(Isaiah 57:14-15, Micah 6:6-8; 1 Timothy 1:12-17)
Micah 6 is a court scene: God, through his prophet, is putting his people on trial. In the first five verses, he calls them into court and declares his indictment against them. He reminds them of the covenant he made with them, which he has faithfully kept and they have dishonored. The only appropriate response would be to repent of their sin and recommit themselves to honor the covenant as faithfully as God has. Instead, in verses 6-7, we see someone speak for Israel who wants to reduce the covenant to a contract. A covenant is a 100% commitment on both sides—when you make a covenant, you’re all in, heart and soul. A contract is 50/50: meet the minimum requirements, and you can do what you like with the rest of your time. Here we see Israel bargaining with God, haggling over the minimum requirements so they can get him off their back.
I like the way Bruce Waltke describes the speaker here and his attitude:
Blinded to God’s goodness and character, he reasons within his own depraved frame of reference. He need not change; God must change. He compounds his sin of refusing to repent by suggesting that God, like man, can be bought. His willingness to raise the price does not reflect his generosity but veils a complaint that God demands too much; the reverse side of his bargaining is that he hopes to buy God off as cheaply as possible.
Micah responds to the fake religiosity of the speaker by saying, in essence, “Don’t you play games with me. You know what the Lord wants from you; he’s told you many times.” He could stop there, but he still goes on to summarize the Lord’s requirements, giving them one last chance to listen and obey.
The landing point in verse 8 is the last line: “to walk humbly with your God.” The primal human temptation is to live proudly toward God—to declare, in the words of the poet William Henley, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” Or if you prefer, you could channel Frank Sinatra: “I did it my way.” It’s the insistence that I don’t care what God wants, I want my own way, I deserve to get what I want, and I’m going to do whatever I have to do to get it. What does the Lord require of you? Set that aside, and bend your stiff neck; accept that he’s the boss, not you, that your life belongs to him, not to you, and that he has the right to control everything, not you. Live your life for him, not for yourself, and for his approval, not for your own satisfaction.
The character of such a life is revealed in the next-to-last line of verse 8, which combines two of the most loaded words in the Old Testament. “Mercy” is the word ḥesed, which we talked about several weeks ago; it’s the unrelenting, unfailing love and faithfulness of God toward his people with whom he has made his covenant, to whom he has made his promises. You might have wondered at the time why we translate it “mercy,” but there’s good reason. Human beings may show mercy for a lot of reasons which aren’t particularly noble; what we call mercy is often just indifference, or fear, or an attempt to promote our own agenda. It’s easy to act as if we’re merciful when we don’t really care all that much about justice. God, however, is absolutely and fiercely just. He shows us mercy not because he doesn’t think our sins matter that much, but because he loves us even more, and his faithfulness is even fiercer.
Having said that, we need to understand what God means by “justice,” which is the other loaded word in this verse; the Hebrew word is mishpat. Old Testament scholar Paul Hanson defines mishpat as “the order of compassionate justice that God has created and upon which the wholeness of the universe depends.” Actions in keeping with mishpat are those which advance the restoration of the original created order of the universe, when everything was right—just, and whole—in accordance with God’s perfect will.
So then, the life of those who walk humbly with God is a life characterized by the justice and mercy of God; but note how. What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, and to love mercy. We turn that around. We want, first, to love justice. That sounds like a noble thing, and we’re able to tell ourselves it is; but whether quickly or slowly, those who love justice come in the end to love justice as they define it. This is because we instinctively believe that justice is something which is owed to us and to the people we care about: justice means we get what we think we deserve. As the missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin observed, “Each of us overestimates what is due to him as compared with what is due to his neighbor,” and we use the language of justice to try to enforce that overestimation.
Second—no, we don’t want to do mercy, it’s not that easy a swap—but we want mercy done to us. We want justice only to be for us, not against us; for ourselves, even when we admit we deserve justice, we want mercy instead. After all, whatever anyone else might think, we know we had good reason for everything we did; if maybe we went a bit too far or shouldn’t have handled things the way we did, it wasn’t actually that big a deal. Maybe technically we should be judged, but really, we ought to be cut some slack. We ought to be let off lightly, or maybe even let off the hook altogether.
We naturally see justice and mercy as things we should receive from others. Micah turns us around: justice and mercy are what God calls us to give others. He tells us to do justice—to treat those around us in ways which are consistent with the character and nature of God and obedient to his will—and there are no exceptions here, and no escape clauses. When others don’t do justice to us, we come hard up against the next command: love mercy. Like the God whom we serve, we’re to keep treating those around us with his love and grace even when they obviously don’t deserve it. We’re called to do justly to others, but not demand that for ourselves; we’re called to love God’s mercy and extend it to others, but not insist on it for ourselves.
From a worldly point of view, this is a good way to lose out. The world is with the proud. The world honors those who demand justice—until someone comes along with a more convincing demand. The world even honors some who call for mercy, as it’s busy changing its idea of justice. The world respects those who go after everything they want, especially if they manage to get it. That’s the way to succeed in this world. Walking humbly with God just doesn’t get the job done.
But the world isn’t all it thinks it is. Its success doesn’t last, and its powers don’t endure; the Lord blows on them, and they wither and fade. To those who walk humbly with him, he gives this promise: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.” The world is with the proud, but the Lord is with the humble; and it is the Lord who is always faithful, and the Lord who never fails.
“Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet,” 1616, Dirck van Baburen. Public domain.
