Dennis Tuuri

# SERMON TRANSCRIPT – Micah 7:1-6

And I said, “My strength and my hope is perished from the Lord. My soul hath them still in remembrance. This I recall to my mind. It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul. Therefore, I hope in the Lord is good unto them that wait for him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.

He siteth alone and keep his silence. He put his mouth in the dust. He giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him. For the Lord will not cast off forever. For he does not afflict willingly to crush under his feet all the prisoners of the earth. And glory to subvert a man in his cause. Who is he that saith and it cometh to pass when the Lord commandeth it not? Wherefore doth a living man complain?” Micah 7:1-7.

Woe is me, for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits, as the great gleanings of the vintage. There is no cluster to eat. My soul desired the first ripe fruit. The good man has perished out of the earth, and there is none upright among men. They all lie and wait for blood. They hunt every man his brother, with a net, that they may do evil with both hands earnestly. The prince asketh, and the judge asketh for a reward, and the great man he uttereth his mischievous desire, so they wrap it up.

The best of them is as a brier. The most upright is sharper than a thorn hedge. The day of thy watchman, and thy visitation cometh, now shall be their perplexity. Trust ye not in a friend? Put ye not confidence in a guide. Keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom. For the son dishonoureth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

A man’s enemies are the men of his own house. Therefore, I will look unto the Lord. I will wait for the God of my salvation. My God will hear me.

We’re moving into the last chapter here. We began really this chapter a couple weeks ago by talking about judgment and the betrayal of the family. And this morning we’re going to look at the same verses we read a couple of weeks ago from a little different angle.

After this morning’s message, there’ll be at least three more messages from the book of Micah and perhaps as many as four or five depending on how long some of those messages get. And after that, I’m thinking about going into a New Testament book, First Thessalonians perhaps, and then following into Second Thessalonians. But before we start that, I think I’m going to have a series of talks, not very many, three or four going back over and clarifying and simplifying the long series that I did on church offices and church government two years ago.

We began it actually in February of 1987 and it took us probably a good four or five months to go through it. We’re probably going to be having a selection of elders and deacons over this next year and I think it’s good to go back over those church offices and kind of talk a little bit about the differences between various forms of church polity again. And so we’ll probably spend three or four weeks in that before we get into the New Testament book that we choose.

And I think it’ll be First Thessalonians. Also this morning before we get going, I wanted to thank everybody for all their prayers and expressions of concern and help meals, etc. over the last couple of weeks to our family. We were quite ill for most of the last two weeks really and the family actually was sick before that time. But it feels so good to have a degree of order come back to our house and things are straightened up once more and we’re feeling good.

Good, all of us again and we’re all here at church together and that’s a real good feeling and I kept thinking this last couple of weeks about this message really and I told my wife well at least there’s an object lesson in all this we were as I said I had a fever of 100 or 101 for a full week and after that we had bad coughs and congestion and this sort of thing I guess with some older people this is turning into pneumonia and it’s going on across the nation now but we were quite sick and uh it was interesting because as I said I thought about this message this morning which is a message about the penitent church in a time of judgment and I was thinking that we frequently take good health for granted when sickness comes it’s a reminder to us of God’s grace normally given to us in times of health but it’s also a reminder that we live in the midst of a society in which it’s easy to sort of become numb to what’s happening in the world around us and the judgments of God in it.

And I think that as sick as we were for the last couple of weeks, the nation is much sicker. The nation has turned from God and is under severe judgment from increasingly so. And I guess what we’re going to be talking about this morning is how we live in the midst of a nation that is deathly ill and in which God’s judgments are being made manifest and in which people’s sin becomes more and more self-conscious and more and more obvious.

And these were the times that Micah found himself in. He begins this section of scripture by saying, “Woe is me.” Now, it’s interesting there just to note in passing that the word woe isn’t the normal word the prophets would use for woe or declaring woe to people that have broken the covenant. This woe is only used a couple of times in the Old Testament. And I think one thing that helps us to do is to differentiate the woe of the righteous.

And of course, by righteous, we don’t mean people that are totally without sin. We mean people who are provisionally righteous in God’s sight, who were covenant keepers and who looked to Messiah and to the atonement of Messiah for the forgiveness of their sins and his imputed righteousness. Justification by faith was central doctrine of the Old Testament as it is the New Testament. And so that’s the kind of righteous we’re talking about this morning.

But in any event, the righteous and particularly Micah and also I think him representing the penitent members of the covenant community during his day and the days of judgment as well. Micah suffers woes not directly because of his sin although there is an aspect of sin which we’ll talk about over the next couple of weeks that God works on our sins during these times. But essentially Micah’s lament here is not because of his sin.

