Dennis Tuuri

And it shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall beat off from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt, and ye shall be gathered one by one, oh ye children of Israel. And it shall come to pass in that day that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and the outcast in the land of Egypt, and shall worship the Lord in the holy mount at Jerusalem.

Let’s pray. Ascribe ye strength unto God. His excellency is over Israel, and his strength is in the clouds. Oh God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places. The God of Israel is he that giveth strength and power unto his people. Blessed be God.

Scripture is Micah 3:5-8. Thus saith the Lord concerning the prophets that make my people heir, that bite with their teeth, and cry peace. And he that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him.

Therefore, night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision, and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine, and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them. Then shall the seers be ashamed, and the divers confounded. Yay, they shall all cover their lips, for there is no answer of God. But truly, I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord and of judgment and of might to declare unto Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin.

Morning. Going through the book of Micah, next Sunday Richard Meyer will be bringing a message. Sunday after that Keith Hansen and Sunday after that Robert Jones. We’ll be up in Washington for the next few weeks visiting with the parishioners and then spending a little time vacationing in that area as well.

This morning the context of course as we’ve been saying is that chapter 3 forms the second unit of the book of Micah. First unit being chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 began—we discussed it last week—with the shama or “here, listen up.” Then he addressed the improper rulers of the nation of Israel for their sins. And then in the middle of chapter 3 he now turns his attention to the prophets. And then in the final portions of chapter 3, which we’ll talk about the first weekend in September, he goes to talk about the establishment in general that are supposed to represent God, including both the prophets that he’s talked about and the rulers.

And he throws in a third office, that of the priest. And so that’s what we’ll talk about in September when we get back to this series. But this morning, he turns, as I said, from the officers of the state to the officers of the prophets, as it were, those officers that speak the word of God to the people. And so specifically the Levite function and their prophetic role and also of course the prophets that were raised up by God would all be included in this.

Those people that were to teach the word, to proclaim the word to a sinning nation. And so Micah turns his attention this morning to the prophets who do not obey God’s word. And he begins with an indictment of those prophets. And it’s interesting that it begins with the saying, “Thus saith the Lord,” which is the prophetic pronouncement. And he’s giving a prophetic pronouncement against the prophets themselves.

That do not prophesy truly for God. And so he begins with an indictment of the prophets. And the specific element I think that forms the basis for the indictment is found in the middle of the verse. Those that cry peace and the effects of that crying of peace are then described in the first half of that verse and the second half of the verse. So the specific thing that the prophets were doing incorrectly was to declare peace when there was no basis for peace.

Now, it’s important that we touch briefly as we have in the past about peace because today so often peace is seen as a cessation of hostilities. We were at Howard L.’s and I had a seminar Wednesday morning with Dennis Peacock and it was quite enjoyable. He’s going to give a general seminar in October. Our church will be one of the sponsoring churches for that as well as the PAC. And I think that you’ll find it very profitable to spend a day and a half when he comes in October.

I think it’s October 21st and 22nd. And we’ll have more information on that as we go along. But he talked about how really in the Bible you have Hebrew peace as opposed to the idea of Hindu peace. And today I suppose most people’s peace in America lines up with Hindu peace which means cessation of activity, eventual nothingness, you know, merging into the great nothingness that is reality. And today in America, peace is primarily seen as a cessation of hostilities.

But of course in the scriptures, the word shalom in the Old Testament is much broader than that and doesn’t really have that connotation at all. It rather has a connotation of being fulfilled, brought to completion, having victory as it were in your covenants with God. The theological wordbook of the Old Testament says these things about the biblical concept of peace or shalom in the Old Testament.

Peace means much more than mere absence of war. Rather, the root meaning of the verb shalom better expresses the true concept of shalom. Completeness, wholeness, harmony, fulfillment are closer to the meaning. Implicit in shalom is the idea of unimpaired relationships with others and fulfillment in one’s undertakings. Shalom is the result of God’s activity in covenant and is the result of righteousness. Isaiah 32:17. In nearly two-thirds of its occurrences, shalom describes the state of fulfillment which is the result of God’s presence.

