NOTES for Mic 7:18

Micah connects God's readiness to forgive the sins of His people, or more precisely of its remnant, with God's own mercy. Such a connection is, of course, 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 essentially the only hope for a people who, by repeatedly violating the Torah, had long ago lost their rights to what they had once possessed according to the covenant-union made at Sinai.

It remained only to hope that God would still not abandon His people and would do for them what, by no laws and no agreements, He was obliged to do. Yet such a possibility could open for the people only after repentance for the sins committed and a new conversion that would restore the former relations. 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 of such a sin too, but to be cleansed from its consequences before Christ came into the world was impossible: no purifying rituals or sacrifices helped here. Strictly speaking, 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 the pre-Christian world.

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

God acts exactly this way, thereby revealing genuine 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 it exists to this day can be explained only by God's mercy.