Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Please stand for the reading of God’s word, which today is Micah 6:8. Sermon text Micah 6:8. It’s at the top of your handouts as well. “He has shown you, oh man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? But to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you for calling us here to meet with you. We thank you for the assurance of the forgiveness of our sins. We thank you, Father, that you receive our praise and sacrifices of praise to you through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for your word. We thank you for the simplicity of this text. May we, Lord God, rejoice in it, be built up by it, directed by it, and rest in it. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, first let me express my thanks to the other elders for giving me this sabbatical of a couple of months and particularly to Doug H. and Chris W., who have, like all good men I think, jobs that require many hours of them—vocations—and yet have given sacrificially over the last few months to enable me to take some time off and focus on some things. I think it’s been very profitable in terms of, for instance, the parents’ education association, and I’ll be talking more about that in the weeks to come.

If I squint with my left eye today, the operation went well—my second cataract surgery—but that cornea is still a little inflamed. But so don’t worry about it. It’ll take, you know, another week or two for it to quiet down, but it’s doing much better. And I’m able to see all of you now and how old you really look as opposed to what I thought, how I remembered you.

Okay. Before we get back to the Ten Commandments, I wanted to—I have several sermons, maybe even a couple of months’ worth that I wanted to bring for particular reasons. And this particular one today I wanted to bring because we live in a very complicated, perplexing sort of world. And I suppose my age is part of why I’m perplexed by the whole thing. But I do think that there are momentous changes going on in our lives—in the way the world works now—that really are unprecedented and can be quite difficult and challenging, and particularly for Christians.

And so I wanted us to sort of—I know that things are kind of all in a tither in various directions, and I wanted just to sort of focus back on the simplicity of God’s basic requirements of man as articulated in Micah 6:8. So part of my desire here is just to sort of, you know, have us all take sort of a deep breath and kind of focus on the major things here—you know, major on the majors—and kind of refocus on one of these basic summations of what the Bible is all about and what our relationship to God is all about. There are others, but this is a pretty good one.

I’ve been reading a book called *Liquid Times* by a man named Zygmunt Bauman, and you know, it’s some good, some bad, but he’s got some very interesting things to say about liquidity. He has various books called “liquid this” and “liquid that”—liquid life, liquid time—and what he’s doing is he’s kind of doing a sociological analysis of what’s happening. So his basic motif here is we’ve moved from a solid world—a more solid world—to more of a liquid world, and things are moving and changing.

Let me just read a short quote of his. He says, “At least in the developed part of the planet—okay, so that would be us—a few signal and closely interconnected departures have happened or are happening currently that create a new and indeed unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, raising a series of challenges never before encountered. First of all, the passage from the solid to a liquid phase of modernity. That is into a condition in which social forms, structures that limit individual choices, institutions that guard reputations or repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behavior—these forms can no longer and are not expected to keep their shape for long because they decompose and melt faster than the time it takes to cast them and once they are cast for them to set.”

So we live in a world where everything’s kind of decomposing as soon as we set it up.

There are a couple of areas where this idea can come across and maybe make more sense in what he’s saying. Vocations, you know—when I was a boy, people basically worked pretty much for one or two or three companies at the most. A lot of times you’d start at a company, you’d build a retirement with that company, you’d retire, and it was a solid view of vocation. That is no longer the case, of course, because of globalism and global competition in terms of workplaces. That’s one reason. All kinds of other factors. But now it’s not like that. And so people move from job to job to job fairly quickly. And it’s disconcerting. You know, we’ve moved from solid to liquid.

And so it’s difficult for people.

Communication, of course, is the most obvious example of all this. We’ve moved from, you know, extended communications being letter-writing to emails and social media networks, Twitters, etc. And so everything—every time you come along you make a change—another few months or year will pass and the way you’re going to communicate changes a lot more. Used to be email was a big deal, then it was kind of replaced by MySpace, and then it’s Facebook and other social networks. And if you’re really going to want to communicate, for instance to a congregation or to a group of people, you know, every the next mode of communication—as soon as you set on it—begins to decompose and give way to something else.

So life is sort of perplexing to us. Borders have kind of melted, right? And so there’s a lot of flow back and forth. Everybody flies, you know, to various parts of the country, world these days. That’s very common. People come here, the borders are porous. You know, and so it produces all these different perplexities for our lives.

We have all these choices. Used to be when I was a kid, you had, you know, three, maybe four major networks on television. You had standard formats. Now you’ve got 250 stations, you got maybe 50 news stations, 10 major ones at least, cable outlets. Their format’s changing all the time as they compete for market share. And so everything’s liquid, everything’s moving, and it can make our lives confused. It can make church life particularly confusing.

What we’re trying to do at Reformation Covenant Church—the same thing that I said about businesses is true of churches. We now don’t have solid church view of Christianity. We have liquid Christianity, liquid church, liquid Christianity. It’s really what happens on Sunday is optional. I mean, it really is for a significant part of the younger generation that’s being raised in this liquid world. That world affects them and they approach the same thing—the same way they approach other liquid parts of their lives—to church.

