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We live in an easily offended age; at work and with friends we have all learned to edit negative truths to keep everyone happy. Should Christians also edit the message of Jesus? Is it love that controls the messenger or something else? Should the City want Christian co-workers to be more like politicians or medical professionals in what they tell us from God?
And I said:
Hear, you heads of Jacob
and rulers of the house of Israel!
Is it not for you to know justice?—
2 you who hate the good and love the evil,
who tear the skin from off my people
and their flesh from off their bones,
3 who eat the flesh of my people,
and flay their skin from off them,
and break their bones in pieces
and chop them up like meat in a pot,
like flesh in a cauldron.
4 Then they will cry to the Lord,
but he will not answer them;
he will hide his face from them at that time,
because they have made their deeds evil.
5 Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets
who lead my people astray,
who cry “Peace”
when they have something to eat,
but declare war against him
who puts nothing into their mouths.
6 Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision,
and darkness to you, without divination.
The sun shall go down on the prophets,
and the day shall be black over them;
7 the seers shall be disgraced,
and the diviners put to shame;
they shall all cover their lips,
for there is no answer from God.
8 But as for me, I am filled with power,
with the Spirit of the Lord,
and with justice and might,
to declare to Jacob his transgression
and to Israel his sin.
9 Hear this, you heads of the house of Jacob
and rulers of the house of Israel,
who detest justice
and make crooked all that is straight,
10 who build Zion with blood
and Jerusalem with iniquity.
11 Its heads give judgment for a bribe;
its priests teach for a price;
its prophets practice divination for money;
yet they lean on the Lord and say,
“Is not the Lord in the midst of us?
No disaster shall come upon us.”
12 Therefore because of you
Zion shall be plowed as a field;
Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins,
and the mountain of the house a wooded height.
This transcript has been automatically generated
Okay, good afternoon. We’re going to read from page 940 of the Bibles in front of you. That’s Micah chapter 3, verses 1 to 12.
The prophet Micah speaks, and I said, Hear, you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel!
Is it not for you to know justice, you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin from off my people and the flesh from off their bones, who eat the flesh of my people and flay their skin from off them and break their bones in pieces and chop them up like meat in a pot? Like flesh in a cauldron. Then they will cry to the Lord, but he will not answer them. He will hide his face from them at that time because they have made their deeds evil. Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry peace when they have something to eat but declare war against him who puts nothing in into their mouths.
Therefore it shall be night to you without vision, and darkness to you without divination. The sun shall go down on the prophets, and the day shall be black over them. The seers shall be disgraced, and the diviners put to shame. They shall all cover their lips, for there is no answer from God. But as for me, I am filled with power, with the Spirit of the Lord, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin.
Hear this, you heads of the house of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel, who detest justice and make crooked all that is straight, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity.
Its heads give judgement for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets practice divination for money. Yet they lean on the Lord and say, is not the Lord in the midst of us? No disaster shall come upon us.
Therefore, because of you, Zion shall be ploughed as a field, Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.
Sim, thank you very much indeed. 3:8 is our verse this week, and we will get to that in just a second. A while ago, I watched a TV programme. It was called The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs. It was one of those celeb doctors called Chris van Tulleken, and he was in the East End of London trying to persuade GPs to prescribe fewer drugs.
I need to say I have no idea whether medically that was a good or a bad idea. The Guardian called it deeply flawed and an hour of shallow filmmaking, and I loved it, which tells you something about me. But I loved it not for the medical advice, but for the human interest. We’re going to have question time at the end. Please don’t ask me medical questions.
I’m not a doctor. The big point was that there are lots of people taking pills that aren’t really helping them, but that doctors keep prescribing them because that is just easier, and also for one other reason, he said. The heart of the episode was a series of discussions with the doctors about whether the drug companies had bribed them. And the doctor said, no, no, no, no, no, no, it used to be like that when we accepted presents and holidays from drug companies. We’ve stopped all of that.
Cut to Dr. Chris talking about the millions of pounds that drug companies spend on marketing their products to doctors. No, no, no, no, no, no, we are scientists. We make rational decisions based on the best available science. In the best interests of our patients. Cut to Dr. Chris explaining that there’s research that shows that GPs consistently prescribe drugs if they’ve received free stuff from the company.
