For the last two weeks, I’ve had the great privilege of traveling through Israel/Palestine. It is truly one of the most remarkable places on earth, full of incredible history, breathtaking vistas, and beautiful people.
It is also an enormous mess.
If you’ve followed the recent news from the region, you’ve seen that the frequency of violent encounters between Israelis and Palestinians has dramatically increased during the last month. While we were there, we heard reports almost daily of killings, reprisals, and homes being bulldozed. In fact, things got so bad after a failed assassination attempt against an activist rabbi that the Israelis closed down access to the Temple Mount for only the second time since 1967, resulting in riots and clashes between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. As several Jewish friends said during the trip, “Jerusalem is burning.”
As we traveled, I spent a lot of time thinking and praying about this seemingly hopeless situation. But this conflict is just one example of the complex and often overwhelming circumstances we often face in our own places and lives. In such times, how does God call us to respond? What should we do when we face the facts, and the facts are awful?
As I pondered these questions, I was incredibly grateful to be reading the the book of Micah, for his prophetic words brought me great hope. I look forward to sharing them together.
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Grace Fellowship Church
Jon Stallsmith
Series: True
November 23, 2014
True Hope: Responding to a Bad Situation
Micah 1:1-4:5
Good morning. How are you doing? Great? Good. As you know, the last couple of weeks I have been over in the Middle East. We were leading a team from Grace the first week through Israel and Palestine, and we then had the second week at a trip more connected with the Jewish Agency, looking at some projects we may be able to do with the Jewish community there, which was really sweet.
Great time. It was really, really rich and a lot to think about and process and pray through and figure out what God’s calling us into as a church, although I am very happy to be home. Even this morning, I woke up and I saw the weather and I walked outside, and it just felt like even my home state of Wisconsin in June, except it’s November. So that’s really wonderful.
I’m gone two weeks; all of a sudden they have this text thing. That’s incredible. I know it’s illegal and forbidden to text while driving, but apparently now it’s okay to text while tithing. You missed my jokes, didn’t you? You did. I can tell by the way you’re laughing, kind of like, “Oh yeah, that’s him. Yeah, he’s back.” I can feel that. I can feel that you did indeed miss me.
If you have your Bibles, open them up to the book of Micah, chapter 1. If you don’t have a Bible, slip up your hand. Our folks will give you Bibles, and you can read, follow along. We’re going to be moving pretty quickly through a big chunk of Micah this morning. So having a Bible will be handy.
Also, if you need a sheet for notes, slip up your hand. You can take some notes. Or if you want to see the announcements on that note sheet, or if you want to put some information on how we can pray for you at the bottom of that sheet, detach it when the offering goes by. Also you can give us some information if you’re new. We want you to know you’re welcome. So lots of things that are moving out through the aisles right now.
This morning as we dig into Micah, you might remember in the last few months we’ve been journeying through the words of three prophets. First, we started with Hosea, that idea of true love. How does God define love? What does it look like to know and love God? Then we saw Amos and true justice. What does the prophet Amos tell us about God’s heart for justice?
Now we’re into the book of Micah, and this is where we really begin to see true hope, beautiful prophecies of God’s heart even in the midst of messy and frankly awful situations. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about this morning a little bit. How do we respond to awful, messy, rotten, difficult situations? How do we respond? What do we do when a situation looks really awful?
I was a week ago in Jerusalem. We woke up, and I went downstairs to eat breakfast. I made my usual plate of granola and yogurt and honey, because when you’re in the Holy Land you have to have milk and honey like every day. I was eating my granola with gusto when all of a sudden I heard the horrible, most chilling, terrifying noise you can possibly hear while chewing. Immediately my tongue went to the area, and it was true. I had broken off part of my molar.
Ah! Really discouraging. In fact, it’s really interesting. As far as I can remember, I’ve had like three teeth, or dental things, break in my life, and all three of them have happened overseas. I need to talk about God about this and add that to my prayer list. You know, instead of just like safety and fruitfulness, also like pray for my teeth when I’m overseas.