So, used to be, you know, you get baptized in a church, grow up in a church, get married in a church. That’s gone. I mean, a few people still do. A few of us old die-hards here. But more and more people choose churches. It’s kind of a consumerist approach to the plurality of choices that are offered to you. And so they want to go here, they go there, they go everywhere. And things become very liquid in terms of commitment to local bodies.

And the end result of this, of course, is isolation. It’s the failure of community—it’s living together apart. You’re in a church—a big church maybe, or a small church—but you’re really apart because it’s liquid. You don’t have fixed commitments for any periods of time.

Set forms are being chucked, right? I’ll talk about this more at the communion table, but you know, we have all these new and novel or regurgitations of past ways of doing liturgical church because nothing in the past really is seen as having value. So, we’re moving and making things liquid and people are consuming things and it’s pop culture and church becomes a pop church and so things move and twist and spin and that’s where you go—to the next buzz, so to speak.

And a lot of this is neither good nor bad. It’s the world we live in. And it’s the world that makes us—it’s perplexing to us. It has all these things going on. And so trying to build a solid church also becomes difficult. It’s difficult.

Another aspect of liquid life: if we factor in public schools and the resulting lack of literacy—particularly of reading—and a more of a video, moving, liquid form as opposed to a fixed set of words on a page. People become disconnected to the past. So pop culture, which has always been around—there’s always been elements of popular culture that pop up for a moment and go away—but that becomes the dominant culture, and for many people the only culture that they have.

Now that’s dangerous because what it means is you’re not tethered to the past as you move into the future. The tethering to the past has been basically cut for a lot of people. We don’t read old books. You know, how can you even tell? We live so much—we’re not disconnected beings. We live covenantally in this culture and all the things that are happening in it affect us. They really do, and in ways that we can’t even understand.

One way that’ll help us to understand it is by reading old books. Books from another age. Books when thoughts were different. And I’m not saying the past was better, but I’m saying it’s different. And it helps us to evaluate our present by having some tether to the past. So all the tethers to the past—whether it’s liturgical tethers or literature, whatever it is—are slowly being eliminated for more and more people. And as a result, we’re just spinning around.

And you can see this politically, of course, what’s happened the last two years. And some people like it, some don’t. Polarization is happening. And part of that is just, you know, are you into the liquid thing or not? How well can you float with the whole deal going on or not? And do you see—liquidity is dangerous if it doesn’t have some tether to the past?

We, in the providence of God, he helps us. He helps us liturgically. We have a set form here we go through for a particular reason. And every week you hear from a very old book, right? Today, Micah—you know, we’re talking several thousand years ago that it was written. And no matter what part of it we read, it’s always at least, you know, 2,000 years old. So, we hear from an ancient book that helps us to evaluate our current life, and it’s not just any book—but let’s say it was—the point is a message from the past is useful—a sabbath breeze blowing in to help us think through where we’re at today. But this book is the inspired word of God and he demands that we pay attention to very old literature—this collection of books known as the Bible. He knows all about the liquid thing; he knew it was coming, brought it to pass, etc. So he wants us to be able to not freak out by all of that, but he wants us to be able to integrate ourselves into it by means of this very old book.

So we have a text that’s quite a simple text and it applied 3,000 years ago. It applied 2,000 years ago. It applied in the early days of the church. It applied in the medieval period. It applied in the dark ages or whatever you want to call them, the age of missionary expansion. Whatever it is, it’s applied. It’s always applied. It’s always a sure word and a relevant word to our day and age. And so it’s useful to us.

We can come to church, take a deep breath, say, “Okay, this isn’t liquid. These are the fixed standards of God’s word that he brings to us every Lord’s day, and it’s good.” And this is a nice little summation. Okay, there are other summations. We sang Psalm 15 a few minutes ago in our entering in. And Psalm 15 is an entrance liturgy. Who gets to come in? Who gets to go to live in the presence of God and worship—first, but then eternally as well? And it gives us particular qualifications.

These qualifications—uh, we sang a very good version of it. The only line it leaves out specifically is “one who works righteousness” or “does justice works righteousness,” which is the very one of the three things that Micah 6:8 says. But it tells us who gets to do that and it lists these qualifications. So those are good things to remind ourselves. What is it we are supposed to do this week in light of all the demands for our time and energy? What is it that kind of centers us?

And Psalm 15 is a good summation, but Micah 6:8 is an even more compact and succinct summation of what we’re supposed to do. If you do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God this week, you should be able to breathe a sigh of relief at the end of the day—no matter if you understood tweeting or emailing or Facebook or whatever it was. And even if you know about all the political stuff that’s going on, if you did justice and love mercy and walked humbly with God that day, you see, you’ve done what God wants you to do. And that’s nice. It’s nice to be able to end the day in the midst of perplexing times, knowing what it was that God required of me, and that I did those things.

