Dennis Tuuri

# Micah 6:9-12

Micah, chapter 6, verses 9-12.

The Lord’s voice cries unto the city, and the man of wisdom shall see thy name. Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it? Are there yet the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked? The scant measure that is abominable. Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances and with the bag of deceitful weights? For the rich men thereof are full of violence, and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth.

See, you this morning we’re going through our series of sermons through the book of Micah. Just to remind ourselves after the two-week diversion for the last couple of weeks where we’re at: Micah 1-3 spoke of judgment, primarily judgment beginning or being described as coming against the whole earth, beginning with the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom by their capitals, Samaria and Jerusalem. Remember, we talked about how there was a progression from the description of that judgment being for the sins and violation of the first tablet of the Ten Commandments of the law.

Those laws requiring the correct worship and honor of God beginning in that, and then went on to proceed in chapters 2 and 3 of Micah 1-3 to speak of violations of the second tablet of the law. And then in chapter 4, began another section—chapters 4 and 5—speaking of the establishment of the mountain of God, the coming Messiah to come. Chapter 5 speaking of the birth of the shepherd king. The mountain will be established as the chief of all mountains. It’ll grow. All nations will flow to it.

Chapters 4 and 5 discussing and describing that process, and it is a process involving spiritual warfare in which the war is waged into the heart of the enemy itself, offensively. And we talked last week about the spiritual warfare, again looking at Ephesians 6 and the enablements for that warfare that God gives us. And we pointed out—hopefully as you can see—the correlations of that equipment for our spiritual warfare, the armor of God that we all are so familiar with, being found in the Messiah’s armament for offensive warfare.

Chapter 6 of Micah returns back to the theme of judgment as we move toward the close of the book. Remember, we talked about the first couple of verses of chapter 6: the court scene was convened. The mountains were called to be witnesses and to testify and to hear the testimony against Israel. Israel was accused by God essentially of not remembering him and not remembering his blessings, not remembering the word of Balaam—that he turns those people who try to curse God’s people; he turns that very cursing into blessing for his people.

Implied, of course, in this beginning of this covenant scene in chapter 6, then was also violations of the first tablet and their failure to honor God in all that they were. We talked last time we were in the book of Micah on God’s requirements of men. Those requirements are to do justly, to have love and mercy, and to walk humbly with God. A summation of the first two—primarily looking at the second tablet—are the last five commandments having to do with our obligations one to another, and then walking humbly with God, speaking of our first tablet obligations in terms of honoring God and recognizing him as our creator and us as his creatures.

So having done that, then the indictment—the court scene, as it were—continues with this morning’s text, and he moves on to second tablet violations. This morning’s text and then to judgments for those violations, which we’ll look at next week. And then there’s a summation statement in chapter 6, the last verse of chapter 6, which we’ll deal with two weeks from today.

I guess in a way you could sort of look at this as sort of charges and specifications. Again, we mentioned that in the first three chapters of the book of Micah, but it’s something you should be familiar with: that there is a charge of violation of God’s law, and then there usually are specifications given in terms of why that charge is being made—specific actions. And these things we’ll look at this morning are specifics. They’re specifications of the general charge of covenant apostasy on the part of the nation Israel.

God, Yahweh, cries to the city in this morning’s text, and that message is what we’ll be discussing this morning.

**First, the recipients of the cry are the community in verse 9.** Now, verse 9 is a little bit hard to interpret—apparently the second half of verse 9 specifically. Verse 9 reads: “The Lord’s”—and that’s Yahweh, of course. We’re talking about a covenant lawsuit, and that’s very important. This is covenant charges against them; will be covenant stipulations and specifications of the charge in these next couple of verses. But in any event, Yahweh’s voice cries unto the city, and the man of wisdom will see or fear thy name. Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it?

Now, the term “rod” there is generally translated “tribe.” And there are many commentators or interpreters of the Bible that believe that really that would be better translated here as “ye tribes,” and then instead of “who hath appointed,” “the assembly of the city.” And so there’s some contention over how that first verse should be translated. Not being a Hebrew scholar, I’ll not attempt to say which of those interpretations is correct. But the general sense of the term is certainly clear, no matter which interpretation you take.