But my tooth broke, and I was pretty frustrated about that. I talked to some folks on our team who had some connections, and they made a few calls, and they got me an appointment with a very interesting dentist. He is one of the best dentists in the whole country, maybe the best dentist in the whole country. He’s the dean of the School of Dentistry at the Hadassah Dental School there. He also has overseen all of the community dentistry in the whole country of Israel, and he treats private patients one day a week, and it just happened to be the day I broke my tooth.
So that was really fortunate, and I was happy about that. I went over, and I saw him, and I had an appointment, and we started to talk a little bit as I was getting to know him. Conversations when you’re having dental work done are not always the best on the part of the patient at least because half your mouth is kind of numb and your words are slurred, and then the other half of the time their hands are in your mouth, so it’s very hard to understand.
But somehow we had this conversation, and we got to talking about the political situation between Israel and the Palestinians. If you’ve followed the news, it’s been a really hard few weeks over there, really since this last summer when there was the Gaza war and there were some kidnappings. Palestinians kidnapped some Israeli teens and they died, and then there were reprisals, and then the rockets launched from Gaza into Israel, and then Israel bombed Gaza like crazy. Since that time, there’s been a renewal of the conflict at a violent level.
It’s not like it ever really went away, but it’s just really coming through, so even while we were there, there were a number of incidents. There were several stabbings of Israelis by Palestinians. There was a Palestinian driver who drove into a train stop and killed a couple of civilians before being shot himself. There were Palestinian homes that were bulldozed, so it was like back and forth, and a pretty messy situation all things considered.
In fact, where that driving happened was the same train stop I got off to go to the dentist appointment. It was the place where the driving had happened, and it was just two blocks from our hotel. So we’re right in the middle of this conflict, and this is what the people are living with constantly.
So I asked this great, kind dentist, “What do you think about the whole situation? What’s your perspective?” He’s an Israeli Jewish citizen. He kind of had this distant look, and he just said, “I don’t see any hope for change on the horizon.” That’s hard. It’s hard when you’ve been living with something for so long, a difficult, messy, challenging situation. You’ve been living with it so long and it has been so repeatedly hard that you lose hope.
You start looking around, not just in Israel with the conflict there, and there are lots of news stories currently that seem like pretty messy situations. What do we do with the number of immigrants who are in the United States illegally? All sorts of conversation about the president’s speech this week and what kind of legislation. How do we work with this? Of course, in Ferguson, they’re awaiting the ruling of the grand jury to find out what’s going to happen with that whole big mess. News stories pile up and pile up, and there are lots of messy situations.
Then even on a smaller scale in our own lives and perhaps more personally for many of us, we have these messy, awful, difficult situations we’re trying to deal with. You have stuff in your family, maybe with one or several of your children, or maybe even in your own marriage. Or maybe it’s extended family with whom you’ve got some beef and it’s turkey time coming up on the holidays again.
So the things that all year you’ve been able to hold at bay and maybe just keep at arm’s length are now suddenly going to be sitting at your table again, and you have to figure out what do you do? What do we do in these really difficult situations, these messy times? What do you do when a situation looks really awful?
Micah the prophet is prophesying at a time when the situation was pretty messy. He’s prophesying about 30 years after Hosea and Amos. Remember, we’ve studied this history a little bit, but the kingdom of Israel at this point was divided in two. Hosea and Amos had been prophesying to that northern kingdom. Micah is a prophet who’ll be prophesying to that southern kingdom, and he’s actually prophesying at about the same time as Isaiah.
So they were contemporaries, and they’re communicating very similar messages. In fact, if you start reading Isaiah and you feel like all 66 chapters are a little overwhelming and you can’t make your way through, reading Micah gives you sort of a snapshot of the much broader and detailed prophecies of Isaiah.
So here’s Micah, and he’s coming into the situation, and he immediately communicates as a prophet what’s going wrong in the society, as these prophets often do. They come and they hold up the plumb line of God’s truth to what’s happening. There are two main things that are making the situation in Judah and in Israel such a mess. So we’ll start here in Micah 1:1, and we’re going to see the situation. We’re going to see how the people are responding poorly to the situation, and then we’ll see Micah’s way of responding wisely. Okay? So first, the situation.
