For this morning's scripture lesson, we are beginning a study in the Old Testament book of Micah. Hosea, Joel, Amos, Jonah, Micah, Nahum. It's somewhere there in the Minor Prophets. I'll give you a moment to look up Micah chapter 1. And I anticipate this study will last for 10 or so weeks. But it is a particularly valuable, I think, as a follow-up to our recent study in the Ten Commandments and the moral law of God. as Micah addresses himself to those who profess to know God, but whose lives do not line up. Micah chapter one. 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. Hear, 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 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 is 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 shall be beaten to pieces, all her wages shall be burned with fire, and 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. 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 to the gate of my people to Jerusalem. Tell it not in gaff. Weep not at all. In Bethleafra, roll yourselves in the dust. Pass on your way, inhabitants of Shaphir, in nakedness and shame. The inhabitants of Zionan do not come out. The lamentation of Bethesda shall take away from you its standing place. For the inhabitants of Meroth wait anxiously for good, because disaster has come down from the Lord to the gate of Jerusalem. I will again bring a conqueror to you, inhabitants of Moreshah. The glory of Israel shall come to a dullum. 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." Here ends our reading. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, great and holy King, Who are we that we should be permitted to hear and to handle such a holy thing as your word? Father, we ask that we would do it in no trivial way, no fleeting way like your people of old did, but that we might lay to heart the warnings of your prophets, that we who are in covenant with you through Christ Jesus might consider our privileges even more holy and our transgressions even more awful. We pray, Father, that you would convict us as we need to be convicted and instruct us as we need to be instructed from this chapter this morning. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. What is sin? Some of our children who know the shorter catechism or those of you who have gotten as far as question 14 could perhaps give the standardized answer to that question. Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. Now that's a very succinct and very accurate definition of sin and I don't dispute it at all. But sin is much more than that in scripture. Sin is also a provocation of judgment. Sin is also the cause of human misery. Sin is also an offense against God. Sin is also a defilement. Sin is also an infection. Sin is the reason also for Micah's ministry and the ministry of other prophets like him. Look, if you would, please, at verse 5 of the chapter that we have read and see why it is that God's judgment is coming and why it is that Micah has been raised up to explain those judgments and to prosecute the covenant claims of Israel's God against God's people. All this, he says, is for the transgression of Jacob and for the sins of the house of Israel. Well, before we look more closely at the judgment for sin that God is bringing through Micah in this chapter, we need to deal with the background that's alluded to in verse 1 of our reading so that we know the situation. Micah 1, verse 1 says that this is 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. God's judgment against sin and God's word about sin comes in this particular context where we meet it this morning. It comes through a man named Micah. His name means, who is like the Lord. Mi-kah-yah, standing for Yahweh. Who is like the Lord, indeed. And Micah. seems to have come from one of the smaller villages of Judah named Moresheth. This was one of the several villages which had been heavily fortified in anticipation of various powers in the ancient world coming to attack Judah. Judah had something of a line of defense in her southwestern corner because that was the most logical way of approach. If you are looking at a Bible map, perhaps, and you wonder why it is that there's so much focus in the ancient world, and even on our passage once we get to the second half of it, on these few cities in southwestern Judah, you need to understand that that's the route of approach into the heartland of Judah. If you're going to attack Jerusalem, you're not going to go up and down all the mountains and cross all the rivers and ravines. You are, if you're marching up some great army from Babylon or Assyria or Egypt, you're going to come up the coastal plain to around the location of Gath or Lachish. And around there is where you will turn inland. Around there is where you will start your plan of conquest, your march towards Jerusalem. Your plan to make Judah howl to adapt what Sherman said about Georgia. Moresheth is one of those villages. It's a small town, and Micah seems to have come from a rural background, somewhat like Amos, who lived not long before him. But it's a town that had been fortified in view of the many