Main news for 21 May 2016

King James Version (en)

Micah, Chapter 7, verse 18

¹⁸Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? he retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy.

NOTES

The prophets spoke often about the sins and crimes of God's people. Yet their words contained not only rebuke but always hope as well. The time of Micah, a younger contemporary of Isaiah of Jerusalem, was a spiritually ambiguous age. King Hezekiah, who then ruled Judah, did much to combat pagan cults, prohibiting public worship of pagan gods in his country. Yahwism became popular, and the preaching of Micah, as well as Isaiah, contributed greatly to this.

But destroying pagan altars and sanctuaries proved far easier than changing people whose souls and hearts largely remained as they had been. Their sins remained as well. For the overwhelming majority of new believers, Yahwism amounted to magnificent religious ceremonies and cheerful festivals; they thought rarely and reluctantly about observing the commandments God had given, about the Torah. Religious enthusiasm by no means brought rapid spiritual change in society. The old sins did not release people. Habits were overcome slowly and with difficulty, even when people sincerely wanted to become different.

Here we see what the priestly books of the Pentateuch say so often: the consequences of a deliberately committed sin weigh upon a person even despite repentance, just as they weigh upon a people when the sin was committed by the whole nation. It was then revealed to the prophet that the situation could be changed only by a special, joint, and purposeful spiritual effort by God and His people. Micah says nothing about the trials awaiting the people, as Isaiah of Jerusalem does, but he understands that it will no longer be possible to overcome the consequences of the people's sins without an upheaval—perhaps a catastrophic one. Yet the prophet understands something else too: God does not need calamities for their own sake. He merely wants to give His people a chance to begin history with a clean slate, and for that the people themselves must become a clean slate. In the end, all historical upheavals are needed only for this—and so that in this new history the renewed people may succeed in welcoming the Messiah God promised them.

Micah connects God's readiness to forgive the sins of His people, or rather of their remnant, with the mercy that belongs to God. This connection is not accidental, and it is easiest to explain it from the understanding of mercy already found in Hosea, which later became part of the prophetic tradition as a whole. From Hosea's point of view, God's mercy was in essence the only hope for a people who, by repeatedly violating the Torah, had long ago lost any right to what they once had in accordance with the covenant made at Sinai.

All that remained was to hope that God would still not abandon His people and would do for them what He was obligated to do by no law and by no agreement. Yet such a possibility could open for the people only after repentance for the sins committed and a new turning that would restore the former relationship. But here there was one significant difficulty: many of the sins committed by the people had been committed quite consciously and voluntarily.

Of course, one could repent even of such a sin, but before Christ came into the world it was impossible to be cleansed from its consequences; no purification rituals or sacrifices helped here. In fact, the whole pre-exilic history of the Jewish people, ending in the Babylonian captivity, is visible proof of this truth. Of course, with the coming of Christ everything changed, but Micah naturally preached in a still pre-Christian world.

And yet God showed mercy to His people. It was impossible to free them completely from the consequences of the sins committed throughout the pre-exilic period; the exile was inevitable, and to avoid it the world would have had to be created anew. But it was possible to grow, in effect, a new people from that remnant of the faithful who kept their faithfulness even when it appeared to make no sense, because everything was over.

God acts in exactly this way, thereby revealing true mercy: in essence, He gives His people another historical life in place of the one that ended after Jerusalem was crushed by the Babylonian army. By all the laws of history, the Jewish people, after the Babylonian defeat, should have disappeared just as many other peoples who inhabited Palestine disappeared in the Babylonian crucible. And the fact that they exist to this day can be explained only by the mercy of God.

Before us are pictures of moral decay. The merciful have disappeared; no one can be relied on. The condition of that society reminds the prophet of a garden emptied after the fruit harvest, when not a single berry remains on the branches...

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