Every one of us will be judged, either by Christ, or in Christ.
[1] The word of the LORD that came to Micah of Moresheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem.
[2] Hear, you peoples, all of you;
pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it,
and let the Lord GOD be a witness against you,
the Lord from his holy temple.
[3] For behold, the LORD is coming out of his place,
and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth.
[4] And the mountains will melt under him,
and the valleys will split open,
like wax before the fire,
like waters poured down a steep place.
[5] All this is for the transgression of Jacob
and for the sins of the house of Israel.
What is the transgression of Jacob?
Is it not Samaria?
And what is the high place of Judah?
Is it not Jerusalem?
[6] Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country,
a place for planting vineyards,
and I will pour down her stones into the valley
and uncover her foundations.
[7] All her carved images shall be beaten to pieces,
all her wages shall be burned with fire,
and all her idols I will lay waste,
for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them,
and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return.
[8] For this I will lament and wail;
I will go stripped and naked;
I will make lamentation like the jackals,
and mourning like the ostriches.
[9] For her wound is incurable,
and it has come to Judah;
it has reached to the gate of my people,
to Jerusalem.
Coming Soon
"Fire and brimstone" — "Turn, or burn" — "The end is near"
These phrases are familiar enough. Some stand on the street corner with signs; others stand a few yards away and laugh.
You can imagine if God plucked Micah up out of the 8th century BC, and set him on a street corner here in the 21st century AD, preaching the sermon we find in Micah 1, Micah would quickly be classified as a "fire and brimstone" preacher.
Any time we come to a passage of judgment in the Scriptures, there are at least three pitfalls that we need to avoid:
First, we may become self-righteous. "Aha, the sinners got what they deserve!" While we should delight in God's justice, we dare not forget that "we all must appear before the judgment seat…" (2 Cor. 5:10).
Second, we may become self-loathing. "Look how terrible I am! I need to be better, so I don't end up like them." This puts an infinite burden on us, as if we can work our way out of sin and back to God.
Third, and related to the second, we may become hopeless and apathetic. You hear about how terrible a sinner you are, week after week, but you see no way out. If you live like that long enough, you might just come to a point where you say, "You know, I just don't care any more. I'm tired of hearing about my sin."
If we fall into any of these traps, we're missing the point entirely. To understand this passage, we'd do better to begin with a question:
"Why is God telling us about judgment on Israel and Judah?"
To answer that question, I'd like to look at this judgment through three lenses. First, the Cause for Judgment.
Why is God coming down to judge in the first place? There's a cause, a context behind the judgment that we need to understand. And we can do that with a brief look into OT history.
In his day, Micah was preaching to two kingdoms: Israel, the Northern Kingdom (whose capital is Samaria); Judah, the Southern Kingdom (whose capital is Jerusalem).
Over two hundred years had passed since the united kingdom had split through a bloody civil war.
Micah preached in the days when Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah reigned in Judah, sometime between the 740s and the 690s BC. Micah himself is from the South, from a farming town called Moresheth, not too far from Jerusalem.
You might remember Jerusalem as the city that God gave to King David, and where God made an astounding promise: "David, I will establish [your son's] kingdom. He shall build a house for my name… I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son."
In fact, David's son Solomon did build God's house, a marvelous temple, and he dedicated it with these words:
"Blessed be the Lord who has given rest to his people Israel, according to all that he promised… [Now,] Let your heart therefore be wholly true to the Lord our God, walking in his statutes and keeping his commandments…" (1 Kg. 8:56–61).
But there was a problem: Solomon himself did not keep God's commandments. "…his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God…," we're told just a few chapters later.
"For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites… [he] built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem" (1 Kg. 11:4–7).
Because of Solomon's faithlessness, God tells the king that He will tear his kingdom in two.
Now, you may be thinking that seems a little harsh. After all, Solomon did not seem to turn wholly away from the LORD; he just supplemented his worship with idols.
But look at it from a different perspective. I love Victoria, my wife, and I can demonstrate my love by bringing her a full bouquet of roses. But what if I bought two bouquets? What if, before returning home, I stopped off at another house, and gave one bouquet to another woman?
That's what's happening here, and that's why the kingdom broke apart: the divided kingdom resulted from a divided heart.
That's the kind of heart that we find here in Micah 1. The people say "We worship God," but they've been fooling around with other gods.
This isn't just a problem among certain groups of people; it's flowing from the very heart of Israel. "What is the transgression of Jacob [i.e. Israel]? Is it not Samaria?" (v. 5). The problem is systemic; it's poison pumping from the heart throughout the nation's bloodstream.
And it's not just a problem in Israel to the north: "[For] what is the high place [i.e. pagan shrine] of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem?" (v. 5).