And they’re fairly simple things to do. These are simple requirements.

Now, one brief literary structure point. Micah 6 is a covenant lawsuit. So what’s going on is the prophetic books are that the death penalty is being announced. In Micah specifically, it’s being announced at the southern kingdom to Judah. So you’re going to die, and then you’ll be raised up, but you’re going to die. And in Micah 6, God brings a covenant lawsuit and says, “Well, this is why you’re going to die.”

And Micah 6 has a nice seven-part structure. We won’t look at it in detail. But he calls on witnesses to come. He’s got a dispute with his people. He ends with a summary statement. He tells them, you know, that there is this lawsuit going on. And uh, he then tells them—he says, “Well, what did I do to you that was wrong?” That’s the second part. And then they say, “Well, what should we do to appease you? Shall we give thousands of bulls and sacrifice, etc.” And then he says, “No, you know what God requires of you.” And then He says, “You didn’t do it and the judgment is coming.” And then he gives a summary statement. It’s a nice seven-fold structure.

And at the very heart of this covenant lawsuit is Micah 6:8 specifically. So again, it sounds as a central summation. The literary structure tells us this is a central summation. You see, it’s real important to do literary structure because of liquid life. We are tempted to reinterpret everything in the Bible if we just pull out little proof texts by the sort of culture that’s been produced through the liquid life we have without being tethered to what the message actually was in its original writing.

So it’s very important, you know, to look at the context of what we talk about, and Micah 6 tells us the context is a covenant lawsuit. So it really does have a central significance—these requirements. And it’s a central significance that the absence of it is the reason why God told Judah, “You’re dying, going into exile.”

So that should get our attention. If it’s not enough, okay, we have a nice simple summation. Let’s listen to what that is. Now, you know as well that there’s a punishment coming if you don’t do the simple requirements of God. That’s what leads a people, a country, a nation into judgment from God.

All right. Now, as soon as we start talking about requirements—”these are the requirements of God. What does God require of you?”—the first thing we want to say is that ultimately these requirements are met in Christ. So the requirements are to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God, and these requirements—these entrance requirements for relationship with God and for blessing from him—we want to immediately say that we can’t work our way into this thing. We only have these things in union with Christ. That Jesus Christ is the one who has met God’s requirements.

I mentioned entrance liturgies, and Psalm 24 is another one. “Who can ascend into your holy hill?” Same thing as Psalm 15, but Psalm 24 goes on to say, “Open the gates and the King of Glory shall come in.” Who’s the King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. So ultimately, Psalm 15, Psalm 24—when the elders stand at the gate of this table, at the gate of the church and say certain people can come in and certain can’t—ultimately the only one that gets to come in is Jesus. Okay? He meets the requirements. We always fall short, of course, but Jesus meets these requirements perfectly.

Proverbs 23:26, “My son, give me your heart and let your eyes observe my ways.” So, if we’re talking about requirements of men, we’ve observed the ways of God when we observe the life of Jesus Christ. So, this is a reflection that he has met these requirements.

Matthew 18:27 says, “The master of that servant was moved with compassion.” That’s the parable about the man forgiving great debt. And the master is moved with compassion and removes the debt of his servant. This is a parable of God forgiving our debts graciously on his part. And God is moved—by way of being illustrated by the master—with compassion. But we have direct statements as well.

Matthew 20:34, “Jesus had compassion, touched their eyes. Two blind men had come, and Jesus has compassion on the blind men. Jesus loves mercy. You see, he loves mercy. Over and over again in the Gospels, Jesus sees the multitude. He’s moved with compassion. He sees the paralytic man. He’s moved with compassion. Blind people come to him. He’s moved with compassion. Jesus Christ is the one who always meets that requirement of loving mercy, of being compassionately moved to help people. And that’s what Jesus did and does.

Jesus is the one who meets the requirement of doing justice. Romans 5:18 says, “As through one man’s offense, judgment came to all men resulting in condemnation, even so, through one man’s righteous act, the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience, many were made sinners, so also by one man’s obedience, many will be made righteous.”

Jesus is the one who meets the requirement of doing justice. He fulfilled, he obeyed the law of God in every detail. He was obedient to the point of death on the cross. Jesus did justice. He meets the requirement, not us.

We read in Psalm 98, great Christmas psalm, “The Lord has made known his salvation, his righteousness he has revealed in the sight of the nations. He has remembered his mercy and his faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of God.” That’s an incarnation psalm. It’s about the coming of Jesus Christ, the coming of the King. And that coming of Christ was the demonstration. People could see Jesus and see the righteousness of God in Christ. And they could see the remembering of the mercy of God in Jesus Christ.

Jesus meets the requirements of Micah 6:8. And while we have some things about our lives that need to be judged and measured, let’s never forget that ultimately it is Jesus who completes all of these things.