serious threats of the day. Now Micah is ministering somewhere around 740 down to 700 BC. And the landscape of the ancient Near East was frankly scary during these decades. Now, in the previous half of the century, in the years numbered in the high 700s, since we're counting down here, it being BC, those had been decades of great prosperity. True, the kingdom of Israel had long since been divided into north and south. But both of those kingdoms had flourished greatly because there was something of a power vacuum. Those were days in which the Assyrian Empire, the ruling power of the day, was in decline and in disorder. However, Assyria had recently gotten its act back together. It had recently reacquired its taste for territory and for blood. It was an infamously brutal empire, which you can read about in the Book of Nahum. A rumbling city was its capital, Nineveh, a city of blood. All the little countries like Judah, like Israel, like the ones across the Jordan River, like the Philistine city-states were preoccupied with the question of how should we survive the Assyrian threat. Now, in order to help situate us in this timeline when a serious threat was on the horizon, and indeed when the northern kingdom of Israel was starting to be picked apart and ultimately obliterated, the southern kingdom of Judah was feeling the heat and was pressured to pay tribute and to compromise and to tremble. Let's situate ourselves on this timeline. This will be familiar, the one in your bulletin, to those of you who were here a few years ago when we studied the books of the kings. This is actually a double timeline. Above the center line is the first 400 years, and then there's 400 more years that continue below that center line. In fact, if you want, you can cut this chart in half and put it together to make one long continuous timeline. You see that in the upper left-hand corner, you've got solid black lines for the days of the United Monarchy, where David and Solomon both ruled over all the tribes of Israel together. But you'll recall that upon Solomon's death around the year 930, the kingdom was divided. And from that point on in your chart, you've got the succession of kings, both in the southern kingdom of Judah and in the northern kingdom of Israel. And interspersed there in kind of the cursive-looking font, you've got the various prophets that appeared during the reigns of these kings. And if you will look down to around the year 720 in the bottom half of the chart, you will see the name Micah. He's a contemporary of Isaiah. He's ministering the same time, the same place, the same stretch of decades that run from about 740 down to about the year 700. He has a lengthy ministry during the time when, as you can see, the northern kingdom was first cut in half and then ultimately destroyed by the Assyrians, and when the same thing very nearly happened to the southern kingdom of Judah. These were the days when the Kingdom of Judah, after the extinction of the Northern Kingdom, the Southern Kingdom was gravely threatened. Its several fortifications were easily overrun by Tiglath-Pileser, by Sennacherib later. It was Sennacherib, of course, who ultimately came near to Jerusalem itself. having conquered Lachish and other villages, who sent his rabshakeh, who sent his letter, who made blasphemies, who made threats, who tried to bully Jerusalem into its final capitulation. And it was that Sennacherib who, in the year 701 or so, was defeated not by the might of Judah, but by the angel of the Lord, working death in the camp of the Assyrians. You will recall that story where 185,000 of them died overnight and Sennacherib fled back to his country. Well, that's the situation we're dealing with. The ministry of Micah is going to overlap the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. You can see them on your timeline there. Jotham, whose story you can read about in 2 Kings 15, was a more or less good king of Judah. He enlarged the temple courts of God, but he wasn't very effective in the sense that he did not root out idolatry. The high places were told remained. He was followed by Ahaz, and Ahaz was one of the worst kings ever. Ahaz was an Assyrian lackey. He was enamored with Assyrian power and made himself a vassal to Assyria, paying them tribute, even rearranging the architecture of the temple and installing Assyrian fixtures and practices in order to make happy his Assyrian overlords. He courted Assyrian power as a way of counterbalancing regional forces. Ahaz, for his many, many sins, including not only his political sins, but also his offering of child sacrifice, his rebuffing of the prophecies and promises of Isaiah, Ahaz is one of the worst kings that Judah ever has. He is followed, though, by Hezekiah, and he is one of the best kings of Judah. His record is somewhat mixed. But he does go after the high places. He does not only purge out from Judah idol worship, but actually seeks to purify the worship of the true God by going after those relics, those icons, including the bronze serpent that Moses had put on a pole that had been preserved for some centuries, that Nehushtan. He then