Cut to, you know, the free mirror, the free notepad, the free pen in the doctor’s hand while he’s saying, no, no, no. The really fun bit was the lunch. The lunch. So every week the practice staff, they all met for lunch and they discussed what new drugs to use. And Dr. Chris said, so who pays for the lunch?
They said, oh well, I mean, it is one of the drug companies, but it doesn’t influence our decision at all. It’s saving the NHS money. We’d have to buy lunch otherwise. And the fascinating thing was that even as they were speaking, you, you could see the penny dropping during the conversation. The pharmaceutical company would not keep paying someone to drive around the East End with 13 free lunches every week unless they were getting a return on that investment.
And as Dr. Chris just left the cameras rolling, you could see good conscientious, caring GPs realised that they had been bribed and that they were making decisions they were convinced were in the best interests of the patients, but really 2 other groups were benefiting: a big company’s profits and their own bellies. It turns out if the programme is right, that if you take people who work in one of the most caring professions and give them a sandwich, you can bribe them hard enough to throw taxpayers’ money at bad medical interventions. Now, again, please, your husband or wife may be a doctor. Please don’t ask me questions about that. Today’s sermon is not about medicine.
It is about bribery. We said last week that Micah is a prophet who speaks at a time of national crisis. It’s a time when God has a very serious warning to deliver, but when Micah speaks and tells the truth, he is told to shut up. That was chapter 2 last week. Shut up.
Don’t tell us the bad news. And last week, we talked about how much we face the same pressure in 21st century London. You can talk about God, as long as that God doesn’t really care about evil and won’t ever do anything about it. And we said last week that a lot of us Christians, we simply say, well, okay, you tell me to shut up and I say, all right, I never really wanted to talk about that anyway. And I said that this week Micah would tell us how we have been silenced and and also how unkind we are.
You see, I think day in and day out, I think I am making careful decisions about who to speak to and what to speak about. I think I’m weighing up how best to help the person in their best interest. Don’t say much, you know, too much too soon, I might put them off. When the reality, according to Micah, is that I have been bribed. Maybe there is a transaction going on between me and the culture, maybe even between me and the individual that I am talking to, and I’m benefiting and they are benefiting and everybody is happy.
And how much really can it matter if we distort what God is like and silence His message to the world when a sandwich seems so much more important? That’s where we’re going. There’s some information and headings on the back of the notices, and point 1 is about a relationship that suits everyone. The context for our verses through verse 11, in Jerusalem its heads give judgement for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets practice divination for money, yet they lean on the Lord and say. His point is, you have all been bribed.
And the background is a background of shady land deals and dodgy court judgments. And the piece of political judgement, the sort of Times cartoon about the leaders, is 3 verse 3, the people whose land you are stealing, you might just as well joint and bone their children and then eat them. That’s the— you can imagine the cartoon version of that. Judge Smith, you are well-fed and prosperous because the land barons bribe you, and the land barons have the cash to do that because they’ve stolen it off these poor subsistence farmers with your assistance in court. And now mum and dad and granny and the kids are going to starve to death by the side of the road.
And the point is, Micah says, you might just as well, cut out the middleman and just eat the children. That would be quicker for everybody. Judge Smith, it was your job to protect the weak. That was your God-given job, and God is right to be angry about this. Verse 10, they are building Zion with blood.
So, why don’t God’s spokespeople call you out? Well, that’s because you have paid them off too. So, evil leaders will find prophets that they can bribe. Verse 5 is prophet as vending machine. You put a sandwich in and out comes peace, peace for you, good message.
But if you don’t put the sandwich in, he says, then you get judgement, then the prophet declares war on you. And combine that with what we saw last week, And this is worse even than just plain bribery. If you were here last week, do you remember that Micah was being told off for talking about judgement? Don’t preach negatively, Micah. God isn’t like that.
But then suddenly in 3 verse 5, you realise these guys, they are perfectly happy to talk about judgement. They are quite happy to go to war with their mouths, but they won’t do it for God, they’ll do it for their bellies. If you don’t feed them, well, then you know what kind of message you are going to get.