Jesus was humble, right? “Walk humbly with God.” Jesus said that he came not to do his own will, but the will of the Father in heaven. Jesus shows humility by doing that will even to the point of death. In Luke 22:42, Jesus says, “Father, if it’s your will, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.”

Jesus meets the requirement. He has compassion. He meets the requirement. He does justice perfectly. He meets the requirement ultimately and perfectly by being humbly walking humbly with the Father.

So Jesus is the one who meets the requirements. But of course we are united to Jesus, and these requirements are to characterize our lives generally. Yeah, we’re going to mess up. We’re going to fall short. But generally speaking, the whole idea of covenantal relationship with God—the purpose of it—is that we might have the divine nature, so to speak, not divinity, but we would exemplify what the divine nature is in terms of justice, and mercy, and humility in the world. We’re supposed to be little Jesuses, right? Little Christ, little anointed ones. And Jesus meets all these things. He gets to enter in, and then through covenant, we’re united with him. And so we meet the requirements in Jesus, right? And we’re also then to reflect those attributes of Christ as well in our lives.

The whole purpose of the covenant is that God’s way might become our way. Okay? And so that’s what the purpose is.

So, in 1 John 2, you know, Doug preached on this a couple of weeks ago, and you know, it was kind of neat to think about what was laid out there. He says, you know, “Antichrist is coming and many antichrists have come.” He says, you got Christ, the anointed one, and you’ve got an anointing. And then he says, “Christ is the one who is righteous and you’re supposed to practice righteousness.” So, you got Antichrist and his seed, so to speak, and Jesus and his seed. And at the end of that, it said, “If you know Jesus is righteous, then you know he who practices righteousness is born of him.”

Verse 29, “If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of him.” That is Christ. So it’s not the imputed righteousness of Jesus—we’re supposed to practice righteousness. Okay? You know, we tend to get up involved with our systematic theologies and righteousness becomes this imputation thing. No, that text that Doug preached on makes it quite clear that he lays this stuff out so that we understand the requirements—that we practice righteousness. We do righteousness.

So it’s our requirement, even though we’re not going to fulfill them perfectly, even though they’re met ultimately through the grace of God in Christ. Still, it means we’re supposed to do something.

Now, it’s gracious of God to reveal requirements, right? You don’t have to guess. You know, some forms of Christianity—if you know, they kind of don’t like laws and structure and particular dictates and stuff. We just want to, you know, flow with constant conscious communion with Christ and what he means and is—apart from his word, apart from his law, apart from these summary statements. That is hell on earth. I mean, if all I can know is sort of look at the life of Jesus and think about what I should be like, that I’m really lost.

God graciously says, “Wait a minute. I’ve given you some things. Ten Commandments is one summation.” These entrance liturgies. “Loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself” is another. But what does that mean? What is love? Well, here we have God graciously telling us what’s required. He says, “You are required to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with me.” It’s gracious of God to reveal it because if we don’t do those things, then he’s going to judge us and bring judgments upon our head—the way he did to Judah, the direct recipient of Micah 6:8.

Not only is it gracious of God, these are good things, right? He says, you know, that these requirements of his are good. “He has shown you, oh man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you.” So those are parallelisms. What God requires of us is good. First of all, it’s good in and of itself. It’s beautiful. Justice, mercy—these things are good in and of themselves intrinsically. They reflect the character of God. But it’s also good for us.

Now, if we reject the idea of requirements that God is seeking in our life, we reject clarity, and how can we rest at night at the end of the day? And we reject also things that are good. God says, “This is really good for you.”

Romans 7:12 says, “The law is holy and the commandment holy and just and good.”

Psalm 119:68 says, “You are good” (talking to God), “and do good. Teach me your statutes, your law, your requirements. Tell me what I’m supposed to do. Teach them to me. Grant me your law graciously.” It’s gracious of God to reveal these things. As long as we recognize that we’re only in union with Christ do we meet these things—He meets them perfectly—but they are to characterize our life.

Titus 1:8 says that elders are to be hospitable, lovers of what is good, sober-minded, just, holy, self-control. They’re supposed to be just, they’re supposed to be lovers of what is good. So that’s good. It’s good to be just, and it’s good to be hospitable, which is showing this mercy.

So these requirements of God are graciously given to us, and they’re good. They’re declared as good. And they’re good for us.

In Nehemiah 9:13, we read, “You came down also on Mount Sinai and spoke with them from heaven and gave them just ordinances and true laws, good statutes and judgments.” Don’t ever call them not good. They’re good. They’re good. They’re just.

It’s interesting. You probably have heard the verse about how the wicked—there’s no peace for the wicked. There’s no rest for the wicked. He’s like the troubled sea and whatnot. And one of those verses that talks about that is at the end of Isaiah 57:21. “There’s no peace, says my God, for the wicked.”

But the very beginning of that chapter—the other bookend of the chapter—says this: “The righteous perishes. No man takes it to heart. Merciful men are taken away. While no one considers that the righteous is taken away from evil, he shall enter into peace. They shall rest in their beds, each one walking in his uprightness.”