And of course the peace that shalom prefigured in the old covenant pointed to the great prince of peace Jesus who would come and effect covenantal peace for his people. So the theological wordbook goes on to say there’s also a strong eschatological element present in the meaning of shalom. Messiah David’s greater son is specifically identified as the prince of peace. Sar shalom, the one who brings fulfillment and righteousness to the earth.

That’s the sort of peace that is a proper declaration of God’s peace. But that peace presupposes covenantal obedience. The people are covenant keepers. Peace is a covenantal concept. In other words, it’s tied to the idea of the berith of the covenant in the Old Testament. And so peace is the fulfillment of that covenant. And indeed, it then calls on the basis of our peace with God through the covenant, or through the peace affected by the covenant mediator Jesus Christ.

Then on the basis of that we’ll then have peace with other people on the basis again of the terms of that covenant. Not apart from the terms of the covenant. The peace treaty I guess that we think of today which usually involves simple cessation of hostilities with God is a treaty that has not only the forgiveness of sins but also has the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. And so it has a sense of fulfillment of our purpose being created in God’s image being fulfilled again.

Hebrew peace, shalom, the proper concept of the biblical peace involves success. It involves victory, victory. It involves fulfillment. And so it’s important that we see that in the context of what Micah is declaring, the false prophets declared falsely peace.

It’s interesting in Genesis 22:17. When God cuts his covenant with Abram, one of the things he tells Abram is that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore, and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies. Again to Rebekah who carried on the covenant line. And they blessed Rebekah and said unto her, “Thou art our sister. Be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those who hate them.”

The biblical concept of peace then involves covenantal victory. Possession of the gates of the ungodly, conquering in the name of the great King of Kings, Jesus Christ, who is also the prince of peace, the Sar shalom. That’s the peace that they should have been declaring.

That God’s peace and fulfillment is contingent upon obedience to the terms of the covenant and is only found in covenantal conformity to God and to his covenant of grace affected through the covenant mediator Jesus Christ. But these people were preaching peace when there was no peace. The false prophets declared peace to those who were in moral and ethical rebellion to God, to covenant breakers that we’ve been discussing for the last 2 or 3 months now that tells us about all the sins going on, the violation of the first tablet and the second tablet.

And to those people that had broken all of the commandments in the first and second tablet, these false prophets instead of calling upon them and bringing them to recognition of their blessed cursing from God, instead pronounced the blessing of the covenant of peace upon them. And so they preached peace when there was no peace. They preached peace to ethical rebels and to the encouragers. And to those people, God’s word is not a word of peace and fulfillment.

It’s a word of judgment and cursing. The effects of that false proclamation of sin are seen and that they make people sin. Then he says, “Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets that make my people heir through the proclamation of peace to those who are sinning, you encourage people in their sin.”

Exodus 23:4 is a case law and it says that if you find or come across the ox or the goat of your enemy, still, you are to retain. You’re to keep that ox or goat safe for him to return back to his possession. When the ox says head straight away, you’re supposed to take hold of that ox if he’s in your vicinity and make sure he’s delivered back—even if he, the person is your enemy—to his proper owner. That’s a picture of what all of us are to do, of course, but it’s also a picture of the prophetic role in a very real sense.

The prophets were given in a specific period of time when people were in sin and when they’re violating God’s law. The whole point was to restore them back to the path that they had strayed off from, to restore them back to their proper owner, which of course is God himself. One of the chief functions of the prophet then was to prevent such straying off the path. The failure of the prophets here means he has caused the people to wander.

You know, there’s that nice song, “prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” And we all have that within us. We have still an element in this that wants to go off and do our own thing, an autonomous streak in us, as it were. And when the prophets failed to proclaim God’s courage against that streak, that streak is encouraged and let go. And so the people wander off into what they want to do.

Jeremiah 50:6 says, “The shepherds have caused the sheep to go astray.” And this is what he’s talking about.