It’s because of the context in which he finds himself, the world he lives in. Judgment has come to the times of Micah. And it’s very interesting as we conclude the book of Micah to look at the nature of that judgment. You know, we mentioned a couple weeks ago that in verse four we read, “The day of thy watchman and thy visitation cometh. Now thou shall be their perplexity.” And what Micah is saying is that all this judgment that he’s talked about that they’ve seen in the north is now coming to the south.

And that’s the times in which Micah 7 comments upon. And it’s a time of judgment. But it’s not at first ultimately a time of invasion from outside. It’s a time of sin. It’s a time of rejection of God and God’s judgments upon the people because of that rejection long before any army comes into the land. And so judgment has come, but in a little different form than what people normally look at. And I guess modern application of that is that judgment is not the USSR invading the United States.

Judgment is the context in which we live today.

Well, we’re going to look here this morning and spend most of our time in an examination of the text in its immediate context, the time of Micah. And then after that, we’ll look at an examination of the text in relationship to redemptive history. Jesus says all the Old Testament pointed to him. And this morning’s passage is no different. And quite obviously and overtly we’ll get to that in a couple of minutes points to Jesus.

And so we’ll point to woe is Micah and then woe is Jesus and the times that he found himself in. And then finally we’ll have an examination of the text and its present application to our time of judgment as well. Woe to us. Then after that we’ll look at the proper response of the righteous to a time of judgment. And we’ll see what Micah said and we’ll see how that should be our plea as well. Living in the time of judgment.

This is a very important thing to sort of get down some of this stuff we’ll be talking about. The next few weeks. As I said, you know, we’ve talked a lot these last few months going through the book of Micah about judgment and I think many of us have been thinking, well, what do we do? You know, what’s what do we do in the context? We understand the correlations. What do we do? And this portion of scripture that we’re entering into now will help us greatly to understand the proper response to the judgments of God in our nation.

## First, the Lament of the Righteous in a Time of Judgment

Woe is Micah. Micah declares his lament because of first of all the absence of godly men in the nation. This is the woe, the absence of righteousness in a land. And Micah begins this first point by expressing this by way of a picture. “Woe is me. And then he talks about how he is as one when they have gathered the summer fruits. As the grape gleanings the vintage there’s no cluster to eat.

My soul desires the first ripe fruit.” So Micah gives us a very good picture here of his lament. It’s as if he’d gone into an orchard. He was seeking summer fruit, first ripe fruit, grape gleanings, clusters, all these things, and there was nothing to be had. And so that’s the sort of thing that expresses to us the frustration of Micah. He uses this picture. You know, these pictures are very useful from the Old Testament and the books.

They help us first of all to understand what is being said. Of course, they also help us to convey that to our children. And remember that we are raising children in the context of severe judgment in this nation again. And these pictures will help us communicate this message to them. You should be doing that on a weekly basis. You should be teaching them about what you’ve learned from the scriptures.

And one good way is to get these pictures before them and tell them that the sort of situation we’re in or Micah was in was he just felt like he craved righteous acts and righteous men in the nation and he couldn’t get it. And it was like you’re thirsty and hungry and you come into a fig tree and there’s nothing there. There’s no fruit. And so there’s great disappointment.

Now I’m going to look at a few of these specifics here and they help us also to understand some of the implications of what Micah is saying in terms of this picture in which he expresses the woe because of the absence of godly men in the nation.

He mentions summer fruit and this is a stark contrast this whole picture actually of going to the vineyard and going to the fig trees for the ripe fruit and nothing there. It’s in stark contrast. Remember in the fourth chapter of the book of Micah in verse 4 he told about what would eventually come about, about the establishment of the mountain of God and the results of peace and prosperity to the people.

“Every man would sit under his own vine and fig tree. Every home would have a productive fruit bearing trees around it as it were. Every man would have that blessing.” And so here Micah is saying that’s what’s headed long term. That’s what we’re going toward long term. Messiah comes and that’s what happens as a result of Messiah’s gospel being preached. But in the immediate context, we don’t have that. We have just the reverse.

Even in the orchards, there’s no ripe fruit. Forget in your own vine and fig tree at home. Even in the orchards there’s no ripe fruit. And so there’s a marked contrast here with what Micah has said earlier in terms of blessing. And so this is a time of cursing upon the land. We might say here that part of this as we looked at in Micah 4:4 that vine fig tree indicated the prosperity, the economic prosperity.

And what these verses can be said to say here as well then is that the productive parts of the economy have become unproductive. And so that’s the context of a nation in judgment. It loses productivity.