So there’s no peace for the wicked. But there is peace for those who do what? According to Isaiah 57, who are righteous and who are merciful. The two very characteristics that are given to us in Micah 6:8 are good because they bring us peace upon our beds tonight. We can rest if we exhibit these characteristics. They’re good for us. They’re good in and of themselves.

Well, what are they? Well, the first is to do justice. Simple concept. Justice and righteousness are paired over and over and over again in the scriptures. So there’s a word that usually is translated “justice,” a specific Hebrew word. There’s a different Hebrew word that’s translated “righteousness,” but they’re really nearly synonymous.

For instance, in Isaiah 56:1, “Thus says the Lord, keep justice and do righteousness.” Okay, so justice and righteousness are parallels. And when God says to do justice, another way to say it is to do righteousness, which is specifically given to us in Isaiah 56:1.

In Isaiah 51:1, we read, “Listen to me, you who follow after righteousness, you who seek the Lord.” If you’re seeking the Lord, then you’re following after righteousness. You’re attempting to see justice and to do justice yourself.

We just sang the Beatitudes, and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” I heard a sermon during my sabbatical someplace else, and you know, the pastor was saying, you know, “Blessed are you, and you hunger and thirst for righteousness, you’ll be filled. The imputation of Christ’s righteousness will be filling to you for that hungering and thirsting.”

I don’t think that’s what it’s saying. Jesus was addressing people in a context of oppression, unrighteousness, injustice from leaders in the church and state. And I think the hungering and thirsting after righteousness there is like the hungering and thirsting that Paul had when he went to Athens. And it’s the same sort of hungering and thirsting after righteousness that we have as we live in a world that becomes less and less righteous.

We hunger and thirst after justice so that babies aren’t killed in the womb anymore. We hunger and thirst after justice so that people aren’t deluded into thinking that sexual practices that produce death for them are actually good things. So there’s a hungering and thirsting for justice or righteousness. So we’re supposed to seek that, and then we’re supposed to actually be doing something about it in our lives.

Now, justice is defined by God’s word, of course. So his law is justice. So really, you know, without belaboring the point, it’s really quite fairly simple. At the end of the day, we think: Were we just to other people today? Were we correct in our dealings? Did we show partiality in our judgments toward this or that person? Were we honest upfront with people? Were we, you know, honest and just, upright? Did we practice righteousness?

Genesis 18:19 says, “I’ve known Abraham in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice.” There the parallels are put together. We’re supposed to command our children—to teach them—that God’s way is to do justice in the context of relationships. Justice is about relationships, man to man. And one side of that relationship is to do justice.

If we go back to Psalm 15 and think of it as this entrance requirement, and it says in verse two, “You’re supposed to walk uprightly and work righteousness.” It goes right on to talk about that immediately—about the tongue. “Who works righteousness, speaks the truth in his heart, who does not backbite with his tongue, nor does evil to his neighbor, nor does he take up a reproach against his friends.”

So at least in Psalm 15, one specific way to think about doing justice is the use of our tongues in relationship to other people. When we have trouble, do we talk to the person we’re having trouble with, or we run around talking to other people? You know, are we helping situations in relationships, or are we stirring things up with our tongues? Are we slandering with our tongues? Are we ministering justice to people?

You know, in Leviticus, it says you’re supposed to love your brother. Don’t go up and down as a tale-bearer. But then it goes on directly to say to confront your brother directly. Okay? So, it’s not that you just ignore things, but you go through the proper process of achieving conflict resolution with our tongue.

So one way of doing justice, we can think, at the end of the day: How did we do with our speech? Well, I screwed up. I did this or that. Well, this was good. The spirit of God was moving in me to try to do right in terms of this relationship with my wife or my children or whatever it is.

Our children are great barometers of justice or injustice in the context of our homes. Children want justice. And as Bill Cosby says, parents want peace. They’re not really too concerned about justice. One kid stealing from somebody else and somebody’s screaming—we just want the quiet to go away—is what Cosby said. You know, and all too often that’s true. Doing justice means immediately in the context of our homes, as well as in the context of our relationship with other people.

So to do justice—very simple concept.

Amos 5:24, “Let justice run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” So justice is to permeate the world. So doing justice in our own little piece of the world is part of seeking for justice in the broader context of the world as well. That’s what we want to do.

Zephaniah 2:3, “Seek the Lord all you meek of the earth who have upheld his justice. Seek righteousness, seek humility.” So again, that’s two of the three requirements of Micah put together—that we’re supposed to seek after justice in the context of our land. And again, this is related to God’s law.

Isaiah 51:7 says, “Listen to me, you who know righteousness, you people in whose heart is my law.” So for us, justice is defined by an understanding of God’s law as it applies to our day and age.