But I think that if you look at that term “rod,” there’s very strong evidence that it should be translated “tribe.” Most translations will translate it “tribe” instead of “rod.” And that reinforces the idea that God is calling unto the city, unto the tribe, unto the whole people convocated together in Jerusalem. And that’ll be a very important point for, as we move on into verses 10, 11, and 12, to remember.

But right now, it’s clear from that first verse, the text we’re looking at this morning, that God’s voice cries to the city, and the recipients of that cry are the community themselves as a whole. And as I said, that’ll be very important as we begin to develop this in a couple of minutes.

**Secondly, the means of the cry is the prophet.** God’s voice cries to the city. Well, how does it happen? Does it come out of heaven? Well, not directly. It goes through, of course, Micah’s mouth. Micah speaks for God. And so God’s cry comes to the city through Micah’s mouth. And again, that may seem rather obvious or not so obvious, but it is obvious once you think about it. But it has large implications for what we’ll talk about at the end of this morning’s message.

**Third, the message of the cry itself.** This is where we’ll spend most of our time this morning. The message of the cry is an economic indictment.

Now, first, a few translation points. Here in verses 10-12 is the message of the cry. Verse 9 gave the recipients and the means. Verses 10 through 12 actually give the content of the message primarily. In verse 10, it reads: “Are there yet the treasures of wickedness and then in the house of the wicked.”

Now, that word “wicked” there—Kuyper and Dietrich in their translation of this text render that as “injustice” and “unjust.” In other words, they say: “Are there yet the treasures of injustice in the house of the unjust.” Again, in verse 11: “Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances?” Kuyper and Dietrich translate that as “the scales of injustice.” So those three occurrences of the word “wicked” or “wickedness”—Kuyper and Dietrich translate in terms of justice or injustice or unjust.

Now, there’s a good reason for that. That’s because the word that is translated “wicked” in the King James Version and in other versions as well, really is the clearest antonym in meaning as it were, of the word in the Old Testament translated “righteousness.” And so wickedness is the opposite of righteousness, and righteousness is understood in terms of justice, conformity to God’s standard. And so injustice is a good antonym for righteousness or justice. And that’s why Kuyper and Dietrich translated “injustice,” and that’s really good and proper.

A theological workbook of the Old Testament says this in terms of this word translated “wicked”: “In contrast to the word for righteousness, it denotes the negative behavior of evil thoughts, words, and deeds. A behavior not only contrary to God’s character, but also hostile to the community and which at the same time betrays the inner disharmony and unrest of a man.”

So I think it’s good to remember that term “injustice” to kind of flesh out what that wickedness is referring to. It has relationship both to improperly reflecting the character of God, and it also has relationship to how we react to our fellow man on the horizontal plane.

Now, another good reason for that translation—well, first, an example of why that’s also a good way to translate it—is found in Ecclesiastes 3:16. It reads: “I have seen in the place of justice there is wickedness, and in the place of righteousness there is wickedness,” and it’s that same word here. And so you see that wickedness is the opposite of justice or righteousness, and so it’s proper for Kuyper and Dietrich to translate “injustice.”

Now, I took the trouble to point that out for this reason: I want you to think of the correlation between what he’s going to be saying here in terms of his economic indictment to being similar to an indictment of injustice in other areas. For instance, an indictment of a false judge who doesn’t render proper justice. A court of justice should be that—a court of God’s justice. But if a judge renders an improper verdict, he is being unjust, and the courtroom now is a courtroom of injustice.

And so what I’m saying is: the severity of this indictment is pointed out to us by using this word that means wickedness or injustice. And so he puts these things he’s going to be talking about in correlation to, or in similarity in terms of, its importance or devastating effect upon the community as having a bribed judge or a bribed jury. It’s that kind of terrible injustice that has a devastating effect upon the community.

Now, as I said, this is an economic indictment. And so it’s very important to recognize that when God goes to detail specifications against his charges of covenant violation on the part of the covenant nation to him, it’s interesting what he doesn’t point to. He doesn’t point to rape. He doesn’t point to adultery. He doesn’t point to prostitution. He doesn’t point to pornography—the things that we would normally consider to be quite immoral, terrible things.

But what he points to instead is a list of things here in the economic sphere, and that’s really important for understanding what this message is all about and for understanding our correct response to it. He points out the terrible injustice, wickedness of economic violations.

