Rebellion in the Kingdom—Part One
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Rebellion in the Kingdom—Part One
Micah 1:1-16
Main Idea: Israel and Judah rejected the King’s covenant by embracing idolatry and placing their faith in pagan nations.
- I. Micah’s Ministry
- II. Micah’s Message
- A. The covenant initiated
- B. The covenant broken
There are few things more destructive in life than rebellion. We can all identify with this statement because we’ve all been rebellious. Rebellion appears in our lives like an uninvited guest, but it soon takes up residence in our hearts. For me, it began to appear in my early teenage years—perhaps it was the same for you. One day I was happy to do whatever my parents told me; the next, I began to question every decision they made. What caused this shift in my thinking? Rebellion. Simply put, rebellion is defiance against authority. It begins with rebellion against our parents, teachers, and coaches. Left unchecked, it grows to be rebellion against employers, law enforcement, and government. Ultimately, though, rebellion is always against God because God institutes all forms of authority.
I spent three years as a police officer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before God directed my steps into local church ministry. I saw firsthand the damaging effects of rebellion. I located children who ran away from home to escape their parents’ authority, and I arrested citizens who refused to submit to the laws of the city of Chattanooga and the state of Tennessee. In every case rebellion was the root cause. No one was going to tell these folks what to do. Sadly, rebellion is a constant enemy for everyone. This was certainly true for the nations of Israel and Judah when Micah began his prophetic ministry. In fact, Micah will spend the first three chapters of his book demonstrating how rebellion had corrupted God’s people.
Micah’s Ministry
In Micah 1:1 we read these words: “The word of the Lord that came to Micah the Moreshite—what he saw regarding Samaria and Jerusalem in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” This verse provides us with some important information about Micah. He was a prophet from Moresheth, a small town in the southern region of Judah. Like his contemporary Amos, who described himself as a “fig-picker,” he was a country boy. Micah and Amos were living proof that God calls people to serve Him from the most unlikely of backgrounds. He always cares more about one’s heart than one’s heritage. Despite his southern roots, Micah probably spent more of his time in the sprawling metropolis of Jerusalem than anywhere else. Micah’s name means “Who is like Yahweh?” and his prophecies will answer that question.
This verse reveals that Micah served God as a prophet during the reigns of three Judean kings. The dates of these kings provide the timeline for his ministry. Jotham was the king on the throne of Judah when Micah began his ministry. He reigned in Judah from 749 to 733 BC. Jotham was a king who feared God, like his father Uzziah before him. He did not succumb to the pride that destroyed his father, however (2 Chr 26:16-23). Despite Jotham’s personal obedience to God, the people continued their sinful practices of idolatry while he was king.
Ahaz, the son of Jotham, was the second king under whom Micah served. He reigned from 733 to 713 BC. Unlike his father, Ahaz was a wicked, idolatrous king. He erected idols in Judah, offered his sons as burnt sacrifices to pagan gods, and even closed the temple! His actions modeled idolatry for the people, and they continued to follow their king on this disobedient path. Consequently, God used the Syrians, the northern tribe of Israel, and the Assyrians to humble him and judge the nation of Judah (2 Chr 28).
Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, was the third king under whom Micah served. He reigned from 713 to 684 BC. Amazingly, Hezekiah rejected the idolatry of his father and embraced the faith of his grandfather, Jotham. In the first year he was king, he reopened the temple, reestablished the worship of Yahweh, and challenged the people to tear down the places of idolatry in Judah, which they did (2 Chr 29:1–31:21). Hezekiah was far from perfect, but he loved God and sought to obey Him, and God blessed him for it (2 Chr 31:20-21).
Finally, we see from this verse that Micah prophesied both to the southern kingdom of Judah, whose capital was Jerusalem, and to the northern kingdom of Israel, whose capital was Samaria. As we look at this range of dates, one date in particular leaps into our thoughts: 722 BC. As you will remember, this is when the northern kingdom of Israel was defeated by the nation of Assyria. The collapse of the northern kingdom was swift and permanent; it was never reestablished. Micah was still serving God as a prophet when this event occurred. As a result, we will see him addressing both Israel and Judah as he writes his book.
It’s interesting to consider the length of the different prophetic books. Another of Micah’s contemporaries, Isaiah, wrote a book that has 66 chapters! Micah’s book has only seven. This seems strange when we consider that he served as a prophet for more than 30 years. His book is one of the Minor Prophets, although this label does not imply that the messages of these books are unimportant. Rather, the designation is derived from the fact that the books of the Minor Prophets are much shorter than the books of the Major Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel). Like most of the other books of the Minor Prophets, Micah simply provides the essence of the message he preached throughout his ministry. He provides us with a very clear understanding of the sins of the people, God’s call to repentance, and His promise of judgment should they continue to disobey Him. Although he was based in Jerusalem, I’m sure Micah traveled throughout the land proclaiming the message that God had given him.
