Please open your Bibles if you have not already opened them to Micah where the reading was just given. We'll continue to follow along there. Let me ask you to pray with me. Before I ask you to pray let me just say this. It's an honor for me to be invited to come to the First Congregational Church of Woodstock. I've known of your church for a number of years and the faithful witness that you have. I bring you greetings from your brothers and sisters in Williston, Vermont at Christ Memorial Church. I thank you for the privilege, and we will look to the Lord to minister to us all today. Let us, let us pray. Our Father in heaven, we call upon you in this hour that you would glorify yourself by causing your own word to go out and accomplish your own desire. We claim that promise from you. We submit ourselves to your word, and we ask you to be at work in our midst. We pray that the Holy Spirit would be at work in this room, causing hearts to respond to your word the way you want hearts to respond. We did to hear from You our Father. We confess together that this is the word of God and not the words of men. I pray that You would open our understanding of Your word today so that we might receive from You the life that's in the Scriptures. I pray for that in Jesus' name, Amen. When I was a young single man in the ministry, I had an occasion from time to time to live with church families. And one family I lived with in particular left an impression on me. They were very godly and sincere, generous people. But I was struck by the way that this mother in particular, who had teenage children, how fiercely she could deal with her children. I could be in the kitchen with this woman having a talk. I was involved in the youth ministry at their church, you know, suburban Chicago church, and we'd be having a sweet talk and then she would spy somebody left a sock on the floor in the kitchen, and this house, this big old house, had a whole house intercom in it. So she would lean over and push the button, and she would say, just about like this, she would say, somebody left a sock in the kitchen and better get down here and pick it up before I get to knock your block off. She just, she freaked me out how fiercely she went at it. And that wasn't, she could shift gears so fast, but that wasn't a one-time event. That happened from time to time. She was riding herd on those kids that she was living with there. It was amazing to me. I'll tell you there was one takeaway that I had from all that. I heard those intercom messages. Sometimes I was in the room, sometimes I wasn't. I made sure that I never left a mess anywhere in that house. I knew how she felt about those transgressions. I saw how fiercely she dealt with them, and I didn't want to face her wrath. And the fact is, I saw how she handled her own kids. And I thought, what in the world would she do with me if I broke the rules? Well, I think something like that's going on. in Micah. The Lord is showing his people what he hates for them to do, and how fiercely he plans to deal with the mess that they've made in his house, and so the message is for his children. They need to love what he loves and hate what he hates, but the message also slops over onto the nation's who are listening to make them think if God would deal with his own people this way what in the world would he do with me if I broke his law. Now Micah is announcing the coming justice of God. He shows us that God is more concerned with the sins of his own people than he is with the sins of the surrounding nations. So his own people really ought to share his dislike for their sins. In our text we're going to hear the first installment of Micah's message, but I'm hoping you can already begin to ask yourself the question, do I know what it is that God hates and do I understand how fiercely God deals with it? Do I share his hatred of sin and have I responded to sin, my sin the way God does. Do I really understand how he has in fact dealt with my sin and what my response to that ought to be? I hope we can seek some of those answers from Micah today. First I need to ask you to let me to indulge you or you indulge me I guess I'm saying because we're launching into what I hope will be three sermons from the book of Micah, Lord willing. and we're just parachuting in. Let me frame the book of Micah a little bit. We're not even going to be able to cover the whole book. It's seven chapters. Micah is a prophet who prophesied during the reigns of kings like Jotham and Ahaz and Hezekiah. They're named there in verse one around 742 BC going forward to 686 BC, the time of the exile. And so the book of Micah is a series of prophetic messages. Micah came from south of Jerusalem. It's a rural area. He prophesied mostly in the south. He was a contemporary of prophets you've heard of, Isaiah and Hosea. His message sounds a lot like Isaiah's message. And in his day, the nation of Israel was divided, north and south. So Israel, they went by the name of Israel in the north. They went by the name of Judah in the south. Both sides, taking the nation as a whole, both sides were in covenant violation. They were both breaking God's law and both were soon going to face military attack and defeat and exile. First, we know from the history, first Israel was going to fall to the Assyrians and then some years later Judah would fall to the Babylonians. So Micah's preaching in that context. The overall theme of the book, if I had to sum it up, is that justice prevails through a coming king. In other words, the covenant unfaithfulness of Israel that was evidenced by things like