So justice—to do justice—that’s the first requirement that God puts upon us. Our judgments in our business, in our home, in the church—to do justice specifically with our tongues, in relationship to our neighbors. This is the first simple requirement.

The second simple requirement is to love mercy. To love mercy. Now, mercy is a word here that has a couple of nuances to it. One is covenantal faithfulness. And in Psalm 89, we read, for instance, uh, David, the psalmist says, “I will speak, I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever. With my mouth will I make known your faithfulness to all generations. I have said mercy shall be built up forever. Your faithfulness you shall establish in the very heavens. I have made a covenant with my chosen,” God says.

So mercy and faithfulness are tied to God’s covenant. So this word “loving mercy” means loving faithfulness to covenants. So on one part, it means loyalty. God is faithful to his covenant to fulfill it for us, and he’s loyal to his people. So again here, this is something that is going away in our day and age—is the idea of loyalty to a family, loyalty to a business, loyalty to a church, loyalty to a personal relationship, faithfulness to that covenantal relationship that God has put you in. A stickiness in relationships is part of what loving mercy is all about.

This particular word “mercy” has this implication of covenant kindness. Now it is kindness, and another nuance of this term is doing kindnesses to other people. So you know, Abram’s servant goes and looks for a wife for his son, and he asks God to show a kindness—to show mercy, show this same Hebrew term—to Abraham by allowing him to find a wife for his son, and God does it. So another nuance of this term is acts of kindness. Acts of kindness is something we should love to do, and it’s just something we should teach our children about.

And specifically beyond that, we’re explicitly told in the Old Testament particularly, and in the New, mercy means to love acts of kindness particularly toward those people who are more vulnerable—widows, strangers, fatherless.

It’s interesting in the Bible—in the New Testament rather—the complement of this Old Testament word is “hospitality.” And hospitality literally translated is to love the stranger. “Stranger” is *xeno*. So to love *xeno*. *Xenophobia* is fear of strangers. And Christians are to love strangers. A very important element to remember as we consider the immigration debates. Justice and mercy are at the heart of those debates, and it’s too complicated a subject to get into, but whatever way we come down on the issue—one of the aspects of the requirements of God, the simple requirements, are to love strangers, to love the stranger, and to be able to be motivated to show—not random—it’s the Morgan Freeman line—”random acts of kindness”—”arc that’ll rescue mankind,” he stole. But yeah, in any event, to do acts of kindness to particularly vulnerable people.

This is one of the basic requirements of the Christian faith, and it’s repeated over and over and over again. This is referred to by many people as the royal virtue. We’re made kings and priests to God, right? That’s obvious. What does a king do? A king demonstrates justice, but he also shows mercy and acts of kindness.

David specifically asks if there were any of the descendants of Saul that he could show this—this mercy—extend an act of kindness to one of Saul’s descendants, and Mephibosheth is the guy, and he brings him to his table. So a king is somebody who brings people into their protection and also demonstrates to them the grace that he knows he has received. He knows he didn’t become king except through union with Christ and his calling. That’s how we got to be who we are, and we extend that grace and compassion to other people, and we’re required then to be hospitable—distributing to the needs of the saints in Romans 12:13.

It means we need to know the needs of the people around us. We live in the context of this employment difficulty that people have, and particularly now in the midst of this recession or whatever recovery we might not have that has brought certain needs to people financially and just in terms of the stability of their lives. Are we thinking about those people? And do we approach them with grace, mercy? Do we love mercy? Do we engage in acts of mercy toward the unemployed, for instance, or people with other kinds of needs individually?

And does it characterize us as a church? You know, we changed our vision statement because of this particular requirement really—loving God and our neighbor and transforming the fallen world. God has called us to be kings, and as kings we’re to demonstrate this royal virtue of the King of Kings by extending grace and compassion and mercy, and not making people feel all weird and stuff about the difficulties they find themselves in, but extending grace and mercy to them in our assistance.

So at the end of the day, and you do an act of kindness to your brother or sister—even, you know, Mom—Proverbs 31 says the law of kindness is supposed to be in your mouth. You’re supposed to minister covenantal faithfulness to your kids, and that includes acts of kind statements to them. And then do we extend it beyond our household? Or rather, do we bring people into our household?

Job said he put on this mercy, this covenantal faithfulness, and the extension of grace as a robe and as a garment, and he brought the poor into his house. God says that homes are to be places of hospitality. It’s required of us as Christians to be hospitable, to be lovers of strangers, to entertain people in the context of our homes, to show them mercy and grace.

We’re to do justice—yes, we understand that. We understand the law. But we’re also to love mercy. We’re to want to demonstrate the grace that we know God has demonstrated to us.

One of the acts of kindness that this church has engaged in that I’m quite excited about—I went to my barber this last week and I mentioned to him that we as a church had done these bumper stickers for the Oregon City Police, and he said a neighbor of his has one of those bumper stickers and he was wondering what that was all about. So you know, Lana was driving around in Gresham. She said she saw a car over there with the bumper sticker. It’s a way to love mercy—the extension of mercy and kindness to the Oregon City Police because they are very vulnerable emotionally. This is the sort of thing we should love to think about doing. And I don’t know who it was in this church that had the idea, but it was a great one. And it’s the gift that keeps on giving as police see those bumper stickers. They know that we’re loving them actively.

