3239. Woe And Weal

A Sermon Published On Thursday, March 2, 1911.

I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my case, and executes justice for me. He will bring me out into the light and I shall see his righteousness. {Mic 7:9}

1. Those who expect to find the road to heaven smooth and unobstructed will discover little in the experience of the ancient saints to support the expectation. The Lord’s people have, in all ages, been a tried people. Cowper well says,—

   The path of sorrow, and that path alone,

   Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.

2. Though, perhaps, to the youthful mind this may sound rather harsh, yet there is a large amount of comfort in it for the more advanced saint, for he says to himself, “Then my difficulties, my distresses, my tribulations, are no new thing; I am in the footsteps of the flock; I can see that I am travelling in the good old way that leads to God,—

   The way the holy prophets went,

   The road that leads from banishment.

If I had no chastisement, I might fear that I was not a child of God; but inasmuch as I am made to smart under the rod, I may hopefully infer from it, if I feel the Spirit of adoption within, that my Father has not forgotten me.”

3. All kinds of trials have beset the saints of God. Rough winds have blown on them from all points of the compass, and they have had bad weather in all seasons of the year. They have been plagued from within, and assailed from without. The arrows of temptation have come upwards from the pit, and often the blows of the rod have came downward from the throne. There is no form of sorrow I suppose, which has not been experienced by the chosen of the Lord, though, blessed be his name, the Lord has delivered them out of it all.

4. Micah appears to have been troubled by a combination of difficulties and afflictions. He was grieved at the low state of the Church,—a lamentation which ought to affect some of us a great deal more than it does. Alas! there are some who will always be contented enough if their own house shall flourish, though God’s house should be utterly ruined. Micah loved the Church of God, and its low state cut him to the quick. Moreover, the generation among whom he lived added to his grief. “The best of them,” he said, “is like a brier: the most upright is sharper than a thorn-hedge.” Doubtless he sympathized with the cry of David when he said, “Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!” Bad company vexed his soul as the Sodomites vexed the soul of the righteous Lot; and it appears, from reading the chapter through, that he also had a personal difficulty, probably in the matter of slander. He speaks of “her who is my enemy.” You may notice how he dwells on it,—on himself being persecuted and maligned, and he implies his belief that God would arise, and plead his righteous cause. Slander is a common injury for the children of God to bear. What false tongues glibly utter, selfish minds easily credit; and pure conscience is exquisitely sensitive. The birds will pluck at the ripe fruits, whatever they may do with the sour ones. The loftiest trees cast the longest shadows, and those who stand the highest are often said by men of the world to be the most base. God was slandered in paradise; why should we expect to escape being slandered in the midst of this world of sinners?

5. It seems that, in the midst of all this affliction which had befallen Micah,—affliction far heavier than any words of mine can describe,—the prophet was led into meditation, and in this meditation he penned the words of our text, in which we may discern, first, what the prophet felt. He says, “I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him.” Secondly, what he believed: “until he pleads my case, and executes justice for me”; and, thirdly, what he expected: “He will bring me out to the light, and I shall see his righteousness.”

6. I. While tracing out WHAT THE PROPHET FELT, if we happen to be feeling the same, it may comfort us to hear the voice of a fellow pilgrim passing through the valley of the shadow of death.

7. Doubtless he felt the smart of the rod. The tone of his utterance shows this. He speaks like a man who could not be callous, for he had been touched in his innermost soul. I think God intends that his people should feel the rod. If we had many temptations, but were never depressed in spirit by them, I question whether they would serve any good purpose. The “needs-be” is not only for the trial, but for the “heaviness” which results from the trial; for you remember that the apostle says, “If need be, you are in heaviness through many temptations.” There is a “needs-be” that the rod should make the child smart. To play the Stoic under trouble is a very different thing from playing the Christian; in fact, it is the very opposite of it. Our great Saviour did not stand at the grave of Lazarus, and say coldly, “It is good,” without any show of emotion; but “Jesus wept”; so we are permitted, indeed, expected, to weep when God chastens us. Do not ask, dear friends, that your nerves may became steel and your sinews of iron. This would be no excellence; it is rather an excellence to be sensitive under the hand of God. I do not see how, unless by the blueness of the wound, the hurt can be made better. When the trouble really stings then it blesses, when the flail falls heavily on the wheat then it separates the chaff from the pure grain. Do not expect to play the bravado with God; expect rather to have to humble yourself before him, and out of the depths to cry out, as others have done, to the Most High. It is clear, from the language he uses, that the prophet felt the smart of the rod.

