Dennis Tuuri

Micah 3:9-12

“Hear this I pray you heads of the house of Jacob and princes of the house of Israel that abhor judgment and pervert all equity. They built up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money. Yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, ‘Is not the Lord among us? None evil can come upon us.’ Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.”

I think we said when we began this series going through the book of Micah that it’s a very difficult book, or at least most commentators have found it to be a difficult book to outline and to give a structure to. I think we also noted that Luther and other people as well have said that the minor prophets particularly are very difficult to read and outline or really comprehend very much because they seem to just sort of say disjointed sort of things.

But I think that hopefully we approach now the end of the third chapter and I think that going through it slowly and didactically like we’ve been trying to do, we see the pattern that’s clearly there throughout the book of Micah and we can begin to develop a good sense of the structure of the book. We suggested, I think several weeks ago, that the “Hear, O Shama” words in chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3 verse 1, and chapter 6 verse one are one way to divide the book.

But there’s another way that we might want to consider. The passage here before us deals with the judgment of God upon the representatives of God, the men who are in positions of influence as it were in the society—heads, as it were. This text brings to an end, in one sense, the first three chapters of the book that are rather comprehensive statement of God’s judgment upon the land of Jerusalem as it had sinned before God at the time of Micah.

Chapter 4 begins what could be said to be a second main section, or maybe even the second half of the book, and we’ll deal with that next week, begin to with the establishment of the mountain of the Lord. Now you remember that this first section—the first three chapters that we’re talking about this morning—began with the statement of the book, of course, in verse one, and then verse two began the prophecy and verse two talked about the judgment to come upon the nation and verses three and four talked about that judgment in terms of God coming down upon the mountain in judgment.

And now at the end of chapter 3, we have the men who are exalted like mountains as it were in the landscape of the population of Jerusalem and them being judged by God, and God saying in the passage that we’ve just read that Jerusalem is judged on account of their sins. And chapter 4 then begins an analysis, or a presentation rather, a proclamation of the tremendous news that God will establish his mountain.

His mountain—unlike being a mountain of death, which the first three chapters describe—that presently resided in the area of Jerusalem and amongst the covenant people—his mount will be a mountain of life. While the three officers of prophet, priest, and king fail in the section we’ve read this morning, the man who is described in chapter 4 and following, who will come to be the covenant peace—Jesus Christ, the true prophet, priest, and king—will establish his mountain, a mountain of blessing, as opposed to the mountain of cursing that’s a result of the building of the bad mountain of the society of Jerusalem.

And so on your outlines, I’ve chosen to describe these men, these representatives of God, as “mountain men” or “men mountains.” And I hope you don’t mind that. We’ve talked before about how these terms that God uses to talk about the heads of society, and various terms that are used to describe the rulers in society—prophets, priests, kings, and other men as well—are terms that originally have the roots, many of them, in the idea of being exalted or up high. And we have, of course, the word “head” itself, which is a term that refers to the head of the body, for instance, the point at the peak or the summit.

Now the scriptures plainly give us this imagery to work with. This isn’t something we’re imposing on the text. We began, as I said, in the first couple of verses of chapter 1 with this imagery being painted out before us on the judgment of God upon this mountain. And we’ll talk about in verse four this imagery painted before us of the mountain of God being established. We’ll see an unusual river action in the first couple of verses next week when we talk about that.

You can look at that in your studies as you’re preparing for next week’s talk. But this is a thing that God has given to us.

Now, it’s important to recognize that mountains are there for a reason. We were in the rainforest in eastern Washington for a couple of days on our vacation, and that rainforest is really kind of at the foot, or right as a result of the mountain range there. I thought of that as we were coming in today—that we were looking at the big skyscrapers in Portland and how men sort of like to make these big artificial mountains.

I was also thinking that one of the things that mountains do, of course, is protect people. And in the case of the rainforest, that’s quite evident, because the rainforest mountains loom up and they stop the storms from coming in and dropping great amounts of rain on the interior of the state. All the rain drops—most of the rain drops—on the other side of the mountain, on the coast side, and so they guard the interior of the area, so to speak, from rain.

