And I said, Hear, I pray you, ye heads of Jacob, and rulers of the house of Israel: is it not for you to know judgement? who hate the good, and love the evil; who pluck off their skin from off them, and their flesh from off their bones; who also eat the flesh of my people; and they flay their skin from off them, and break their bones; yea, they chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron.- Mic_3:1-3.
Some time in the reign of Hezekiah, when the kingdom of Judah was still inviolate, but shivering to the shock of the fall of Samaria, and probably while Sargon the destroyer was pushing his way past Judah to meet Egypt at Raphia, Micah, standing in sight of the Assyrian march, attacked the sins of his people and prophesied their speedy overthrow beneath the same flood of war. The exact year was probably 720-719 b.c. Amos had been silent thirty years, Hosea hardly fifteen; Isaiah was in the midway of his career.
1. The prophet begins by describing, in impressive imagery, the approaching manifestation of Jehovah for judgment, on account of the transgression of the two kingdoms, which is centred in their respective capitals, Samaria and Jerusalem. In the first instance, Micah declares the impending ruin of Samaria. The evil does not, however, rest there; he sees it advancing upon Jerusalem as well, and utters his wail of lament as the vision of disaster meets his eye. To Micah as well as to Isaiah Jerusalem was dear, and his subsequent prediction of her overthrow ought to be read with the accent of this previous mourning for her peril. Nevertheless his heart clings most to his own home, and, while Isaiah pictures the Assyrian entering Judah from the north by Migron, Michmash and Nob, Micah anticipates invasion by the opposite gateway of the land, at the door of his own village. His elegy sweeps across the landscape so dear to him. This obscure province was, even more than Jerusalem, his world, the world of his heart. It gives us a living interest in the man that the fate of these small villages, many of them vanished, should excite in him more passion than the fortunes of Zion herself. In such a passion we can incarnate his spirit. Micah is no longer a book, or an oration, but flesh and blood upon a home and a countryside of his own. We see him on his house-top pouring forth his words before the hills and the far-stretching heathen land. In the name of every village within sight he reads a symbol of the curse that is coming upon his country, and of the sins that have earned the curse.
One quality of the Hebrew Prophets' ideal of national religion is their strong conscience of their people's sins and civic duties. This is the harder and the more misunderstood half of patriotism. The ears of every people are open to the celebration of its history as Divine, and even the baser hearts among it may be flattered by the idea of its mission to the world. But the true test of national religion is sensitiveness to the national sins. This was the test between the false and the true prophet in Israel; it is our test as preachers to our own day. Is our office servile to the pride and material interests of our nation? Or do we feel with trembling that the ethical element in patriotism is, in the strong tumult of all the others, the most easily neglected, and therefore the most in need of emphasis by a people's prophets? For its sake and God's the true patriot must sometimes run counter to the currents of popular enthusiasms, and be willing to incur the charges of treason to the commonwealth, and of cowardice in face of the national destiny. We have nothing to dread from that fear of kings which once made so many prophets false; but we have all the more to watch that we do not become flatterers of the common people. If we are to defend their rights, we must be brave to declare their sins; the offices of the Prophet and of the Demagogue are absolutely irreconcilable.1 [Note: G. A. Smith, Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament, 270.]
2. After announcing the Divine judgment upon Samaria and Judah, Micah goes on to state the reasons for the judgment. Isaiah's work as a social reformer had met with scant success. Unable even to prevent Ahaz and the people from entering into alliance with Tiglath-pileser, he had, in the main, given himself for the last dozen years to the instruction of his disciples. The social wrongs, which he had first attacked, became more and more marked. Misuse of power, indifference to the claims of human brotherhood, and wanton luxury, characterized the daily life of the city. To Micah, the villager, the unjust treatment of the helpless poor by men of wealth and power is the sin that cries aloud to Heaven. The prophet portrays a social and economic situation in Judah very similar to that of Samaria as described by Amos in the years immediately preceding the overthrow of the Northern Kingdom. A degenerate aristocracy, mastered by greed and fattening upon tyranny, makes life unbearable for the tiller of the soil and the wage-earner. The possession of wealth is looked upon as the summum bonum; nothing may stand in the way of its attainment. The ordinary demands of justice and righteousness are trampled under foot. The quality of mercy is swallowed up in avarice. The custodians and administrators of law abuse their powers. Justice is for sale to the highest bidder. Under due process of law widows and orphans are expelled from their ancestral homes, that a few acres may be added to the estate of the neighbouring landlord. In the lust for wealth, the substance and sustenance of the poor are devoured, so that they are reduced to the lowest depths of misery and degradation. Even the sacraments and consolations of religion are on the market; priests and prophets cater to the rich and browbeat the poor.
