Albert Barnes Commentary Micah 1:2

"Hear, ye peoples, all of you: hearken, O earth, and all that therein is: and let the Lord Jehovah be witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple." — Micah 1:2 (ASV)

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).