But any event, we were sitting there in the rainforest and the primary mountain peak there is Mount Olympus, which is, of course, a name of a god. And it’s easy to think about how these mountains picture gods to us, as it were, men of power and distinction. But of course, what the mountains really point out to us is the exaltation of God himself, his authority over the land, his being raised up.

Van Til talked about nature in this way. He said, “It follows that the spiritual can be truly, though symbolically, expressed by images borrowed from the physical. It is this conception that underlies Jesus’s use of parabolic teaching. The vine and the branches give metaphorical—very important metaphorical, but truthful—expression to the spiritual union between Jesus and his own, because the physical is created for the purpose of giving expression to the spiritual. The physical is created for the purpose of giving expression to the spiritual.”

Now, there’s two ways to goof up when we look at the world around us. One way is to divinize the created order—to say that it is God, that he’s immanent in the very atoms of creation, that it is God. And of course, that’s a perversion of the truth. But the other perversion that we’re much more attuned to and trained in is to look at the created order and think it just got here somehow apart from God’s direct providence.

Now, none of us would say that overtly, but when we look at mountains, for instance, and don’t realize that they’re there to convey spiritual truth to us metaphorically, but still true spiritual truth, we act like good humanists saying, “This world just somehow sort of happened around us.” God does not use some sort of common ground with man—the created order—and say, “Oh yeah, I guess I can talk to him about mountains and the responsibilities of men that I describe as mountains because that’s some common ground between us.” No, God establishes those mountains to begin with.

It’s his providence and his decree that brought mountains and rivers and valleys and all those things to pass, and they all in some way convey to us spiritual truth. Truth relating to the person of God, truth relating to our response to the person of God and our responsibilities. And so the same thing is true of mountains.

Now God, of course, is not just a god of the mountains. He’s a god of the valleys and all. Really, the created order helps us—it’s there to help us understand aspects of God. But mountains specifically, I think, exhibit God’s exalted status relative to all else. Now, they do have limitations. Mountains are part of the created order. If you look, for instance, at the Olympic foothills, they are preceded by those big mountains. And so mountains are on a chain of being, as it were, with the hills and then the valleys themselves.

And so in the scriptures, God isn’t usually described as a mountain. God is described as residing on top of the mountain, okay? Because he’s the creator of the mountain. And it certainly pictures his power and his authority and his exaltation in our lives. But it’s important to recognize that it is a created thing. And so God dwells upon the mountain, not in the mountain, as it were, as a part of the mountain.

But any event, these mountains then do speak of God’s residing power and authority upon the earth. Compared to the rest of creation, mountains are big and tall. We also went up to the Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic forest there—the Olympic National Park there—and you just cannot help but be struck by the awe of these huge mountain peaks. Mountain peaks are exalted. They’re big things compared to the valleys or the foothills even. And they are tremendous things when compared with five or six foot tall human beings who like to think of themselves as being somehow very highly exalted in creation.

Of course, we know we are God’s image in creation, and that’s an important thing to remember. But these mountains are there to help us realize that we are dwarfed compared to the creator and his power and authority.

Well, this morning, as I said, we begin with a passage that concludes this first half of God’s judgment upon the mountain that had been built in Jerusalem at that particular period of time. The society and culture that have been built by these sinning representatives or leaders in society, who I would call in the outline this morning “men mountains” or “mountain men.”

Now, these mountain men are God’s representatives upon the earth. And that’s a very important fact to keep in mind. As we said, from Van Til’s quote, the created order is here to help us understand the spiritual realities behind them, and these mountains we’ve talked about are images of God, as it were, and his power and strength.

But another thing—another way in which these leaders represent God—and we’ve talked about this before, but it’s good to touch upon it again—is that these men mountains, as it were, these leaders, these princes that are described in the first verse here in verse 9, the heads of the house of Jacob and princes of the house of Israel, are obviously God’s representatives because they bear titles that ascribe, really chiefly and ultimately, to God himself.

And we talked about that before. We talked about the fact that if you’re a father in a household, you shouldn’t treat that name with disdain. God is the Father, right? One person of the Trinity is God the Father. And he allows us to use his title, “Father,” in our households to help remind us and those under our authority that we represent God as a covenantal head in that family.

