Micah 6
worthless gifts
(Micah 6)
Jason Procopio
We’re in Micah 6 today, and let me give you a bit of warning before we get into it. If you’ve been following this series with us, you’ll know that the first three chapters of the book are very dark. It’s God, accusing the people of sin and promising his judgment against that sin. Then, in chapters 4 and 5, it seems to lighten—God gives this beautiful promise through Micah of his heavenly kingdom, this beautiful end that awaits God’s people, and then of the Messiah, the Shepherd-King who will come to usher in this kingdom.
So we end chapter 5 thinking we’re on a pretty high note…and then chapter 6 comes along, and pulls us right back down again. At least it seems that way.
That’s what happens in this chapter, but on a smaller scale.
This chapter contains two separate prophecies that work together: the first is found in v. 1-8, and the second is found in v. 9-16. The first seven verses, and the last eight verses, function like bookends: they give charges God is bringing against his people. And in between them, we have one very simple verse (almost jarring in its simplicity and beauty) that throws perspective on the whole thing, and makes us see how devastating the accusations are.
We have a hard time with structure like this, because we tend to think in a linear fashion. So reading this, we see accusations from God, a statement of what God wants (Great! a solution!), and then more accusations, as if that previous verse never happened. But this bookend structure is meant to put emphasize the main point that’s found in the middle.
So we’re going to play with the order of things today, just to help our modern minds grasp it. We’re actually going to look at v. 9-16 first, because they give a pretty good summary of what we’ve seen so far in this book. Then we’re going to go back to v. 1-8 and end on the main point.
The Consequences of Sin (v. 9-16)
In this section, Micah proclaims God’s accusation against the people, essentially summarizing things he has mentioned in previous chapters. Again, the people are slow to listen.
9 The voice of the Lord cries to the city—
and it is sound wisdom to fear your name:
“Hear of the rod and of him who appointed it!
10 Can I forget any longer the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked,
and the scant measure that is accursed?
11 Shall I acquit the man with wicked scales
and with a bag of deceitful weights?
12 Your rich men are full of violence;
your inhabitants speak lies,
and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth.
God starts by calling the people to listen, to “hear” what he is saying—and it should come as no surprise, because he’s said it all before.
His fundamental accusation against them is commercial and social corruption.
He talks of “scant measures”, of “wicked scales” and “deceitful weights.” In all of this, he’s talking about people amassing treasure for themselves by cheating the less wealthy out of theirs. We used to do this when we were kids. We’d go to buy candy (the kind you can scoop out yourselves and put into bags). You pay for that candy according to weight. So when you go to weigh it, what do you do? You sneak your thumb underneath the edge of the scale and lift it up a little, so the weight reads as lighter than it actually is.
This is what the rich are doing for the poor: taking advantage of their wealth to gain more, to the detriment of those who have less.
He speaks of rich men falsely accusing those who can’t defend themselves, or rendering unjust judgments in order to exploit others.
This is exactly what we saw in chapter 2, when God condemned the oppression of the elite against the poor. But the scary thing about this passage is that, rich or poor, the unrighteousness on the part of Israel’s elite has now apparently worked its way through the entire community—so now God isn’t only speaking to the elite, but to everyone.
Consequently, God promises judgment (v. 13):
13 Therefore I strike you with a grievous blow,
making you desolate because of your sins.
Literally, he says, “I’m going to make you sick because of your sins.” If we look at what the Bible says about sin, we see that God isn’t inventing illness to fall upon the people for their sins; he’s simply promising to let the effects of sin play themselves out. Why? Because sin is rebellion against our Creator. It is rebellion against whom he created us to be. So living in sin does make us sick. It diminishes us, makes us less human than he intended us to be.
God is saying, “You’re going to feel what you didn’t feel before. Your sin is killing you, and I’m going to let you feel it.”
After, he describes the promised “desolation” (v. 14):
14 You shall eat, but not be satisfied,
and there shall be hunger within you;
you shall put away, but not preserve,
and what you preserve I will give to the sword.
15 You shall sow, but not reap;
you shall tread olives, but not anoint yourselves with oil;
you shall tread grapes, but not drink wine.