In Lamentations 2:14, Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee, and they have not discovered thine iniquity to turn away thy captivity, but have seen for thee false burdens and causes of banishment. And so he says the same thing there. Another indictment of the prophets. He says, “They didn’t turn you away by discovering your sin by declaring it to you openly. And so they didn’t release you from captivity.”

An extended portion of scripture that we’ll go through real briefly now is Jeremiah 23, beginning with verse 13. Jeremiah 23 begins in verse 13 this way. “I’ve seen the folly of the prophets of Samaria. They prophesied in Baal and caused my people Israel to heir. Again, the prophets are responsible for causing the people to heir. I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing.

They commit adultery and walk in lies. Now you see there the importance of the walking in lies. The walking in lies is equated with committing adultery there. And so it causes people to sin. They strengthen also the hands of evildoers that none doth return from his wickedness. They are all of them unto me as Sodom and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.”

Jeremiah 23:15 continues by saying, “Therefore, thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets, behold, I will feed them with wormwood and make them drink the water of gall. For from the prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness gone forth into all the earth.”

Profaneness—separation from the temple, seeing things not in the relationship to God and to his created order and to his possession and his consecration and sanctification, but rather seeing things apart from God. And so the prophets that failed to declare the judgments of God against sin increase profaneness in the land. If we have profaneness in America today, which is—if you understand what that word means, not just swearing, but of seeing things in a secular fashion, cut off from the life of God.

One must say that the secularism, the profaneness of the entire world according to this verse must be the responsibility for that must be laid in large measure the failure of the prophets of the lands and of the churches that have failed to proclaim God’s judgments. And so the church that fails to open its mouth declaring God’s judgments against sin then results in profaneness going forth into all the land.

And that’s what we have in our country today. “Thus saith the Lord of hosts, hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you. They make you vain. They speak a vision of their own heart and not of the mouth of the Lord. They say still unto them that despise me, The Lord hath said, ‘Ye shall have peace.’ And they say unto everyone that walketh after the imaginations of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you.”

You see, that’s what the prophets in Micah this time were doing. People were walking in their own way autonomously, the vain imaginations of their own heart. The prophets failed to address it. And as a result, they are responsible for leading those people astray.

“For who hath stood in the counsel of the Lord and hath perceived and heard his word, who hath marked his word and heard it? Behold, a whirlwind of the Lord is gone forth in fury. Even a grievous whirlwind, it shall fall grievously upon the head of the wicked. That’s the correct proclamation to the wicked. Judgment. The anger of the Lord shall not return until he hath executed, until he hath performed the thoughts of his heart. In the latter days, he shall consider it perfectly.

I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran. I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied. But if they had stood in my counsel, and had caused my people to hear my words, then they should have turned them from their evil way and from the evil of their doings.”

You see the responsibility of the prophet is to speak for God. And if he does that and he does that consistently and boldly proclaiming the truth of God then the people are turned from their evil way. When they don’t do it they cause God’s people to heir.

God goes on to say in Jeremiah 23:23 “Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God far off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? Saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth, saith the Lord? I have heard what the prophets said. That prophecy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed. I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? Yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams, which they tell every man to his neighbor, as their fathers have forgotten my name for Baal.

The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream. And he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? What’s the chaff to the wheat? What’s he saying is the false prophets are as chaff. But the true prophet who has a word from God and proclaims that word in obedience, he’s the wheat. Wheat feeds us. It’s the bread of life. It forms bread. And the word, of course, is what the prophet is telling.

The word that’s supposed to be sweetness to our mouths and sustenance to our bodies and the church that fails to proclaim and execute God’s word in relevancy to the society around it and to the sins in this specific context in Micah the civil rulers—that prophet has become chaff and no longer wheat. And we know what happens to chaff. Jesus says chaff is burned. That’s all it’s good for. And so these prophets that Micah refers to also will be burned.

Jeremiah 23 ends with verse 40: “I will bring an everlasting reproach upon you and a perpetual shame which shall not be forgotten.”

