CRITICAL NOTES.]
Micah 3:9. Hear] Resumed from Micah 3:1. Heads] Whose ungodly conduct is briefly summed up again. Abhor] As a thing loathsome and abominable (Heb.)
Micah 3:10. Build] Lit. building with wealth and money obtained by bribes and murder of the innocent (Jeremiah 22:13; Ezekiel 22:27; Habakkuk 2:12). “Or by blood he may mean that they indirectly took away life, in that, through wrong judgments, extortion, usury, fraud, oppression, reducing wages, or detaining them, they took away what was necessary to support life” [Pusey],
Micah 3:11. Reward] Take bribes, when they should teach gratuitously (Leviticus 10:11; Deuteronomy 17:11). Prophets] False prophets. Money] “Giving the answer which their employers, the rich men, wanted, as if it were an answer from God” [Pusey.] Among us] Enthroned in the temple to protect us from calamity.
Micah 3:12. Therefore] Culminating the threats of Micah 3:8, a great contrast to the conclusion of chapter 2. They thought to build, when by their conduct they destroy Zion; “for your sake be plowed.” “The predicates are divided rhetorically, and the thought is this: the royal palace, the city, and the temple shall be so utterly destroyed, that of all the houses and palaces only heaps of rubbish will remain, and the ground upon which the city stood will be partly used as a ploughed field, and partly overgrown with bushes” (cf. Isaiah 32:13-14) [Keil]. Hezekiah’s repentance delayed the execution of the judgment for more than a hundred years; but Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and by Titus.
HOMILETICS
GUILTY LEADERS.—Micah 3:9-11
The prophet gives a proof of his fidelity in reproving the rulers of the nation, civil and religious; briefly sums up the sins of which they were guilty, and which brought their ruin; and shows that all who are confident of God’s favour will not escape his judgments.
I. Civil rulers perverted law for selfish aggrandisement. Rulers of the State should have been patterns of justice, but they despised it.
1. They abhorred judgment. Loathed it as abominable. Plato taught that if virtue could be seen by men, it would be attractive; but these judges knew and hated it.
2. They perverted judgment. They twisted and distorted it. Not only crushed individuals, but destroyed the foundation of justice.
3. They perverted all judgment, “all equity.” Whatever was right and straight they made crooked. Natural conscience and God’s law were both defied. They neither governed themselves by right, nor gave right to others. They encouraged others by their practice, and, as in the age of Nero, made nothing unlawful.
4. Their aim was to build up Zion. The rich built their palaces with wealth gained by fraud and oppression. The city was adorned with streets built by rapine and blood. The Lord looked “for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.”
II. Religious teachers expounded law for gain. All are accused of bribery and mercenary conduct. Princes, priests, and prophets loved the wages of unrighteousness.
1. Priests taught for hire. They had maintenance assigned to them by God, had much by gratuity (1 Samuel 9:7-8), and should have made a difference between holy and unholy (Leviticus 10:10-11; Deuteronomy 17:10-11). But they sold what they should have given, and combined with the heads of the nation, with injustice. One class abused their power, another their knowledge; the judge perverted law, the priest misinterpreted it.
2. Prophets divined for money. False prophets gave answers to please those who paid them. As the oracles of Apollo were corrupted by the gold of Philip, so the law of God was sold for money. All sought their own, not the things of Christ, nor the interests of the people. “Thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.”
VAIN CONFIDENCE DESTROYED.—Micah 3:11-12
Notwithstanding their abominable conduct, yet the judges, priests, and prophets presume upon God’s favour, and think that no evil will befall them. The prophet seeks to rouse them from their vain confidence.
I. They were confident of God’s favour. “Is not the Lord among us?” Presumption feeds men with delusion. External privileges, outward reformation, ritual worship, will save no man. Those who lean upon these will dishonour God and destroy themselves. Perversion of truth and abuse of ordinances will drive God from us. “Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord are we.”
