It shall come to pass in the latter days
     that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
     and it shall be lifted up above the hills;
     and peoples shall flow to it… – Micah 4:1

Well: the Lord comes to dismantle the corrupt edifice of His people’s kingdom, to purge pollution from His land. And then?

And then: when He is there, and when His outrage has been expended against His people’s offenses, He will bring about what ought to have been happening all along.

The blessing will evince an odd symmetry with the judgment. Where His coming will make the “high place of Judah” – Jerusalem, host to her people’s idolatrous cult (1:5) – melt and flow down the mountain’s slopes (1:4) into oblivion, now that mountain will be higher than ever she was, with God’s word flowing down out of it and Gentiles flowing uphill in response (4:1-2).

There is going to be a Judge in Jerusalem, one who will bring in the heathen not as instruments of destruction, not as invaders, but as disciples (4:3). The Good Life will be instituted (4:4), everybody having enough, everybody provided the means of rest and enjoyment. Judgment is horrendous news for those liable to it (viz.: you and me and everyone we know), but if judgment falls and there is a future on the other side of it, then the presence of a just judge, the true Judge, means peace.

The whole Bible is shot through with the insistence that there will be latter days: in the latter days, the woman’s seed will bruise the serpent’s head; in the latter days, all the nations will be blessed in Abraham’s seed; in the latter days, there will be a prophet like Moses; in the latter days, God will raise up a son to sit on David’s throne; in the latter days, the earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. There will be a way through death, a way through destruction, and out to the other side.

For Israel and Judah in the immediate future, this is the way of defeat and survival as a shamed and broken remnant of a once-proud kingdom, enduring imprisonment, exile, and slavery in hope of a future homecoming.

That hope will never really be fulfilled, though, until this passage is not one of survival but of death itself endured. When there is no more fiery wrath to flow down the mountains, then the word of peace can do so, and the peoples of the earth can approach the One who sits atop His holy mountain.

It seems impossible and demands faith: all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever (4:5). We will do this, not because there is any hope that we will turn ourselves into a people fit for His kingdom, but because He has promised a future. We walk in His name because that is surely the only path to that holy mountain, the only passage into the latter days.