The second installment in a series of reflections on Micah for Advent. Here’s part one.

“Do not preach”—thus they preach—
     “one should not preach of such things;
disgrace will not overtake us.”
     Should this be said, O house of Jacob?
Has the Lord grown impatient?
     Are these his deeds?
Do not my words do good
     to him who walks uprightly? – Micah 2:6-7

Before we call the Lord’s coming good news, we had better take some time to audit ourselves. Micah’s harshest words are reserved for the presumptuous, for preachers of and believers in cheap grace (Bonhoeffer’s memorable term). “No, no,” drips the favored rejoinder from languid lips, “don’t be so dramatic.”

We are, after all (so our thinking tends to go), the people of God. Nobody’s perfect, and the God who was so lavish in His promises to our forebears would never be unreasonable in His expectations. Surely He’ll understand that the ongoing project of real estate reallocation in Judah has been a necessary condition for the present burst of prosperity, which we have it on expert authority will keep the economy growing (and finance the highly necessary Assyrian appeasement policy), despite whatever the malcontents want to claim (2:1-2; 8-9).

But no true prophet can be reasonable about these things. Take away what Yahweh has given to others, and He will disinherit you (2:5). Treat what God has promised and given as something common, a commodity meant to serve your appetites, and you pollute it to such a degree that He will call the faithful to leave it for their own salvation: Arise and go, for this is no place to rest, because of uncleanness that destroys with a grievous destruction (2:10). In the end, exile will be an exodus (2:12-13).

It is not enough for Our Guy to be in office, either. With godly and faithful Hezekiah on the throne, confidence in cheap grace still ran high: “Is not the Lord in the midst of us?
No disaster shall come upon us” (3:11). This at a time when those who sat on the right side of a rigged game were fattening themselves on the destruction of the flock entrusted to them (3:1-3). If your hope is in cheap grace, this is the inevitable progression: you will give yourself carte blanche to pursue your own ends; you will stifle the voice of conscience and truth that says that this carte isn’t blanche but bloodstained; you will seek out and subsidize the voices that affirm the rightness of your ways; and when the day of reckoning comes, you will call out to a silent God (3:7).

But it is not too late before then: meaning, it is now, today, if you hear His voice, not too late. The prophet still speaks in the words he wrote down; the Prophet of prophets still speaks by the Spirit he put in Micah 2,700 years ago (3:8). Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly? saith the Lord (2:7): it is good for you to hear that you are a crook and a cannibal in His eyes, if only you will believe it. You may yet be part of the remnant from whom He takes everything they thought they had, so as to give them a city with foundations in a kingdom that cannot be shaken, a city founded on the blood of His firstborn, founded on costly grace, incalculably costly grace.

Because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field, the prophet promised (3:12); but for those with ears to hear, even and especially those at fault, they would yet be plowed into fertile soil to receive the seed of the Sower.