is zealous for purity and for holiness. And it is this Hezekiah who who was ill and who prayed for recovery, was given 15 more years. It was this Hezekiah who received congratulations on his recovery from Babylonian emissaries, who courted Babylonian power, because Babylon was actually at this point just one of the Assyrian cities in an Assyrian coalition. Babylon has its own aspirations and will eventually become its own empire, overthrowing the overlords in Nineveh. But for now, it is merely trying to stoke rebellion in people like Hezekiah. And it works. Due probably to Babylonian influence, Hezekiah rebels against Assyria in 705 BC. And as we said already, that catches up with them when you get an invasion of a massive army, which the southern kingdom will survive only by the skin of its teeth a few years later. So you've got back and forth in terms of the nature of the kingdom and the men who rule it. You've got lots of political upheaval. You've got lots of fear and threats on the horizon. It's a time of complexity. It's a time when the northern kingdom is being destroyed by the Assyrians, and a time when the southern kingdom is teetering, even as Isaiah preaches messages very similar to those of Micah. And in some ways, the call to repentance that these men issued will be heeded. Hezekiah will eventually turn to the Lord. Hezekiah will spread his letter before God in the temple and plead for help. Hezekiah will experience something of the mercy of God. And indeed, the southern kingdom of Judah will be spared to live another century. But of course, like all reformations, progress was short-lived. Micah's call to repentance, Micah's demand that God's people should do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with their God needed to be reiterated in succeeding generations. And indeed, his threats of the destruction of Jerusalem, though they did not immediately happen during the days of Hezekiah, became perfectly applicable a hundred years later. when a southern kingdom that deteriorated still further experienced that destruction now at the hands of Babylon itself. So Micah remained relevant after his death to the southern kingdom of Judah and of course he remains relevant to us because all scripture is given for our benefits according to the Lord. We still need to hear Micah's challenge to our sin. We still need to hear Micah's hope of forgiveness from God if we will repent. And we still need to hear Micah's hope of a prince who will arise from Bethlehem and restore the house of David. Well, so much for the setting that is evoked in verse 1. Now you understand we are situated back in the 700s BC when all this is going on. Now let's get back to the main theme and the main cause for the oracle recorded in Micah chapter 1, namely transgression and sin. Both the northern kingdom of Israel, which is spoken of under the terms of its capital city, Samaria, in verse 5, and the southern kingdom of Judah, which is spoken of under its capital city, Jerusalem, both of these kingdoms are being judged for sin. And since the southern kingdom of Judah is not only where Micah's from and where Micah lives and where Micah's preaching, and since it will outlast as well the northern kingdom by quite some time, most of the sins and transgressions will be Judah's sins and transgressions. But here in chapter 1, both are being addressed. Here we have both Samaria and Jerusalem spoken of in verse 5. And it's actually primarily the northern kingdom with its capital city of Samaria that is in view then, that is the target in verses 2 through 7 of our chapter. And it is primarily Jerusalem and Judah which are the target of God's judgment in verses 8 through 16. So then basically, as you see God pursuing through Micah the transgressions and the sins of his people, we have just two points to follow. First, God's judgment on Samaria shows what our sin boils down to. What it's really all about. And secondly, God's judgment on Judah shows the grief that our sin causes. To reiterate those two halves of the chapter, first, God's judgment on Samaria shows what our sin boils down to. And second, God's judgment on Judah shows the grief that our sin causes. In the first place, then, God's judgment on Samaria shows what our sin boils down to. We have, at the beginning of Micah's prophecy, an awesome picture of God, a visionary theophany, that is to say, with the eyes of his prophetic office, Micah can, as it were, see the Lord. It says he saw the word of the Lord in verse 1. What does he see? Well, he sees the Lord coming out from his holy temple in verses 2 and 3. The Lord comes and treads down the high places of the earth and the mountains melt under him and the valleys split open." There is leveling of hills, there are avalanches. It's an awesome picture of the appearing of God, the Judge, because He is coming to address the transgression of Jacob and the sins of Israel. Now we get a little more specific as to what's going to happen starting in verse 6. Verses 3 and 4 are kind of visionary. It's not that there is literally this invisible colossus stomping on mountains and flattening them. It's not