You cannot but have noticed how often in those parts of the Bible which are likely to be oftenest opened when people look for guidance, comfort, or help in the affairs of daily life-namely, the Psalms and Proverbs-mention is made of the guilt attaching to the Oppression of the poor. Observe: not the neglect of them, but the Oppression of them: the word is as frequent as it is strange. You can hardly open either of those books, but somewhere in their pages you will find a description of the wicked man's attempts against the poor: such as-“He doth ravish the poor when he getteth him into his net.”
“He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages; his eyes are privily set against the poor.”
“In his pride he doth persecute the poor, and blesseth the covetous, whom God abhorreth.”
“His mouth is full of deceit and fraud; in the secret places doth he murder the innocent. Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge, who eat up my people as they eat bread? They have drawn out the sword, and bent the bow, to cast down the poor and needy.”
Now, do we ever ask ourselves what the real meaning of these passages may be, and who these wicked people are who are “murdering the innocent”? You know it is rather singular language, this!-rather strong language, we might, perhaps, call it-hearing it for the first time. Murder! and murder of innocent people!-nay, even a sort of cannibalism. Eating people,-yes, and God's people, too-eating My people as if they were bread! swords drawn, bows bent, poison of serpents mixed! violence of hands weighed, measured, and trafficked with as so much coin!-where is all this going on? Do you suppose it was only going on in the time of David, and that nobody but Jews ever murder the poor? If so, it would surely be wiser not to mutter and mumble for our daily lessons what does not concern us; but if there be any chance that it may concern us, and if this description, in the Psalms, of human guilt is at all generally applicable, as the descriptions in the Psalms of human sorrow are, may it not be advisable to know wherein this guilt is being committed round about us, or by ourselves? and when we take the words of the Bible into our mouths in a congregational way, to be sure whether we mean merely to chant a piece of melodious poetry relating to other people-(we know not exactly to whom)-or to assert our belief in facts bearing somewhat stringently on ourselves and our daily business. And if you make up your minds to do this no longer, and take pains to examine into the matter, you will find that these strange words, occurring as they do, not in a few places only, but almost in every alternate psalm and every alternate chapter of proverb or prophecy, with tremendous reiteration, were not written for one nation or one time only, but for all nations and languages, for all places and all centuries; and it is as true of the wicked man now as ever it was of Nabal or Dives, that “his eyes are set against the poor.”1 [Note: Ruskin, Two Paths, § 179 (Works, xvi. 397).]
3. In the opening verses of Micah's prophecy there is manifested something both of severity and of sympathy, loyalty to God and pity for man. We have first a powerful description of coming judgment given by one who sees the storm approaching; then in the eighth verse there seems to be a sudden revulsion, an outburst of personal feeling, “For this will I wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked.” The prophets do not write or speak as logicians or systematic theologians, but as men whose passion expresses itself in poetic forms; consequently they paint their pictures with strong light and deep shade, the transitions are abrupt, they pass quickly from one mood to another. The startling change is especially instructive in the case of Micah, a man whose mood is grim, whose attacks upon evil-doers are rude and realistic. Read the sublime theophany, study the picture of Jehovah coming to judgment riding upon the high places of the earth, so that the hills are melted and the valleys cleft. How real this is to the prophet! He sees it by the eye of faith; he knows that it must be, because God is righteous; he acquiesces in it and seems to rejoice in it, so strong is his sympathy with the justice of God, but when he realizes all that it means for the doomed land he utters the mournful cry, “For this will I wail and howl.” What is the explanation of the abrupt transition? It is not merely because it means pain to himself, loss and distress to the district in which he lived. “For her wounds are incurable; for it is come even to Judah; it reacheth unto the gate of my people, even to Jerusalem.” Neither is it simply grief and personal bitterness that the people have rejected his message and scorned his ministry. That these considerations enter as elements into the case there is no need to deny. Micah, if we take the first three chapters of this book as a decisive specimen of his work, does not seem to be a man of the sensitive emotional style of Hosea and Jeremiah; there is a plainness and roughness about his fibre, but it is just because of this that he shows most clearly that he has grasped the twofold life which is essential to real prophetic ministry-the vision of Divine judgment, and sympathy with sin-stricken, sorrowful men. He is on the side of God; through conviction of the Divine righteousness he enters into the secret of judgment, but what he sees is so awful that he swings round to the side of men, and goes into mourning for their woe. At the very time, it may be, that the world is making merry, that the Church is gay in her festival attire, the weird figure of the prophet comes across the scene preaching judgment and manifesting pity. This change from sternness to sympathy is not weakness or inconsistency, it is real prophetic strength; this spirit is the source of power with God, and influence over men; the prophet, because he has been so near to God, is driven close to the heart of humanity. In the case of Micah, with his fierce denunciation of wicked rulers, we are in danger of forgetting this, and we may be tempted to think of him as a raving demagogue. Hence it is important to emphasize the fact that he has in his own form that twofold outlook and double spirit which is the essence of the deepest religious experience, the noblest spiritual life. The prophet speaks for God, but he speaks from within the circle of human life, not as a cold outsider.
