The Message Remix (272 page)

INTRODUCTION MICAH

 

Prophets use words to remake the world. The world—heaven and earth, men and women, animals and birds—was made in
the first place by God’s Word. Prophets, arriving on the scene and finding that world in ruins, finding a world of moral rubble and spiritual disorder, take up the work of words again to rebuild what human disobedience and mistrust demolished. These prophets learn their speech from God. Their words are God-grounded, God-energized, God-passionate.
As their words enter the language of our communities, men and women find themselves in the presence of God, who enters the mess of human sin to rebuke and renew.

Left to ourselves we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, some
thing
we can use to our benefit, whether that thing is a feeling or an idea or an image. Prophets scorn all such stuff. They train us to respond to God’s presence and voice.

Micah, the final member of that powerful quartet of writing prophets who burst on the world scene in the eighth century B.C. (Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos were the others), like virtually all his fellow prophets—those charged with keeping people alive to God and alert to listening to the voice of God—was a master of metaphor. This means that he used words not simply to define or identify what can be seen, touched, smelled, heard, or tasted, but to plunge us into a world of
presence
. To experience presence is to enter that far larger world of reality that our sensory experiences point to but cannot describe—the realities of love and compassion, justice and faithfulness, sin and evil . . . and God. Mostly God. The realities that are Word-evoked are where most of the world’s action takes place. There are no “mere words.”

 

 

From:
Micah came from a village in Judah near the Philistine border, but he knew Isaiah, who lived in Jerusalem. The two men’s messages overlapped, but Micah spoke from the point of view of a small-town guy who daily saw local rich people exploiting ordinary folk. The rich retaliated by hiring “prophets” to speak in God’s name against Micah.

 

To:
Wealthy landowners were using extortion and sharp lawyers to manipulate small farmers out of their land. They claimed to believe in God, but they acted like the worst idol worshipers. They didn’t heed Micah when the Assyrians crushed the northern kingdom of Israel, and they didn’t heed him when Assyria returned, twenty years later, and came within a hair of conquering their own country.

 

Re:
About 740-690 B.C. Legend has it that Rome was founded on April 21, 753 B.C., by twin brothers who had been raised by a wolf. While this may be doubtful, archaeological evidence shows that around this time two villages on two of Rome’s hills united. These early Romans modeled themselves on the strong Etruscan city-states in northern Italy. The Etruscans had grown rich trading with Greece, the Middle East, and Africa. From the Greeks they had acquired an alphabet and human-like gods, but their artwork and rituals for divining the future were unique. Romans still celebrate April 21 as their founding day with parades and festivals.