that there is literally the avalanche of all creation sort of dissolving and melting together. Although there will be something of an avalanche of the stones of Samaria as they are bulldozed into the valley below, the reality rather is described in verses six and seven. I will make Samaria, the capital city of the northern kingdom, a heap in the open country, a place for planting vineyards. In other words, you won't even be able to tell this used to be a city. I will pour down her stones into the valley, there's the literal avalanche, and uncover her foundations. All her carved images shall be beaten to pieces. All her wages shall be burned with fire. All her idols I will lay waste, for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them. Now, there is some thought among scholars that perhaps there is a reference here to the Northern Kingdom being prostitute-like. There is certainly a basis for that comparison. Indeed, the whole ministry of Hosea having to marry a prostitute was intended to illustrate the faithlessness of God's people, and particularly the Northern Kingdom in which Hosea was a prophet. However, there is also likely a literal dimension to this as well. Because as you may recall, the Northern Kingdom of Israel was idolatrous from its very beginning. In an attempt to justify its being severed from the house of David and the temple in Jerusalem, the first king of the north, Jeroboam the son of Debat, had instituted this new kind of religion, a new priesthood, which mixed elements of Old Testament faith with stuff from the nations around them. And it centered on the worship of these golden calves or bulls, some in the north and some in the south. Well, it was later a successor of his, Omri, who actually moved the capital of the Northern Kingdom to Samaria. And so now Samaria is the center of the North's religious life. Samaria is where their temple is built and it is an inherently idolatrous version of Israelite religion. And one of the things you would pick up from the nations if you were following their practices in the ancient world was cult prostitution. Now, it certainly shocks our sensibilities to think, oh, hey, if the church is running short on money, we should perhaps have a bake sale and, oh, let's set up a prostitution booth, and that'll bring in some extra income. But this was significant in the ancient world not only as a source of income, but also as a means of religious expression. This is self-centered heathenism at its most flagrant. And in Mesopotamia particularly, but also in Canaan and elsewhere, you would have these fertility rituals and fertility rites that, frankly, people indulged in thinking they were doing good things. And yet they were quite hideous. And so when it speaks about her wages and her idols and the fee of a prostitute, there is at least in part a literal dimension to that. The temple in Samaria would have been at least partly funded by temple prostitution, by people going and paying their fees, and those fees being used to staff and to furnish the temple and to buy these great and beautiful idols. Because hey, the bigger and more beautiful and more expensive the idols you can stick in your temple, the more spiritual power they have to protect you in the thinking of the ancient heathens. And so, God says, I will destroy those idols. I will lay them waste, and in fact, to a fee of a prostitute they shall return." What this means is all the good stuff, all the rich stuff, all the gold and whatnot from the temple in Samaria is going to be looted and plundered and brought back to Assyria, and it's going to be spent on the cult prostitutes back in Nineveh by those triumphant soldiers. For all the luridness here, brothers and sisters, I would have you observe what God's real target is in Samaria. It's not just the sexual immorality that's being practiced as part of their religion. It's not just the political entanglements and false hopes that are signified by the language of adultery. It's not just the greed that's the acquisitiveness of buying better, greater things and being more gloriously furnished with gold and silver and whatnot that's being spoken to here. Those are all manifestations of what God is most upset, we might say, about what God is most opposed to. It is idolatry itself that he is seeking to destroy, to uproot, to erase the memory of in Samaria. For all the things that you could say about what's going to happen to this people, to the northern kingdom, as the ten tribes of the north are scattered to the four corners of the earth, never to be reassembled again. For all the things you could say about the devastation, about the military tactics, about the leveling of that city, what is focused on here is the idolatry. All her carved images, as God's concerned, they will be beaten to pieces and those wages will be burned with fire, he says. And whatever is of value will return to the fee of a prostitute. The root sin, if we can put it that way, the root sin of Samaria is idolatry. The prime provocation of her ancient father's god is idolatry. The idolatry of power, the idolatry of security, the idolatry of