Now, okay, that’s generally to introduce this section. First, he says that the cry is against the house of the unjust. We just talked about that a little bit. And then he says that the house of the unjust contains treasures of injustice. “Are there yet the treasures of wickedness or injustice in the house of the unjust?” And obviously it’s a question that expects the answer “yes, there are.” His point is: there still are treasures of wickedness or injustice in the house of the unjust. And I think that is a summary statement to go on to speak of the three specific things he’s going to talk about—to detail the means whereby these treasures have been gotten by people in unjust houses.

So he says you’ve got all this wealth there. And that’s an interesting thing to comment on in passing: for a short season, crime, injustice, wickedness does pay. There are treasures in that house. Now, next week we’ll talk about how, really, it doesn’t really pay in the long run—that those treasures are of no value to the people that own the house. We’ll talk about that more next week in terms of God’s judgment for these sins.

But it is interesting to note in passing that there were actually treasures in that house. And those treasures were obtained through three means of injustice, which he then begins to specify for us in the following verses.

“Are there yet treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked and the scant measure that is abominable?”

That’s the first specification of the thing which the people have engaged themselves in to obtain treasures of injustice or wickedness: the scant measure that is abominable. And again, it’s important just to touch briefly on those words. Kuyper and Dietrich called this “the epha of consumption”—instead of “the scant epha”—because he doesn’t use the word for “little” or “small.” He really uses the word here for “scant,” meaning really lean. There’s a verse in the Bible that talks about fat cows and lean cows, and God will bring leanness to the land in terms of starvation and whatnot. And that’s what’s being talked about here. It’s a word having the implication of consumption or leanness.

Now, the word for “abominable” is also important to point out what that means here. The word “abominable” refers to indignation, fierce anger or wrath, or the thing that evokes that anger or wrath from God.

Now, we talked about Balaam—Balak’s witness a few weeks ago in Numbers 23:7 and 8. Balak tells Balaam, “Come, curse me Jacob; come, defy Israel.” And that word “defy” is the same word that’s translated “abominable” here—the same root word. So it’s a synonym to “curse.” Balaam’s response is: “How can I curse whom God hath not cursed, or how can I defy”—this word that’s translated “abominable” here—”whom God hath not defied?” And so it’s a synonym to “curse,” and so really all other translations except the King James that I studied through this week translate this as “a lean epha that is abominable.” They translated it actually as “the lean epha that is cursed” or “cursed by God.”

And again, I point that out to show you the severity of this particular crime. It calls for the full curse of God’s fiery wrath. In Jeremiah 10:10, we read that the nations will not be able to withstand God’s indignation. And that indignation is the same word here—his wrath or his curse—against an ungodly nation. It’s his fierce, fiery anger, wrath, curses against somebody for what they’ve done. And what he’s saying is: the scant epha brings about his fiery indignation. It’s a terrible sin.

Okay. Well, what is the scant epha? Well, an epha was a measure of capacity—like you’d think of it as a bushel today—and so was a measure of dry weight, dry capacity, as it were. And a scant epha is one that is too small. It isn’t full in one way or the other. It purports to be a full epha, a full measure, but it isn’t.

Now, there’s lots of ways to accomplish that, but all of them are equivalent in that they puff up a small epha to look like a full epha. In other words, if you have a bushel of corn and you’re going to sell it as a bushel of corn, and if God’s going to indict you for selling a short bushel, it doesn’t mean you brought a short bushel to the marketplace, because everybody can see that it’s lower, it doesn’t have come up to the rim, and they’re not going to pay as much for it. But what you’re doing is you’re passing off a short bushel for a full bushel.

Okay? So what he’s talking about here is what is called in some terms “puffing a product”—to take a product that we have to sell and purporting it to be more than it actually is. Taking a short epha and selling it as a full epha.

We’ll look at a specific verse in Amos later on as to how they would go about doing that. But the point I want you to see here is that this first sin of injustice, wickedness, violation to God in the covenant community—that would dissolve the community, as it were, if you’ve continued in it, and brings God’s fiery wrath in indignation against it—is simply falseness in advertising.

Now, that’s an amazing sort of a thing, isn’t it? When he goes to bring specifications against a nation for great wickedness that brings his curses, he takes something that all of us are very accustomed to and probably have participated in one form or another at various times in our lives: purporting something that we have to be of more value than it actually is. Puffing the product, selling a short epha or a short bushel as a full one.

