What is to follow the strongly worded vision of Micah is devastation and judgment at the hand of God himself:
“All her carved images shall be beaten to pieces, all her wages shall be burned with fire, and all her idols I will lay waste, for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them, and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return” (1:7, ESV).
After many words of denunciation, we can picture God shaking his head:
“If a man should go about and utter wind and lies, saying, “I will preach to you of wine and strong drink, he would be the preacher for this people” (2:11)!
Strong language; the Lord has spoken of his children as drunken prostitutes.
But the Cycle does not stop with judgment. Yes, those who repeatedly defy God will pay the ultimate price. Yet God’s never-ending love for his children is forever, even if they have been reduced to a small by sin and death. In the very next verse:
“I will surely assemble all of you, O Jacob; I will gather the remnant of Israel; I will set them together like sheep in a fold…a noisy multitude of men” (2:12).
Although not mentioned here, it follows that the remnant will be gathered when his children in exile and those who remain behind in Jerusalem truly repent.
So what do true, though fallible, believers do when their country descends into idolatry and indecency? How do we repent in a way that leads to restoration, not getting sucked into the same sewer as the culture? Micah asks:
“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high” (6:6a)?
Micah wonders how many and how large the sacrifices under the Law of Moses it would take to pacify God. Good question. The answer:
“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (6:8)?
At that, Micah repents as we should do every time we, our family, our church, or our country does not live up to “what is good”:
“But as for me, I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me. Rejoice not over me, my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me. I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his indignation” (7:7-9).
We all pay the price of sin in ways that are sometimes small and sometimes great. If our relationship as believers stops there, we are simply dead. But thank God for the Cycle of the never-ending love of God that flows to us as a result of sincere repentance.
Soak this in:
“Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea” (7:18-19).
With what shall I come before the Lord? My pitiful, broken self, in full repentance.
The Cycle shows what awaits me: restoration to eternal life!