Well, certainly the heads of civil government—the judges, the prophets, the priests—these are all terms that describe primarily God and his attributes. And so he gives them to men to remind men that they are indeed representatives of him in their function and as a result are going to be called to account by him for what they do or don’t do in obedience to his law word.

Now, this is an important point. I was thinking about this, and I thought that you know, there was no other—if we wanted to just skip all other exegetical proofs for a theonomic position—and the theonomic position, I suppose, is primarily. The primary point of contention is that the law of God has implications for the civil magistrate, as opposed to just the moral law being binding upon people. It has obligations upon the civil magistrate to do his job in relationship to the word of God.

But if we just keep in mind the simple fact that the civil governor—the governor, for instance—bears the title of “governor” because it is he that reflects himself as God’s representative who governs all of creation according to his decree and according to his providence. So the fact that these civil leaders have God’s titles ascribed to them is proof enough that they have obligations to use those positions as God’s representatives in accordance to his scripture.

And so these men are called to account by Micah because they are heads and because they have failed to manifest God in their headship, because they are princes and because they have failed to manifest the Prince of Peace who is to come—the covenant peace himself, Jesus Christ—in their ways as they’ve fulfilled their offices.

So these men, these mountain men, are God’s representatives first by the titles used to them and additionally to that, they are also molders of the society around them. Now it says in verse 9 that these heads of the house of Jacob and princes of the house of Israel abhor judgment and pervert all equity, and additionally they build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity.

You see the heads here described, and we’ll talk about more of the content of those heads in a couple of minutes. But these heads, these representatives of God in terms of authority in the lands that they live in, also then mold the society in which they live. Now, this is important to recognize. We have kind of a built-in distrust of talking about some men as more important in these sort of things than other men. There’s a couple of good reasons for that.

There’s one good reason for that, of course, and that reason is that we’ve all understood the biblical teaching relative to reconstruction, and on the reverse, destruction being a ground-up, bottom-up sort of a thing, and that’s good and proper if it’s kept in balance.

There’s another reason why though we don’t like to think about these exalted men who have positions of responsibility and greater accountability as having real power, real authority. And that’s because we’ve all been raised not just to be good humanists, not to be good materialists looking at mountains as if they just somehow evolve, somehow. We’ve also been raised to be good egalitarian people today. That’s a big word. And what it means is we think that all people should be equal in all things—not just in legal rights, in terms of the law structure that we have, but in terms of abilities, in terms of all kinds of things.

We want to be equal with everybody else, not just in terms of our created being, but also in terms of our function. And so we have people utilizing that egalitarian mindset and political philosophy to move us closer and closer toward a pure democracy, supposedly, so all men have equal functions. All men can decide what we’re going to do tomorrow. Of course, the danger with that is that you still end up with people controlling those in government, and those people usually are a very tiny minority.

But in any event, because we’re all good egalitarian people, and because also the biblical thrust on bottom-up reconstruction necessary in our land, we tend not to want to think about men of position of authority and responsibility as having greater ability to mold society about them. And yet this verse clearly tells us that, does it not? It says that these representatives of God built Jerusalem and they built Zion. They were responsible for the conduct of the society in which they lived.

And so as a result of that, he says to them that they are going to be looked upon as the reason for the judgment to come. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Now, again, as we were sitting there in the rainforest, we went on a little guided tour of the river there, the Hoh River. And the tour guide basically said that the river was responsible for the entire park that we were in—the entire area we were in. And because the river, I can’t get into a long extended exposition of this, but the river moves and it then produces changes in the whole valley there as a result of the river’s movement.

The river is meandering here and there. It carves out areas. It builds up ground. There’s a plateau effect. There are three specific and distinct plateaus of different types of trees, and the reason those trees are there is because the river has done particular things in its history to produce the kind of soil that’s there. So the river is determinative for the valley down below. But the river, of course, has its origin up on that mountain, up in the mountain range, and what happens up there determines how that river is going to flow down and how the society downstream, as it were, is affected by that river.

Well, that’s another good picture God has created—the order gives us, as a picture to show that the mountain man, the men mountains, the representative heads in various areas, have a molding influence upon society about them, as Micah describes here. And so it’s important to recognize that these men are not just God’s representatives in a detached sort of sense, but they also then mold the society that they’re in the context of.