their unjust oppression, their greed, and especially their corrupted worship, that it wouldn't go unpunished, but that God's covenant faithfulness would prevail in justice, so he would restore a remnant in glory through the king he was going to send. So justice prevails through a coming king. In order to read our way through, Micah, you need to know that it's really divided, those seven chapters are really divided into three messages, three oracles. And each one, when taken in its totality, warns the nation that God's judgment is coming because of their covenant breaking. And then each one, as it indicts for sin, then foretells the coming of the Messiah who would accomplish God's salvation for them. Now here's one more framing thing I need to tell you for us to just leap into Micah. You need to know that the Bible teaches us that the prophets, all of them, they show us Christ. In Luke 24, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus explained to his disciples the things concerning himself in all the scriptures. You may have read that. and throughout his ministry Jesus kept saying things like that. In John 5 he said the scriptures they all bear witness of me. He said he said Moses wrote about me. So the book of Micah is no exception to that rule. In the whole of Micah there is going to be the revelation of God's coming salvation through Jesus Christ for his people. Now sometimes that revelation will be explicit and in other parts it's just implicit but it's really there. But it all shows us, it all shows us Christ. And I think we're going to see that this morning, just beginning. So here's the theme of the message we're going to take from just the first 16 verses of Micah, just part of the first oracle. That's all we're going to cover today. And here's the theme. Since the Lord will pour out his wrath on all wickedness, starting with his own people through Christ on the cross, his saved people, ought to hate our own sins more than others. Now let's look at the text. It's already been read that this is the word of the Lord that came to Micah the prophet. These are not Micah's words that he made up. This is how God speaks to his people. He tells the prophet, the prophet tells his people. That's how God speaks to his people today, except that what God has told the prophets has now all been committed to writing for us. And so we get what God says from his written word. But this isn't stuff that Micah made up. This is God speaking to him. So what does he say in the verses that we already read? He says that justice is going to fall on Israel. He says for Samaria, if you look there in verse 2, where he says, hear, O peoples, and listen, O earth. He means the whole world. I want everybody to listen to this, he says. Now the prophecy is spoken to Israel, both in the north and Judah in the south. God is predicting judgment on his own people, but he wants the whole world to hear about it. He wants the nations to tremble at the way he deals with his own people. So what does he say in verses 3 and 4 as was read? He says that he's coming himself. He says, I'm coming. It's meant to strike fear into the hearts of Israel. God is coming personally, and not in a good way, not in the way you want the Lord to come. His presence in your midst is supposed to be a blessing if you're an Israelite. But he's saying, you've forsaken that. Now he's coming in anger and judgment. So what does he say he'll do? He says he'll tread the high places. That's kind of a double entendre, because the mountaintops or the high places, and that's a place of strength. It's military strength, military superiority in the high ground. So when it says God is walking on the mountaintops, it means that what is high and strong to you is low and weak to him and he'll just step on it. It's nothing to him. But there's another subtle shade of meaning because the high places are where Israel had committed her idolatries. Pagan altars were set up on the high places. Pagan sacrifices were made there. And again and again, Israel was guilty of dabbling in the religion of the nations around them. So God says, no more of this. I'm going to crush what you've raised up on your high places. It's an almost cartoonish picture. Mountains melt like wax. Valleys are split. That is God's terrifying judgment. And he says he's coming because of the sins of Jacob. Now he's coming for both North and South. He's coming for Samaria, their exhibit A of the sins in the North. And then he's coming for Jerusalem, their exhibit B for the sins in the South. Jerusalem has become Judah's high place, a place of false worship. So the first indictment of sin in the book of Micah is for idolatry and false worship. That's what they were guilty of and just listen to the judgments that he's promising to bring. Again we read verses six and seven already but what was described there you can look at it and see it's a reversal of fortunes that's going on. So big, beautiful Samaria will be a heap of stones. This is poetic justice. The city will wind up being a place where people plant vineyards. The strength of the city, that's its foundations, will be crumbled to pieces. Everything's turned on its head. And their carved images, their idols, those will be smashed to bits. and all the money that they stockpiled will be burnt up. He says that all their money had been bought with money that was earned through temple prostitution. That's the wages of a harlot that he talks about there, the fee of a prostitute, and so he says now that money is going to go to somebody else, the conquerors who are coming for you, and they