Now, summer fruits is also important because that phrase reminds us of Amos 8. And Amos was a contemporary of Micah to the northern kingdom and prophet to them. And in Amos 8, God also uses the image of a summer fruit to talk to Amos about the judgment that’s coming upon the northern tribes.

And God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit. And then God says that uh the end has come for my people of Israel. I will not again pass by them anymore. And he uses a play on words there to say that the summer fruit, the ripe fruit means now the nation is ripened for judgment and the end for them has come and you can see that the ripening there toward judgment is pictured as well as the general absence again of God’s blessings will now come upon the nation he had blessed them now he would not bless them he will not give them productivity in terms of summer fruit again and I bring this up because in Amos 8 in that context the Lord God said that in verse 11 behold the days come and remember we talked about Amos 8 before terms of its correlation to the economic inequities of Micah’s day and age.

I don’t remember that or not, but the scales, the unjust scales, the puffed ephah, the debasement of the currency, all that came from Amos 8. So, it’s a corollary passage to these passages in Micah. And in verse 11, he says, “Behold, the days come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.” And if we crave first ripe fruit and find none, that is just a small picture of the craving that the righteous has for the preaching of God’s word and the manifestation of God’s word in the culture.

And what Amos is saying and I think what Micah draws reference to as well is that a time of judgment is a time of a dearth of the preaching of God’s word and its fullness and in its application to society. And you know we sit here in a church and people have come from you know Washington and way east and way west. And why is that? That’s because in church after church if you visit in the churches in the greater Portland area today there’s a dearth of the preaching of God’s word.

There’s a lot of recitation of personal examples and illustrations, but there’s not a lot of exposition anymore of God’s holy word. You know, that’s unusual. These things we’re going to be talking about this morning are not things that are usually supposed to happen in a nation. We live in the context of them. It’s like that’s the way it is. But the point is that’s unusual. There’s a dearth the preaching of God’s word and it’s judgment against this nation against the nation that had Gideon Bibles in every motel room and still does.

And yet people reject the word of God. And God says, “Great. I’ll give you a dearth of preaching then.” And so that’s the judgment of God as well. And summer fruit reminds us of that.

Micah says that he wanted the grape gleanings. And even the grape gleanings, he can’t find the cluster of grapes. You know, they would go through and they wouldn’t harvest the corners. They wouldn’t eat all the top of the branches. They had to leave the grape gleanings there, the clusters for the gleaners to come through. And Micah says that even the gleaners get absolutely not a nothing zilch out of that vineyard. And this is another example to us in the scriptures are beautiful in this way and giving us these cross references.

In Jeremiah 49:9, we read that if grape gatherers came to thee, would they not leave some gleaning grapes? If thieves by night, they will not they will destroy until they have enough. And Jeremiah 49, God says in Jeremiah 49 that if this was just thieves coming in, they take away some of your grapes, but they leave some after they’d eaten their full. Or if it was other people, they’d still have a gleaning left over in the fake vineyard, but because there is no presence of fruit at all, he says in Jeremiah 49, this is to indicate to you, my judgment is upon you.

This is not thieves. This is not secondary means. This is the direct judgment of God. And so when Micah says that grape gleanings are gone from the land and when we teach our children about the absence of the gleanable grapes, even we should teach them that what Micah is saying is this is a time of judgment from God. And the severity of that judgment is on the land.

Micah says there’s no cluster. There’s no cluster. And that’s the same word that’s used in Numbers 13:24 when they went across and spied out the land. And the place the land they spied out was called the Brook Eshkol. The name of the place there by the brook was Eshkol because of the cluster of grapes which the children of Israel cut down from them. Remember they brought back a huge cluster of grapes on a big pole between two men. And that’s the same word cluster here.

And they named the land so grape cluster because of it. Why do I bring that up? Again, there’s a contrast here. This was the land of Eshkol, grape land, beautiful, bountiful harvest from God that he gives to his people. And now that land that was eaten has now become a wilderness and there’s no cluster of grapes left. And so God’s hand is heavy against that society. And as a result of that, Micah expresses his frustration that he has a strong craving for what is no longer there.

God’s blessings and productivity. He uses this picture of first ripe fruit, grape gather, grape clusters, gleanings, and the summer fruit. And uh he uses this as a picture to indicate his frustration. And then he moves in the second verse to tell us exactly what that means. Having given us this picture of this change from blessing to curse, from being filled to being empty, and that God’s hand is in all this because otherwise there’d at least be some gleanable grapes represented as being left here.

He then moves to the reality of what he is actually craving and it’s not food ultimately, it’s righteousness in the land. He says in verse two that “the good man perished out of the earth and there is none upright among them.” And so he says that what this picture was, this terrible picture of great hunger and famine and searching for God’s blessings, that picture is a picture of looking for righteous, upright, good men in the land.