wealth, the idolatry of sex, the idolatry of privilege, the idolatry of military strength and alliances, all manifested as these gold and silver and marble and wooden statues littering her temple. Idolatry is what is seeping into Judah by way of the Northern Kingdom. If you look for the clues in this passage, it is coming near her. Her wound is incurable and it has come to Judah, verse 9. Why is Judah being prosecuted as well as Israel? Because the idolatries of Israel are showing up in Judah. Lakish is mentioned near the end of our passage, verse 13. That's the great fortified city of southwestern Judah, and you might think, now wait a minute. How is that the gateway, the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion, for in you were found the transgressions of Israel? It's saying that Lachish is a foothold for the idolatry of the north to get into the southern kingdom of Judah. You say, now wait a minute, why is Lachish that? Because Lachish was the fortress of Judah. It was the bastion, it was the place of horses and chariots and fortifications. It was the prime point of defense and it was therefore a source of idolatry, of putting confidence in something other than the Lord who was to be Israel's protector. It was pride. It was self-made security. It was the worship of military might, which was the idolatry of Lakish. And when you see that kind of idolatry going on, Micah traces it back and says, this really trickles down from the north. They're teaching us idolatry. This long-abandoned, long-corrupted version of Israelite religion is trickling down into the way that we serve idols. Perhaps not by setting up gold and silver images in the temple, although Ahaz did some of that kind of stuff, but even under good King Hezekiah, our trust, our devotion, our fear is misplaced. And what God is most upset about, the reason God is prosecuting, not just up to our border, but down in through Lachish and the villages of Judah up to the very gates of Jerusalem, the reason why we have to reckon with His wrath here. is because, in truth, we're idolaters." That's the thought of this passage. That's the core of the problem. Now, it's not the only sin. Indeed, please don't misunderstand me. Micah will get specific and extensive about sin. And he will bring in indictment after indictment of social sin and political sin in his later chapters. But right here up front, we see What is in the crosshairs of God in these decades of upheaval and of judgment, both realized and threatened, is idolatry. Idolatry is the supreme offense against God. It is the supreme caricature of God if we pretend to be worshiping God and yet make images of him in our mind or with our hands. It is the supreme offense to God if we call anything else the one who has delivered us from Egypt. And our idolatry might manifest itself in other ways. in our financial transactions, in our sex lives, in our rebelliousness, in our selfishness. But however it's manifested, the root of human sin, the offense of human sin, starts with treating something other than God as God. We are ultimately idolaters at our core, and that is what God is going to go after, first in the North and then in the South. That's why I think the theophany is so awesomely stated in verses 2, 3, and 4. The theophany just means the manifesting of God. Why does Micah bother to tell us that he sees the Lord coming out as a witness, coming forth victoriously and fearfully from his temple, as it were like some colossus stomping down the mountains and making the valleys split open, making the earth shake and dissolve and triggering avalanches and so forth. Why? It's in contrast to the idols which have been served and trusted in Samaria and increasingly in Judah. It is the opposite of idolatry. It is the healthy and clean fear of the Lord that Micah is inviting us to as he envisions God as the one true source of power and judgment and holiness. The remedy, you see, to idolatry is not just to identifying idols. Oh yeah, that's probably idolatrous. Yeah, I probably shouldn't trust that or care so much about that or lose sleep over that or give all my money, time, and attention to that. That's important. The remedy to idolatry is to give your devotion instead to the Lord, whose fear is the beginning of wisdom. To know Him, to love Him, to trust Him, and yes, to have a healthy, holy fear of Him, as Micah is implying in the way he describes the appearance of God the Judge. So then I am arguing God's judgment on Samaria shows what our sin boils down to. It boils down to idolatry, the worship of something other than God. But secondly, in our passage, God's judgment on Judah shows the grief that our sin causes. So we have the spread of sin in our passage. You have Judah coming to resemble the northern kingdom. It starts in verse 5 where we read, what is the transgression of Jacob? That is, what is the guilty spot? What is the stain of Jacob? Samaria, the capital city, is the center of the problem. And then, kind of surprisingly, anticipating where we're going to go after verse 7, what is the high place of Judah? High place referring not only to the geographical