So to do justice, to love mercy, and then to walk humbly with God.

You know, doing justice and loving mercy, loving mercy specifically means, you know, it’s easy to do acts of kindness to people that are like you. That’s not what this means. It means going outside of yourself or bringing somebody else into your home—someone you wouldn’t necessarily normally associate with.

Now, it starts here in the church. You know, snobbery is the opposite of loving mercy. You know, clicking up, so to speak, is the opposite of loving mercy. Now, we’re going to have associations of friends and groups. That’s understandable. But we should always be seeking to bring people into our sphere of acts of kindness. We should always be seeking to make sure we haven’t created walls of clique and snobbery that somehow are denial of this basic requirement of God.

We’re to do justice and we’re to walk humbly with God. So this really explains what it means in terms of whether we’re doing these things or not—is if we’re doing them according to God’s method. If we just think it’s nice to help people and help people indiscriminately and without the particular attention to the details that God says, we’re not doing it humbly.

Psalm 15 goes on to say, “he does no evil to his neighbor. But he also it also says, ‘in whose eyes a vile person is despised.’” A requirement is to despise vile people, and they’re not to be treated the way other people are. So benevolence is dictated, or rather surrounded by, and informed by God’s word and the specific requirements of that word. And justice is the same way.

So we walk humbly with God, and this humility then provides the understanding of what justice and mercy is.

Micah—this is very important for us before we get to verse 8. The verses just before that are verses 6 and 7. And the people say, well, what can we do? Shall we bring a lot of calves? Shall we bring a thousand rams? Shall we bring our firstborn and offer him to God? They made a very high bid sacrificially in terms of worship, but they bid wrong.

We’re—this is something we need to pay attention to. We try very hard, and I think we should liturgically as a church, to do what God wants us to do in worship. But to think that worship on Sunday is the basic requirement of God requires is exactly the problem that the people in Judah in the time of Micah fell into. They thought the big deal was cultic celebrations, religious celebrations, liturgical celebrations.

Now, they were doing those things wrong too. But the point is, God says, “No, that’s not it. I want you to worship me. Sacrifice is good, but obedience is better.” And sacrifice actually, if you understand the relationship of our praise to God, is supposed to usher forth in obedience during the week. So, we don’t meet the basic requirements of God by going to church. We should go to church, but we should go to church to understand God’s grace to us so that we can then act graciously to others in the context of the rest of the week.

Daniel 4:26 is another summation of these same requirements. Here’s what we read. This is the time of Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel’s interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. He says this: “In as much as they gave the command to revive the stump and roots of the tree, your kingdom shall be assured to you after you come to know that heaven rules.” So Nebuchadnezzar, you need to have humility knowing that heaven rules.

“Therefore, O king, let my advice be acceptable to you. Break off your sins by being righteous. Be humble to God. Know that heaven rules. And then, king, break off sins by doing righteousness and your iniquities by showing mercy to the poor. Perhaps there may be a lengthening of your prosperity.”

The same three things that Micah talked about were also true of gentile empirical rulers. It’s the same thing that’s true of us. And we’re to see these same requirements on us as Nebuchadnezzar had to him. And these things are then clearly given to us as essential requirements of God to us that we’re supposed to respond to in the context of our lives.

Now, they’re simple, but in a way, they’re not so simple in this day and age. You know, we live in a day and age, you know, when people just expect things to happen. RJ Rushdoony—he wrote that the silent majority, if there was such a thing, was the sinning majority because they fell into the temptation of Marxism. Marxism said progress is inevitable. Social classes will do this and that to have this synthesis come out of it. Progress in culture is inevitable, and that’s the way a lot of us seem to think as well about it—it’s kind of a perversion of postmillennialism. Think the same thing: Well, it’s inevitable. Things will get better over time.

Well, that’s not really true. I mean, it is true in the long term, but it’s only true because God personally acts in our lives, requiring of us certain actions to do justice and to love these acts of kindness. And if we’re humble to God, it means we’re engaged in our world in these simple yet profound ways. It means we’ve not been thinking it’ll just take care of itself. It means we’ve attended to what God calls us to attend to. And we’ve attended to it in a very personal way in the context of our homes, in the context of our families, in the context of our individual lives, and in the context of our church.

So God says that’s what changes things. Nebuchadnezzar’s reign would be extended and conversion would happen, and things would change through the simple application of humility, doing justice, and loving compassion on the poor—those who have needs. And so instead of expecting inevitable progress, Christians are called to do particular things. They’re simple things, but they’re things we still have to do. We don’t just think it’ll all work out in the end. No, God says we’re to do certain things. And we’re to do certain things. That’s unlike what our culture says.

