Micah Week 3-Premeditating Punishment

All right, welcome to our Wednesday night gathering as we go through the book of Micah. I want to recap quickly the process and format of what we're doing on Wednesday nights while studying this book in the Old Testament. It's not a huge book, but there is an awful lot in this passage. If you read through chapter two last week and went through the observation and interpretation questions we provided, you know there is a lot in Micah chapter two. I'm sure the discussions we have tonight in our groups will be fruitful because there is so much to explore.

We have been giving out a paper each week that looks like this. There are some on the back table for you to take as you leave tonight. These papers contain the observation and interpretation questions that we encourage you to use as you read through the book of Micah. This next week, we will be studying Micah chapter three, so you can read through that over the next seven days and utilize the observation and interpretation questions. There are eight observation questions and two interpretation questions, and you can take notes on them to prepare for our gathering on Wednesday nights.

When we come together on Wednesday night, I will share a little bit from the passage we have been studying, and then we will break into our small groups to discuss the application questions specific to the text. Tonight, if you haven't received one of these papers, there are three application questions and a couple of sub-questions for what we will be discussing in Micah chapter two.

Now, please open your Bibles to Micah chapter two. If you have a Bible in the Old Testament, you will find the big book of Psalms roughly in the middle. If you keep turning to the right, you will pass other large books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel. Eventually, you will reach some smaller books with names that are hard to pronounce and that we don't often use. So, turn to Micah chapter two.

As you are turning there, let me pray again that God would give us wisdom and insight as we examine this passage. Father, thank you again for your Word. It is living and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword. You have given it to us so that we may be instructed in righteousness. Through your Word, we gain an understanding of who you are—not just your nature, but your character and your will, and what you desire for us. As we look at what you reveal of yourself and your will in this passage, Lord, help us to find truths that we can live out and apply this week.

We pray this in Jesus' name, and all those that agreed said, Amen.

Well, Micah chapter two, like Micah chapter one, is a tough passage of Scripture. I know that as you go through it, some of the things will challenge you. As I was reading through it this week and thinking about some of these things, I had to grab multiple Bible versions to see what the New Living Translation had to say or how the New International Version translated it, just to try to gain some insight.

Some of the questions that we've been asking the text as we've been going through this include: Who is speaking? Who is being spoken to? What is revealed about God? What do we learn about God's character from the passage of Scripture? Is there a key theme or topic? If you were with us last week in Micah chapter one, you know that the key theme or topic addressed was God's judgment upon His own people about 2,800 years ago because of their idolatry. That was the primary focus we saw last week: God was going to judge His people because of their idolatry.

If you've studied through the Bible before or if you've heard about the Ten Commandments, you know that the very first commandment that God gave was that you are to have no other God before Him. They were breaking the first commandment of the Ten Commandments. The following three commandments after the first all deal with our relationship with God. You shall have no God before Me, you shall have no graven image, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, and you shall keep the Sabbath holy to the Lord. Those are the first four commandments of the Ten Commandments.

If you've ever looked at the Ten Commandments, you will see that we have four commandments that deal with our relationship with God. We are not to have any other God, we are not to have any graven images, we are not to take His name in vain, and we are to keep His Sabbath holy. Then, there are six commandments that deal with our relationship with one another. You have the vertical plane, our relationship with God, and the horizontal plane, our relationship with one another.

The very last of the Ten Commandments is the commandment, "You shall not covet." As we go through Micah chapter two, the focus of the sin that God is addressing in this passage is the issue of covetousness. The people were not only committing idolatry and breaking the first four commandments of God's law in the Ten Commandments, but His own people were also committing the sin of covetousness. As a result, they were breaking the other six commandments: You shall not steal, you shall not lie, you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall honor your father and your mother, and then you shall not covet.

In coveting, you can break all those other commandments. In fact, to kill someone, to commit adultery, to steal, or to lie, all of those begin with covetousness. They start in the heart. This is one of the principles we find in the New Testament: all sin begins in the heart. It is out of the wicked, fallen heart that proceed evil thoughts and evil actions.

The people that God is addressing here in the Old Testament, in Micah, are His people. They were individuals He called, blessed, and gave a promised land. He bestowed upon them many wonderful blessings. Yet, as we look at their history during this period, we know that they were not living out the will of God in any way. They were involved with idolatry, as we saw last week in Micah chapter one, and now we see they are engaged in covetousness, which is leading them to steal and commit murder—terrible things because of their wicked, evil hearts.