Jerusalem. Jerusalem. City of David; city of God's Temple, the city where God said, "here I will dwell…." To Jerusalem God now says, "You become nothing but a pagan shrine, and I'm gonna cut you down."
You see, no matter how much they thought they were giving to God, they weren't giving Him their hearts. They didn't trust God to make them successful; they didn't trust God to make them happy.
And we know what that's like. Our idols may be more subtle, but the principle remains the same: God is not good enough for us.
It's more than just kneeling to wooden posts. As the Book of Micah unfolds, we find covetousness, oppression, and deceit. Yet all throughout we can follow a single thread: these people say that they're serving God, but they're really just serving themselves.
"I'll put God here, and my toys and aspirations over here. I'll put God here, and my anger, my lusts, my pride over here." And so God becomes one "thing" out of many things in our lives, competing for primacy.
But God is not a competitor; He is the LORD. He drew you up from the dust of the ground. And He does not want your distracted worship, or your divided heart; He wants you, every ounce of you, to worship and enjoy Him forever.
So we may be happy to look to Samaria and say "Ah, see, those people out there have abandoned God."
But have we reckoned with our own high places? Have we seen our own shrines to Chemosh and Molech for what they are? Because those shrines are the reason why the LORD comes down to judge.
That's the Cause for Judgment. Now, let's look secondly at the Character of Judgment, i.e. how God comes down to judge Israel and Judah.
One of the first things we notice is that this judgment is utterly cataclysmic:
[vv. 2–4] "For behold, the Lord is coming out of his place, and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains will melt under him, and the valleys will split open, like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place."
The "high places" here may be another reference to the pagan worship shrines, but it could simply describe God's towering presence over creation. We are given a similar picture from Amos, a prophet to Israel just a few decades before Micah:
"…prepare to meet your God, O Israel! For behold, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind, and declares to man what is his thought, who makes the morning darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth — the LORD, the God of [armies], is his name!" (Am. 4:12b, 13).
It's a day of reckoning, as God bears down on the mountaintops. They buckle beneath the weight of His glory, melting away like a candlestick amidst a forest blaze. Valleys are rent apart, the ground rushing away like water down a slope.
You can imagine a hydrogen bomb or volcanic eruption. I've not seen either of those in person; but I have seen a house fire. It's fast, and violent, the sort of thing that reminds you just how small and weak you really are.
Cataclysms like those help us see the power of God. And that's what we find here in Micah; as creation unravels beneath His feet, God reveals His immense and unparalleled power. He is greater than us, and indeed greater than all of creation.
And that should unsettle us. As one commentator wrote, "Men feel secure so long as God remains in heaven, but when he comes to earth in judgment they are gripped by the terrifying realization that they must meet the holy God in person."
This judgment is cataclysmic, revealing God's power. But it is also comprehensive, revealing God's thorough and unfailing justice.
As we hear repeatedly throughout the Bible, God is a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. That's an astounding verse, the kind you can get tattooed on your arm. But on that (hypothetical) tattoo, will you include the rest of the sentence? "…but who will by no means clear the guilty."
God is gracious, but sin is never ignored; God is merciful, but everyone must stand before Him to give an account. And, deep down, we all know that this is right and good. As a friend pointed out in our Bible study some time ago, no matter how distasteful we might find the idea of "judging" or "judgment," we still have a strong desire for "justice."
We abhor the idea that evil deeds go unpunished, or that God might turn a blind eye towards heinous sins. But God is not blind; He is the "searcher of hearts and finder of facts," as theologian J. I. Packer once wrote. We see a picture of that here in judgment on Samaria. God says:
"I will make Samaria a heap in the open country, a place for planting vineyards, and I will pour down her stones into the valley and uncover her foundations" (v. 6).
Can you imagine if we heard someone say this about Washington D.C.? This is not simply a terrorist attack; this is total annihilation. And God makes a special point of targeting the cause of the calamity: the city's false worship.
"All her carved images shall be beaten to pieces, all her wages shall be burned with fire, and all her idols I will lay waste, for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them, and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return" (v. 7).
The last part of that verse is particularly fitting. Like prostitution, idolatry involves giving yourself to false lovers. The Israelites have false hearts, from which stem the works that Paul lists in Gal. 5:
"…sexual immorality… idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these."
God sees it all, and consigns it to the fire.
At this point, we see Micah reduced to tears:
"For this I will lament and wail; I will go stripped and naked; I will make lamentation like the jackals, and mourning like the ostriches."
The ostrich is a funny-looking bird, but his calls can be quite haunting: a deep, throaty cry, like when you run out of tears, and all you can do is softly heave and moan.