Our sympathy with men is the direct result of our union with Christ. The first bond of the Christian life is that between our souls and Christ. And upon the strength of that first bond will depend the kind of spirit we show to men. I want to put this quite clearly, because it is the point which distinguishes the true Christian sympathy from every other kind. There are other kinds of sympathy in the world; for example, the instinctive sympathy of the human heart which goes out to a fellow-man in his need. But let that sympathy meet with any rebuff, let it encounter opposition or misunderstanding or ingratitude, and it soon tires and withdraws in disgust. How many times have we heard a saying something like this: “My sympathy was thrown away. I shall never give it again”? Well, the true Christian sympathy can never speak in tones like that. For it does not depend upon men's attitude to itself. It is based upon the love of Christ. We do all for His sake, and so long as the bond between ourselves and Christ remains firm and strong, so long are we under the obligation to show sympathy towards men whatever may be their attitude to us. Our sympathy may be taken advantage of. We may be cheated and deceived. But as surely as we turn to Christ we hear His command to show that same spirit again. Our sympathy is not allowed to tire or fail. It is fed continually from Him.1 [Note: S. M. Berry, Graces of the Christian Character, 121.]
4. Micah's words of denunciation are terribly strong, but there have been many other ages and civilizations than his own of which they have been no more than true. “They crop us,” said a French peasant of the lords of the great Louis' time, “as the sheep crops grass.” Is there nothing of the same with ourselves? While Micah spoke, he had wasted lives and bent backs before him. His speech is elliptic till you see his finger pointing at them. Pinched peasant faces peer between all his words and fill the ellipses. And among the living poor to-day are there not starved and bitten faces-bodies with the blood sucked from them, with the Divine image crushed out of them? We cannot explain all of these by vice. Drunkenness and unthrift do account for much; but how much more is explicable only by the following facts. Many men among us are able to live in fashionable streets and keep their families comfortable only by paying their employees a wage upon which it is impossible for men to be strong or women to be virtuous. Are such employers not using them as their food? They tell us that if they are to give higher wages they must close their business, and cease paying wages at all; and they are right, if they themselves continue to live on the scale they do. As long as many families are maintained in comfort by the profits of businesses in which some or all of the employees work for less than they can nourish and repair their bodies upon, the simple fact is that the one set are feeding upon the other set. It may be inevitable, it may be the fault of the system and not of the individual, it may be that to break up the system would mean to make things worse than ever, but all the same the truth is clear that many families of the middle class, and some of the very wealthiest of the land, are nourished by the waste of the lives of the poor.
Among the most remarkable of the series of tracts, “On Christian Socialism,” was “Cheap Clothes, and Nasty, by Parson Lot” [now republished in Kingsley's Alton Locke], exposing the sweating and slop-selling system, which was at the root of much of the distress in London and the great towns. The opening sentences of this tract were:
“King Ryence, says the legend of King Arthur, wore a paletot trimmed with kings' beards. In the first French Revolution (so Carlyle assures us) there were at Meudon tanneries of human skins. Mammon, at once tyrant and revolutionary, follows both these noble examples-in a more respectable way, doubtless, for Mammon hates cruelty; bodily pain is his devil-the worst evil of which he, in his effeminacy, can conceive. So he shrieks benevolently when a drunken soldier is flogged; but he trims his paletots, and adorns his legs, with the flesh of men and the skins of women, with degradation, pestilence, heathendom, and despair; and then chuckles, self-complacently, over the smallness of his tailor's bills. Hypocrite! straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! What is flogging or hanging, King Ryence's paletot, or the tanneries of Meudon, to the slavery, starvation, waste of life, year-long imprisonment in dungeons narrower and fouler than those of the Inquisition, which goes on among thousands of English clothes-makers at this day?”1 [Note: Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, i. 192.]
Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work-work-work,
Till the stars shine through the roof!
It's oh! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!
Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch-stitch-stitch,
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A Shroud as well as a Shirt.
But why do I talk of Death?
That Phantom of grisly bone,
I hardly fear his terrible shape,
It seems so like my own-
It seems so like my own,
Because of the fasts I keep;
Oh, God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Work, work, work,
Like the Engine that works by Steam!
A mere machine of iron and wood,
That toils for Mammon's sake,
Without a brain to ponder and craze,
Or a heart to feel-and break!1 [Note: Thomas Hood, The Song of the Shirt.]
“The Song of the Shirt” laid hold on him, as Plato sometimes did, and with a firmer grasp. That startling sorrow touched the hearts of thousands, but stamped its image on his like a seal on softened wax, and the impression was seen on his face as if an affliction had visited his home. For weeks after its appearance the pitiful dirge seemed to engross his thoughts and affections. He referred to it from the pulpit, if my memory does not err, and was full of it in conversation. “ ‘The Song of the Shirt,' ” he said, “is one of the best sermons that has been preached for many a day. This lay sermon teaches a great lesson to the Church.”1 [Note: A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of the late John Duncan, 115.]