God, because He loves His people and His children, will punish them. We have all experienced the punishment of our parents growing up. There are kids here today, and we all know what it is like to face punishment from our parents. The Scriptures say in the New Testament, in Hebrews chapter 12, that the Lord disciplines the one He loves. His discipline is an expression of His love, even though it can be hard for us to comprehend.

I remember thinking as a child that when my parents would say something like, "This hurts me more than it hurts you," I would respond with skepticism. I couldn't see how that was possible at all. When they said, "I'm doing this because I love you," I struggled to understand how this discipline was an expression of love. Now, as a parent, I understand it much better than I did when I was a child.

We see that the discipline of the Lord is indeed an expression of His love. Because He loved His people, it seems from Micah chapter two that He is addressing the Northern ten tribes. As I mentioned two weeks ago and reminded everyone last week, the nation of Israel, God's people, at this period in their history—2,800 years ago—had been divided into two kingdoms: the Northern kingdom called Israel and the Southern kingdom called Judah. God is dealing with the sin of the Northern kingdom, Israel, which consists of ten tribes at this time, 2,800 years ago. He is saying, "I am going to judge you. I am going to punish you for your idolatry last week and for your covetousness this week in Micah chapter two." Ultimately, all of this is an expression of His love.

He's wanting to discipline them, to chastise them, so that they will return to Him. One of the really important points that becomes clear in Micah, in Isaiah, and in many of the other prophetic passages is that God's punishment is for the purpose of purification. When I've taught through the book of Isaiah at the Bible college, I emphasize that ten times a week. God's punishment is for the purpose of purification.

This is what we see in Micah chapter two. God is speaking, "Woe" to the people. Micah chapter two, verse one, begins with the very first word: "woe." In some other English translations, "woe" is translated as "destruction is certain" or "judgment is determined." With this small word, God is pronouncing judgment on the people. Punishment and judgment are going to come.

In verse one of chapter two, He describes why He is going to punish them. He does not punish arbitrarily. Some people seem to think that God is an angry God in the Old Testament, just going around pushing the smite button to make people have a bad day. They imagine Him up in heaven, saying, "Let's pick on that guy today," and then choosing someone like Corey to mess with. This mindset about God in the Old Testament is misguided.

God gives a very clear reason for why He is going to judge these people. He states that judgment is certain and pronounces woe to those who devise iniquity and work out evil on their beds. The picture here is of a person lying awake at night, unable to sleep because their mind is full of ideas. Have any of you ever experienced that? You can't fall asleep because your mind is racing. I find myself in that sleepless state often; I can't shut my brain off at night.

In this passage, the person is lying on their bed, awake at night, not able to sleep because they are coming up with new ways to do wicked things, churning these thoughts through their mind. They think, "What if I could do this? What if I could accomplish that?" God says judgment is going to come to them because they are devising iniquity. They are planning sinful acts and working out evil on their beds. When morning light comes, they practice it because it is in the power of their hands. Thus, God declares that they will be judged and punished for planning wicked things. When the sun rises, it’s as if they say, "Alright, let's put our plan into action. I've been strategizing sin all night long, planning how I'm going to do this."

I'm going to do it. When he says, "because it's in the power of your hand to do it," the opportunity was there for them to do the things they were devising. I was struck by this because about 400 years before this period of time, actually about 300 years before Micah spoke, David, the King of Israel, wrote in Psalm 63 about laying awake on his bed and meditating upon God. In Psalm 1, he says, "In your word, I meditate day and night." David's mind and focus were on God, God's word, God's glory, and God's splendor. He would go outside at night, look at the stars, and wonder, "What is man that you are mindful of him?" David's mind was fixated and focused on the Lord. That was what kept him up all night.

In contrast, a few hundred years later, these people are staying up all night figuring out how they can do wicked things. At morning light, they practice it. They are not even trying to cover their sinful deeds in darkness; they just do it openly for everyone to see.

What exactly is the specific nature of the sinful things they want to do? He describes it in verse two: they covet. If you want to go ahead and circle or underline the word "covet" in verse two, as I said last week, we talked about the idolatry of the people. This week, it's the covetousness of the people. They are planning all these sinful things at night. They covet fields and take them by violence, and they seize houses. They oppress a man in his house, a man and his inheritance.

