The Lord’s Query
Micah 6 begins with an honest question from the Lord. God wants to know just how He has wearied His
people. He can see quite plainly that
they have abandoned His ways. He desires
to know why.
Through Micah, God reminds the people that it was He who brought
them up out of slavery from Egypt. He
freed them from oppression. He set Moses
and Aaron and Miriam before them to lead them.
Through Moses, the Hebrew people received the Law. Is any of this a bad thing?
The short answer to the Lord’s query is “no.” What has the Lord done to His people but
bring them out of captivity, give them rules that make social interaction possible,
and then deliver them into a land that can absolutely sustain their life! Everything that the Lord has done has been
geared for the successful life of the Hebrew people.
What is unspoken in these verses is the reality of humanity. We want all the good without any of the
effort, don’t we? Yes, freedom is a good
thing. But we want it handed to us as
though it is our right instead of having to work and struggle with justice each
and every day. We want an ordered life
where things go according to schedule, but we aren’t usually inclined to put in
the effort to make that happen. We want
a successful life filled with good relationships and feelings of accomplishment
but we don’t want to turn to the God that can make that happen.
You see, it isn’t that the Lord has done anything bad to drive
away the people at all. The reality is
that human beings just don’t have it within us to stay loyal to the plan! We don’t have it within us to be accountable
to do what it takes to live as a society where all people can know joy. No, we are inherently self-mongers. We think of ourselves first in most
circumstances. The problem isn’t with
what God has done. The problem is that
we cannot properly respond to what God has done.
Walk Humbly with Your God
And now we come upon one of the most famous passages in the book
of Micah. What does the Lord require of
us? He has blessed us so lavishly, what
does He ask in response to this gift?
The answer is simple. “He has
told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do
justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
Here we see what I spoke about in the prior section. God has told us what is good. He has shown us the way! All he asks is for us to practice justice, do
kindness, and walk humbly.
What’s really scary is that none of those concepts are all that
hard. Our country is supposedly built
upon the foundation of justice – so you would think we shouldn’t have a
difficult time appreciating justice. {Although admittedly, justice is something
that I believe is easily skewed in the eyes of the beholder.} As a people – especially a Christian people –
we shouldn’t have any difficulty appreciating kindness. Those two concepts are not terribly difficult
for us to understand as human beings.
I think it is the third one, the generic one, that gives us the
most trouble. I believe that we do not
desire to walk humbly before our God.
Justice is perverted when it is our own justice and not God’s justice
that is sought. Kindness towards others is
lost when we put ourselves first. It is
when we forget to be humble and remember our place with respect to God that
things get out of whack. We begin to
believe what we want to believe and do what we think is right in our own mind. Society never goes along all that well once
we begin that process.
Judgment Comes
As we would expect to follow a passage denouncing the ways that
people turn from God, we get a passage on judgment. God tells the Hebrew people that he has had
enough of their deceitful economic practices.
He has had enough of their malicious and venomous tongues. He has had enough of their violent
lifestyle. To put it simply, God is fed
up with the Hebrew people and their rebellion.
So what does God say that He will do to them? He will let them follow their pursuits and
let them see how far they get on their own.
Let them just try to find true satisfaction without Him and His
ways. Let them try to find fulfillment
in pursuing their own paths. Let them
try and store up and persevere under their own strength and provision. Let them try to bring about a harvest when
their focus is on their own efforts and farming techniques.
When we forget God, God often allows us to walk freely down that
path. That’s what free will is all
about, isn’t it? We as human beings have
to be allowed to walk away from God if we so desire it. Sure, He will continue to call to us; but He
will not force us to respond to His call.
Woe to the nation that does walk away from God. Woe to the nation that relies upon its own
definition of justice. Woe to the nation
that is convinced in its own science and technique that it can feed the
world. Woe to the nation that tries to
find fulfillment in the emptiness of pop culture. Woe to the nation that tries to find
satisfaction in our own success. When
any nation walks away from God, it gets the fruit of such labor.
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