And so the absence of practical righteousness is then explicitly stated by Micah in verse the first half of verse two. And this is really the absence of the fruit of the spirit in the midst of the nation around found and the spirit of God produces fruit. The scriptures are clear with that example throughout them. And here in this time, the time of judgment means we do not see the manifestation of the fruits of the spirit in the nation.

And it becomes so much a dearth that you can almost say as if there are no good men anywhere to be found. And again here he uses terms here that go back to earlier when he talked about the three requirements of godly man. I one of the fellows came in this morning and we were joking in the back there. And I said, “We’re examining everybody for the three requirements before you come into the presence of God here.” And I was kind of joking around, obviously, but hopefully you’ll continue to remember those three requirements.

Remember, you’re supposed to do justice, and you’re supposed to love mercy, or kindness, and you’re supposed to also walk humbly with your God. And there’s tones of that in the words that he uses here. He says, “The good man is perished out of the earth.” The word good there is the adjective form of that word for kindness. That’s one of the three requirements of men. And so, he says, “There’s no good man in the earth.

There’s nobody that does acts of kindness and mercy and covenantal faithfulness in the context of their family or their covenant community or even the extended nation around that is gone from the land the loving of kindness. In fact, there’s actually no practice of kindness even here.

Secondly, he says that “there is none upright among men” and that term upright is defined for us by a contemporary of Micah, the prophet Isaiah in chapter 26:7. He says the “way of the just is uprightness.” Same word is used here. “Thou most upright dost weigh the path of the just. God is upright. He calls us to be upright.” And he says that upright is equatable to just being just. Isaiah 26:7, “the way of the just is uprightness.” And so Micah says, first of all, there’s none that love kindness. And then he says, there’s none upright. There’s none who does justice in the land.

And again there, just to remind you, of course, that uprightness, that justice, that doing what’s good and upright before God is doing the word of the law and it’s acting in covenantal faithfulness to God’s covenant. And I’ve listed some verses there for you in Deuteronomy and Exodus. We won’t look at all of them, but in Exodus 15:26, he says, “Thou will do that which is right in his sight and will give ear to his commandments.” The definition of doing what’s right in God’s sight.

Same word here, that’s the root word for this word upright. The upright man does God’s commandments. And then in Deuteronomy 12:28, he says, “Hear all these words, and these are the words of the covenant that he has been given to the people to the covenant people. And he says, “If you do that, then you are done what is good and right,” the same word for upright in Micah chapter 7, “you’ve done what’s right in the sight of the Lord thy God.”

And so when Micah says there’s no good man, there’s nobody who loves kindness. And then he says that there’s no upright among them, there’s nobody that obeys God’s law, and there’s nobody that acts in terms of the covenant of grace that God has given to man and brought him into the context of. There’s a rejection of covenant, there’s a rejection of law, and there’s a rejection of the demonstration of grace to the people around us which indicates that we are no longer in a position of grace with God.

Remember if we don’t extend that royal virtue of grace to other people, we say in effect that we are not recipients of grace from God, we have earned our privilege in the land and that’s an abomination in God’s sight. And so Micah says that the picture is one the picture of this thirst and craving for righteousness is a craving for good men in the land and yet he finds none.

He then uses a picture to demonstrate the this woe of the presence of wicked men as well. He also uses a picture the way that he used a picture to describe the absence of righteous men, he now talks about the presence of ungodly men. And in this section of the scriptures at the second half of verse two and into verse three, he also uses a picture. But he says that not only is there none righteous in the land, we have an actually it’s not just a negative. We don’t have something. We have a net.

It’s not just a minus absence of a positive. It’s the net negative. He’s saying that not only is there none good, these people are actually wicked because he goes on at the second half of verse two to say there is none upright among men. And then he says they all lie and wait for blood. They hunt every man his brother with a net that they may do evil with both hands earnestly. The prince asketh and the judge asketh for reward and the great man he ought his mischievous desire.

So they wrap it up. So he has a statement here that the woe that the righteous find in the context of a nation in judgement is the absence of righteous men in the land, but it’s also the presence of unrighteous men or of wicked and evil men. And so, woe to the righteous man because he sees the wicked in the land.

He says here that they and we talked about this a little bit a couple of weeks ago during our talk on family betrayal. But just to remind you again, we have here now the outworking of sinfulness with these men. I was teaching my daughters this week about total depravity and what that means and what it doesn’t mean. And of course, it means we’re depraved in everything that we do apart from the saving grace of Jesus Christ. There’s nothing that we do that is good or meritorious before God because nothing is done for God’s glory and for God’s honor.