Starting in Micah 1:1, it says, “The word of the Lord that came to Micah of Moresheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem.” (Micah 1:1) It’s always amazing to me how many of the prophets talk about seeing the word of the Lord. Not so much hearing it; they see it. It’s like somehow God is communicating maybe in their minds or it just appears. They can see it as much as they hear it.
Then here’s the address, the prophecy of Micah, and it’s to all the peoples of the earth. This is unique. He says, “Hear, you peoples, all of you; pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it, and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple. For behold, the Lord is coming out of his place, and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains will melt under him, and the valleys will split open, like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place.
All this is for the transgression of Jacob and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem? Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country, a place for planting vineyards, and I will pour down her stones into the valley and uncover her foundations.” (Micah 1:2-6)
The announcement of the current situation, the first thing here Micah says, “God is coming out, and it’s going to be intense. Mountains melting, valleys torn up. God is coming out to change and work judgment.” Why? Why is God doing this? Well, it says there in verse 5, “What’s the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria?” Samaria. That’s language to communicate the people have drifted away from God.
Remember, as we’ve studied Hosea and Amos, Samaria was one of those centers of idol worship. They’re going after Baal and all these other false gods. They’ve forgotten and they’ve failed to love God. But then Micah even takes it another layer and talks to the people of Judah, and he calls Jerusalem the high place of Judah.
Do you see that there in verse 5? High place. That’s where they would go up and make their sacrifices to false gods. Here, Micah is saying what they’re doing in Jerusalem is like a high place. If you were there in Judah and you were listening to this, you’d think, “What? I thought we were doing great.”
During the days of King Hezekiah, probably around the time when Micah is prophesying here, there was great reform in the land of Judah in that southern kingdom. They struck down a bunch of the false gods, and they cleansed the temple, and they brought back the right worship of God, the sacrificial system. They’ve got access to the temple. They’re going to Jerusalem.
The people probably really thought they were doing it, but Micah is coming along saying, “No, no, no. You just have the outward form of religion, but your heart is still far from God. You’re not really worshiping and knowing God.” That’s what’s happening here. The people have first, forgotten or failed to love God, but then secondly the mess, the awful situation they’re in, has to do with how they’re treating their neighbors.
So go ahead and skip ahead to chapter 2, verse 1. Micah continues. He says, “Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil on their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance. Therefore thus says the Lord: behold, against this family I am devising disaster, from which you cannot remove your necks, and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be a time of disaster.” (Micah 2:1-3)
The key word here is in verse 2. They’re people who are devising wickedness. They’re staying awake at night scheming up ways to take from others because their hearts are covetous. In verse 2, they covet fields and seize them. It’s the same word that appears in the Ten Commandments, in the last, the tenth command, “Thou shalt not covet neighbor’s house or wife or servants or animals. Don’t covet anything of your neighbor’s.”
Here Micah is saying, “These people are consumed with covetousness.” “I want that thing that that person has.” So all night long they stay awake thinking, “How can I get that? How can I make it mine?” We could do a whole morning talking about the word covet, but for now, we can just conclude that really the problem here is that the people are despising their neighbors. They’re coveting. They’re even taking advantage of the weak.
If you go ahead to verses 8 and 9, Micah says, “The women of my people you drive out from their delightful houses; from their young children you take away my splendor forever.” (Micah 2:9) They’re just robbing women, probably widows or people who can’t defend their own homes, and taking away the land.
Then chapter 3, verse 1, here Micah is addressing the leaders and the heads. He says, “And I said: Hear, you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel! Is it not for you to know justice?—you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin from off my people and their flesh from off their bones, who eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them, and break their bones in pieces and chop them up like meat in a pot, like flesh in a cauldron. (Micah 3:1-3)
Pretty graphic, Micah. Pretty graphic. He’s not here talking about literal cannibalism; he’s talking here about how the leaders in the land are consuming their people for their own benefit. Once again, this idea, this coveting, taking, violence, just despising their neighbors. So Micah is prophesying into an awful situation.
