Albert Barnes Commentary Micah 1

The word of the Lord that came to Micah ... which he saw - No two of the prophets authenticate their prophecy in exactly the same way. They, one and all, have the same simple statement to make: that what they say is from God, and through them. If a later hand had added the titles, it would have formed all upon one model. The title was an essential part of the prophetic book, indicating to the people afterward that it was not written after the event. It was a witness, not to the prophet whose name it bears, but to God. The prophet bore witness to God that what he delivered came from Him.

The event bore witness to the prophet that he spoke this truly, since he knew what God alone could know—futurity. Micah blends into one the facts: that he related in words given to him by God what he had seen spread before him in prophetic vision. His prophecy was, at once, the word of the Lord which came to him, and a sight which he saw.

Micah omits all mention of his father. His great predecessor was known as Micaiah son of Imlah. Micah, a villager, would be known only by the name of his native village.

Similarly, Nahum names himself “the Elkoshite”; Jonah is described as a native “of Gath-hepher”; Elijah, the Tishbite, was a sojourner in the despised Gilead (1 Kings 17:1); Elisha was from Abelmeholah; and Jeremiah was from Anathoth.

These were forerunners of Him and were taught by His Spirit—He who willed to be born at Bethlehem. And since Bethlehem, although too little to be counted among the thousands of Judah, was still a royal city and destined to be the birthplace of the Christ, He too was known only as Jesus of Nazareth, “the Nazarene.”

No prophet speaks of himself, or is spoken of, as born in Jerusalem, “the holy city.” They speak of themselves with titles of lowliness, not of greatness.

Micah dates his prophetic office from the kings of Judah only, as they were the only kings of the line appointed by God. Kings of Israel are mentioned in addition, only by prophets of Israel. He names Samaria first because, its iniquity being almost full, its punishment was very near.

Hear, all you people – Literally, “hear, you peoples, all of them.” Some 140 or 150 years had passed since Micaiah, son of Imlah, had closed his prophecy in these words. And now they burst out anew. From age to age the word of God holds its course, ever receiving new fulfillments, never dying out, until the end shall come. The signal fulfillment of the prophecy, to which the former Micaiah had called attention in these words, was a pledge of the fulfillment of this present message of God.

Listen, O earth, and all that is in it – The “peoples” or “nations” are never Judah and Israel only; the earth and its fullness is the well-known title of the whole earth and all its inhabitants. Moses (Deuteronomy 32:1), Asaph (Psalms 50:7), and Isaiah (Isaiah 1:2) call heaven and earth as witnesses against God’s people. Jeremiah (Jeremiah 6:19), like Micah here, summons the nations and the earth. The contest between good and evil, sin and holiness, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan, everywhere, but especially where God’s Presence is nearest, is a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men (1 Corinthians 4:9).

The nations are witnesses of God against His own people, so that these should not say that it was for lack of faithfulness or justice or power (Exodus 32:12; Numbers 14:16; Joshua 7:8–9), but in His righteous judgment, that He cast off those whom He had chosen.

So shall the Day of Judgment reveal His righteousness (Romans 2:5). Listen, O earth. The lifeless earth (Psalms 114:7; Psalms 97:5) trembles at the Presence of God, and so reproaches the dullness of man. Through this, He summons man to listen with great reverence to the Voice of God.

And let the Lord God be witness against you – Not in words, but in deeds you will know that I do not speak on my own authority, but that God is in me, when He, by His Presence, fulfills what I declare.

But the nations are appealed to, not merely because the judgments of God on Israel should be made known to them by the prophets. He had not yet spoken of Israel or Judah, whereas he had spoken to the nations: hear, you peoples. It seems then most likely that here too he is speaking to them.

Every judgment is a pledge, a forerunner, and a part of the final judgment, and an example of its principles. It is but “the last great link in the chain” that unites God’s dealings in time with eternity. God’s judgments on one imply a judgment on all. His judgments in time imply a Judgment beyond time.

Each sinner feels in his own heart a response to God’s visible judgments on another. Each sinful nation may read its own doom in the sentence passed on another nation.

God judges each according to his own measure of light and grace, accepted or refused. The pagan will be judged by the law written in their heart (Romans 2:12–15); the Jew, by the law of Moses and the light of the prophets; Christians, by the law of Christ.

The word, Christ says, that I have spoken, the same shall judge him at the last Day (John 12:48). God Himself foretold that the pagan would know the ground of His judgments against His people.

All nations shall say, wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this land? What meaneth the heat of this great anger? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers which He made with them, when He brought them forth out of the land of Egypt... (Deuteronomy 29:24–25). But because the pagan knew why God so punished His people, they thereby came to know the mind of God; and God, who at no time left Himself without witness (Acts 14:17), bore fresh “witness” to them, and, so far as they neglected it, against them. A Jew, wherever he is seen throughout the world, is a witness to the world of God’s judgments against sin.