And as a result of that, Micah goes on in verse 12 to say, “Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field.” The judgment to come. The judgment that’s been described for the last three chapters comes as a result of the failure of the heads of the princes and then a subset of that group that he describes—prophets, priests, and kings. Okay? That’s the reason for the judgment: their sins.

Now, at this point in time, Micah has just dropped a bombshell in the context of the community in which he’s preaching. Now, you remember we back in chapter one, we said that Samaria’s destruction was foretold and it was said that the destruction would come close to Jerusalem, but he didn’t make a definitive statement as to Jerusalem’s fall. Now he’s saying Zion, Jerusalem, the place of the temple itself, of God’s special residence with the people, will be judged. God’s judgment will come upon it.

Now, that doesn’t mean a lot to us today because if God’s judgment comes upon Beaverton, it’s no big deal. Or it comes upon Portland or Gresham, because these areas are just little geographical units, and there’s no particular presence of God ascribed to them. But remember, we’re talking here about the center of the culture at that time, the religious culture. We’re talking about the temple where the sacrifices were performed. We’re talking about the special dwelling place of God with his people.

They can look to that temple and say, “Yeah, God lives inside that temple.” Now, they realize that God was not localized like that. But the point is that was the center of the distribution of his law that was to go out across all society and mold it like those rivers come off the mountain range of the Olympics and mold the valley down there through the whole river and other rivers coming down. Well, they recognized that about Jerusalem and about Zion, the specific area where the temple was built.

And so now Micah was telling them that area was going to suffer judgment from God. And that was a bombshell. But then to realize that judgment was a result directly of the failure of the representatives of God that they had in the land with them there—the heads, the princes, the prophets, the priests, the rulers—that was a damning indictment against those men. And it is in relationship then to that sense of judgment we have to understand the importance of those men in that society.

Now, another illustration of how this works itself out, and coming from our vacation, we have a lot of things—illustrations that we kind of stored up, I guess, over the last three weeks. We were in Seattle the last couple of days, and I don’t know if most of you know about the history of Seattle. I don’t want to get into a long dissertation on it. But the point was Seattle was not a particularly good town. They had a large number of women whose occupation was listed as “seamstress.”

This is in the early 1900s, late 1800s. These women were actually prostitutes, and the city was really built on that. Prostitution was one of the probably the biggest industries there in that developing lumber town and mining town as well. The city was not a good city. Additionally, some of the men who first tried to develop the city were doing so for not godly purposes at all, but for ungodly purposes.

There’s a book written by a fellow who created or began these tours up there in Seattle of the underground—where the city originally was—called “Sons of the Profits” (P-R-O-F-I-T-S).

Well, that city was not particularly built on a good basis. And that’s an illustration again that the men that were there, the heads of the community that established the community in Seattle—both the economic people who were doing things strictly for profit and gain, the quickest profit and gain they could get, and then the prostitutes who were also doing those sorts of things—they built a city as a result of their influence on that city.

And what they did, though, is they built a city that was ready for judgment. And indeed, a fire swept through that city and destroyed the entire thing. It’s interesting to note, by the way, that fire came at a time when the fire commissioner, who would have understood how to put it out, was out of town in San Francisco going to a firefighting conference.

The fire occurred when a little boy dropped a candle into some turpentine-soaked wood shavings, and the fire wouldn’t have been a big deal, but it then spread to the building next door that had just gotten a fresh supply of brand new shipment of whiskey, and so it went up like that. The building next to it had just gotten a shipment of ammunition in, and so that really spread the fire. They thought, well, the water system doesn’t work. We can always get water from the ocean. It’s right here after all.

They went to the ocean, and it was one of the lowest low tides in history, and so they couldn’t get the water to the fire. They had to just let it burn itself out, and the city was destroyed. Now, those things, you know, the tour guides look at them as interesting coincidences. We must say that God and his providence brought all that to pass. And there’s a correlation to the fact that that city was built upon prostitution and greed and dishonest gain and the fact that it then burned in a fire.