8. It is equally clear that he readily perceived that the rod was held in the hand of God. Not all Christians can see this, especially in the case of slander. We generally exhaust our thoughts on the second cause, and vent our indignation on the framer of mischief. We are angry with the person who has caused us our loss, or put us to shame, instead of knowing that God uses even the wicked to chastise his people. Beat a small dog, and it will try to bite the stick; if it were a reasoning creature, it would try to bite you. Sometimes you and I are doggish, and we snap at the instrument that makes us smart. We are irritated with the missile which has struck us to our grief. Oh, that we would only look up, and see that there is a hand, an unseen hand, that wields the agencies of providence, and realize that every stroke that lands on the Christian is given by his heavenly Father’s will. Oh that we were not so accustomed generally to stop at second causes! I am afraid that this is a part of the philosophy of the age. When the world was very ignorant, men used to pray for rain, and thank God for it when it came; they believed that thunder was the voice of God, and lightning was the glittering of his spear. Now we have grown so wise that we attribute all startling visitations to natural causes. We will scarcely pray to have cholera or plague removed, or ask for anything desirable as the bountiful gift of heaven. The philosophy that puts God farther off from us than he used to be, would be better unlearned, and a truer philosophy known. At any rate, so far as personal sorrows are concerned, it would be a very sharp and trying experience for me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quality. Oh, that would be bitterness indeed! But, on the contrary, the prophet here sees the hand of God in all his trials, and I pray that you and I may do the same. May we see that our heavenly Father fills the cup with loving tenderness, and holds it out, and says, “Drink, my child; bitter as it is, it is a love potion which is meant to do you permanent good.” The discerning of the hand of God is a sweet lesson in the school of experience.

9. As he felt the smart, and traced that smart to the hand of God, the prophet discerned that he had sinned. “Because I have sinned,” he said. We do not always see that quite so clearly in health as we do in sickness. A night or two of weary tossings on our bed will do more for us concerning heart-work and the depravity of our nature than a hundred sermons. To be despised and misrepresented, to have to creep into a corner away from one’s best friends because they are alienated from you, or to have to go to the grave with one after another of the dearest objects of our affection, these are sermons under which we cannot sleep, and sermons the responsibility of which we cannot put on another. God’s children, if they are as they should be, are greatly profited and benefited in the discovery of sin by the affliction which God sends them. I would never have known the loathsomeness there was in my heart if the spade of tribulation had not turned over the green sods of my profession, and made me see in it holes and places where loathsome things crept and crawled within. Do not shun the furnace, dear friends. You need not certainly pray for it; you will have enough of it without praying for it; but if God sends it, do not be afraid of it. There is no more enriching place in the world to go to than to the Egypt of bondage, for you shall come up out of it with jewels of silver and gold. I am of Rutherford’s mind when he said that, “Of all the wine in God’s cellar, birch wine may be the bitterest, but it is the best.” And so it is. You shall never see the stars shine with such splendour as at the north pole, where the sharp frosts and the long winter have taken away the light of the natural day. All the Arctic voyagers tell us that there seems to be an excessive sparkle about the stars there; so it is in the winter of trouble. We then see the sparkling of the grace of God as a contrast to the evil which we discover in our own hearts.

10. Another thing the prophet felt was, the trouble he then experienced from God dealing with his sin. We must always discriminate between things that differ. God never punishes his people for sin in the sense of a legal and vindictive infliction. That would be unjust, for Christ, their Substitute, was once and for all punished in their place. They owe no debts to divine justice, for all their debts were paid by Christ to the utmost farthing. But now they are placed under a different government. They are not summoned before a judge, but they are put under parental care; and just as a father chastens every child whom he loves, so our heavenly Father chastens us; again, I say, not with a legislative punishment for sin, but with a father’s chastisement for our offences.

