During the Eighth Century BC Israel was filled with prophetic warnings and instruction. People were taking advantage of one another, especially of those with little power, wealth or status. They were ignoring their obligations to God, while enriching themselves. They believed that their strength was sufficient to save them from any danger. (Sound familiar?) The people’s infidelity to the God, who had bonded with them in a covenant, was opening them to invasion, destruction and being carried off into exile by Assyria – the big, bad, pagan empire of the time. The last of this series of prophets to passionately cry out and call for conversion was Micah.
Micah loved God and was deeply concerned with his people. He summed up what God required of them in three interrelated phrases: Act with justice; love fidelity; walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8). In other words, “Get your act together. Turn your life around before it’s too late!”
We tend to view justice in terms of a balancing act – weighing out deeds and consequences in some kind of mathematical formula (e. g. an eye for any eye and a tooth for a tooth). We think that it is very fair if someone who does something wrong or harmful gets a properly measured punishment. We are into payback; not justice. Justice in Scripture is infinitely different (literally).
We are to treat others as we would like to be treated. But there’s more! We are called to treat others as God treats us. Whoa! God, an equal opportunity lover, makes the sun to shine and the life-giving rain to fall on good and bad alike; on wicked, sinful unbelievers the same as on those of us who think of ourselves as the righteous ones. That’s unfair! That’s the God that Jesus reveals to us – the only true God there is. Deal with it. God forgives everybody for everything. God works for the good of all. We are to act this way.
Love, in the understanding of the people of God, meant to choose to be wholeheartedly for someone or something. The word for fidelity in Hebrew, hesed, is at the heart of the covenant. It captured how God was for the people: faithful, kind, loving, good, compassionate, tender. To love fidelity is to put our whole self, holding nothing back, into infusing all our relationships (God, others, self) with faithfulness, kindness, love, compassion and tenderness.
Adam and Eve, as pictured in the first chapters of the book of Genesis, were accustomed to walk with God in their garden paradise in the cool of the evening. Their intimacy with God was shattered when they decided that they preferred to be like God rather than to simply savor being with God. They cut themselves off through their arrogance. To walk humbly with God has two main facets: to walk in step with God, not trying to get ahead of God nor falling behind; and to walk humbly, certain that we are loved as we are. We are wonderful, amazing, precious, but we are not gods. Humility is about holding in dynamic tension our littleness and our awesomeness.
Micah invites us to reorder our lives in justice, fidelity, love and humility. God will supply the grace-energy needed to live in this way. That’s a promise.
Jana Buckley says:
Our human nature definitely does see justice as a balancing act, unlike God.
I like the reference to God as an equal opportunity lover in how he loves all of us and blesses each of us. The visual of Adam and Eve walking in the garden and savoring to be with Him is a wonderful reminder to me as to how I should approach my prayer time. Thank you, Tim