Justice, Mercy, Humility: Series: Fundamentals
Micah 6:1-8 July 25, 2010
Intro:
Fundamentals. A child has to learn balance in order to learn to walk. A business has to have more money coming in than going out. A family has to understand the basic rules of the Monopoly game before they can enjoy an evening together around the kitchen table. And a follower of Jesus has to live out of a daily, moment-by-moment relationship with the God of the universe. These are fundamentals.
Micah 6:1-8:
This morning I want to walk you into an ancient courtroom as a witness to an ancient legal trial, with a whole lot of contemporary relevance.
1 Listen to what the Lord is saying:
“Stand up and state your case against me.
Let the mountains and hills be called to witness your complaints.
2 And now, O mountains,
listen to the Lord’s complaint!
He has a case against his people.
He will bring charges against Israel.
3 “O my people, what have I done to you?
What have I done to make you tired of me?
Answer me!
4 For I brought you out of Egypt
and redeemed you from slavery.
I sent Moses, Aaron, and Miriam to help you.
5 Don’t you remember, my people,
how King Balak of Moab tried to have you cursed
and how Balaam son of Beor blessed you instead?
And remember your journey from Acacia Grove to Gilgal,
when I, the Lord, did everything I could
to teach you about my faithfulness.”
6 What can we bring to the Lord?
What kind of offerings should we give him?
Should we bow before God
with offerings of yearling calves?
7 Should we offer him thousands of rams
and ten thousand rivers of olive oil?
Should we sacrifice our firstborn children
to pay for our sins?
8 No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good,
and this is what he requires of you:
to do what is right, to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God.
The Complainants: vs. 1-2
The court case begins. God starts. The invitation is given. “Go ahead… come… bring all your evidence of how poorly you have been treated by God…”. It is obvious there is a problem – the earlier part of the book of Micah demonstrates that. God and the people are not getting along, things aren’t going as they should, it is coming to a head, and God starts with this invitation. “Come and prove how badly you have been treated”…
The next line invites the mountains as witnesses of this complaint, which immediately elevates this entire confrontation and puts it in a different league. If I may re-interpret, God essentially says “go ahead, bring your case against me, but do so not from a moment in time or a single incident, but in the light of the history of my interaction with you”… You might find a few places in your life when God didn’t seem to “show up”, when things didn’t go as you thought they should, when you felt like God wasn’t doing enough/doing His part/keeping His promises. So if you want to come and complain against God, know that God is going to hear that from a much longer perspective. Has God really not done enough for us? Has God really not done His part?? Are we contending that God has really not kept His promises???
I don’t know if you’ve ever had a similar experience. I have… there have been times, even in the not-so-distant past, when I’ve gone to prayer kind of mad at God. I’ve gone to prayer with an attitude of, “OK God… only You can fix this, only You can solve this, only You can make this happen… and thus far you ain’t doing it…”. Now, this passage in Micah is on a much broader scale, and much more confrontational, but the same process happens to me when I shut up and listen to God. He brings me back to a much bigger picture. God asks me questions like the ones we are going to see as we work through the rest of the passage. He says, as He does in vs. 1, “go ahead and bring your complaint, but do so in front of the timeless grandeur of all creation.” And know some perspective is coming…
The tables turn quickly in vs. 2. We find out that the problem is not the unfaithfulness of God, but rather that God has some charges of His own to bring, which He does in the verses that follow.
God’s Case: vs. 3-5
Would you feel slightly intimidated, if the God of the Universe suddenly declared He had charges to lay against you? Perhaps “terrifying” would be a better word! I imagine myself in this passage, beginning with a desire to come to God and complain about something He had or hadn’t done, and then hearing God say, “I have a case against you…”, and I imagine cowering away…
But that imagination is shattered by the first, tender words of God. “O my people”… They are words of lament, of hurt; they are not the words of a casual acquaintance who means nothing, they are words of a deeply loving parent or spouse who is feeling betrayed. “What have I done to make you tired of me?”
Then God recites His saving deeds. As Christians now we would hear of Jesus’ empty tomb rather than the exodus from Egypt, and we could also put our own stories in the place of the other examples. Verse 5 says, twice, “remember”… Do you remember? Do you really remember what God has done for you, in saving you, in taking your sin, in adopting you as His child, in giving you a new spirit, in freeing us, and in walking with us through all the experiences of our lives? At the end of God’s declaration is the statement, “I did everything I could to teach you of my faithfulness.”
The Response: vs 6-7
Everything God has just said comes from the position of a very unique relationship. It is a relationship based on faithful, covenantal love. It is tender, “my people” used twice, recalling God’s salvation, His provision of great leaders, His reversing intended curses and turning them into blessings, and His faithful, covenantal love. And next we hear the response.