11. Antinomians {a} have gone to the length of saying that there is no such thing as even chastisement for sin. Very likely not, as far as they are concerned. I do not suppose that they were ever worth chastening, or that God ever took the trouble to chastise them. But he does chastise his own children, and I think those who know their adoption will not be long before they get a very clear realization of it in the tingling of their flesh under the rod of the covenant. Why, of all the blessings of the covenant, the sharpest, but one of the best, is the rod. “Before I was afflicted, I went astray; but now I have kept your Word,” says David; and that testimony of David’s is the testimony of all the saints. They will all tell you that they have to bless the hand of a chastening God quite as much as they have to bless the lips of a caressing God when he kisses them with the kisses of his mouth. No, the children of God cannot sin without smarting for it, even as God said to the children of Israel, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” If some boys were breaking windows in the street tonight, and you went by, you might leave them all alone except for your own boy if you saw him there, and most likely you would make him smart for it; and when God goes through the world, since this is not the day of judgment, he winks at the sins of many sinners; but if he sees his people transgressing, he will not wink at them. I have often felt very glad when I have seen some of God’s people come down in the world to poverty. I have not rejoiced at their misfortunes, but I have been glad of the gracious discipline it indicated. I have sometimes said of such and such a man, “If that man prospers, acting as he does in business, I shall know that he is not a child of God; if he is a child of God, he cannot do as other men do without making a terrible mess of it before long.” If you only want gain in this world, do not be a Christian; nor pretend to be one. You cannot expect God and mammon to agree together. If you are a Christian, God will watch you more closely than others. If you are a king’s counsel, a little thing will be treason in you which would not have been treason in an ordinary subject. God expects great things where he gives great things; and if he honours us so much as to tell us the secret of his covenant, he expects us to walk with the greatest possible circumspection. So, Christian, whenever you are in trouble, though it may not be distinctly the result of sin, yet you may well enquire whether it is so or not. Say with Job, “Show me why you contend with me.” At the bottom of our sorrow there is generally a sin; at the roots of our grief we shall find our guilt.

12. Observe one more point. The prophet felt that, since he could connect his suffering with his sins, he could bear it. “I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him.” It was a grand point in Aaron when he “held his peace.” In that case, “silence” was “golden” indeed; and when we distinctly see our trouble happening to us, and springing out of our wrong-doing, what can we say, what can we do, but put our hand over our mouth, and humbly bow before God? I am persuaded, dear friends, that we often make more trouble for ourselves by holding an argument with God about our trouble. When your child is stubborn, as long as he holds out, and brazens it out with you, you will not put away the rod; but when, with broken heart and weeping eyes, he confesses that you have done right, and that he has been wrong, then your heart moves towards him and yearns with compassion. It is so with our God, so let us cast ourselves into his arms. It is a sweet thing to be able to say, “Well, Lord, do as you wish with me.” It is not easy to say it when the pain is acute, or when the inward grief is very heavy; but it is a sweet relief to let the lancet, as it were, into the boil, and it gives us ease to say, “Not as I will, but as you will.” You are not far from liberty when you are content to sit there in the dungeon until he wishes to let you out; when you can say in your spirit, “Strike, Lord, if you wish, only sanctify the rod to me; but go on striking if you wish so, I will not say a single word against all that you do. ‘I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against him.’” Have you ever read Brooks’s Mute Christian under a Smarting Rod? If you have not, you might do so with great profit, if you can get a copy of it; but better than reading that will be to go out yourselves, and be “mute Christians under a smarting rod.”

13. If some of you do not know anything about this infliction now, you will one day. You need not wish that the day may be very soon; but when it comes, remember what has been said to you tonight, and “bear the indignation of the Lord” as the prophet Micah did.