will spend it on their own prostitutes. That's poetic justice for Israel, for Judah. The same thing in Judah in the south, that God is angry over the sins of his people and intends to deal fiercely with them. If you look at verses 8 and 9 we haven't read yet, this is where the prophet speaks up in his own voice. Look at verse 8, I'll read. For this I will lament and wail. I will go stripped and naked I will make lamentation like the jackals and mourning like the ostriches for her wound is incurable and it has come to Judah it has reached the gate of my people to Jerusalem. See this prophet is being called upon to deliver such devastating news that it makes him stop and personally grieve about what he's hearing. He's from the South, so he's particularly grieving for Jerusalem. This comes close to home for him. He doesn't really want to deliver this message. That's why he says, I will lament and wail and go stripped and naked. He'll act out his grief in a sort of prophetic enactment, a living parable. He says I'll howl like a jackal in sadness because the incurable wound has reached even to my precious Jerusalem. Now in verses 10 to 16 what follows, we haven't read that yet, Let me read and then let me explain what's going on here. It says tell it not in gath, weep not at all, in Bethlehephra roll yourselves in the dust. Pass on your way, inhabitants of Shafir, in nakedness and shame. The inhabitants of Za'anan do not come out. The lamentation of Beth Edzel shall take away from you its standing place. For the inhabitants of Maroth wait anxiously for good, because disaster has come down from the Lord to the gate of Jerusalem. Harness the steeds to the chariots, inhabitants of Lakish. It was the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion, for in you were found the transgressions of Israel. Therefore you shall give parting gifts to Moreshep Gath. The houses of Akzib shall be a deceitful thing to the kings of Israel. I will again bring a conqueror to you, inhabitants of Marashah. The glory of Israel shall come to Adullam. Make yourselves bald and cut off your hair for the children of your delight. Make yourselves as bald as the eagle for they shall go from you into exile." Now what I just read is in Hebrew a very sophisticated bit of wordplay. Micah's detailing what the whole nation is going to experience. It's going to be a few years away, but it's coming. And he wants them to know that it's real. And so he's talking about all these surrounding cities and towns, all these places that he names. and what they need to expect is going to happen when the Assyrians show up, and they sack the north, and then later when the Babylonians show up, and they sack the south, and they carry off into exile people like Daniel, and Shadrach, and Meshach, and Abednego, you know those guys. That's what Micah foresees. and I said this is wordplay it's hard to catch in our Bibles. He wants them to feel the pain so what he does is he uses the names of their towns and he invokes either the meaning of that name or else he uses some of the names of their towns to say something that rhymes with their town, or that somehow goes along with what the town name means in some way, to different ways of describing the doom that's coming for them. So if we were to try to put that in our language, you can imagine that somebody was coming, the Lord's message was coming to us, and the message was, oh, Vermont's going down. You're going into exile in Vermont. He says, he says, well, let me just run through these. Tell it not in gath. Gath rhymes with tell. You're not going to want to hear me saying what gath wants me to say. Roll in the dust in Beth Ophrah. Beth Ophrah means house of dust. Go out in exile from Za'anon. Za'anon means go out. Be naked and ashamed in Shafir. Shafir means beautiful and pleasant. Mourn in Beth Edzel. That one probably means the nearby town no longer stands. Writhe in bitter pain in Meroth. Meroth means bitter. Harness a team to flee from Lakish. It sounds like the word for team, and so on. Receive parting gifts in Moresheth. Moresheth sounds like betrothed. So the idea is you're coming to a wedding party and you want to give parting gifts. The parting gifts you're going to get is carried off into exile. That's going to be your parting gift. Be deceived in Aqzib. So here's the glory of Israel will flee to Adullam. The glory of Israel in this context means the nobles, all your princes, they're going to run and hide in the caves of Adullam like David once had to hide in the caves of Adullam, and be shaven, be bald in mourning for your children. So like I say if you wanted to modernize that for us or localize it, and God was sending that message to us, he might have sent the prophet to say I'm warning you, you will be laid low in Ludlow. There'll be nothing fair in Fairhaven. Your castle won't help you in Castleton. You'll be killed in Killington. You'll be stuck in a rut in Rutland. It's going to be the pits in Pittsburgh. You'll be poor in Richmond. You'll lose your will in Williston. You'll be buried from Middlebury to Waterbury to St. Johnsbury. Your stock will crash in Woodstock. Would that start to sink in on you? There's disaster coming in. It's local. It's next door. It's personal. It's here. Now, that is the end of the first part of Micah's oracle. And that's a dark place to stop, I admit, because the explicit good news hasn't been proclaimed yet. But I'm going to tell you that you can already see the light from here if you know how to look. And I would not faithfully have preached this portion of God's Word if I didn't point you