That’s what happens to chaff. And so the false prophets by refusing to speak God’s word, God’s declaratory word of judgment to the people, instead cause people—cause God’s people—not to turn from their sin, but rather they cause God’s people to err. And because they do that, they’re also described by Micah, I believe, in this text as being Satan’s agents instead of God’s agents. Why do I say that?

It’s interesting that this text says that the prophets make my people heir that bite with their teeth and cry peace. Now, many commentators say that what’s going on there is that if they can bite with their teeth, if you put something in their mouth to feed them, they’ll tell you peace. And they say that because the verse goes on to say, “He that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him.” And there’s certainly some parallelism there and there’s some truth to that.

But the important thing to recognize here is that when they say that they bite with their teeth and cry peace, that word for bite is not the normal word for taking hold of something with your teeth and eating it. The word bite stands out. It’s not used very often in the scriptures. I believe 20-25 times. And all those times refer specifically to two specific things that are talked about by that verse or that term rather.

The first is the bite of the serpent. A bite that stings. In other words, a bite not just to eat something up, but a bite that inflicts venom. Okay, that has a sting to it. And so the word bite should conjure up in the mind of those people that heard this word and the specific word Micah is using who knew the Hebrew.

Of course, it conjures up images of that serpent that would bite them. Remember when Moses had to make a bronze serpent in the wilderness? Anybody that was bitten by the curse of God, as it were, by the snakes, the scorpions that came upon them. They had to look up at that bronze serpent and they’d be healed. And that word for bitten by the snake is the same word here. And it’s used continually throughout the Old Testament to refer to the bite of a snake or a scorpion.

The other way it’s used, by the way, the only other way it’s used is the term lend upon usury. And to lend upon usury is the same term, to bite with a sting. And that should be a strong warning to all of us not to take advantage of our Christian brothers who are poor or need help at a particular point in their life, need the extension of grace that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. That is the royal virtue.

But in any event, the point I’m making here is that Micah describes these prophets as having turned against God’s word. And Jeremiah says that’s a self-conscious turning away to the word of Baal, as it were. And he says that as a result of that, they actually bite people. They are Satan’s agents, as it were, stinging and biting people for the serpent who is Satan. And of course, Jesus when he came to the false prophets in his day and age said the same thing.

Woe to you. And he described them as a brood of vipers. They have bites. They don’t have normal human teeth eating away nicely. They have viper teeth. And so these prophets by failing in their role have become actually Satan’s agents.

This is also seen in the next phrase. It says that he that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him. And the word for prepare there is kadash. It’s the Hebrew word for holy, to be consecrated unto something. And so the false prophet is described as waging holy war, consecrated war, you know, accumulated warfare as it were against those who refuse to put money into their mouths.

Now, most people interpret this verse in an economic sense, and it probably has those connotations to it that those people unable to put a large offering in the plate, as it were, would not be given a favorable prophecy by the prophet. But I can think of other people who wouldn’t put money in the mouths of those sorts of prophets either. Those people who were righteous. Micah, I’m sure, did not feed the false prophets. And there’s nothing—we don’t know Micah’s economic status, but it had nothing to do with his reluctance to put something into the hand of the false prophet. He was righteous. And so the righteous here are described as having holy war waged against them by these false prophets, by these men who refuse to declare God’s word.

Even though they’re calling peace out, they’re actually—the scriptures tell us in revelation from God, “Thus saith the Lord, they’re working for Satan. They’re waging holy war against the righteous, and they’re refusing to turn people away from their sin and leading them to die and suffer in that sin.”

Now, that’s pretty bad stuff. We talked last week about the evil of the civil magistrate who refuses to uphold God’s order in the civil realm and in the public square. And certainly that’s bad. And it means the righteous get set upon and beat up and raped and killed and this sort of thing just like they do in this state because the civil magistrate refuses to walk in obedience to God’s word. And that’s bad.