And just before we get too comfortable here, it’s very interesting how the New Testament applies the role of prophets. There’s an obvious line through, isn’t there, to people who are paid to represent God and churches, to senior leaders like bishops in particular, And it is interesting that in our denomination, the Church of England, the Church of England will speak out against the sins that everybody hates in our culture. The Church of England has lots to say on the environment, lots to say actually about certain kinds of financial injustice here in the city. You may have noticed that coming in through your inbox. But the church is much more cautious about sins that our culture doesn’t think are sins.
A London vicar resigned recently in protest, in protest that we are not changing the morals fast enough. He said, the Church of England cannot continue to claim a role in the national life if it is so at variance with the basic moral principles of the country. And I think he’s probably right. There will come a point where we won’t be able to go on enjoying seats in the House of Lords and palaces and titles if we don’t change the morals so that they agree with the new moral consensus. So, the question is going to be, how much do we want the bribe?
But as I said, don’t get too comfortable because before we get the boot in too thoroughly to bishops, In Acts chapter 2, it’s clear that now every single Christian is a prophet. You may not feel you quite have the beard for that, but that’s the New Testament picture. We are all messengers of God inspired by the Spirit to tell people His message. And I wonder how you got on with the question that I asked last week. I asked us all to find out what our non-Christian friends would say if we asked them to talk about our God.
I wonder, would they say, Charlie’s God is fine with the way I live my life. Charlie’s God doesn’t really want much from me except maybe to come to church a bit. I must be fine, mustn’t I? Or Charlie would have said something, wouldn’t he? And with Micah 3 open, you can see that I’m going to ask us whether we’re not just silent, but whether we are also bribed into silence.
And just towards the end, I’m going to ask us what our sandwich might be. But first, I want us to look at Micah. So, point 2, unlike them, the Spirit-filled prophet speaks about sin. Here now is verse 8, our key verse. This is why Micah is different.
But as for me, I am filled with power, with the Spirit of the Lord, and with justice and might to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin. Micah is different because of God. It’s the obvious other option really. You can either speak for and follow the leaders of your culture, or you can speak for for and follow God. And Micah says it is the Spirit of God that brings him the power to do that.
I love the consistent realism in the Bible about how difficult it is to speak for God. Micah didn’t find this easy because he had zero social skills and couldn’t tell what other people thought. Micah didn’t find this easy because he was weirdly brave. Micah found this hard, but he did it anyway because God gave him the power. Filled with the Spirit, so he speaks about sin.
And when I first read that, or when I first noticed that a few years ago, I couldn’t believe that that was Micah’s test of the Spirit-filled person. Is that verse really in the Bible? And why did no one tell me that when I was a teenager? I lived through the years in this country when we were all desperately insecure about who had the Spirit and who didn’t, and who was filled with the Spirit and who wasn’t, and whether you had to have a certain kind of spiritual gift or had to see visions or had to have a certain kind of smile and a certain kind of inner peace or something. Here’s how you know.
The Spirit-filled person will be speaking about sin. And why did no one tell me that when I was nervously, clumsily trying to tell my friends the gospel, when I was getting opposed for it at school, when I thought that meant I didn’t have enough of the Spirit to do it properly and do it right?
And I wonder, it is striking actually how many of my friends who make the most about being filled with the Spirit, are some of the least likely of my friends to speak about sin and judgement and hell. I don’t mean to say that I do it all the time and find it easy, but to claim that you are full to the brim of God’s Holy Spirit and not be speaking for Him, I don’t think Micah would say those match. And it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to work out how this would have gone down in in Micah’s Jerusalem. See, the prophets are the vending machine. They’ve got a nice business going.
They say peace if you feed them. And Micah over here, he says judgement and sin whether you feed him or not. Do you see how much they’re going to hate him, how much he’s going to blow the racket that they’ve got going? Who’s going to keep paying these prophets if the word gets around that God doesn’t change His mind no matter how much you feed His prophets? And that has just been normal since Micah’s day, through Jesus’ time, through the apostles, throughout church history, and now.
