Albert Barnes Commentary Micah 7:5-6

"Trust ye not in a neighbor; put ye not confidence in a friend; keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom. For the son dishonoreth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man`s enemies are the men of his own house." — Micah 7:5-6 (ASV)

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).