Why is it awful? Because the people have failed to love God and they’ve failed to love their neighbor, the two very things Jesus teaches are the hinge or the core of the entire heart of God. These people are not loving God and they’re not loving their neighbors. So how are they responding to this situation? The situation is bad. It’s awful. How are they responding?
First, Micah calls out two unhealthy responses. What do we do in an awful situation? There are two really unhealthy ways. Go back to chapter 2, verse 6. I know we’re jumping around a little bit, but these prophetic books are not always linear. They usually include numerous messages from various times, and they’ve been put together, and so to figure out what’s going on, you have to read the whole thing and then work out, “Okay, how is Micah talking here? What’s his big message?”
So in Micah 2:6, this is the response people are giving to Micah as he’s telling them they’re in a mess and that God is going to come and bring judgment. They say, “‘Do not preach’—thus they preach—’one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us.’ Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Has the Lord grown impatient? Are these his deeds? Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly?” (Micah 2:6-7)
There in verse 6, you see one unhealthy response to a message, and that’s denial. They say, “Do not preach. Don’t preach about this. Disgrace will not overtake us.” Micah says, “Hey, God’s coming. He’s devising disaster. Judgment is coming.” They say, “Don’t talk about that. That’s not going to happen.” Just straight up denial.
We do this too. We do this, don’t we? There are situations we know are messy, maybe even in our own hearts. Or maybe there’s just a growing distance in your marriage, a point of disconnect, and you just feel that separation growing and growing, but rather than dealing with it, we just deny that it’s there because it’s easier, it feels.
Sometimes denial feels like the simpler way. In our workplaces, if there’s a really deteriorating relationship, some injustice is beginning to grow, sometimes we just try to ignore it. That’s another way of saying denial. We just ignore it. That’s what’s happening here. Micah even is coming in and saying, “Hey guys, wake up!” and they won’t. It’s denial like that.
Then the second thing they do, and this really goes hand in hand with the denial, is that they embrace deception. They begin to create untrue perspectives of God and life in order to continue in their way. This is Micah 3:5, and this is about the prophets the people are following. It says, “Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry ‘Peace’ when they have something to eat, but declare war against him who puts nothing into their mouths.
Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision, and darkness to you, without divination. The sun shall go down on the prophets, and the day shall be black over them; the seers shall be disgraced, and the diviners put to shame; they shall all cover their lips, for there is no answer from God.” (Micah 3:5-7)
What’s happening here? The prophets, the leaders, the people who are supposed to be conveying the heart of God to the people are in it for their own good, and they’re making up whatever people want to hear. They’ll just say, “Oh yeah, peace is coming, peace is coming,” as long as it continues to line their wallets or money pouches or whatever it is they had back then…their texted tithes. As long as the money is rolling in, as long as they have something to eat, they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear, and the people eat it up. “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll embrace it.”
The moment they don’t have that, they declare war on that person. They’re not being true to the truth at all. They’re just saying whatever serves their own purposes best. So that’s what we have. Denial and deception. We’ve got these two things, and they run together. “I want to ignore it. I just don’t even want to think about it. Then, if I can have a few lies that serve my purposes and give me a framework so I don’t have to deal with it, all the better.” This is not a healthy way to deal with an awful situation, but it’s something that just like these people of Israel did, we do from time to time.
What’s the healthy way? What’s a better way to respond? Micah shows us in the way he prophesies what he does as a man of God. The first thing he does is back in chapter 1, verse 8. How does he respond? Well, he delivers this message of judgment, but he doesn’t deliver it from a distance. He’s not standing over here like a prophet saying, “Hey, you guys, you’re all in big trouble.” No, look at what happens here.