There’s a lesson there that should have been learned, but I don’t think Seattle did learn it. They built basically on the same foundation again. But in any event, the point is that these men mountains are tests of judgment for the societies which they build. If they’re performing their job and responsibilities correctly and biblically, they’ll be blessed. But if they perform their functions in a poor manner and in a sinful manner, the society will be judged.

Now, this isn’t just some sort of magic thing. It’s because of the covenantal headship that we’ve talked all about for these first three chapters. These men are covenantally heads in the areas in which they govern and have control and influence, and that covenantal headship works itself out then in their influence in society.

You’ve probably heard that old expression that if you go by, if you—well, let’s see the expression is that 1% of the people makes things happen, 3% of the people watch them make things happen, and 96% of the people say “what happened?” Well, I think that all too often is the case in modern society. Very few numbers of men who are in positions of responsibility and influence then direct the flow of culture. And so it’s important to see that Micah’s judgment here of the culture is based upon the sins of the representatives that God had put there to manifest him.

Psalm 127:1 says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that built it.” These people did not build upon the Lord. And so they labored in vain and they were judged by God for it. The house came down around their heads, as it were.

Now, Micah moves from the general statement of these heads and princes in chapter, or in verse 9, to then in verse 9 and 10, rather then to verse 11, to talk specifically about three specific people of these heads and princes. Now in Isaiah 3:1-5, we have a description of more of who the heads and princes are. I’ll just read this for your reference.

“Isaiah 3 says, ‘For behold the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water.’—Source of nourishment: bread and water here. And who are these stays and staffs? They are the mighty men. Verse two: ‘the mighty men, the man of war, the judge, the prophet, and the prudent and the ancient, the captains of 50s, and the honorable man, and the counselor, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator. And I will give children to be their princes, and babes will rule over them.’”

So Isaiah 3 gives us another list of who some of these heads of influence are in a society. And again, that’d make an excellent thing to work on this next week in your own application of these studies. We can’t take the time now to go through this entire list, but the point is that heads don’t just refer to prophets, priests, and kings. There are people in positions of influence and authority in various areas.

And some of the people in this list would not be found in most lists today. For instance, the ancient—those who are the elders in society—the captains of 50s. But these are important people: military people, counselors, the eloquent orator. These are people of position and influence, and those are the people that Micah has been talking about in the first two verses.

But now in verse 11 of the text, he moves to three specific key mountain men in the society that he was addressing. Those are, of course, the judges, teachers, and preachers. He says specifically in verse 11: “The heads thereof judge for reward.” Those are the judges he’s referring to there. Those particular heads. “The priests thereof teach for hire.” The teachers are being indicted here by Micah. “And the prophets thereof divine for money.”

Instead of preaching about the judgment of God to come upon people unless they turn from their sins in obedience to the teaching they should have received from the priests, these prophets instead are preaching whatever the people’s money will pay them to hear. So these are the three specific image bearers of God, as it were, who are being spoken of here.

Now, these men have failed. They failed in their actions because we’ve read, just back in verse 10, that they have produced bloodshed and iniquity in the land. They’ve produced death. In other words, the word for “blood” there means blood that leads to—if it’s shed in that particular sense—the term “blood” means that death follows. These men have been purveyors of death and sin instead of holiness and life.

They have, in their actions, then brought pollution into the land. Remember we’ve talked about how here in the Willamette Valley and Willamette River, they’ve had various pollution drops into the river. Instead of the river being a fountain of life, it becomes then a fountain of death and stagnation and pollution, instead of being nice clean water. And so these men, by their actions, are purveyors of death and sin instead of life and holiness.

Also, by their motivations, they were judged by Micah. Micah says all three of these groups are doing what they’re doing not motivated by a concern for God’s holiness and a desire to serve God and his people, but rather all three of these men are being motivated by money and by profit and by gain. The common error of all three of these specific groups of men is materialism—an attempt to benefit oneself materially instead of spiritually before God.

We were visiting with a family the first week of our vacation, and they’re listening to a series of tapes by Joe Morecraft, going through the book of Hebrews. He talked about Hebrews 12, where it talks about Jacob and Esau. The point he made was a good one: Esau was a materialist. He was doing what he did for the purpose of gain—immediate monetary or, in his case, food—sort of gain, as opposed to Jacob.

