As a careful reader of the minor prophets, I am often intrigued at the way in which the minor prophets are used and appropriated in contemporary religious and political discourse. Generally speaking, the messages of these twelve prophets are often twisted and distorted when used for merely partisan political purposes, as is often the case. Right-wing commentators will often find the personal and sexual sins of Israel and Judah to be worthy of commentary while left-wing commentators will find solace in the economic and social justice views and the divine discontent against superficial religiosity that lacks genuine godliness and love for one’s fellow man. Nevertheless, just as left and right find some solace in the minor prophets, both of them also find elements that are uncomfortable. While reading a book about the supposed “real Jesus” from a left-wing social gospel adherent, I was struck by how the author, on merely personal and political grounds, dismissed the religious and moral worldview of the minor prophets while attempting to appropriate their fury against exploitation and the abuse of the vulnerable by those who were powerful elites. We must resist the urge to distort the minor prophets (and the rest of scripture) and remember that these books, and the rest of scriptures, show God’s whole moral worldview, which hates all sin whether personal or collective but loves all sinners and desires them to repent before they face deserved judgment.
Within the minor prophets as a whole Micah has an honored place, being well remembered for the similarities of the message of Micah of Moresheth Gath (Micah 1:1) to the prophet Isaiah and for the way in which Micah’s safety to preach doom for Jerusalem (which was delayed due to the repentance of Judah under Hezekiah) was used as a precedent to preserve the life of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 26:18-19) and to demonstrate the shared hostility towards Jerusalem’s corrupt elites from the prophets of God. I was struck myself by the frequent citation of Jeremiah by an author I am reading about the relationship between the antebellum South (and its devotion to slavery) and the moral corruption of the Southern Baptist Church (and Southern-based evangelical Christianity) and it struck me that Micah was a very fitting book to deal with the corrupt elites of the South, both in history and in the contemporary period, given that they are a corrupt elite I know very well which often self-righteously proclaims their own righteousness and godliness vis-a-vis the corrupt and ungodly elite of the rest of the United States that makes few pretensions to devotion to Christ.
Micah 2:1-5 gives a serious warning to corrupt elites like those of Jerusalem in the period of the divided kingdom, and to many professed Christian nations today: “Woe to those who devise iniquity, and work out evil on their beds! At morning light they practice it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields and take them by violence, also houses, and seize them, so they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance. Therefore thus says the Eternal: “Behold, against this family I am devising disaster, from which you cannot remove your necks; nor shall you walk haughtily, for this is an evil time. In that day one shall take up a proverb against you, and lament with a better lamentation, saying: ‘We are utterly destroyed! He has changed the heritage of my people; how He has removed it from me! To a turncoat He has divided our fields.'” Therefore you will have no one to determine boundaries by lot in the assembly of the Eternal.”
This particular passage speaks of the social sin of the acquisitive greed of the selfish elites of Jerusalem who woke up in the morning plotting to dispossess their poorer neighbors from their land and from their inheritance so as to increase their own holdings and their own potential wealth. God views the ancestral heritage of his people as well as the rights of common folk to preserve their own land and avoid being a mere landless proletariat subject to the whims of wealthier elites very seriously [1], and this is one passage that reinforces our understanding of God’s hatred of the exploitation of the poor and vulnerable by the wealthy and powerful. Although those who are powerful may think that their powerful connections at court will save them from any sort of legal remedy in this world, they often act without the proper respect and fear of a God who has promised to avenge the suffering of the poor and helpless on those who have acted in an abusive and oppressive manner.
Ironically enough, even though the wicked may devise iniquity from their beds, not even taking the time to get up in the morning before plotting to exploit or oppress others, God Himself devises disaster against them, promising them that their own heritage will be removed in poetic justice, and that just as they disregarded the inheritance of their poorer neighbors that they too would have their own heritage removed and have no one to help them gain their boundaries by lot in the assembly of God, because they would be cut off and removed from inheritance. Although the justice of God often works slowly for human tastes–it took more than a century for this particular prophecy to be fulfilled in the days of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel–it does come to pass eventually. The longsuffering and patience of God, and His willingness to wait for mankind to repent and change their ways and seek forgiveness and restoration in His good graces is often accounted to weakness, but it that same mercy that provides all of us with a chance to enter into His kingdom as adopted sons and daughters in His family.
Although I would hope that no one reading this particular blog will be among those who behave in such an oppressive fashion plotting from early morning how to oppress and dispossess others for their own selfish game, hopefully we may all take this passage, and others like it, as encouragement in the eventual and certain justice of God and in the way in which the wicked who refuse to repent and seek God’s ways have their own plots and devises turned on their own heads. For those who seek to rob the heritage and inheritance of others will themselves lose their own inheritances that they take such pride in. And those who delight in iniquity and oppression will themselves lament their fates when the judgment of God eventually comes, if they do not repent while there is time to do so.
Edge Induced Cohesion 