to the light that's in it, how these things point us to Jesus Christ our Savior. Here it is in a nutshell. The good news is that all this horrible pending judgment that's represented here, all of the just demands of God's law, all of this wrath due for sin is going to fall on Jesus Christ. So his people can be delivered from that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This passage is one of those that cries out for a deliverer who could save us from this, who could save us from the wrath of God. So Micah's oracle is a witness to the world of God's justice. It displays God's justice to the surrounding nation as God deals fiercely with the sins of his own people. And it is intended, as we said from the outset, to say to them and to us, if God would deal with his own children this way, what would he do with me if I were guilty of breaking his law? Romans chapter 3, you know, describes Christ's death on the cross as a display of God's righteousness. It's a display of God's justice that Jesus Christ publicly was portrayed as a propitiation, a propitiation of God's wrath He stood for us and hung on that cross so he could absorb the wrath of God as our sin bearer, the wrath we deserve for committing sins like these. Jesus Christ interceded for us. His death manifests God's righteousness, as it says in Romans. It's righteousness that's seen apart from the law, which means it's apart from personal law keeping. That's good news for covenant breakers. but it's witnessed by the law and the prophets. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Everybody deserves what Micah's preaching about. Judah deserved it. Israel deserved it. The nations deserve it. We deserve it. But believers are justified through faith in Christ, through faith in the redemption of Christ's death on the cross. Yes, God is angry about sin, but Jesus Christ has stepped in as a propitiation and God is satisfied. His blood satisfied God's wrath for your sin, dear one, for your sin in Christ. That's why Romans is able to say to us, God offered up Jesus on that cross so that he could be just That is, he would be shown to be perfectly just in punishing sin. He never lets sin go. He always punishes sin fiercely. But that he can also be the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. The only way God could be just and the justifier is if Jesus stands in our place and bears that wrath and pays that penalty and suffers that judgment that we deserve. So what you're seeing in Micah is the same thing you're hearing in Isaiah 53 about the suffering Savior. Jesus is the one who suffered this very reversal of fortunes that Micah prophesied. He stepped in. Jesus entered into Micah's lament. Jesus was the one who was stripped naked the one who throughout the days of his flesh he offered up prayers with loud crying and tears. He entered into that anguish on our behalf. He's the one that left the glories of heaven to walk the earth with no place to lay his head. Just as Samaria was going to be ruined and be turned from a city to a wilderness, Jesus entered into the wilderness for us as Jerusalem was going to be stricken with an incurable wound, Jesus took the incurable wound to himself. All this stuff that Micah portrays, it fell on Jesus as God fiercely dealt with his people's sin. This is how God fiercely deals with sin. He suffered the stroke that's due to idolaters who replaced the glory of God with an image made with their own hands. It's for our sake that Jesus endured the wrath of God coming down, God treading the high places and trampling idols underfoot, melting the mountains, all that wrath Jesus bore in himself in order to establish justice for his own people, in order for him both to pay that sin debt and to establish his own in true righteousness. Oh, listen to me, I don't know you this morning, but if there's anybody here who's hearing these words and if your heart is moved to embrace the one and only remedy for sinners, I want to call on you to come to faith in Christ, to repent and believe the gospel. If you're not a believer in Jesus Christ today, I want to call on you, I want to soberly warn you about a judgment that is yet to come. First Peter reminds us that it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God, which it did at the cross. And if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? If the righteous is scarcely saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner? So the day is coming and coming soon when there will be a final fulfillment of what Micah predicted here, because the Lord Jesus himself will come. He will come and he will tread the mountaintops and the earth will quake and the stones will melt and everything will be destroyed. He will himself cast into the lake of fire every person who has remained stubborn against his call. He will on that day have no pity. There won't be any mercy on that day. He will impose the fate that's described here without remorse. So if you're not in Christ by faith today, I call on you to heed the offer of mercy that's in play right now. It's in play today. Today is the day of salvation. Will you receive the free offer of the gospel today? Come to Christ and be saved. I plead with you. But what is the right way for a believer to apply what Micah has shown us? If I had to put it in a nutshell, I would say this, in view of Christ's redemption, in view of the threatened judgment, and in view of the judgment that fell on Christ, the right response is to look to your own repentance rather than the sins of the world. Learn from the fact that judgment begins with the household of