We may help somebody in our family. We may help somebody out in the world, but we do it for selfish motivations or for helping a person. We don’t do it for motivations of loving God. Everything that we do apart from the regeneration of the Holy Spirit is totally depraved for God. It’s all tinged with sin and wickedness and comes from improper motivation. But what total depravity does not mean is that we are totally as bad as we could be.

We’re not all axe murderers after all. And so that’s not what total depravity means. It doesn’t mean we’re as bad as we possibly can be. But here, a nation in the throes of judgment is filled with men who become increasingly as bad as they can be, who become more and more self-conscious because of the lack of restraint of the preaching of God’s word and adherence to it and the presence of righteous men.

Those restraints are gone. And so men do become increasingly as bad as they could possibly be. And that’s the picture here for us. We’ve got people out there hunting his brother with a net the way you’d hunt a wild animal. You have them eating each other up as it were and killing each other and doing evil things and looking for blood. And we have the even the men who should know better, the prince and the judge and the great man who’s been given more privilege by God in terms of giving a degree of responsibility because of the knowledge they have of God’s word.

They know better. But they even themselves lead in the unrighteousness. And certainly today we can see some examples of this in our own land. These men are very good at doing evil. That’s what he says that they may do evil with both hands earnestly. They become more and more self-consciously evil and they get good at it. They get very good at it. And I couldn’t help but think as I read these verses this last couple of weeks about, for instance, the introduction of a bill in the Oregon legislature this week that would essentially call for the regulation of all private schools in Oregon and would also throw in some very interesting wording about homeschooling.

I won’t talk about the details of it now, but this is the point. That bill looks innocuous to anybody who looks at it, but if you understand the terms that they use and understand the rest of the legislative code relative to registration, for instance, of private schools, you know they’re calling for the total state control of curriculum, buildings, school teachers, and employers of all private schools.

The state of Oregon. But you see, these guys are good at doing evil. They know how to write these bills, and it was introduced at the request of the Oregon School Board Administration. Of course, they know how to write these bills. They become earnest at doing evil with both hands. They write them in such a way as nobody knows what’s going on. The average person doesn’t know. And of course, you know, they’ve got full-time lobbyists, plural, working for the state agencies down there.

And we have no advocates for private schools, of course, that are recompensed at all.

So anyway, it’s just another example of how they become very earnest and very skilled at doing what’s evil. And of course, you look at the pay raise that’s currently a big brouhaha in the federal government. The Congress is supposed to set their own wage. They’re supposed to have accountability because of that. And they have to say, “Yes, we’re going to do this thing and be held accountable to the people.” They set up some sort of ridiculous commission to take it out of their hands so they don’t have to be held responsible.

And not only that, but again, they use both hands and they do evil very earnestly. They make an arrangement whereby it’ll look like the Senate actually wants to do something about it and so they vote against the pay raise knowing full well that the Speaker of the House, Representative Wright, has assured the Senate that we won’t vote on this thing. She can go ahead and vote and get out of the heat and we won’t have a vote on our side.

And so they make these deals and arrangements that we occasionally get a glimpse into because of a issue that some people get particularly worked up about such as the pay raise. But this sort of stuff goes on all the time at these legislatures. These men get very practiced in doing what’s evil. They make deals. They wrap it up in the words of Micah.

Another example, current example of the evil that is done. And this passage in terms of this progression in evil reminds me again of Romans 1 where we have the picture of the declension of society in terms of judgment by God as men move away from God. And remember at the end of Romans 1, it says not only do they do such terrible things as homosexuality, and other ungodly acts. They encourage, they exhort other people to do the same things. They reward other people for doing the same things.

Well, I got a news brief and some of you may have heard of Project 10. Project 10 is a thing that the National Education Association has endorsed this program. The National Education Association, the teachers of almost, you know, the vast majority of children in this nation has recommended Project 10 for use in every public school in the United States. Under Project 10, homosexual lesbian counselors interview students in an effort to seek out those who might be disposed to homosexuality.

Such students are referred to homosexual hotlines and self-help groups to help them accept their homosexuality. See, not only do they practice what is evil and corrupt, they want other people to do it. And there’s this growing self-consciousness of evil. They use both hands and do it well. And Micah says those were the signs of judgment in his day and age.

And then he gives us a picture of that as well. But he gave us a picture of his craving for the righteous man and finding none. And now he gives us a picture of the presence of the ungodly men. He tells us in verse four, “the best of them is as a brier and the most upright is as is sharper than a thorn hedge.” And he gives us this picture of course of curses instead of the not just the absence of blessings now in terms of no grapes, no Eshkol, no grape cluster, now the presence of curses, thorns and thistles growing up and sharper than uh a brier hedge.