These people are devising ways to rip others off. They see a piece of land that a brother, a family member, or a friend in their own nation has. They see a house that that person owns and they want it. "I want that piece of land," they think. So they come up with a way to try and get it. They might loan some money and then defraud the person, increasing the interest rate to the point where the person cannot pay it. Then they foreclose on the land and take it from them. That's the plan. They are coming up with wicked ways to steal from their own brothers and sisters.

It's interesting because the Tenth Commandment, Exodus chapter 20, verse 17, says, "You shall not covet your neighbor's house." They are explicitly breaking that commandment. They are saying, "I want that. I see it. I envy it. I'm jealous over it. I want it." They come up with a plan to take it by force. They will defraud and rip it off. If they have to, they will take it by violence. The New Living Translation says they covet fields to take them away by violence.

They're looking for a way to take it. They're trying to come up with a plan. When the morning comes, they move into that. They have this excessive covetousness filling their hearts, and God says, "I'm going to judge you for this." The words that God chooses to use are pretty interesting in verse three. It says, "Therefore, thus says the Lord: Behold, against this family, I am devising a disaster." They were devising, coming up with, and planning wickedness, and He says, "I am devising and planning your destruction."

There is a real challenging word here in this passage. If you devise and plan sinful things, you need to be careful because God may just be devising and planning your punishment as you are devising and planning those sinful things. Here, they have this thought that they begin to build in their minds, and they come up with a plan on how they are going to take this by violence.

I was listening to a Bible teaching a couple of years ago. The pastoral staff and I went to a pastor's conference, and the Bible teacher was talking about the three things that, when joined together, lead us to sin. We all know temptation; a thought comes, and something we see tempts us to move towards sin. There is the temptation involved in leading us to sin. Then there is the desire. When a temptation meets our desire for that thing, we move a little bit closer to sin. The third thing is the opportunity. When you have these three things converge, it becomes very easy for us to fall into sin.

In this case, the temptation was there. They were seeing a land that was better than the land they had. They saw a house that was nicer and bigger than the house they had. They started to think about it, and they realized, "I have the desire; I want to take that." They began to figure out how they could take it, and then they found it was in the power of their hands to do it. They found a way to do it—the opportunity. They had the temptation, the desire in their wicked hearts because they were already walking away from the Lord, and now they had the opportunity. They seized upon it and took it.

The danger of taking hold of temptation, holding onto it, and thinking about it while devising a plan is significant. God says, "Woe to you; destruction is going to come to you because you are premeditating sinful behavior." He continues, "I am premeditating your punishment, your judgment." He describes it in verse four, saying, "In that day..."

Now, those three words, "in that day," are what I call a prophetic landmark. When you see those words, oftentimes in the Old Testament, they point to some predictive plan that God has for the future. That phrase, "in that day," is used 106 times in the Bible, and 91 of those times are in the prophets. So, 90% of the time that it appears in the Bible, it is applied to a prophetic day.

In that day, God is going to bring woe and destruction. He says that when that day comes, there will be people who ridicule you. He talks about it in verse five. They will sing this song or proverb about you, as mentioned in verse four. They will ridicule you and taunt you with this mournful song, saying, "We are utterly ruined. My people's possession is divided up. He, God, takes it from me. He assigns our fields to traitors."

God prophesies through Micah what is going to happen to the people of the Northern Ten Tribes. He says there is going to come a day in the future when your enemy will come in and take your land from you. In the same way that you have been devising to take the land from your brother, you have been ripping people off to try and get it. God has planned a judgment for you, and He will do the same thing to you, using another nation to come and expel you from the land. They will cast you out from the land.

Now, the people, of course, when they hear this message, do not like it. It would be as if someone came today and prophesied that because our nation is so wicked, the people of Canada—though it sounds far-fetched and crazy—would one day come down from the North, expel us from the land, and take everything from us. You might think, "How is that possible? That will never happen. That sounds completely insane. The Canadians are going to come down here and take our land? That will never happen."

When Micah was saying this to the people, it sounded absurd to them. Everything in their nation seemed to be going really well. So, the prophecy that God was speaking through the prophet Micah seemed like it would never happen. There were other prophets, people who identified themselves as prophets in that day, who were what we call soothsayers. They would say the nice, fluffy things that make you feel good and speak soothing words to you. Micah, however, was saying that judgment is coming and that they better repent. Meanwhile, these other prophets were saying, "Don't listen to Micah. He's so harsh, and nobody likes to hear what that guy has to say. His message is always so difficult. That will never happen to us because we are God's people."

