve pain in childbirth and marriage; the pain which exists in our world is the just consequence of the sin of humanity—ours included.

But here’s where we see the grace of God: he promises to restore us, not by always keeping us out of pain, but by coming to us in our pain. By letting our pain be the stage on which his restoration plays out. 

And God will go even further than that. He won’t simply promise restoration in our pain; he’ll promise to restore us through the pain itself, using it for our good and his glory. That’s what we’ll see after the break.

Restoration through Pain (v. 11-13)

So God promises to restore his people in their pain in v. 9-10, and then, he takes it one step further—more than simply promising restoration in the pain, he promises restoration through the pain. He begins at v. 11 with something of a transition:  

11  Now many nations 

are assembled against you, 

saying, “Let her be defiled, 

and let our eyes gaze upon Zion.” 

We know this is a transition because it’s no longer just Babylon that is threatening: Now, he says, MANY nations are assembled against you. Many enemies are desiring your defeat. That wasn’t the case for God’s people at the time Micah was writing.

What this means is that starting in v. 11 God is no longer speaking to just the people of Judah, but to all of God’s people, for all time. Because we know that throughout history, there have been many threats against God’s people and God’s plans, and there will always be. 

And I don’t think we should see this verse as referring to only literal nations waging literal war; it is every possible threat against God’s people—threats from real nations (like Rome at the time of the early church, or those nations today in which the church is persecuted); from Satan and demons (who can taunt us and tempt us to despair); or from our own sin (which draws us away from God).

All of these threats are represented here as one united force, as many nations gathered together to defeat one common enemy—the world vs. the people of God.

And in v. 12, God promises victory over it all—over every possible threat against his people.  

12  But they do not know 

the thoughts of the Lord; 

they do not understand his plan, 

that he has gathered them as sheaves to the threshing floor. 

13  Arise and thresh, 

O daughter of Zion, 

for I will make your horn iron, 

and I will make your hoofs bronze; 

you shall beat in pieces many peoples; 

and shall devote their gain to the Lord, 

their wealth to the Lord of the whole earth. 

My grandpa loved Westerns, and almost every time we’d go to my grandparents’ house when I was a kid we’d end up watching one together. One of my favorite tropes of Westerns is the box canyon trap.

Namurachi Box Canyon, Mexico

A box canyon is a canyon with high walls and a path running through the middle, which narrows until it disappears altogether. The good guys would lure the bad guys into the canyon, and when all of them were inside, they would light a fire in front of the exit, so there was no way out, then they’d just stand on top of the canyon walls and shoot down. Fish in a barrel.

Essentially, in these verses, that’s what we see. The enemies of God always find themselves in a box canyon. They have their thoughts set against God and his people (remember v. 11— “Let her be defiled,” they say, “and let us watch”); they make plans against God’s people. “But,” Micah says, “they do not know the thoughts of the Lord; they do not understand his plan.” They think they are working to harm God, but really, he’s drawing them in, gathering them as sheaves to the threshing floor.

The point is that even though all we can see is our pain when we’re in it, God is always doing something behind the scenes, through the pain, turning the intentions of whatever is hurting us into something that is for our good and for his glory.

We see example after example of this in the Bible. The most cited example is probably Joseph, whose brothers sold him into slavery because they didn’t like him. He endured years of slavery and imprisonment before rising to power in Egypt and working to prepare for a famine. When, many years later, his brothers come to Egypt for food, Joseph brings them in and they realize that this is the brother they sold into slavery all those years earlier. 

Joseph would have every right to be angry, to lash out at them, to imprison them as they did to him. But he knows what God has been doing all this time. Remember what he said? Genesis 50.20:  

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. 

Of course we hear that, and we look at our situation, and we think, God’s not allowing me to go through this pain in order to feed millions of people during a famine. Far too often we can’t see as clearly as Joseph why God allows us to fall in any particular situation.

Even so, we can have the assurance that God isn’t letting our pain go to waste. He’s doing something with it. He’s using it for our good and for his glory.

Charles Spurgeon, the English preacher, suffered greatly during his life: from personal pain, from persistent health issues  (which would eventually claim his life at the young age of 57), but most especially, from intense and chronic depression. 

But his perspective on all of these things is remarkable. Spurgeon hated suffering, and would avoid it if at all possible; he spent much time convalescing, or working to avoid new outbreaks of his physical problems. At the same time, he had learned two things we would do well to learn ourselves. 

The first is that God is sovereign over all things, including our pain, and always allows pain to come to us in the way it needs to come. This was a comfort to him, and it should be to us: to know that our pain is never outside the purview of God’s sovereignty over our lives. Spurgeon wrote:     

It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quantity.

