‘Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge,
Who devour my people as they eat bread,
And call not on YHWH?
There were they in great fear,
For God is in the generation of the righteous.
You put to shame (deride) the counsel of the poor,
Because YHWH is his refuge.'
Indeed God is perplexed at the folly of men. He cannot believe that they are so lacking in wisdom and common sense. They neither call on YHWH nor treat well those who do truly call on Him. They ‘eat up My people as they eat bread'. ‘My people' must refer here to those who truly call on Him, the faithful in Israel (Micah 2:9; Micah 3:5). For while ‘my people' is used of Israel as a whole it is always with the understanding that they are potentially responding to the covenant. Those who fail to do so in the end cease to be ‘His people'. They are combined with the enemy. Devouring or eating up His people refers both to depriving them of their possessions, devouring their wealth, and to oppressing them, giving them a hard time and even doing violence to them (compare Micah 3:1-3; Isaiah 3:14-15). So the world is seen as in deliberate antagonism against God, and against true righteousness as personified in His true people.
‘The workers of iniquity' are thus those who deliberately continue in the way of sin having refused to become one of His people. They are not necessarily great sinners as the world would view it, but they are from God's viewpoint, because they fail to truly respond to Him.
What is more they overlook the fact that ‘God is in the generation of the righteous', that He is among the righteous and concerned about them and looks after them in each generation. Thus He will judge the persecutors in such a way that they will be in great fear. (This may be referring to a past event, or a number of past events, an example of judgments that have already happened. Or it may be simply looking to the future, to a judgment yet to come. Hebrew tenses are often not particular as regards to time. They are more concerned with whether an action is complete or incomplete, than whether past or future). And all because they have taken advantage of, or have derided, the lowly who have taken refuge in Yahweh, and whose thoughts and honesty and peacemaking attitude make them a prey to their scheming.
‘The poor' regularly indicates those who are lowly and godly. This confirms that while ‘My people' must in one sense mean Israel, it basically means the ones who show that they are His people by their way of living. The remainder are linked with the world.