Dionysius: “Christ, the faithful Witness, shall witness against those who do wrong, and for those who do good.”

The Lord from His holy temple – Either that at Jerusalem, where God showed and revealed Himself, or Heaven, of which it was the image. As David says, The Lord is in His holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in heaven (Psalms 11:4); and contrasts His dwelling in heaven and His coming down on earth. He bowed the heavens also and came down (Psalms 18:9); and Isaiah, in similar words, says, Behold, the Lord cometh out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity (Isaiah 26:21).

For, behold, the Lord comes forth - that is, (as we now say,) “is coming forth.” Each day of judgment, and the last also, are ever drawing near, noiselessly as the nightfall, but unceasingly. “Out of His Place.”

Dionysius: “God is hidden from us, except when He shows Himself by His Wisdom or Power of Justice or Grace, as Isaiah says, Verily, You are a God who hide Yourself (Isaiah 45:15).” He seems to be absent when He does not visibly work either in the heart within or in judgments without. To the ungodly and unbelieving He is absent, far above out of their sight (Psalms 10:5), when He does not avenge their scoffs, their sins, their irreverence.

Again, He seems to go forth when His Power is felt. Dionysius: “Thus it is said, Bow Your heavens, O Lord, and come down (Psalms 144:5; Isaiah 64:1); and the Lord says of Sodom, I will go down now and see, whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is come to Me (Genesis 18:21).”

Or, the Place of the Infinite God is God Himself. For the Infinite sustains Itself, nor does anything out of Itself contain It. God dwells also in light unapproachable (1 Timothy 6:16).

When then Almighty God does not manifest Himself, He abides, as it were, in ‘His own Place.’ When He manifests His Power or Wisdom or Justice by their effects, He is said ‘to go forth out of His Place,’ that is, out of His hiddenness.

Again, since the Nature of God is Goodness, it is proper and co-natural to Him to be propitious, have mercy, and spare. In this way, the Place of God is His mercy.

When then He passes from the sweetness of pity to the rigor of equity, and, on account of our sins, shows Himself severe (which is, as it were, alien from Him), He ‘goes forth out of His Place.’

Jerome: “For He who is gentle and gracious, and whose Nature it is to have mercy, is constrained, on your account, to take the seeming of hardness, which is not His.”

He comes invisibly now, in that it is He who punishes through whatever power or will of man He uses; He shows forth His Holiness through the punishment of unholiness.

But the words, which are image-language now, shall be most exactly fulfilled in the end, when, in the Person of our Lord, He shall come visibly to judge the world.

Jerome, Theoph.: “In the Day of Judgment, Christ ‘shall come down,’ according to that Nature which He took, ‘from His Place,’ the highest heavens, and shall cast down the proud things of this world.”

And will come down - not by change of place, or in Himself, but His coming will be felt in the punishment of sin. He will tread upon the high places of the earth to bring down the pride of those (Job 9:8) who, “being lifted up in their own conceit and lofty, sinning through pride and proud through sin, were yet created out of earth. For why is earth and ashes proud?” .

What seems mightiest and most firm is to God less than the dust under a person's feet. The high places were also the special scenes of unceasing idolatry.

“God treads in the good and humble, in that He dwells, walks, and feasts in their hearts (2 Corinthians 6:16; Revelation 3:20). But He treads upon the proud and the evil, in that He casts them down, despises, and condemns them.”

And the mountains shall be melted under Him – It has been thought that this is imagery taken from volcanic eruptions; but, although there is a very remarkable volcanic district just outside Gilead, it is not thought to have been active at times as late as these, nor were the people to whom the words were said familiar with it. Fire, the real agent at the end of the world, is, meanwhile, the symbol of God’s anger, as being the most terrible of His instruments of destruction. For this reason, God revealed Himself as a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:24), and at this same time said by Isaiah: “For behold, the Lord will come with fire ... to render His anger with fury, and His rebuke with flames of fire” (Isaiah 66:15).

And the valleys shall be split as wax before the fire – It seems natural that the mountains should be split, but the valleys, so low already! This speaks of a yet deeper dissolution, of lower depths beyond our sight or knowledge, into the very heart of the earth. Sanch.: “This should they fear, who choose to be so low; who, so far from lifting themselves to heavenly things, pour out their affections on things of earth, meditate on and love earthly things, and forgetful of the heavenly, choose to fix their eyes on earth. The wide, gaping earth, which they loved, shall swallow these; to them the split valleys shall open an everlasting tomb, and, having received them, will never release them.”

Highest and lowest, first and last, shall perish before Him. The pride of the highest, kings and princes, priests and judges, shall sink and melt away beneath the weight and Majesty of His glory; the hardness of the lowest, which would not open itself to Him, shall be split in two before Him.