God. God has always been more concerned about the sins of his own people than with the sins of the surrounding nations. Jesus had a lot more to say about hypocrisy and wickedness in Israel than he did about the sins of the rest of the Roman Empire, about which he said very little. Jesus himself reminded us in Matthew not to be those who see the speck in someone else's eye, and do not see the log that's in our own eye, right? How can you say to your brother let me take the speck out of your eye when there's a log in your own eye? Hypocrite. First take the log out of your own eye. I think this teaching is well illustrated in our portion of Micah. Yes, the surrounding nations are wicked, but God starts with the wickedness of Israel. And that's the way it is to be for us as Christians today. Of course we're surrounded by wickedness. Our country is wracked by violence and hatred and division and injustice and general immorality, sexual immorality. Should we hate those things? Yeah, we should hate those things. Yes. We do hate them, but we should not fall into the self-righteous and hypocritical posture of railing against the sins of other people and not taking a look in the mirror. To the extent that we tolerate sin in our own lives, we have no leg to stand on in criticizing our culture. More to the point, God hasn't called us to criticize sin. He's called us to repent from sin and to preach the gospel to the world, right? Our world, you might know, thinks Christians are those who see themselves as morally superior. Looking down their noses at others, they think a Christian is smug and self-righteous. And I have to wonder why they think that. The gospel doesn't support an attitude like that. And I just wonder if we've contributed to drawing that cartoon of Christianity. I wonder if our outrage over various acts of hate that we see in the news is really expressed from a morally superior posture looking down on such awful people. I think humility demands that we continue to acknowledge ourselves as the sinners and the beggars that we are. So the fact that God deals with the sins of his people first should completely humble you because there but for the grace of God go you. It's only the grace of God shown to you in the death and resurrection of Christ where God did deal first with the sins of his own people. It's only that that separates you from the worst of what you see on the internet. Only grace separates you from them and you didn't come up with that on your own. It's all a gift of God. Now just to take this application a little bit deeper, however, that's a little bit general. If you're gonna look at your own sins, that means you have to look to tear down your own idols. Idolatry was the big deal in this first chapter. That's what God was after, the high places. A fierce display of wrath against corrupt worship and idolatry. We need to know as believers that on account of the sin that remains in us, we're still prone to give our hearts to idols of various kinds. I wonder if you understand your own tendency toward idolatry. It was the bane of Israel in Micah's day. It was the target of Jesus when he preached the gospel to the rich young ruler. And it remains a real threat to you. I wonder if you see how easily you lean into idolatry. It's very subtle and deceptive. See, it'd be easy to root out the idols if they were all statues, engraven images that we made. You could just throw those in the trash. That's pretty easy to do. But what is an idol really? It is a false object of devotion. And it's therefore something that competes for the single-minded devotion to the Lord that he wants from us in Christ. So if you're looking for your idols in order to root them out and put them in the trash, you have to step back and ask what are you devoted to? What is your passion? What occupies your mind? What occupies your time? And you have to be careful because objects of false devotion are not necessarily intrinsically wicked things. I'd say not even usually. Usually they're things that in and of themselves may be perfectly commendable, good things, but they're idols because they steal your devotion to the Lord. So your job and your money can be your idol. Nothing wrong with jobs and money. Your looks can be your idol. Your retirement can be your idol. Your own children can be your idol. Your health can be your idol. Christ has died on the cross to bear God's wrath against Our idolatry. God doesn't want to share his glory with another. So shall you, shall I not therefore hate idolatry as he hates it? I think that's a clean takeaway from Micah this morning, chapter one. God hates idolatry and so must we. So don't give yourself a pass on that. Pursue that holiness without which the Bible says no one sees God. So I want to appeal to you, my dear brothers and sisters of Woodstock, Micah has brought us good news after all. The God who desires our fully devoted worship has acted decisively on our behalf through Christ to secure that devotion. He has sent his son to die on the cross for our sins and to rise from the dead to give us new life, new and everlasting life, hearts made new, hearts oriented toward him. So may God give us the grace more and more by faith in Christ and by the Holy Spirit to turn from sin and worship him with all our hearts. For Jesus' sake, let us pray. Oh, Father in heaven, I thank you for the sober word from Micah this morning. And thank you for Jesus, our sin bearer, our wrath bearer, who turned aside this judgment for us, that we might live and worship you. Make it so in us, I pray, our Father in Jesus, our Lord's name, amen.