Now in 2 Samuel 23:6 and 7, we are told again, we’re letting scripture interpret these symbols for us. In 2 Samuel 23:6 and 7, we find out two things about thorns. David is recounting his life and saying the great blessings that God has given to him. And then he ends the last thing that he writes by saying that it’s not so with the wicked or with the evil men, but instead they’re like thorns. And he says the men that touch them must be armed with iron and the shaft of a spear.

So he says that when we have unrighteous, ungodly, wicked men of the nation, they’re like thorns and sharp thorn hedges in that if we get involved with them, we become cut in the hands. We have to have gloves of iron as it were and you know, we have to have full body suits of titanium alloy or something to walk out in the midst of the sort of wicked men in a society of judgment. But he tells us something else as well about thorns and hedges.

He says, continuing in 2 Samuel 23:6 and 7, “they will be completely burned with fire in their place.” You see these thorns and specifically the word here that’s used for brier was a common fuel at the time. And so not only do the that tells us two things about the presence of these wicked men. First, it tells us that there’s danger to us in terms of our own protection of ourselves and our family. And it also tells us that their end will come and it will come quickly.

That they are good for nothing but to be burned up and to suffer God’s wrath of judgment. And so he goes on in verse four to say that indeed “the day of thy watchman and thy visitation cometh. The judgment comes. He gives us this picture of the ungodly men as thorns and thistles fit for burning. And then he says immediately after that the day of thy watchman and thy visitation cometh. Now shall be their perplexity, their confusion.

They will be judged by God. They will be burnt up with his fiery wrath by the way, there’s a play on words there as well. The word for hedge there, thorn hedge, sounds a lot like the word for perplexity. And so there’s a relationship then between the character of these men, their state, as Leslee Allen in his commentary on this passage of scripture says, and their fate, they are their hedgeness will lead to their havocness in terms of the judgment.

There’s a relationship between what we are and the fate that God has in mind for us.

Now, one other thing I wanted to point out before we leave this section of scripture is a verse in Ezekiel 13. And I want to point this out. Now, we read these passages about how men lie and wait for blood and you know, hunter men at his net. And we don’t want to soften that in terms of saying it relates not to physical torture and punishment.

We know that’s true. Yeah. The Bible study we had Friday night, there was a visitor from out in the west side and he nine months ago he was driving in Portland. and a crazed drug person came up to him in his car while he was stopped at a stoplight, demanded his keys. the window was down, I guess. The man said, “No, I’m not going to give you my keys.” And so the guy said, “I’m going to kill you.” At which point, this man who was visiting our church, this Christian man, dove for the side of his car away from the steering wheel, and the fell fired several rounds into his legs.

And he’s had quite a bit of problems. He hasn’t worked since. And so he’s had some real problems in terms of the gunshot wounds that he suffered. And so certainly we have those sorts of dangers of when the prince you know the head of corrections gets stabbed outside of his office in Salem. Certainly these things are coming true in our day and age. But there’s another way that men which men’s souls are hunted that I wanted to point out here.

In Ezekiel 13:17 God says to Ezekiel, “Thou son of man, set thy face against the daughters of thy people which prophesy out of their own hearts.” Now he goes on to talk about pillows and arm coverings. And I’m not going to get into that. It’s a kind of a hard section of scripture to decipher what’s being said. I could do it, I think, given some time, but it’s not necessary for the point here. It goes on to say that so Ezekiel is going to talk against these false prophetesses, the daughters of his people that prophesy out of their own heart.

And then in verse 19, he says, “And will ye pollute me among my people for handfuls of barley and for pieces of bread, to slay the souls that should not die, and to save the souls that should not live.” And so he says that one of the ways in Ezekiel’s day that people were slaying other people was through the substitution of man’s word for God’s word and they did it to slay the righteous these false prophets see and so if we say that God is going to give us a dearth of his word in terms of Amos and a famine not of bread necessarily but of the dearth of his word we know then that what will happen is instead of God’s word there’ll be the substitution of false prophets words and today of course we have the substitution of the word of the state that will provide salvation and blessing for people instead of the word of God.

And that is a way in which men hunt down the souls of other men to kill them and to slay them. And so we don’t want to miss that. That again is an indication of the judgment that we live in. And we have to be aware of these things that is the way in which men are slain is through the re the the substitution of man’s word, man’s false word instead of God’s word. And so becoming streams of death to people instead of streams of life.

So Micah has talked about the absence of the godly men, the presence of the ungodly men, and I think that behind all this, we can see the isolation of the godly. And again, we spent a lot of time talking about this two weeks ago. We won’t talk about it a lot now, but verses five and six say, of course, “don’t trust in a friend. Don’t put confidence in a guide. Keep the doings of the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom.”