14. II. Let us enquire, briefly, in the second place, WHAT DID THE PROPHET BELIEVE?

15. He believed that he had an Advocate above. Though he would not plead for himself, yet he says, “I will bear the indignation of the Lord,…until he pleads my case, and executes justice for me.” Every believer has at least two Advocates in heaven. His Father himself is his Advocate. “Just as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him.” Have you never felt your own heart plead for your child when you have said to him, “Now you are under my displeasure; go away, I shall not want to see you again; go to your bedroom, and stay there”? And if you have heard him moaning there, and sighing and crying, oh, your heart has ached to be with him. You have said to yourself, “Have I been too severe?” And though you may have come to the conclusion that you were not, but that it was necessary for his good, still your child does not need to plead for himself, for your heart pleads for him. “Just as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” Oh, the tenderness of God’s heart, even when you feel the roughness of God’s hand! Oh to believe, Christian, that God is, as it were, doing despite to himself when he strikes you; that, although his wisdom and his highest love appoint it, this tenderness of love would gladly let you go unchastened, unless the knowledge and prudence of love recognised that it was for your welfare that you should feel the smart! You have an Advocate in your Father himself, and then you have another Advocate whose office it is to plead for you, your blessed Lord Jesus. Could you want a better one? In all your afflictions he is afflicted. He can sympathize with every pang that torments you, with every doubt that oppresses you.

   He takes you through no darker rooms

      Than he went through before.

And at the everlasting throne, when you are being sifted like wheat, he is praying that your faith does not fail, and so the rod passes away; and very often, what is worse than the rod, the axe, too, because the Intercessor pleads for us. Yes, we have an Advocate above to plead our case.

16. And do you notice that the prophet puts, with the pleading above, activity on earth? He looks at his present trouble, which seems in his case to have been slander, and he says that the Lord himself would execute justice for him. When David took his sword in his hand, and declared that not a single man of the house of Nabal should be alive by morning light, how furious was the son of Jesse as he marched at the head of his clan; and what a blessing it was when Abigail, the wise woman, knelt before him, and stopped him, and said, “My lord fights the battles of the Lord.” David stopped, and thought that, when he became a king, it would be a great consideration to be able to feel that he had not shed blood in haste; so he put up his sword, and went his way. There was no need for David to kill Nabal, for ten days afterwards the Lord struck him, and he died. Why, oh why, should we be in such a great hurry to fight our own battles?

17. Brothers and sisters, if anyone should speak harsh words about us, we are up in arms immediately. “Oh!” one says, “I will have this wrong righted; my character is too precious to be lost in that way.” “Yes,” says another “I will see the thing through; I will have the law on such and such people.” Well, now, be still; or go and fight the Lord’s battles, let God fight for you. What is your name or your character, after all? Who will be any the better for your caring about such an insignificant creature as you are? Why, when you are dead and gone, the world will not miss you! It is amazing what great beings we are in our own esteem, and yet what little beings we really are, after all! When Mr. Whitelock was much troubled about the peril of England, his servant said to him, “Mr. Whitelock, did England get along pretty well before you were born?” “Oh, yes, John! very well indeed.” “And do you think it will get along all right when you are dead?” “Yes, I think it will, John.” “Very well, then; if I were you, sir, I would leave it to God now without troubling yourself about it.” The fact is, the longer I live, the more I feel that the very things which I fret about are the things that go wrong; but the other matters that I can just put on the shelf, and leave with God, always go right. A line in one of our hymns says,—

   “’Tis mine to obey; ’tis his to provide.”

While we are trying to provide, we neglect to obey, and so the obeying and the providing both go awry. If it is a battle of your own, leave it alone. In everything else, if you want a thing done, do it yourself; but in the matter of your own character, if you want it defended, leave it alone. God will take care of it; and the less you stir in that matter, the better it will be for you, and the more for God’s glory.

18. What a sweet thing it is, then, to believe that you have One to plead for you above, and that the same Lord will vindicate your case below! How blessed it is for you to live with the consciousness that you have left everything in his hands, casting your burden on the Lord, and making it your only burden to pray to him and serve him all the days of your life!