It’s hard to imagine anything worse than this—but again, it is simply the natural consequence of sin. How many people work their whole lives, then get to their retirement, and think, Why did I do that? All those years of work, all that restless toil…for what? Was I happy? Was I fulfilled? Did it bring me what I wanted? Many of even the wealthiest people in the world testify that all their wealth, all their work, didn’t bring them everything they wanted.
This is what sin does. It causes us to focus all our attention and effort on things that do not bring us satisfaction. And that’s what God promises his people: what you have will not satisfy, and what you hope to keep, you will lose.
So Micah ends on this summary condemnation, and promise of judgment. V. 16:
16 For you have kept the statutes of Omri,
and all the works of the house of Ahab [two wicked kings of Israel];
and you have walked in their counsels,
that I may make you a desolation, and your inhabitants a hissing;
so you shall bear the scorn of my people.”
All of that seems very harsh…and it is—particularly in the light of what came before, which we’ll see after the break.
Worthless Gifts (v. 1-7)
Let’s go back to the beginning: we saw the last bookend, the summary accusation and promise of judgment against God’s people. Now we’re going back to the first.
Micah begins this section the same way he started the one we just saw: with a call to Israel to hear what the Lord has to say.
Hear what the Lord says:
Arise, plead your case before the mountains,
and let the hills hear your voice.
2 Hear, you mountains, the indictment of the Lord,
and you enduring foundations of the earth,
for the Lord has an indictment against his people,
and he will contend with Israel.
There’s something that may escape us here if we’re reading it in English: the word “hear” in v. 1 is plural—he is calling the people to attention. But the word “arise”, in the second line, is singular. God is speaking to Micah himself, telling him to call the mountains and the hills—the very earth itself—to hear God’s complaint against his people, to stand as witness against them.
So here is his complaint. V. 3:
3 “O my people, what have I done to you?
How have I wearied you? Answer me!
4 For I brought you up from the land of Egypt
and redeemed you from the house of slavery,
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
5 O my people, remember what Balak king of Moab devised,
and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the righteous acts of the Lord.”
Notice the form of v. 3: God is responding to a suggested accusation that the people of Israel have held against him. This isn’t the kind of thing any respectable Israelite would have said aloud, but many of them may have surely thought it: “Good grief, why won’t he just let up? Why all these rules? He’s so exhausting!”
If anyone here says they don’t understand this, we’d be lying. We all understand what it’s like to think unfair thoughts about someone else, or even to say unfair things about someone else. But apparently, this thought is no longer just a thought for the people of God. Apparently, this thinking has now sunk its roots down into the people’s minds to the point where they actually feel this way. They think about God, and they see his law and his will for them as unfair and burdensome (the literal translation of the end of v. 3 is, How have I burdened you?).
So rather than accuse the people of their own sin, God is going to turn it around here, and answer their accusation against him. He’s going to show them just a couple of the many, many reasons why they should have remained faithful to him—everything he’s done for them—in order to highlight just how twisted their thoughts have become, how unfair and wrong their unfaithfulness to him has been.
He has not “burdened” his people, but rather has shown them constant faithfulness.
He mentions the Exodus from Egypt in v. 4—the Hebrews had been forced into slavery in Egypt for centuries. God heard their cries for help, and sent Moses to deliver them. God worked through Moses to display his awesome power, and led them free out of Egypt, delivered from slavery.
Next he says, also in v. 4, that he sent before you Moses, Aaron and Miriam.
Moses wasn’t only the one who delivered the people from Egypt; he was also the one who delivered God’s Law to the people. It was through Moses that God told his people about his own character, his own integrity, his own holiness, that the people might follow him and become like him (we’ll come back to that in a minute). So in Moses, we have God’s direction, through his law.
Aaron and Miriam were Moses’s brother and sister. Miriam was a prophetess, and one of the ways she exercised her prophetic ministry was by essentially leading the people in worship to God after the exodus from Egypt (we see this in Exodus 15.20-21). In Miriam we have celebration of the very might God is describing to the people here.
Aaron became the first high priest of Israel; he was the one who ministered before the Lord in the tabernacle, effectively serving as the people’s representative before God. Through Aaron’s ministry, God made it possible for the people to be declared pure, by the sacrifices he offered to God on their behalf. So in Aaron, we have a means of intercession, of reconciliation (if only temporary) between God and man.
