Materials
The Old Testament
Minor Prophets #6
What GOD Wants
Micah 6
by R. Todd Bouldin
This morning we turn to the minor prophet, Micah. Micah again takes
us into the courtroom of God where we are on trial. In the first two
verses of chapter six, the prophet Micah tells us to "plead our
case." We, as the accused, sit in the box. The mountains and
hills that have been around since the beginning and have seen everything
are the witnesses for the prosecution. To our horror, we discover
that the prosecutor is God. And the charge is that we have failed
to remember.
Prayer - Merciful God, when it comes to walking
with You, our confidence is more in Your hold of our hands than of
our grasp of Yours. In the Name of our Savior, Amen.
We sit in the divine courtroom, and in verses three to five, the prosecutor
stands to make His case against us. The prosecutor is God. He sticks
His prophetic finger in our face and demands to know, "What have
I done to you? What right do you have to turn away from me, to forget
that it was I who brought you out of slavery, gave you a place among
the nations, and redeemed you with saving acts? How dare you forget
that your life has been created and sustained by My love?"
Notice, unlike other prophets, Micah isn't concerned that we have
broken laws. He's concerned that we have broken the heart of God by
failing to remember that life is a gracious gift. From the first
days after the Exodus, for that matter from the first days after creation,
humanity has had a hard time remembering that we live in God's Hands.
"When you were born, Who gave you life? When you were in trouble,
Who rescued you from disease, the old addictions, bad relationships,
and the lost dreams? When you were alone, Who gave you every relationship
you now cherish?" The sacred Prosecutor is unrelenting. "You
dared to forget that it was all a gift!"
This is a very serious charge, because every time we forget that
we exist by the hand of God we begin to act like gods ourselves.
Then the worst things start to happen. When mortals try to act like
gods they only hurt others. In the words of Karl Barth, "All
sin is rooted in a lack of gratitude." When our hearts are not
filled with thanksgiving for what God has done, they are inevitably
filled with anxiety over what we have not done. And out of anxiety
about ourselves we fail to care for others with the steadfast
love with which God has cared for us.
As Micah continues his courtroom drama in verses six and seven, we
make our meager defense. "With what shall I come before The Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?" We ask ourselves what God
wants, and how much we have to give Him to take care of this problem.
"Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a
year old? Will The Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten
thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgressions?"
When you want to please God, it’s always easy to make a bargain.
And a little more time in worship or prayer is usually where we begin.
But God won’t let us off that easy. He is interested in a lot
more than our worship.
These are bad questions, corrupt questions, asked by people trying
to bribe their way out of trouble. The questions reveal only how little
we remember. The reason God dragged us into court in the first
place is we keep acting like we are the gods and He is the one looking
for a hand out. This isn't about what God needs. It's all about
your calling to live like a man or woman who needs your God.
By the time he gets to verse eight, Micah can't stand it anymore.
So he breaks into his own story to speak directly to us. "He
has told you, O mortal, what is good." In other words, don't
keep asking God what you are supposed to do. And don't keep avoiding
your calling with your favorite defense of being confused. "He
has told you, O mortal, 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."
Notice what isn’t on the list. It’s not that these things
are unimportant but they are not what counts when it all comes down
to it (Matthew 25). Being faithful in worship or attending the true
church isn’t on the list. In fact, God just said in the prior
passage that accurate and true worship isn’t enough to please
God. Your view of the inspiration of Scripture or your political affiliation
doesn’t make the list. Neither does your view on gay marriage
or abortion, or your view of women’s roles, or whether you are
for or against the war in Iraq. In fact, as far as Micah is concerned,
what God requires has little to do with the doctrines you believe.
It is what you do because of what you believe that matters. Action
is an outgrowth of what you believe – but at the end of the
day, what God cares about is what you do with what you believe.
So what God requires is to walk humbly in His presence, to love the
way of kindness, and to do justice in the world.
But what does that mean? First, He requires that we do
justice. The most important thing to remember about
the requirement to do justice is that you must never, ever confuse
it with believing in justice. God is not impressed with the sincerity
of our beliefs about social justice or with our ability to lobby for
justice, vote for justice, or demand justice for ourselves. It also
should not be confused with compassion, or “loving kindness.”
Justice is to work for the humane treatment of all people and creation
as the images and children of God that they are. Sometimes that requires
more than just compassion. You haven’t really helped someone
with compassion if you haven’t also worked to change the structures,
systems, and policies that keep them in their condition. That is called
justice.
The prophets of the Old Testament do not give us their theory on justice.
They just walked the streets of Israel and Judea and were so horrified
by what they saw that they told the people to start doing justice,
or stop calling themselves the people of God. They were to stop charging
excessive interest to the poor, to prohibit unfair balances that charge
consumers more than what an item is worth, to treat their workers
fairly and honestly for a day’s work. According to God, those
things are not policies for sandal wearing, granola eating liberals.