Micah’s Message
As we turn our attention to chapter 1, we see in verses 2-4 that Micah wasted no time in getting to the heart of the problem. Most writers like to use an engaging introduction to draw the reader into a conversation about the topic. Not Micah. Rather than begin with some niceties, Micah shocks the reader with his words. His meaning is clear: God is a witness against you for your sin. He is preparing to leave His throne room in heaven to come down to earth, and when He gets here, it’s not going to be pretty. Micah used apocalyptic language in these verses. By definition, this type of language is reserved for the most devastating of events. The fall of Israel in 722 BC and the subsequent fall of Judah in 586 BC meet this criterion. Micah provided the rationale for this impending judgment from God.
First, God’s judgment was coming as a result of the sins of Jacob (v. 5). First Kings 11 teaches us that Solomon turned away from God in his old age to worship idols. Consequently, all of the idolatrous sins of Israel and Judah have their origins in Solomon. While God spared Solomon from judgment for David’s sake, Solomon’s sons were not so fortunate. Rehoboam, who became the king of Judah, continued in Solomon’s ways. He was a wicked king who led the people to become idolaters. And because he was responsible for the division of Solomon’s realm into two separate kingdoms, he was indirectly responsible for all of the sins that occurred in the northern kingdom under King Jeroboam. These roots of idolatry had grown into full bloom during the time of Micah, and God was preparing to bring judgment against Israel and Judah because of it.
Second, God’s judgment was coming because of the sins of Israel (v. 5). Israel had been created as a result of Rehoboam’s sinful pride, but they must bear the consequences of their own unabated idolatry. As you remember, Jeroboam went so far as to create a counterfeit system of worship that involved the worship of two golden calves located in Dan and Bethel. While he claimed to worship Yahweh, his idolatrous religious practice abandoned every aspect of authentic covenant worship. As a result, the people of Israel maintained a consistent practice of idolatry. Both Judah and Israel prostituted themselves spiritually with foreign gods in direct disobedience to God’s revealed truth through the law (vv. 6-7).
The Covenant Initiated
As we study chapter 1, we find the first of three specific ways that Judah and Israel had rejected God as their King: they had rejected the King’s covenant. However, we must understand the basic concept of covenant to grasp fully how Israel and Judah had rejected it. A covenant, in its simplest terms, is a binding agreement between two groups or individuals. Today we are more likely to use the term contract. When you finance a car, for instance, you sign a contract with a bank. In essence, the contract defines the responsibilities of both parties. The bank provides the money and the terms required to pay it back. The buyer is responsible to pay to the bank the money owed for the car, plus interest. This contract is fully binding. The bank cannot change its terms halfway through the time of the loan. Similarly, the buyer must make the required payments throughout the life of the loan. Should the buyer fail to pay what is due, the bank will repossess the car in an attempt to recover some of its money.
God had initiated a covenant with Israel at Sinai, and Israel had agreed to enter the covenant on God’s terms. As part of this covenant, both God and Israel had specific obligations. For His part, God promised Israel that He would provide their physical and spiritual needs and protect them from their enemies. This was a huge commitment from God. He was taking responsibility for His people’s well-being at every level. He was promising to give them land, houses, farms, cities, and every form of financial provision, as well as to protect all of those assets for His people. For the people’s part, they promised to obey God and be loyal to Him alone. The root of this covenant loyalty and obedience can be found in the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments reveal the requirements of loyalty: worship God alone, do not make idols, do not desecrate God’s name through idle speech, and honor God’s holy day by focusing on Him. Sadly, throughout most of their history Israel and Judah had violated every aspect of their covenant of loyalty. The final six commandments reveal the requirements of obedience: honor your parents, honor life, honor marriage, honor integrity, honor truth, and honor your neighbor. These are the building blocks of a godly society. God required obedience to His law because it would assure the people’s loyalty to Him and create a culture of interpersonal relationships that mirrored His character. Nevertheless, both Israel and Judah violated every aspect of their covenant of obedience.
Before we’re too hard on God’s people, we should pause to consider that we are prone to the very same challenges in our own spiritual journey. While we are no longer bound by the Old Testament covenant, the principles of God’s Word remain binding on our lives. For instance, the Ten Commandments continue to provide foundational, spiritual truth for our lives, and when we read them we should take a personal inventory. Are we living as loyal kingdom residents? Is God alone seated on the throne of our hearts, or have we created some idols to compete with our allegiance to Him? Are we following after God with our whole hearts, or is He sharing time with our own personal agendas? We must ask the same types of questions about our obedience. To what degree do our interpersonal relationships honor God? Do we honor our parents? Are we embracing truth? Are we living with a spirit of contentment? It doesn’t take long to realize that we struggle with the same types of sins as the people who lived in Israel and Judah. Living for the glory of God through loyalty and obedience is a challenging task in any age. Thankfully, Jesus provided us with the template for accomplishing this task (Matt 5–7).
