Albert Barnes Commentary Micah 7

Woe is me! For I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits, as the grape-gleanings of the vintage. “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts,” Isaiah said at the same time, “is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant plants” (Isaiah 5:7). Isaiah said it brought forth wild grapes; Micah, that there are only gleanings, few and poor.

It is as though Satan pressed the vineyard of the Lord, and made most of them his prey, and few were left to those who glean for Christ; “the foxes have eaten the grapes” (Song of Solomon 2:15). Some few remain too high out of their reach, or hidden behind the leaves, or, it may be, falling in the time of gathering—fouled, sullied, marred, and stained, yet left.

So in the gleaning there may be three sorts of souls: “two or three in the top of the uppermost bough” (Isaiah 17:6), which were not touched; or those unripe, which are only imperfect and poor; or those who had fallen, yet were not wholly carried away. These too are all sought with difficulty; they had escaped the gatherer’s eye, and they are few and rare. It might seem at first sight, as though there were none.

There is no cluster to eat; for the vintage is past, and the best is only like a sour grape which sets the teeth on edge.

My soul desired the first-ripe fig. These are those which, having survived the sharpness of winter, ripen early, around the end of June; they are the sweetest, but he longed for them in vain.

He addressed a carnal people, who could understand only carnal things, in terms they could understand. Our longings, though we pervert them, are God’s gift.

As they desired those things which refresh or revive the thirsty body, as their whole self was gathered into the craving for that which was to restore them, so it was with him. Such is the longing of God for man’s conversion and salvation; such is the thirst of His ministers; such are their pains in seeking, their sorrow in not finding.

Dionysius writes: “There were none through whose goodness the soul of the prophet might be spiritually refreshed, in joy at his growth in grace, as Paul says to Philemon, ‘refresh my bowels in the Lord’ (Philemon 1:20). So our Lord says in Isaiah, ‘I said, I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and in vain’ (Isaiah 49:4). ‘Jesus was grieved at the hardness of their hearts’ (Mark 3:5).”

Ribera says: “The first-ripe fig may be the image of the righteous of old, such as the Patriarchs or the Fathers, whom in later days we would gladly see.”

The good – or godly, or merciful, as the English margin notes.

Man – The Hebrew word contains all. It is “he who loves tenderly and piously” God, for His own sake, and man, for the sake of God. Mercy was probably chiefly intended, since it was to this that the prophet had exhorted, and the sins which he proceeds to speak of are against this. But imaginary love of God without love of man, or love of man without the love of God, is mere self-deceit.

Is perished out of the earth; that is, by an untimely death. The good had either been withdrawn by God from the evil to come (Isaiah 57:1), or had been cut off by those who laid wait for blood. In that case, their death brought a double evil: through the guilt such sin incurred, and then, through the loss of those who might be an example to others and whose prayers God would hear.

The loving and upright—all who were men of mercy and truth—had ceased. Those who were left all lie in wait for blood (literally, bloods, that is, bloodshedding); all, as far as man can see, as Elijah complains that he was left alone.

Amid the vast number of the wicked, the righteous were as though they were not. Isaiah, at the same time, complains of like sins, and that it was as though there were no righteous people: Your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness. None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth (Isaiah 59:2–3).

Indirectly or directly, they destroyed life. To violence they add treachery.

The good and loving had perished, and all is now violence; the upright had ceased, and all now is deceit. They hunt every man his brother with a net. Every man is the brother of every other man, because he is human, born of the same first parent, children of the same Father; yet they lay in wait for one another, as hunters for wild beasts (Psalms 57:7; Psalms 140:6; Jeremiah 5:26).

That they may do evil with both hands earnestly - (Literally, "on evil both hands to do well,") meaning, “both their hands are on evil to do it well,” or “earnestly,” as our translation provides the meaning. The Hebrew, however, expresses more: that evil is their good, and their good or excellence is in evil.

Bad men gain a dreadful skill and wisdom in evil, as Satan has, and cleverness in evil is their delight. Jerome says, “They call the evil of their hands good.”

The prince asks, and the judge asks (or, it may more readily be supplied, judges, does that which is his office) against right for a reward (which was strictly forbidden), and the great man, he utters his mischievous desire (Deuteronomy 16:19. See above Micah 3:11), or the “desire of his soul.”

Even the show of good is laid aside; whatever the heart conceives and covets, it utters—mischief to others and, in the end, to itself.

The mischief comes out from the soul and returns to it.

The elders and nobles in the city (1 Kings 21:8, 1 Kings 21:11), as well as Ahab, took part (as one instance) in the murder of Naboth.

The great man, however, here is rather the source of the evil, which he induces others to carry out; so that for as many great men as there were, there were that many sources of oppression.

All—prince, judges, the great—unite in the evil. They do this not just once, but continually, and so they wrap it up (literally, twist, intertwine it).

Things are twisted either to strengthen, or to pervert or complicate them. It might mean they “strengthen” it—that which their soul covets against the poor—or they “pervert” it—the cause of the poor.