And so materialism is condemned throughout the scriptures. When we make dollars and profits our god, we move into judgment before him. The scriptures say that “the love of money is the source of all sorts of evil.” And the words used there apparently refer to, to use a cleaner term for a dirty product, social sewage. And so the love of money, materialism, putting money and profits above service to God in terms of our motivation for things, leads to the pollution that we’ve referred to in terms of their action—spreading death instead of life, sin instead of holiness.

Materialism produces social sewage, pollution, as it were, downstream from that river that’s supposed to come out from these men who represented God and his authority in the lands in which they were placed by God.

Secondly, though, or in addition to their motivational problem, they also have a problem of theology. And Micah ends on that because that really is the most important thing to remember here about their bad actions and their bad motivation. They had an improper apprehension of who the person of God was.

He says that they do these things. They create this bloodshed and iniquity. They do what they do for hire, for reward. And he goes on to say, “Yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, ‘Is not the Lord among us? None evil can come upon us.’” Their theology was also improper. They thought that God was with them regardless of what they did. They believed in cheap grace.

In other words, they believed in covenant blessings without covenant obedience. They believed that if they simply went through the ritualistic practices that they undoubtedly did with precision at the temple, they would be blessed by God for that. If they kept the external forms and yet denied the internal realities, they thought that God would bless them.

But God’s covenant is not primarily, or even, or is not only concerned, and not even primarily concerned, with our external actions. God wants those actions in worship to reflect what we do the rest of the time—when we’re not at the temple or not at the church. And so these men had badly misunderstood, and I don’t mean to imply with that their problem is intellectual. It was not. They had rejected the picture of God that they had been given by the oracles of God, by his covenant revelation of who he was. They’d rejected his law and still wanted God’s blessing.

Very similar to our day and age today. The theology was incorrect. It was cheap grace theology, instead of covenantal theology.

Amos 5:14 says, “Seek good and not evil that you may live. And so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you as ye have spoken. Hate the evil, love the good, and establish judgment in the gate. It may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.”

Jeremiah 7, beginning with verse one. Why don’t you turn to this portion of scripture? It’s so important and such a good commentary on this. We’ll talk about this in a couple of minutes, but Jeremiah 7 followed this prophecy by about 100 years.

“Jeremiah 7, beginning in verse one: ‘The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house.’—That’s familiar. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That’s what we were reading about our call to worship today. We come to the gate of the Lord’s house and we hear these things from God’s mouth.—’Proclaim there this word and say, Hear the Word of the Lord, all ye of Judah, and enter into at the gates to worship the Lord. Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, amend your ways and your doings. Okay? He points to their actions, not primarily to their head knowledge. Here he points to their practice.—Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place.’”

Obvious implication being if they don’t, he’ll cause them not to dwell in that place.

“‘Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are needs.’”—See, that’s kind of a hypnotic phrase that we can get into somehow. A hypnotic approach toward worship. If we just go through the right actions—we have communion each week, we baptize our children, we enter through all these ritual observances to God’s word, which are all important, of course—that somehow God will be with us in spite of our actions and our injustice and our unrighteousness and unholiness throughout the rest of the week. Such is foolishness before God.

“‘For if you thoroughly amend your ways and your doings, if you thoroughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbor, if you oppress not the stranger, the fatherless and the widow.’—Boy, you know, those terms keep coming up continually, continually, continually: the fatherless, the widow, the stranger. Please be praying for the elder training program and for the men in that group. We’re going to be studying out ways to implement specific policies for this church relative to those three groups of people. You see how important it is for righteousness before God to do correctly to these groups of people.”

In any event, we go on: “‘And shed not innocent blood in this place.’—Now, see, that’s interesting, too, because he’s not—I’m sure he’s not saying that people actually were bringing the widow and the orphan into the temple and killing them. But what he’s saying is that if you do incorrectly, if you oppress them in any way and don’t give them justice, it’s as if you had shed their blood in the temple itself. Okay? It’s that kind of a serious sin before God.—’Neither walk after other gods to your hurt.’—And you see, that’s what the people that we’re talking about in Micah’s day were doing, weren’t they? They were worshiping a God who was a god of cheap grace, who is with them regardless of what they did, and that’s a different God from the scriptures. That’s not Jehovah God. Jehovah God is a covenant-keeping God, and he has covenant obligations that we must walk in obedience to. They were worshiping other gods, and as a result had entered into oppression of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.”