19. III. Now, lastly, WHAT WAS IT THAT THE PROPHET EXPECTED?

20. He says, “He will bring me out into the light, and I shall see his righteousness.” Believer, will you also expect this,—that God will bring you out into the light? “Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart.” But if you are not of good courage, your heart will be weak. If Satan can persuade you that the night will never give place to the morning, then he can make an easy prey of you; but if you can say, with Micah, “He will bring me out into the light”; if you can still feel persuaded that God never did cast one of his own chosen ones down without intending to lift him up again, that he never did kill without making alive, and never did wound without intending to heal, why then your worst and multiplied afflictions can be borne with holy cheerfulness and confidence. “He will bring me out into the light.” Oh, what a mercy it is to come out into the light after you have been in the dark! How sweet the light is then! I have heard people, who have been very sick, say that, after they have recovered, life has been a perfect joy for them. Indeed, I know one who very seldom has a day free from pain; and when she does have such a day, it is a day indeed. You can see, by the very sparkling of her eye, how good a thing it is to live. It is almost worth while to suffer pain to have the joy of being delivered from it. And so, when a child of God has been tried, tempted, afflicted, and he once gets out of it, what joy and peace he has! If you are baptized in trouble, when you lift your head up again, you shall come out all the fairer and the brighter for the washing, and thank each billow that breaks over you for the good it has brought you, as you come out into the light. Then you shall be able to sing,—

   “For yet I know I shall him praise

      Who graciously to me,

   The health is of my countenance,

      Yea, mine own God is he.

Previously, he has helped me, so I can say to him, ‘Because you have been my help, therefore in the shadow at your wings I will rejoice.’ If I cannot get the light of your face, the very shadow of your wings shall make me glad, for I shall feel that I am safe even under their shadow. Oh God, you will bring out your people into the light, and they shall triumph in your exalted right arm, oh my delivering God!”

21. Then the prophet added, “and I shall see his righteousness.” One might have half forgiven him if he had said, after being slandered, “I shall see my own righteousness; men shall see it too, and they shall honour me all the more because they treated me so unjustly for a time.” Oh, no, it is not written like that; but “I shall behold his righteousness.” To see the righteousness of God in having tried us, to discern clearly his wisdom, his goodness, his truth, his faithfulness in having afflicted us, and more and more to see how suited to our case is the fulness of righteousness which is treasured up in Christ Jesus, this is the divine result from all our troubles. So may it be with us until the last wave of trouble breaks over us, and we enter into everlasting rest!

22. Dear friends, I commend the text to you. May you live in the spirit of it, and may the Lord help you to glorify him even as the prophet Micah did.

23. Alas! I know that there are some here who have their troubles, and they have no God to go to. How I pity you! The snow that falls tonight makes it very cheerless for you who have to be out in it, and the thaw makes the snow press through your boots until your very bones and marrow seem chilled. Thank God, we can get the curtains drawn, and sit around the fire, and if the blast blows outside, it is all warm within. But what must it be to have no home to go to? What must it be to be a homeless wanderer on such a night as this? What must it be to pass by houses all lit up and cheerful, and to say, “There is no home sweet home for me; I am an outcast, and must tread all night these snowy streets?” I hope there is no such creature in London who will have to do so. One could pity such a poor wretch indeed! But think, my dear friends, what it must be for your soul to have no home at the last; when the storm of wrath shall fall, to have nothing to comfort you; to be driven from God’s presence; to have no Father in heaven, to find no warmth of love in the divine heart; to see the happiness of angels and the joy of glorified spirits; perhaps to see your own children in heaven, and to be yourselves shut out; dear ones, whom you loved on earth, separated from you by a great gulf for ever? Happily, the day of grace is not yet over, the day of mercy is not yet past, the long eternal night has not yet set in! Hurry, sinner! There is a home for you if you have grace to knock at this door. The door is Mercy; to knock is Prayer; to step across the threshold is Faith. Trust the Lord Jesus, and you need not fear, though all your lifelong you should be tried. You need not fear the accumulated terrors of the latter days, whatever they may be, nor fear the dread trump of judgment, nor the last tremendous day. Flee to Jesus! Flee to Jesus! Flee to Jesus now! May his Spirit draw you tonight! Amen.

