Mi 2 – Bibletogetherblog

Read Mi 2 (Recommended: New Living Translation, not ESV because of vv4-7)

vv1-2: What were the sins of God’s people who Micah denounced here?

v1: What evil did they devise, and why at night? [Busy during the day carrying it out]
v2 mentions land, house, property, inheritance:
- Where and how do you see similar things going on today?
- If law and order in your country protect you against rampant injustice, does that mean that your people is not committing any such crimes? Or is this process now globalized and just hidden?
- Hidden how? [keywords: Fair trade, sweatshops, child labor…]
How can one ‘oppress’ someone’s inheritance (ESV)?
- NLT translates: ‘stealing his family’s inheritance’: What inheritance law in Israel was instituted by Moses to prevent such abuse? Lev 25:10 (year of Jubilee)
- How was it thus possible to ‘steal’ land even without moving borders? [By not returning what should have been returned to a family at the end of 7 ‘weeks of years’ (49 years)]
Where did Micah locate the root of such greed? cf Mi 1:7 =>
- Why and how does idolatry open the floodgates to greed and covetousness and every other vice? cf Jer 2:13; Ro 1:24-25

2) vv3-5: What did Micah prophecy as God’s inevitable response? cf Mi 1:16

NLT recognizes that God’s just judgment was designed to return evil for evil: How did God’s punishment resemble in kind the crime denounced by v2?
v3: What is the goal? What will only punishment accomplish in God’s people? Hint: What virtue requires that they ‘no longer walk proudly’?
- Why is humility essential for salvation? =>
- Why is pride the essence of what man needs to be saved from?
v4 predicts that Israel’s pride will be crushed by how their enemies will taunt them: How? Why would the same taunt lose its sting on any nation that does not believe in God’s absolute sovereignty the way Jews did?

3) vv6-9: What vice is denounced here as aggravating their sin?

v6: How does pride manifest itself in the way it responds to genuine prophecy?
- What deluded them into believing that Micah was mistaken?
- Read 1 Thes 5:20-21; Did Paul ask the Thessalonians to ‘test prophecies’? Or rather to rely on prophecy to thereby test ‘everything’ (i.e. everything else)?!
- What do you think the Israelites did here with Micah’s prophecy: Did they fail to ‘test’ it? Or did they fail to use it to test themselves?
v7, lit. ‘Has the Spirit of the Lord grown short?’: Was the proud rejection of God’s word an unpardonable sin against the Holy Spirit (Mk 3:29-30)? cf Jn 9:41
- Why would the word of God through Micah do good ‘to those who are upright’? If upright would mean that they already do what is asked of them, would they need this exhortation?
- Read Lk 16:14-15 How did the poor example of the Pharisees define what upright means? [It means to listen and yield to the word instead of judging it and justifying ourselves]

4) vv8-11: How does the denounced sin (again) resemble in kind the punishment?

vv8-9: In what sense are delightful houses and children the embodiment of rest in a man’s life?
vv10-11 What is the price for depriving other people of those blessings for the sake of our own greed? [Banishment from the land of ‘rest’ (Israel)]
- Metaphorically, that ‘land of rest’ stands for the blessed state of believers who have found rest in God from their ‘dead’ works through faith in the work of Christ (Heb 4). Accordingly, what is at stake for societies who are Christian only in name but who resemble the Israelites in Micah’s days in what they worship and how they live?

5) vv12-13: Did Micah have any solution how man can break free from that prison where he is enslaved by his own idolatry and its consequences?

What is it, and how does that differ from anything else in any other religion or philosophy of the wise of this world?
v13, ‘Some day…’: Unlike Jeremiah years later, Micah did not predict a specific time span until a remnant will be gathered again. Why not?
Do you think that this prophecy was fulfilled when the Israelites returned to Israel after the Babylonian exile? Why or why not?