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...
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.