Your own wife will betray you. Son dishonoureth father in verse 6, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. “The man a man’s enemies are the men of his own house, a family betrayal.” And this is certainly that it’s a betrayal of all relationships. And what it shows us also that the results of living in a nation of judgment is isolation, the isolation of the godly man.

And Micah found himself alone on more occasions than one. And he expresses that aloneness. Now, of course, if you’re familiar with your scripture, you’ll know that throughout the scriptures, we have that same perception by people that they alone are the only ones who are left. And God has normally kept a group of people. But the point is that things are so bad. The righteous men are not to be found in any kind of abundance.

The abundance of the wicked men. And as a result of that, we have the isolation of the godly. The loneliness of doing what’s right and proper before God’s sight and suffering persecution for him. All of this really amounts to the lament of the righteous in a time of judgment is essentially based on the absence of God’s presence in the nation. Now we know that God is you know where is God? God is everywhere and God is always present.

But God’s manifestation of his presence comes and goes. The scriptures make that quite clear. God would sometimes leave Israel. He would forsake them. He would go away. And certainly when he gave a famine of his word, he was leaving in terms of his special presence among the people by and large. Now not to everybody of course, Micah still received his word. But in any event, there is essentially in time of judgment an absence of the presence of God.

And So we have the woe here of the failure, the manifestation of God in the land. And today the righteous as well would in Micah’s day that is rather the righteous would want to see manifestations of God in the land. You know, we’ve talked before about how the created order is given to us to give true expression although analogic expression to spiritual truth. And so when we see winter storms for instance we can think about the power of God and the wrath of God against evildoers and we can remind ourselves that but for his mercy and grace we’d be snuffed out in an instant.

And so these things are all true and man constructs societies in which he lives and these societies also give expressions to what he believes is true. And what we find ourselves in and we find ourselves in a time of judgment as Micah did that is manifested by the rejection of God and the affirmation that there is no God except man himself. Those are the sort of symbols we see all around us. You could use real common ones such as the TV and the radio and you’ll see it everywhere on there.

Of course, you don’t think about it in terms of architecture and structures and this sort of thing. But believe me, ideas have consequences. And although pagan man borrows on the capital of the reality that God has created and cannot totally sublimate the presence of God in the land, that is his intent. And what I’m saying is when you walk down to the 7-Eleven store, the fact that it is a secular society we live in screams at us from every corner as it were, there is no God.

There’s no presence of God in this nation. And that is should be a cause for woe and lamentation on our part. We should want to see God affirmed in all that we do and in all the society about us. But we don’t. And so essentially, and that of course is true with the absence of godly men, the absence of the preaching of God’s word, and the presence of wicked men, but more than that, the whole society images as it were the faith of that society.

And so Micah laments the lack of the manifestation of the person of God.

## Now, the Redemptive Historical Context

Now, we said that there’s a historical redemptive context to this, and obviously that’s the case. We’ve talked about this a lot. The Old Testament pointed to the coming of Jesus. This reduction down of the remnant always that was going on throughout the Old Testament period came down to Jesus Christ himself. And so, all the Old Testament speaks of Jesus.

And these this particular text of scripture indicating a time of great judgment also funnels down to and points us to the time of Jesus Christ himself. Now, there are a couple of specific things that we mentioned before, but we’ll mention them again. Now, in terms of the manifestation of that this really points to the woe not of Micah ultimately but the woe of Jesus Christ the times of judgment that he lived in the context of two things specifically in Matthew 21:18-21 Jesus curses the fig tree remember he’s going into Jerusalem he sees this fig tree there with leaves on the appearance that it might have fruit but there is no fruit on it and Jesus curses it and that’s obviously a real pointed symbol that the nation itself Jerusalem is also going to be cursed because there’s no fruit.

There’s no fruit of the Holy Spirit. He’s like Micah going into a vineyard. See, and there’s a lot there’s obviously Jesus had that in mind when he cursed that fig tree. Now, Hosea 9:10, God says, “I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness. I saw your fathers as the first stripe in the fig tree at her first time, but they went to Baal Peor and separated themselves unto that shame, and their abominations were according as they loved.”

And so God in Hosea 9 says, “At one time you were as ripe fig trees to me and you were as clusters of grapes in the wilderness when I found you and delivered you. But now because you’ve rejected me and accepted Baal Peor and the abominations of the gods around you, you are no longer like that.” And Jesus said the same thing. See, he said that Jerusalem had become like that fig tree which should have been with fruit and everything and yet there was no fruit there. And Jesus curses them. And so that shows us obviously ly that Micah 7:1 specifically pointed to ultimately the times of Jesus Christ.

