MICAH - INTRODUCTION
A
Bible Study - Commentary by Jim Melough
Copyright
2002 James Melough
Little is known of the prophet
Micah which means who is like Jehovah? He was a native of the town of
Moresheth (Moresheth-Gath), about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem, and close
to Gath, the name, in fact, meaning, possession of Gath, and he
prophesied for approximately sixty years from about 740 to 687 BC during the
reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. He was a contemporary of Isaiah and
Hosea. Jeremiah mentions him in Jer 26:18; and in Mt 10:35-36 the Lord
quotes Mic 7:6. The best known part of his prophecy is probably verse 5:2
which the Jewish leaders quoted to Herod in response to his question
concerning the place of the Lord’s birth, “And they said unto him, In
Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet, and thou
Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda:
for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel,” Mt
2:5-6.
Though the bulk of his prophecy
was to Judah, which became captive to the Babylonians in 586 BC, he predicted
the fall of Israel (the ten northern tribes), which fell to Assyria in 721
BC. Mic 5:2 foretells the Lord’s birth in Bethlehem, the fulfillment of these
three prophecies giving the assurance that the prophet was what he claimed to
be: God’s spokesman.
The style of the book indicates
that Micah compiled the material some time after he had delivered the
different parts orally, and at different times.
It may be of help to consider
briefly the background against which his ministry is set. During that century
the character of Israel had changed drastically, and for the worse. The
God-ordained system of land tenure under which every man owned his land, and
which ensured to a great extent an equitable distribution of wealth, had given
place to a system closely resembling that which governs today’s world.
By bribing corrupt judges, and
by any other means that served their avaricious purposes, unscrupulous men had
seized the lands of others, so that there had arisen a class of rich land
owners at one end of the social scale, and their poor victims at the other,
each passing year broadening the gap between them. In addition, there had
also arisen an equally grasping and cruel merchant class, for whom the poor
were fair game. With the original God-ordained order cast aside, the poor, as
in every age, became the helpless victims of the rich, and had little
alternative but to remain on the land as virtual slaves of the wealthy land
owners, or to migrate to the cities where they had also little alternative but
to do menial work for mere subsistence wages.
But a further evil attended the
rejection of God’s pattern for Jewish society. The new system broke down the
barriers that had kept her separate from the surrounding heathen nations, and
very quickly her sin was compounded by her worship of the false gods of the
nations, a worship which incorporated every form of sexual sin, and cast away
every God-ordained restraint of moral corruption. And to add insult to
injury, the guilty nation kept up the empty form of worshiping Jehovah even
while they also worshiped the gods of the nations, and relegated Him to a
place of mere equality with those gods.
In a word, Israel had become a
cesspool of every imaginable evil, leaving God no alternative but to destroy
her. But because He loved her in spite of her evil, He graciously sent His
messengers, the prophets, to inveigh against the evil, to call her to
repentance, and to warn her that refusal to repent would result in her
becoming the object of His consuming wrath, He making the heathen nations His
instruments of destruction.
If, however, we see nothing more
in these prophetic books than the record of the past, we are reading them
wrongly. Israel is God’s mirror in which He bids us see ourselves, and if we
fail to see that today’s world is the same moral cesspool as was the Israel
addressed by the prophets, we are spiritually blind. And if we fail to hear
in the words of the prophets God’s words to us, we are spiritually deaf.
May God remove the scales from
our eyes, and unstop our deaf ears, so that we will see how accurately
Christendom is portrayed in the Israel addressed by the prophets, and hear in
their words God’s voice speaking to us; and may that seeing and hearing
produce the repentance which alone can avert His wrath and secure His
blessing. Remember, in the midst of her idolatry and moral corruption, Israel
never ceased to maintain that she was God’s chosen nation; nor does equally
apostate Christendom cease to claim that she too belongs to Him, dismissing
as inapplicable to her the words of the Lord Jesus Christ recorded in Mt
7:21-23, “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the
kingdom of heaven ... Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not
prophesied in thy name? and in they name have cast out devils? and in thy
name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never
knew you: depart from me ye that work iniquity.”
The message of the prophets was
a call to Israel to repent in view of certain coming judgment, and that is
still their message to apostate Christendom and to a sinful world, whose
destruction will come in the form of the terrible Tribulation judgments that
will destroy the whole present evil world system. The Gospel is simply the
confirmation of the prophets’ warnings, but it adds a note that is missing
from their pronouncements, for it gives the assurance that those who trust in
the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior will be caught up to heaven before the
Tribulation begins.
Relative to Israel, however,
Scripture makes it clear that her blindness will not be healed until the
Tribulation does begin, so that those who then become believers will have to
endure the effects of those judgments just as will their unbelieving fellows,
those believers who die having the assurance that to be absent from the body
is to be present with the Lord, and those who live to the end of that terrible
era, having the assurance of deliverance at the Lord’s return to inaugurate
His millennial kingdom, and bring them into the enjoyment of its blessings.
The believers in Israel in the
days of the prophets were in the same position: their being believers didn’t
deliver them from having to endure the same affliction as the unbelievers.
Many of them also died, but they did so in anticipation of the resurrection of
life; and those who survived lived in the expectation of the coming of the
Lord to set up His kingdom, unaware that that coming would not be in their
day, so that they too eventually died, but also in anticipation of the
resurrection of life.
We are indebted to the late Dr
Fredrick Tatford for the following list of similarities between the writings
of Micah and Isaiah:
|
Micah |
Isaiah |
|
1:9-16 |
11:28-32 |
|
2:1,2 |
5:8 |
|
2:6,11 |
30:10,11 |
|
2:11 |
28:7 |
|
2:12 |
10:20-23 |
|
3:5-7 |
29:9-12 |
|
3:12 |
32:14 |
|
4:1 |
2:2 |
|
4:4 |
1:20 |
|
4:7 |
9:7 |
|
4:10 |
39:6 |
|
5:2-4 |
7:14 |
|
5:6 |
14:25 |
|
6:6-8 |
58:6-7 |
|
7:7 |
8:17 |
|
7:12 |
11:11 |
[Micah 1]