But these prophets, they don’t just lead people out there to be physically harranged. They lead people out there without an awareness of their sin. And Jesus says, “If you cause a little one to stumble, it’s better that a millstone be wrapped around your neck.” These people were given the prophetic word by God, and we’ll see that in a minute, to turn people from sin to the covenant of grace to heaven. And instead, they let people go the route to hell. And so, the false prophets were waging holy war. They were taking captives, it were out of God’s covenant people into the darkness that would come upon them here in a couple of minutes that we’ll read about.

They were moving people not just out of physical security in the land. They were moving people out of spiritual security to spiritual death and damnation. And that’s a terrible thing. And so the judgment that comes upon them is a terrible judgment as well. It may not seem like it when you first read it, but it is terrible in its implications.

Verse 6: “Therefore night shall be unto you that you shall not have a vision, and it shall be dark unto you that you shall not divine, and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them. Then shall the seers be ashamed, or the diviners confounded. Yay, they shall cover their lips, for there’s no answer of God.”

Now, the judgment that God sends upon these false prophets is first of all a movement from holy sight to unholy blindness. This is particularly damning on the part of Micah because he says these people had vision from God. It’s not as if they didn’t have understanding. It’s not as if they were totally false prophets making up whatever they wanted to make up and never having a word from God.

They had a word from God. They had, as the church has today, the holy scriptures, God’s word to declare to the nations, but they turned their back on that word. And God says that as a result of their turning back, he’ll remove the holy vision that he had provided to them and turn them over into unconsecrated blindness.

It’s very important to realize here that as we expose ourselves in this church to more and more of the teaching of the spirit of God as he writes his law upon our hearts with an understanding of what it means and moving in application in our lives that we have a great responsibility before God to obey that. These prophets had tremendous blessing vision from God and they did not walk in obedience to that. And so God judged them more harshly.

We’ve said this many times. But it’s important to recognize if you sit under the ministry of the teaching of this church and you go home and you study your Bibles and you have your devotions throughout the week and you expose yourself to the teaching of the word of God, you know, if you just leave it up here and don’t go down here with it, you’re going to be judged by God and cast into darkness.

He says, “Faith is faith that acts. Faith without works, head knowledge without works is dead.” There’s nothing to it. And so these prophets had original knowledge if they were cut off from all knowledge by God. God says he’ll take away their vision. But he says even more than that, he won’t give them visions anymore. He won’t reveal his word to them anymore.

But he says more than that—he said they’ll move from first light, as it were, to last night. The sun shall go down over the prophet. The day shall be dark over them. Big deal, huh? The day shall be dark. Ask a little child, two or three or four years old sometimes, how they’d like to be in a totally dark room having no connection to whatever is in that room beside them and not knowing what it was. Darkness is fearful to our children.

And you know, I don’t want to get too strange here, but remember that God’s creative act began with light. He took the formlessness and void, the darkness, and he brings—the second creative act actually. He brings the light out of that darkness. You see, that’s a movement. That’s the original movement as it were toward the consummation of the kingdom age. When Jesus at the consummation of all things, he’s the light in the city. There’s no darkness there. Remember that old song, “there’s no night there. There’s no night there. Hallelujah. There’s no night there. In that city bright, Jesus is the light. Hallelujah. There’s no night there.”

See, that’s where it goes to. God brings forward light. And the consummation of history is the final light to come in Jesus Christ and the consummation of all things. No night in the city. It’s a movement from formlessness and void and darkness to light in Revelation. And in the passage before us, God was saying, “I’ve brought you into light. I’ve given you the light of the sun and the light of the moon to govern your day. I’ve given all these great blessings. See you, without light, we can have no night or lights. You know that, don’t you? The sun goes out, we’re done for. It’s all over, folks.”

So physically, we need the light. And spiritually, we need God’s revelation. We take these things for granted. We assume a naturalistic explanation for the sun and its effect upon us, etc. The point is all that points to God, the fact that we need God’s presence, his light. We need Jesus, the light of the world in order to live in fullness and completion.