Additionally, the reference to the disintegration of the family is quoted by Jesus in Matthew 10:35 and following. We’ll spend more time on that next week as we speak about the manifestation of judgment and the persecution of the righteous. Today, we’re just talking about the craving for righteousness in the land and the finding of none ultimately essentially. And we’ll talk more about Jesus’s quote of the disintegration of family and family betrayal from Matthew 10:35.

next week. But suffice it to say with both these two references, Jesus hooks them as it were into his life and ministry and shows that these things ultimately pointed to the time in which he came in which God’s full judgment was poured out against Jerusalem and of course in which Jesus found himself the only righteous man because he is the only truly righteous man. Jesus waited on the Lord. Jesus waited on the Lord the way that Micah as we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes here waited on God.

We read throughout many of the messianic psalms where David representing the Messiah says, you know, I’m persecuted about and I trust in God and he’ll deliver me. And we know that those that prayer ultimately applies to Jesus Christ on the cross who takes the sin of mankind upon himself and takes the vile revilings of the people around him who crucify him and then relies upon God for his deliverance and God indeed sees his righteousness and sees the satisfaction of sins caused by the death of his only begotten son and the giving of his blood and God sees that as fit and good and God resurrects Jesus. Jesus waited on God and so he also Micah here is typical of Jesus Christ. And so all these things really point to Jesus Christ ultimately. But they also point to the times that follow the manifestation of Christ and they have a woe element to us as well.

Redemptive history doesn’t stop with Jesus’s work. It comes to fruition. But from then on all men and nations are judged in relationship to what they do with that gospel that has now become manifest and with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that has happened in time and history once and for all.

And now for the last 2,000 years, men and nations are being judged and sifted out as it were and put to the left hand and put to the right hand, men and nations by God based upon what they do with Jesus Christ in that gospel. And so redemptive history as it were proceeds here. The implications of the redemption are worked out in history. History, God is not absent from history now. He’s just as present.

Book of Daniel, the stone cut without human hands crushes under it all other empires. And indeed now various empires rise up. and the stone that cut with is cut without hands. The gospel of Jesus Christ, he grows to fill the whole world as the book of Isaiah tells us. And that’s the time period we’re in now. And so these things have immediate application for us in our day and age. We’re in an age in which men have rejected the stone, the chief cornerstone.

And so God’s judgment comes upon this nation. And so what Micah experienced has implications for us. We should bemoan the absence of godly men in our nation. You know, about six or seven years ago, Howard and I or maybe later or maybe even earlier than that. I’m not sure when it was now. We were driving back from Steve Samson’s apartment out in Gresham or Boring or Gresham, I guess it was out there somewhere.

It’s all the way out there to me. We were driving back late one night. We had a couple of meetings at Steve’s house. And this final meeting, I think there was just three of us and I think Kent Kenoy was there even that night. the last few faithful people from the large group that had started with Steve Samson trying to think through the implications of the faith for our day and age. And it’s interesting that we’re all sitting here this morning.

But any event, I remember driving in Howard’s little Carmen Gia back from that place going back out to Beaverton and looking around this great city, this great secular city of Portland, Oregon, and thinking to myself, there are a lot of people here. And you go and I don’t know about you, I always I think about this a lot when I go down the freeway and you go by many cars and many houses and you think all these lives out there.

And I was thinking about all these people in Portland and almost to a man They have rejected the Lord God and they’ve rejected the word of God. It’s a it’s if you start to think about the implications of that, you find yourself like Micah saying, “Woe is me. There is no fruit out there to eat. Men have rejected God.” This is a time of judgment, folks. And this has not always been this way in history. We live in a very uh rebellious day and age in which that rebellion is calling forth God’s full-fledged judgment.

We also should bemoan the absence of godly men in the nation. We also should bemoan the presence of ungodly men. And as I mentioned before these battles at the legislature, every time we have one of these sessions and these bills start getting introduced, I always go through the same emotional set of occurrences. I think why do I have to waste my time going down there and telling these people the obvious?

That parents know how to teach their kids and they’re doing a great job in private and Christian home schools. What’s the point of having good on there? These people have a dropout rate of 35, 40, 45, 50% in some of the schools in Portland. They’re turning out reams of illiterate people who don’t know how to read or write good enough for jobs and certainly don’t know a thing about the government in which they operate and the society in which they live.

All they’re taught is the biggest thing they get across to people is that God has no relevance to them. They have a terrible result and yet they want to take lots of time and effort coming after the Christian private and homeschoolers. It makes you sick. makes you want to say enough is enough. I am tired.