The best of them is as a brier - The gentlest of them is a thorn, strong, hard, piercing, which lets nothing unresisting pass by without taking from it, “robbing the fleece, and wounding the sheep.” The most upright—those who, in comparison with others still worse, seem so—is sharper than a thorn hedge (literally, the upright, them a thorn hedge). They are not like it only, but worse, and that in all ways; none is specified, and so none excepted; they were more crooked, more tangled, sharper. Both, as hedges, were set for protection; both, turned to injury. Jerome: “So that, where you would look for help, from there comes suffering.” And if such are the best, what about the rest?

The day of thy watchmen and thy visitation cometh - When all, even the good, are thus corrupted, the iniquity is full. Nothing now hinders the visitation, which the watchmen, or prophets, had so long foreseen and forewarned of. Now shall be their perplexity; now, without delay; for the day of destruction ever breaks suddenly upon the sinner. When they say, peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them (1 Thessalonians 5:3): whose destruction cometh suddenly at an instant. They had perplexed the cause of the oppressed; they themselves were tangled together, intertwined in mischief, as a thorn-hedge. They should be caught in their own snare; they had perplexed their paths and should find no outlet.

Trust you not in a friend - It is part of the perplexity of crooked ways, that all relationships are put out of joint. Selfishness rends each from the other, and disjoints the whole frame of society. Passions and sin break every bond of friendship, kindred, gratitude, nature. “Everyone seeks his own.” Times of trial and of outward hardship increase this, so that God’s visitations are seasons of the most frightful recklessness as to everything but self.

So God had foretold (Deuteronomy 28:53); so it was in the siege of Samaria (2 Kings 6:28), and in that of Jerusalem both by the Chaldeans (Lamentations 4:3–16) and by the Romans. When the soul has lost the love of God, all other love is but seeming love, since “natural affection” is from Him, and it too dies out, as God gives the soul over to itself (Romans 1:28). The words describe partly the inward corruption, partly the outward causes which will call it forth.

There is no real trust in any, where all are corrupt. The outward distress and perplexity, in which they will be, makes that to crumble and fall to pieces which was inwardly decayed and severed before. The words deepen as they go on. First, “the friend,” or neighbor, the common bond of man and man; then “the guide” (or, as the word also means, one “familiar,” united by intimacy, to whom, by continual association, the soul was accustomed); then the wife who lay in the bosom, nearest to the secrets of the heart; then those to whom all reverence is due, “father” and “mother.”

Our Lord said that this would be fulfilled in the hatred of His Gospel. He begins His warning about it with a caution like that of the prophet: Be you wise as serpents, and beware of men (Matthew 10:16–17).

Then He says how these words would still be true (Matthew 10:21, Matthew 10:35–36). There was never a lack of pleas of earthly interest against the truth.

He Himself was “cut off” lest “the Romans should take away their place and nation” (John 11:48). The Apostles were accused that they meant to “bring this Man’s Blood upon” the chief priests (Acts 5:28); or as “ringleaders of the sect of the Nazarenes, pestilent fellows and movers of sedition, turning the world upside down, setters up of another king; troublers of the city; commanding things unlawful for Romans to practice; setters forth of strange gods; turning away much people” (Acts 24:5; Acts 16:20–21; Acts 17:6–7, Acts 17:18); (1 Peter 2:12); endangering not men’s craft only, but the honor of their gods; “evil doers.”

Truth is against the world’s ways, so the world is against it. Holy zeal hates sin, so sinners hate it.

It troubles them, so they count it “one which troubles Israel” (1 Kings 18:17). Tertullian, in a public defense of Christians in the second century, writes, “Truth set out with being herself hated; as soon as she appeared, she is an enemy. As many as are strangers to it, so many are its foes; and the Jews indeed appropriately from their rivalry, the soldiers from their violence, even they of our own household from nature. Each day are we beset, each day betrayed; in our very meetings and assemblies are we mostly surprised.”

There was no lack of pleas: “A Christian you deem a man guilty of every crime, an enemy of the gods, of the Emperors, of law, of morals, of all nature;” “factious,” “authors of all public calamities through the anger of the pagan gods,” “impious,” “atheists,” “disloyal,” “public enemies.” The Jews, in the largest sense of the word “they of their own household,” were ever the deadliest enemies of Christians, the inventors of calumnies, the authors of persecutions. “What other race,” says Tertullian, “is the seed-plot of our calumnies?”

Then the Acts of the Martyrs tell how Christians were betrayed by near relatives for private interest, or for revenge, because they would not join in things unlawful. Jerome says: “So many are the instances in daily life (of the daughter rising against the mother) that we should rather mourn that they are so many, than seek them out.” He also says: “I seek no examples (of those of a man’s own household being his foes); they are too many, that we should have any need of witness.”

Dionysius says: “Yet we ought not, on account of these and like words of Holy Scripture, to be mistrustful or suspicious, or always to presume the worst, but to be cautious and prudent. For Holy Scripture speaks with reference to times, causes, persons, places.” So John says, Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God (1 John 4:1).