Word of Salvation – May 2011
LAMENTING GOD’S JUDGMENT, John de Hoog
(Sermon 2 in a series on Micah)
Text – Micah 1:8-16
Many of you will have some idea of what true Middle Eastern lament looks like. You will have seen snatches of it on TV, from widows in Iraq mourning the senseless death of their beloved husbands to pictures of Jews lamenting as they are being dragged out of their settlements in the Gaza strip. In Micah’s day, when people mourned, they often shaved their hair, wore sackcloth, sat in ashes, wept, and sometimes even employed professional mourners. There is much lamenting in the Bible.
Do we lament? Should we lament? In this passage, Micah is lamenting the judgment of God. Should we do the same? Should we wail and weep over God’s legitimate punishment of rebellious people? Do not rebellious people deserve God’s wrath? Should we feel sorrow over those who have deliberately chosen to reject God? Perhaps lamenting in this way is dishonouring to God; perhaps lament over God’s judgment casts doubt on the justice and rightness of his punishment! Does it? These are some of the questions we should bring to this passage from Micah.
Let me remind you of the history behind this section. Micah prophesied during the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah kings of Judah, which is about a fifty year span between 750 BC and 700 BC. He was a contemporary with the prophets Hosea, Amos and Isaiah. About halfway through his ministry, in 722 BC, the northern kingdom of Israel fell, Samaria was destroyed and the people were taken away into exile by the Assyrians. We saw last time that Micah had predicted this destruction of the northern kingdom; his preaching about this event is found in vss 2-7 of Chapter 1.
But now in the rest of Chapter 1, Micah is in mourning over the fact that the destruction of God’s people is not going to be limited to Israel in the north; the destruction is also going to come down into Judah, and even to Jerusalem itself. So in vs 9 Micah says, “For her wound is incurable; it has come to Judah. It has reached to the very gate of my people, even to Jerusalem itself.”
The verses before us are divided into three sections, each ending with a reason for lament. I want to quickly run through these three sections before we try to answer the questions about lament that we asked at the beginning.
The first section is vss 8-9. Here Micah declares that he is going to lament and gives the first reason for lament. Vs 8 “Because of this I will weep and wail; I will go about barefoot and naked. I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl. For her wound is incurable; it has come to Judah. It has reached the very gate of my people, even to Jerusalem itself.”
Micah’s bitter howling and moaning is enough to set people’s teeth on edge. His going barefoot and naked is a kind of sign prophecy – what he is doing by choice, as a sign, is what will be forced upon the people when they are taken captive and sent into exile. Isaiah and, much later, Ezekiel were commanded to do similar actions to depict what would happen to the people as a result of God’s judgment.
Micah is lamenting what he calls the incurable wound of the northern kingdom of Israel, which he says has also spread down and infected the southern kingdom of Judah.
What is this incurable wound that has afflicted Samaria? It seems to be the punishment of vss 6-7. The Lord God himself has wounded Samaria; indeed, he has not just wounded her, he has utterly destroyed her. It is an incurable wound, a fatal wound, there is nothing that can be done to escape it. And in 722 BC Micah’s prophecy came true, when the Lord utterly destroyed Samaria through the Assyrian invaders.
But now, says Micah, that wound has come into Judah as well, even to the very gates of Jerusalem. Did that happen? Did God indeed wound Judah as well at this time, and did he perhaps wound Judah in the same way, through the Assyrians?
Well, in fact, that is exactly what happened. We read the account earlier in 2 Kings 18. [Have read 2 Kings 18:1-17; 19:35-37.] After taking Samaria, the Assyrians invaded Judah and captured all the fortified cities of Judah. What that means is that most of Judah was in Assyrian hands. Jerusalem and its immediately surrounding area was the only part of Judah that held out against the Assyrians. Archaeologists have discovered that the population of Jerusalem swelled dramatically during this period of her history. It’s not hard to understand why, is it!
What Micah does now in vss 10-15 is he takes up a lament for these various towns in Judah that will be invaded by the Assyrians. Now I think it is right to see the whole of Chapter 1 as being a single prophecy prophesied before the defeat and destruction of Samaria. Micah is predicting what will happen, and he saw it happen in his own lifetime.