Because we're God's people, we're never going to taste of that. We are the children of Abraham, and God would never judge us; He would never let a nation so wicked come and destroy us. Yet, God is saying, "No, this is the plan that I'm bringing about." In fact, many times in Israel's history, they had that response to the message of the prophets: "Oh, God will never do that to us. We're His own chosen people."

We see that response of the people here in Micah chapter two, as God is telling them what is going to come upon them. There is a conflicting word; Micah is saying judgment is coming from God because of their sin, while other prophets are saying, "No, no, no, everything's just fine. We're God's people. Don't listen to Micah." This back-and-forth dynamic is evident.

In Micah chapter two, verse 10, the New Living Translation says, "Get up! Be gone! This is no longer your land and home. You have filled it with sin and ruined it completely." God says that because they have brought sin into the land and because they refuse to repent, He is going to remove them from the land.

Then Micah says, "Suppose a prophet full of lies would say to you," in verse 11, "I'll preach to you the joys of wine and alcohol." This is just the kind of prophet that they would like. What Micah is identifying here in verses 10 and 11 is exactly the same thing that the Apostle Paul speaks about in the New Testament when he writes to Timothy. He says that in the last days, there will be people who heap up for themselves teachers who will tell them things that just tickle their ears. They will tell them what they like to hear because they do not want to hear the truth, sound doctrine, or the reproof and rebuke of God's word.

So, they will reject God's word in favor of people who will speak lies to them. This is not new; it was happening 2,800 years ago, it will happen in the future, and it is happening today. Micah is saying that God is going to remove them from the land for their sin, but they do not want to hear what he has to say. They would rather have someone come and prophesy good things about drinking wine, having parties, and enjoying feasts, but that is not what is going to happen. Instead, they are going to face a time of judgment.

The last verses, Micah chapter two, verses 12 and 13, touch on a theme that is often repeated in the prophetic books of the Bible: the theme of the remnant. In fact, the word "remnant" is used in Micah chapter two, verse 12. God says that the northern ten tribes are going to be judged because of their sin, but He will bring about a day of restoration, and a remnant will be brought back.

To the land. Now, a remnant is a very small amount of the whole. The prophet Isaiah has this theme throughout the book of Isaiah: a remnant shall return. The nation is going to be destroyed and judged by God, but a remnant is going to return. It’s the idea of refining.

We have all heard that word, refining, before. A refiner takes a piece of metal. They dig up a piece of gold or a big piece of silver out of the ground, and yet there are all kinds of impurities, dirt, and other metals, alloys in that silver. The refiner takes it and puts it in the fire, causing the impurities to come to the top. He gets rid of the impurities to purify the silver. This is what God is essentially doing here through judgment and punishment. He is turning up the fire of affliction to remove all those impurities so that He can bring a purified people, a remnant.

In the book of Isaiah, God says, "I'm going to refine you, but not as silver is refined. I'm going to refine you with the fires of affliction." The difficulty and judgment that the Northern ten tribes are going to go through because of their sin is so God can purify them, getting rid of the dross, which is the impurities of the metal. He can wipe that away. It sounds like a pretty heavy sort of thing, but this is because God has to remove and purify His people and remove their sin from them.

In the end, He says there’s a promise. There’s a heavy judgment coming; you’re going to be wiped out of the land. But the promise is that a remnant shall return. There are some pretty interesting things to consider here in this passage. God is going to judge His people. The punishment is for purification, but they think, "Well, we’re God’s chosen people, so we’ll never go through that difficult thing." They essentially take advantage of God’s patience, thinking, "He’ll never do that because He’s a loving God, and we won’t ever go through that."

There are a lot of practical principles that apply to us in the 21st century in this passage. That’s what we’re going to be talking about tonight as we get together with our groups in just a minute.

Let me pray, and then we’ll dismiss to the rooms. Father, thank You for Your good word. Thank You for the way that You reveal Yourself to us and how, as a loving Father, You want to refine us and make us a people that are holy to You. I pray, God, that we would learn from the principles in this passage and that our lives would be changed so that we would glorify You.

Reflect your glory in a world that's dark and in need. We thank and praise You for all the blessings that You pour upon us, Lord. Bless us tonight with wisdom, insight, and understanding by Your Spirit as we talk with one another. In Jesus' name, amen.