But just before we look at that, what might an appropriate response be? What might your response be?
The Israelite’s response here is disgusting. God frames His charges in relational terms, they respond basically asking how much it is going to cost to buy God off. Commentator Bruce Waltke puts it this way:
“Instead of responding to such a wonderful Lord with loving and obedient hearts, Micah’s generation transformed the covenant into a contract. In a series of parallel lines, each beginning with a question, a representative ‘worshiper’ seeks to establish the price that will win God’s favour by raising the bid even higher. Holocausts? One-year-old calves (already more costly)? Thousands of rams? Myriads of torrents of oil? Or, the highest price of all, the cruel sacrifice of a child? He can bid no higher. Outwardly he appears spiritual as he bows before the Most High with gift in hand. But his insulting questions betray a desperately wicked heart. Blinded to God’s goodness and character, he reasons within his own depraved frame of reference. He need not change, God must change. He compounds his sin of refusing to repent by suggesting that God, like man, can be bought. His willingness to raise the price does not reflect his generosity but veils a complaint that God demands too much; the reverse side of his bargaining is that he hopes to buy God off as cheaply as possible.” (Tyndale Commentary on Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, IVP, 1988. p. 194-195).
I am only comfortable using such harsh language on the Israelites in Micah 6:7 because I do the exact same thing, and I suspect you do also. We ‘transform the covenant into a contract’ – we sometimes live from a perspective that we do “x” as our part of the agreement, which means God must do “y”. The times I act like God has messed up are evidence in my life that I’ve fallen back into a place where I see myself as an equal, where I have rights and needs, and God ain’t meeting them. Maybe even more – maybe evidence that I believe I really know better than God what needs to happen. And it misses the fundamental reality.
It Isn’t A Contract:
Remember this sermon series is about the practical fundamentals of being a Christian? Here is a big one: Christianity is fundamentally about a relationship, begun in a response of faith to un-deserved grace, sealed in the forgiveness offered from the historical reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and now lived daily in love and faithfulness. It is SO NOT a contract: I do “x” for God, God does “y” for me.
God’s Heart for This Relationship: vs 8
God’s response to His people stays within the covenant relationship. Despite their series of questions escalating the price, God simply responds by re-stating what it actually is that God requires from us, His people, in the context of this covenant relationship. “No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
This is beautiful. Notice the three phrases. The first two are directed outward in our relationships with others, the last one describes our relationship with God using the same “walking” language that we talked about last week in Gal. 5 where it says “keep in step with the Spirit”, reinforcing these ideas of a regular way of living closely and dynamically with God, from an attitude not like a contract or agreement but in humility and gratitude and never forgetting that we are God’s children by His grace, at His invitation, and so enjoy and respond to His love by loving Him and walking with Him with a heart of humble gratitude.
Now I want to come back to the first two phrases, which clearly and simply lay out “what God requires of us”. “to do what is right, to love mercy”. Notice first that God expresses this in positive, proactive terms. I think we’ve tended to miss this. In our practices of our Christian lives we have tended towards acting from a perspective that defines the most important things as the things we don’t do because we are Christians. Put more simply, we tend to think that “what God requires of us” is mostly that we don’t sin. From that perspective, we think “well, I’m not cheating on my spouse, I’m not lying to my boss, I’m not cussing like a sailor, I’ve never murdered anyone, etc…”, and we think this is what it means to live as God requires. Now hear me clearly, yes God requires us to stop sinning. But that isn’t what Micah 6:8 says – here God phrases His requirements in positive, proactive terms. We are “to do what is right”, or “to act justly”. The emphasis is on us having to act, us having to do, not simply us NOT doing sins, but us actually doing, initiating, starting, working for that which is right or just. Do you see how important this shift in perspective is? It changes us from a posture of avoiding something (sin), to a posture of pursuing something (justice). The second phrase, “to love mercy” is similar, but gets to the heart (in the call to “love”) and puts it back in terms of covenantal love (the word for “mercy” is the familiar Hebrew word hesed, which we’ve talked about before as faithful, committed, active, timeless, covenantal love).
Both phrases are about a posture of us acting towards others, especially those who are not powerful. These phrases very clearly and bluntly state that what God requires, what God expects, is for His people to actively seek justice and to love mercy, on behalf of those in whatever society who don’t have the power and who are thus vulnerable. This is what God requires.
Application Time:
So now we must ask ourselves how this passage of Scripture, this ancient courtroom drama, informs our lives. What do we do about this? How do we apply it? Let me say, first, that Micah 6:8 still applies to us: God still requires us to seek justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. But how? When you and I walk out these doors, how do we obey? I decided today that rather than me suggest ways, I’d just ask you directly. How can you apply this, what can you do to demonstrate your obedience to God, in what ways will you live the way God requires this week?