After this, in v. 5 God calls the people to remember how he protected them from the machinations of foreign enemies who sought to harm Israel (Balak king of Moab), as well as the religious leaders they hired to help them (Balaam son of Beor). It’s an incredible story that we don’t have time to get into, but it’s found in Numbers 22. (And if you don’t know the story, there’s also a hilarious interlude with a talking donkey you really don’t want to miss.)
Finally, God brings up what happened from Shittim to Gilgal at the end of v. 5. What happened from Shittim to Gilgal? A lot of things, actually—he’s talking about the journey the people made to enter into the land that God had promised to give them. Their entrance into the Promised Land was nothing short of miraculous, from divinely won battles to the supernatural dividing of rivers.
The point of all this is simple: the people have abundant proof that God is a good God, that he is righteous and that he treats them with perfect justice and love. He has shown them incredible patience for centuries, always forgiving them when they returned to repent after rebelling against him…and yet they complain that he has burdened them.
We do this too, don’t we? How often do we find obeying God to be a burden we don’t want to carry? How often do we complain (inside ourselves, never out loud) that it’s too hard? How often do we despair over God’s reign on our lives, rather than rejoice?
And yet, if we were to sit down and make a list, if we were to be as objective as possible, most of us would have a long list of all the ways God has been good to us. (And if you can’t see it, take a few minutes this week to meditate on Psalm 103, which is basically a description of how God deals with us on a day-to-day basis.)
We have all of these objective reasons why we can know, without a doubt, that God is for us and not against us…and yet we still feel that he is against us, and we despair.
So what do we do? The default instinct of most of our hearts is, when we feel that God is against us, we try to do whatever we can to earn back his approval. We feel we have to show God and convince him that we really aren’t that bad. That if he just took the time to get to know us, he’d like us; he’d see that we are worth saving.
This is essentially what we see in the next two verses, albeit in a very extreme example. V. 6:
6 “With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
Here we see someone (perhaps one of Israel’s kings) standing in for the people and trying to come before God bearing gifts, in order to earn his favor. Now perhaps it’s just a figurative illustration, and no one had actually done this. But let’s not forget that God himself inspired these words, so if it’s an illustration, it’s an apt one: it illustrates what the people’s mindset has become.
This representative comes before God bearing gifts, and the gifts become more and more elaborate and extreme as we go on.
First he proposes burnt offerings—the kinds God prescribed in the Law of Moses. He says, Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will THIS satisfy him? Will THIS be enough?
Then when he senses that that’s not working to earn God’s favor, he ups the ante. Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Will THIS satisfy him? Will THIS be enough?
Still no? Okay, he’ll go for broke: Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
As he continues, he strays further and further from what God commanded in his law. God did command burnt offerings, sure—the first question seems fair. But then he goes on… God did command offerings of livestock and oil—but never specified anything like thousands of rams or ten thousand rivers of oil. God never asked for these things.
And then finally, the representative mimics pagan rituals by offering to kill his own son as a sacrifice.
You see the point: the people have strayed so far that they no longer know what God is like. They’ve forgotten who he is and what his will is. And because they don’t know God, they assume he’s like all the other pagan gods they’ve heard about, and offer him the wrong things; or they imagine that God cares about the size and cost of the gift.
What Is Good (v. 8)
So what are they missing? The people have rebelled against God, have allowed idolatry and corruption and dishonesty to seep into every aspect of their lives, and consequently, they find themselves under God’s judgment for their sins.
I personally think that v. 6-7 are figurative, and that no one has actually asked this question, but that this is God saying, This is the kind of people you have become. If you ever did try to make things right, this is the kind of solution you’d come up with. But we have no indication this is the case.
So let’s frame the question another way. We know what type of people they are; but what type of people should they be? What “gift” would be an honor, and not an insult to God?
V. 8 (one of the most famous verses in this book):
8 He has told you, O man, what is good—
Stop here for a moment. God has told you “what is good”—this is a summation of all the law. The kinds of things the people would offer, the various ways they would try to appease him, are ridiculous, because they have the law: they should know that God would never ask for such things!
They’ve missed the point: they’ve missed “what is good.”
So what is it? Let’s continue:
—and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
So you see, God has given his people his good law—a written expression of the depth of his goodness, a written expression of the incredible precision of his holiness. This law doesn’t exist simply to bring order to a chaotic people (although the law does this). It doesn’t exist simply to establish ritual worship in Israel (although it does this too).
