I told my wife that we're going to be singing that song and she said something along the lines of, wow, brave choice with the Christmas music already this early. But it's, you know, it's a hymn, so it's not technically Christmas music. Or it is, yeah. Anyway, tonight we're turning to the book of Galatians. We're going to be reading first, the first ten verses of chapter six before we turn to our text in the Old Testament. It's on page 1239 in your pew Bibles. Galatians chapter 6 verses 1 through 10. Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself lest you too be tempted. Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let one, each one, attest his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone, not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load. Let the one who is taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches. Do not be deceived. God is not mocked. For whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. The one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up. So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith. And then we turn to our passage in the Old Testament, Micah chapter 1. This is on page 985 in your Pew Bibles. And I actually see that you have an introduction in your Pew Bibles which pretty much preaches my sermon for me. We'll be reading the first 11 verses of this chapter. The word of the Lord that came to Micah of Moresheth in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. Here are you, peoples, all of you. Pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it, and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple. For behold, the Lord is coming out of his place and he will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth and the mountains will melt under him and the valleys will split open like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place. All this for the transgression of Jacob and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem? Therefore, I will make Samaria a heap in the open country, a place for planting vineyards, and I will pour down her stones into the valley and uncover her foundations. All her carved images will be beaten to pieces. All her wages will be burned with fire. All her idols I will lay waste, for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them, and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return. Thus far, the reading of God's word. Let us come before our God in prayer. Dear Lord, we do marvel at the strength and the power of your word. We do pray that you would be here present among us tonight. Lord, I pray that you would guide my lips, help me to speak truth to your people, open their hearts and their minds, help them to be edified encouraged and strengthened Lord through the preaching of your word. I pray this in your name. Amen. So after the wonderful and very powerful language that we hear in Micah, before we dive into the theme and points of the sermon, I'd like to read you a tweet that I came across. going from very elevated to Twitter. But this is a tweet that I came across in the past few weeks, and you might be somewhat familiar with the content. This is what I saw. Today in chapel, we confess to plants. Together we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt, and sorrow in prayer, offering them to the beings who sustained us. but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life? I can't make this up. I actually read this. It's a tweet that was tweeted by the Union Seminary from New York. And perhaps you've even heard this referenced in sermons in the past as illustrations. It's a pretty hot topic among the OPC pastors these days. But it really tells us some amazing things about how fallen our culture is, about where we are now, that we pray to plants rather than the God who judges, the God who creates, the God who sustains. Well, Micah in his context was not teaching or preaching to a community or a culture that worshipped plants or prayed to plants, but his problem was very similar. It was the problem of idolatry. He was preaching, teaching, prophesying against the idolatry that was present in his culture. This is really the theme. that we're going to explore tonight, this response to this idolatry. In our passage here tonight, Micah reminds his people that God is a powerful and a just God. That's our theme. Micah reminds his people that God is a powerful and a just God. And we're going to be looking first at the timely message of Micah, and then we're going to be looking at the powerful coming of the Lord. And we're going to finish with a just judgment on Israel. So first, the timely message of Micah. I'd like to kind of give you a bird's eye view about the ministry and the times and the prophecy of Micah. Verse 1 starts us out with a very brief overview. It tells us that this is Micah who's speaking. The word of the Lord is coming to Micah of Moresheth. Now, in the scriptures we only encounter Micah One other place for sure, that is in the book of Jeremiah. There's a slight reference that is thought that it could be talking about Micah in the book of First Kings, I believe. But this is the only time that we hear him speaking in his own voice. This is the only time that we hear Micah talking to the people of Israel directly. So we're not very familiar with Micah, very likely. And unfortunately, you know, saying he's from Moresheth doesn't help us much either. Moresheth shows up twice in the scriptures. Once here in Micah, and then once in Jeremiah again. So we have a very insignificant person bringing this word to us in this book. But it's important to see that the word of the Lord came to him. He was a prophet. He was a man, but he was a prophet. He was tasked by God with bringing God's word to the people of Israel. So, another thing we notice is he's not told, or he's not said to be the son of another person. He's not said to be related to anybody famous. He has no family to speak of. He comes from obscurity. He was not important in himself and neither was his personal background or his place. He was a small town prophet with a big message for the nation of Israel. Now we also know his time period as well. He prophesied during the reign of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, the kings of Judah, the southern kingdom. Remember your kings of Israel? Do you have your kings of Israel and Judah memorized? I certainly