In verse 8, he says, “For this [reason/judgment] I will lament and wail…I will make lamentation like the jackals…” The sound of a jackal is howling. “…and mourning like the ostriches.” I don’t know what sound an ostrich makes. Maybe it’s burying your head in the sand or something. I think it’s kind of the idea of a screech. “For her wound is incurable, and it has come to Judah; it has reached to the gate of my people, to Jerusalem. Tell it not in Gath…in Beth-le-aphrah…” (Micah 1:8-10) He goes on to list these 11 cities of Judah that will be destroyed.
What’s Micah doing here? He’s lamenting. In verse 8, “I will lament and wail.” That word lament means a passionate expression of grief or sorrow. The original Hebrew in it has the sense of crying out, lamenting. What do we do in a really difficult situation? One of the important things is that we lament it, that we acknowledge the difficulty and even enter into the pain of the situation. Not distant ourselves by denial or believing lies, but to step into it and become a part of it ourselves. Not to the point where it becomes overwhelming but to the point where we are credibly sharing the experience. We’re lamenting it. It shouldn’t be this way.
A lot of times I think in my life or in our culture, we’ve lost the art of the lament. Do we know how to grieve and mourn well? Do we know how to enter into the pain of a messy situation and with authenticity say, “I feel that too. I feel that with you. I feel that for you”? Think about the Psalms.
How many of the psalms talk about these occasions when things are really going bad and there’s just this lament? Or King David. When he hears about the death of Saul and Jonathan he composes this beautiful song of lament to give voice to his grief, because the death of kings of Israel, the mighty ones who fell on Mount Gilboa, is tragic to his heart.
It’s hard for us to imagine Jesus lamenting, but remember, when he comes to Lazarus, his friend’s grave, it says Jesus wept. He entered into lamentation. Even though Jesus knew he was going to bring Lazarus out of the grave, he had told Mary and Martha this is not going to end in death, still when he shows up, he weeps. Big, loud, lamenting cries. Or when he comes over the hill, the Mount of Olives, and sees Jerusalem, he cries out. He laments, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you had known what would make for peace in your day.”
I don’t know if that shakes up your mental image of Jesus, but Jesus understood what it meant to lament. Jesus was not afraid to show his brokenness of heart. Not just sort of put on a stiff upper lip and, “You’re going to get resurrected anyway,” but really to enter in and feel that pain, that brokenness.
What do we do in a messy situation? Really before anything else, it’s pretty important that we be able to enter into authentic lament. Micah talks about going stripped and naked. This is what would happen as the people were carried off into exile. Micah was saying, “I’m going to take that same stripped-ness into myself.”
So whether you’re in the Middle East talking to Israelis and Palestinians and you hear the stories about suicide bombers and innocent people and civilians being killed on both sides, whether you’re talking to an Israeli or you’re talking to a Palestinian, it’s really important to be able to lament with them before ever offering any kind of solution if you offer a solution. “I just feel this.” With that dentist… “I see no hope for change on the horizon.” “Yeah, I feel that. That is painful. You’ve been dealing with this for a long, long time.”
In our lives, these situations, it’s important that we rediscover what it means to lament. But then, and this is the beautiful part of Micah, he doesn’t just leave us in the lament, he joins together lament with hope. So go to Micah 4. This is where the vision of the prophet, the words from God begin to flourish and just become so beautiful. It’s not just lamenting, but it’s lamenting with hope.
So actually we’ll do the last verse of chapter 3. This is again one of the most devastating words of judgment. In 3:12, “Therefore because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field…” Remember, Zion. That’s the temple mount. That’s the city of Jerusalem. That’s everything. It’s going to be plowed as a field. “…Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house…” Which is the hill where the house of the Lord is. “…a wooded height.” It’s just going to be forest.
But then listen to this note of hope. In chapter 4, verse 1, “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted up above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it…” (Micah 3:12-4:1) Wait a second. We’re talking about the same mountain that just a minute ago you were saying is going to be plowed as a field and a heap of ruins, but this place of ruin, Micah is coming in and reminding that the heart of God is not ruin forever. It’s not just desolation, but then out of that place it shall be restored.