God gave his law to his people in order that they might become a different kind of people. That their knowledge of who God is might reorder their character. That it might restructure their affections.
So what does the Lord require of them?
First, that they be just. This is a direct contrast to the behavior we saw in chapter 3, where we see Micah condemn the corruption of the religious and political leaders in Israel. What does God require? That we do what is right, what is just, what is good. He keeps this general—doesn’t go into great detail about what it means to “do justice”—because he doesn’t want the people to simply adopt new tasks to fulfill, new boxes to check off. He wants them to be just people, people who do justice because that’s how they’re wired now.
Secondly, to be kind—and here it’s even more explicit. He doesn’t just want his people to “do kind things,” but to love kindness. He wants kindness to be their instinct, their default means of expression to others. This is in direct opposition of the oppression of the poor and the weak that we see in chapter 2. He wants them to think of others before they think of themselves, to care for those who can’t necessarily care for themselves (which of course implies allowing others to care for them too).
Thirdly, to be humble, and follow him. To walk humbly with your God. Another way to say this is to “walk thoughtfully with God, in the light of the covenant’s requirements”. In the end, it comes down to the same thing. This last part of the verse serves as the lynchpin for the rest—for no one is able to be perfectly just, perfectly merciful, but God himself. Walking humbly with God means knowing we need him to help us walk with him.
And this of course is what God provided for us in Christ. Christ is the only human being who ever perfectly lived like this…and the incredible thing is, through his work on the cross to take the punishment for our sin, he transferred his perfect justice, his perfect mercy, to all of us who place our faith in him. And as he lives in us by his Holy Spirit, he gives us the ability to learn how to live as he did, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
Conclusion
This text should unsettle us a little, because far too often we find ourselves thinking like the people of v. 1-7, or we find ourselves under the weight of the judgment of v. 9-16…and we forget the goodness of the God of v. 8. We forget the blinding simplicity of the gospel.
So this passage calls us to two simple and distinct realizations about ourselves, and about God.
The first realization is simple: that God is holy, and we have sinned against him. We too have been dishonest; we too have been unjust; we too have pursued false gods to satisfy our desires. We are guilty of the same sins as the people of Israel. And we deserve the same judgment.
When we realize that, our first instinct is to panic: to earn God’s approval through some other means—to show God that we’re really not that bad, that he has good reasons to save us and forgive us. “See God, I never miss a service, or a prayer meeting, or home group! See, God, I never give in to temptation when I’m online. See, God, I volunteer for this association that works to provide for the poor! See, God, I’m worth your time!”
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed what happens when we fall into this pattern, but it’s pretty simple. Either we despair that our efforts are still not sufficient, and we worry endlessly that despite our efforts, God still doesn’t love us… Or we become proud of our efforts, and look down on others who don’t do as much or as well.
And that’s the second realization this text calls us to: that the only thing we need to earn God’s approval is God himself.
God’s approval of us isn’t dependent on how well we’re able to perform. It’s like Arnaud was saying a couple weeks ago, when his dad said to him, “I don’t love you because you’re smart; I love you because you’re mine.”
A lot of you need to know this, because you’re constantly trying to earn God’s affection by the life you live. But God doesn’t love you because of the life you live. He loves you because you’re his.
This people, to whom he made the amazing promises of the last two chapters, were an idolatrous people. They were unfaithful. So what did he tell them? I’ll take away your sin. I’ll remove your idols. I’ll make you pure.
And that’s the third realization—this is how good God is. What God requires, God gives. Because God loves us already, because we’re his…because God approves of us already, because we’re his…he gives us everything we need to live for him.
A lot of you need to know this too, because you’re waiting. You’re waiting to feel like you’re “ready” to be obedient to God’s commands—commands you know God has given you. You’re not obeying today, because you feel like you can’t.
And that is simply untrue. There is no commandment in the Bible that the Christian cannot obey. His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness (2 Peter 1.3). Now. Already. It’s done. What God requires, God gives.
We can see it already in the Bible. God requires that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with him; so what does he do? He gives his Son who does justice for us, who loves mercy for us, and who walks humbly with God for us. He gives his Son, who lives in us by his Spirit…that he might teach us and enable us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with him.
What God requires, God gives. We can not only obey his commandments, but we can obey freely—not out of obligation, but joyfully. Because he’s changed us. We’re different now, and this is what we love to do: to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