Now, that’s quite interesting to me that God deals with that as severely as he does. But it’s not the only means of injustice that he calls out for his special curse.

**The second thing he calls out are unjust balances.** “Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances?” And again, he’s saying there are three things in your house that bring treasures of wickedness or injustice. First is the short epha. The second is the unjust or wicked balance.

Now, a balance is a tool of evaluation. Yet it is the way you evaluate something if you’re going to sell or trade it, and it has a weight to it instead of a capacity to it. And so it’s a judgment or a measure here that God has given to us that is supposed to reflect proper evaluations. But what these people have done is they are using improper evaluations in commercial transactions.

Now, the specific mechanism probably frequently was a rigged scale or a rigged balance. But I think that we don’t want to restrict it just to a rigged scale or a balance. Anytime we use improper evaluations in commercial transactions, we’ve engaged with a wicked balance. It’s a method of evaluation.

**The third thing that brings about God’s fiery wrath and indignation are deceitful weights.** “Are there yet in this house the three means of injustice: the short epha, the wicked balances, and the bag of deceitful weights?” And the word “deceitful,” of course, really characterizes all of this. There’s deceit going on throughout this entire process.

Now, the weights have reference to a couple of things in the scriptures. Obviously, one thing, one prohibition was not to have one small weight and one large weight in your bag. And that weight was used in conjunction with the balance we just talked about. You would put a weight on one side of the scale, and you would weigh something on the other side of the scale. That was one way to weigh things, to evaluate them.

And certainly that’s one of the things I think that’s being discussed here: that if you have a deceitful weight that purports to be a 5-pound weight and it’s actually a 10-pound weight, and you use it for your own economic advantage in the transaction, that’s a deceitful weight. It purports to be something that it isn’t. And again, it has to do with the valuation.

But I think that beyond that obvious example, there’s also an indication here of improper, debased currency. Now, that may not be obvious right off the bat, but take a few things into consideration here.

First of all, the word for “shekel”—and shekel was the basic unit of commercial transaction, the money, as it were, in the Old Testament. The word for “shekel,” the root word, it comes from a word that meant “to weigh.” And so the word “shekel” itself means kind of a weighed thing, a particular portion of weight. And indeed, there are at least three separate Old Testament occurrences that give an official weight for the temple shekel. It’s got to weigh this much. Period.

And so the shekel—money, the money that was used for financial transactions—was to be a specific and fixed weight that didn’t change. Now, if you’re on your toes, you’ll say, “Yeah, okay, shekel is a subset of weight, but that doesn’t mean that weight always means shekel, because shekel is a subset of weight. It could also mean this other kind of weight.” And that’s certainly true.

But let’s look at a couple of parallel passages here. First, judgment in the northern kingdom, and then a contemporary of Micah. First, in the northern kingdom, then we’ll look at Amos 8:5 and 6. Amos is a minor prophet. Turn to that, please.

Remember, I asked you months ago now that it be a good time to memorize the minor prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah. If you’re having trouble finding it, all that following Daniel, of course. Amos was given to the northern kingdom. And as we’ve seen from throughout this study, the northern kingdom was doing the same sorts of wickedness the southern kingdom eventually participated in also. So it’s kind of a parallel in that sense.

And in Amos 8, we have a parallel sort of passage to this one. Amos 8, chapter verses 5 and 6. Okay. He’s talking about how they’re terrible. Well, start verse 4. “Hear this, you who trample the needy to do away with the humble of the land, saying, ‘When will the new moon be over so that we may buy grain, and the Sabbath that we may open the wheat market? To make the bushel smaller and the shekel bigger, and to cheat with dishonest scales.’”

Now, you got those same three. You got again a specifying of three specific means of injustice in commercial transactions. And look at them: you have the bush—the small bushel, the bushel that purports to be a little bushel but is a small bushel. You have a large shekel, an inflated shekel, a shekel that is mixed with dross and becomes larger than it actually is. And you have dishonest scales. So there’s a correlation between these three specifications in the book of Amos and the three specifications that the book of Micah points out in the verses we’re looking at this morning.

Now, Amos 8 is very interesting because it goes on to help us with understanding that. It gives us another verse, verse 6, and that I think is correlary to verse 5 and fleshes it out for us: “So as to buy the helpless for money.” And there’s a reference back to that improper weight, money, shekel, the debased currency, as it were, being used to buy the poor.