If you speak about sin and judgement, it is religious people who hate you the most, because there is a normal settlement that religion makes with culture. There is a relationship, and it is one that suits everyone. We’ll be religious and we’ll see your sin and we’ll tell you that you are fine. So, you get to go on doing whatever it is you like doing and you don’t have to worry about God. And if you could, you know, just give us what we want on the side, then everybody is happy.
I don’t know if— this may be exposing you to a world of commercial relationships you didn’t know existed. If you’re a religious person, if you have that reputation in your office, Did you know you had a very valuable product to sell? You can go around the office with your religious reputation telling everyone that they are fine, and that is a valuable commodity in every culture around the world. And nothing blows the COVID like somebody who keeps on saying what God has actually said rather than what they all pay the religious people to say instead.
So, Micah, I guess, had some conversations with the other prophets. Why do you have to be so difficult? Why do you keep talking like this? And Micah says, I have to tell you about your sin because it is true, because God actually knows everything and He knows what everyone is really like and He cares about it, which means it is true and urgent. It is life and death.
Whether I tell you what God is really like. And the environment he is speaking in is just like London because they have no idea. Look at verse 11 again, they lean on the Lord, I stopped there, didn’t I? They lean on the Lord and they say, is not the Lord in the midst of us? No disaster shall come upon us.
And Micah says, really? Verse 12 is the truth, Jerusalem is going to be destroyed so thoroughly that you will think it was just another farmer’s field. And remember, I said last week that the historical value of Micah for us is he lived through a major crisis in world history. So, with hindsight, we can see that he was right about every single detail. There is a sort of time thing at the top of the handout.
He was right 30 years ago about Samaria. Samaria the capital city of Israel is now a ploughed field. Jeremiah tells us that this sermon, today’s sermon, was preached in 701 BC when there was an Assyrian army camped around the capital of Jerusalem, which means he was right about that invasion as well. And Micah, he now says, by the way, God is going to destroy Jerusalem as well.
And the decision you have to make is about what God is like. It’s what we said last week. If you’re going to speak for God, then it matters what God is like. And verse 11 is their theology of God. Their theology of God is we have a cast-iron, no-time-limit guarantee from God.
Whatever we do, God will protect us because He lives with us. God’s temple is here. He’s in the midst of us. We have a blank check God. And Micah, he does something different because he knows that is a lie.
He knows that God never promised the blank cheque. In fact, He has always consistently said the opposite. And the shock for English people is that those people then, they had far more excuses for making this mistake. Than we do. They had the actual temple rather than churches built to look like temples.
They had actual promises from God about their actual city, Jerusalem. And I’ve been looking through the Bible and I’ve never found London mentioned. To be honest, I’m not even sure London existed when these words were written. So, how come English people, certainly English people of my age and my education and my class, assume that God will defend them whatever they do in this world or the next, when there are some fairly concrete events in history that say that God is not like that and that Micah was right about everything. Micah thinks that God wants to warn people about sin, and Micah thinks that if that’s what God wants, then the kind, caring prophet really should tell them.
So, come back to the GP surgery in East London. Come back to their moment of realisation. They are kind, considerate professionals, having to think about bribery and corruption and realising actually that might mean them. It’s not at all part of my self-image that I could ever be bribed. You know, I think I’m one of the good guys.
You come at me with a brown envelope, I’m going to turn that down. But since reading Micah 3, I’ve been thinking about what are some very, very normal conversations for me, where maybe, you know, if you were to record it and look at what is said out in the open, everything would be fine. Maybe someone comes up to me and says, I think it’s just a bit extreme, isn’t it, those Christians that talk about God’s judgement and anger? You’re not one of those extreme Christians, are you? And I say, no, no, no, no, I’m not one of those extreme Christians.
You know, I think you do have to challenge people’s consciences sometimes, but I’m not like those guys on the street with a megaphone.
Is that, is that an okay conversation?
It’s sort of truthful. I am not like those guys with a megaphone. That certainly isn’t me. I kind of whisper at people instead of megaphone at people. But in terms of what is really going on there, I think you just witnessed a transaction in which everybody gets what they want.