How you treat your workers, what you do with your money, and what
we as a community and a nation do with our resources, is something
close to the heart of God. It is not because God is so consumed with
fairness in our modern political sense. But your love for justice
flows from your passion for a God who is just.
Similarly, the New Testament tells us nothing about Jesus' personal
opinions on justice issues. He resisted the public debates of His
day over what should be done with the Samaritan issue, the taxation
issue, the adultery issue, or the Roman occupying army issue. He did
not lobby for policies against the sexually immoral. He did not speak
to Caesar for or against taxes. Instead Jesus cared for the people
who had been beaten down by these issues, and He restored their humanity
to them again. His treatment of people exceeded any policy or moral
high ground. And thus, He did justice.
I believe we all need to have thoughtful positions on the issues that
confront our society, but I also believe that is a pretty easy thing.
What is much harder is to follow Jesus as He introduces us to the
people behind the issues. Or perhaps under the issues. Every justice
issue has names, faces, stories that will break your heart. As the
founder of the Sojourner Community Jim Wallis has said, we really
have no business talking about "the poor" unless we know
people who are poor. Do you know poor people? How do you do justice
for them if you don't even know them?
But let's not stop there. How do you do justice to the demands of
home, children, aging parents, friends who are in need, work, church,
PTA, coaching soccer, a country at war, and now we are throwing the
poor on top of all that? All these demands pull you in a different
direction. So if you do the right thing long enough, sincerely enough,
hard enough, do you know what you will soon be saying? That there
is too much. To do right by one commitment is only to take time and
energy away from another. "I can't do justice to all these demands,"
we finally exclaim. Well, it gets worse. There is another requirement.
Second, what is required is not that you do justice only
because it is right, but because you "love kindness." The
word for love in the Hebrew here is hesed. It refers to an
unshakable, steadfast love that God has shown you. When we add sacred
love to justice, it removes the element of giving people what they
deserve, which is so often associated with justice, and substitutes
giving people what they need. We do this because that is how God responds
to us. When He placed His hesed alongside His justice, He chose to
give us not what we deserve, but what we need. Which is what we refer
to as grace.
God isn't asking you to make sure that every part of your life gets
just what it deserves. He is requiring you to give your heart to the
needs of others. We wonder how anyone can meet this requirement. "No
one can give his heart away so easily and frequently. I don't have
that much heart! How can I give my heart to my colleagues, and my
family, and the church, the nation, the poor, and all my needy friends?
Can't I just fix them?" No. It was that kind of thinking that
got you hauled into court by God. Again, you are not a god who can
fix people.
The requirement is just to do justice with loving kindness. "But,"
as we protest against our guilt, "No one can love as faithfully
and broadly as God does." Right, and that leads us to the
third requirement He has always made of mortals, that we walk humbly
with our God. As we sincerely seek to fulfill the first
two requirements of doing justice and loving steadfastly, we'll inevitably
be thrust into the third of walking humbly.
When will you ever have cared for enough of the poor, the sick, or
the broken hearted? When are you going to take care of those problems?
When will you ever be a good enough parent? When will you ever get
the church fully reformed and in order? Never. When will your love
ever be as faithful, and steadfast as God's is? Never.
We make that confession, not to get off the hook, but to place
ourselves squarely on it. We hold ourselves accountable for doing
justice and loving freely, but not because we expect to succeed. Rather,
it is because as we try, our hands are kept more tightly within God's
hands, and we make room for God to be God.
I am struck by how many of you there are who are really trying to
live a good life. You do want to do justice. I’ve heard you
express concerns for oppressed people, for minorities, for the poor,
for those dying of AIDS and poverty in Africa, for those victims of
genocide in Sudan. You would never say you're trying to do injustice.
And you do want to be loving. But it just seems so impossible. Now
you're in court before God with the rest of us, because you keep forgetting
that you are not in charge. Some of us are doing very little, and
we wonder how we will fare before this prosecutor. But others of us
are doing so much that we are exhausted and bitter. And it is not
because we love God or justice or kindness so much. It is because
we love ourselves so much that we have proclaimed ourselves everyone
else’s Messiah. I see people doing it in the church all the
time, and I see religious groups doing it on the national scale. God
never asked you to be the Messiah. He asks you to remember that you
have a Savior, and to walk humbly with Him as you attempt justice
and love.
To walk humbly means to remember that there is only one Messiah,
and it is not you. To remember that what you have received has
come from the bounty of His grace, and to remember, with a grateful
heart, that you have received in order to give. When you fail at giving,
day after day, rather than giving up as one more burned out do-gooder,
you who walk humbly with God will rise the next morning and try again
refreshed in the certain knowledge that God is still God. His Son,
Jesus Christ, is still risen from the dead. The Spirit is still at
work in the world. All that means anything can happen, on any day.
Perhaps a little more justice and love will even break into the world
through your life. But at the end of the day it isn’t up to
you. Lay that burden down and walk humbly with your God.
God doesn't want to keep you in court for your failures. He just wants
you to confess that you need Him to do all that He wants.
July 24, 2005
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