Then he says, “And the needy for a pair of sandals.” And then he finally says, “And that we may sell the refuse of the wheat.”

They’re going to sell the refuse of the wheat. You see, one way to have a short epha is to have inferior quality in your bushel—probably mixed in or primarily at the bottom. And the “refuse of the wheat” is like the chaff, other portions of the wheat that aren’t good. Then they would fill up the short epha of good wheat with improper or inferior quality. And so a short epha isn’t one that just comes down below the line at the top of the basket. It also is one of inferior quality with the chaff mixed in.

And so we’ve got a specification of three means of injustice in verse 5 of Amos 8, where he talks about the shekel, the bushel, and the scale. Or not the bushel, the epha, which isn’t exactly a bushel. And he goes on in verse 6 to talk about how they use those to hurt the helpless in the society.

Now, I skipped over real quickly “and the needy for a pair of sandals,” and if you’re going to see a correlation between those three means of injustice and then the specific ways those things are worked out with the poor, you’ve got to see a correlation to the balances with that one, don’t you?

And I think you do. I was talking to my wife last night about this, real late. I’ve been thinking about it for a day or two, hadn’t come up with the correlation, but she said, “Well, it seems rather obvious that a man is worth far more than a pair of sandals.”

And that’s correct, isn’t it? If you put them on a scale—evaluation, if you evaluate the poor man as the same value as a pair of sandals—you have performed improper evaluation. You have put them on the scale of justice, as it were, and you’ve said they’re equal. But they’re not equal. And so you’ve got a deceitful, terribly deceitful scale that equates a man’s labor for the rest of his life, or for a fixed period of time, with a lousy pair of sandals.

Now, this has a lot of implications, folks, in terms of what we call the free market. God says there is justice that’s to penetrate that marketplace. And maybe the going rate in a third world country for a laborer might be just enough to give him food and drink for that day and to see him waste away over his lifetime. But that is not just. You’ve used improper scales. If that’s all you pay that man, you’ve done improper evaluation of the commercial transaction.

Okay, that’s one parallel. And it shows the reason we went to that originally was to show the correlation between the weight mentioned in Micah, the corollary passage—three methods of injustice in the book of Amos. One of those is the shekel, then called the money in the second part in verse 6.

But let’s look at a contemporary now. That was in the northern kingdom. Let’s look at a contemporary passage in the southern kingdom. Now, Isaiah, of course, was Micah’s contemporary. Isaiah 1, verses 21-23.

“How hath the faithful city become a harlot? I shall take time to give you time to get there. Isaiah 1:21-23. And again, here we have God’s crying against the city. There’s a parallel to Micah. “How is the faithful city become a harlot? She who was full of justice. And so again, we have a city accused by God of injustice or wickedness.

And he goes on to specify it: “Righteousness, justice, lodged in her, but now murderers. And now, it’s interesting—we’ll get to this in a couple of minutes—but the people that involve themselves in illicit commercial transactions are characterized in verse 12 of our text from Micah 6 as being men of violence. And so there’s a parallel to that here. But now murderers reside in it.

Your silver now, what’s the meaning of murder that he talks about? It’s kind of interesting. He doesn’t talk about your murderers or your Saturday night specials. What he says is: “Your silver has become dross. Your drink diluted with water.” And so he says, “Your silver’s become dross. You’re dealing with an improper weight. It’s no longer a fixed standard set of currency. You made it. You’ve put tin or lead or some other sort of metal in with the silver. You put dross in with it. You’ve debased your currency and caused economic inflation.

The corollary to that is: your drink is diluted with water. You take a half of a measure of wine, you pour in a bunch of water, and you sell it as a full measure of wine. You’ve got a short epha. You’ve got a short hin. You’ve got a short liquid measure that you’re using here. And so it’s the same thing that’s talked about in Micah. And again, I bring that up to show the correlation here in these matters of evaluation—between shekel and weight, between money and what Micah is talking about.