Jesus encountered a Pharisee near the end of His ministry (Matt 22:34-40). The conversation went like this:
“Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
In this brief dialogue, Jesus identified the two key requirements for honoring the covenant. The requirement for covenant loyalty is to love God. Here, Jesus affirmed the central teaching of Deuteronomy 6:4-5. This classic Old Testament text teaches that Yahweh is one God, unlike the pantheons of gods embraced by pagan religions. The people of Israel were to have a singular focus on their God, loving Him with their whole heart, soul, and mind. The second ingredient is love for one’s neighbor. Here Jesus selected Leviticus 19:18 and provided the requirement for covenant obedience: Love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus then made an astounding claim: “All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” In other words, these two commands are the foundation on which the entire covenant is based. As we noted above, the Ten Commandments follow this concept as well, the first four emphasizing love for God and the final six emphasizing love for neighbor. Ultimately, then, the failure of Israel and Judah to uphold their part of the covenant was a result of failing to love God and neighbor with selfless abandon.
As we examine this concept in more detail, I want you to consider the following chart. It will be expanded in the next chapter.
This chart demonstrates the way that God intended His people to relate to Him and to one another. As you can see, “Love” has been listed as the source for covenant loyalty because Jesus said that love is the motive behind every act of loyalty and obedience to God (for now, focus on the right side of this chart). Loyalty requires two distinct things: obedience to God’s law and surrender to His purpose. In response to their loyalty, God would bless them, providing freedom from their enemies and provision for their lives.
The Covenant Broken
As Micah continued to teach in chapter 1, however, we see that Israel violated the covenant repeatedly by disobeying God in two areas. First, they embraced idolatry, which violated the first four laws in the Ten Commandments. In verses 5-7 Micah provided a severe indictment of the rampant idolatry in both Israel and Judah.
Micah identified a second problem of evil in this chapter as well. Israel and Judah had abandoned their loyalty to God through idolatry, so it was easy for them to take the next step and look to pagan nations for protection and provision. He provided a cryptic explanation of this in verses 13-14. Micah referenced two historic cities that had great significance for Israel and Judah. The cities of Lachish and Moresheth-gath were located on the main road between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean coastal town of Gaza. Strategically located about half way between the two prominent cities, Lachish and Moresheth-gath were Amorite cities that Israel had defeated and captured under Joshua (Josh 10). The land was given to the tribe of Judah and continued to be part of the southern kingdom during the time of Micah. Rehoboam, whose pride led to the division of Israel into two distinct nations, rebuilt and fortified a number of cities, including Lachish and Moresheth-gath (2 Chr 11:5-12). Rehoboam continued in the idolatry of his father Solomon, and his sinful influence spread throughout Judah. Micah claims here that Lachish was the first city to adopt his idolatrous practice, and it became systemic throughout the southern kingdom.
These cities became strategic to Judah because enemies often approached from the sea. As a result, Lachish and Moresheth-gath were critical for the defense of Jerusalem, the capital city of Judah. They were located in a mountain pass—to attack Jerusalem you had to defeat Lachish. This is exactly what Sennacherib accomplished during the reign of Hezekiah while Micah was a prophet in Judah (2 Chr 32). And it was in Lachish that Hezekiah made one of his most critical mistakes. Rather than remain loyal to God and place his trust in Him, Hezekiah sent emissaries to Lachish and sued for peace (2 Kgs 18:13-15). Hezekiah failed in this effort, and Sennacherib promised to lay siege to Jerusalem and destroy Judah. God used Micah’s contemporary, Isaiah, to deliver the message of hope to Hezekiah (2 Kgs 19:20-34), and God destroyed Sennacherib’s army for him (2 Kgs 19:35-37).
For Micah, Lachish and Moresheth-gath represented all that was wrong with Israel and Judah. They were cities that represented the failure of the people to honor their covenant obligation to God. As a result, the following chart reveals the conditions that actually existed in Israel and Judah during the ministry of Micah:
Notice again the right side of this chart. As you can see, Israel and Judah had replaced a love for Yahweh, Israel’s one true God, with a love for idols. The people of Israel discovered that they became loyal to the things they worshiped. Perhaps they found obedience to God’s laws too oppressive, and so they looked for the promise of freedom that pagan idolatry offered—freedom to live however they pleased and to find pleasure in the rites of idol worship. But they were simply buying into the myth of the serpent in Eden. Bondage, not freedom, is always the result of sinful lifestyle choices. So it was with Israel and Judah. Their love of idols led them to be loyal to their idols rather than to God, and the result was bondage. They were trapped in their sin, and they would experience literal bondage when both Israel and Judah were defeated by foreign powers.