The wound is incurable. In other words, the judgment on Samaria must come to pass. God will never ignore sin; justice will be done. And the justice that falls on Samaria will likewise fall on Jerusalem; it will come up to the very gates of Micah's country, of his family.
But that's not the end of the story. The cataclysmic, comprehensive judgment of Micah 1 is also a judgment that's coming soon.
Samaria and Jerusalem serve as signposts for the Last Judgment. Just so you see I'm not making this up, take a look back at v. 2:
"Hear, you peoples, all of you; pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it, and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple."
You see, this is not a private court case; the LORD calls the whole earth to witness judgment falling on Israel and Judah, because it's a judgment that is coming for them as well.
"They have all turned aside," as it says in the 14th Psalm. Israel and Judah will not escape judgment, but neither will the nations;
Recall from before: "…all must appear before the judgment seat…" (2 Cor. 5:10). That's not just an OT warning; it's a NT promise, and it's carried out by Jesus Himself, for "all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ."
Jesus promises that He Himself would stand as judge over the whole world. We find this throughout the NT, including Mt. 25:
"31 When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats."
To His sheep He will say, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you…." To the rest He will say, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."
Even more than Micah's day, that Last Judgment will be cataclysmic and comprehensive. Not an ounce of sin can slip into eternity. Jesus will accept no false hearts in His Heaven.
And that is why we got to get it into our heads, that every one of us will be judged, either by Christ, or in Christ.
What could possibly cure the incurable?
God says to you this morning, "I have a cure."
I will again have compassion on you; I will tread your iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.
Micah learned all of this, yet knew that God cannot ignore sin. As Peter tells us (1 Pt. 1), prophets like Micah, along with the angels of heaven, longed to learn: "God, how are you going to work this out?"
And then, one day, God showed them by doing the unthinkable: by taking on frail human flesh.
God the Son became the Son of Man; the Judge became judged for us, for everyone who would call upon His name.
We can mourn with Micah because the wound did come to Jerusalem, when Christ was crucified on a hill for the ungodly. "For our sake he [was made] sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5).
All of the idols, the high places, the faithlessness; all the treasures of our half-true hearts; all of these were drowned in the depths of the sea… along with Jesus, as God's wrath fell, full force, upon Him.
And as the wrath fell on Jesus, it fell away from those who actually deserved it.
"This," says J. I. Packer, "is the real heart of the gospel: that Jesus Christ, by… His death on the cross as our substitute and sin-bearer, 'is the propitiation [the guilt-negation] for our sins' (1 Jn. 2:2). Between us sinners and the thunder-clouds of divine wrath stands the cross of the Lord Jesus. If we are Christ's, through faith, then we are justified through His cross, and the wrath will never touch us, neither here nor hereafter. Jesus 'delivers us from the wrath to come'" (1 Thess. 1:10).
"[A]n hour is coming," Jesus tells us (Jn 5:28, 29), "when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment."
This is not Jesus saying, "Alright, you've done good things? You're in. You've done bad things? You're out."
This is Jesus saying "whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life."
We should not ignore the fact that our Risen Savior calls us to die to sin, and to walk with Him in holiness.
But when we're looking at Judgment, when we're looking at the difference between eternal life and eternal death, our only hope is not that we did good, or even that we tried; it is that we are not our own, but have been bought at a price.
We escape judgment for our sins only in Jesus. In Jesus we find the righteousness that God requires. In Jesus we find the sacrifice that washes us clean of our guilt. In Jesus we find the power of the Resurrection, restoring us to new, everlasting life.
Those who are united to Jesus cannot be cast into Hell, any more than Jesus could cast Himself into Hell.
Those who are united to Jesus will be judged righteous, as perfectly righteous as Jesus Himself.
Her wound is incurable; the blow must fall; all sin must be judged. But for those in Christ, the blow has already fallen; the wound was given when our Savior was wounded.
By His bloody stripes, we have been healed. Our hearts have been made new, and will sing with pure, undivided praise in the presence of the LORD, forever and ever.
This leaves us with a question: When the Last Day comes, and you stand before the risen and glorified Jesus, will you be judged by Him, or in Him?
In a moment, we'll have the privilege of singing Hymn 499, "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me." I think many of you know it.
But though it might be familiar, don't ignore the incredible grace that lies behind those words — the grace we have in Christ, that He was willing to live for us, to die for us, to redeem us from our sins by His precious blood.
And so, as Augustus Toplady writes:
Let the water and the blood, from thy riven side which flowed, be of sin the double cure — cleanse me from its guilt and pow'r.
*Note: The above text is the written manuscript from Pastor Ben, not the precise transcript as it read by Elder John.