elevation, but high place referring to those places where pagan shrines were built. So often in the Old Testament, high places are condemned and high places are removed by good kings. And we're being told here that Judah, for all her professed religion, has set up a high place in Jerusalem. She is subtly engaging in idolatry, you see. And then verse 9 again, her wound, that is, the wound of the north is incurable and has come to Judah. Why? By implication, if the armies who have prosecuted idolatry in the north at the behest of God have come into Judah, why? Because Judah too is idolatrous. And again, verse 13, the transgressions of Israel have come to the daughter of Zion through a place like Lachish with all its power and its preparations. Now, the better part of the second half of this chapter is kind of obscure to us. It addresses a series of small cities and villages in the southern kingdom of Judah. These are all fairly close to each other. They are all on the line of march, and hence the line of destruction for the incoming Assyrian armies. And each one of them is basically given an oracle of doom. It's very brief, but that's a play on the sound of its name or the meaning of its name. I don't want to get too deeply into this because some of these are kind of disputed or debatable, and you can read this or that article or commentary if you want to, but just so you get a flavor of this. What Micah is saying, for instance, in verse 2, in Bethleafra, roll yourselves in dust. Well, Bethleafra sounds like, or means by extension, house of dust. House of dust, roll in dust. Pass on your way, inhabitants of Shaphir, that is, inhabitants of beauty, pass on in nakedness and shame. Inhabitants of Zanon, that is, inhabitants of the city of coming out. Do not come out, because they're all dead inside, you see. The Lamentation of Beth Ezel, well, that means house of taking away. She shall take away you from its standing place. And again, some of this gets hard to translate, but you get the idea that there's this play on words where town after town after town in Judah is threatened. Verse 12, Meroth, bitter town, keep waiting for something good, for something to come and unbitter you. And on it goes. Again, some of these identifications are disputed and so forth. But one thing I would point out to you is, again, the focus on Lachish, which was the great fortified city and the second most populous city of Judah. Harness the steeds to the chariots inhabitants of Lachish. It was the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion, that is, to put your trust in horses and in chariots. wherein you were found the transgressions of Israel." Lachish is the city that Sennacherib, the biggest prize Sennacherib ended up obtaining on his Assyrian campaign. And indeed, not only have archaeologists discovered mass graves of dead Jews around Lachish, but also you can see very graphically the evidence of the kinds of things Assyrians did in the so-called Lachish relief. It is from the palace of Sennacherib, and it is a carved commemoration of all the siege works, of all the butchery, of all the impaling, and everything else that the Assyrians did to the Jews at Lachish. Now look, as we've said, in the days of Micah there would be repentance, particularly there would be a moment where Hezekiah threw himself in the Lord's mercy. In the days of Micah then there would be a deliverance from the Assyrian threat. And all the threats of the Rabshakeh would be hollow. And Sennacherib would go back to his capital city only to await assassination at the hands of his own son. And there would be in Micah's day the slaying of 185,000 men of Assyria. But something I would observe here, brothers and sisters, is not before Lachish fell. not before Shaphir, and Zianon, and Bethesda, and Meroth, and town after town, and family after family, and heritage after heritage of the people of God was destroyed by Assyria. There may have been some who were celebrating a drunken revelry if we are reading the book of Isaiah right, but by and large, it was a day of grief, even as the Assyrians retreated, even as they lifted the siege on Jerusalem, and that one city at least escaped by the skin of its teeth. All this devastation, all this grief and butchery. And you can get the tone of grief here, not only in kind of the wordplay on the various village names, but also in the way the list begins. Did you see in verse 10 how Micah says, tell it not in Gath? Now, Gath isn't one of the Israelite cities that's being threatened here. That, rather, is a quotation from what's at this point the most famous lamentation in Jewish history, the lamentation of King David for the death of Saul and Jonathan back in 1 Samuel chapter 22. Sorry, 2 Samuel, rather, chapter 1. Tell it not in Gath. Publish it not on the streets of Ashkelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised exult. That moment of intense grief recorded in scripture is being brought into the present now hundreds of years later by Micah. And something similar happens in his allusion to Adullam in verse 15, the glory of Israel that is all the leaders, all the important