{a} Antinomian: One who maintains that the moral law is not binding on Christians, under the “law of grace.” spec. One of a sect which appeared in Germany in 1535, alleged to hold this opinion. OED.

Exposition By C. H. Spurgeon {Mic 7}

The prophet begins in a sorrowful strain, and there is much that is sad in the chapter, yet there is also much holy confidence in God.

1. Woe is me! For I am like those who have gathered the summer fruits, like those who glean vintage grapes: there is no cluster to eat: my soul desired the first-ripe fruit.

It is a terrible thing for a good man to find good men growing very scarce, and to see wicked men becoming more wicked than ever. It makes him feel his loneliness very keenly, and joy seems to be banished from his heart.

2. The good man is perished from the earth: and there is no one upright among men: they all lie in wait for blood; each man hunts his brother with a net.

Those were sad times in which Micah lived; and yet, under some aspects, one might be willing and even glad to live in such times; for, if ever one could be useful to one’s fellows, surely it would be then. God had need of a voice like that of the prophet Micah in the days when his worship was forsaken, and the true faith had almost died out among men. Unless God had left a Micah here and there, the land would have been like Sodom, and have been made like Gomorrah. So the more unpleasant the age was to the good man, the more necessary and profitable was he to that age.

3. That they may do evil with both hands earnestly,

I wish the professed followers of Christ did good with both hands, that is, with every faculty, with every capacity, in every way, and at every opportunity, just as wicked men “do evil with both hands earnestly.”

3. The prince asks, and the judge asks for a bribe; and the great man, he utters his mischievous desire: so they scheme together.

Honesty seemed to have died out of the nation; the highest people in the land, who ought to have been beyond the power of bribery, sold the administration of justice to the highest bidder. Ah! those were bad times indeed.

4. The best of them is like a brier: the most upright is sharper than a thorn-hedge: the day of your watchmen and your visitation comes; now shall be their perplexity.

Sin brings sorrow in its wake; and, since nations will have no future as nations, God deals with national sin here on earth, and visits it with national punishments. Now that sin had become so rampant in Israel, it would be the time of their perplexity, and when sins, like chickens, come home to roost, then will be the time of the sinner’s perplexity. He lets his sins fly abroad, and thinks that, like the wandering birds of the air, they will soon be gone, and he shall never see them again; but they will all come home to him, and he shall be made bitterly to rue the day in which he thought that he could profit by transgressing the righteous law of the Lord.

5. Do not trust in a friend, do not put confidence in a guide: keep the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your bosom.

So saturated with dishonesty had the nation become that the evil had penetrated even into domestic life, so that, where all should have been in a state of mutual happy confidence, the prophet felt bound to tell them that such confidence could not exist between those who appeared to be friends, or even between husbands and wives.

6. For the son dishonours the father, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s enemies are the men of his own house.

And this is still true in a measure, for, without the fear of God, you will find that even the nearest and dearest relationships will not keep the unconverted from being the enemies of the godly. In that respect, a gracious man cannot trust her who lies in his bosom, if she is not a true child of God.

Now notice the grandeur of faith. Set this white spot right in the middle of the black darkness of which we have been reading:—

7. Therefore I will look to the LORD;—

There was nowhere else for the prophet to look. According to what he tells us all men had become false; “therefore,” he says, “I will look to Jehovah”;—

7, 8. I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me. {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2069, “My Own Personal Holdfast” 2070} Do not rejoice against me, oh my enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light for me.

And this is all the light that God’s people need. Even if it is the darkness of a black Egyptian night into which our spirit has fallen, yet, if God shall only appear to us, there shall soon be light for us. Dr. Watts truly sang,—

   In darkest shades, if he appear,

      My dawning is begun;

   He is my soul’s sweet morning star,

      And he my rising sun.