So now, in vss 10-15, he takes up a lament for the towns of Judah that the Lord is going to wound. The first section is in vss 10-12, with vs 12 giving the second statement of the reason to lament. In the Hebrew here, Micah is making all kinds of verbal connections between the names of the towns and the kind of wound they will suffer. We know that the Assyrians captured 46 towns in all at this time, but Micah speaks about only 11 of them, and he seems to choose towns which have names that can be used as a pun for a kind of punishment. [Show examples from vs 10a and vs 15a.] If we were using these kinds of puns today we might say things like, “And Washington will be washed away, and Canberra will be canned, Corio will be corroded and Waurn Ponds: Be warned!” In the NIV there are footnotes to indicate the kinds of puns being used.
So in vss 10-12 he laments the fate of six cities in Judah. “Tell it not in Gath; weep not at all. In Beth Ophrah roll in the dust. Pass on in nakedness and shame, you who live in Shaphir. Those who live in Zaanan will not come out. Beth Ezel is in mourning; its protection is taken from you. Those who live in Maroth writhe in pain, waiting for relief, because disaster has come from the Lord, even to the gate of Jerusalem.”
All these towns are on the plain bordering Philistine territory. Micah is a native of Moresheth Gath, he knows these towns, he knows people living in them. Micah is prophesying in Jerusalem, but his family and his friends live in these cities of the plain. He is predicting the Lord’s wounding of these cities and he is lamenting over them.
Why does he use these puns for punishment? Is he just having fun with the names of the cities? I don’t think that would be right; he isn’t having fun here, he is lamenting! One commentator has made the intriguing suggestion that these are nomen-omen prophecies; nomen meaning “name”, and “omen” meaning fate. He suggests that Micah’s predictions of punishment are meant to indicate that the punishment the Lord will send on each city will perfectly fit the crime of each city. I don’t know if that’s the meaning of the puns for punishment pattern used here, but that’s certainly a Biblical principle. The punishment will always fit the crime.
In vs 12, Micah gives us the second statement of reason for lament: “…because disaster has come from the Lord, even to the gate of Jerusalem.” Where is all this disaster going to come from? Yes, it will be Assyria who will flood into Judah and defeat town after town. But how can Assyria achieve this; where is the disaster coming from? The answer is clear. The God of Judah is sending this disaster upon his people. As we keep on reading Micah it will be plain that many of his hearers simply do not believe him. Why would God of Judah purposely try to destroy his own people? Does Micah really know what he is taking about?
In the next stanza of the lament, in vss 13-16, Micah takes up the fate of five more of the towns of Judah, including his own hometown of Moresheth Gath. Again he uses puns for punishment, again he emphasises that the punishment will fit the crime. And see the stark conclusion in vs 15 “He who is the glory of Israel will come to Adullam.” The glory of Israel is the Lord God himself. Adullam evokes memories of David’s career; there was a cave at Adullam where David would hide from Saul. But nothing, not even the cave at Adullam, will be able to hide Jerusalem from the wrath of the Lord God.
The climax comes in vs 16, where Micah calls upon the people of Jerusalem to join him in his lament. “Shave your heads in mourning for the children in whom you delight; make yourself as bald as the vulture, for they will go from you into exile.” The enemy will come all the way to Jerusalem, to the gate of the city, and he will take your children into exile, so mourn, for the Lord is going to judge you.
Well, we know what happened. The Assyrians did indeed flood into Judah and capture all her fortified towns, and they came to the very gate of Jerusalem and laid siege to the city. But Hezekiah responded to the faithful preaching of Isaiah, and to the faithful preaching of Micah, and the Assyrian invader, Sennacherib, was defeated. We read the account in 2 Kings 19. “That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning – there were all the dead bodies! So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.”
We know that Judah as a nation survived, and the Assyrian threat disappeared, and it was about 120 years before Judah was invaded again. Micah’s preaching and Isaiah’s prophetic work turned the history of an entire nation.