She can go on sinning and know for sure that God will always protect her. I am the most religious person she knows. In my case, I even work for a church. So, you know, I’m the God expert and I said she was fine. And I get what I want out of that conversation.
I get the self-image and the respect and the friendship. I am not one of those extreme Christians. I’m the kind of intelligent, thoughtful person that my mum paid all my school fees to make sure that I would be. That’s what’s going on there. And you could repeat that conversation a thousand times, I think, every time a Christian moves into a new flat share, every time a Christian gets a new job and settles into the team, every time a friend demonstrates in their life that they don’t care about God at all, and you think, oh no, they want me to say something, Well, I’m not one of those judgmental Christians, so I’ll go for nervous laugh.
That kind of covers it, doesn’t it? And one day, one day I’ll get the gospel opportunity that I’ve been praying for, and I’ll tell them the whole gospel.
Now, please, please don’t hear me wrong. I don’t mean to say that your first words this afternoon back in the office should be sin, judgement, or disaster, but I do think I need to rerun a whole load of conversations I’ve had and work out what was really going on. See, I don’t think I am only silent because I am scared, certainly not only because I am pastorally sensitive. I think I am silent some of the time because it suits me, because I don’t want that reputation. I don’t want to lose my job.
I don’t want to have to face the anger. And it turns out you don’t even need to give me a sandwich. It takes a sandwich with a GP, but just a smile will do it for me.
And the tragedy is, and this is where I want to finish, the tragedy is that somebody in this chapter saves an entire city. There are lots of movements around that, Christian movements that love to offer to save the city or serve the city or loved the city. And I guess the prophets in chapter 3 would have joined up with that because they believe in Jerusalem, the great city. They want everyone to know that God loves Jerusalem. But the reference on your sheet from Jeremiah, 100 or so years later, tells you when Micah preached this sermon, when 3:12 came out of his mouth, this horrible, terrifying, negative judgmental verse, 3:12.
Jeremiah says, that is the piece of speech that saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians. Micah, we said last week, is budget Isaiah. You had this major prophet called Isaiah who was preaching in Jerusalem at the time, and it turns out that the rescue in the middle of the book of Isaiah was caused by one of Micah’s sermons. Budget Isaiah. He said through verse 12, he told them the truth even though he knew that they would hate him for it.
And that, you know what, in that year, in 701 BC, the people listened and they feared God and they turned and he saved them. And the Assyrian army went off with its tail between its legs and went home. And Micah was right about that as well. So, 3 verse 8, 3 verse 12, that is how to save a city. That is how to love a city.
You do it by telling them the truth and waiting to see if they will turn back to God. And we think that our culture wouldn’t do that. We think they are too far gone, but could it be, could it be that we haven’t tried telling them? And could that be because it suits us not to, that we don’t really want to save the city at all? Let me pray before we break for questions, and then I’ll explain how that’s going to work.
Our Father, thank you for Micah, for his truthfulness, his integrity, And Father, we ask that You would be the kind, gracious, forgiving God to us as we think about this and discuss it together. We ask that in Your patience You would give us Your Spirit too and help us to speak for You. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Thank you very much for the questions. Let me do the best I can in the, I think, 6 minutes that we have got.
First question, surely there is good news to share too? Absolutely. Again, on the handouts, you should be able to see that in each section of the book, Micah starts with judgement and moves to rescue. More of the book is about rescue than about judgement, and we will come to that in the next 2 weeks very, very thoroughly. But without the bad news, the rescue news is meaningless.
The Christian good news is rescue good news, not other kind of good news. It involves something that you need rescuing from and the reasons why you need rescuing. When I was a student, we had someone come and do some talks for us at the university, and he was sufficiently, I don’t know, had some time on his hands, he wrote a book for us that we published and gave out. And one of the chapters in the book was, Why Should You Be a Christian? And this well-known Christian listed the reasons why you should be a Christian, and it was, you’ll be happier, your health will improve, your relationships will get better, you’ll find life is easier if you’re a Christian, full stop, end of chapter.
And I think that is not true. It’s not necessarily true that all those things will happen if you become a Christian, and I don’t think it is the reason. It may happen. There’s good advice in the Bible. I know people where it saved their marriage, it saved their job, it saved their life from various kinds of complications, but the promise is not become a Christian and everything will be happy.