And these prophets as all men after them and before them have done walk in the common grace that God has provided through the daylight through the revelation of his word and these people had a great amount of light but they turned their back on that light and thought to keep the light that was left to them that was their own light but they have no light there’s no such thing as artificial light in that sense these prophets were moved from creative light to decreative darkness they were ripped in half remember that’s the sign that Abraham gave of the covenant.

If I don’t obey it, may this be done to me. And that’s what happened to them. Their existence was torn—was to be torn apart. They were to be cut off from God. They’re to be cast, as Jesus said, into the outer darkness with this great fear and trepidation and gnashing of teeth. Terribleness. To be disconnected from God, from his presence, which is light, and to be cast into outer darkness is the worst possible thing that could happen to somebody.

To be totally cut off from all knowledge and all revelation. To be turned to our own devices, to be turned to the emptiness, the formlessness and voidness of that and to suffer in that for eternity is what hell is all about. To have no connection to the world around you because there’s no night to develop that connection. There’s no light rather to develop that connection. There’s no light to have you see what’s the relationship to the thing next to you.

Utter darkness is what the end result from these prophets was going to be. To be cast from first light into last night, to be cast into outer darkness and disconnectedness. And that, if you understand the implications and begin to think it through in your mind, that is a horrifying and dreadful thought. These people have done terrible things, leaving people in their sin and on the road to hell instead of turning them back to the path of righteousness.

Instead, their road becomes the road to hell itself. Amos 5:18-19 is a verse that you know we should probably shout from the rooftops to the Christians of America in 1988. “Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord. You want Jesus to come back? Do you want to be delivered from all this trouble so you don’t have to walk in obedience anymore? You want to be the lazy servant sitting next to the tree and saying, ‘Oh, Master, let me off this terrible job. It’s so tough to do all this work. And after all, this world isn’t important anyway. And the job you give me isn’t worth spit. All I want is to be saved and out of here.’”

Amos said. And God says, “Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord, the return of Jesus Christ. To what end is it for you? The day of the Lord is darkness, not light.” And that’s what it was to these prophets. Darkness, not light.

“As if a man did flee from a lion and a bear meet him. Or went into the house, leaned his hand under the wall, and a serpent did him.” There’s that serpent biting again. You see that? That uses of the term there. Serpent bites him. “Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light? Even very darkness and no brightness in it. Very darkness and no brightness in it.”

To those members of the Christian community that refuse to take seriously God’s law, God’s blessing, God’s cursings. And to declare that judgment to the world around us, the day of the Lord to them is darkness, not light. And if they think the rapture is a movement into a safe house, they’re going to lean their hand against that house. They’ll be bit by a serpent. Jesus will say, “Depart from me. I never knew you. You didn’t walk in my covenant. All you wanted was out of the responsibilities that I gave you to fulfill. You wanted the easy out. Well, you’ve gotten out. But you’re in outer darkness.”

Those prophets moved from first light to last night. As a result of that, they move from total confidence, false confidence to total insecurity.

“Then shall the seers be ashamed of the divers confounded. Yay, they shall all cover their lips for there’s no answer of God. No answer of God. No voice, no manifestation of God.”

As we said, that has tremendous implications relative to in darkness and for everything else that we do. They become ashamed and confounded. They shall cover their lips. God is not mocked. Their sin is justly recompensed. And they understand the recompense after the judgment has come. They become ashamed and confounded. They cover their lips. The lepers covered their lips and said, “Unclean, unclean according to the scriptures.” So these men are identified as the living dead as it were.

And they will be brought also and confounded temporally. Certainly when the judgment that Micah was talking about and the Assyrians continue their drive to the city and judgment happens more and more and increasingly the society refuses to turn to God temporally of course those prophets are confounded. They’ve been prophesying peace all along and lo and behold the army’s at the door and they’re going to be ashamed and confounded.

They have to cover their lips cuz they know that they’ve been had. God has brought what was their secret thoughts—we can get away with this—into the open light of day and so confounded and ashamed them. Of course eternally as well is also true.

It’s interesting when God built the temple, had Solomon build the temple in First Kings 8:8, it talks about the poles of the ark and how when they put the ark into the Holy of Holies into the inner room and everything where it was supposed to be that the poles were so long they stuck out and you could see them from the courtyard of the temple.