people, the cream of the crop will come down to Adullam, to that cave of hiding, remember, where David, when he was hunted by Saul, gathered with his chosen men. David departed, 1 Samuel 22, from there and escaped to the cave of Adullam. When his brothers in his father's house heard it, they went down there to him. And that was a day, too, of cowering and of grieving, even. Psalm 57 is the psalm that David wrote while he was undergoing that experience. He fled from Saul in the cave, and we read in verse 1 of that psalm, be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me. For in you my soul takes refuge, in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge till the storms of destruction pass by. You see Micah is alluding to those things, to the challenges, to the griefs, to the destruction that the house of David has had to undergo before, that Judah has seen in days past and will see again. Now there's a whole interesting idea here about the challenge and the apparent extinction of the house of David that we'll come back to in Micah chapter 5. But for now, just note, please, the overall atmosphere of the second half of Micah 1, the response to God's judgment against sin, how much grief is brought. I will again bring a conqueror to you, inhabitants of Moreshia." Verse 15, the glory of Israel shall come to Adolam. And then listen to this powerful statement. Verse 16, make yourselves bald and cut off your hair for the children of your delight. That is, for the ones you think are your future. For these lovely children, these pampered children, these ones you care about so much. They're going to go into exile, so just shave yourselves bald. Our translation says, like the eagle. Probably better translation is like the vulture. And particularly in days when men typically wore beards, to shave your head and to shave your face and to look like a vulture was a sign of intense, intense grief. And it's not just limited. to those who are going to experience these things. At least they're threatened in Micah's day and they will actually come true a hundred or more years later. Micah himself experiences this grief. Back up to verses 8 and 9. As he sees the Northern Kingdom under judgment, as he sees judgment creeping nearer and nearer to his own people in the Southern Kingdom, he says, I will lament and wail. I will go stripped and naked. That is, he will undergo intense mourning procedures. And then he says, I will make lamentation like the jackals and mourning like the ostriches. I had to look those up online to hear what those sounded like. It's kind of uncanny. You hear a jackal sound something like a cross between a cat yowling and a wolf howling, this piercing howl. And the ostrich is even stranger. The NIV changes this to owl so that you'll understand it better, but it really is ostrich. They make this deep, booming kind of bark with the air chambers in their neck. And it's meant, of course, to be a threat, to be heard from miles away, but if you listen to it, it almost sounds like some great barrel-chested man heaving and sobbing so hard he can hardly catch his breath. This is where the sins of Judah, as well as Israel, have brought the prophet of God. Sin brings judgment and misery. And sin, therefore, is the ultimate cause. These transgressions, these sins, are the real reason for the misery and the grief that these kingdoms are going through. And this is the lesson that we need to receive today, brothers and sisters, that we need to believe, because I have a hard time believing it. I go about my privileged life assuming that sin doesn't have any real consequences. Sins, wages, are death. And that's not some half-thought-out step on some truncated Roman's road thing. That's where we live. The wages of sin are death. Now sometimes there's a specific correlation between our sins and our miseries. Not always. We don't want to be Job's counselors about this and make wrong inferences. But at least generally speaking, our sin is always the cause of our misery. We are people of unclean lips. We dwell among a people of unclean lips. And what else would we expect? Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me. Of course we are surrounded by pain and death. Of course we go about grieving and being perplexed. Sin is the reason for every tear that every human being has ever shed. Sin is the reason for the pain that is inflicted on us. Sin is the reason for our anxieties and our offenses against each other and our conflicts. Sin is the ultimate cause for every illness. Sin is the ultimate reason for every funeral you have ever been to. Sin is the cause of sorrow and grief. Hear it in the howling of Micah. Hear it in the grieving of the cities of Judah. And will we then indulge in sin, in idolatry, in selfishness, in all manner of godless foolishness? Will we protect our sin and excuse our sin and delay our repentance? When this is the reality of it, when it provokes the Lord to come out from His holy temple and inflict judgment on us, what idolatry is worth provoking God? What idolatry is worth prolonging your misery, deepening your infection, compounding your judgment, What