What God Asks of You

The word of the Lord came to a man named Micah, in the days of the kings Jotham and Ahaz and Hezekiah, while Isaiah was preaching in Jerusalem. Micah was not a city man. He came from Moresheth, a town out where the fields and the olive trees are. What he saw was Samaria and Jerusalem, the two capital cities, both of them busy and pleased with themselves. He began by telling everybody to listen — not only his own people. Everybody. “Listen, all you peoples. Earth, pay attention, and everyone in you. Look — the Lord is coming out of his place, and the mountains will shake under him, and the valleys will melt like wax in front of a fire.” And it was about Samaria, and about Jerusalem: God coming down to deal with his own two towns. Samaria would be knocked into the valley until you could see the bare rock her walls had stood on. Micah did not say it cheerfully: he went about barefoot and wailing, because the wound had come as far as the gate of his own people. Shave your heads for the children you loved; they are gone.

Then he said what was wrong, and it was not complicated. There were men who lay in bed at night working out how to get somebody else’s field, and got up at first light and did it, because they had the power to. They wanted fields and took them. They wanted houses and took them — a man and his house, and the land his family had always had. And God said to them: “You lie there planning trouble. Now I am planning trouble, and it is coming to you, and you will not walk about with your heads up any more.” Micah said the rulers had eaten his people: torn the skin off them, broken their bones, cut them up like meat for the pot. When men like that call out to God one day, God will not answer. The prophets, whose work was to bring God’s word, brought it to whoever fed them: put something in their mouths and they told you peace, put nothing in and they declared war on you. The judges judged for presents, the priests answered for a fee, the prophets read the future for silver — and every one of them leaned back on God and said: “The Lord is here among us, isn’t he? Nothing bad is going to happen to us.” So Micah told them what was coming. Zion plowed up like a field. Jerusalem a heap of stones. The hill where the house of God stood grown over with trees.

But Micah did not only see the plowed-up hill. He saw a long way past it. “In the last days the mountain of the Lord will stand up above the tops of the mountains, and the peoples will come hurrying to it, saying to one another: come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will show us his way, and we will walk in his paths.” “He will judge between many peoples, and settle matters for strong nations far away. And they will beat their swords into plows and their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and they will never learn how to make war again.” “Everyone will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and nobody will make them afraid. The mouth of the Lord Almighty has said it.” Not a palace and not an empire: a tree in your own yard, and nobody coming up the road to take it. It would get worse first, he told them. Jerusalem would go out of her own gates and come all the way to Babylon — and from there the Lord would rescue them and buy them back out of their enemies’ hands.

And then he said where the one who would do it was coming from — a place so small nobody would have guessed. “And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrath — you are too small to be counted among the thousands of Judah. And out of you, for me, will come the one who is to rule in Israel. His goings out are from the beginning, from the days of forever.” Bethlehem was where David had come from, hundreds of years before — the little town with sheep on the hills round it. Micah said the next one would come from there too. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, Micah said, and be made great to the ends of the earth.

And then there is a court case. God calls the mountains in to listen — the hills, the valleys, the old foundations of the earth — because he has a case against his people and means to argue it in front of witnesses that big. And then, standing in his own courtroom, God does not accuse them of anything. He asks them a question. “My people — what have I done to you? How have I worn you out? How have I given you trouble? Answer me.” And then he brings out his evidence, and every piece of it is something kind. “I brought you up out of the land of Egypt. I bought you out of the house of slaves. I sent Moses ahead of you, and Aaron, and Miriam. Remember what Balak the king of Moab planned against you, and what Balaam son of Beor answered him. Remember the whole road, from the Reeds to Gilgal.” That is the whole case. I got you out. I sent people to lead you. When a king hired a man to curse you, the curse never landed. Now tell me what I did wrong. Nobody answers that. What comes next is a voice out of the crowd, hunting for something to bring: “What am I supposed to come to the Lord with, when I stand in front of God Most High? Burnt offerings? Calves a year old? A thousand rams? Ten thousand rivers of oil? Should I give him my oldest child, the child of my own body, for the wrong I have done?” Each offer is bigger than the last, and the last one is horrible, and he makes it anyway. And the answer is not big at all. It is three things, and a child can carry all three. “You have been told, man, what is good. And what does the Lord want from you? Only this: to do what is right, and to love mercy, and to be ready to walk with the Lord your God.” No rams. No rivers of oil. Do right. Love mercy. Walk with God.