Okay? And it seems like a strange thing for God to tell us that these people every time they went into the choir, they could see these poles sticking out from the Holy of Holies and from the Ark of the Covenant. But you see, those poles were there for a reason, weren’t they? Those poles were there because that’s how the thing was carried. You know, it had some sockets, two long poles through it, and they’d pick it up and carry it that way.

And so, I think God was reminding the people even when they went into that temple, don’t take me for granted. Don’t take me for granted. You break this covenant and you refuse to come to repentance for your disease of rebellion against me. These poles are going to be used. I’m leaving. That’s what he’s saying. Don’t think this temple’s going to hold me here. The beauty of this thing, it manifests me.

And when I go, this temple may as well be gone as well. And of course, when Jesus went, that temple was destroyed. You see, the point of that is that these false prophets thought they could get away with something and still have some light of revelation, still have some degree of security. But security is only found in God. And God says to them, and he says to us today that if we refuse to obey his word, don’t take your baptism, your circumcision, your temple of God, your taking of communion every week as some sort of assurance that God must be with you.

He’s got poles on him. He leaves when he decides he’s had enough with our sin and our rebellion. And so, he was warning the prophets here, there’d be no answer from God. He would be absent. He’d be cut off from the people. They would be bereft. The spirit would have departed them.

Now, in contrast to this, Micah ends this four-verse section dealing with the prophets with a picture of the true prophet. He contrasts the marks of the true prophet.

“But truly, I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord and of judgment and of might to declare unto Jacob his transgressions and to Israel his sin.”

Micah had the blessing of the Holy Spirit upon him. And you notice here this statement just—he’s just talked about the confounding of the false prophets and they’re putting their hands over their lips in a sign of, you know, shame and everything and they’re just grief-stricken, totally insecure and devastated.

Micah says, “But truly, I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord.” Notice his holy confidence here as opposed to the lack of confidence that would come upon the false prophets. Micah had great confidence because he walked in the covenant and he walked in the spirit of the Lord and didn’t grieve that spirit. And so to him, the poles were still there should he sin, but God was with him. And because God is with him, he had great confidence.

Remember we talked at the beginning of the series about 2 Kings 22 and Micaiah son of Imlah—another namesake of Micah our prophet—and how Ahab called his 400 prophets forward to give him his advice and counsel as to a particular war he wanted to engage in. He brought up Micaiah because they wanted a true prophet and Micaiah was the only one who resisted the council of the other 400 prophets. 400 against one. But Micaiah son of Imlah was confident.

He knew what he was speaking. He was full of the spirit. He didn’t need men’s votes in order to tell the king what the word of God was. Now, he suffered for that. He suffered imprisonment. They hid him. They threw him in prison. Jeremiah was thrown in prison. Many of the prophets were killed and stoned. Of course, Jesus talks about that, doesn’t he? When he says that the slaves of the king come to the people, slaves of the owner of the vineyard go to the men who are running the vineyard and they kill them and beat them.

And then he sends his son Jesus and they kill him too, thinking they can take the inheritance, but God takes his vineyard away from them. Point is that the prophets were uniformly or very frequently subject to great persecution, imprisonment, and death. But that didn’t shake their confidence because they were full of the Holy Ghost. They were full of the spirit because they knew they walked in accordance to the law of the spirit as dictated through the covenant.

And so they had a holy confidence before God. And they had true vision. Micah knew what was going to happen. He had begun this section by saying, “Thus saith the Lord. I have vision from God. Your vision will be cut off, but I have vision.” His vision then gives him three characteristics that give him power, judgment, and might.

He had power. Power indicating the limitless resources that he could draw upon because he was in covenantal obedience to God and to the author of power itself, in whom all power and might resides. And so, Micah had no resources of his own. As Paul said, I don’t come to you with grand speech. I don’t come to you with my persuasive powers but in the power of the Lord. He calls upon the resources of God. And so the true prophet that declares God’s word has capacity to act. He has the resources he needs from God.