As wax before the fire – , melting away before Him who did not soften them, vanishing into nothingness. Metals melt, changing their form only; wax melts so as to cease to exist.

As the waters poured down – (As a stream or cataract, so the word means.)

A steep place – Down to the very edge, it is carried along, one strong, smooth, unbroken current; then, at once, it seems to gather its strength for one great effort. But to what end? To fall with greater force, headlong, scattered in spray, foam and froth; dissipated, at times, into vapor, or reeling in giddy eddies, never to return.

In Judea, where the autumn rains set in with great vehemence, the waters must have often been seen pouring in their little tumultuous brooklets down the mountainside, hastening to disappear, and disappearing faster, the more vehemently they rolled along.

Both images exhibit the inward emptiness of sinners, humanity’s utter helplessness before God. They need no outward impulse to their destruction.

Jerome: “Wax cannot endure the nearness of the fire, and the waters are carried headlong. So all the ungodly, when the Lord comes, shall be dissolved and disappear.” At the end of the world, they shall be gathered into bundles and cast away.

For the transgression of Jacob is all this—Not for any change of purpose in God; nor, again, as the effect of man’s lust of conquest. None could have any power against God’s people, unless it had been given him by God. Those mighty monarchies of old existed only as God’s instruments, especially toward His own people. God said at this time of Assyria, Asshur rod of Mine anger, and the staff in their hand is Mine indignation (Isaiah 10:5); and, Now have I brought it to pass, that thou shouldest be to lay waste defenced cities into ruinous heaps (Isaiah 37:26).

Each scourge of God chastised just those nations, which God willed him to chasten; but the especial object for which each was raised up was his mission against that people, in whom God most showed His mercies and His judgments. I will send him against an ungodly nation and against the people of My wrath will I give him a charge (Isaiah 10:6).

Jacob and Israel, in this place, alike comprise the ten tribes and the two. They still bore the name of their father (who, wrestling with the Angel, became a prince with God), whom they forgot. The name of Jacob then, as of Christian now, stamped those who did not do the deeds of their father as deserters.

“What (rather who) is the transgression of Jacob?” Who is its cause? In whom does it lie? Is it not Samaria?

The metropolis must, in its own nature, be the source of good or evil to the land. It is the heart whose pulses beat throughout the whole system. As the seat of power, the residence of justice or injustice, the place of counsel, and the concentration of wealth—which all the most influential people of the land visit for their various occasions—its manners penetrate to some degree the utmost corners of the land.

Corrupted, it becomes a focus of corruption. The blood passes through it, not to be purified, but to be diseased. Samaria—being founded on apostasy, owing its existence to rebellion against God, and the home of that policy which set up a rival system of worship to His (which He had forbidden)—became a fountain of evil from which the stream of ungodliness overflowed the land. It became the impersonation of the people’s sin, “the heart and the head of the body of sin.”

And what—Literally, who (מי) always relates to a personal object, and apparent exceptions may be reduced to this. So Ae. Kim. Tanch. Pococke.

Are the high places of Judah? Are they not Jerusalem?—Jerusalem God had formed to be a center of unity in holiness. The tribes of the Lord were to go up there to the testimony of Israel; there was the unceasing worship of God, the morning and evening sacrifice, the Feasts, the memorials of past miraculous mercies, and the foreshadowings of redemption.

But there too Satan placed his throne. Ahaz brought there that most hateful idolatry: burning children to Moloch in the valley of the son of Hinnom (2 Chronicles 28:3). There (2 Chronicles 28:24), he made for himself altars in every corner of Jerusalem.

From there, he extended the idolatry to all Judah. And in every several city of Judah he made high places to burn incense unto other gods, and provoked to anger the Lord God of his fathers (2 Chronicles 28:25). Hezekiah, in his reformation, with all Israel, went out to the cities of Judah and broke the images in pieces, bowed down the statues of Asherah, and threw down the high places and the altars from all Judah and Benjamin, as well as from Ephraim and Manasseh (2 Chronicles 31:1). Indeed, by a perverse interchange, Ahaz took the Brazen Altar, consecrated to God, for his own divinations, and assigned to the worship of God the altar copied from the idol-altar at Damascus, whose fashion pleased his taste (2 Kings 16:10–16).

Since God and mammon cannot be served together, Jerusalem had become one great idol-temple, in which Judah brought its sin into the very face of God and of His worship. The Holy City had itself become sin, and the fountain of unholiness.

The one temple of God was the single protest against the idolatries which encompassed and besieged it; the incense went up to God from it, morning and evening. However, from every head of every street of the city (Ezekiel 16:31; 2 Chronicles 28:24), and (since Ahaz had brought in the worship of Baalim (2 Chronicles 28:2), and the rites of idolatry continued the same) from the roofs of all their houses (Jeremiah 32:29), incense went up to Baal—a worship which, denying the Unity, denied the Being of God.