don't. But when I looked back at 1 Kings, 2 Kings, the history of these kings, I realized that there's a trend among them. First, you have Jotham. He was a good king overall. He brings reform. He trusts in God. but he's marked by a certain weakness, a weakness that will not tear down the altars, it will not tear down the high places of the false gods in his country. And then Ahaz was the exact opposite except for even worse. Not only did he reject God, not only did he turn from God, in fact, he sacrificed his son on the altar of a false god. That's what he's known for. And then Hezekiah. Hezekiah, for the most part, is a very good king, with only occasional slips, occasional places where you sit back and scratch your head and think, what is he doing here? But for the most part, Hezekiah is a good king. Again, weak, but overall a good king. What Micah is wanting to point out is not so much the character of the kings, but the character of the country underneath these kings. This is a time of richness, a time of peace for the most part, but it's also a time of turning away from God, a time of idolatry. The land throughout all these kings reeked with idolatry. So this is the setting that Micah found himself prophesying in, a land filled with idolatry and perversion, to a people who were led by weak and wicked kings. Some of these kings repented, as we see in Jeremiah 26, when Hezekiah listened and heeded Micah's warnings. But on the whole, Micah's words, his prophecies fell on deaf and rebellious ears. So now we know who Micah was and who he ministered to, but what was the purpose of his message? The purpose we see at the tail end of verse 1. His purpose was to call Israel and Judah to repentance. To warn them of the coming judgment if they continue to rebel. We're familiar with this among all the prophets of the Old Testament. They keep beseeching their country. They keep beseeching the nations. Turn before it's too late. Turn. There's destruction and judgment coming. The really fascinating thing, though, is his message is very tailored to two specific entities. We see this in the tail end of verse 1 when he singles out Samaria. This is the capital city of the northern kingdom. And Jerusalem, the capital city of the southern kingdom. He singles them out and he says this prophecy concerns Samaria and Jerusalem. We see him, of course, through Samaria and Jerusalem talking to the entirety of the nations. He's talking to every one of the tribes. But these are the figureheads, the hotbeds of the rebellion that he is prophesying against. We see him focus especially on Judah. This is for good reason. Partway through Micah's ministry as a prophet, his prophecy about Samaria and the northern kingdom was fulfilled. During the reign of evil King Ahaz, that middle king, the northern kingdom led by King Hoshea was led into captivity by the Assyrians. His words in chapter 1 here that we read today, they came true. So, of course, there we see the rebellious land, the rebellious northern kingdom of Israel led into slavery, led into captivity. God's judgment comes down just as Micah said. Well, this makes the message of Micah to Judah even more powerful. As Micah continues his message to his ministry to the people of Judah, They should only have to look back to this beginning prophecy to see, oh, he's telling the truth. This man has power. The Spirit of the Lord is active in this prophet. Remember, he predicted the downfall of the Northern Kingdom. And what happened? The Northern Kingdom was captured, was led into slavery. So theoretically, at least, when they heard Micah, they should have realized Now this was a true prophet carrying the Word of God to them. The second purpose of Micah's message is seen in verse 2. It says, Micah's message is not just to the people of Israel and Judah. but it is, in fact, for the people of the world as well. Micah calls the people to listen, to hear, to pay attention. This message is for all men, the entire earth, not just for the chosen people of God. But Micah's not calling on the world to come and see what happens to a rebellious nation. He's not just saying, grab your popcorn, watch God take care of this idolatrous nation. Micah is not merely calling on the earth to attend a spectator sport, a divine smackdown of the nation of Israel. No. Instead, Micah calls the earth to come and see what God will do to all those who sin against Him. God is a witness against them. That's literally what the verse says, pay attention oh earth and all that is in it and let the Lord God be a witness against you. Micah calls the earth to come because they are next. This is their warning. Israel is the example. If you continue in idolatry, What happened to Israel is going to happen to the earth. Now notice that God is in his holy temple when he says this, the Lord from his holy temple is coming to be a witness against you. That means God is in his holy temple, pure, holy, undefiled. And the earth, in contrast, is the opposite. The earth is stained. is wicked, is unholy in God's sight. This is really a judicial hearing in which Micah is calling the earth to see what God does in His righteous judgment to those who sin against Him, those who don't repent and turn to Him. Well, his third purpose in the entirety of the book is to point to Christ. This summer when I was on my internship, I was talking with an older fellow from a loosely reformed church in the area, and he said, you know, there's this thing I've noticed. The pastors who come to visit our church, their church didn't have a pastor, he said, you know, the pastors who come to visit our church, they always try to make every passage about Christ. It's like there's some Old Testament passages where Christ doesn't even show up. What do you think about that? It's like, well, I think that's pretty good, actually. I hope that brings some reform to your church. But it is something that we have to carefully examine. Every passage in the Old Testament, every word points forward to the coming Christ. Now, of course, we don't see Jesus' name here in the book of Micah. There's no prophecy on such and such a day, Jesus Christ will be born and there'll be wise men. No, but what this book does do is it points to Christ in a variety of ways. First, by contrast, it says some very fearful things about rebellion and destruction. When we hear about rebellion, when we hear about judgment, our