Chapter 22

_Judah Learns its Lesson._

King Hezekiah's preparation for rebellion against Sennacherib, in 715, shattered any optimistic hopes that Micah held for a continuation of improvement in the condition of the common people, in which he had been instrumental up to this time. The costs of war always fell heaviest on the poor, and the devastating results of war upon the farming population.

Younger and readier to act than his older contemporary, Isaiah, he was not satisfied with a negative warning, such as the older prophet gave the leaders in Jerusalem when he walked about the city barefoot and in the garb of a slave.

Micah came up to the capital to stir it up; and he did set the people to talking and to thinking when, in a memorable speech, he differed fundamentally from Isaiah in his declaration that the Temple, the very House of God, as well as the city in which it was situated, could and would be destroyed:

"Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, And rulers of the house of Israel, That abhor justice and pervert all equity; That build up Zion with blood, And Jerusalem with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, And the priests thereof teach for hire, And the prophets thereof divine for money; Yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say, 'Is not the Lord in the midst of us? No evil shall come to us.' Therefore shall Zion, for your sake, be plowed as a field, And Jerusalem shall become heaps, And the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest."

Micah, naturally, received opposition from the same clique of false prophets that opposed Isaiah, and made his labors so difficult and, at first, unsuccessful; that misled king and people, "that bite with their teeth and cry, 'Peace,' to make my people to err." To these Micah gave as well as he received:

"The seers shall be put to shame, And the diviners confounded. Yea, they shall all cover their lips, For there is no answer of God. But as for me, I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord, And of judgment and of might, To declare unto Jacob his transgression And unto Israel his sin."

For years Micah kept at his task. He was indeed a tribune of the people, the champion of their rights against the vested interests, the great commoner of his day and time, fearlessly and courageously standing out against all opposition, trusting absolutely in God.

At last came the crisis of 704-1 and Hezekiah's memorable change of mind and heart. Micah played no mean part with Isaiah, in Hezekiah's reforms that followed.

Reforms were needed, however, not alone by "the heads of the house of Jacob" and "the rulers of the house of Israel," not alone in the courts of law and among the priests and prophets; they were needed as well in the religious beliefs and practices of the common people, whose cause was Micah's cause.

With the passing of all political danger to the fatherland, Micah retired permanently to his farms in Moresheth. There he devoted the remainder of his peaceful, happy years to teaching the common people, "_my_ people," as he fondly refers to them, the religious, moral and ethical life that God demanded of them.

Micah employed the same vivid, picturesque language in his speeches of peace as he did in his addresses of war. There is extant a remarkable oration in which he pictures a religious controversy between God and his people, and in which he makes a declaration of what _true religion_ is that has not been better phrased in all the thousands of books that have been written on religious subjects since that day.

The address is in the form of a dialogue between God and Israel, and reads as follows:

"Hear ye now what the Lord is saying: 'Arise, contend thou before the mountains, And let the hills hear thy voice. Hear, O ye mountains, the Lord's controversty, And ye enduring rocks, the foundations of the earth: For the Lord hath a controversy with His people, And He will plead with Israel."

Then God is pictured pleading with the people:

"O my people, what harm have I done unto thee? And wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me. Is it because I brought thee out of the land of Egypt, And redeemed thee out of the house of bondage, And sent before thee Moses, Aaron and Miriam? O my people, remember now what Balak, king of Moab, devised, And what Balaam, the son of Beor, answered him; (Remember what took place) from Shittim unto Gilgal, That ye may know the righteous acts of the Lord."

As with the purely religious teachings of the older prophets, the people could not quite understand Micah. They believed that religion consisted in offering the prescribed sacrifices regularly, and that, in having fulfilled this obligation they had performed their religious duties.

The average Judean's idea of religion, of the relationship between man and God, was that of a _bargain_ between man and God; so many sacrifices brought to God, so many favors from God, in return; the more precious and numerous the sacrificial oils and burnt offerings, even to one's children, offered to God, the more precious and numerous would be the blessings from God.

To this false idea Micah replies, with irony that stings, in these words:

"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, And bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, With calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"

To which God answers, through Micah, in the world-famed and unparalleled definition of religion:

"It hath been declared unto thee, O man, what is good: Yea, what doth the Lord require of thee, But to do justice, and to love mercy, And to walk humbly with thy God?"

THE PROPHET OF WOE AND HOPE