And then, because it is Micah, he goes straight from that to shop scales: is a man to be let off when he keeps crooked weights in his bag and a balance that lies? So this was coming — you will eat and not be full, sow and not reap, press the olives and have no oil, make the wine and never drink it.

Then Micah says he feels like a man walking a vineyard in the wrong month, hunting for a grape somebody missed, and there is not one on the whole hill. The good man has gone out of the land, he says. Do not trust your friend: a man’s enemies are the people under his own roof. And then he turns round and says this: “But I will watch for the Lord. I will wait for the God who rescues me. Do not be glad about me, my enemy. I have fallen, but I will get up again. I am sitting in the dark, but the Lord will be a light to me.” And last of all he asks a question — the same question his own name asks, because Micah means who is like the Lord. “Who is a God like you — taking wrongdoing away, walking straight past the sins of the few who are left to him? He did not keep his anger for ever, because he loves mercy. He will turn back and be sorry for us. He will sink our wrongdoings, and throw all our sins into the deepest part of the sea.”

Two other prophets had short words to say. The first was a man called Nahum, and his word was about Nineveh. Nineveh was the great city Jonah did not want to go to, and went to, and preached eight words in — and the whole place put on sackcloth, from the king down to the cattle, and God did not do what he had said. That was about a hundred years earlier. Nineveh went back to being what it had been: the capital of Assyria, the empire that ate countries. It had swallowed the northern kingdom whole and marched its people away. Nahum spoke about that city when its hundred years ran out. “The Lord is patient, and his power is great — and he does not let the guilty off in the end. He is good to the people who wait for him on the day of trouble.” Then Nahum shows the night the city fell, in flashes, the way you see things in a bad dream. Whips. Wheels. Horses at the gallop. Chariots crashing in the squares. The river gates open, the palace comes down, and the people run and nobody looks back. He calls Nineveh a lions’ den, and asks where it is now — the den the lion dragged everything home to, where nobody dared come near. “Look, I am against you, says the Lord Almighty.” Nineveh had been frightening people for a long time. When the news went round that it had fallen, everybody who heard it clapped their hands — because who had not suffered under it? And Nahum says one thing that is not a threat at all: look, up on the mountains — the feet of somebody running with good news, calling out that there is peace. Keep your feasts, Judah; that army is not marching through you again.

The other was Zephaniah, who preached in Jerusalem in the days of King Josiah. His word is the day of the Lord, and it is near — and coming fast. “That day is a day of anger, a day of trouble and distress, a day of ruin and wrecking, a day of darkness and thick darkness, a day of the trumpet and the shout against the walled cities and the high towers.” God will go through Jerusalem with a lamp, he says, the way you search a house at night, looking for men who have settled down comfortably and say inside themselves that the Lord will do nothing, good or bad. They will build houses and not live in them, and plant vineyards and never drink the wine. He goes round the countries too — Gaza and Ashkelon on the coast, Moab and Ammon over the river, Ethiopia away south — and then north to Nineveh again, which will be a dry place where flocks lie down and hedgehogs sleep in her ceilings. And to his own people, in the middle of all that, one quiet thing. Look for the Lord, all you humble people of the land. Do what is right. You may be sheltered on that day. And then, at the very end, Zephaniah says this. “Shout out loud, daughter of Zion! Be glad, and let your whole heart be happy. The Lord has taken your wrongs away. The Lord, the King of Israel, is in the middle of you, and you will not see harm again. Take courage, Zion; do not let your hands hang down. The Lord your God is inside your walls, and the Mighty One will save you. He will be glad over you, and make you new in his love. He will be so happy over you that he will sing — the way people sing on a feast day.” God, singing over his people. That is the last thing Zephaniah has to say.