II. They were confident of security from evil. “No evil can come upon us.” We are perfectly safe whatever others say. Thus men are deluded in sin, and rocked to sleep in fatal security. If men are not restrained from evil by religious privileges, they can never be protected by them. Shake off carnal security, fear the Lord, and depart from evil.
III. They were doomed to destruction in their confidence. “There shall Zion,” &c.
1. The city would be destroyed. Its stately buildings were demolished, and its proud palaces reduced to heaps. The ground on which it stood was ploughed as a common field, and the site of the temple became wild as a forest.
2. Their own sins had procured this ruin. “For your sake.” Sin will ever draw calamity in Church and State. Corrupt rulers and teachers involve the people in defection, and hasten on the judgment. They may think that they build, when they only destroy; that they secure prosperity, when they ruin it. Every sanctuary desecrated by hypocrisy will be demolished by the wrath of God. Instead of protecting, it will fall upon its worshippers, and great will be the fall of it. “Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood!”
HOMILETIC HINTS AND OUTLINES
1. Persons in eminency, accustomed to sin, are generally deaf to what the Lord saith.
2. The messengers of the Lord must not give up when their message is not received, but cry till either they get audience or have delivered their souls. Hear, I pray you.
3. It is the duty of faithful ministers, in reproving the faults of rulers, to be courteous, and not contemn authority. Hear, ye heads, &c. [Adapted from Hutcheson].
Micah 3:10. Building Zion by wrong means is the way to pull it down. It can never stand erected by sinful materials, and for a selfish end. “Truly we build up Zion with blood when we cheapen luxuries and comforts at the price of souls, use Christian toil like brute strength, tempt men to dishonesty and women to other sin, to eke out the scanty wages which alone our selfish thirst for cheapness allows, heedless of everything save of our individual gratification, or of the commercial prosperity which we have made our god” [Pusey]. Righteousness builds up because it brings God’s protection and blessing unrighteousness tears down because it brings God’s curse [Hengstenberg].
Micah 3:11. Leaning.
1. Holy men sometimes rest on official relationship with God, pollute the holiest things, and become a warning to others.
2. Guilty men will often lean upon the Lord, claim his protection, and flatter themselves into false security. “The sacred office is a grievous snare to unsanctified hearts,” says one. “No ungodliness, pride, secularity, and hypocrisy are so great as those which stand before God in association with the teaching of his Word.”
Micah 3:11-12. False confidence in God.
1. Its ground, an outward temple—sacraments.
2. Its danger, disregard of the distant future, indifference, indulgence given to the natural man.
3. Its end. Fate of the Jewish state; the holy city becomes as the world, and shares the fate of the world. So likewise we. If we forsake God he will forsake us [Lange].
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 3
Micah 3:9-10. Build. The crimes of the people of England are not denounced by the pulpit as they should be; the abominations of royalty, the injustices perpetrated in the courts of justice, the cupidity of traders, the swindlings of joint-stock company men, by which they become millionnaires, and win a seat in the parliament of the nation. These things are not held up, as they should be, for public execration, in the broad sunlight of eternal truth [Dr. Thomas].
Micah 3:11. Money. The priests of Rome aim but at two things—to get power from the king and money from the subject [Selden]. Gold is the fool’s curtain, which hides all his defects from the world [Feltham].
“They all the sacred mysteries of heav’n
To their own vile advantages shall turn
Of lucre and ambition” [Milton].
Micah 3:12. Zion ploughed. At the time I visited this sacred ground, one part of it supported a crop of barley, another was undergoing the labour of the plough, and the soil turned up consisted of stone and lime, filled with earth, such as is usually met with in the foundations of ruined cities. It is nearly a mile in circumference [Richardson’s Travels]. On the S.E. Zion slopes down, in a series of cultivated terraces, sharply, though not abruptly, to the sites of the king’s gardens. Here and round to the S. the whole declivities are sprinkled with olive trees, which grow luxuriantly among the narrow slips of corn [Porter].