Okay. And I think Gary North is the one who pointed out, I think quite accurately, that really the first one leads to the second one. Doesn’t always have to, but it probably will usually. If you have inflated currency, people and your prices go up and up and up and up. People are no longer going to be willing to pay, uh, $100 for a bottle of wine. They have a thing in their mind that says that’s too much. I don’t care how much inflation has affected our dollars. They don’t tend to remember that these are 1988 dollars, in the case of America. And you can’t really think of them in terms of 1920s or 1930s or 1940s. So they have a kind of a fixed set in their mind that says, “I won’t pay that much for a bottle of wine.” And so, to get them to be able to sell a bottle of wine for $50, you cut it with water.

And if you’ve seen, over the last 20 years as we’ve grown up in this country, tremendous, terrible inflation racking the country over the last 20 years, and you’ve seen a corresponding devaluation of the products—the products get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And part of that’s because you won’t pay what it would really require to buy a good product. You have a kind of resistance against that. But in any event, in both Amos and Isaiah—contemporaries in the north and then also in the same southern kingdom Micah was preaching to—we have the implication that Micah’s text also is concerned certainly with the weights used on scales, but also with debased currency, improper weights and measures in terms of the medium of exchange and currency, money.

Now, it’s interesting that archaeologists tell us that coined money with inscription of the realm appeared in Israel in the late 8th century BC during Hezekiah’s reign. And I don’t know—this is speculative on my part—but it might well have been a reaction to Micah’s prophecy, where somebody, Hezekiah or somebody else, decided, “Well, let’s try to correct some of the situation by verifying this is a true shekel and trying to get rid of the monetary inflation, the debasement of the currency, that was going on.” I don’t know that’s a fact, but that might well be. Then what happened? The state tried to intervene to protect the currency that was being debased by other people.

Okay. So the summary of this section—section 3, subsection B, points 2 through 4, the means of injustice—with these three things specified, are really just a restatement plain and simple of Deuteronomy 25:13-16. So if you want to look at that for a minute, we’ll read that.

Deuteronomy 25:13: “Thou shalt not have in thy bag diverse weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not have in thine house diverse measures, a great and a small. But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have, that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”

And so we had case law there calling for appropriate measures. Now, it’s interesting in Deuteronomy 25 that portion of case law is buttressed by references to injustice in terms of the poor or the vulnerable. Just before these four verses we read are the verses dealing with the levirate laws, in which the woman whose husband has died is provided for. She’s in a very vulnerable situation. The husband’s relative was to take over and essentially replace him in the marriage relationship for her protection in the society. And if he won’t do it, then he’s made to go through a ritual in which he’s disgraced publicly, essentially.

And then right after this, God reminds Israel of what the Amalekites did to them when they were going into the land—the stragglers at the end of the tribe of Israel who were faint and weary. He says the Amalekites got after those guys, beat them up, killed them, or whatever. And as a result, you’re supposed to wipe out the Amalekites, because they’re terrible people.

And so he buttresses this thing with just weights and measures in Deuteronomy 25. The context is both groups—vulnerable people: the widow, and then the ones who are struggling behind a group of people and who are faint and weary. And I think the reason for that is—and we saw this in the Amos passage we just read—that frequently it’s the poor people who don’t have access to hire people to be their advocates either in law or in commerce or whatever who are frequently set upon by these sorts of commercial transactions.

And so the injustice is particularly heightened for those members of the community who are supposed to go out of our way to help and protect, and yet these improper commercial transactions go out of the way to hurt that specific group of people.

Okay? When we use dishonest business practices, then particularly upon the poor, we are in great sin calling for God’s fierce indignation. We’re like the Amalekites. God is not for us. God then becomes against us. His curses reside upon us.

Now, there are parallel passages besides the Deuteronomy one, and I want to just look at a few of those briefly. I’ve listed the references on the outline. I won’t take time for you to look them all up, but I will mention through them briefly here. Parallel passages dealing with weights and measures. Again, out of the book of the law, the Pentateuch, we have in Leviticus 19:35 and 36 a corollary passage to Deuteronomy 25. We read: “You shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meaty yard, in weight or in measure. Just balances, just weights, a just epha, and a just hin shall you have. I am the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.”

Very important text. Now, commented on this and I want to read his comments at some length. This is a comment on the Leviticus passage that says essentially what Micah says and Deuteronomy says. Ginsburg, in his commentary on Leviticus, says this, commenting on this passage from Leviticus:

“It would be seen that the lawgiver uses here exactly the same phrase with regard to meaning, outright measure, which he used in connection with the administration of justice in verse 15 earlier in the text. He therefore who declares that a false measure is a legal measure is, according to this law, as much a corrupt judge and defrauds the people by false judgment as he who in the court of justice willfully passes a wrong sentence.