“It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted up above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it, and many nations shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.” (Micah 4:1-5)
Amazing prophecy of hope. Taking that same place of desolation and Micah is saying, “But let me tell you God’s heart for this. It’s going to be a place, God’s heart, where people of all nations are able to come together, where real transformation occurs, where people are hearing and obeying the Word of God. It’s going to be a place where there’s no more war. There’s going to be security, contentment, even prosperity.” Talking about sitting every man under his vine and under his fig tree, Micah here communicates the heart of God.
What do we do in messy situations? We lament, but we also can be bearers of hope if we know the heart of God. Now the question comes up…When is this fulfilled? He’s talking about the latter days. When are the latter days? When will this happen? So there are some who read this and would say that the people of the southern kingdom of Judah were taken off into exile 586 BC by the Babylonians but then they were regathered around 400. We read that this spring, looking at Nehemiah, and they were able to rebuild the wall, rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.
Some would say, “Oh yeah, that was the time that this was fulfilled,” and to a certain extent it’s true that God brought the people back. Now there’s another argument that can be made that this is being fulfilled and was powerfully fulfilled at the time of Pentecost. That phrase the latter days. If you remember the story, Jesus walked the earth, was crucified, resurrected on the third day, spent 40 days with his disciples and followers teaching them about the kingdom of God, then ascended to be at the right hand of the Father.
About 10 days later, on Pentecost, as the people of God were gathered in the upper room, the Holy Spirit descended. There’s a wind, a sound like a mighty, rushing wind in the room, and the flames of the Spirit of God descended upon each of the people and they were sent out in boldness to the streets of Jerusalem, and there they found people from all over the world who had gathered to celebrate the feast of Pentecost.
One of the miracles of that day is that the Holy Spirit gave the disciples and the apostles the ability to speak about the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection as the true King of the world in languages that the people coming could understand. Here it talks about people shall flow to it, many nations. Now all these nations are here, and the apostles are announcing the good news in a way they can understand. In their own dialects, it says, in the book of Acts.
Then Peter stands up to summarize after the people are going, “Wait, are these people serious? Are they drunk? What’s happening here?” Peter stands up, and he says, “First of all, nobody’s drunk. It’s too early for that.” But then he begins quoting from the book of Joel, another prophet from a similar time period who uses that same phrase the latter days.
This is what Peter says, “And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…” (Acts 2:17) So as far as Peter was concerned, on the day of Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit was in fact the beginning of these latter days.
But then even beyond that, because here this prophecy of Micah involves the removal of war, and even though we live in a time where the Holy Spirit has been poured out and we’ve entered into these latter days, there’s still war all around. There’s still violence. We see it all the time. So we can say with confidence this has not fully been fulfilled until the day when Jesus returns and renews the new heaven and the new earth. So there are layers to the hope Micah shares with the people here, unpacks these layers of hope, several fulfillments of it.
But there’s a phrase I’ve thought about a lot in the last couple of weeks especially as I was lamenting and really just heartbroken for the conflict in the Middle East. One of the days we drove up to the northern border of Israel, and we could see into Syria. You guys know for the last year and a half, maybe a little longer, Syria has been in an awful civil war.
We all, just with our team, were praying for God to bring peace to Syria, and as we were praying, you could hear the report of artillery shells landing and launched in the distance. Kind of a thud. Gunshots. Just as we were praying, you could look. Literally, we were on a hill. We could look into this land of Syria. You could just hear it on the horizon.
So I’ve been thinking, “Lord, what’s our hope? What’s the hope for that situation? What’s the hope for our country? What about the hope in our own lives in these messy, awful, rotten situations we face constantly? Show us, Lord, hope.” There’s this phrase in verse 2 in Micah’s prophecy of many nations shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.”
And I prayed. I just felt like the Lord was reminding me personally to go up the mountain with him, to not just get caught up on a day-to-day level, ground level, “This is what I see. This is a challenge. Oh, there’s this conflict over here. This is kind of overwhelming. How do I deal with that situation?” But just from time to time to be summoned and go with God up the mountain.
