Hear, you peoples, all of you;
     pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it,
and let the Lord GOD be a witness against you,
     the Lord from his holy temple.
For behold, the LORD is coming out of his place,
     and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. – Micah 1:2-3

The Lord is on His way: this is the governing idea of Advent, the governing reality driving the way the Church and her members are supposed to live in the world.

This short declaration is, we insist, good news. He comes to make His blessings flow; He is born to set His people free; light and life to all He brings. Come, we pray, and ransom captive Israel; o come, we call to one another, let us adore Him. His coming, we claim, fulfills our deepest need as a fallen race; it is the invasion that turns the tide of the war on sin and death for good. We long for His coming, thrill to hear the voice of the Psalmist: Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity (Ps 98:8-9).

But a lot seems to depend on what He finds when He comes. Rejoice in the Lord, you righteous, because when He comes, the mountains melt like wax in His presence (Ps 97:12, 5); but the prophet Micah here promises melting mountains as well (Mic 1:4) – and why? For the transgression of Jacob and for the sins of the sons of Israel (1:5).

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

Whether he does or not, it’s going to hurt. The architecture of our world is going to be broken down, our cities will be plowed under, and our civic religion will be dismantled. The Lord showing up means the end of normalcy, stability, the way the world works. Micah the prophet knows his Lord’s coming is the fulfillment of his people’s hope, and yet he mourns, stripped, shaven, and naked (1:8-16), for that people, inextricably implicated as they are in the wrongs Yahweh is coming to set right.

I have not come to bring peace, Jesus said, but a sword.

For Advent to resonate with us as it ought to, we need to be convinced, with Micah, that there is no hope of blessing or peace in the world and the flesh. We need to know ourselves as people who have had to die to receive what God promises, who have become bitterly conscious that there are only two ways to turn: to our Maker or to our own perdition. And we need to let His word convince us that nothing about the lifestyle we’re accustomed to, nothing about the course of human events, is off-limits to the calamitous regeneration He comes to bring.

Micah promises that Samaria, that wicked city, will become “a place for planting vineyards” (1:6), when its foundations have been laid bare and its stones thrown down.

Nothing is wasted; when God comes, He will burn the thorns and thistles that infest the ground so that the seed of His word might find good soil among the ashes of the world that was.

Though I slay you, saith the Lord, yet hope in me.