Owing to the fact that men who would otherwise disdain the idea of imposition often discard their scruples in the matter of weights and measures, the Bible frequently brands these dealings as wicked and an abomination to the Lord, whilst it designates the right measure as coming from God himself. According to the authorities during the second temple, he who gives false weights or measure, like the corrupt judge, is guilty of the following five things:

One, defiles the land.
Two, profanes the name of God.
Three, causes the Shekinah to depart.
Four, makes Israel perish by the sword.
And five, go into captivity.

Harsh dealings for economic transactions. Hence, they declare that the sin of illegal weights and measures is greater than that of incest and is equivalent to the sin of denying that God redeemed Israel out of Egypt. Because the correlation here is that God has delivered them, and therefore there have just weights and measures. He’s delivered them. They’re to image him in their justice. They don’t do it. It’s as if they hadn’t been delivered.”

“They appointed public overseers during the second temple period. They appointed public overseers to inspect the weights and measures all over the country. They prohibited weights to be made of iron, lead, or other metal liable to become lighter by wear or rust. In order for them to be made of polished rock, of glass, etc., and enacted the severest punishment for fraud.”

Excellent commentary on these passages from Leviticus. Now, you probably thought that they used stone weights and balances because that was the stone age. They didn’t know how to use metal very well. But that’s not the case. Metal was known to rust and corrode. You could dip it in salt and whatnot. Whereas good hard stone material would not wear, and so it was used as a better weight.

But I think that Ginsburg correctly points out the importance of the violations of these specific laws of God.

Now, we cited from the case law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The wisdom literature, of course, is full of these same sorts of quotations. Proverbs 11:1, which we read responsibly a couple of minutes ago, reads that “a false balance is abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.”

And I hope by now, when you read “false balance” and this sort of stuff, you’ll recognize these three means—at least three means—of fraudulent commercial transactions: puffing the product, improper or debased money, and improper evaluation.

Proverbs 16:11 says, “The just weight and balance are the Lord’s. All the weights of the bag are his work.” Proverbs 20:10: “Diverse weights and diverse measures, both of them are like abomination to the Lord.” Proverbs 20:23: “Diverse weights are an abomination unto the Lord, and a false balance is not good.”

Then in the prophetic literature, we read similar things in the book of Amos, which we read, in Micah, which we read. Ezekiel 45:10-12 reads: “You shall have just balances and a just epha and a just bath. The epha and the bath shall be of one measure, that the bath may equal the tenth part of an homer, and the epha of the tenth part of an homer. The measure thereof shall be after the homer, and the shekel shall be 20 gerahs”—specific weight given for the temple shekel here, specifying a fixed weight for monetary exchanges that would remain stable throughout the time.

Hosea 12:6 and 7 is one more reference I’d like us to look to briefly. Hosea 12—Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah. Hosea is the first minor prophet of the book following Daniel. Hosea 12:7. “A merchant in whose hands are false balances, he loves to oppress.”

And the reason I wanted to point this out is the verse that goes just before it is kind of interesting. Verse 6 in Hosea 12: “Therefore, return to your God. Observe kindness and justice, and wait for your God continually.”

Sound familiar? See, it’s kind of a restatement of those three characteristics or requirements of God we talked about from the text just before the text we’re dealing with this morning. To do justly, to love kindness or mercy, to walk humbly with God. And he says in verse 6 here, “Observe kindness and justice, and wait on your God continually.” And then he goes on, just like Micah does, to speak about the implications of that immediately in an area rather that we all have to deal with on a daily basis, almost daily basis, in verse 7: “A merchant in whose hands are false balances, he loves to oppress.”

Okay. So there’s lots of literature in the scriptures—law, case law, prophetic, wisdom of wisdom literature, and the prophetic literature—to talk about the importance of truth and justice in economic transactions.

Okay, so that sums up those three elements. Now, this cry then contains these specifications of these specific means of injustice. And now let’s think about who the cry is against briefly.

**First of all, the cry is against the violent rich men.** Okay, they are specifically set apart in verse 12. “For the rich men thereof are full of violence.” And I mentioned that word “violence” there. The word “violence” means a violators of God’s law. It involves the use of sin, and it does harm to other people.

