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MICAH CHAPTER 4
The establishment of Christ’s kingdom, Mic_4:1,2; the peace of it, Mic_4:3-5. The restoration, Mic_4:6-10, and victory of the church, Mic_4:11-13.
But: this particle, which ushers in the following promise, doth also bid us look to somewhat before spoken, of a very different complexion; that was news of a total and a long-continued desolation, but this is of a happy restitution, which doth refer both to a temporal deliverance out of Babylon’s captivity, and to a spiritual deliverance out of ignorance, superstition, and all other ways of false worship. This latter is the principal, the former is typical, and so shall we consider them.
The last days; or the latter days, at the expiring of the seventy years’ captivity, (near two hundred years from Micah’s time,) as type of the days of the Messiah’s kingdom, which are most usually called the last days.
The mountain of the house of the Lord; the city Jerusalem; or, more particularly, the mountain on which the temple did stand, called the house of the Lord; the hieroglyphic of the church of Christ in gospel times.
Shall be established; literally, and in the type, fulfilled when the second temple was built by the Jews returned out of captivity. Spiritually, and in the antitype, accomplished when Christ did establish his church by the preaching of the gospel, and laid the foundations of it so that the gates of hell should never prevail against it, and made it this promise.
It shall be exalted above the hills; as the mountain or hill on which the temple stood was by this honoured above other mountains and hills, so shall it, after desolation and reproach of seventy years, be honoured with the temple rebuilt upon it for God’s true worship, whereas on other hills the heathens worship idols. So the gospel church and the way of worship to God shall excel all modes of religion.
People; the Gentiles as antitype, those who came up with Israel out of Babylon, said to be servants and maids, Ezr_2:65, above seven thousand three hundred and thirty-seven, many, if not all, of them proselyted to the Jewish religion, and a type, as well as first-fruits, of the Gentiles to be converted in the times of the Messiah. This number we are sure of; as for that Josephus reports of four thousand and seventy four of a mixed multitude, we look on with no more credit given than to his report of four million six hundred and twenty-eight thousand of Judah and Benjamin, Antiq. lib. 11. cap. 4.
Shall flow unto it; come in freely, continually, and in multitudes, which in the type was fulfilled, partly at the return out of Babylon, and partly in after-days when Darius Hystaspes favoured the Jews and encouraged them, as Josephus reports, Antiq. lib. II. cap. 4, consonant with Ezr_6:3-12; and we have reason to believe that God so disposed Darius’s mind to favour them, that it might occasion some to embrace the Jewish religion. But all this type was eminently fulfilled in the conversion of those multitudes we read of brought in to Christ by the preaching of the gospel in the apostolical times.