NOTES for Mic 4:10
Micah's logic seems paradoxical: it turns out that God needs His people to find themselves in Babylon, in exile, and only there will God have the opportunity to buy His people back. The corresponding Hebrew word means exactly this; all other related connotations, for all their importance, are still secondary. On the one hand, we undoubtedly have before us a continuation of the theme of the people's loss of the God-given land because of their sins. On the other hand, we have the theme of the remnant, about which all the pre-exilic prophets spoke.
But the prophet brings something new into the old theme: he says that the people enter captivity because of their sins, but God buys them back from captivity. Such a view gave the theme a somewhat unexpected angle. After all, in this case the sins in question were the sort whose consequences, according to the Torah and traditional ideas, could not be escaped.
The Torah, of course, allows for the possibility of cleansing from the consequences of a sin committed by a person, but only when the sin was committed unintentionally, not when the matter is a conscious and voluntary sin. Meanwhile, the people end up in captivity precisely as a result of conscious and voluntary sin, for captivity, according to the testimony of all the pre-exilic prophets, became the consequence of conscious violation of the Torah, even to the point of apostasy.
And if God, in spite of everything, is ready to buy back His people and to forget all that they have done, it means only one thing: He is ready to reveal to the world and to His people the full measure of His mercy. A fullness able to do the impossible, to redeem the unredeemable, to free from that from which, by all the laws of the untransformed world, it is impossible to be freed.
And here those connotations appear that lead us directly to the New Testament: without the coming of the Messiah, without the Kingdom that has drawn near, the task of redeeming God's people is completely impossible. Thus the logic of resisting sin leads God's people to the threshold of the Kingdom, the only place where one can be freed from the power of any sin once and for all.