The Christian message is you are in desperate trouble. God is angry with the way you live a lot of the time. And He wants to rescue you because He loves you so much. And do you see, the second half is nonsense without the first half. And there is a similar question here that may help, should our message be exactly the same as Micah’s post-Jesus?
That’s very helpful. Again, we will get to that next week. No, please don’t go to Jerusalem and announce that Jerusalem is going to become a ploughed field. We have no mandate from God to say that, no reason to think that would be true. The message will be different.
The reason I think we can do what we did today responsibly, though, is because people are the same. All sorts of things have changed, but I am still tempted in the same way that Micah was tempted and Micah’s friends. I still want bribes. I still find it hard to tell the truth if that message brings opposition. And I think that those character things come through.
So, no, you’re absolutely right. Our message should be different, and it should be different in exactly the ways that Jesus’ message was different and the apostles’ message was different. It’s not that I get to make up the ways it should be different. The Lord Jesus Christ shows us exactly what He wants us to say. And His chosen messengers give us exactly the words to use and the ways of bringing that forward to today.
And what you will find if you look at Jesus is that He talks about, well, take hell, I guess, the least popular Christian piece of truth. He talks about that more than anyone else in the entire Bible. And for Jesus, that is part of loving someone. There is a question again, the next one will help us. Galatians 5:6 says, the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
To be loving, do we therefore need to be speaking about sin? I think that is a very, very helpful question. And let’s just try the GP illustration again. Let’s say you were a trained doctor with a member of your family who you had noticed had a serious but curable disease. What is the behaviour of a loving member of the family in that situation?
You know that if you raise it, it’s going to be socially awkward and they’re not going to like it and it’s bad news. They’ll be frightened of the diagnosis and they’ll maybe push back at you. You maybe won’t get invited around for tea next week. But surely, the loving thing to do is to take what you know and give the other person the opportunity to benefit from what you know. That is the loving thing to do.
Jesus is the most loving person ever to live. As we said, Jesus tells the truth, good news and bad. That is how it makes sense. How do you explain sin to your non-Christian friend? is the next one.
We do have a problem with that, don’t we? Because people think that sin is all about either just sex or chocolate cake. Those are the only 2 options really of what sin is. And we need to explain. We’re in no worse situation there than the people when the Bible was written.
When Paul went to Corinth and Rome and places like that, the categories needed changing and explaining. Let me have a go. I would say sin is not really about naughty things that you do, It is about your attitude to God. It’s about saying, stuff you, God, I will do what I want regardless of what you think. And immediately, do you see that you have to explain some other things that we don’t like talking about?
So, that only makes sense if you explain that God is actually King and Lord. Interestingly, that is the summary of the Christian message used most often in the New Testament. God is your boss whether you want him to be or not. He’s in charge of you. He tells you how to live whether you want him to or not, and he thinks he’s right whether you agree with him or not.
So, sin is, stuff you, God, I’m going to do what I think is right instead. And sometimes that also involves saying, stuff the other person, I’m going to do what I want regardless of whether it hurts them or not. And just occasionally, it might involve sex or chocolate cake. That’s the way around.
We’ve got no time left, I think. Let me finish with the last one. Will God judge us differently if we never pluck up courage to talk to anyone about Jesus? There is a passage in Luke 19 where Jesus tells a story about the end of the world and asking His servants how they acted for Him. And there is this one embarrassed servant who has to basically say, I didn’t really do anything that you wanted me to do.
And in the picture of the story, it is clear that he is still one of Jesus’ servants. He is not put in with the enemies of Jesus at that point. Jesus is gracious and kind and forgiving, but it is also clear that at that point he realises that he has made the biggest mistake of his life. Because Jesus is thanking and welcoming these other servants, and presumably behind them there is a whole string of people who are there with Jesus forever because they told them the message, and this one guy is left there thinking, I really wasted my life. I didn’t save the city.
I didn’t save the people I knew and loved. And I think that’s— the challenge comes that way around. Do we want to be involved in God’s big project of saving people from His judgement?