thoughts should go immediately to Christ. Because we are rebellious people. The only way we can escape judgment is through Christ. But also, quite interestingly, I think, this is actually why I chose this book. I really wanted to dig into some of these passages. There are passages in this book which are very clearly prophecies about the coming Christ. We look at Micah 5, verse 2. But you, O Bethlehem, Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler. of Israel, whose coming forth is from old, from ancient days. A prophecy pointing directly to Christ, the coming ruler, coming from the town of Bethlehem. And then, of course, we also see prophecies about forgiveness. Micah 7, verse 18. who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance. He does not retain his anger forever because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us. He will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. Forgiveness comes only through Christ. Micah points forward to the need for forgiveness, and thereby he points to the one who comes to wash away our sins with his blood. So now we come to our second point, the coming of the Lord. The coming of the Lord. In these next two verses, we see the coming of the Lord described by Micah. The first thing we see is the raw power He says, behold, the Lord is coming out of his place and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth and the mountains will melt under him. And the valleys will split open like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place. The first thing we see here really is the raw power of God. Micah uses anthropomorphic language here. to describe God and his wrath to his audience. In other words, he puts it in terms that we easily understand. He's saying God's coming down. He's going to flatten the earth. The earth that you think is so indestructible is going to be like wax before a flame. What he's really saying is you can't fathom how powerful, how dismaying God really is. Remember that Israel is intimately familiar with their idols alone. They're comfortable with the idols they control. Their gods never show destructive power as Jehovah was about to do. So Micah's message is a terrible one, a message of a God who is coming in anger, anger that cannot be controlled, who cannot be appeased. By contrast to the idols that Israel knows and loves, Micah describes a God who's on the move. He's leaving his place in verse 3. He's coming from heaven to walk among his people. Remember for a minute the first time Israel dabbled in idolatry. The golden calf. Moses was up there on that mountain talking with God and You know, they really didn't have anybody watching them, so of course they got into trouble. And they started desiring a God who they could touch, a God who they could see, a God who they could control, really. The people of Israel wanted a God who walked among them, not one who's in heaven ruling them through Moses. Remember the result? God came in judgment. He was ready to destroy all of them. God does not stand for idolatry. God does not stand for those who want to replace Him. But now God comes in much the same way that He came before. He's coming to be with His people. But it's not a coming of companionship. It's not a coming of fellowship. It's a coming of punishment, of chastisement. He's coming in all his fearful might. He's coming from heaven and the earth cannot stand before his awesome might. And we don't have mountains around here. It takes a day's drive or so to find mountains. But they're pretty significant. towering, massive, strong pieces of geography. What's the most powerful thing that we can imagine in nature? A hurricane or an earthquake. The raw destructive power of a tsunami maybe. None of these can level a mountain. None of these can destroy a mountain completely. What has this destructive force? The answer, of course, from Micah here is God. God alone has this destructive force. God alone. And unfortunately for them, he also is angry. He's coming in anger. So what do we take from this description? Do we just sit back and say, well, thank goodness God is on our side. Thank goodness we're safe, right? Because we don't have idols. I mean, we're part of the OPC. We're safe, right? Brothers and sisters, we cannot grow too comfortable with our God. We should never assume that we are free from the sin of idolatry especially. We should never assume that we're free from the sin of rebellion as well. This warning is for us too. It's first to Israel. It's first to Judah. But it's for us too. God came for Israel as a judge. God came to Judah in judgment as well. We should look at these examples of divine justice and we should tremble. We serve a God who will not be replaced by anything. We serve a God who created and who can destroy. In a way, it would almost be easier to say, yes, I serve a plant. That's my God. I pray to a plant because they sustain us. Because you can control a plant. You can uproot a plant if you don't like it. But you can't uproot God. You cannot control God. We often serve idols without realizing it, brothers and sisters. comes in a variety of ways. And we see our nation as a mountain that can never be shaken. But God is the leveler of mountains. We shouldn't trust in our politicians. We shouldn't trust in the system. Instead, we should trust in the God who sustains and governs all his creatures and all their actions. We look to our lives and we realize that there's idols all over the place. We trust in money. We trust in entertainment, in success, in the lives that we've built, the houses that we've poured time and money into. But brothers and sisters, we cannot rely on these things. We serve a God who is coming. The Lord is coming and if your trust is in anything other than the Lord, If anything brings you comfort more than the Lord, if anything seems safer to you than the Lord, God will judge you. But now we see this judgment played out against Israel. This is our third point, the judgment on Israel. In verse 5, we see Micah again addressing both Samaria and Jerusalem. He says, all this for the transgression of Jacob and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria, the capital city of the Northern Kingdom? And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem, the capital city of the Southern Kingdom? He asks, what is the sin of Jacob? What is the sin of Israel? It is Samaria. It