And we may don’t usually think of violence in those terms. But if you think about what we’ve been talking about this morning and the dishonesty that’s going on in commercial transactions, you can begin to think through the implications of that in terms of the Ten Commandments. And again, you can see how it’s a violation of most of the second tablet.

Obviously, it’s a violation of the eighth commandment because it’s an attempt to steal money from your customer when he’s led to believe that your product is thus and so, but it really isn’t. It’s also connected to violence because the violation of the eighth commandment also moves into a violation of the sixth commandment—protection of life. The sixth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”

If you read the Westminster Confession, for instance, the implications of that—it means you cannot do anything to detract the life of another person. And when you use these sorts of unjust commercial transactions, you really are taking away the livelihood, the substance, the food from another person, and it’s really a violation of the fifth commandment too. It’s taking away some of the life of that person. And so I think that’s one of the reasons why it talks about the violence done here.

Now, but what’s interesting about this, though, is that obviously there are governmental implications for all of this, as we know in our day and age today. And we’ll talk about that in two weeks in the summary verse that talks about the house of Omri, the king of the northern tribe, that then became the practices of the southern tribe. But it’s interesting that God doesn’t go for the rulers here first of all. He goes to the rich men. And that’s okay with most of us. You know, you always think in terms of those lousy rich people ripping off all the poor. And so you might take some sort of small solace that he deals at least here first with the rich men.

But he goes right on in chapter, in verse 12 of this text: “For the rich men thereof are full of violence, and the inhabitants thereof have spoken lies.” And this is why I said to keep in mind that the cry was against the entire community, the whole city. Because it’s not just against robber barons or people at the head of businesses or whatever who are ripping off the poor people. The people, the ordinary citizens, the inhabitants of the city, are spoken of also in verse 12 as being recipients of this message or cry of God of injustice, because there’s larceny in their hearts. They have deceitful and lying tongues. They want things without going through the proper means to get them.

In other words, they’re willing to gamble in the economic marketplace because they’re not going to use proper methods either. They’re going to use improper methods to try to line their own pockets. So what I’m saying here is that the whole city has become corrupt.

And if you think about it, that’s usually what occurs in a culture that goes downhill in terms of economic transactions. It reminded me of this song, and I was thinking the other day that I haven’t used songs for a long time as illustrations. But there was this one song, and I don’t remember who sang it anymore. It always strikes me as the epitome of a lot of the thinking today. It says, “There ain’t no good guys, there ain’t no bad guys, there’s only you and me, and we just disagree.”

You know, oh, but what these verses seem to be saying—these verses—is that in terms of the economic wickedness, injustice going on in the city of Jerusalem, there ain’t no good guys. There’s only bad guys. And you and I, we all are wicked. That’s what it seems to be saying.

Now, undoubtedly there was a small amount of people who cried out for justice to God, and his they will be heard. But essentially what I’m trying to say here is that when these sorts of situations occur, it’s an indication that larceny, deceit, covetousness has entered into the hearts of all the people, because they’ve rejected the covenant God of Israel, Yahweh. This passage applies then to everybody in the culture he’s addressing.

This is quite important to remember. Rushdoony, quoting and commenting on these some of these verses we’ve been looking at this morning, wrote in Institutes that the scriptures pronounce “caveat emptor”—let the buyer beware—as unbiblical. It lays a fair economics total hands off in terms of the state, unbiblical.

Now, it’s certainly true also, and he points this out, that not only is the jungle rule of economy, as he calls it, unbiblical, but also if we have the phrase “let the seller beware,” that’s also unbiblical. Any attempt to use, or to reduce the responsibility of either buyer or seller, is not condoned by the laws we’ve just looked at. It calls for and mandates responsible action on the part of both buyer and seller in the commercial transaction.

And so this is neither a call for totally free market economics nor for state-controlled economics. Rather, the state has an interest in justice, but the economic structure itself is bound to fail and to fall into disrepute when the hearts of the citizens are no longer pure before God. They then seek wealth apart from the means of ordinary transaction, work, fair commerce, etc., and they seek unjust gains. And then we have the debasement of currency, we have wicked scales, improper valuation, and we have puffing and advertising.

Okay. The recipient response: not just the rich people, the ordinary citizen as well. And then later we’ll see, in two weeks, the state as well.