The second thing Spurgeon learned is that God is sovereign over all things, so not only does he allow our pain…he uses it. He is active in our pain. This is perhaps my favorite quote from Spurgeon (who wrote thousands of pages of quotable material):     

I am afraid that all the grace that I have got of my comfortable and easy times and happy hours, might almost lie on a penny. But the good that I have received from my sorrows, and pains, and griefs, is altogether incalculable... Affliction is the best bit of furniture in my house. It is the best book in a minister’s library.

You see, in these verses God promises victory to his people…but it’s not victory in the way they might have hoped. We remember what came before. We know the context. The context is that of the people of God, under God’s imminent judgment. The context is that of the promised exile. The victory of v. 13 doesn’t mean that the pain of v. 10 won’t happen. 

So what are we to make of this? Does this passage promise deliverance, or difficulty? 

Of course, the answer is both: it promises difficult deliverance. Exile is coming, yes; but that exile will pave the way for rescue. Suffering is coming, but that suffering is the avenue of restoration. The deliverance of God isn’t always protection from pain, but rather restoration through pain.

Embrace the Process.

I understand that this may not seem like great news at first. Like I said at the beginning, we want the miracle. We want the immediate exit. We want it over now. 

But if we could take a wide-angle view of the Bible, and see what God is after, we’ll see that he’s doing something much bigger and much better than simple deliverance from a painful situation. His goals are greater than that.

God’s plans were fulfilled through the person and work of Jesus Christ: we’ve just spent a month remembering that reality. We say—and we believe and we know—that Christ lived, died and was raised to save us from our sins: he took our sins on himself, and suffered for them; he gave us his perfect life, to declare us righteous before God. And because of this salvation, we are promised a perfect eternity with God in the new heavens and the new earth, free from sin, free from pain, free from suffering. This very personal, individual salvation was achieved for us through the work of Christ.

But that’s not all he achieved. Jesus lived, died and was raised to ensure the perfect fulfillment of all of God’s plans. His sacrifice wasn’t a picture for us to admire; it wasn’t an ideal; it wasn’t a model. It was a decisive act that achieved the decisive victory over sin and all of its effects. The designs of God’s plan are global, cosmic, universal. It wasn’t just for me and for you; it was for all of God’s people, throughout all of history, and all of God’s creation, everywhere.

And that’s what makes the deliverance he promises here so much better than we think. God’s deliverance isn’t less than personal, but it’s much more: it’s not just for me and for you: it is for all of God’s people, throughout all of history, and all of God’s creation, everywhere. 

God’s deliverance is so much better than the deliverance we may hope for, because it’s deliverance we share with our brothers and sisters. It’s deliverance we will celebrate together forever, in the new heavens and the new earth. As the pain we feel today is common to all of us—the pain of living in this fallen world—the deliverance we will experience will also be common to all of us who have faith in Christ. 

Every human being who belongs to God will know what it was like to live on this broken earth and be subject to the pain of sin’s effects; and every human being who belongs to God will know what it is like to be rescued from it. 

So I suppose that if there is one takeaway from this passage, one thing this passage is calling us to do, it is this (I’ll borrow a simple phrase from a buddy of mine): embrace the process. Deliverance may not be what we hoped for, but it is good. Better than we could imagine. Bigger than we could imagine.

Knowing that God delivers not just from pain, but in pain and through pain gives us this assurance: whatever we are experiencing is not outside of the purview of his sovereignty. God is not looking down at us with a worried look on his face, thinking, Well what am I going to do about THIS? 

The pain we’re feeling isn’t unknown to him; both in the abstract and in the concrete, Christ himself knows what we’re going through, because he lived in this fallen world too. So he’s not indifferent to our pain, and he’s not powerless before our pain. He is working in it—and we’re hurting now simply because the process is still going on.

So I can’t tell you that your pain is going to end today. I can’t tell you that if only you have enough faith, if only you pray hard enough, it’ll go away. I can’t tell you those things because the Bible doesn’t tell you those things; anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. 

But I can tell you that your pain isn’t eternal, and it isn’t meaningless. It’s doing something. The apostle Paul said it this way in 2 Corinthians 4.16-18:  

16 So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, 18 as we look not to the things that are seen [the pain we’re feeling now, the situation we’re in] but to the things that are unseen [the deliverance God has promised to his people]. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. 

If you belong to God, then whatever you’re going through won’t last, and it is working for your good. You may be in exile now; you may see exile coming; but there will be rescue in and through the exile. Affliction is the best bit of furniture in your house, the best book in your library.

So embrace the process. Be okay with letting God do the work he wants to do. His deliverance may not be what we hoped it would be, but it is better.