idolatry is worth embracing the serpent's lie about where you really find happiness and peace and strength? Let us learn from Micah to cringe, to hate, and to grieve for sin because of what it ends up with, where it leads to. But brothers and sisters, let us not depart until we are reminded of the gospel hope that we have in the fact that our Savior Jesus Christ is himself known as a man of sorrows. Now, of course, coming to a fallen world as he did, Jesus Christ tasted sorrow during his life. He was homeless. He was hated. He was betrayed. Nowhere to lay his head. Even we see his friend Lazarus dying, and in that famous verse of scripture in John 11, Jesus wept. But I mean more than that. It's not just that Jesus came and experienced the grief that sin inflicts on us so that he could grieve like we grieve. Jesus Christ actually shouldered the substance of our sorrows. I'm talking now about the cross specifically. The cross is where Christ Jesus takes on himself the judgment, the consequences, the misery of our sin. In Handel's Messiah there is an attempt to capture what is happening at the cross. First by adapting Psalm 69 verse 20. where the tenor sings, Thy rebuke hath broken his heart. He is full of heaviness. He looked for some to have pity on him, but there was no man, neither found he any to comfort him. And then by adapting Lamentations 1 verse 12, which I think is very fair, Because lamentation speaks about the miseries of living under God's judgment in Jerusalem a hundred years after Micah's time. But Christ Jesus has tasted far more guilt on our behalf, has tasted far more judgment and wrath then, even than Jerusalem did. And so into the mouth of Christ Handel puts these words, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow. That's what I mean by saying that Jesus is a man of sorrows. To quote you that passage from Isaiah 53, he was despised and rejected by men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. See, he's talking here about atonement. It's talking here not just about experiencing sympathetically the things that we go through as sinners living in a sin-stained and sin-cursed world. It's talking about carrying our griefs, carrying our sorrows, becoming himself like this jackal, like this ostrich, like these shaved-head grieving Jews, like us. We esteemed him stricken, spitten by God, and afflicted, but he was wounded for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. Yes, I know, Hebrews 12 says that for the joy set before him, Christ Jesus endured the cross and despised the shame, but first he had to undergo its intense grief. First he had to cry out, Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani. He had to be forsaken by his father and bear the consequences of sin. Now the upshot of that, the benefit of that, He's also spoken of in Isaiah 53, where verse 11 says that out of the anguish of his soul, which is what we're talking about here in Micah, and as we reflect on the consequences of sin, out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied, and by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, he shall bear their iniquities. In other words, he has undergone this for the sake of those who belong to him, for the sake of those who will be accounted righteous. This is why our hope, this is why our faith is in Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows, a faith that we invite all of you to share in. This is how God has provided for us to be rescued from sin and from God's own judgment and from endless bitter woes. I invite you this morning to trust in the provision of Christ Jesus to be saved from the grief and the misery of your sin. If you remain apart from him, you remain subjected to this kind of misery. Not only futility and frustration during your life here under the sun, but as Jesus describes it after that last day of judgment, you depart into weeping and gnashing of teeth. but with Christ, carrying your sorrows. Then, even though we, as Paul says, are killed all the day long and regarded as sheep to be slaughtered, nevertheless, in these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. And neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor anything present, nor things to come, nor powers, or height, or depth, or anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. we may still undergo pains and grief, living in a sin-stained, sin-infected world. But as those who are being redeemed by Christ and shielded from the wrath of God and given a hope that will outlast the misery of sin, in Christ Jesus we can say with the psalmist in Psalm 34, many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. May it be so for each of you through Christ Jesus. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, please help us better to understand and to hate our sin. May we who belong to Christ Jesus no longer wallow in it, but renounce it and repent of it. And we pray that those who are still laboring under a heavy yoke and sorrow, that they, Father, might come to know life in Jesus. Thank you for providing Him as the answer to our judgments. And it's in His name we pray. Amen.