Micah continued chapter 1 by emphasizing this coming judgment from God. God was planning to come down from His high place to supervise this judgment (vv. 2-7), and Micah could only weep at the inevitable consequences (vv. 8-9). Though the people, rulers, and priests “anxiously wait for something good, disaster has come from the Lord to the gate of Jerusalem” (v. 12). Ultimately, young and old alike would be taken into exile (v. 16).
When we read the Prophets, we are often struck by their tone. They seem harsh and abrupt in their teaching and prophesying. There is a simple reason for this—they were attempting to capture the attention of distracted people. The people who lived in Israel and Judah had heard prophets proclaiming this truth for years, and nothing had ever happened. So why couldn’t the prophets just leave them alone? Oh, sure, there was the occasional war or recession, but they were still standing. After all, the kings’ ingratiating prophets were telling them that they would be fine. They were God’s people, and He would never let anything bad happen to them. They had a covenant with Him!
Honestly, this was the root of their problem. The nations of Israel and Judah were confident in their position as children of Abraham. True, they had different national identities, all the way down to their style of worship, but they had the same idea of the meaning of covenant. Despite the fact that they had totally abandoned their role of loyalty and obedience to the covenant, they had absolute confidence that God would never break His promise to protect and provide for them, regardless of how they lived.
Over time they began to trust more in their national identity than in God. They believed God would provide for them and protect them because they were children of Abraham, not because they were obedient and loyal to the covenant. They believed that they could live any way they wanted, even as idolaters, and God would bless them. We should not be surprised that Israel and Judah drifted into this mentality. This is the bondage that came to them through idolatry: Once we place our hope in someone or something besides God, we make ourselves vulnerable to falsehood. Ultimately, the people believed the lie that their nationality was enough.
Let’s pause here to allow ourselves to explore how this temptation grows in our own lives. God wants us, like Israel, to love Him with our whole heart, soul, and mind. When we do, we will choose to be loyal to God by obeying His word. God will bless us in freedom as a result of these choices. However, like Israel, we are prone to erect idols too. Generally, we do not have shrines in our homes containing stone or wooden figurines, so we don’t think that we’re capable of idolatry. In the Western world, however, we erect different types of idols. Our idols are just as real, though they look different. Some come in the shape of dollar bills, while others take the form of houses, cars, clothes, sports, media, hobbies, drugs, alcohol, sex, fame, or career. We worship God on Sunday, and then we quickly retreat to the temples of our “other” gods. Soon we become more loyal to them than to God Himself, and before long our idols have trapped us in bondage. All the while we convince ourselves that God is okay with the existence of these idols in our lives, and that He will continue to bless us regardless. After all, isn’t He a God of love and grace? Hasn’t He promised to bless us?
Israel and Judah were in trouble during the ministry of Micah for precisely these reasons. Their hope was in their national identity as children of Abraham, not in their obedience and loyalty to God through covenant. They hoped in their kings and their armies to protect them, and they trusted in their own labors for their personal provision. Time revealed that none of these things was sufficient to hold back God’s discipline on their nations or their lives. Even today, Christians, regardless of their national identity, may be guilty of this same misplaced hope. Our hope as Christ-followers must never reside in our nations, our military, or our political leaders. There is only one Person who offers hope for the world, and His name is Jesus! Jesus is the promised Messiah of Israel (Mic 5:2), and He is the Savior of the church. He alone provides the hope of salvation and significance for every person on earth, and He alone is worthy of our obedience and loyalty. When we follow after Him with our whole hearts, we are recipients of His favor, and in Jesus Christ alone we find hope.
Reflect and Discuss
- Explore the development of idolatry in Israel:
- Beginning with Israel in the wilderness, attempt to identify the unique form of idolatry in each passage (personal, tribal, national).
- How and why did idolatry spread in Israel?
- What was the ultimate result of idolatry in Israel and Judah?
- What warnings do these accounts offer us?
- In Deuteronomy 6:5 God said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Israel’s love for God was replaced by a love of idols. This is the indictment Micah brought against Israel and Judah in chapter 1. Israel and Judah broke their covenant commitment to God through idolatry and disloyalty. We are tempted to erect idols in our own hearts. Which of the charts below best defines your life today?
love - How does loyalty to God lead to freedom in our lives? Think about an event in your life where you found this to be true.
- How does loyalty to idols lead to bondage in our lives? Think about an event in your life where you found this to be true.
- List some specific idols that you are tempted to erect in your own life.
- Israel attempted to worship God and pagan idols as well. Is it possible to love God and an idol at the same time? What would God say based on what He told Israel and what Jesus told His followers (Matt 6:24)?