Power is something that is talked about a lot these days and usually it’s equated to faith. You have enough faith, you have enough knowledge and you get power. But it’s the object of the faith. Our faith is in Jesus Christ. It’s Jesus Christ’s power that is the resources for us. And God says the key to power is not knowledge or it isn’t some sort of metaphysical thing called faith removed from the object of the faith. God says the key to power then now and forever will be service. It will be obedience to him.

We obey God. And so we have the resources that he gives us not because we have great knowledge as the Gnostics would claim but rather because we have obedience as the scriptures say. The scriptures stress obedience before knowledge. We’ve got to know it to obey. But God gives us much more than we’re obeying now every day. And he’s not going to give us more than that until we get into obedience to the knowledge that he’s given to us.

And on the basis of that, then we move in his power. Micah had that. He obeyed God. He obeyed God when God told him to declare to Jacob his transgression unto Israel his sin. And so he had the resources of God.

Micah was full of judgment and that word has a lot of implications which we can’t get into all of them but essentially I think that when you think of the word judgment mishpat in the Hebrew text here that word indicates God’s authority to act his governing power. Okay, it’s certainly related to the power and the resources but it’s related specifically to how God then governs his world the authority of God is declared and his justice and his judgment.

Judgment certainly declares the predictive elements of the law, the blessings and cursings. And that’s a declaration of justice or judgment in the nation. But more than that, the scriptures actually call the law God’s judgment. It’s his authority. And so when Micah says he’s full of judgment, he’s saying that he is a spokesman for God’s authority. He has power not just to use for his own pleasure, but to rule and to govern according to God’s word, according to God’s judgment, according to God’s mishpat, his authority.

And so, Micah says, “I’m a spokesman of God for his government here.” And of course, that should remind us that we are all spokesmen for God in his government. We’re called to declare the word to the culture around us, to sit in the gates, as it were, and to recognize that we’re in authority as well. That God has given us spiritual authority as we walk in Jesus Christ.

As we declare his law to the nations, God gives us authority and strength.

And also one other reference there to get across this idea of God’s governance. We talk about that verse the Proverbs. “The lot is cast into the lap but the whole determining of it is the Lord’s.” Well, the word there for determining is the same word judgment or mishpat. In other words, the lot is cast into the lap, but the whole judgment of the matter thereof is the Lord.

You see, it talks about his governance, including, of course, his providence, but in terms of his authority and his rule over the land. And so, when we line ourselves up with God and draw on his resources and his law and declare his law, we’re also then can be said to be partaking in God’s authority, God’s rule, and God’s government.

And third, Micah said he had might. He was full of might from God. And remember, we talked about the Proverbs woman, and we talked about the word there for might gibor that’s talked about in reference to the virtuous woman in the very first verse that she’s a strong woman and that word we talked about before there’s a class of men in the Old Testament known as the gibbore hayil and they were the mighty men of valor those men that were by the time of some of the writing of the prophetic scriptures an established class but their class had been established by mighty valor in warfare and so they were like the select troops as it were the army and Micah says I’m a select troop of God’s army here I’m filled with might as is I’m a man of valor, a mighty man because I declare the word of God.

The declaration of God’s word, which includes, of course, our obedience to that word is the basis for might, for power, for authority, for judgment, and for justice from God. The prophets, the false prophets, refused to declare God’s word and declare the opposite of God’s word, and so were cut off from them. But Micah says on the basis of God’s word and the true declaration of it, he is a mighty man full of power and judgment.

Micah as the true prophet has a true declaration of war as opposed to the declaration of holy war against the righteous. Micah says that I am full of these things for what purpose? To declare unto Jacob his transgression. Remember transgression means revolt, rebellion, and to Israel his sin. And so Micah declares holy war against the wicked. And he intends to recover the wicked from their wicked ways and bring them back to God in the covenant and make them productive servants of Jesus Christ, the Messiah to come, of course, which we would now identify as Jesus Christ. Covenant servants of Jehovah God.