is the concentration of rebellion found in Samaria. The rulers who turn the nation into idolatry turn the nation towards idolatry. It's the place of false worship that stands in contrast to the temple in Jerusalem. And then he asks, what is the sin of Judah? What is the high place of Judah and really all of the house of Israel? It is Jerusalem. Now this is a fascinating caveat that I'm not going to spend too much time on, but Micah is the master of a pun. He uses puns throughout his book, and it's really fun to examine the different ways that he talks, using names of cities, using various geographical things as well to point out the humor and the irony in God's coming as well. But here we see this. In verse 5, what is the high place of Judah? Now normally we think of high places and we think of, you know, the altars that were constructed for the false gods of old Israel. But notice verse 3 when we compare these two. For behold, the Lord is coming out of his place, and he will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. The mountains will melt under him. The high places and the mountains are very parallel. And we have to understand that there's a dual meaning here. He's saying God is powerful, of course, over his nature, over his creation. But he's also powerful over the idolatry, the false worship that is taking place in Jerusalem, his holy city. The language of high places reminds us of the idolatry we see in Israel. and corruption of the holy nation, and corruption of the worship to Jehovah. Well, in verses 6 and 7, we see Micah focus powerfully on the coming judgment of Samaria. Remember, this is because first he preaches, he prophesies to Samaria, the first nation to fall. Judgment would come to the cities of Samaria in the destruction of everything that they trusted in their wealth. Their comfort and their strength would be wiped out, destroyed. God is making the point here that he is more powerful than anything man can construct. Along with this, however, we see the idols and the marks of false worship would be decimated. Not only is God more powerful than these rebellious humans and their cities and their strongholds, he's also infinitely more powerful And then the false gods, small g gods made by human hands. We see this of course in the eventual fate of Israel. 2 Kings 17 we see Shalmaneser, the king of Assyria coming in and taking the people of the northern kingdom into exile, into captivity. So God through Micah is saying, where are your gods? Where are the things that you trust in? Who do you trust in? All gods made by men are useless. They were paid for by the wages of sin, but the wages of sin is death and destruction. Notice the irony here in verse seven. All her wages will be burned with fire, and all her idols I will lay to waste, for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them. and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return." Not to get too graphic here, brothers and sisters, but he's talking about the shame that these idols, that these false gods were rooted in. What is the source of our God? In seminary, we like to talk about the aseity of God, the self-existence of God. Our God is a holy God who doesn't need anything else to exist. But these idols that Israel raised up come from very, very sordid places, sordid sources. And he says, look, from shame you paid for the construction of these idols. And they will be taken away. They will be crushed. and they will go to support more shame." And we see the folly and the end of idolatry clearly in the New Testament. In Galatians 6, God is not mocked. For whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. But the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. The one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. God is not mocked by these idols. He has never been mocked. The Israelites tried to replace God with their own strength, their own rebellion, but God mocks them. God comes to show them who is actually in control. The really fascinating thing about this is that Idolatry, though we don't serve, though we don't have little idols in our house, idolatry is present in pretty much every aspect of our lives. Every time we rebel against God, every time we decide not to follow God's word, it's idolatry. It's putting ourselves above God. It's saying, who is God here? Who's making the rules? Anything other than following God's law, it's our rules that we're following. So brothers and sisters, the warning that was to Samaria, to Judah, is a warning that we need to heed today. And you might say, are you going to leave us here in gloom and doom here at the end of this passage? No. In the rest of Micah, we see cycles of doom followed by hope, despair followed by joy. There's always hope after judgment is promised. God is a fearsome God who will judge the rebellious unrepentant, but he is also a faithful God who forgives. Brothers and sisters, we are called to repent. Look to the power of God over Israel, his power to judge, to chastise, but also look to his power to redeem. Look to the one he promised. Turn to God in fear, yes, but also turn to him in hope, in repentance. When you see idolatry in your life, turn from it, flee from it, repent from it, but also trust in Christ. There was, sadly, not very much hope for Israel, for Judah. They would face captivity, they would face exile. But for us, we have hope. Hope in the blood of Christ who died for us. Who saves us from our sins, from the guilt that we bear. The one who says, I will take your iniquity and I will cast it into the depths of the sea. That's the one we serve. Jesus Christ. Trust in Christ. Trust in the one whose blood is not useless, like the idols are. Trust in Christ, the God who is not handmade. Christ whose coming is guaranteed. Christ whose coming guarantees his people hope and forgiveness through his blood. Trust in him, brothers and sisters. Let's pray. Dear God, we come to you tonight and we thank you for these words of power that we read in Micah. We thank you for the hope that you give us. We don't need to fear the destruction that came on this nation. Lord, we thank you for the one who saved us, who brought us close to you. We pray that you would help us to trust more and more in him, to look to him in fear, but also to look to him in hope. We thank you for your son, dear Lord. Pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.