Maybe not literally climbing a mountain. I mean, I suppose you could go to Stone Mountain around here. But spiritually, what does it look like for us to have our hope renewed by going up the mountain with God? That’s a common phrase throughout the Scripture. You might remember in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses was living in a bit of a mess he had created himself. He’s leading this people. The first time they needed water, he was supposed to strike the rock and the water came out.
The second time they needed water, God said, “Speak to the rock.” Moses was like, “No, I’m going to whack it,” and he hit it, and he was rebellious as a leader, and God said, “Because of this, you’re not going to get enter into the Promised Land.” So now Moses is on a death march, waiting for all these people to die off, and he himself will never enter into the land. It’s kind of a discouraging, messy situation. I mean, if you’re Moses, how do you find hope there? Easy to lament. Maybe harder to hope.
God tells Moses in the end of Deuteronomy, “Moses, I want you to go up the mountain. I want you to go up and I want you to look over into the Promised Land.” So Moses went up Mount Nebo, and he viewed the land of Canaan. God reminded him, “Hey, I’m giving this land to the people of Israel.” Moses needed that glimpse, the reminder to go up the mountain with God and look in.
The Psalms again and again talk about this. What does it look like to hope? “I lift my eyes up to the mountains to find my hope in God. Who shall ascend the holy hill of the Lord?” Jesus, you might remember, before he started his fateful, final journey to Jerusalem, while he was still in Galilee, he invited three of his closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he said, “Guys, come up the mountain with me.”
When he got to the top of the mountain, he was transfigured. No longer was it just Jesus in the flesh as a man, but actually the glory of God began to radiate out of Jesus’ innermost being, and here these disciples are standing on the mountain, and they’re beholding the glory of Jesus, and he’s glowing whiter than any bleach could bleach it.
They needed to see that on the mountaintop because Jesus was about to go and die on a cross and be betrayed and everything else. You could just know that these disciples, as they’re processing everything, it’d be really easy to lose hope, but Jesus said, “No, come up on the mountain. I need you to see this so you can gain perspective, so you can gain hope, so you can know what God is really doing.”
So our question as we’re reading Micah 4 and talking about hope, is…When do we, how do we, go up the mountain with God? What does it look like to let him renew our hope through the way he sees things, what he’s going to do, whether it’s going to happen in our lifetime, or like Moses, after our lifetime?
Sometimes we just need to take that moment with God and remember he has a great, good, beautiful destiny. That there will be a day when evil is judged, when Jesus returns and sets things right, when we’ll all be able to live under our fig tree and under our vine in security and prosperity. Sometimes we need to remember that so that as we step into these challenging situations where we just feel like we’re coming apart at the seams, we not only can lament with authenticity, we can also hope with certainty. Yes, the Lord has a goodness in the future.
As I was reading Micah this week, I was also reading a lot of the history of the Civil Rights Movement. I think one of the best leaders I know of who was able to maintain these two things at once, both the lament and the hope, is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I was reading that story of the Civil Rights Movement and tracing some of the earliest history.
Of course, American history has been marked by slavery from the beginning all the way up until the time of the Civil War in the 1860s. Lots of blood was shed there in the Civil War, resulting at least in one way for the Emancipation Proclamation, the declaration that slavery is no longer legal.
But then within about 20 or 30 years, particularly in the South, those forces of racism were still at work, and so a number of the black community were excluded from being able to vote because of poll taxes, because of literacy tests, all sorts of strategies. As they were excluded from being able to vote, you had racist lawmakers able to draft Jim Crow laws.
The big idea of these Jim Crow laws was separate but equal, and the whole truth we know is that it was really separate and very unequal. The idea was that there had to be dual facilities, a white facility and a black facility…schools, libraries, restrooms, water fountains, you name it, like that. But the resources available to the black community were incredibly inadequate, and so that cycle of oppression continued. All the way until after the Second World War you had these patterns of racism working.
Then it seemed like God was beginning to really move a groundswell of momentum to change this. Into the 1950s, Martin Luther King Jr. became one of the leading voices in that whole movement. It was lots of people. It wasn’t just Dr. King. It was lots of people, but Dr. King kind of came to the forefront of that.