Justice has been redefined. And you read a lot of books these days on social justice. And they talk about equality of results. They say there’s not social justice because you have rich people and poor people. Well, that’s not what justice is. That’s not the definition of justice in the context of God’s world. We have strange notions of justice where a Christian man who ran for governor that I actually endorsed several years ago is now proposing a statewide ban on plastic bags for grocery stores. And so we have this weird deal where we have certain plastic bags—ones used to carry groceries, not all kinds of other ones—being subject. Well, it’s already been made illegal in Portland, or it’s in the process of being made illegal. And now they’re wanting to do it statewide.

So, we’ve got that going on, and at the same time, we’ve got babies being aborted. You know, it’s—we have very odd notions of social justice and what it means. And we have laws now that increasingly take control of every aspect of our lives in ways that really is a perversion of biblical justice. Justice leaves people basically free to live their lives, and there’s not an imposition on the part of the civil state in every detail of our lives saying what sort of bags you can use to bag up the groceries that people buy at your store.

So, we have strange views of justice in our day and age. And it’s important for us—it’s very important—that we don’t just slide along with this liquid culture and slide into the notions of social justice that our culture gives us and accept them. Don’t accept them. Look at what the Bible says about social justice, not what the culture says. And what you’ll find is that we’re prohibited from showing partiality to the poor in judgments in Exodus. Absolutely prohibited from showing partiality to the poor. And yet that’s exactly the sort of justice that people expect now—is to show partiality to the poor through redistribution, forced redistribution, of wealth.

Justice has been redefined. Don’t go along with it. The simple requirements of God are no longer so simple because the culture wants us to have different definitions in terms of what these things are.

Exodus 23:2 says, “Don’t follow a crowd to do evil, nor shall you testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after many to pervert justice.” We live in a context where justice is seen as the extension of what I think is right. I don’t like paper plastic bags. I think these cloth bags that—by the way, grow salmonella and e-coli quite good. So now it’s you got to have three of them: produce, meat, and canned goods. I don’t like them myself. And rather than allowing people to make individual decisions, I’m going to force everybody else to do what I think is the right way to do it. That’s the modern definition of justice.

I sort of like this. Therefore, let’s make a law and make everybody else like what I like. That’s following. And if we just go along with that blindly, we’re following a crowd to do really what is not good.

The same thing with benevolence, the same thing with modern mercy. What do we have? We have impersonal entitlements. I went to a store last night, got some groceries. Woman said, “You’re entitled to get a credit card.” Entitled. Oh, that’s pretty good. You know, entitlement was like, you know, king, royalty, duke, whatever it was. And now, you know, different kinds of social benevolence programs are entitlements. That’s what they’re actually referred to as—entitlements. And they’re not distributed. These acts of kindness are now institutionalized. They’re not personal. They’re not benevolence behind them, mercy behind them, but rather it’s a right of the person receiving the act of kindness.

So, it isn’t an act of kindness at all. Kindness has been totally removed from the whole thing. Personalism has been totally removed. And the institution of the church and the family and the individual—under Christ—who is supposed to show loving mercy and doing these acts of kindness. Well, you know, you can’t do a lot of acts of kindness because people don’t have the need because it’s been met supposedly through an institutionalization of what mercy is.

We live in a coercive state as opposed to a royal family. A royal family that demonstrated the virtues of the royal virtue of showing mercy and of kindness to other people in the context of their homes. You know, the old Armenian wedding ceremony—a guy and a gal would get married. And at the ceremony, they’d both be crowned, and the man would have a sword and the woman would have a dagger. And there it was—a picture of what the family is supposed to be. Kings and queens under Christ and exerting influence in the context of the world—doing justice, but also being called to demonstrate the royal virtue of loving kindness, loving mercy, loving the showing of benevolence. That’s what we’re called to be.

And God says that’s what will move the world ahead—is as you and I, and as the children that we train, do justice, love mercy, and as they walk humbly, letting these things be defined by the word of God, not by the current group of people, not by the people that take the scriptures and wrench them out of their context and talk about a social justice the scriptures know nothing about.

As we define these things biblically, humbly before God, God says that’s what indeed moves cultures ahead. Nothing else will. The only other sort of progress we’ll have is a progress away from Christ, which inevitably means—as Micah 6:8 reminds us—is the center. The denial of those things, the absence of those things, is the center of what brings God’s covenant lawsuit against a people and against a nation.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ, for his justice, for his mercy, for his humility. Bless us, Lord God, in like ways. Help us at the end of this week, at the end of our days this week, to look back and ask: Did we do justice with how we used our tongues and what we did in our actions? Did we try to extend justice in small ways in the context of our sphere of influence? And then did we engage in acts of kindness, loving the demonstration of mercy? Were we loyal to one another? And did we extend kindness to those outside? Bless us in our homes that they may be places that are royal, where acts of justice and kindness are going on all the time.

In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.