9. I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my case, and executes justice for me: he will bring me out into the light, and I shall see his righteousness.

Listen to this testimony of the prophet, tried child of God; even when in your own household you find enemies, put your trust in God, for he will yet appear to deliver you. Let this be your joy. Sit still in humble patience, and “bear the indignation of the Lord”; for, even though trouble is laid on you, it is not so heavy as it might have been, and it is not so severe as it would have been if the Lord had dealt with you in strict justice. Therefore in patience possess your soul, and wait quietly before your God. Do not be without hope; expect that he will plead your case and that he will execute justice for you; watch for his light, which will most surely come, and in which you shall behold, not your own righteousness, but his.

10. Then she who is my enemy shall see it, and shame shall cover her who said to me, “Where is the LORD your God?” My eyes shall see her: now she shall be trodden down as the mire of the streets.

This verse relates to the nation which, at that time, was oppressing Israel. She should have her turn of suffering, for she should be crushed beneath Jehovah’s foot as the mire is trodden in the streets.

11, 12. In the day that your walls are to be built, in that day the decree shall be far removed. In that day also he shall come even to you from Assyria, and from the fortified cities, and from the fortress even to the river, and from sea to sea, and from mountain to mountain.

This is what was to befall those who had sinned against God, and oppressed his people; he would let loose the oppressors on them, and they should find foes in every quarter.

13. Notwithstanding the land shall be desolate because of those who dwell in it, for the fruit of their doings.

That is a wonderful expression, “the fruit of their doings.” All doings bear fruit of one kind or another, and sinful doings bear bitter and deadly fruit. Woe to the man who is made to eat the fruit of his own doings! What men eat on earth they may have to digest in hell, and there shall they lie for ever digesting the terrible morsels which they ate with so much gusto here below.

14. Feed your people with your rod, the flock of your inheritance, which dwell solitarily in the woods, in the midst of Carmel: let them feed in Bashan and Gilead, as in the days of old.

Sometimes, there are pastures in the very centre of a woods, and God’s people in Micah’s day were like a little flock of sheep hidden away from their enemies in the midst of a woods, but God will bring them out eventually to far greater liberty. They shall yet have Bashan and Gilead to be their pasture, “as in the days of old”; and so the little one shall become a thousand, and the small one a great nation; and those who were hidden away because of their many enemies shall have such liberty that they shall worship and praise the Lord their God everywhere.

15-17. According to the days of your coming out of the land of Egypt I will show to him marvellous things. The nations shall see and be confounded by all their might: they shall lay their hand on their mouth, their ears shall be deaf. They shall lick the dust like a serpent, they shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth: they shall be afraid of the LORD our God, and shall fear because of you.

The day will come when there shall be such a fear of the people of God on those who formerly persecuted them that they shall tremble before the Lord, and be afraid of the very people whom once they derided and oppressed.

18. Who is a God like you, who pardons iniquity, and passes by the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger for ever, because he delights in mercy.

He never delights in anger, especially in anger against his own people. That is only temporary anger, and is, after all, only another form of love, for the parental anger which hates sin in a dear child is only love on fire. May God never permit us to sin without being angry with us! We might almost beseech him never to tolerate sin in us, but to strike us with the rod rather than allow us to be happy in the midst of evil. Perhaps the worst of horrors is peace in the midst of iniquity, happiness while sin is still all around us.

19. He will turn again, he will have compassion on us; he will subdue our iniquities; and you will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 1577, “Sin Subdued” 1577}

We read about their sins in the earlier part of the chapter; and what a horrible catalogue of evils it was; yet here we read, “Who is a God like to you, who pardons iniquity?” Even those mountainous sins of which the prophet writes, the Lord will rip up by their roots, and cast them into the depths of the sea.

20. You will perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, which you have sworn to our forefathers from the days of old.

There is our comfort; our God is the covenant-keeping God who will perform every promise that he has made. Even “if we do not believe, yet he remains faithful: he cannot deny himself.” Blessed be his holy name.