“Verse 7: ‘Then will I cause you to dwell in this place in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever. Behold, ye trust in lying words that cannot profit it. Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom you know not, and come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations.’”

Will you say, in other words—what he’s saying—will you say that as long as you pray the prayer and believe in Jesus in your heart and ask him to come into your heart, that you then can be a rapist, a murderer, an adulterer, whatever else you want to do, and still have peace with me? Said, “Will you do those sort of things? Do you believe that in your heart? Do you think you can go out and commit those sorts of sins and come into this temple and worship? We are delivered to do all these abominations?”

Is that what the scriptures teach? No.

“‘Is this house which is called by my name become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the Lord.’”—Jesus, of course, referred to this passage when he turned the money changers out of the temple. “The house of God become the den of thieves.”

And so it is today that if the churches today preach a gospel of cheap grace and say that men are delivered to do whatever they want to do, that they can assert the salvation of Jesus Christ—Jesus as Savior—without Jesus as Lord, they’re found in this same sin that was found in the time of Jeremiah and 100 years before the time of Micah. And for which the sinning representatives of God, the men mountains, as it were, were judged, and indeed the whole society around them came about, came down in judgment as well.

Well, let’s move then from looking at what the text teaches us to applying it to our society today. Let’s do a societal checkup in relationship to this. How are the men, the mountains, in our day and age performing? How are the men who wear the robes—the judges, the teachers, and the preachers? How do they perform in our day and age? How are the judges and rulers performing?

It’s interesting that Jeremiah 22:13 says, “Woe to him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong, that useth his neighbor service without wages, and giveth him not for his work, that saith, ‘I will build me a wide house in large chambers, and cutteth him out windows, and it is sealed with cedar, and painted with vermilion. Shalt thou rain, because thou closest thyself in cedar? Did not thy father eat and drink, and do judgment and justice, and then it was well with him? He judged the cause of the poor and the needy, then it was well with him. Was not this to know me, saith the Lord? But thine eyes and thine heart are not, but for thy covetousness and for to shed innocent blood and for oppression and for violence to do it. Therefore thus saith the Lord concerning Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah: They shall not lament for him.’”

The situation here is Josiah—as we know was a godly man who created a restoration and revival. His son Jehoiakim did not. He fell. He did not obey God’s word, and that’s what this specific passage in Jeremiah is pointing to—his sin and failure. And so judgment did come upon Jerusalem in his day and age.

But what I want you to see here in terms of the judges of our day—Jehoiakim was a king and as a result he was like the chief judge and the civil magistrate. He was the chief civil magistrate. It says he used his neighbors’ service without wages and giveth him not for his work. He built the civil palace, as it were—the house, the building that house, the civil government—as a result of people being enslaved to him to do his work without being paid for it.

Well, what can we say about a civil state in America today and a civil government that not only takes—not just the 10% that would have been considered tyranny according to Samuel—that takes, as we’ve said before, between 45 and 50% of the gross national product of this country year in year out for its purposes, to build its house as it were, its base of authority and its influence in the land?

Jehoiakim was better, wasn’t he? He would just have people come and work for nothing. This civil governor says, “Regardless of whether or not you’re working for me or not, I am going to go and take 45 to 50% of your wages and use it for my purposes.” That’s what the governor says today. The judges and civil magistrates are an abomination for doing this thing—for stealing from the people.

You know, it’s interesting that in biblical times we read about the poor, right? We read about the people that had to glean because they didn’t have their own fields. So they had to go glean the corners of somebody else’s fields because they didn’t own a field. And we think, gosh, they sure were in bad shape for them. We make, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 a year, and we’ve got the nice cars and everything, the nice houses. They were sure in deep trouble, and we’re in good stuff here, aren’t we? We’re being blessed by God.

But remember, folks, we don’t own hardly any of this. We don’t own our own personal homes because the civil governor exacts a property tax, claims ownership to the land, and can at any time push you out of that land by condemning the property or claiming eminent domain over the use of that property. He has an assertion to ownership of your private land.