So, of course, there was the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, and it drew national attention when Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat to a white man when he got on the bus, and people began to see, and this was beginning to simmer over…how is this Civil Rights going to happen? Dr. King modeled his strategy of nonviolent resistance on Jesus and also on what Gandhi had done in India, who also used Jesus as a model, by the way.
So there were these demonstrations. There were marches. In 1961, they went to Albany, Georgia, and there they weren’t able to gain much ground, but then a big opportunity presented itself in 1963 in Birmingham where they had finally a march toward the center of town. Bull Connor, the racist director of public safety, did not want to let them reach the center of town.
So they had fire hoses and fire trucks there. They had attack dogs. He gave the order, and they sprayed the people with the fire hoses, and most of the people in that march were actually teenagers and even younger. They were high school kids who’d come out to do the march. They went nonviolently.
When news of this reached the airwaves, it created such an outrage that within a year in combination with the “I Have a Dream” speech and the march on Washington and all the rest they passed the Civil Rights Act. But then even when they passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it wasn’t like just signing the law into existence fixed everything, because people’s hearts were still involved, and people’s hearts still hadn’t changed. So Dr. King continued to lament what was wrong while casting a vision of hope for the future, both at the same time.
In 1968, he went to Memphis. In Memphis, there was a strike because the sanitation workers were still getting the short end of the stick. They were treated like second-class employees, the black sanitation workers. So about a thousand of them went on strike. One of the reasons is that when it rained outside they would send home all the black sanitation workers without any pay, but the white workers would be able to remain, and they got a full day’s pay. So it didn’t seem fair.
Secondly, there was a law there. Even though the Civil Rights bill had cast out all the Jim Crow stuff, even in spite of all of that, there was still a law that said black workers were not allowed to take shelter from the rain in any structure other than the garbage trucks themselves. So the only place the black workers could get out of the rain was in the garbage truck. It was awful! So they went on strike. Of course, that brought up another furor of national media coverage and everything else.
So here’s Dr. King. He comes out to speak, and in his heart he’s lamenting. Things still have not changed, and yet at the same time he’s holding fast to that vision, that hope that he knows God will do something. King was not a perfect man. You read his biography. We know this. Nobody is a perfect man, but maybe better than anyone else in recent memory, he was able to hold together that prophetic lament and that godly vision for where we can go.
So King delivered his speech in 1968, and then the next day he was shot just outside of his hotel room in Memphis. I want you just to see about a two-minute clip of his from that speech.
[Video]
Martin Luther King Jr.: All we say to America is, “Be true to what you said on paper.” If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there.
But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let any dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around.
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over.
And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
[End of video]
[Song]
I went up to the mountain
Because you asked me to
Up over the clouds
To where the sky was blue
I could see all around me
Everywhere
I could see all around me
Everywhere
Sometimes I feel like
I’ve never been nothing but tired
And I’ll be walking
Till the day I expire
Sometimes I lay down
No more can I do
But then I go on again
Because you ask me to
Some days I look down
Afraid I will fall
And though the sun shines
I see nothing at all
Then I hear your sweet voice, oh
Oh, come and then go, come and then go
Telling me softly
You love me so
The peaceful valley
Just over the mountain
The peaceful valley
Few come to know
I may never get there
Ever in this lifetime
But sooner or later
It’s there I will go
Sooner or later
It’s there I will go
[End of song]
Let’s take a moment to pray together.
Father, we thank you that your heart is good. Lord, some of us, we confess that we have some messy situations in our lives, and we see some problems in the world maybe even that we feel you’re calling us toward and we have chosen a path of denial, maybe even deception. So Lord, this morning, we open our hearts to your Holy Spirit to uproot denial, to uproot deception, and replace it, Lord, with true compassion, with lament and with hope.
Lord, we ask you this morning, each of us where we are, just spiritually you would lead us up the mountain with you where we could see as you see, we could understand your heart for the long term. Lord, we just take a moment to listen, to meet with you. Lord, let us see your glory. Restore us with hope. And so, Lord, we listen. In Jesus’ name.