Pause
Now we should return to the questions we began with about lamenting. Lamentation and wailing were a normal practice in the Middle-eastern culture of the Old and New Testaments, and there were many different reasons to lament – death of friends or family, death of a king, trouble with enemies, and so on. But the better parallels to this passage in Micah 1 are those examples where someone weeps because people have not responded to the ministry of a prophet and will be judged as a result. A great example is Jeremiah, who is sometimes called “the weeping prophet.” Jeremiah often weeps for his people and intercedes with God, even in response to his own prophecies of judgment. Listen to Jeremiah weeping before God in Jeremiah 14:19,21 “Have you rejected Judah completely? Do you despise Zion? Why have you afflicted us so that we cannot be healed?… For the sake of your name do not despise us; do not dishonour your glorious throne. Remember your covenant with us and do not break it.”
The examples of Micah and Jeremiah also point us to Jesus himself, as he weeps over Jerusalem. Matthew 23:37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” We know this passage, but perhaps many of us do not realise that it comes from Matthew 23! Yes, Matthew 23, where Jesus pours out his woes against the Pharisees and teachers of the law. Matthew 23 contains his most scathing condemnation of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, but part of that same speech are these words of lament over Jerusalem that would not repent. Jesus threatens severe punishment, and expresses deep lament and sorrow.
In Romans 9:1-3, Paul displays the same character. He condemns the stubborn rebellion of Israel, but he mourns and is in anguish over it. He is willing to have himself cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of his brothers.
In each of these cases, in Micah, Jeremiah, Jesus and Paul, a messenger of God declares God’s message, the audience does not accept the message from God, and the messenger then expresses deep sorrow over the coming judgment of God. The speaker takes the side of God in expressing judgment, and then he takes the side of the audience in expressing his deep regret that they are not listening.
Notice that the lament does not modify the speaker’s beliefs. Micah still predicts the destruction of the towns of Judah, and he says that the disaster will even reach to the gates of Jerusalem. Jesus and Paul do not change their minds about the sinfulness of the people. A lament is not a soft, mushy position of weakness, it is not a softening of a belief in God’s justice, it is not a form of pastoral compromise that somehow tolerates sin. Rather, it properly feels the great horror of sin and judgment, and deeply sorrows at God’s righteous judgment against sin.
Do we lament in this way? Do we follow Micah and Jeremiah and Paul and Jesus in lamenting God’s judgment upon people who rebel against God and choose to reject him?
These questions reveal the kind of attitude we have towards the ungodly. Should we pray against them, asking God to honour himself by judging them, or should we pray for God’s mercy on them? Do we love them enough to cry out in pain at the punishment that awaits the wicked? Do we just fling a few Bible verses at them, or do we cry out to God in intercession for them? Are we in fact emotionally hurt by the knowledge that God judges and punishes thousands and thousands of people every day as they die without knowing him?
These are disturbing questions, aren’t they! In the church in the Western world, we have largely lost the ability to lament. Yes, we may weep and wail over the death of a loved one, and that is perfectly natural and right. But do we have any sense of compassion for the thousands around us who will die and who will experience God’s wrath? And if we do not, how will we ever maintain any real desire for witness and evangelism?
Such concern and such lament is not weakness. It does not imply any disapproval of God’s justice, of his righteous judgment against his enemies. On the contrary, it understands the terrible necessity of God’s judgment, but it feels the pain of those who must undergo it. Are you able to identify with that?
Realise that God laments over the rebellious. Micah is speaking; Micah is God’s spokesman. Micah laments because God laments. He laments over his covenant people who rebel against him and reject him.
Does God lament over you? You have heard it all, and yet you have never turned, never repented. God’s lament is not weakness; it is not a kind of hand-wringing wishing that things were different. God is the Judge who will be honoured through the punishment of the rebellious. And yet, he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn, turn and live! Why will you die? Turn and live!
Let me add just one more thought. You will not truly recognise that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is good news for unbelievers unless you begin to be able to lament for unbelievers. Repeat. If you have no sense of the dire situation of unbelievers, and if you do not begin to weep over them, then neither will you share the gospel with them.
Brothers and sisters, these are tough words aren’t they. Hear what the Lord is saying to us through Micah’s lament, and ask him to change your thinking today.
Amen