But remember, those fields weren’t just the private land. These poor people that used to go glean the fields, they probably had their own house and owned it outright, better than us. But they also were working toward the day when they could have their own field. Now the field was the area of production, of business, economics, production of wealth for the family and for the household and for the family trust.

And so in scripture, if a person didn’t have the means of production—his own business, as it were—he was seen as someone who needed help from somebody else so that he could eventually have his own field and have his own place of production, okay? Well, how many of us today have our own places of production, our own fields in which we work instead of working for somebody else as a wage servant? You see, we are not in good shape today.

If you try to enter into a business on your own today, and primarily not because of the economic risk you’ll have to take, but primarily because of the taxation level, social security tax, other taxes—primarily because of registration fees, fees for getting inspections and all this sort of thing—it is almost impossible. It’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to start a private business today and to have your own field. That’s because the judges and the rulers have created a situation of tyranny where the entire population becomes increasingly enslaved to do its work.

It’s interesting. I get a thing called World Events Update from John Gilly in Oklahoma City. He mentions the Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. Okay? That sounds good, right? We want to get rid of drug abuse and we want to get rid of drug pushers, etc. Well, it’s interesting what they’re going to do. Without reading this whole thing, this act proposes that all suspicious transactions be examined by the IRS.

And to implement that, what this bill will do, if passed by the federal government, will mandate that every financial institution keep a record for 5 years of all transactions of $100 or more. $100 or more. And turn those over to the IRS. And the IRS will then analyze all these transactions and decide which transaction seems suspicious. And then, of course, using RICO and other things, they can just take whatever you’ve got long before they can prove anything against you.

Of course, it’s interesting, too, by the way, that the RICO act is being used against anti-abortion protesters as well. I don’t know if you know about that case, but that’s going on. Point of all this is that we move increasingly toward a state slavery system, having bound the people by taking 45 to 50% of their income. They then exert more and more control over the people.

So today we must say that the men who wear the robes of the civil magistrate, the judges, and the people that put them there and run the civil government, are found wanting—and wanting badly.

Isaiah 1:23 talks about how the civil governor is supposed to protect the innocent, protect those who are unable to protect themselves, and not be bribed. Bribery, of course, is a common occurrence in our government today. As we’ve seen in defense scandals, we’ve had astrology in the White House. In terms of abortion, of course, we have not just the civil government failing to protect the unborn, but actually funding people to go after and kill the unborn. The same thing’s true, of course, in terms of AIDS.

The civil government is supposed to protect the innocent who might get AIDS because of transmission from people that are being sinful and as a result of being judged by God. No, no. The civil government, according to the World Events Update, says the National Center for Disease Control has given a $675,000 grant of taxpayer money to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Incorporated, New York City. The organization’s purpose is to help homosexuals “discover and share information on how to be sexually active in low-risk ways.”

And your tax dollars, to the tune of $675,000, is supporting that. It’s interesting, too. This also says that apparently Eastern Bloc nations are now encouraging their female athletes to get pregnant and then have abortions because studies have shown that when you’re pregnant, the first two months your muscles are strengthened. Yeah, I’m sure most of you probably have seen—I found it in Vancouver, but I’ve seen letters to the editor of the Oregonian since I’ve gotten back—where apparently the same story has been talked about down here.

The man who’s quoted—let’s see, Gwyn Dyer from London—says that on August 7th, Judge Angel Campos at the minor court in Asunción, Paraguay, commenting on a case where seven Brazilian baby boys aged between 3 and 6 months were rescued from a private home, said, “The investigations lead us to believe that these babies were going to be butchered in the United States.”

There apparently is other evidence as well that babies are being grown to be harvested for organs at the age of 3 to 6 months or later. Well, why not? If you tell the parent that they have the right to terminate pregnancies—to have a therapeutic abortion, to kill an unborn infant, in other words—so that they don’t have to bring that baby to term and go through the responsibilities of rearing it, what’s the difference between that and a 3-month or a 6-month-old baby, and doing with it whatever the parent wants to do?

We’ve reached a low state. The civil governor no longer protects the unborn, and in fact encourages people to go after them and harvest them.